Platforms Exploring Dark Forests

Way back at the beginning of 2020 I wrote this:

Venture into the Dark Forests

Another trend arising from the shine fading from social media and similar algorithms? The growth of “dark forests”. Sounds ominous, right? It’s not, it’s just a fancy term for mediums like email newsletters, podcasts, private groups, and other non-broadcast messaging platforms. People increasingly want the information they’re interested in waiting for them when they’re ready versus bombarding them, and usually without a comment stream of sadness attached. They want community, not trolls with megaphones.

Does this mean social media is dead? No, but it is changing. Or at least we need to change our approach to it, especially as organic reach continues to decline. Approach these as focused content and story platforms more than broader social connecting.

Still feels accurate to me. Or we’ve at least matured to an ecosystem of walled gardens and dark forests sharing the internet (the open web is still there, in the cracks and outskirts).  

If you add in the shoutout to chatbots and voice assistants (you know Microsoft is going to combine Cortana voice with ChatGPT generation (what if Once The Windows Company™ released the first headphones-as-standalone-computing-device? It has the pieces now, the tech is easier than glasses/optics (which it managed to pull off with HoloLens), and it’s primary audiences could let it get away with something more like a gaming headset and less like the smallest viable earbud.)

Here are the four horse-techs of the platform-pocalypse:

• Podcasts

• Newsletters

• Private Messaging

• Chatbots

Many of the big engagement platforms are finding ways to turn these dark forests into features. With mixed success. 

Chatbots aren’t covered below, but just think of any of the ‘ChatGPT is an existential threat for Google’ think pieces you’ve probably seen lately.

Podcasts Are Boring

Earlier this month I wrote:

podcasts are now just another boring channel to advertisers

Turns out advertisers aren’t the only ones.

While overall podcasting revenue and listenership continue to grow, the runaway exuberance many felt about the state of the medium has dissipated lately, even among some of its most ardent practitioners.

Tech’s fall from cash cow status means the money from big platforms for shows is drying up.

Exclusives also haven’t proven to be successful in driving subscribers.

Podcasts were the forest-to-feature attempt du jour during the pandemic. But it hasn’t panned out for any of the platforms…yet.

Facebook and Twitter both did some half-assed attempt at something, IIRC. But it seemed that live audio and spaces were form that took off for them (RIP Clubhouse). But Google and TikTok aren’t backing down.  

TikTok added a tab called ‘podcasts’, but it’s nothing special at the moment. This could be a sign of things to come, but for now it’s just TikTok with the screen off. 

Google, on the other hand…

YouTube DTR’ing With Podcasts? YouTube DTR’ing With Podcasts.

YouTube is a wildly popular video platform with a large audience. Podcasting is a (wildly?) popular audio medium that is becoming an advertising darling.

YouTube can’t really be consumed on the go (thinking scenarios like driving, running, etc). Podcasts may not be as engaging as video when your eyes aren’t occupied.

Could the two be like peanut butter and jelly? Or almond butter and dark chocolate? Or gin and tonic?

The Big Red Play Button is already one of the top podcast platforms thanks to its superior search and discovery infrastructure, but it’s currently “just another” channel podcasts get posted on.

That might be changing based on a new test allowing users to create and manage a podcast within YouTube Studio.

we’re running an experiment that allows you to create a podcast or set an existing playlist as a podcast within Studio.

No word on external distribution features (audio only RSS feed?), but there will be analytics.

You’ll also be able to measure your podcasts in analytics, where you’ll see a set of tabs with performance, audience and revenue insights for each podcast show.

And YouTube Music will soon have dedicated podcast features, including audio-first show badges and support.

“If someone wants to watch a podcast, we have a solution,” Chuk said. “If someone wants to listen to a podcast only, we should have a great experience for that as well.”

Platform exclusive shows may not be far behind. Can they make it work? (Google/YouTube has a better monetization track record than most.)

The Next Podcast Metric?

Bumper (a “podcast growth agency”) is pushing for a new podcast metric: listen time. Which makes a lot of sense.

The current North Star metric for the medium is downloads, which is kind of like a social media ‘like’—rather pointless since it doesn’t indicate a valuable action. Episodes can be auto downloaded never to be listened to, so what’s that metric mean?

If this gains traction, then it’d be pulling a YouTube for the medium.

Newsletters Are Sexy

If podcasts aren’t the hot new thing, then maybe newsletters are.

This is another realm where Facebook and Twitter tried to Substack but ultimately shuttered the efforts. (The pinnacle was when Jack Dorsey started a Substack despite being in charge of Twitter, the company that bought newsletter competitor Revue.) But just because it failed for some, doesn’t mean it will fail for all.

Not to be out InstaTok’d, LinkedIn is making profiles more visual (to make it seem more like a modern social network) and giving you some control over the display order of different content types and sections.

But the bigger deal in my mind is the build out of its newsletter feature.

We heard you loud and clear - you wanted the ability to schedule content on LinkedIn - and we’re happy to share it’s now possible. Last year, we introduced the option to schedule posts, and now we’re extending that feature to your newsletters and articles as well. This means you can plan your content in advance and share it at the best times to reach your audience.

I like this for two reasons:

1. It means the platform is taking newsletters seriously, at a time when other social platforms are killing off their offerings.

2. This is a great option for many people looking to start a personal newsletter on a topic matching the platform.

I set up a newsletter recently to test out the feature.

Pros

• Rapid growth: the feature leverages LinkedIn’s social graph and feed to help people discover your newsletter. I hit double digit subscribers in a matter of minutes after launch.

• Distribution: it’s a LinkedIn article that also delivers the full version to people’s inboxes. That means you get feed and email visibility from one piece of content.

Cons

• Walled garden: as far as I can tell you have to have a LinkedIn profile in order to subscribe, which means your potential audience is limited (but if your topic is well aligned to the platform this may not be a huge deal, depends on your goals).

• No data: you don’t get any email addresses or first-party data for your subscribers, just a list of their profile links. This makes moving to a different platform difficult (you can try lead forms, but there is no direct way to hit your subscribers right now).

Meta’s Dark Forest

The number of people posting to Meta feeds is dropping, so the megalith is focusing on its messaging features since that’s where the user action is. It’s taking a newsletter-y approach to doing so, trying to combine two horses into one. (Mega-horse?)

I recently glossed over a headline about Instagram copying a Telegram feature to allow one-to-many broadcasts via DM. Initially I saw it as just another copy-and-hope attempt in Zuck’s continued war against any platform that may steal even a few minutes of screen time from his apps, but this take made me revisit:

This is a way bigger deal than most are making it out to be! It’s essentially Instagram’s version of Linkedin’s internal newsletter feature. The more opportunities us marketers take advantage to send push notifications and get in front of our target audience, the more successful we will be! This is a huge one

Given that I’m high on LinkedIn newsletters I should be all in on this, but I want to see how things play out for a bit first. Each day a new headline is raising my hype meter.

It’s now testing Product Promotions in IG Group Chats. I’m skeptical of social commerce still (at least of the direct shopping version‡) but I can think of some ways to use this to create a VIP experience without asking users to give up their email address. Flash sales, early access, sneak peeks, low stock warnings, etc.

Speaking of newsletters, WhatsApp is reportedly experimenting with private newsletters. Details are sketchy at best for now since this discovery was made in the code, but it sounds like it could be very similar to LinkedIn’s version.

Digital dark forests (newsletters, podcasts, encrypted messaging) are a threat to social platforms. Embracing messaging and newsletters turns these forests into monetization and data-collection opportunities to help those balance sheets. The downside for businesses is you’re still tending to a walled garden and don’t own the relationship.

Word Of Mouth Still Wins

Let’s round it out with the darkest of forests, what’s in people’s heads and private conversations. (get out of here, Elon!) 

But Influencers (and other user generated content) help bridge the gap between organic WOM forest and platform garden, giving the most intimate marketing channel the scale of digital.

Matter’s new influencer report dropped and has some nuggets:

• 81% of consumers have been influenced by posts from friends, family, or influencers

• 69% trust these types of recs more than ones from brands

• It’s all about authenticity and relatability

• 11% prefer celebrity influencers, which is down 2020

• Educational content (edutainment) is on the rise (this is the core of TikTok’s Chinese sibling)

• Food, wellness, and beauty are influencer powerhouse verticals

• YouTube is tops with consumers for authentic influencer content

• But users are wising up to sponsored influencer content, thus the de-influencing trend on TikTok.

Creating a product or service people want to talk about is the best marketing. And allows you to build an advertising engine on the things that make it remarkable, including what real people are saying about it.

🤔 What if your ad campaign was designed on a WOM strategy?

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Section 230

A case against Google is in front of the Supreme Court. It’s about responsibility for extremist content posted to platforms, so it’s really Section 230 on trial. It’s a big deal.

So far:

Supreme Court justices reacted skeptically Tuesday to claims that YouTube parent Google LLC could be sued for algorithms that automatically recommended extremist recruiting videos

This is the latest battleground in an ongoing war over responsibility, and something worth keeping an eye on.

If you’re interested in more around 230, regulation, and potential fallout, I recommend Ben Evans.

Stolen Playbooks

So What?

That's your next copywriting trick. Ask "so what?" Again and again. And again.

Pick a product, pick a feature of that product, and then:

Keep asking, “So what?” until you reach one of these desires:

• Physical: Food, drink, warmth, and shelter

• Safety: Security and safety

• Belonging and love: Companionship and intimacy

• Esteem: Feelings of success and superiority

• Self-actualization: Achieving one’s full potential

The Secret to Overnight YouTube Success

A handy checklist from Demand Curve”””””

1. Creating videos that people find valuable

2. Posting them on YouTube at least once a week

3. Repeating this for at least 2 years

Ad Snacks

New Google Ads Goodies

PMaxers rejoice, new toys cometh (or you can read this LinkedIn post from the ads liaison). Here’s what we’re getting:

• Campaign-level brand exclusions for Search & Shopping inventory: so you can avoid showing on branded queries related to your brand—or other brands, from a provided list.

• Page feeds: allowing you to curate potential landing pages. Or grouping them by label to use in relevant campaigns.

• Page feeds + final URL expansion = steered AI performance

• Build video assets directly in the campaign creation flow.

• New experiments: incrementality and Standard Shopping faceoff

• More reporting: asset group level metrics and budget pacing insights

Less good new: Google Ads Tests Disabling Opt Out Of Search Partners & Display Network. All bots, all the time! The reps have been pushing this approach but soon it may be the only way to advertise, which is less than thrilling.

Microsoft Teases New Goodies 

No surprise, but there will be ads in BingGPT. Reports are a “friend of a friend” type grapevine so far, but here’s what it sounds like.

Some will be links within responses, search ads turned in-line links. A new format would be contextual pop ups triggered by question topic. This latter one is an example of what I think AI can unlock for digital advertising: turbocharged contextual targeting, the best kind of display targeting.

The chat interface is geared more towards focus than choice so these ad placements could turn out to be very valuable (if the hype pays off). And we may soon find out if bigger really is better.

Worth A Test?

If you’re looking for new channels and Reddit is on your radar, check out this guide.

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Thanks for reading!

-Kyle

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Earnings Bonanza

The reports are in, so how did everyone’s favorite tech giants fare in their recent earnings calls?

Last year, a round of these calls foreshadowed tech’s fall from grace. This year, with economic uncertainty in high supply, results were mixed with a dash of hope.

We’ll go roughly in order of their release.

Microsoft grew in some respects, but too slow for analysts’ liking. Overall, the consumer and business markets for Classic Microsoft offerings weakened, and cloud services didn’t grow enough to offset the blows. A rocky start for earnings szn, but the hope for The Former Windows company has to be its AI future (a common refrain, as you will see).

Snap: users, subscribers, and revenue up, revenue per user down.

The mismatch comes from reliance on North America for revenue but Rest of World (especially India) for user growth. The Ghost also hasn’t fully rebounded from Apple’s tracking changes with iOS 14.5.

One plan to help boost revenue? Let users buy back Snapstreaks for $0.99.

It’s earnings week, so we’ll soon know what trend Snap is kicking off this time.

Meta sang the same old song for most platforms these days: users up, revenue down, and growth in established markets was pretty much non-existent.

So what does a revenue drop get you these days? A 20% stock price increase!

Wait...what?

Zuck+Co just barely beat most of Wall Street's expectations, but that's more than most of its competitors can say these days. So aggressive cost cutting + the bottom not dropping out + increasing engagement = happy traders. Oh, and its use of AI is a big plus.

But here's the gem for marketers:

In the fourth quarter of 2022, ad impressions delivered across our Family of Apps increased by 23% year-over-year and the average price per ad decreased by 22% year-over-year. For the full year 2022, ad impressions increased by 18% year-over-year and the average price per ad decreased by 16% year-over-year.

Really feeling like Meta (and specifically Facebook) is the play this year.

Apple kept the lack of good news rolling. Revenue dropped for the first time in years thanks to a hindered ability to sell high-end iPhones. Aka it’s China’s Fault! (Put a pin in this.) The services end of the business grew though, so the focus on increasing this part of the pie should heat up this year (hello more Apple Ads!).

Not to be left out, Amazon capped off the biggest annual loss in its history. In part due to things like taking an L on Rivian and paying to let a lot of people go. But also because of things like Amazon Web Services no longer being the money minting machine it once was. Ads were the belle of the ball, which should mean a bigger push there this year to grow revenue (which isn’t necessarily great for sellers or shoppers).  

Google (/Alphabet (+YouTube)) was more Snap than Meta. Ad revenue was down for the second time in a row (new record!), but that’s ok because AI will save the day! (Cloud did well, put a pin in that too.)

If Goog wants revenue badly enough, could ad costs drop to sweeten the deal?

Finally, Pinterest capped things off on a high note (aside from the announced layoffs). Both users and revenue are up, thanks to Idea Pins (TikTok in Pinterest) and Gen Z. There is plenty of room for improvement in its ads products too, it’ll be an interesting platform to watch this year.

Closing the loop on a casual mention from a while back:

you can’t post video as a native pin anymore, only in Idea Pins (or paid ads)

On the general ad ecosystem front:

But as Andy Taylor, Tinuiti’s vp of research explained, any digital channel that leans toward the performance side of marketing had a bit more reason to be upbeat. “Those channels and platforms that have really been proven drivers of performance — really tried and true campaign types in terms of driving that return on ad spend — those still grew pretty meaningfully,” said Taylor. “And I think we’re probably going to continue to see that focus in the early months of 2023, where a lot of marketers are focusing on channels and platforms that they feel confident will deliver them results.”

Sounds like the opportunities early this year are in:

• Streaming video ads

• Meta ads (notably Reels)

• Pinterest?

• Sponsored product ads on marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart

(Google Ads will likely be ol’ faithful, if unremarkable. (Not mentioned in that piece: Microsoft Ads could be huge if the ChatGPT fervor draws enough interest in testing out BingGPT.))

Follow the money

Podcasts might be losing their shine, but they’re not losing ad revenue. In fact, the medium has been immune to slowing spend so far.

This means two things: 1) podcasts are now just another boring channel to advertisers, which is good & 2) if budgets aren’t getting cut here there must be a reason, are you missing out on something?

TikTok may be feeling the heat from various and assorted regulators, but advertisers are all good. As are users.

At this point for most advertisers, the audience on TikTok is just too good to resist.

The New New

No cookies? No problem. At least for advertising on Disney. The Most Magical Ad Platform on Earth’s post-cookie clean room collaboration with The Trade Desk (Unified ID 2.0) is getting its first workout.

The partnership allows the new identity solution to tap into Disney’s audience graph for all the data goodness. Expect this partnership to be the first of many.

And it’s not just cookies. Disney is making moves to level up purchase intent and reach & frequency measurement and reporting.

Due to the cachet of The Mouse, these decisions could create front runners in the race to replace Nielsen.

Also, robots.

In summary, as AdExchanger says:

the entertainment giant is focused on building out its own in-house ad tech stack to improve targeting, measurement and programmatic automation.

Oops, Microsoft’s AI-powered Bing just leaked. For a brief moment the next era of search was live and the example in the screen shot hinted at an experience superior to the current 10 blue links paradigm. (The example was a system suggestion and some inference, so not sure what % of BingGPT searches will be superior.) (Update: the limited initial version is live for real now.)

Microsoft must be capitalizing on all the OpenAI / ChatGPT headlines because they're making more "performance improving" changes to ads.

Moving forward, you will no longer see the audience ad bid modifier in your campaign settings. Instead of using positive or negative bid modifiers to manually adjust participation in the audience network, all you need to do is define your goals, and Microsoft Advertising will fully optimize your campaigns across channels.

To reward advertisers for their loyalty (probably not, but the narrative potential is too good), TikTok has unveiled video insights.

With Video Insights, you can:

• Compare your ad performance against industry benchmarks.

• Dive deeper into the specific video elements that are making your ads perform.

• Inspire new videos and optimize your production workflow through an informed content strategy.

The Trend Machine also wants to find out how important music really is to the user experience. Surely it has nothing to do with labels wanting a bigger cut. Spoiler alert: the test isn’t going great. In fact, it’s going badly enough that some creators might leave all together. The dangers of a poorly implemented test. 

The Clock’s newest trend? De-influencing; or, being more authentic by posting “what not to buy” content.

• Yahoo is making a return to search

• New Google Ads Feature: Account-Level Negative Keywords

Mo’ Meta

I missed a noteworthy bit in the piece about Reels and Facebook performance the last weeek:

Data gathered in the middle of the fourth quarter showed that time spent on [Facebook] was up worldwide, including in developed markets, over the course of a year.

Instagram Notes are going (more) global, which means the feature must be working. Some people are reporting way higher response rates when asking questions compared to asking via Stories.

Your phone’s battery life seem lackluster? Might be Meta’s fault. A document provided in a court case by a former employee details a negative testing program that intentionally drained batteries in order to monitor app and feature performance. (Remember, TikTok uses your battery state and performance in its algorithm.) (Fortune article, PDF of the document)

From the Today in Digital Marketing podcast:

• RIP Instant Articles (in mid-April)

• bug alert: newsfeed ad images appear to be getting randomly and weirdly cropped, no matter what you set during ad creation (as a whole, the Meta ad platform and manager seem buggy lately)

• Want to get past someone’s two factor authentication to hack their account? Turns out all you needed was their email or phone number. This “bug” should now be fixed.

Do The Goog

Remember the pin we put in Google Cloud? Well, Big G pulled a Microsoft and invested in an AI company (one that just so happens to have a solid ChatGPT competitor) with the funds invested being used to buy cloud computing from the source of the money.

Doesn’t sound like Claude (said competitor) will find its way into Google products as part of this deal. Until it does, of course.

That's a nice analytics set up you have there, shame if anything were to happen to it. Is what someone at Google probably said. But they worded it like this:

For any customer who does not set up a GA4 property with basic settings, starting in March, we will configure one with a few basic settings consistent with the existing Universal Analytics property; this includes certain conversion events, Google Ads links, and existing website tags.

Sounds like Google is getting pickier about UTM parameters in GA4. When in doubt, reference the help doc.

• Google ready to kick the cookie habit by Q3 2024, for real this time

• Google will once again apply Gmail spam detection to political campaign emails

• Improved search for properties and accounts in Google Analytics 4 (you can now use that search bar I ignore in GA4 to access details about the current property's data stream(s) and settings or navigate to other GA4 properties (It's always fun when Big G remembers they're a search giant and might want to leverage that knowledge in their other products))

Stolen playbooks

If you’re serious about SEO, get on this. The Russian search engine Yandex (a top 5 player globally) had its source code leaked.

It’s designed to be as close to a Google clone as it can get, which means there are plenty of Big G tricks in there. Here is the list of ranking factors if you want to skip straight to digging in.

People love correcting other people on the internet. You can use that to your advantage.

Intentionally make a mistake in your post or post a comment with the wrong answer from a burner account and wait for the comments to roll in.

Another thing to consider on TikTok (according to Jorden Souza of The TikTok Lab) is “comment campaigns.”

