Your Weekly Pencil - March 23, 2021

New Signals

• Nordstrom announced a shoppable, interactive livestream platform, an extension of the more than 50 virtual events the retailer has hosted since last year. During each show, customers can shop at Nordstrom.com and participate in a live chat, while fashion experts demonstrate how to style the products.
• FB is looking to help writers monetize with a new platform for building websites and subscription newsletters, and will soon test the early product with a small group of independent creators.

"If you want to have good ideas, you must have many ideas." - Will's March platform update

This month we focused on significantly speeding up the platform. More speed, more play, more ideas, better ROAS. Aside from this, we also added the 2 top requested features, all while fixing bugs reported by our users in less than 12 hours on average. Link above for the full update or TL/DR:‍

• Speedier generation and export time
• Increased "snappiness"
• Exact scene swapping
• Ability to import audio

We've partnered with Clearbanc, the world's largest ecommerce investor - See uses, cases and apply for Facebook Ad funding here

• "You’ve worked hard to build your business, you should own 100% of it." 
• By founders for founders—having invested over US$1.6b to more than 4,000 eCommerce and SaaS companies, Clearbanc’s mission is to empower founders around the world with the capital, insights and resources required to grow their business.  Watch the video and blog post here: Pencil and Clearbanc

Need to keep testing, but no new material? - How to efficiently experiment with ads

• We understand that a problem that every performance team faces is needing new ads to test, but not having new material. So on this week's installment of the Hey Pencil series, we've demonstrated how Pencil's AI lets you generate lots of new design layouts to try, all from your existing assets.

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Something deeper

• We repeat what we don't repair

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