Rabbbits Weeekly 02.23.22
Or, the one in which we play Risk with the internet and try to gaze into the post-cookie crystal ball. Also, a Quibi reference!
I promise this will eventually settle into a regular cadence (probably).
This week: the internet’s Great Schism, The Future™, robots, Y2K is back, where to spend money, data definitions, and is your brand name a lady? Should it be?
The Trinternet
Your GDPR-compliant cookie banner is actually a violation of GDPR.
And so is your analytics platform. (If you’re using Google.)
And so is Facebook Meta. (This is unlikely to impact non-European targeting advertisers directly (if it were to actually happen) but the fallout, at least financially, from such a move could cripple Big Blue Infinity / Upsidedown Spider-Man Mask Eyes)
More importantly, this is another sign of the decentering of America in the digital sphere and the splintering internet. We essentially have two internets now: The West v. China. But these headlines could signal a Web Trinity: America v Europe v China.
To be overly reductive of the West v China split: the western internet is bottom up while China is top down. Wild west versus total control. This has been getting more dramatic lately with full blown tall poppy syndrome taking effect, as illustrated by the recent Tencent drops.
The US v (western) Europe division is more nuanced but built on items grabbing more (marketing / tech) headlines: privacy, competition, data sovereignty, and user experience. European authorities don’t want their citizens’ data in reach of US spy orgs (and no one wants it within reach of China) and they want privacy by default. The thorny bits are related to data handling for international tech platforms and the fact that privacy typically benefits incumbents since they get to keep their data locked up tight. And how does all of this impact the user experience of the web? (I’m guessing no one enjoys ubiquitous cookie banners.)
The ad-based internet gets a lot of flak; some of it warranted, some of it overblown. (I’d wager people will like depersonalized advertising a lot less than the current setup, remember ye olden days of banner ads?) Combining recent lawsuits in various European countries hints at a trend of making advertising harder while forcing the platforms that rely on it for money to pay for the content they make accessible (you know, because News Corp needs more money).
This will be an interesting space to watch over the next few years, especially if laws and regulations remain ambiguously written.
Hey, isn’t this supposed to be about marketing news?
Yup!
Speaking of privacy and the future of digital advertising…
The Future of Advertising (Maybe)
🎵 Ebony, Ivory, Facebook Meta and Mozilla working in (perfect?) harmony 🎶
They’ve teamed up to throw their hat in the post-cookie future of ad personalization ring.
It looks like they are keeping things server-side, unlike recent Apple & Google pitches. Privacy will be maintained via a cryptographic practice called multi-party computation so that one party isn’t seeing all the data. Then users will be assigned IDs (kind of like the IDFAs that Apple dropped) that advertisers can access but not see. So, theoretically, everything is done in private and advertisers can target relevant users without knowing who they are or any other identifying info. And it will function like an API so it can be used across providers, etc.
In other news, Android is going Apple and will (eventually) remove a device’s advertising ID as a targeting/tracking option. This is also part of their larger roll out of Privacy Sandbox to Android.
Speaking of Google, it’s going to the robots (again).
Automated extensions are getting a little extra love now.
Despite what you may have heard, Performance Max is not adding keywords (which is kind of the point of the campaign type as it’s basically display/discovery ads but with search placements built in), but they are adding account-level negative keywords (finally). Now if only they would allow mobile app placement exclusion at the account level. Or Kindle device exclusion. Hey Goog, ya listenin’?
Is your brand name a lady?
Maybe it should be. This study found that “feminine brand names” have an advantage when it comes to more favorable attitudes toward and increased choosing of the brand. This advantage doesn’t occur when the product is mostly for males and is lessened when the product is utilitarian.
Rising from the Dead
Y2K is back! Versions 100 of Firefox and Chrome could break the internet (or at least your site).
Quibi 2.0 is here, it’s called TikTok. The Trend Machine™ is rolling out 5 minute video capabilities.
Your ads are getting more expensive, but not as quickly as everything else.
Speaking of money…
New places to spend dat money
Your friendly neighborhood big box store. Every retailer that can feasibly attempt it is trying to pull an Amazon and turn their customer data into an ad platform (this shouldn’t be a surprise, loyalty cards were the OG retail media ad play).
WhatsApp (probably)
Mid-roll ads on Snapchat (like the YouTube ads that pop up in the middle of a video but in stories (aka the future))
Reels! Meta has announced two types of overlay ads coming to Reels: banners and stickers. Banners show up at the bottom, stickers are programmatic and placed by the Reel creator. No clue when (if?) this will roll out to all advertisers.
Edison Super Listeners
These are podcast fans that listen to 5+ hours of podcasts each week (not to brag but I probably do that in a day sometimes). The average for this group is now 11.2 hours each week (a steady increase over the past 2 years). 51% of these peeps say they pay more attention to podcast ads than to ads on any other media.
Forget the bird, brand safety is the word this weeek
TikTok rolled out a Brand Safety Center
iHeartMedia launched “Best-in-Class Brand Safety Tools Across the Largest Global Podcast Network” (that’s got to tick a few boxes of your buzzword bingo card)
Swipe Right-Click Save As
Take a headline writing page out of LinkedIn News’s book
A 5-part abandoned cart email sequence
After 30 minutes - “hey, don’t forget about this!”
4 hours - “Was something wrong? Here’s some free money.”
12 hours - “These people loved it! You will too, as long as you don’t miss out.”
2 days - “Seriously, this thing will really help you. Here’s even more free money.”
3 days - “This won’t last long! For real! Also, we have this sweet guarantee if you don’t like it.”
Data Party
Third-party data is grabbing all the headlines (mostly for its imminent demise) but plenty of other data levels are getting press. So much so that it’s getting hard to keep up. So here is the handy Chasing Rabbbits Guide to #-Party Data™
Zero-party = info a person intentionally shares with you (stuff they voluntarily share with you through forms, etc) (purchase level info could also fall here if you’re DTC and they “opt in”)
First-party = the info you get as someone uses your site / app / product and/or a list of items they purchased from you
Second-party = someone else’s first-party data that you buy from them (like a USPS mailing list via Every Door Direct Mail) (this ties to the big box story above)
Third-party = info about people you buy / access from someone else (the current ad ecosystem, more or less)
Fourth-party = a yes / no for whether or not you celebrate May the Fourth
Fifth-party = data collected from your relationship to the movie The Fifth Element
Sixth-party = a boolean field about whether or not you see dead people
Seventh-party = an integer denoting which circle of hell you are currently destined for
Eighth-party = when you find out you have four duplicates of your second party data
Ninth-party = what number life the user’s cat is on
Tenth-party = a quantum binary state where the value is both 1 and 0 at the same time (only available to the 5 people that understand how quantum computing works)
Eleventh-party = only used by the coolest of brands, those whose data goes to 11
A (Semi-Related) Rabbbit Hole for You
This (definitely) fictional (probably) story about scissor statements (it’ll make sense if you read it).
i'm not entirely sure what i just read, but i liked it