It’s an easy way to get brand awareness, and usually the creator will make a video responding to the comment in shock, further propelling the brand. It also “humanizes” the brand and gives it some personality!

I like this advice from the DTC Daily newsletter so I'm just going to paste it here:

The advice I keep seeing for 2023 is you really need to find your unique value proposition. What makes your brand different? What values do you have? All these brands have something that sets them apart. Study them and think about what a write-up for your own brand would look like in a list like this.

From this Twitter thread by Alex Garcia:

1. Clarity - communicate only one idea (which is stated in the headline)

2. Context - how will you deliver on that idea? (subhead)

3. Creative - further clarify with more context

4. Call to Action - be specific and reiterate the value prop

5. (Bonus) Social Proof - support your claims with the word(s) of others

The Logic of Liquid Death:

We realize that 98% of people actually hate marketing. If you can make people laugh, they will have a deeper connection with your brand, regardless of the functional differences of your liquid.”

(I have quibbles with the wording at the start of the quote, but I think the lesson holds: be real. (but not necessarily BeReal))

And:

I’ve used this analogy a ton lately — we think about our marketing team more like “Saturday Night Live.” Like, we’re an entertainment machine and we’re constantly trying to put what we put out on the level of an SNL sketch.

Modern Retail has a piece up on how a DTC brand is using QVC (yes, it still exists!) to grow its audience. The approach could prove useful on other livestream shopping platforms, or really just content in general.

The episodes themselves follow QVC’s The Total Experience format rather than a direct selling approach and are up to about three minutes long. The format allows Agrawal to share more of her background, the brand’s story and the community behind the brand Sonder Club. For example, in one episode, Agrawal explained how customers can connect with Silk + Sonder users and gain access to Sonder Socials, which are special events and classes led by the company’s trained facilitators.

…

consumers also aren’t as easily influenced to buy items just based on static images. “We’re smarter than that now,” she said. “We want to see things in action. We don’t necessarily want to get in our car and drive to the store but we want the next best thing.”

And then there’s this:

According to a 2021 McKinsey report, livestream shopping generates conversion rates approaching 30% — up to 10 times higher than conventional e-commerce.

When you launch a new Google Ads campaign—no matter how long your account or conversion tracking has been running—start with manual bidding.

This gives you more control while giving the algorithms their requisite time to learn. Once you hit at least 30 conversions you can return to the sweet embrace of automation.

How to evaluate the incremental cost per conversion of your Google Ads campaigns (using the performance planner tool, so grain of salt).

And let ChatGPT write your ads for you.

• Inside Heyday’s marketing playbook for franchisees

• SEO v Social Media: The 9 Big Differences & What Works Where [Infographic]

• Should your influencers be human - or virtual? / Virtual influencers make your brand stand out and make your products seem more innovative. (“Pro tip: related research found that virtual influencers are great at grabbing attention for your brand, but not so good at direct conversions to sales, because people struggle to relate with them.” (Probably applies beyond just avatars when it comes to AI))

Psych-snacks

Via the Chase Diamond newsletter:

Emotion is how you’ll get your prospect to buy. Logic is how you’ll get your prospect to defend their buying decision to their friends and family — which becomes your word-of-mouth messaging, leading to indirect sales for you.

• How Apple brilliantly used a 100‑year‑old persuasion strategy (hint: it's the labor illusion)

retail.tea.leaves

Another week reading the tea leaves: Ecomm passes the trillion mark as mobile carves out a bigger piece of the purchase pie, Can you buy love this Valentine's Day? & a couple headlines. (Also covered some earnings news and the QVC livestream stuff already mentioned here)

Supply chains

Remember back when semiconductor supplies got squeezed and all hell broke loose? Now we have the opposite, but some hell might still break loose.

DRAM (the thing we call ‘memory’ in computers) is in overwhelming supply (maybe the flip side of those other chips being the bottleneck) and manufacturers are hurting because of it. And suppliers will hurt, etc.

To help with that whole “our bad revenue is China’s fault” thing, Apple is further splintering its supply chain. This time by moving some parts of the AirPods chain to India.

Mr TikTok Goes to Washington

TikTok CEO to Appear Before US Congress, as Pressure Mounts on the Chinese-Owned App

• How to Turn Your Brand into a Cult Brand (think: Nike or Crossfit)

• The Trinternet Does Skynet (China and the US are in a race to see who can export more facial recognition systems, but it may be more than just that)

• Can Apple Out-Google Google? (Apple launching its own search engine would be a $15B+ gamble)

• When Brands Act Against Type: Intuit & Shell & Balenciaga (what happens when brands do something unexpected?)

This weeek: The Memeconomy, checking in recent plots that are thickening, tips and tricks to steal for your playbook, The Meta Memo, a tip for your podcast art, More Ads in More Places, a riddle about ad spend forecasts, & #Hacked (& Other Attack Vectors)

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🦠 The Memeconomy

Memes are the Ron Burgundy of the internet (kind of a big deal). And the lifeblood of many a social/content platform.

They are also big business. And maybe a key to unlock marketing.

I am by no means an expert resource for the meme-averse (which is much less theoretical than the metaverse currently), so I am going to highly recommend this piece by Liz Hagelthorn and treat a few slides as memes here.

Thickening Plots

The whole Microsoft+OpenAI vs. Google thing just keeps going. 

Seems like each day brings a new report of [enter Microsoft product name here] to get [insert AI capability here] comes out. But Google has a plan, and it’s: launch over 20 AI products this year, including a demo of its own search chatbot. (well that escalated quickly (how many join the Google Graveyard by 2025?))

And it turns out, Microsoft Cloud is doing great. And it hasn’t even gone full ChatGPT yet. This success, when compared to Google Cloud Platform, shows the advantage Microsoft has when it comes to enterprise infrastructure and sales.

Google knows scale. Microsoft knows sales.

Let’s pivot to a space where Google has the power stance: the monetization of Shorts. YouTube and TikTok are locked in as the top two platforms for short-form video and now reports are coming out that TikTok monetization is not great and going viral is getting harder.

So maybe my idea that brands that want to create digital community should start a Mastodon server was a bad one. The points made by the Financial Times Alphaville team are apt, and the most common thread is liability. Definitely something I’d be wary of in light of pending cases that could put platforms on the hook for what users post.

I do wonder if there is a way to do it as a private community. I’m not willing to let this idea go yet, but it’s not looking great.

The Playbook

Is this the start of The Great Un-TikTok-ening?

Probably not, but Instaglam pulled the plug on its TikTok overhaul. And Head of Da Gram, Adam Mosseri, admitted they went a bit too cuckoo for video puffs.

The new goal is an even mix of video and photo and let and further video-fication of the platform be driven by user engagement.

From Inside.com: How do you balance creativity with data-driven decision-making?

Data wins for direct response outreach. Creativity wins for brand outreach. Period.

-Daniel James Scott

Want to level up your Instagram numbers this year?

Focus on SEO and Reels.

Like Pinterest, Insta uses all available signals to figure out what your post is about. Use that to your advantage and spell it out for the robots.

It may not be "all Reels, all the time" anymore, but the format is still hugely important to the platform. Looking for direction?

Creator Olivia Noceda leverages trending audio with original storytelling to build a lasting community. And saw a 75% increase in follower growth after going Reels-only.

But don't try to go viral.

Stay true to you and the growth will follow.

You can also use your business profile CTA button to generate lead form fills. Platforms love when you don’t try to take users off-site, lead forms are a great hack to make the platform happy while you get a direct line to a potential customer via a platform you “own.”

Newsletter discoverability, courtesy of LinkedIn:

Use Reddit and Twitter to see what your audience really thinks of you.

From Stacked Marketer:

• Twitter: search for tweets containing your company’s name or one of your competitors’. Look for tweets like, “Has anyone used [company name]?” or replies to tweets like “Anyone know a way to [do the thing your product does]?” Sometimes, customers write the copy for you.

• Reddit: See if you can find people talking about your product or similar products and focus on the things they care about.

• Google: People still write product reviews as blog posts. If you can find one for your brand, read what they’re saying.

Another audience finding tip from from Social Media Today: poke around the platform’s ads manager to see the estimated audience size for your target (and aspirational) audience.

From the tea leaves:

A study found that caffeine consumption boosts hedonic purchase behavior. You could test increasing ad budgets during common coffee consumption times. Or campaigns that only run in the morning. Or AM flash sales. Or try to microtarget around coffee shops and other caffeination destinations.

A twist on the marketplace concept, curate a collection of complimentary products from other brands related to your niche / sector. For example, a high-end pajama company that started a relaxation and sleep product shop within its stores.

The Meta Memo

Instagram saying “we pivoted too hard to video” might be code for “we pivoted too hard away from revenue.” Reels Ads are the cheapest of the Meta lot at the moment, so competing with TikTok cost more than just cred.

Fun fact: The Big Blue App generates 2/3 of Meta’s Zuck Bucks™️.

Reports were flowing after the holidays that Facebook performance was the gift that kept on giving. Sounds like Facebook expects that to be the norm and not the exception moving forward. Thanks in part to improving AI prediction machines for ad targeting and content (Reels) delivery. The money tanker may have finally finished adjusting course post-iOS privacy changes.

But if you only remember one nugget, remember this:

While Reels is often publicly associated with young users and Instagram, Facebook users appear to be the more avid consumers of the short videos.

Meta needs engagement. Which means more users spending more time in the apps. Which means more content for them to look at, interact with, get incensed by, etc. Which means more people making that contact. Which leads us to The Eye of Sauron paying Buzzfeed millions of dollars to help bring in that sweet, sweet content.

Boring but maybe helpful: Updating ad measurement terminology to align with Accounts Center (more name changing as product update (and more monkeying with metrics to look better))

🌈 The More You Know

Have a podcast? Thinking about starting one? Make sure your image communicates the topic (as much as possible in a small square) and is formatted right:

• 3000x3000 pixels (this is the new size Apple is pushing for)

• 72 dpi

• JPEG or PNG

• RGB color space (if you don't know what this means, you probably don't need to worry about it)

More Ads in More Places

It may soon be possible to measure ad viewability in games (and other virtual experiences (trying not to say metaverse)).

This could be the shark that needs jumping as it would start to hint at awareness and reach numbers.

The big question: what counts as viewable?

Current IAB video impression standards are:

50% of the ad’s pixels are visible in the browser window for a continuous 1 second.

Other places:

• WeWork

• Disney+ Announces Exciting New Ways to Show Ads to You and Your Kids (age, gender, and geo-targeting now, then the “full suite of targeting” options available on Hulu)

• Twitch is going to make pre-roll ads way less annoying / Twitch is also adding a bunch of features for streamers and sharing what it’s working on for creators in 2023 and beyond. (the changes will de-emphasize ads and potentially make them easier to pause/skip, but that could make them less annoying to users and thus boost their value (looking for a new platform to test? Twitch is worth a look if it has your demo)

This Search Engine Land post on consent-based targeting is worth a read for any PPC manager. Nothing groundbreaking, but a great refresh and primer for the new year. Topics include:

• First-party vs. Native (platform) data

• How to use native data in your campaigns

• How to collect more 1st party data

• How to make your messaging relevant to these audiences

Ad Spend Forecasts: A Riddle

Forecasts for 2023 ad revenue and spend aren’t so rosy (and the survey results seem downright contradictory at times). But the number of new business applications have been off the charts lately.

So if few businesses are planning to cutback on their marketing spend and a bunch of new businesses are starting up, why is ad revenue / spend forecast to only grow by a small amount (if at all)?

You can read a bit more on this here.

Google Giveth, Google Taketh Away

Giveth: YouTube is working on updates to make it easier for uploaders to figure out what part of their video caused violations. You know, instead of the vague email devoid of any info to help you even start trying to solve the problem.

Giveth: Chrome is adding support for Scrollend,a browser event that fires when:

• The browser is no longer animating or translating scroll.

• The user's touch has been released.

• The user's pointer has released the scroll thumb.

• The user's keypress has been released.

• Scroll to fragment has completed.

• Scroll snap has completed.

• scrollTo() has completed.

• The user has scrolled the visual viewport.

Sounds like a useful event to track if you’re interested in how people engage with your content and where they lose interest.

Giveth: How Vimeo improved Video SEO for their customers (an official Google case study, so worth a read if relevant)

Giveth (but not by Google): It’s easy to setup a Performance Max campaign in Google Ads, but it can still be a little difficult to figure out how it’s really doing. Thankfully, Collin Schmelebeck has a handy Twitter thread to help shed some light on shopping performance. You have to wait for your follow request to be accepted before you can see the thread, but I don’t want to steal his thunder, so here’s a taste:

• Custom report

• Merchant Center ID (/ MC ID) row

• Metrics

• PMax filter

• Nerd out

Taketh: Optimize will be sunset on September 30. A/B testing and other experiments will be moved (unsurprisingly) to Google Analytics 4. Presumably the feature will even be live and relatively stable by then.

retail.tea.leaves

Another week reading the tea leaves:

• Luxury just treading water?

• Walmart says the water's fine, thanks

• How some retailers are surfing the "returns tsunami"

• The benefits of caffeinating your customers

• More splintering

• & some headlines

#Hacked (& Other Attack Vectors)

U.S. ‘No Fly List’ Leaks After Being Left in an Unsecured Airline Server

Riot Games receives ‘ransom email’ for stolen source code following social engineering attack (humans are always the weakest link in the security chain)

TikTok is facing threatened bans in the EU and the US House and Senate. 

Apple’s Privacy Policies Under Fire From Ad Tech Industry (specifically about its “hypocrisy” (who could have seen this coming?))

DOJ Poised to Sue Google Over Digital Ad Market Dominance

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Thanks for reading! As usual, I didn’t have time to write you a short post so I wrote a long one. Catch you next weeek.

-Kyle

This weeek: More Social Signals, Where’s Your Audience?, and a Slow Trickle of Robots. Just care about digital ad stuff? Scroll to the bottom.

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👥 Social Signals

Will the trend for social media platforms this year be...

20-Community?

Instagram is in full hustle mode to stave off TikTok, lawsuits, and regulation while also increasing its chances of raking in money via more engagement and brand appeal.

The newest test is collaborative collections; or, Pinterest in Instagram (Pinstagram!).

Turn saved posts into a board you can share with others. The potential for brands lies in community building and curated shopping experiences. Worth a test.

On the "we care about our users (plz don't sue us)" front, it's added a Quiet Mode, which is basically Apple’s do not disturb but just for IG notifications. Keyword blocking so you can avoid personal trigger words. And more.

But brands ❤️ Reels, so at least they have that.

And if your community is professional, don't forget about LinkedIn. If Reels aren't for you, maybe LinkedIn Live Events are. The platform put together a handy infographic if that's your kind of thing. (More below)

And The VidCon Title Sponsor Is…

YouTube!

As the unicorse would say: aaaaaaaannnndddd why should I care?*

Because it took the spot back from TikTok. The two platforms are locked in a heavyweight fight for the hearts and minds of creators. And wallets, as YouTube will begin monetizing Shorts (aka TikTok in the Red Box) next month.

The Clock is Ticking?

TikTok is clapping back at YouTube with...podcasts! That's what it's calling it, but it’s really more like YouTube playing in the background if you’re a paying subscriber. While everyone else is chasing short form video the trendsetter is going audio.

If The Clock App does crack open its algorithm for inspection, will other platforms get a peek? If they do, will they learn anything useful? If everything is suddenly the For You feed does TikTok maintain its magic?

This speculation is all assuming the algorithm actually is "magic" and it's not just the people behind the curtain boosting content for brands, personalities, and friends and family making things go viral.

And who forgot to tell them about the ad spend slowdown?

As budgets increase for TikTok ads, it appears a standardized playbook is taking shape.

The moves on display from TikTok advertisers nowadays are starting to resemble a tried and tested playbook.

What works for a lot of them these days seems to be to run TikTok ads in conjunction with influencer marketing. So they use paid ads to essentially boost content they think could, or is, getting traction among users.”

But as ad dollars shift, opportunity opens on the losing platforms.

Buckle Up Twitter

Mastodon has arrived. You can now schedule your toots via Buffer.

*is it obvious I’m a dad now?

🕵️‍♂️ Where’s Your Audience?

Maybe on Roblox.

December daily active users rose 18% and hours engaged rose 21% to 4.7B. That’s a lot.

But maybe not in China.

China’s population dropped for the first time since Mao’s great famine. And the birth rate is the lowest it’s been since it went communist.

The country has reached a crossroads in its development, but the splintering of supply chains could lessen its impact on the global economy.

Related: keep an eye on India.

Watching Something

About that whole “Netflix ads are doing fine” thing. Maybe not so much. Revenue growth is set to be the In-Home Theater app’s slowest ever.

Oh and co-founder Reed Hastings is stepping down as CEO. Probably unrelated. (This was announced right after The ‘Flix reported it crushed new subscriber projections, so maybe he’s pulling a Jordan or Jay-Z. (The first time they retired.))

On LinkedIn

The Platform 4 Professionals is (still) having a moment.

850+ million members. $5B in annual revenue. 22%+ increase in various engagements.

The sleeper feature: LinkedIn Live Events. 231% growth in attendance. If your brand is considering doing it live, maybe do it on LinkedIn.

Shopping

Luxury and resale are in. (Especially with The Youth.)

Amazon Prime is out?

Thrift is the theme of the year so far.

And your customers really don't want to hear from you that much.

More on these in this weeek's retail.tea.leaves.

How To Be Sophisticated

Want to be fancy in 2023? Alan R Newton, COO and Co-Founder of virtuall, has you covered:

the more sophisticated marketers will be more advanced in mapping the ideal customer pathways and creating engaging and emotive experiences that motivate action.

Wants to Be Shown, Not Told

A great question from Marketing Max:

How can you articulate the absence of your product without even showing what happens when your product is present?

🤖 A Slow Trickle of Robots

Silicon Shuffle

The hottest algorithm on the planet right now is TikTok's For You feed. But is it all a lie?

TikTok can manually boost videos into the For You feed to juice views. It’s one hell of a talent attraction feature. And one hell of a hornet’s nest for a congresscritter to kick.

But The Trend Machine really doesn’t want to get banned. To the point it might just be willing to crack open that coveted algorithm for inspection.

Hey Siri, does Apple smell blood in the voice assistant water with Amazon’s Alexa woes?

Can Apple figure out how to monetize voice search?

It had to learn something from the success of AirPods, right?

And it looks like my moderately hot take from last week is cooling off by the moment, Google has a ChatGPT competitor almost ready for launch. Why the wait? They want it to be more like Wikipedia and less like Twitter.

Ads Meet More AI

What's hotter than retail media networks and AI right now? AI for retail media networks!

Say hello to Horizon’s Neon. An AI analytics tool that (allegedly) improves budget allocation decisions across retail media platforms. More info in this weeek's retail.tea.leaves.

Less flashy, Google Ads experiments come to Performance Max campaigns. Between this and Analytics 4, it’s starting to feel like the company has adopted the “build in public” mindset on a grand scale.

Generative AI (Algorithmic Insecurity)

According to some headlines, AIs like ChatGPT are the end of education or our need to write or maybe even humans in general.

For marketing specifically, it ranges from we'll never need to write ads again to who needs human interns?

But I like this take from Michael Hoffman, CEO of Gather Voices:

In 2023, we are going to be overrun with mediocre and bland AI-produced content. As Ezra Klein put it, the cost of bullshit will go to zero. What that means for us is that marketers will only break through with authenticity. Real people. Real voices. Real stories. Real opinions. The best of it will be on video.

🍪 Ad Snacks

Only care about what's happening in the world of digital advertising? Here're your quick hits:

If you run ads on retail media networks, you might want to check out Neon, an AI that compares performance across the networks and uses predictive analytics to help you allocate budgets more efficiently. At least that's what it says on the box.

Performance Max campaigns are getting experiments. Slowly becoming a real, live Google Ads product.

LinkedIn recently shared a bunch of platform metrics that make it sound like you should try running some ads there. At least to get the conversation going.

TikTok may be recession-proof. And is dabbling in audio-only content consumption modes.

