🐇Rabbbits Weeekly: Dead Weeek Double Dose
Two weeeks of news and opinions, just what you need to start 2023. Has your Meta Ad Account been hacked?
Hey, it’s Kyle. And, as the poet-philosopher Tyson Steinbeck Burns said, the best laid plans of mice and men get punched in the face by respiratory viruses, storm-induced power outages, and truly absurd car problems. Or something like that. 2023 appears to be “hold my beer”-ing 2022, thus Rabbbits Weeekly a weeek late. But also right on time.
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.
👾 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:
Do keyword research.
Create an article for those keywords.
Wait and repeat.
(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...
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:
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:
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:
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.
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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.
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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:
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?