Rabbbits Weeekly: Steal Like a Social Media Company
A picture about what makes a good metric. Plus, other marketing happenings and headlines and things about the æconomy, algorithms, ads, audiences, analytics and attack vectors.
THIS WEEEK
Because I’m a data nerd, I liked this guide to a good metric from Dan Cullum:
Æconomy
First our gas prices and now our stamps? This is Inflation: USPS Edition. (Not actually stamp prices, it's for parcel service.)
The official Consumer Price Index confirms a lot of the trends mentioned last week, but adds the (somewhat comforting) context that, all together, there was no increase from June. Of course, there also wasn't a decrease. But let's see what August brings.
On the other hand, the jobs market is looking good. Real good. 528k new jobs added, dropping the unemployment rate to 3.5%.
It-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named (but was repeatedly named above) is hitting Shopify, but not in the way you might think. Merchant growth is slowing, specifically amongst the intro paid tier. This is Shopify-as-indicator that business starts may stagnate if/as consumer spending slows and smaller and newer ventures are more risk averse, not looking to outlay money they are uncertain will provide ROI. (Amazon and local could benefit from this as Amazon could be seen as a safer digital alternative, while local can feel less risky since it is easier to understand and learn about the customers.)
Consumer spending may be on the decline, but so are online prices. I’m guessing this is from a mix of slowing demand and Back to School sales and promotions.
This is one of those things that’s probably of way more interest to me than most, but lumber prices might finally start coming down. Things got crazy during the lockdown portion of the pandemic but stability is settling back in. If you’re a DIYer (✋), now is the time to buy according to the experts.
CHIPS is official. Now we wait for the SALSA Act?
Audiences
Cable companies being pretty much the worst isn’t new. Receiving market signals that that’s the case is. For the first time in a looong time, broadband customer numbers fell. 5G is coming for your cable internet.
More than 1 million people are paying for Snapchat+. 🤯They’re rolling out some new features for subscribers but none seem particularly game changing (to me at least, not a big Snapper so what do I know?). It’s a tiny percentage of their users, but I’d be interested in seeing how this stacks up to other platforms.
Ads
Are you starting an ad business? Because apparently everyone else is. Lyft is building out capabilities to deliver ads in vehicles and via owned channels.
I’m not going to recap these tips for Performance Max campaigns in time for the holidays, because if this topic is for you, it’s worth the 10 minutes to listen to it for yourself.
Facebook is taking a page out of LinkedIn’s playbook and adding some new B2B targeting options: IT decision-makers, Business decision-maker titles and interests, Business decision-makers, New active business.
Say hello to Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns on MetaMoneyMaker. Sounds like Google Shopping Ads, automatically creates up to 150 combinations of creative and use AI to do a bunch of stuff for you. Plus, it’s for small business! (Their favorite messaging point.) Couple updates to Advantage+ App Campaigns and Advantage+ Creative as well. Hooray robots.
And we have an end date for Big Blue’s special ad audiences for housing, credit, and employment ads, they kick the bucket October 12th.
TikTok added two new transparency features for users that are really just copies of what other platforms have had for a while: About This Ad (what targeting made you see it) and Ads Personalization (toggle if gender and which interests can target you with ads).
The New York Times may be your next ad platform, at least if you want to advertise on Wordle.
Algorithms
Influencers go corporate. LinkedIn is the place to be for B2B influencers, where they sell...business stuff...I guess?
Whatever it’s for, InBlue is going all in. Rolling out new features like links in images and videos, templates to make text posts more visual, and carousels like we mentioned before.
While Meta is going TikTok, LinkedIn is going Facebook?
TikTok funded a study on their Live offering which finds that it works. Thrilling stuff.
It says 50% of live viewers purchase a product. Wonder if that’s why they just shoved eBay into the app, I mean, launched Order Center to allow you to track orders, manage payment options, buy more stuff, etc.
Twitter has released a new feature that could actually be pretty cool: multimedia tweets. You can now embed multiple pieces of different media in one tweet. Here’s an example of two videos side-by-side.
What has now become a trope of social media advice for brands is to engage with the community and adapt to the idiosyncrasies of the platforms. Turns out, that advice might be worth following. Retail brands are seeing success on Reddit not by running ads but by being part of the conversation and treating it as an R&D channel.
Walmart’s been looking to beef up their Prime, I mean, + offering by including streaming services in the membership. And they’ve picked a winner: Paramount+. This feels like Amazon buying Whole Foods breached some kind of unspoken agreement the two retail giants had and now Wally World is going all in.
Help Meta train their new conversational AI chatbot. What could go wrong?
Instagram search to be "as impactful as Amazon search" according to one Meta ecomm expert.
Analytics
Is your site suddenly really popular in New York and Chicago? Thank Apple. Starting with version 15.5, Safari is spoofing location in the data it sends some services, including Google Analytics.
Attack Vectors
Turns out Meta's in-app browsers are massive data collection tools and can skirt pretty much any privacy measure they want. They say (of course they do) that it's to comply with Apple's privacy measures, but it's a hell of a convoluted way to do that.
We are getting closer and closer to a potential EU blackout for Meta properties. This is still over where the data is stored (so it will affect other international platforms) but I’m not sure how tossing a few servers on Irish soil is going to fix anything. The network effect of platforms like Facebook is built on connections created by users–likes, shares, comments, etc–so if a German user comments on a post by a US resident, where does that data have to live? Can a social graph be both international and abide by local data storage and privacy laws? Is social about to splinter?
Adtech company Criteo (user tracking for ad targeting an lot of jargony speak on top of that to make it sound super advanced (it might be, I have no experience with the product)) could be getting hit with a fine of $65M for violating GDPR (because pretty much everything violates GDPR, it turns out).
DOJ is about to sue Google for having an ad monopoly. I wonder how they will define “digital advertising market” to prove this. It sounds like, if they’re talking to publishers, this is about the display network, which is a subset of the “digital advertising market”, not the whole thing. For example, Amazon has a monopoly on “advertising on Amazon” but only accounted for 11.6% of digital ad spend last year.
Klaviyo was in this space last week for Shopify's strategic investment, this week it's for getting hacked. An employee's account was compromised and the "threat actors" targeted crypto company accounts. Shocker.
Speaking of compromised employee credentials, Cisco got hit for the same reason. Threat actors got 2.8GB of files but sounds like nothing too serious.
Finally, Twilio was breached and nearly 2,000 phone numbers from encrypted messaging app Signal were exposed because of it.
Alternates & Assorteds
The growth of ecomm could make this Stray Shopping Cart Identification Guide increasingly important.
More on in-app browser data collection behaviors in the new Rabbbits Weeekly (hint: it's TikTok) https://chasingrabbbits.substack.com/p/rabbbits-weeekly-chasing-tiktok