There are a lot of people spending a lot of time on Roblox.

Shell bought an electric vehicle charging station company / network. The chargers have screens that play ads. Electric vehicle drivers have money, right? Seems like an audience tailor made for someone to reach. (Of course, those same drivers probably have expensive screens in their pockets too.)

Apple is probably a top 25 player in the ad market.

The Metal & Glass Rectangles Company could soon become a major player in digital advertising, and might even break out specific revenue numbers if/when it does. But I have a question…

Your challenge for the weeek…

Think up an ad that sells your product / service without saying what it is or showing what it does.

Like the McDonald's ad above.

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Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Rabbbits Weeekly is now Spottting Rabbbits, which will focus more on trends and less directly on headlines. Like last weeek's RW. I'm aiming to push these out on Wednesday, or Trendsday as I think of it now (yes, a lot of these changes are due to inane wordgames I played in my head, welcome to my brain).

I might still do some kind of streamlined headline roundup somewhere, but not sure what form that will take. I'll also be creating a list of my go-to sources so that you can fill out your feed if you want. But mainly, with the number of sources and sites out there, I feel like another headline round up in this space isn't super valuable. So instead, opinions! (Just what everyone wants more of.)

Some other ideas I'm playing around with:

A Monday Memo that covers a tip or topic I think might be useful for marketers (podcast notes, book notes, anecdotes, sweet advice I ran across, etc).

Publishing Retail Tea Leaves as a weeekly thing on LinkedIn to test that platform out.

Doing more strategy-related writing, which will post on, you guessed it, Straturday.

Is there something you want more or less of from me? Comment or reply and let me know.

Thanks for reading!

-Kyle

This weeek: Tech Bros vs Congresscritters (& Concerned Adults), Social Signals & Shifting Screens, Microsoft’s Window Just Opening?, plus retail and a few quick headlines. And is Google going gone?

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⚖️ Tech Bros vs Congresscritters (& Concerned Adults)

Read on the blog

2022 was rough for Big Tech. Layoffs, privacy changes, regulatory attention, the rise of TikTok, bad press, etc etc. So far 2023 is less fresh start and more 2022 extended director’s cut.

Seattle School District #1 is suing the tech giants because (and yes, I pulled this from the first paragraph of a 92 page document, sorry, not sorry):

Defendants’ growth is a product of choices they made to design and operate their platforms in ways that exploit the psychology and neurophysiology of their users into spending more and more time on their platforms. These techniques are both particularly effective and harmful to the youth audience Defendants have intentionally cultivated, creating a mental health crisis among America’s youth.

I’m sure it’s unrelated, but Meta is further restricting how ads can be targeted to teens. Now “age and location will be the only information about a teen that we’ll use to show them ads.” Interests and activities were previously removed as options, now previous engagements across apps and gender join the list. Zuck’s Bucks Generator is also giving teens more control over what types of ads they see and information about their privacy options.

Speaking of privacy-friendly Meta moves, the successor to Special Ad Audiences for Housing is here. Enter the Variance Reduction System (VRS). It’s supposed to ensure the audience that sees the ad matches the targeting without discriminating. Consider me firmly in the “I’ll believe it when I see it” camp.

Switching tech giants, W3C (a web standards group) said Google’s Topics idea for post-cookie advertising just continues the surveilling status quo and asked they retool it. Google said “nah, we good.” The cookie continues to crumble but the crumbs haven’t taken a new shape yet. (Gated article, podcast recap)

New Jersey and Ohio have joined the ranks of states banning TikTok on government devices.

And Joe Biden has asked Democrats and Republicans to unite in legislation against a common adversary: big tech. Both sides of the aisle have issues with the big players (though those issues are usually also on opposite sides of an aisle), which could make 2023 the year of privacy on The Hill. And could mean cookiepocalypse 2.0 for platforms and marketers.

On The Continent, Germany wants Google to stop sharing so much user data between its services (for those sweet advertising profiles) and France has fined TikTok, Facebook, Google, and Amazon for cookie banners. And Apple for improperly collecting user data for ad targeting (while limiting/spoofing the data it sends to others (not part of this case, just an intriguing coincidence)).

🧵 connective thread: Meta changes

🪩 Social Signals

Read on the blog

In 2022, social media became synonymous with short-form video—the TikTok-ification of the internet.

Despite what headlines about "what Gen Z is doing" would have you believe, social media is still plenty popular. Global time spent on social apps rose 17% year-over-year last year (on Android devices).

Under the Influence®️

While people are sick of influencers flaunting/flogging luxury (turns out celebrities aren't just like us when times are tough (and, yes, this is from the UK, which has a much different energy situation than the US currently)), influencers are sick of Instagram. Or at least not banking on it making them bank.

Unsurprisingly, TikTok is the cool kid and YouTube is the popular clique that doesn't play super well with others. On the other hand, Instaglam is becoming the quiet loner that only speaks in quotes.

The agency HigherVisibility did some research on creators and its Top 20 list includes only 2 that use The 'Gram as their main platform. And only 1 of those started on IG (shout out, Vine! We see you). It doesn't get better:

Instagram places last with the lowest amount of average followers among the top 10 creators on the app

But here's the real kicker:

Organic reach for brands on TikTok is reported to be 118%, and when compared to the likes of Instagram which is reported at 13.51% the difference is astronomical.

🤯

Since Instagram "accounted for 94% of influencer marketing campaigns as of 2022," the opportunity in 2023 may lie literally anywhere else.

Big Blue Elephant in the Room

Insert an "I'm not dead yet!" GIF here because the Facebook app still gets downloaded. Mostly in India, but the US clocked 30M+ downloads last year. It may not be popular with the youths†, but it's popular with someone. (†This may be an overblown take, they may just use less feed and more groups. The slow growth of dark forests should continue to be a trend.)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before (you can’t because you haven’t), Meta ads got cheaper. Prices dropped 12% week-over-week to end 2022 (with some saying CPMs were down 28% year-over-year), and performance improved (for some). A marketer’s dream scenario: spend less to get more. It’s unlikely Zuck instituted a price drop, so this could mean advertisers are taking their dollars elsewhere. Could Meta Ads become an opportunity in 2023?

What other crazy things might happen in Meta’s ‘verse this year? Messenger is going back in app.

I expect Meta (and other platforms) to prioritize revenue and earnings this year, that means fewer moonshots and more focus on the money making basics. For Meta that means giving more people more reasons to spend time in the flagship apps: Big Blue and The ‘Gram. The former has easier levers to pull on that front than the latter. And both share a lever: Reels.

All signs point to Facebook being an interesting play to start the year. To that end, you’ll want to make sure you beat ad fatigue and maybe do a little community building.

It’s More Than Meta

Turns out turmoil may be good for LinkedIn. The Professional Platform has been on an upswing since early in the pandemic. First the mass shift to remote work and less face-to-face, then That Twitter Thing, and now the mass layoffs in tech and media sectors (I feel for them, good luck in your job searches). Through it all, LinkedIn has been growing—revenue, users, and engagement. If you’re wondering where your audience is, it might be on LinkedIn.

YouTubers get some new analytics (or at least new, more visible locations for old analytics) and other toys. Surprise surprise, Shorts get the spotlight. And some other new features, plus monetization.

📺 Shifting Screens

Television has long been the go-to example for the bundling-unbundling cycle. With the rise of short form and streaming, we’re nearing peak unbundling in this current phase. Throw in inflation and a quasi-recession-thing and linear TV is feeling the heat.

S&P Global is predicting an 8.2% drop in TV advertising this year, with local taking the biggest hit. Why?

S&P says: “Recession increases vulnerability of linear TV with higher cord cutting, declining audience ratings, and weakened advertising.”

But Netflix's ad tier is doing just fine, thank you very much (at least that's what it says). CPMs might be coming down though, which means it could become another ad channel option for more advertisers (and the splintering continues). The format options could become more robust as well, as it "aims to do a bit more than just running typical ads, including things like dynamic insertion of ads near moments that are relevant to marketers, single-show sponsorships, and more. It will also later allow marketers to target ads by age and gender."

…
Back to the S&P predictions, what is this chart trying to communicate?

🧵 connective thread: LinkedIn Growth

🪟 Microsoft's Window Just Opening?

Read on the blog

Microsoft is betting big on OpenAI, thanks to ChatGPT. $10 billion big. It could be a 2-for-1 approach to supercharge The Former Windows Company’s future as a cloud computing and AI-powered software and services provider with dashes of AI in anything they can add it to (Bing, Office, Azure, etc). (ChatGPT runs on Microsoft servers, 🎶the circle of life 🎵)

About that AI-powered future, Microsoft’s new VALL-E model can reliably generate audio that sounds like someone using only 3 seconds of source audio. The podcast and indie cartoon explosion cometh? (We’re getting closer to Ron Jeremy’s future.)

But it's more than just AI. It looks like King 'Softie is getting serious about shopping. BigCommerce sellers can now integrate their store with Merchant Center to deliver ads and listings across Bing, Edge, partners like Yahoo! and AOL, and more.

But that's just the amuse-bouche of their aspirations. It's adding features to its PromoteIQ platform to take it omnichannel: onsite, offsite, and in-store. The big play in onsite is the newly announced Microsoft Retail Advertising Network. Now retailers don't have to roll-their-own solution to become a retail media revenue generator, they can just tap Microsoft (and soon a bunch of AI-powered features, presumably).

Does all this have you wondering if you should consider Microsoft Ads (if you aren't running them already)? A good rule of thumb (according to Marketing Max) is:

If you spend more than $15,000 a month on Google ads, you should consider a small test investment in Bing ads.

The logic being (I'm guessing here), if Bing generates 900 million searches a day and Microsoft ads deliver on other search engines (like DuckDuckGo) and a test budget is 10% of spend, would you get more from tossing another $1,500 on your existing Google spend or putting it on a new channel with a (potentially) new audience? Plus, you can import your Google campaigns to Microsoft with a few clicks, so where's the downside of testing?

...

It's not outlandish to think that Microsoft has forgotten more about enterprise sales and partnerships than Google knows about them. And with its history and track record in the field it has IBM status, no one gets fired for choosing Microsoft.

Moderately Hot Take?

Of the tech giants, it is the one that most closely resembles a decentralized or federated structure, which could become very handy in this evolving landscape of privacy and sentiment. It used to just build software that got installed on devices owned and operated by others. You didn't have to visit one URL to use its products. You didn't have to buy a piece of hardware it controlled the manufacturing process for. And now (I haven't checked earnings reports so this could be dead wrong) it doesn’t live or die by ad revenue or device sales or consumers clicking on a buy button. And if a bunch of Fortune 500 companies stop paying for it or start going out of business we probably have much bigger things to worry about then if Microsoft can survive.

This past meets present ambitions in this bit from the BigCommerce announcement:

Without leaving the BigCommerce Control Panel, merchants can see campaign performance with a snapshot view or run detailed reporting on a wide or granular scope, with specific key elements or side-by-side comparisons across various ad campaigns. Changes can be made in real time to status, budgets and bids while having access to a personalized tips dashboard and customer support to get better results.

Microsoft doesn't care about getting you back to a platform or page it controls to do what you want, it just wants you to use its stuff wherever is "convenient" for you.

All of these threads braided together with LinkedIn's growth gives Microsoft an intriguing foundation as Google's appears shaky. Is Google going gone?

🧵 connective thread: BigCommerce

🛒 retail.tea.leaves

Read on the blog

Let’s Get Digital

Sell with Amazon from the comfort of your own site. The Everything Store is expanding the Buy with Prime program to all US merchants at the end of the month. And Reviews from Amazon will let Buy with Prime merchants show reviews from Amazon on their site.

Another nail in social commerce’s coffin? Instagram is removing the Shop tab from the main nav. The Once-Upon-A-Photo app will “continue to invest in shopping experiences that provide the most value for people and businesses across feed, stories, reels, ads and more,” but I don’t think Amazon 2.0 is in the cards.

Better ecomm measurement is coming to Google Analytics 4. Big G has added 12 dimensions and metrics and renamed another 7. Each shopping action is now tracked at the item and event level, “enabling you to analyze information about your products or services and separately analyze important ecommerce interactions.” For example, items added to carts and add to cart events.

Now you can (better) put your business on the Apple map.

Retail By The Numbers

Retail job growth bounced back in December.

Holiday spending was up 7% year-over-year, but inflation is likely inflating that. Volumes were flat or down. Good news is inflation deflated a bit in December.

Less good news, a wave of returns may soon be rolling in. Salesforce is predicting 1.4 billion orders will be returned. Since retailers’ inventory finally caught up to consumer demand…after that demand started to dwindle, this “tsunami” should help the glut.

📉 out of left field trend

🔎 Google Going Gone?

Read on the blog

Search is splintering across apps and platforms—by niche and purpose—and the rise of AI is only going to accelerate this. Some people already see ChatGPT as a functional information search replacement (last I heard, the data collected for training stopped in 2021, so you may not want to use it for current events).

Big G has issued a code red over the chatbot and we covered plenty of competitive and regulatory concerns for the search giant above.

Google needs traffic to live. Because that traffic drives ad clicks which drives revenue. It also survives on a healthy diet of cookies and cross-service data sharing to build robust user profiles. All of those things are in jeopardy because of items listed above and elsewhere.

Google isn't going to disappear over night, but its continued dominance and duopolist status is certainly less certain than it used to be.

🗞️ Quick Hits

• On Thursday, Google Ads' automatic recommendations for removing redundant keywords is changing. The main point to know is that now the changes will default to keeping the broadest match type in the ad group. If that's not your cup of tea just make sure you're opted out by Wednesday night.

• Automattic got a little Tumblr in its WordPress, it’s expanding the Blaze advertising tool to its other blogging platforms. Turn your content into ads that deliver across those same platforms.

• Apple finally remembered they have a Maps app that businesses would love to control their info in, so it created Business Connect, which sounds a lot like Google My Business. But wait, there’s more! The info can also appear in Wallet, Messages, and searches via Apple tools (Siri and Spotlight).

• Medium is launching its own Mastodon server for users. (The beginning of Brandodon?)

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Thanks for reading! This was a big one, don’t know how you made it this far.

-Kyle

This weeek: Meta malware, how to budget during a recession, SEO in 2023, a cult brand teaser, and some headlines about ads, retail, audiences, analytics, algorithms, attack vectors, and supply chains. Plus, links to a few other things I wrote.

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👾 Ducktail Malware Hits Meta 🦆

Meta ad accounts are getting hacked and used to run ads on the stolen accounts' dime. It's known as the Ducktail malware and two factor or hardware key authentication won't help (in part because Meta is a dumpster fire when it comes to the implementation of these security measures).

The Today in Digital Marketing podcast has an interview snippet with a firm that suffered hacks twice.

The first was years ago and used a compromised grammar browser plugin to gain access. The lesson: be wary of the permissions plugins ask for. The firm does not use the TikTok or Twitter pixel helper plugins because of what they ask to gain access to (Google and Facebook are fine (for now)).

But the hackers have evolved.

Beware messaging apps. The recent round of exploits deliver the malware payload via links in apps like WhatsApp. It then installs an invisible browser that screen scrapes credentials and steals cookies to gain access. Once access is gained, bogus Gmail accounts are added as admins and finance managers.

The previously hacked company has implemented these mitigation steps:

• Don't use SMS 2FA

• Regularly review all active sessions on the account

• Regularly review all connected apps

• Limit admin access to only the necessary people

• Try to avoid Gmail accounts and use trusted domains (like Google Ads)

• Rethink your LinkedIn job title (appears to be how they identify targets)

It appears to be PC only so far (it recently swtiched to using the .NET framework), so use a good anti-virus and don't click on suspicous links. Ever. Those last two recommendations should be table stakes when using an internet-connected computer.

Your Guide to Recession Budgeting

As the old (like, really old) saying goes: "feed a cold, starve a fever".

So is a recession a cold or a fever (because it is like an economy's immune response (and yes, I am mentally spiralling out on this metaphor))?

Answer: a cold. Feed your marketing budgets during a recession.

I hate Twitter threads like this (I’ve seen the Notion sites that give you the copy-paste template to create ones just like it), but I can’t argue with the advice. The best time to scale advertising spend is during a recession. If your competition is scaling back, scaling up allows you to fill the void and grow your market share. The thread is worth a read, and these two charts from it are why:

LinkedIn shared data on why B2B marketers shouldn't sleep on January spend, but the logic applies here as well.

Smart marketers who advertise in January, or another "quiet month," will gain an edge over their competitors, building more recent and fresher brand memories while their competition is quiet. By advertising when competitors choose not to, brands increase their share of mind and effective share of voice, at a bargain price.

The best offense is a good defense. A better offense is scoring when your competitor isn’t even playing defense.

SEO in 2023

I recently posted some content marketing advice I liked. Specifically this part:

Content marketing of the past:

1. Do keyword research.

2. Create an article for those keywords.

3. Wait and repeat.

4. (Plus link to the article in a tweet and send it to your newsletter.)

That's the standard SEO-first approach to content. Well, turns out the standard SEO-first approach to anything may not be a good idea anymore.

Google released a research paper that...

has a section named "attempts at search engine optimization (SEO)" which says, "documents that attempt to perform SEO tend to be flagged as very low quality."

So what should you do?

I'm not copy-pasting the advice from that other post (again), so just click the link for that. But also, think about content you enjoy and then about what your audience might be interested in. Create that.

Especially as people might start to use AI models like ChatGPT more, write the content they expect to get from that.

I don't mean write like a robot, I mean write to inform. Definitely write like a human.

To help with writing less like a robot, Google has removed the character limit for title tags and headline schema (but still keep it concise).

Cult Brand Status (A Teaser)

If there were a year to transform your brand into a cult brand, 2023 would be it.

I'm working on a post with more detail based on an episode of the Marketing Against the Grain podcast. But it you want a brand like Death Wish Coffee, Patagonia, or The Liver King (don't be like The Liver King), then you're looking for this:

More next weeek...

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Headlines

Retail

I think 2023 will be a year of unbundling (more on that soon). Shopify’s first news release of the year is providing early returns on that bet with Commerce Components by Shopify (CCS).

Shopify has taken their all-in-one platform and broken it into its essential components (like checkout or storefront or product catalog) for companies to buy a la carte to integrate into their existing, non-Shopify web store.

Additional revenue stream and another avenue to become integral to digital retail operations, nice move.

As inflation increases, so does the popularity of store brands. (Didn’t Amazon get in trouble for doing stuff like this?)

Bye, bye free returns. A logical step for e-commerce sellers dealing with try-before-you-buy style orders and dealing with the nightmare that is digital returns.

More on the blog: Twenty Trendy Three: (Modern) Retail Edition

Audiences

Nearly all customers read reviews when shopping online. “96% of customers look for negative reviews specifically” and “49% of consumers trust reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends and family members.” If you use reviews for your brand, there are lots more stats like these at that link.

More on the blog:

• What’s Your Customer Focus?

• Ask, Tell, Ask

Algorithms

How should you think about YouTube Shorts in terms of your content strategy? The buzzword bingo answer: discovery. The classic marketing answer: a promotional strategy. Many creators are finding that their Shorts help drive new viewers to their channel / main videos by exposing their material to a new (to them) audience. (Study of one: I can confirm this after a recent YT comedy binge that started on Shorts.) via one of Van Neistat’s peer discussions.

LinkedIn grouped last year's most engaged with posts on into 5 handy categories:

• Remote work is here to stay, yay?

• The "new normal" for work culture won't look much like the "old normal"

• Covid really is sticking around, huh?

• The future of leadership is empathetic

• LinkedInfluencers: some really well known people shared some stuff

A startup is trying to turn the “get paid for your data” dream into a reality. Maybe the current privacy climate will make this model viable, but I’m curious which supply side will be harder to crack. My favorite part: “Caden also plans to use the data collected to build out systems for making optimal recommendations.” So you’ll sell your data for more personal advertising from the company you sold it to.

Who needs voice talent when you have AI? At least, that’s Apple’s opinion. It’s started rolling out AI-narrated audiobooks, which is inevitable but will likely lead to some legal drama in the near term.

Twitter, a company desperate for (ad) revenue (Elon isn’t supporting those loan payments on subscription fees anytime soon), has laid off the data science team working on ad optimization. My favorite line from the post: “Twitter eliminated its press relations team and could not be reached for comment.”

More on the blog:

• More Than Words?

• Incentives Matter: AI Flash Fiction Edition

Ads

Bye, bye similar audiences. Google is ditching them in favor of “automated solutions” (death date August 2023). It looks like the replacements are features that already exist. The cynic in me thinks this is Google admitting they never really worked well, but either way: the cookiepocalypse strikes again.

Pinterest is joining the data clean room trend (for select ad partners). Clean rooms allow advertisers to upload their first-party data for targeting without actually sharing any of it with the ad platform. The fallout from the cookiepocalypse continues.

Attack Vectors

There it is:

US House bans TikTok on lawmakers’ official phones

It’s no longer hypothetical, Meta has to pay a hefty fine on top of reinventing their ad targeting model in the EU. (It’s not the final word yet, plenty of appeals and back-and-forth are coming.)

Analytics

Meta is rolling out yet another new metric: additional attributed conversions. Best I can tell, it's a sales tool for using the Conversions API since it "is a metric that helps you understand how much your business benefits from using the Conversions API alongside the Meta Pixel." Use this as an algorithm optimization tool, not an analytics one.

Supply Chains

New year, new production country. Apple will start producing MacBooks in Vietnam in 2023. This will have every product in its portfolio manufactured in multiple countries.

&

Covid is wreaking havoc on Apple’s supply chain once again. The main Foxxcon factory in China was hit by an outbreak in October leading to production hot potato with other plants. Now, the reversal of country’s zero-Covid policy could lead to worker shortages as the virus rampages through winter. I’m sure Apple won’t be the only company with bumpy roads ahead in China, so 2023 could be starting a lot like 2020 for supply chains.

&

Dell is following Apple as it attempts to decouple from Chinese manufacturing dependencies.

Assorteds & Alternates

$73 billion worth of investment was announced in EV battery production projects in the US last year, and this is just the beginning. This should signal that we’re on the cusp of an EV revolution, and I’m not talking about market share. Investment at this level and dedication should lead to more breakthroughs and developments in the underlying tech. Battery technology is one of the fields I’m most interested in watching in the coming years.

More on the blog:

• How to Record Nirvana

• On Using & Buying Tools

• The Return of the Blog

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Thanks for reading! I have no idea what the near future holds, so I’ll see you when I see you.

-Kyle

What is Dead Week?

This weeek: why you should own the demand, Meta’s metaverse and EU woes, and some headlines about ads, retail, the æconomy, analytics, algorithms, and attack vectors. Plus, links to a few other things I wrote.

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Own The Demand

We live in the Platform Era. Aggregators rule the day—from Amazon and Google to TikTok and Uber.

It’s the marketplaces that make the money.

In our current era, attention and currency are synonymous so “marketplace” doesn’t have to mean commerce, a la Amazon. TikTok is a marketplace of content. Google is a marketplace of information. Facebook is a marketplace of connections.

Of course, when framed as marketplaces it makes everything feel more like an extension of history. The market has been the center of activity for towns, cities, regions, populations for a long time now. It’s been the maker of fortunes and the spreader of news. The market has been the gathering place. The difference now being that it’s been digitized and the major players have gone meta—owning the space the market happens within instead of just participating within it.

This rabbbit hole line of reasoning is brought to you by: this post called Own The Demand.

It argues (rather convincingly, even if it is just a reflection of the current Silicon Valley vault of 10x’ing playbook) that it is both better and safer to own the demand instead of the supply. The same level of pricing/market power with fewer production concerns.

For example:

There’s this famous comment that “Uber owns no cars; Airbnb no real estate; Facebook no content; and Ebay or Alibaba no inventory.” If you can get away with being 1% as capital-intensive as your competitors while extracting greater profits, why wouldn’t you do it?

In logistics, it’s all about the “last mile”. That’s the hardest, most expensive part of any delivery chain. It’s also what connects the supplier to the end consumer. Controlling that “last mile” is owning the demand.

If you want a shot at a mega-business, control the last mile for the sandbox you’re playing in.

…

As an aside, Uber’s mission statement used to be way better:

Uber is a two-sided marketplace, yet its mission statement used to be “transportation as reliable as running water, everywhere and for everyone” (is it now “We ignite opportunity by setting the world in motion”).

The newer one feels grandiose and aspirational, but what does it mean? What vision does it instill?

The original is both clear and a useful decision-making check: “does this make transportation as reliable as running water?”

(Maybe the NYC Uber air taxi idea failed that question filter so the mission had to become more abstract to allow it. Optionality strikes again?)

Not So Merry Meta-mas

The head of VR hardware development at Meta, John Carmack (co-creator of DOOM), is leaving. But he made sure to leave a flaming pile of poop on Zuck’s front porch on his way out.

In an internal memo (that leaked, naturally), he said things like:

We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort. There is no way to sugar coat this, I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy.

He also said (more or less) that his ideas are mostly ignored and openly complained about things during a recent Meta event keynote.

A year ago he was saying:

we should be wary of "architecture astronauts" who do a lot of high-level hand-waving instead of building viable products that customers find useful.

Hell of a way to end the year for Zuck’s dream-turned-nightmare.

AND

The EU doesn’t like Facebook Marketplace. One reason is because Big Blue users automatically get access, “whether they want it or not.” Another is the data collection possibilities, which, have you met a large internet company? (Or a retailer with a store brand?)

On one hand I understand the concerns. Especially since the EU is more concerned about competition and anti-monopoly positioning than “consumer benefit,” usually via the method of price (the US flips that). On the other hand this seems like a clear signal that incumbent companies shouldn’t try to innovate.

This ruling could more firmly entrench the trinternet. And could push large internet platforms to “localize” operations to a certain extent.

TikTok is the (technically) non-Chinese version of Douyin. And Project Texas is supposed to mean US user data gets processed and stored on US soil (what happens if you like a video from someone in Japan? where does that data live?). The Trend Machine could be on the forefront of another trend, this one more technical and less interesting (probably) to users.

Headlines

Retail Tea Leaves

The season of gifting to others is over, ‘tis the season of self-gifting now. As shopping picks back up to end the year—a result of people getting cash or gift cards or not getting what they wanted—some retailers are keeping the sales going to capitalize.

Amazon will level the playing field for third-party sellers thanks to a settlement with the EU. Will these measures extend beyond the bloc’s borders? (Consider this a counterpoint to the Meta story.)

Attack Vectors

Last weeek I mentioned a bipartisan bill to ban TikTokin the US, which is apparently gaining in popularity. But it appears The Trend Machine has to deal with more than just “what ifs” at the moment.

As state governments ban TikTok on government-issued devices, so do public universities. Bans range from just restricting access on university-issued/owned devices up to blocking access on all campus networks. This should be interesting to watch.

Oh, and, some Chinese Bytedance employees definitely accessed personal info on a couple US journalists over the summer “as part of an unsuccessful effort to investigate leaks of company information.” But don’t worry, they’ve been fired, so everything is fine now. Right?

Not specific to TikTok, but beware of social media scams, especially around holiday gifting and shopping. People lose a lot of money to them, don’t be one of them.

The FBI is recommending ad blockers to combat malicious ads that impersonate legit brands to trick users to install data-stealing malware.

Algorithms

Wonder why you’re seeing that video in your For You feed? TikTok will tell you now.

Tumblr is doing it live. Live-streaming that is.

Apple, Google, and Mozilla are teaming up to create a next-gen browser benchmark that their browsers can then be measured against.

Ads

Microsoft is working on programmatic in-game advertising for streaming games that would aim to blend with the game environment and only display during “low action” moments.

Facebook’s all-in-on-automation Advantage+ Shopping campaigns are awesome and totally work! (Says Meta (a friend got beta access early on and said it was garbage but this should be a feature that gets better with time so hopefully we’re seeing those improvements already.)

Analytics

Google Analytics 4 has added more features that make it almost ready for release, except it’s been out for a while and now Big G is desperate to get people switched over. Now you can: use Sheets to migrate your audiences from Universal Analytics and personalize the home page metrics. Almost like the tool is supposed to serve you instead of vice versa.

Æconomy

Inflation not enough for you? Add in a dash of avian flu and watch the price of eggs soar. Food prices are rising across the board, but eggs are lapping the field.

A Few Other Things I Wrote About Recently

• The Booming Online Beauty Business

• What Happens to AI Training Now?

• Super Intelligence Time Machine

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Thanks for reading! Apologies now if I blow up your inbox the rest of this weeek to close out the year.

-Kyle

This weeek: One-time messages, Schrödinger’s Social Commerce, how to determine influencer rates, Google’s always changing ad targeting, and some headlines about ads, retail, the æconomy, audiences, analytics, algorithms, and attack vectors.

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This Message Will Self-Destruct

WhatsApp now has one-time messages. These messages can only be viewed once and are then deleted—for both sender and receiver.

While I think messaging apps and features will play an increasingly large role in the space formerly dominated by traditional social media, I don't care too much about features and announcements like these. But what about one-time ads?

In traditional media these are nothing new, an ad run once in the Sunday paper is a one-time ad. But digital typically aims for a certain level of repetition to maximize the chances any one user sees the ad (and remembers the brand / message).

At the extreme you could set a frequency cap of 1, and maybe users who interact with it are your truly engaged audience. This could be interesting for a big flash sale you want to run as a quasi-secret. "Save 50% if you order today. But act fast, you'll only see this deal once!"

This makes me realize that I don't know if the big social platforms stop showing ads to users that click on them.* Or if that is an option. Guess I have a new rabbbit hole to go down.

*I assume lead gen ads will stop delivering to users that have completed the form. So you can use that format as a proxy for this idea.

Social Commerce is Dead, Long Live Social Commerce

Western social platforms have been dreaming of WeChat for ages and the first step was supposed to be social commerce—discover, shop, and buy all without leaving the app. A platform’s wet dream. Especially since they’d collect a cut on both ends, selling the ad that drives the purchase that gets them a processing percentage. But it’s never caught on in the West (at least not yet, TikTok may still have the last word).

Side note: this is why I’m bearish on everything apps in “the West.” If you can’t even get users to finish the purchase process in your app how are you going to get them to do everything else?

What’s next for social commerce? A return to basics. And the basics are ads.

The No. 2 biggest reason for US social media buyers to purchase is in response to seeing an ad

So what should marketers do? This advice is solid all around, even if you remove the social specifics:

Meet consumers where they are (on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook) with content they’ll respond to (ads and influencer posts).

The Cost of Influence(rs)

If you’re considering influencer marketing, this Shopify guide might be helpful. I’m partial to the price benchmarking equations:

Instagram
Rate = ((# of Followers / 10,000) * $100) * # of posts + additional required expenses (as agreed to)

or

Rate = (# of Followers * 4%) * # of posts + additional required expenses

TikTok
Influencer CPM = Average # of views + likes + comments for last 5 posts / cost of content production

Hidden costs:

• Usage rights

• Exclusivity

• Agency / management cut

• Long running campaign partnerships

• Cross-platform posting

• Short turnaround time

• Adding a link

And maybe see if you can get a wholesale or AAA member discount.

Keyword Targeting: Broad Match 2.0

Google's broad match for keyword targeting ads used to be garbage. There was no better way to waste budget on irrelevant and junk searches. The search query reports were fun to review though (and unsettling at times).

But that might be changing now.

As further proof that bots are running the company, the broad match matching system now leverages other signals from your account (like keywords and landing pages) to help better match ads to queries.

To help clarify this, Google indulged in Silicon Valley's favorite signaling mechanism: a name change. Broad match keywords will now trigger on "relevant" searches, not just "related" searches.

The secret to using them effectively: let campaigns / ad groups train on more specific match types first and make sure you're using a Smart Bidding option when you add broad match in.

Google's Post-Cookie Potluck

Google really wants people to start testing out its post-cookie targeting ideas (Topics, FLEDGE, Attribution Reporting), so a Googler wrote a post about them.

How will these impact "audience creation"?

Topics is the new Google-based interest targeting and will be used for Affinity and In-market audiences. It can be extended with contextual data (about the page the user is on, so contextual advertising) and Attribution Reporting (which could help unearth other topics of interest to converters (say, the overlap of sports fandom and international news interest).

FLEDGE allows implementers to create their own user segments (which live on-device / in-browser for privacy purposes) and covers all 4 audience types: Affinity, In-market, Remarketing, Audience extension (I think this one is like lookalike / similar audiences). In all cases this is accomplished by assigning site visitors to custom interest groups to be used for targeting.

Headlines

Æconomy

Inflation isn’t over, but it is slowing. Prices were up 7.1% year-over-year in November, which marks the fifth straight month-over-month of year-over-year decline. That weird wording is because November prices were up 0.1% compared to October. So basically flat.

Janet Yellen (the Treasury Secretary) suggests inflation should continue to cool off through 2023. Recession not required? And does saying we don’t need a recession increase the chances of not having one? And does helping avoid a panic increase consumer confidence?

Regardless of the answers to the above and whether the chicken or the egg came first, the Federal Reserve increased interest rates again. But this time only by 0.5%, so even that indicator is slowing down.

On the flip side, the Fed also expects that rates will rise higher than its previous target. And that inflation will remain about its 2% target until 2025.

Europeans are cutting back on spending, anticipating high energy bills and even bigger inflation.

Oh, and vegetable prices are way up. Why? Drought.

Retail Tea Leaves

The party may be coming to an end for retail as brands gear up for slower sales. Nearly half of survey respondents expect their holiday sales to take a hit thanks to the economy. Looking into 2023 this jumps to nearly 2/3 of respondents.

This attitude is well-supported by the current consumer environment: Given the record-breaking start to the holiday shopping season, it’s clear that people are ready and willing to spend, despite all of the economic headwinds at play. Brands are likely looking to do what’s best for their bottom lines with the decision to forgo steeper discounts, and bet on shoppers’ willingness to pay full price (or close to it) to shore up their sales as much as possible heading into the uncertain environment waiting for us in the new year.

Reality begins where the free money train ends. And how much of this is a normalization from the recent boom?

Ads

First cookies were given a stay of execution, now ad blockers. Chrome is planning an overhaul to its extension framework that will all but prevent ad blockers and other privacy preserving plugins from doing their thing. And like cookies, we don’t know when (if?) these changes will actually take place.

There’s a new AI-powered tool that determines the “host suitability” of podcast hosts to put advertisers at ease.

Algorithms

The heat got too high for Apple so it’s leaving the exclusive App Store kitchen. In Europe. But, just like security backdoors, if you put the opening there for one party, others will soon follow. And this could only be the first domino of many to fall (camera, browser, and the infrastructure that enables Apple Pay (NFC) are mentioned).

I’m interested to see how Apple handles the security aspects of these openings. Android is rife with malware (Bible apps are a popular vehicle) and, while iOS is not invulnerable, that security has long been part of its appeal. (Mac users sideload apps all the time without issues so a lot of Apple’s grandstanding is just to protect their current mafioso approach to the App Store.)

#

Everything is customer service, even SEO. Google has added an E to its E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) content rating framework: Experience.

Does content also demonstrate that it was produced with some degree of experience, such as with actual use of a product, having actually visited a place or communicating what a person experienced?

Sounds like this is an anti-ChatGPT, anti-fake review measure.

#

Netflix got its ad supported tier out in time to beat Disney+ and lure in some holiday budgets from big brands, but now they’re giving those advertisers their money back. Some of it at least. Turns out they don’t have a big enough audience to meet their guarantees, so they’re refunding the difference.

It’s a classy move. But is it also a sign of more revenue troubles ahead for the OG streaming service? Based on viewing habits, they don’t have a competitive content moat and gaming hasn’t saved the day yet. 2023 could be make or break.

#

Reddit officially has its own “we’re business friendly” microsite, the surest signal that Twitter’s blood is in the water.

As does David Krebs informal test on engagement levels which finds that Mastodon beats Twitter and LinkedIn (hint: Mastodon has no financial incentive to keep you on-platform or gamify feed engagement(which also means brands may find it tough sledding compared to what they’re used to)).

I checked a recent toot of my own and calculated a 60% engagement to follower rate. Granted, I barely use the platform and have almost no followers.

Instagram account get hacked? The former photo sharing app will help you with that now.

As further proof that Meta is pivoting to a novel focus on revenue and the core business, Big Blue has shut down its Cameo clone and its LinkedIn rip off, creatively named Jobs.

YouTube went TikTok so now TikTok is going YouTube and testing out horizontal video.

Audiences

Sports fans are more likely to be interested in international news, finds Fox. (Sometimes the easiest way to reach an audience is through a side door.)

Analytics

Just when I thought I’d be closing out the year by creating a whole bunch of landing page reports in Google Analytics 4 for clients, it goes ahead and gets its very own native version (Merry Christmas to me).

Attack Vectors

A bipartisan bill to ban TikTok in the US has been put forward. The concerns about Chinese access is valid, but interesting that this comes after all the Oracle partnership and US data center stuff. But does it need to be banned?

Assorteds & Alternates

The US Department of Energy announced successful nuclear fusion ignition. A process that creates more energy than it needed to create it. Fusion has been a green energy dream for a long time and if this is the first breakthrough of many our future could look a lot brighter (and greener).

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Thanks for stopping by! With the holidays, I have no idea when I’ll be publishing what, so consider everything from here on out this year as an advent calendar or white elephant gift exchange.

-Kyle

We’re almost there, the year has almost ended. So here’s the plan: I’m aiming to close out 2022 with round ups of trends and predictions and some opinion stuff (more than usual, bet you’re excited). And maybe the last week will be an “and now for something completely different” type thing.

This weeek: targeting on Pinterest, Meta dusts off its ad platform features list plan, and some headlines about ads, retail, audiences, analytics, algorithms, and attack vectors. And goblin mode.

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Pinterest Targeting Playbook

If you run ads on Pinterest, your targeting options are:

• Interests

• Keywords

• Retargeting

• Lookalike

• Customer Lists

• Robots!

That last one isn't targeting robots (I think), but using robots to do lots of fancy statistical analysis for targeting purposes.

I'm most interested in the first two because of how they interact. And keywords are fairly unique in the world of social ad platforms.

Interests are what you'd expect, interests users express via their on-platform behavior (and conceivably off-platform if sites have Pinterest pixels installed, etc etc). The platform may not have as many as Facebook, but the interface to select them is much better. There aren't any hidden interests and the ones they do have niche down pretty far. For example, do you want to target people interested in "Home Decor Style" or "Country Farmhouse Decor"?

Keywords function basically just like Google Ads, or other search engine ad platforms. Including match type modifiers.

There are two placements on Pinterest: Browse and Search.

Browse is the home and Related Pins feeds. Search-less scrolling, if you will.

Search is, well, search.

I oversimplify the targeting types as:

• Interests are for Browse

• Keywords are for Search

When users are browsing, Pinterest wants to show them more of what they've been interested in historically.

When they're searching, Pinterest wants to show them what they are expressing interest in in that moment.

Interest targeting can deliver in Search, but reading between the lines of a chat with my Pinterest rep makes me think you are at the back of the line waiting for your keyword competitors to filter through the auction system. You're waiting on the scraps.

There is also a checkbox in the Interest and Keyword targeting section to "Enable expanded targeting." This uses your Pin image, title, and description to add to the explicit targeting options you set. Useful to cover all your bases. But keep it in mind if you're trying to microtarget or need to reduce competitive overlap between similar brands or products.

Meta Updates

I think Zuck’s League of Sauron got too distracted by the metaverse dreams and the like because some of the new features they recently rolled out for advertisers feel like they should have been done a long time ago. Guess this is what happens when you have to focus on making money again.  

First up…

Lead Forms Get A Facelift

Facebook lead ads are a great tool if they fit your business goals. Now they're finally getting better. What's changing?

Pre-Qualify Leads

Add a custom multiple choice question that will categorize the user as a lead or not a lead based on their answer. Users whose answer keeps the in the lead bucket get to continue through the form like usual. If they answer a "not a lead" answer then they get sent to a custom completion screen and can't fill out the rest of the form. As of now you can only use one filtering question per form and it must be the first question.

You create one completion screen for each lead bucket with a headline, description, and call to action button (so basically the garden variety end screen, you just create two depending on if they finished the form or not).

More Calls to Action

After a form is filled out you have a choose-your-own-adventure set of options to finish it off with:

• Send users to a link

• Get them to give you a call

• Give them direct access to a file

The link option is the standard, but maybe you want them to do something else. You can drop a phone number in and encourage them to call you without leaving the app (or the form). Or, and this is the most interesting one to me, you can use the form as a content gate and let them download a JPEG, PNG, or PDF straight from the form. (And yes, these options are available with the lead filter feature.)

Go Crazy With Custom

Not content to be basic? Good news, now you can go custom.

According to Big Blue, this option allows you to "tell your brand's story with rich context, visuals and customizable sections."

Here's a list of the options, click through on the link above to see visuals and get a better feel for it:

• Add a cover image

• Set a color scheme

• Write a headline

• Add an overview and a list of (up to 3) benefits, if you want

• Add (optional) sections for How it works, Products, Social proof, and Incentives

And voilà, you now have something that looks a lot more like a landing page than a standard Facebook form.

*These are slowly rolling out so your account may not have access yet.

Instagram’s New Ad Targeting Option

Meta just rolled out a shiny new ad targeting option, you can now deliver ads to your Instagram followers! How are they just getting around to adding this now?

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Headlines

Ads

Meta may have to stop running personalized ads in the EU. This could be a big blow to first-party data advertising in the bloc as the ban excludes targeting users based on things like “the Instagram reels they've viewed or Facebook profiles they've clicked.” So how else will ads be targeted? And will anyone enjoy that experience?

Retail Tea Leaves

Amazon started messing around with video on mobile search results a while back, but now it’s going full feed. Aimed at TikTok, the new feed sounds more like a mix The Clock App, Instaglam, and Pinterest. Get inspired to shop via a feed to photos and short-form videos. Social may be dying, but content and discovery is alive and well.

The .99¢ hack says that consumers see a price ending with 9 as much cheaper than the number ending in 0 one penny higher, even if it is only a penny difference. But is this the best way in all cases?

No.

This research disproves the myth that odd termination is effective for products of all types and prices, as the impact of prices ending in nine in brands with better market positioning, is greater.

Premium products benefit from having a round number price ending in 0. It can even impart a sense of scarcity.

For the category of kitchen towels, this means that a strong brand decreases the impact of finished prices when compared to other competitors. In five of the six presented brands, the preference share is greater for the prices ending in nine, compared to the closest price ending in zero, which confirms the benefit of presenting prices ending in nine for the case of mass market brands. On the other hand, in a premium perceived brand like Apple, that values exclusivity and design, an increase in price generated an increase in share, so the higher price ending in zero, presented better results, both in preference and in revenue.

Audiences

Perhaps companies like Amazon are paying users for the personal data firehose because the people that won’t go for it are actively lying about their personal info (hi it’s me I’m the problem it’s me). This is a good reminder that no one is waiting for your brand email to hit their inbox. You have to earn it, every time.

The Women’s 2022 Podcast Report has dropped and the it finds that listenership is getting more female. 48% female to be exact, up from 44% a few years back. And as for specifics:

As we see with podcast listeners overall, women monthly podcast listeners stand out from total U.S. women ages 18+. They are:

• Younger (48% more likely to be ages 18-34)

• More likely to be in the workforce (47% more likely to be employed full time)

• Higher income (36% more likely to have household income of $100k or more)

• Highly educated (22% more likely to have a college degree)

• More likely to be Moms (33% more likely to have children under 18)

Analytics

Google Analytics 4 now has behavioral modeling for realtime reporting. So if a user declines analytics cookies, Google will “model” their behavior based on similar users that have accepted cookies. Which, yes, means algorithmically guess.

It’s a common client question, “what does our SEO say we should write about?” (It’s not worded like that, but hopefully you get the idea.) Google Search Console may answer that for us soon. Some users are seeing a new tab in GSC called “content ideas,” which shows topics they could write about.

Algorithms

Want more people to see your Snaps? Get Snapchat+, they’re adding a post boost feature for subscribers. This could be an interesting way to advertise without “running ads.” Twitter Blue subscribers get similar priority, so this could be the new trend to get people to pay up. Gotta replace that missing ad revenue somehow.

Microsoft (like Elon and Zuck) wants to create a one-stop-shop super app as a response to the Apple-Google phone duopoly. The vision is the toss a bunch of their consumer-ready products into a pot to “combine shopping, messaging, web search, news feeds and other services.” I’m bearish on super apps in the West, but Microsoft has an advantage over the social players. Corporate users are already used to existing in a Microsoft ecosystem, maybe enough will adopt the super app to give it a chance. (Paywall, Recap)

Attack Vectors

Your ad selling furniture or featuring a picture of a building may get flagged by Facebook for some off-the-wall reason, but try to run an ad threatening election workers and it’ll probably be approved. The platform once again failed an election ad related test. YouTube and TikTok, meanwhile, removed all offending test ads.

Amazon’s Shopper Panel consumer research program will now pay you $2 per month to route all your web traffic via its servers. This allows the retail giant to verify “the ads [you] see from Amazon’s own advertising or third-party businesses that advertise through Amazon Ads.” It’s a data goldmine for advertisers and a privacy nightmare for users.

It gives Amazon insight into how users behave after seeing ads and can fill the tracking gap in view-through conversions. But it also means every web request the user makes pings the Amazon server. Facebook used a program like this to figure out what competitors to try to buy or squash.

Rackspace’s Hosted Exchange service (a Microsoft email thing) was targeted by a ransomware attack.

Alternates & Assorteds

Goblin Mode is the new metaverse.

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This weeek: why brands should think Mastodon before metaverse, why you might want to ditch a sales landing page in favor of Google Docs, and some headlines.

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Brandodon

At this point, any company working on a metaverse presence* (or the 56% of media buyers kicking the tires on it) should probably spin up their own Mastodon server and hire a community moderator to run it.

The Stanodons probably won't like this, but it's not about corporatizing the fediverse.

People checking out Mastodon as a Twitter replacement have to figure out which server to choose. Many servers are temporarily freezing sign ups or buckling under the weight. How many will buckle under the increased moderation and management load down the road?

Many brands love talking about digital community building. Now is the perfect time to put their money where their brand mouth is.

*This certainly isn't limited to metaverse-curious brands, but if you're spending time and money to build for something that is basically in public beta with low user uptake, why not shift some of those resources to an effort that can pay off now?

Google Docs as Sales Page

This is a cool use for Google Docs. 

we used a Google Doc that pitched the course and used a Stripe payment link for checkout.

Visitors could see that 90 other people were looking at that page when there were only 30 remaining spots.

Headlines

Ads

YouTube’s list of top ads is out and the verdict is: it pays to be funny. Super Bowl ads littered the top of the rankings with Amazon’s taking the #1 spot. On the flip side, the list was light on Consumer Packaged Good (CPG) megalith brands, which could be a sign that retail media is sucking up their ad dollars in this inflationary environment.

But this quote is where the value is to me:

humor and relatable imperfection can show that a brand gets their audience, and that’s reflected in how products and services are advertised.

This lines up with a lot of the reasons influencers seem to work. So stop over-polishing (or start under-polishing?) your ads and try to relate to your customer.

Google gave up on FLOCs so LinkedIn decided to borrow the idea. The professional platform’s new Group Identity features lumps users together based on first-party data like job title, company, industry, etc. It then uses this to deliver and measure ads in a “privacy-enhancing” way.

Da Goog has overhauled its ad creation and management flow. This is boring unless it’s of interest to you, so here’s their post about it (with screencap gifs, my preferred form of media for seeing stuff like this).

Brave is growing its privacy-focused, Google-alternative stack. It started with a browser, then an index of the web, then a search engine on top of that (“recently passed 20 million queries per day”), and now search ads (in beta). Don’t want ads? $3 a month gets you ad free search.

Brave Search only uses your search query, country, and device type to show you ads, and does not keep any kind of profile of your searches.

Podcast platform Acast has opened wide the doors to its self-serve ad platform. Providing another alternative to Spotify (like RedCircle). Minimum spend is $250 (not sure on timeframe) and the shiny new feature is Keyword Targeting (based on AI transcriptions).

Taboola has given Yahoo a 25% stake in the ad platform in exchange for becoming The Yodel's exclusive native advertising partner for the next 30 years. It's not a new connection, but it's the newest step in the relationship. The goal: build a ‘Contextual Powerhouse.’

Analytics

Google Analytics 4 has two new metrics (that are old hat for Universal Analytics): Average Session Duration and Views Per Session. These are available through the custom report building tools. My PSA: independently these metrics are pretty useless. Use them together or not at all (unless one has changed dramatically and you’re trying to figure out why). Google PSA: GA4 and UA may show different session numbers.

Retail Tea Leaves

Yeah, Amazon has a lot of ads. Like, mostly ads. How close is this to the digital incarnation of merchandising practices in physical retail?

Why, in a world of one click, do you need to check a little box to apply a coupon on Amazon? To give shoppers a feeling of control and a dopamine hit from scoring savings, which is amplified by having to “work” for it. I would guess it’s also to redirect the decision making process. Instead of a customer asking “should I buy this?”, they’re asking “should I snag this coupon?”

Algorithms

OpenAI may have cracked imitation learning for AI. A model trained on videos of people playing Minecraft was able to complete tasks involving complicated input sequences. This form of machine learning is much closer to the way humans learn.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is common in things like chatbots and social listening sentiment analysis efforts. But the big winner is personalization via data a.k.a. The Amazon Effect. (Paywall, podcast recap)

Apple and Google have released their lists of Top Apps of 2022, and the big winner was BeReal. The drop-everything-and-be-authentic-on-camera app won Apple’s top app and Google’s users’ choice spots (for non-games). Google’s best overall app was AI text-to-image art generator Dream by WOMBO. Locket got a cultural impact nod from Apple.

Based on post content trends, Insta is for the glam and TikTok is for that real real. Keep this in mind when planning your posts and ads for each platform.

Looks like you made it!

Look how far you’ve come…down your screen.

Thanks!

Kyle

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• Tech companies are taking a beating

• Advertising spend only forecast to grow a small amount next year

• Recession?

• Agencies and marketing initiatives to be under increased scrutiny in 2023

• You won’t believe what Elon just did!

We’re also in the (presumed) holiday slow down period. So expect this space to be filled with less news and more tips and strategic thinking points, at least until the new year.  

And really, that’s what the original idea for this was: take the stuff I share with clients and team members and put it in one spot.

This weeek: Neal Stephenson coined the term “metaverse” and recently clarified the concept, what you’re actually competing with, semiconductors as national security, Twitter alternatives, some handy guides, conflicting recession signs, and some headlines.

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The Metaverse

Neal Stephenson, the man who coined the term “metaverse,” was on the a16z podcast to talk about it. It’s worth a listen if any of that sounds interesting, but here are some of the things that stuck with me.

The Metaverse is one thing. It can have many different sub-metaverses, but they have to all work together in some fashion to be The Metaverse as Neal sees it. This means the interoperability many shout for from current social platforms (hello, ActivityPub (a deep dive here coming soon)). The (likely imperfect) metaphor I thought of was the Earth. The Metaverse is a digital Earth, and all these different metaverses companies talk about building (Meta, Roblox, whoever) will be the countries. 

The Metaverse does not require Augmented Reality (AR) or Virtual Reality (VR). Much of the reasoning Neal and the host discuss is in line with how I’ve thought of these technologies: we are (currently) too social a creature used to interacting in physical space to suddenly become Ready Player One.

If you have Neal on your podcast you are legally obligated to ask about the trends he’s currently watching for the next 30 years, so here’s what he’s got:

• Carbon (especially capture and sequestration)

• The Polarization of Society (and it's being weaponized by bad actors that benefit from it)

Your True Competitor

Here’s a long Harvard Business Review post that I think can be summed up by this quote (I say “think” because I stopped reading after this quote, it had all the hallmarks of a long-winded business piece that drives its point home at the expense of brevity (like this parenthetical, perhaps?)):

The last best experience anyone has anywhere becomes the minimum expectation for the experience they want everywhere.

• Bridget van Kranlingen, a senior executive at IBM

Everything is customer service. Experience is high on my list for brands, it’s why I will never not like Death Wish Coffee. I had a lovely support experience with my HSA company today about a Two Factor Authentication (2FA) issue today. I am months into an ongoing back and forth with Facebook over the same 2FA issue and, at this point, think my next step is asking them to nuke my account. (Yes, it was user error, but if it can happen to me I guarantee it happens to others.)

Trend: National Security Chips

TSMC has announced a second US facility, next to their other one in Arizona, to manufacture those all important silicon chips (a.k.a. the things that turn all the other things into computers). The US government also passed the CHIPS Act that sets aside a Scrooge McDuck pile of money to throw at stateside efforts to build out the semiconductor supply chain.

TSMC is also a foundation of Taiwan’s hopes that the US will back it if China gets a little too aggressive (again). 

The COVID induced supply chain crunch and general distrust of important tech components that could double as spy devices made in China (looking at you Huawei and ZTE) has put the spotlight on chip diversification. The explosion of machine learning and resulting development of specialized chips by any major player has wrestled the duopoly away from Intel and AMD. NVIDIA was the darling thanks to gaming, crypto, and AI, but two of the 3 of those have crashed or gone elsewhere.

Chips are now more than just a component that makes our shiny new toys. They are a competitive advantage. And that advantage is no longer limited to just companies. 

Life After Twitter

Maybe Hive Social is the Twitter replacement you’ve been looking for.

Or Post. 

Or Tumblr.

(Or Mastodon or Cohost or Micro.blog, as mentioned previously.)

And I promise the ActivityPub Primer is coming. New stuff is coming out every day on this front and I want at least one programmer friend to spot check it to make sure I’m not completely off base.

Guides

LinkedIn’s Document Ads are high on my list of things to test, so this guide from the platform is well timed. The quick version:

• It starts with the format. That means use a PDF smaller than 100MB.

• Make it mobile friendly. That means the text is big enough and in a one column layout

• Get fancy. That means an eye-catching cover page to lure them in and a visual, scannable layout.

I have not reviewed this yet, but if you have a podcast you should probably check out this 67 page guide from YouTube on podcasting on the platform.

A breakdown of the 5 Facebook bidding strategies, I like the Google Ads comps:

• Highest Volume = maximize clicks

• Highest Value = maximize conversion value

• Cost Per Result Bidding = target CPA

• ROAS Goal = target ROAS

• Bid Cap = old school manual CPC

Recession Proof?

Is a recession coming? That’s the million dollar question right now and indicators are a bit murky. They aren’t all rosy as things are slowing down, but spending is still happening.

This piece is gated, but the Google snippet covers it:

While the U.S. ad market declined for the fifth consecutive month in October, signaling signs of a new advertising recession, a longer view suggests it is more of a stabilization than a downward correction.

This thread predicts rough times ahead. The massive growth prior to the recent drags and dips has me wondering how much of this is just things leveling off and returning to some sort of normal? How useful are prior experiences as indicators when we’ve just experienced an unprecedented period of time? The thread is about B2B which I imagine will really feel it this next year as many hunker down for whatever’s to come.

In an attempt to recession proof, many businesses are forgoing customer acquisition to focus on retention. This makes sense, but may also open up acquisition opportunities for those customers that are shopping around.

Speaking of retention, heed this advice from the Marketing Against the Grain podcast:

When business gets going poorly, the worst thing you can do is tax your existing customers for your strategic mistake.

Headlines

Retail Tea Leaves

Want to know what products were hot like Hansel this year? Google’s got you covered.

Shopify is testing out a platform-wide search feature in the Shop App that basically turns it into Amazon or Etsy. I get this from Shopify’s end: boost discoverability, try to generate more purchases, maybe entice more merchants. But what about sellers? The search may bring them more revenue but it likely won’t bring brand equity. Is it just another set of SEO hurdles to worry about? Do they want another marketplace to worry about?

Secondhand shopping is going full zeitgeist thanks to Poshmark adding Secondhand Sunday to the Turkey 5 shopping/spending extravaganza lineup. 

PayPal’s Happy Returns has rolled out a Shopify integration that aims to turn returns into revenue.

Looking for a new marketplace to sell your products on? This chart might help.

Ads

Online video is eating the ad world. It’s taking over digital and making non-internet video providers nervous. And, of course, TikTok is the ascendant. So maybe your 2023 marketing resolution should be short form, vertical video. (On the flip side, this could mean less competition around other formats, placements, and platforms.)

Amazon is all about those video ads too.

Declines in ad spending are slowing. Part of the reason for the recent declines could be the crazy growth in 2021 that carried over into early 2022.

I’m not going to try to interpret this post since I’ve only spent a few minutes in Amazon’s ad platform to date, but it’s worth checking out if that’s your world. Account organization only gets more important the longer you run campaigns.

Should you add a dash of science to your marketing? Well, it depends…

when we’re exposed to “hedonic” ads -- ads that appeal to pleasurable sensations -- the parts of our brain that retrieve memories kicks in. This isn’t true when we see more utilitarian ads. Predictably, we approach those ads as a problem to be solved and engage the parts of our brain that control working memory and the ability to focus our attention.

Algorithms

It’s time to stop depending on platforms

we should spend less time trying to game these platforms and more time doing whatever we can to convert these users to our owned and operated properties..

Meta’s ad woes are grabbing the headlines, but the company is also grabbing Black Friday ad budgets. An estimated 70-85% of these budgets are going to the classic social app, but advertisers are branching out to TikTok with about 1/10th of budgets. Google and YouTube are getting the rest. Why Big Blue? The Trend Machine has yet to prove its performance marketing chops. Interesting to note, early sales windows haven’t caught on as expected so Turkey 5 could still be a gold rush. (Paywall, podcast recap) 

Facebook’s newest Widely Viewed Content report dropped. The good news? Political content is going down. The bad news? A lot of the most viewed content is basically Taboola but in your feed. So now we’ll learn how much ad revenue a tabloid company can rake in. Of note, 15% of content viewed in feeds came from the new discovery via curation efforts as discussed in Rabbbit Spottting last weeek. 

How is AI being used by marketers? Natural Language Processing (NLP) is common in things like chatbots and social listening sentiment analysis efforts. But the big winner is personalization via data a.k.a. The Amazon Effect. (Paywall, podcast recap) 

Minecraft has an anti-advertising policy, not allowing logos in the game. But maybe advertising can still happen. One Minecraft Influencer created in-game locations for partner advertisers, giving them a presence in the game while still allowing for experiences that could be completely brand free for users. 

Snapchat is struggling to recruit and retain Creators. But I’m not sure how big an issue that will be for the platform long term. It leads the pack on AR and may be able to make Quibi’s dream a reality.

Audiences

Gen Z is driving the trends and brands are chasing them, but the real population trend is aging. People are living longer and many countries have fertility rates below replacement, which means most populations will get older and then smaller.

Attack Vectors

Have a Google My Business account (or access to one)? Seeing a lot of weird access requests? Me too. And so are others. Don’t fall for the scam.

Google services like Maps and Flights are moving from subdomains to the main domain (like maps.google.com to google.com/maps), which could mean allowing location access to one service (say, maps) is actually just saying “Google, have at my geo data.” (And here’s a Hacker News thread about it if you want to waste some time and see if there are any useful nuggets or clarifications on that “could” (let me know what you find if you make it through the whole thing).)

I’m just pasting the headline for this one:

Tax filing websites have been sending users’ financial information to Facebook. The Markup found services including TaxAct, TaxSlayer, and H&R Block sending sensitive data.

Hey! You made it down here. That’s pretty impressive. Thanks!

-Kyle

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Social is Composting

Composting turns something once ripe into good dirt for the next crop to grow from. The process of composting is basically rot, so it smells and doesn’t always look so great and generally gets hidden from polite company in a container or at a dedicated location (shout out Atlas Organics). 

And…what does this have to do with marketing and technology and stuff?

I think “social media” is in the composting phase (it’s not the only thing, but this isn’t a politics newsletter).  

The era of The Wall™ is over. The era of The Feed™ is ending, at least Feed 1.0 (and maybe 2.0, I honestly don’t know what iteration we’re on right now). Connections got maxed out, so now everything is about discovery via curation. Taste matching instead of connection checking.

It’s a bit surprising that it took this long, since this shift signifies moving from who you know and what you claim to care about to what you actually spend your time doing. Behavior over facade. 

There are five main networks (that I know of) that either haven’t capitulated to Meta, grew despite not being Meta, or terrify Meta: Snapchat, Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

None of them are a “social network” in the stereotypical sense.

Snapchat focuses on private messaging and AR. It’s social, but in a close friends way. (just like iMessage is Apple’s killer social app)

TikTok focuses on entertainment, and does not consider itself a social media app (as they will tell you every chance they get). Social mechanisms are wrapped around the content focus.

Pinterest focuses on search. The index is filled with content via social mechanisms.

YouTube focuses on videos and hosting. The social aspects are bolted onto video.

LinkedIn focuses on “professionals” and “work.” Both used loosely here as they are imperfect descriptors, but the niche is what’s powering the platform's recent success. It is the most similar to Facebook, but it has an audience to focus on (and that audience isn’t “everyone”).

At various times, all of these apps were considered social media. Likely because they are all built on user generated content (UGC) and network effects. They scale via social mechanisms, but they aren’t social media as Facebook popularized it.

A lot of words are spilled on the internet related to the rot and the composting process. But what will grow out of this digital soil?

Data Dominions

If Tim O’Reilly was right and data is the new sand, then we’re all at the beach.

As mentioned in Rabbbits Weeekly this weeek, TikTok knows basically everything about your device when you’re using the app and uses that in some vague way to determine what content you see.

According to TikTok, the information they receive about your device is anything from user agent, mobile carrier, time zone settings, model and operating system,and network type to screen resolution, battery state, or audio settings.

I haven’t mapped this out, but Facebook’s revenue struggles feel like they’re on the same timeline as the continual eroding of the app’s data collection and usage abilities. Losing all the behavioral targeting options post-Cambridge Analytica started the scramble they’re currently at the peak of (this has to be the peak, right?). The app tracking opt-in that rolled out with Apple iOS 14.5 last April (2021) sent them reeling. Then Mozilla started stripping their URL tracking IDs and Apple started sending fake IP info to some services (I don’t know if Meta was impacted but I could easily see them making the list). Plus ad blockers and other privacy features being built into browsers, Zuck’s Bucks Machine is taking a beating (thus Meta). And recently, just anecdotally, it seems like there is a growing chasm between the traffic numbers Facebook Ads Manager reports and what I see in Google Analytics. We’re talking 85%+ different in some cases (is anyone else seeing stuff like this?). 

Apple is a data Janus. The public face is all about privacy and user protection. The “private” face is building an ever more robust ad platform that has to use something for targeting. Oh, and when it collects usage data from your phone it tags it with a persistent ID that is also connected to your Apple ID, which means everything is tied to all your personally identifiable info. And yes, their privacy policy does say it should be the exact opposite of this. Looks like the company is very much taking a “do as I say, not as I do” approach.

Cookies Continue Crumbling

It no longer matters that cookies still exist (from a marketer’s perspective), you need to act like they don’t.

From Rabbbits Weeekly this weeek:

WebKit, a browser underpinning for Safari (amongst others), updated JavaScript cookie handling so cookies will now expire after 7 days of browser use if the site isn't meaningfully interacted with (click, keyboard input, etc.). In some cases, like the presence of URL parameters, this maximum drops to 1 day. Post-cookie analytics keeps getting trickier.

Plus the above mentioned Facebook traffic weirdness. And we’ve seen some clients have mismatches in ecomm reporting between Shopify and Google Analytics lately (Green Bag has rolled out a new checkout experience that can mess with analytics, just fyi).

Server-side tagging is being touted as the answer of the moment, we’ll see how long that lasts.

Search Still Splintering

I’ve wondered why Google seems to be getting increasingly opinionated about Search. Partly it’s because that’s where most of their money comes from, so it’s kind of important to them. But the other part must be because search is no longer a platform or an engine, it’s a feature. Google replaced AOL as the gateway to the internet for a while and became the verb for searching the internet. Now, it’s just one tool among many, one you use for specific use cases.

The youths TikTok for lunch spots.

You YouTube if you want to learn something.

You Amazon or Etsy or eBay or Shopify (soon, maybe) if you’re shopping.

You Pinterest if you’re planning a project or looking for ideas.

You LinkedIn or Indeed or ZipRecruiter if you’re looking for a job.

Depending on your phone, you might Apple Maps if you’re looking for directions or nearby spots.

All of these things used to start on Google, now Google might just be the fastest way to get to them. Big G does not want to be the transportation service between users and competitors.

Rant: This is why it can get tricky when companies like Yelp or shopping aggregators complain when Google adds a similar feature or changes the algorithm so they drop out of the top 5, Google is not a utility company. As with social media, plenty of politicians and lobbying interests want these companies to behave like public services without actually regulating and requiring that they do so. Twitter is not the public square, it’s just where a lot of news-inclined people hang out so the loud voices confused it with the public square.

• Tech companies are taking a beating

• Advertising spend only forecast to grow a small amount next year

• Agencies and marketing initiatives to be under increased scrutiny in 2023

• You won’t believe what Elon just did!

• Platforms trying to bank easy wins by finally releasing features users have wanted for a while

We’re also heading into the (presumed) holiday slow down period. So expect this space to be filled with less news and more tips and strategic thinking points, at least until the new year.  

And really, that’s what the original idea for this was: take the stuff I share with clients and team members and put it in one spot.

This weeek: a peek into the TikTok algorithm, how to win at Pinterest, a Google Ads recap, the formula for sponsored videos, tips to sell better, and some headlines.

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#Trending on The Trend Machine

Lidia Infante wrote a beefy post for Moz and visited the Today in Digital podcast to share everything she learned about the algorithm du jour from digging through TikTok’s various docs.

2 principles behind the ranking factors:

1. Surface content that’s interesting to you (the viewer) - give you more of what you like

2. Burst filter bubbles - mix it up and show you something entirely different

3 processes used to rank content:

1. Determine what the video is about and assign it to a topic

2. Determine the quality of the video

3. Determine your topic and interest profile

8 ranking factors:

1. Engagement: Lidia thinks the algorithm is like Facebook’s old EdgeRank. Likes are the least valuable and everything builds from there based on how much effort the action requires, especially if that action spreads the content or gets you following more accounts. And, of course, did you actually watch it?

2. Discover Tab: all the non-video engagements (searches, sounds, hashtag clicks, etc.) that help build those user interest profiles

3. That sweet, sweet content. These are the questions the system tries to answer:

   • What is in the video visually?

   • What is the message (text and/or spoken word) of the video?

   • What’s in the SEO fields (title and hashtags (these are getting spammy now so may be getting less emphasis))?

   • What sound does it use?

4. The language of that sweet, sweet content. Users provide their language preference, the algorithm only delivers content that matches.

5. Device suitability: The Clock App knows basically everything about the current state of your device when you’re using the app (network quality and battery level included), this may influence what content you see.

6. Location, location, location: The closer you physically are to the content creator, the higher the ranking score for that content.

7. That stuff they don’t want: Run afoul of content moderation and obviously that video isn’t going viral. But there are some other factors that prevent For You Page placements: the person who made the vid is under 16, there’s a QR code, begging for engagement, presence of watermarks, amateur Jackass stunts, tobacco.

8. Native content creation: Use TikTok’s tools, get TikTok’s love, adoration, and a rankings boost.

Speaking of hashtags, how many should you use? The official recommendation for advertisers is 3-4 hashtags

A few other TikTok tidbits:

The key to breaking out on TikTok is the For You Page. So, how do you get there? Rumor has it the keys are:

• Use hashtags, but only relevant ones (and don’t use any#foryoupage style ones)

• Keep it brief, 21-34 seconds is the sweet spot

• Make sure your sound selection is trending

It released its Discover List of the top 50 creators on the platform according to what it cares about and values. A good peek under the hood and, maybe, a list of potential partners for marketing efforts.

New: audience insights, that should be handy.

PinTips

Pinterest expert Meagan Williamson shared some secrets on The Email Marketing Show podcast.

First, remember that Pinterest is a visual search engine. Because of this, your content gets indexed. It doesn’t get lost to the feed, so don’t just pin the same thing all the time. The platform favors new landing pages over existing.

The good news, using content you made for other platforms is fair game. In fact, it’s encouraged.

We want you to repurpose your content but with purpose on Pinterest.

-Alex, a real Pinterest employee

Let’s start with some of the technical underpinnings you should know about.

There is no magic post frequency number, the algorithm determines what is consistent for your account. Performance grows exponentially for you when you show up consistently with high-value content. Pick a cadence that is sustainable for you.

Saves (repins) are the key metric used by the algorithm to determine your content’s value. Is it good enough that people save it so they can revisit it later?

How does the algorithm determine who should see your post? It checks the quality level of where you’re sending clicks, analyzes the image for content and visual similarities, and crawls the pin copy in standard SEO fashion.

How do you make good pins?

• Provide enough info that you close the loop on-platform. Make a promise with the image that you deliver on in the copy (or in the other Idea Pin slides, etc.)

• You can still provide extra value off-platform, just use a CTA

• Make sure that next step is very clear

• Your landing page needs to do the converting, these visitors don’t know who you are

Remember, Pin sizing is different from other platforms: 2:3 ratio, 1000x1500px recommended. 

What should you use each format for?

• Use Idea Pins to grow your audience and create visibility by offering free value

• Use Standard Pins to drive traffic to your new content pieces (blog, podcast, etc.)

Wait, what about video pins? At some point, video pins will be removed with the intention of shifting that content format over to Idea Pins exclusively. 

Recommended wholistic plan from the episode:

• 1-2 Standard Pins per day, everyday using a mix of old and new content, but as much new as possible

• 3 Idea Pins per week (if the format fits), this is the perfect place to repurpose (with purpose) Reels and TikToks or other vertical videos (looking at you, Shorts)

A Google Carol

Google Ads expert (seriously, she trains their employees) Jyll Saskin Gales joined the Today in Digital podcast (again) to talk Google Ads past and present.

How has Google Ads changed recently?

• Performance Max everything (hello automation)

• All match types are broadening (hello automation, hello more monetized searches)

• Short from, vertical video everywhere (hello TikTokification)

What’s (probably) next?

• More Shorts!

• More automation

• More features in and control over PerfMax

• More focus on the core business

Speaking of Shorts…

Now you can shop in Shorts on YouTube. It's early days so access is limited, but it sounds similar to product tagging on social platforms. And after that, affiliate features.

How to Win Awareness & Influencer People

Want that next sponsored video to hit? Here’s what the (gated) research says: 

• It’s about authenticity. Viewers expect influencers to be honest, and this can give your brand a halo effect. 

• Disclose the sponsorship. 

• The less customized to the brand the better, stick with shoutouts 

• Get that shoutout later in the video

• Viewers don’t want subjective info, so keep it objective (just the facts, ma’am)

To maximize engagement: keep the production values low (sorry, authentic), save the brand shoutout for the end, and steer clear of opinions. 

This research was done for longer form videos like YouTube (average duration of 7 minutes).

ABC

Some sales tips from the Nudge podcast:

• Before the sales moment, don’t just tell yourself you’re going to do it, ask yourself how you’re going to do it. This starts priming your brain to figure it out. In digital, this could mean asking yourself how you’re going to make an ad people will click on or how you’re going to layout the product page for maximum appeal.

• Adopt the perspective of the other party, this results in more win-win outcomes for both sides (and more sales)

• Combine the two above to ask yourself how your potential customers will interact with your ads, how your site will answer their questions, and how they will feel about the shopping experience.

• People value potential more than reality. For example, an ad for a comedian got more clicks when it said they “could be the next big thing” instead of “are the next big thing.” I think this plays into people’s desire to have good taste and be recognized for it.

Headlines

Ads

Video ads for everyone (using Microsoft Ads (in certain countries)).

Internet cookies 101 from the Planet Money podcast. 

A quick listen on using PPC to help SEO:

• Dynamic search campaigns for keyword and audience prospecting

• Ad copy performance data to inform on-page content and meta tags

• Audience observation to see which in-market and affinity audiences perform the best to mimic on other platforms

Algorithms

Intel has developed a real-time deepfake detector that uses blood flow patterns to catch fakes 96% of the time. Which, of course, means the next wave of AI video generation will include blood flow modeling. 

Microsoft and Nvidia are teaming up to build an AI supercomputer, for business! 

Retail Tea Leaves

Network effects: they apply to fake reviews too. A team of researchers were able to identify products likely to have a large number of fake reviews based on the network of reviewers. A common way to get these reviews is through Facebook groups. Find one product that farmed Facebook for verified reviews and map the reviewers against other products. 

Æconomy

Starting a business is so hot right now. Ecomm is driving part of that. I wonder if we'll see another spike as laid off tech workers think about their next move(s).

Analytics

WebKit, a browser underpinning for Safari (amongst others), updated JavaScript cookie handling so cookies will now expire after 7 days of browser use if the site isn't meaningfully interacted with (click, keyboard input, etc.). In some cases, like the presence of URL parameters, this maximum drops to 1 day. Post-cookie analytics keeps getting trickier.

Here’s a list of Google Analytics 4’s Suggested Audiences, should you be interested.

Attack Vectors

The Digital Services Act is in effect in the EU now, which means, come February, we'll know which companies are "Very Large Online Platforms" or "Very Large Online Search Engines" and subject to extra regulation.

Google is paying almost $400M to settle a lawsuit about sketchy location data handling.

That One Bird

Unless something truly interesting happens or it becomes “safe” for advertisers again, I’m done covering Twitter for the time being. But there are a few things from this conversation with Kara Swisher that I want to highlight (and they apply to all social networks):  

1. It’s freedom of speech, not freedom of reach

2. All these platforms are owned by one person who has control over everything and says “I want everyone to have control.” So why do you have total control of the actual business?

What’s bad for The Bird is good for Mastodon.

In brief, Mastodon is a social media oriented platform in the Fediverse. I’m sorry, what now? While Twitter is an imperfect comparison, let’s go with it for illustrative purposes. 

There is only one Twitter, you are either on it or not. You can interact with anyone else on The Twitter. But you cannot use your Twitter to interact with people on Instagram or Snapchat, etc. 

Mastodon is made up of a bunch of different servers, called instances. To join Mastodon you pick the instance you want to be your home base. You can interact with anyone else on Mastodon, regardless of their instance, but all your info is tied back to your home base. This allows you to root your experience in the instance that most fits your tastes while still experiencing Mastodon as if it were a monolithic social network. Want to move to a new home base? You can do that, and your data is all yours. Although you may lose all your posts, at least for the time being, though you will have a JSON file archive of them.

It’s probably better to think of Mastodon as similar to Reddit but with a Twitter like interface. Or even like the message boards and blog rings of old.

Mastodon is built on the ActivityPub protocol, which is a really cool tool for building decentralized, social network like experiences without the walled gardens.

And if you’re still looking for alternatives, there’s always Micro.blog (I’m there), Cohost, or whatever “Twitter 2” turns out to be.

Leaner issue this week due in part to the above stance plus the general rough time in the industry and a lot of “news” I saw over the last week feeling like retreads of stuff we’ve talked about already.

retail_tea_leaves

People plan to holiday shop in-store this season. They want something approaching normalcy and they want it out of the house.

eBay is doubling down on the secondhand surge and will only promote used items this holiday season.

So long, free returns?

Making people decide how many of your item(s) to buy via multiple buttons (Add 1 to Cart, Add 2 to Cart, etc) might ground them into thinking how many to buy rather than whether to buy or not. A field study of this approach led to a 12%+ increase in conversions. Of course, this doesn’t work for products that people only buy 1 of most of the time (cars, for example). But it does work better for more expensive items. (Check out the paper or listen to a teaser.) 

Shopify has released a native email collection form tool, but it looks like it only integrates with the Shopify Email suite?

Retail media may not be living up to its promise. It’s getting money because merchants have the data, but it sounds like these platforms are experiencing the same issues with most nascent digital ad platforms: they just aren’t very good (yet).

Æconomy

Amazon has lost a trillion dollars in market value. Microsoft almost copied it. Nvidia is in the valley. And Meta is worth less than The Home Depot. It’s a good time for tech.

In response, The Everything Store is looking to cut costs, and Alexa is under the microscope. It doesn’t sound like the voice computing platform is poised to get axed, but the limit for new initiatives will be much lower than the sky for a bit. (Also, layoffs.)

Ads

Digital is forecasted to grow its share of the ad dollar pie in 2023. 2026 forecasts include: video as the new banner as thanks to Connected TV (1/3 of digital spending), CTV will eat into mobile spend, and search will start to lose ground to display (presumably thanks to CTV). Social is forecast to drag display down a bit next year. (But beware CTV ad fraud.)

YouTube is adding a new bidding optimization: Target Frequency. This will allow advertisers to target a max frequency of 4 / week, and the system will try to optimize for unique reach within this goal. This is welcome news for anyone used to seeing the same commercial every break. If want to steal a learning to keep in mind across platforms, how about this:

On average, TV advertisers’ return on investment (ROI) decreased by 41% when frequency exceeded 6+ weekly impressions

You can now run performance forecasts for Video Action Campaigns in Google Ads.

Want to advertise on MLS games? There’ll be an Apple for that.

Algorithms

Disney missed earnings estimates thanks to soft advertising numbers on their traditional media properties. But Disney+ added 12m+ new users. Bet they can’t wait to turn on the streaming ad money tap (on Dec. 8 with 100+ advertisers).

Even TikTok is feeling the earnings burn, revising revenue expectations down by $2B.

Pinterest Shuffles is public, will it keep its cool cred without the invite-only status?

YouTube Shorts, now on your TV! The device most perfectly designed to enjoy short-form vertical video.

Etsy gets visual search to help shoppers find the perfect thing. Search used to be a tech problem, the deep learning explosion looks to have turned it into a feature to add wherever makes sense.

Google Search Advocate John Mueller:

I imagine, over time, the weight on the links. At some point, will drop off a little bit as we can't figure out a little bit better how the content fits in within the context of the whole web.

The context of your content is becoming increasingly important to Big G’s vision for the future of its search algorithm.

Attack Vectors

Hypocritical?

First up, in current news, Meta laid off 11k people today.

Speaking of layoffs, Twitter is a mess right now. I really don’t want to rehash it all, so you can get a quick breakdown by listening here. I think this sums it up pretty well though, at least from the marketing angle: Elon writes a letter to advertisers assuring them it will still be a good platform for that purpose (10/27), Elon suggests a “thermonuclear name & shame” of advertisers that leave (11/4), Elon tries to smooth things over with advertisers (11/8). People spend money on their hobbies. Really rich people spend lots of money on their hobbies. Steve Ballmer likes basketball, so he bought the LA Clippers. Elon likes Twitter, so he bought Twitter. 

Algorithms

Twitter’s new sheriff has locked down internal content moderation tools, which may be a red flag to many of these advertisers. 

Also this:

But hey, we might get Vine back.

Netflix with ads is live, but it’s missing some content. The new plan required new deals with studios and some heavy hitters have yet to sign on the dotted line, including “Walt Disney, NBCUniversal, Sony Pictures, Warner Bros, and Lions Gate Entertainment.”

Meanwhile, Roku users are up, but ad revenues are down. (Paramount+ users are also up.)

Roblox is realizing Zuck’s dream, attracting brands like Walmart to the metaverse. Apparently Gen Z (and maybe Gen Alpha) are “really starting to get into Web3” and “spend an awful lot of time in the metaverse.” One industry person expects TV ad budgets to shift to this space.

Meta is taking businesses to the DMs. The move to encourage businesses to delve into the world of messaging makes sense.

And the flailing for a future continues as Instagram tests the NFT waters, allowing a small group of creators to mint and sell on the platform (subject to App Store fees, of course).

Just a handy reminder:

TikTok has repeatedly explained that it’s not a social media app, it’s an entertainment platform, with a focus on showcasing the best video content, not building a social graph to connect users with friends, as such.

(that link is about the "Shoppertainment" opportunity in the APAC region)

The Trend Machine drives Millennials to restaurants, with over 50% of users visiting places they saw on the platform. And search keeps splintering.

And as it splinters, it expands. Rewind is a screen recording for your day that you can keyword search back through. Part of me feels shades of Minority Report and another part thinks this would work extremely well for me.

retail_tea_leaves

Stripe is cutting 14% of its workforce in order to “build for leaner times.” Probably not a great sign for e-commerce and other businesses built on internet transactions. 

Etsy’s doing well, which could be proof that ‘tis the season for little luxuries. 

eBay did alright too as people sought luxury at a bargain. 

And it’s not just eBay, secondhand is having a moment and high income shoppers are looking for luxury. 

Wayfair is losing revenue and customers since its pandemic bubble burst and this pesky inflation thing popped up. Interesting to note, many purchases on the site are impulse buys, so don’t build your holiday strategy on that impulse.

Snapchat is bringing the power of AR-enabled shopping to Amazon via their new partnership.

Amazon is going after grocery advertisers. “Retail analysts agreed that the move signals that Amazon’s advertising ambitions increasingly revolve around companies that sell household items and everyday goods.”

Ads

One of the most important targeting parameters of your Facebook ad might be who is in the picture. 

Researchers found that more ads with young women get shown to men over 55; that women see more ads with children; and that Black people see more ads with Black people in them.

Some DTC brands are shifting their Meta ad budgets to TikTok. Not surprising a move, but it will be interesting to see how this impacts the maturation of The Trend Machine as an ad platform. 

There’s a very specific kind of advertising creative recipe for Meta that is completely different for TikTok.

So say hello to TikTok Works, a series of studies by different partners to show that TikTok Ads, well, work.

Google is getting rid of similar audiences. Which sound like they should function like lookalike audiences on social platforms, but are a little narrower. Each network was siloed. On search, similar audiences were only people that searched similar queries, no other info was incorporated. So what should you do?

• For Display, Discovery, and Video Action campaigns they recommend optimized targeting, which is like audience expansion using your conversion goals as the signal.

• For other video campaigns they recommend audience expansion, which uses your first-party data as the signal.

• For Search and Shopping they recommend Smart Bidding, hopefully this is not a change you need to make.

Lots of small ad product announcements from Microsoft, like low-code conversion tracking with the UET tag. Most interesting for the holidays, you can now import your Google Merchant Center into Microsoft Merchant Center.

Delivering the same message across multiple screens works better. At least when some of those screens are playing linear or Connected TV content.

98% of businesses believe that CTV advertising will be bigger than mobile advertising. 

That’s a lot. How much of this is because it’s the new shiny? How much is due to privacy-related tracking issues? And how much is because it’s a return to the familiar world of TV for some?

First Safari, now Uber? StrangersTaxi is testing out push notification ads, so you can promote your business by annoying people.

Æconomy

Headline: More Than a Third of US Small Businesses Couldn't Pay All Their Rent in October

Attack Vectors

European TikTok user data is accessible to team members outside of Europe, including China.

The Facebook News section is getting fully turned over to the bots, as human-curation is now a thing of the past.

Fun holiday project: remove your info from data brokers.

Metatrends

License to Spam

I hope you like canned ham, because it’s about to get digitized and supersized.

• The Republican National Committee asked Google to keep their emails out of spam, Google agreed and implemented a solution, now the RNC is suing Google because it didn’t work well enough. Doesn’t matter if users said they didn’t want the emails, they need to get them.

• Twitter’s blue checks may soon be for sale, for $8 a month. I get that the old system for verification (whatever it was) was probably not great and made it another weird cultural status symbol, but this seems ripe for scams and spam.

• TikTok and Facebook failed a test of their election misinformation readiness. Probably not a big deal considering confident predictions of tampering efforts. 

The witches’ brew of poor media and misinformation literacy, large platforms’ transition to “discovery engines,” weaponization of “free speech” as a term, shoddy content moderation systems, and pay-to-play nature of many attention engines for brand content has us in a frothy spot for content delivery. Network effects and scale don’t only apply to quality content.

The Split

A split has been forming, or at least forecasted, in the advertising market. The big brands are spending big. Coca-Cola is spending at record levels and expects to step it up even more in 2023. Meanwhile, Direct To Consumer (DTC) brands are taking their dollars from Meta to TikTok.

The consumer side is hinting at a high vs. low split. Overall, consumers are expected to spend the same amount on holiday gifts, they’ll just buy less of them (thanks inflation). But breaking it out further shows high income shoppers are looking to reign things in while low income shoppers are planning on spending more. Amazon is going all in on grocery and everyday essentials for their ad products. And food related businesses show the highest volume of inflation mentions in Yelp reviews.

Everyday essentials and little luxuries should be in good spots, which explains the big spend from Consumer Packaged Good (CPG) brands. Legit luxuries could be a different story this Q4.

Assorteds & Alternates

A story of America’s bestselling yet forgotten poet who was also a proto-influencer? He launched a record label in the early 70’s and check out this marketing:

If you went to see Rod McKuen live in concert any time in the early ’70s,” said Zax, “there was a postcard sitting on your chair: ‘Get on the Stanyan Records mailing list.’ ”

A quarter ended and the Elon-Twitter saga started a new chapter. So some things happened. Let’s get into it.

Ads

Facebook is updating its self-serve ad policies. The updates have generated a lot of hoopla, but turns out the only real change is switching “Facebook” to “Meta,” along with some other minor stuff. But I read the policies (for the first time) before learning that, so I have some highlights that struck me as particularly interesting. Including this mea culpa (which is probably more about minimizing legal exposure than admitting dark secrest):

when serving your ad, we use best efforts to deliver the ads to the audience you specify or to achieve the outcome you select, though we cannot guarantee in every instance that your ad will reach its intended target or achieve the outcome you select.  

(We're not always great at what we say we're gonna do, but we try real hard, promise.)

This super handy clarification of their random disapprovals:

We may reject or remove any ad for any reason.

Looks like the got a bulk deal from Equifax:

By placing an Order, you authorize us to obtain your personal and/or business credit report from a credit bureau, either when you place an Order or at any time thereafter.

Apparently platform security is on you:

You are responsible for maintaining the security of your advertising account, and you understand that you will be charged for any Orders placed on or through your advertising account.

Time truly is meaningless:

You can cancel an Order at any time, but your ads may run for 24 hours after you notify us, and you are still responsible for paying for all ads that run.

(Really I think this one is based on the ad targeting and delivery system, the ad cache loads when a user opens the app/site.)

Always check your payment method:

Past due amounts will accrue interest at 1% per month or the lawful maximum, whichever is less.  

Translation: we break shit a lot, sorry, not sorry:

You understand that, from time to time, we run tests on our Self-Serve Ad Interfaces and related systems, which may impact your use and experience thereof, including campaign performance.

A helpful note:

If users have interacted with your ad, your ad may remain on our Products (e.g., shared until the users delete it or visible to users through their account tools).

Big Brother Blue shared the Performance 5 framework for growth. Simplify your account, partner with creators, use all and different creative format options, use the Conversion API, and sue Conversion Lift.

Running Facebook Ads right now? Keep three things in mind:

1. Test visuals more than you test copy.

2. Don’t be afraid to use casual product photos.

3. Sell the lifestyle, not the product.

The tables have turned in the publisher-adtech vendor relationship (thanks Apple!) , which could mean more publication-by-publication ad buying. Or, hopefully, less terrible ad vendors (bye Taboola!). 

Google Ads is giving advertisers all the things. Like a new placement: podcasts. The spot will accept audio and video ads.

And a magic robot tool that turns your long video into 6 second clips. Could be a handy way to get in on the YouTube Shorts game.

Target YouTube users based on their music mood with the 5 new music mood lineups in topic targeting.

Those YouTube audio ads will be “served to users exhibiting signals of listening, such as accessing content through a Google Nest smart speaker.” Called it.

Christmas has come early for Performance Max users, the new toys include: 

• performance planner works for them

• schedule asset groups

• now with up to 15 headlines

• let the robots tell you what's working with Explanations

• first-party audience insights

Amazon is adding more video ad features. The format is coming to the self-service Sponsored Display tool and a video building tool is in beta.

Amazon says its on-box ads work quite well. Wonder what they cost.

Apple’s privacy solution for app download advertising should be a little better now.

Despite concerns around market conditions, newsletter ad spending remains strong. The sector has recovered from a summer slump and posted the highest revenue month of the year in September. Within that total, crypto is on its way down while travel is coming back. Consumer Goods spends the most as a category but is down slightly from a May high. Finance & Investing and Software & Technology helped drive a strong September with noticeable increases in spend month-over-month.

About those brand safety concerns…

Algorithms

Elon wrote a letter to Twitter advertisers that (I think) basically says: Twitter will be more or less the same but with a looser user banning policy. With a hint of a potential protocol-over-platform future (“where you can choose your desired experience according to your preferences”). And a potential conundrum for the ad review and approval systems (“low relevancy ads are spam”). At least that’s what it seems like. Guess someone told Elon where the salaries come from.

Here’s a good response/reaction post.

There’s a new Hansel in town when it comes to social. Say hello to Gas, an app that encourages anonymous compliments amongst high schoolers. It’s overtaken TikTok and BeReal in terms of downloads.

BeReal could have to face reality soon if it wants to stick around. Apparently ads are now on the table (which makes sense since it signed on to the VC handshake), but timing could be of the essence with the looming 2023 marketing dollar squeeze. (I hope they find an alternative to ads that keeps them around, you don’t have to be massive to be worthwhile.)

TikTok will teach you how to TikTok for marketing.

Brands are starting to create content with a TikTok-first approach and agencies are responding by building out TikTok teams. This feels a bit like letting the tools use you, instead of the other way around.

YouTube is getting tab happy. Channel pages will now be broken out into tabs for Shorts, Live, and Videos (a.k.a. OG YT).

The Video Box also rolled out pinch-to-zoom, better playback location dragging, and it’ll set the mood with the new ambient lighting effect.

Remember when I said there’s an API for everything (or something to that effect)? Well, now there’s a Facebook API for cease & desist notices, more or less.

Apple has revised the App Store in-app payment rules to further clarify that all it cares about is its cut. Specifically from Zuck. 

It’s long wanted a chunk of Meta Money, looks like this is the new plan to get it. (And maybe wants to stifle an emerging audiobook threat in Spotify?) 

Yay, push notifications for Safari, just what no one wanted.

Shutterstock is adding AI-generated images to its product offerings. So you’ll presumably still have to worry about licensing.

You can now visit Interpol in the metaverse. But why? (Community and training might be the “why”.)

Amidst falling revenue, Meta shareholders are over the metaverse and want Zuck & Co to focus on actually making money and being a viable business in the here-and-now. (Does Meta need its own Jobs-to-Cook moment?) 

Æconomy

Q3 earnings reports and, once again, Snap was the canary in the coal mine.

Google, Microsoft, and Spotify all reported ad revenue growth below expectations. Oh, and YouTube revenue dropped, I’m sure it’s fine. Right?

Amazon saw growth, but less than forecasted. Advertising helped make up for slowing Web Services growth. The latter will be interesting to watch as this could be a signal that saturation is being reached and it may be transitioning to a phase of maturity from hyper-growth.

But it wasn’t all bad news:

• Pinterest pulled an anti-Snap and posted revenue growth (PDF). Active users, however, are flat compared to Q3 2021 and up slightly compared to Q2 ‘22.

• Shopify posted growth across the board (I think) including a ballooning operating loss.

Corning, the glass company, reported some not so great numbers, expect Apple and Samsung to follow suit. 

Or Apple will report some great numbers. Q3 was just fine, thank you very much, with revenue up 8% year-over-year, and set a new quarterly record. This growth was driven primarily by iPhone and Mac sales, with services chipping in a bit, and iPad sales tumbling. Just don’t expect the party to continue this quarter. 

US GDP grew over 2% last quarter, first time this year it’s been positive.

Yelp’s data is showing a continued increase in consumers’ inflationary experiences, especially when it comes to food and experiences. There are lots of great charts and breakouts so it’s worth a click through.

Retail Tea Leaves

People's sense of power can be impacted by things like economic conditions, pay, and sports, and these feelings of power can impact their browsing behavior. People experiencing low feelings of power want more choice, high power needs less choice. Why? It's all about control.

2/3 of Shopify stores close within a year, according to one analysis. That’s higher than the 20% small business first-year failure rate reported by the BLS, but ecommerce reduces many of the barriers to startup, so this makes complete sense to me. Setting up a Shopify might seem like a path to easy money for some, the reality that doesn’t match expectations leads to closure.

Will live-stream shopping in the West become TikTok’s Reels?

If you want to turn your e-commerce ads over to the algorithms then Facebook’s Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns are for you, and now you can try them for yourself. I haven’t had a chance to try them yet, but I’ve heard less than great things from a beta tester. On the other hand, the Advantage+ audience expansion option is showing some early positive returns for me.

Shipping shenanigans, an annual tradition. Most (all?) major carriers are raising their rates which could mean more logistics induced fun for the holidays.

Subscribe now

Analytics

In an effort to make the transition easier, Google is improving their Analytics 4 setup tool. It should now transfer more of your Universal Analytics setup. (It really feels like they rushed this out and what should be the beta phase is actually the mass onboarding period.) And, if you use Analytics 360, you get an extra year to transition.

Also, behavioral modeling! Better ROI! More buzzwords soon to come, surely.

A/B tests aren’t a game of prediction, they’re for learning and improvement.

Attack Vectors

China is threatening to attack Taiwan (what you might call, pulling a Putin), which is the home of TSMC, otherwise known as the manufacturer of 92% of the world’s computer chips. 😬

Welcome to Australia: Northern Hemisphere Edition. Canada wants platforms like Meta and Google to share the wealth with news publishers. While I understand the sentiment, it’s a bit interesting that governments require these platforms to pay some sectors for the privilege of sending them attention while all others have to pay. Ben Evans wrote an essay on the Australia saga.

Content moderation jobs are a thing out of dystopic sci-fi. TikTok moderators report having to watch 900 videos a day, allocating 15 seconds per video, to scrub out all the terrible shit we don’t have to see. For their efforts they’re paid $10 a day.

Add Amazon to the list of data leaks. A database (named Sauron) of Prime Video viewing habits was accidentally left open to the internet and wasn’t password protected. Whoops!

Redaction: White House doesn’t care about Elon’s Twitter acquisition, at least not on national security grounds.

Alternates & Assorteds

A story from Hoover about how to put your company out of business via marketing.

Chip engineering could be the next big major, at least at Purdue.

R.I.P. Normal

The Media™ likes mass: critical mass, mass culture, mass casualties. Bigger is better when it comes to people impacted or interested because it means a bigger market to attract. (Same reasoning can apply to hyper-partisanship, “us vs. them” triggers our evolutionary tribal response.)

I say this because it feels like a lot of headlines lately strike me as trying to will a return to “normal” into reality. The problem is, mass culture is dead. At least in the near term as the gathering points for mass culture unbundle. 

The Streaming Wars killed the chance of another mass cultural moment around a TV show or movie. I have not (yet, in some cases) seen: Game of Thrones, most of the Marvel movies, Ted Lasso, most of the Fast & Furious movies, or Stranger Things.

I was on a digital conference / webinar thing recently where they had a session on Ted Lasso and something about omnichannel marketing. One of the speakers made the comment, “there are what, 3 people that haven’t seen Ted Lasso?” While obvious hyperbole, the sentiment would be more accurate if stated as, “there are what, 3 people who will pay for whatever Apple puts out that haven’t seen Ted Lasso?”

Twitter is probably about to die, at least as a cultural gathering point for a large enough group of people to mean something on a near-mass scale. Meta may implode. BeReal may run into a wall before it can walk a marathon. TikTok is defined by its sub-cultures as much as its mass reach.

Radio fell out of the center of culture a while ago, and anything printed well before that (I say as an avid reader and lover of books).

Culture has been unbundled. We have moved from a phase of critical mass to one of critical yeast.

Unbundling AdTech

The End of the Techno-Giants? + The Age of Unbundling + The Cookie-pocalypse Deconstructed

The industry’s zombie shuffle to the cookie-pocalypse has shifted the power from the demand side to the supply side, and the numbers show it.

Revenues are growing at slower rates, or dropping, across the board for the digital giants. (all the links)

Meanwhile, every retailer that’s large enough is launching a media network to sell ads against. And publishers are starting to kick AdTech vendors to the curb (bye, Taboola) in the interest of doing it themselves.

Outside Magazine did this a while back and reported an almost immediate improvement in the quality of advertisers that wanted to work with them directly. It’s been years since I heard the Outside info and can’t find the source, but they attributed it to the lack of garbage content once they got rid of the trashy sponsored content ads after articles.

Just as the internet looks to be niching back down, advertising options could be doing the same. Instead of setting up a campaign on the Google Display Network and delivering all over the place, the future may be curating a small selection of placements and placing buys directly. Strategic and contextual partnerships over spray-and-pray at scale.

Or working with whatever the next-gen programmatic platforms are. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was an adtech version of Hulu, a bunch of incumbent publishers get together and create a platform themselves to rival the startups.

The Splintering of Search

In the Age of Unbundling section last weeek, I wrote:

Search is unbundling from Google as specialized and niche alternatives pop up to fill the gaps Google leaves behind in its quest to realize The Future of Search™.

There are a lot of pieces being written about TikTok replacing Google as the search engine of choice among Gen Z’ers. More recently, Klarna has announced a “rich and unbiased search tool“ for shopping.

Here are some other niche search engines I’ve collected over time:

• One for the indie web

• The best products, according to Reddit (and other review sites)

• One for weird old books

• One for old book illustrations

• One for museum collections

• One for “random awesomeness” (less search engine and more standalone “surprise me” button)

Happy Trend-O-Ween

Make sure you’re on trend this Halloween with Google’s Frightgeist. That means: witch, Spider-man, dinosaur, Stranger Things, fairy, pirate, rabbit (how did I not think of this?), cheerleader, cowboy, Harley Quinn, etc and so on. 

Or, if you want to go unique, opt for the Cereal Killer.

Retail Tea Leaves

Deloitte has released their holiday survey for 2022 (PDF) and it’s about what you’d expect, inflation is the headliner. Overall, people are planning on spending more, which will mean less stuff. But the split isn’t evenly distributed (a trend of the current economy), the low-income group is planning on spending more, while the high-income group, less.

5 shopping behaviors to prepare for this #holidanszn:

1. Shoppers want to save money, but might still reward themselves with little luxuries 

2. E-commerce may have fallen from pandemic highs, but it’s far from dead 

3. Shop, shop, shop around the clock. Work hours doesn’t mean a shopping pause, probably because they’ll spend so much time scouring for deals

4. When in doubt, shoppers are likely to put their dollars where it matters to them (American made, small business, minority owned, etc)

5. Free shipping is the gift everyone wants to receive

In prep for the holidays, retailers are both stockpiling to ensure inventory and discounting to clear excess inventory. 

The holiday sales sprint is now a sales quarter, with big retailers and DTC brands alike spreading things out and not going all in on the Black Friday-Cyber Monday shopping bonanza. 

Supporting the holiday sales quarter are the following strategies / drivers: all the promos; paid search, affiliates and partnerships; email and SMS as top sales channels; a fear of data-loss and inflation.

Target is starting their dealz szn already. All these early sales and promos could mean less money being spent around the “traditional” shopping times later in the quarter.

The future of Black Friday is…football? ​Amazon will be airing an NFL game of BF23. Could the annual stampede be slowly replaced by experiences and events?

Klarna is going full Zuck and copying from everybody:

• Google - full featured, “unbiased” shopping search (which totally makes sense for Klarna (how long until ads show up?))

• TikTok - (shoppable) short form videos (legally mandated of all digital platforms)

• Influencer, sorry Creator, marketing tools - the name is self-explanatory, find influencers/creators to market with

• Patagonia - “Tools to support our planet’s health” (which appears to means an easy way to donate to environmental non-profits and a product carbon footprint tracker)

Secondhand shopping and resale may be primed to break out of their niche status.

Buy* clam flavored mayonnaise from Target and find a pack of cards inside! It sounds outrageous, until you realize it’s a promo partnership with Cards Against Humanity and it makes perfect sense. (*sorry, you can’t, it’s sold out.)

Da Goog is bringing its visual first shopping features from mobile to desktop, like filters and product details without leaving the search results. (Another reminder that Google is in the business of delivering information to users, not traffic to your website.)

A Capterra survey found that online shoppers expect checkout to take 4 minutes or less, and over ¼ of respondents said it should take less than 2. It also found that 72% of guest checkouts are actually returning customers who didn’t log in. This can cause issues for lifetime value calculations,  site personalization efforts, etc. So, how do you get them to login? Well…

• Offer incentives (points, discounts, etc.)

• Don’t be sketchy, be transparent about what the data you collect is for (also see: privacy regulations)

• Dig into the “new user” analytics to see if you find any patterns

• Turn your site into a concierge machine

• A/B test (do this anyway)

Amazon has a retention problem (of employees, not customers). Big enough that internal data predicts they could churn through the working age population in some metros in a matter of years. Retention is why Henry Ford doubled the minimum wage. This also explains why The Everything Store is plowing so much money and R&D into automation and robotics of all kinds, you don’t have to retain a robot or algorithm, you just reset it.

Ads

2023 could be the year of Where Did the Marketing Dollars Go? (I’m assuming this survey is of national brands that’ll get hit hard by any recession versus “average” companies that advertise).

Netflix is launching (a stripped down version of) their ad platform next month (and related ad-supported subscription tier). But it might be sold out by the time it does.

Twitter continues to build on their (current) shopping ambitions (we’ll find out what Elon thinks about all this soon enough, I suppose) with a new ad asset: product cards. Cards are the Twitter name for the different types of rich assets you can place in promoted tweets (like images, videos, links, etc). The cards allow brands to highlight new products and drive traffic to their Twitter Shop by highlighting different products.

Google has announced pumpkin spice ads. Not really, but they did announce seasonal video ad templates, so kind of.

Big G is putting (some of) the power in users’ hands when it comes to the ads they see with the launch of My Ad Center.

YouTube content targeting conversion campaigns is no more. Mixing audience and content targeting creates an AND relationship, meaning you get the overlapping part of the venn diagram only. They claim it’s to improve conversion performance, I guess the increased revenue generation is just a happy side effect.

But it does have some new toys. Moment Blast is their version of a Super Bowl commercial, big time attention during a big moment. Product feeds are coming to Discovery ads. And it’s getting into the podcast ad game with audio ads. (I would imagine they’ll find a way to work these into smart speaker placements too.)

An Amazon Ads crash course if you need one before the holidays.

Caffeine, a hybrid social media-streaming platform at the "crossroads of streaming culture, sports, and music" (I think), is launching video ads. Do with that what you will.

Where have you been, where are you going, and how can we sell ads based on that? Uber’s new plan for profit, jump on the first-party data train to deliver ads in-app. Or sponsor an entire ride with Journey Ads and deliver 3 different ads to one user during their ride. Also, commerce capabilities in-app. Because of course.

Having issues with fake leads from your Performance Max campaigns? Google has some tips for that:

Facebook’s weird auto-generated ads promoting random businesses are back. To opt out, go to Commerce Manager: settings > general > find “promote products from your shop” > edit > turn off, and then click it again to confirm.

TikTok is giving ads the Full Algorithm treatment with the new Smart Performance Campaigns (working title should have been Trust In TikTok campaigns). Pick your objective, country, budget, and creative and the algorithm that ate the world does the rest.

A clever use of AirDrop and billboards to promote a Netflix show. Clever until it’s overdone that is. (And no airdropping strangers while on mass transit, please.)

Algorithms

Snap’s stock cratered again, will it be a sign of bad things to come again? But don’t give up on the ghost, it just barely missed revenue expectations and grew its user base.

TikTok’s next play in becoming an Everything App™ might be podcasts.

The Trend Machine is very popular (with the under-35 set), but not as popular as YouTube…for now.

Pinterest further TikTok-ifies Idea Pins with a newly licensed music library for creators.

Meta is still keeping it Reels, this time working on a collaboration feature. (Also, Reels are coming to Groups.)

Will the next wave of streaming services be from sports teams? The Los Angeles Clippers are either about to start a trend or create another memeable moment for Steve Ballmer. (For reference, NBA League Pass is $100 for the season, but excludes national broadcast games and local blackouts.)

The team at Twitter tasked with coming up with a decentralized social protocol may finally have something to show off, something that sounds a lot like Mastodon and ActivityPub? Maybe?

Forget “tap to pay,” Apple is planning the future of “blink to pay” with XR headsets. (XR means augmented and virtual reality.)

Æconomy

Consumers are now more worried about inflation than COVID. The most common behavior change in response is brand switching.

The IRS is increasing standard deductions for the upcoming tax season, hoping to help make inflation sting a little less.

FedEx is predicting lower ground shipping volumes to end the year, so supply chains and shipping times may not be the biggest concern this holiday season.

Analytics

Google might not own the post-cookie future of tracking and targeting. FLEDGE is the most recent effort of theirs that has failed. (FLEDGE is the retargeting “solution.” Topics covers the interest based targeting, not sure how its faring.) 

Automatically import cost data to Google Analytics on a regular cadence from an FTP server. The cost import tool can be super useful, it’s the actual importing that can be a drag (especially if you’re doing it manually), so any automation is always welcome.

YouTube is testing out Data Stories, which appear to be an Instagram or Snapchat story style experience in YouTube that gives you the highlights and insights from your channel analytics. So it’s YouTube content about your content’s performance on YouTube.

Attack Vectors

A watchdog group tested YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok with blatant misinformation ads about US midterms. YouTube passed, the other two very much not.

California is getting another privacy bill, the California Privacy Rights Act. It expands the CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) by ditching the “selling data” language that was very easy to circumvent (Meta does not sell user data, it sells access against the data) and replaces it with “data sharing.” I think the safe interpretation is that any company that interacts with consumer data of California residents in any way needs to make sure they’re playing by these new rules.

Remember all those concerns about TikTok being used as a tool for espionage by the Chinese government, turns out they might not have been totally wrong.

Elon might buy Twitter (and slash headcount by 75% (Blue Bird says there are no plans for this)), but he definitely tweeted his way to federal scrutiny. The US government is getting uncomfortable with some recent tweets friendly to Russia and his funding triumvirate for the purchase of Saudi Arabia, China, and Qatar. 

The UK has told Meta they have to sell Giphy in the interest of competition. No word on if Zuck is planning a tea party.

Advice: Define the Relationship

As I put together Rabbbits Weeekly each, er, weeek, I notice what feels like overarching themes or trends connecting various pieces and headlines. Here are the connective threads I’m paying attention to at the moment.

East vs. West: Attention Platforms Edition

The past week or so has felt like the dam breaking in terms of TikTok showing its ambition and illustrating the differing approach of eastern and western attention platforms.

First, why “attention platforms” and not “social media”? One reason is because TikTok refuses to call itself social media. More importantly is because this isn’t just about traditional social platforms. Social media as a discreet concept or experience type feels more archaic by the day. The guiding idea here comes from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings who said (something along the lines of) the company doesn’t (just) compete against other TV and movie platforms but all other ways people spend their time. Name-checking options like TikTok, YouTube, and even sleep.

Back to TikTok. While most social platforms have been rushing to TikTok-ify (or BeReal-ify), The Trend Machine has been ignoring all of them and setting its sights on other sectors.

I would categorize the Silicon Valley approach as a vertical one. Adding iterative features that are similar to what they already have with everything geared towards maximizing ad inventory and, therefore, revenue. For Facebook, everything since the creation of the News Feed has been just another feed. This might also explain why Horizon Worlds and the dream of the metaverse is going so poorly.

My take on the Chinese approach is solely informed by what I know of WeChat and TikTok, so consider it highly imperfect. As you might guess, I see it as horizontal. Instead of asking “what format don’t we have,” they ask “what activity don’t we have?” Announcements or leaks have come out about TikTok potentially getting into product distribution, music streaming and podcasts, and it continues to build out its commerce capabilities.

Silicon Valley typically tackles efforts like this through minimum viable products or partnerships / integrations. TikTok is doing it themselves, including buying warehouses. But it’s not just TikTok, Shein is getting into the reselling game by building their own, in-app functionality. American retailers just partner with someone like ThredUp.

Elon wants to build (or turn Twitter into) an Everything App like WeChat. If he manages it, it will likely be in some crypto-ish decentralized way. TikTok is actively working towards building the American version of WeChat, in a very centralized way (much like the Chinese government). (I am highly skeptical that a true WeChat clone will happen in the US. The Everything App is more-or-less a digital representation of the state, so users didn’t have to adapt to the idea. It is also dangerous to map across countries on different points of their development and adoption curves.)

Only time will tell if their bets pay off, but we’re watching the fallout of one approach to building an attention platform while witnessing an attempt at another approach.

The Age of Unbundling

Just as markets boom and bust, they also bundle and unbundle. We are currently in a phase of unbundling. 

Everyone that owns a tv show or movie now has a streaming service.

Search is unbundling from Google as specialized and niche alternatives pop up to fill the gaps Google leaves behind in its quest to realize The Future of Search™.

The shopping experience is splintering across platforms and surfaces as every company tries to shave off their sliver of the commerce pie.

Social is shifting from “one platform for everything” to “one thing per platform” (such as Facebook for groups, Snapchat for close friends, Instagram for broadcasting to connections, TikTok for discovery, YouTube learning and entertainment (and yes, it’s a bit of an overstatement)).

Plus podcasts, newsletters, slacks, discords, telegrams, messaging apps, etc. 

It appears the internet is niching back down. But the problem is all the providers and platforms still want to be monoliths.

The End of the Techno-Giants?

This unbundling could hit the current techno-giants (techno-tyrants?) the hardest. 

Google is flailing to find a post-cookie solution the market will latch onto. The current cookie ecosystem powers their money printing machine and they’ve parlayed it into a dominant market position. Content creators love to talk about not building your empire on rented land; the way things are currently shaping up, Google is poised to become a tenant of someone else’s tracking and targeting high rise.

Meta is floundering. The meta-pivot was too little, too soon (the timeline was probably accelerated to distract from all the bad headlines they were generating) and another example of techies chronically believing The Next Big Thing™ is much closer than it actually is. In this case, that’s VR. The metaverse is here, it’s just called Roblox or Minecraft or something else the kids are doing that I haven’t heard of. Meta is also getting hammered by the privacy-posturing of Apple (and others) and the years of trying to be everything for everyone is finally catching up with them.

Microsoft is no longer The Windows Company but is having one hell of a second (third?) act so far. Apple is probably just fine, unless they bet too big on The Next Big Thing™ or bet on the wrong one (that mysterious AppleCar project is getting mighty expensive), but it has more than enough money in the bank to weather plenty of storms. Amazon is in the awkward adolescent period, we may soon find out if it’s a goose or a swan.

Generative AI Models are the next creative director

Any company that wants to be (even tangentially) an AI company is rolling out generative tools to create images or videos, or turn images into videos, or etc etc. Microsoft is adding the feature to every tool they can think of. Soon (if it’s not possible somewhere already) there will be a prompt field or button in the ad creation flow of most major digital platforms that allow you to generate visual assets instead of or alongside “manually” created assets you upload.

The biggest draws of this route for marketers will be speed and no longer needing to worry about image licenses or permissions. You can’t get sued over an image an algorithm created based on your own words (probably, only precedent will truly tell). A potential drawback will be the terms and conditions the platforms apply and if it includes language that you don’t really own the image. Ultimately not a big deal if it’s just an ad campaign image, but the concern arises from where else it might surface or what it might be used in tandem with if the platform owns it.

The Cookie-pocalypse Deconstructed

The fallout from The End of Cookies has already (for the most part)  happened and now various crumbs are being swept up into assorted piles as marketers and platforms figure out what shape fits their needs.

On the marketers’ end, influencers and creators look to be the post-privacy strategy of choice on social platforms that were hit hard by The iOS-ening.

On the platforms’ end, APIs are the name of the game. Conversion APIs are the most common but there are others for various purposes. These APIs allow platforms to receive data directly from servers instead of using the browser as a proxy. In many cases this means data can be transferred without having to worry about ad blockers or privacy controls. Generally this is less plug-and-play than the pixels for end users.

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Who Wants to Play More, More, Less?

My brain is still stuck in “more or less” mode after last week, which isn’t helped by the fact that most news seems to fall into one of these buckets these days. Who knows, if someone doesn’t stop me, this might just become a regular format around these parts.

So, again, here is a round-up of recent more, more, more related announcements. And some less, less, less to act as counterpoints. 

Meta

Facebook

• More prospecting with Advantage Custom Audiences (and even more tips at the link)

• Less people in Horizon Worlds. Meta has dropped their year end goal from 500k users to 280k, which is less than a previous user milestone the hit. Also less legs, that video they released with them was fake. 

• More commerce ad resources from Big Brother Blue.

Instagram

• More guides from Meta on how to use the features they want you to use.

• Less ad free Instagram. First Apple and now Google have removed The OG App from their app stores, it imported users Instagram feeds without any ads. Wonder why Meta didn’t like it?

• More MySpace in your ‘Gram

TikTok

• More Creator Marketplace tools and features to help brands capitalize on the “71% of the TikTok community says that it's a creator's authenticity that motivates them to buy from a brand.” (Anecdotal experience/advice: partnering with multiple creators in the same niche could help your product seem less like an ad, “I’ve seen a lot of influencers recommending this specific one.”)

• More campaign objectives: Focused View. It’s like Video View ads, but actually geared towards people paying attention. Like watching a video for 6 seconds versus the industry standard 2 (and only half the video has to be on the screen for that 2 seconds for it to count). Plus, you get that first 6 seconds for free.

• More #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt: Prime Day edition. Or Prime Early Access Sale, or whatever they call it. Whatever you call it, some brands used TikTok to drive lots of traffic.

• More warehouses for TikTok. It’s becoming apparent that they don’t want to be Amazon’s acquisition channel, they want to be Amazon.

• More music streaming in The Trend Machine one day? Elon wants to turn Twitter into an “everything app” like WeChat, Zuck has wanted this for Facebook for years now, turns out it might be another Chinese app that cracks the code in the US first.

We interrupt these messages to bring you:

TikTok Tid Bits

I recently collected some ad benchmarks for a client and now I’m going to share them with you, lucky reader. And hey, while we’re here👇

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How much can you expect to spend?

• In-feed ad CPMs will run you, on average, $10

• A hashtag challenge will run you $150k / week

• A brand takeover costs $50k / day

  • This ad type will show as soon as a targeted user opens the app, effectively taking over their screen. One advertiser per category per day.

• A click, on average, will cost you $1

  • Expect a range of $0.20 - $2.00 cost per action

• Minimum spend of $20 per day per ad group

What can you expect to get?

• Average engagement rate 5-16%

From what I’ve heard, the most cost effective way to advertise on TikTok right now is to run Spark Ads, which is their fancy way of saying promoted posts.

I’ve also heard TikTok reps recommend refreshing ad creative every 72 hours.

If you’re running shopping ads, you may have better luck getting things setup via the Catalog Manager (look for the shopping cart icon that is actually a button).

Now back to your regularly scheduled program.

Pinterest

• More Trends! Inspiration Station has expanded the Trends tool and will be better integrating the Conversions API with Shopify and Google Tag Manager (GTM).  

Google

• More handles, YouTube is jumping on the @ train, which honestly might be a great idea.

• Less automatically created Google Ad assets, a request from (some (many?)) advertisers. (I’m curious if these same advertisers use Dynamic Search Ads, because it’s the same concept just applied on a broader scale.)

• More privacy-oriented targeting options for publishers (called PAIR, I think). Sounds like it’s a venn diagram approach to first-party retargeting, the advertiser sends a list to the publisher and matched users get ads (wildly oversimplified). Which, honestly, sounds like customer list targeting on social platforms.

• More ad spend on Google, so get ready for auctions to cost more.

• More Google Workspace (Docs, etc.) features (and in place of Formerly Officr?). The chips feature looks cool, it’s like they finally realized that these things are web apps and not everyone is going to use scripts to take advantage of that.

• More experiment ideas for Responsive Search Ads (RSAs).

Microsoft

• More tools, this time it’s a Canva knockoff.

• Less Microsoft Office, at least in name. Related: more Microsoft 365.

• More DALL-E image generation in Bing, search your way to a generated image.

Apple

• More ads on Apple TV+. I heard somewhere that the targeting would not be data-rich like other platforms, keeping in line with Apple’s “privacy first” image. So, new tech, old targeting model probably.

Gen Z

• More buy now, pay later this holiday szn

• More Gen Z’s on Facebook than you might think, they just use Groups. 

Gen Z like to accumulate knowledge. Some of them are whip smart, and they are extremely adept at using their phones. They view phones as a portal into the unknown. Ask any question, or engage in a conversation with Gen Z, and they are more likely to look up the answer quickly on their phones than those in other age groups. They are truth seekers. In mentoring students at a college, I found they were far less likely to accept something at face value or to follow a hunch or an assumption, which doesn’t make sense when you can Google it.

Retail Tea Leaves

• Less online shopping. That 5 year pull-forward seems more like a blip and less like a paradigm shift. Though I do wonder how much of the current spending environment is driven by cabin fever and the desire for experiences in place of all the shopping that occurred during lockdowns and quarantines. Are we too quick to judge the dip, like we were the spike?

• More online shopping this holiday season (but less growth than prior years (according to Adobe)). Expect bigger discounts, more online grocery, and earlier holiday spending.

• Less shopping on Prime Day Part 2: Lower Basket Size Boogaloo. 

• More insights from Klayvio on how generations will shop this holiday season. 

• More clothing resale options: Shein Exchange. The fast-fashion sensation is creating their own resale market in the app to tap into an existing market. Another interesting example of how Chinese companies are approaching growth avenues differently than their Western counterparts.

Marketing Grab Bag

• More Roblox, the real metaverse company. Share price, users, and time spent on/in the platform all increased.

• Less active BeReal users. Is the fad already fizzling? Is TikTok Now pulling a Facebook and killing it via clone?

• More augmented reality (AR) in your marketing mix, according to consumers in a Snapchat survey. Shopping is the prime use case currently.

Æconomy

• More inflation. Fashion might be all about that 90’s nostalgia, but the economy is on an early 80’s nostalgia trip. For reference, the last time inflation was this high, this song was topping the charts. (#2 on the year behind this song.)

• Less bad market days, some exchanges saw positive numbers yesterday.

• More economists say we’re heading towards a recession (up over 50% now).

• Uber, Doordash plunge as Labor Dept proposes gig worker change

• Less gig work in the future. Things could get dicey with the Labor Dept planning legislation that would require service providers be categorized as employees instead of contractors.

Attack Vectors

• Less cookie consent banners, at least if you use the Brave browser.

• Less Huawei and ZTE equipment in the US. The FCC is about to ban new equipment from Chinese telco and surveillance equipment firms. This has been a long simmering security risk vector for many Western nations, now it may be coming to a boil.

Alternates & Assorteds

• Less Alaskan snow crabs, like 1 billion less. So no crab fishing this year. Can’t wait for this season of Deadliest Catch.

• Less GIFs? (I’m still using them, sorry, not sorry.)