Rabbbits Weeekly: Doubble Feeture
Gadzooks Snap! And the Not-So-Incognito bandit.. Plus, the usual headline roundup for ads, algorithms, and analytics.
Apologies for the delay, Life With Kids™ mode was engaged in full force on Friday through the long weekend. I’ll make it up to you with 2 Above The Fold “features” (One is really just Attack Vectors renamed but I’m trying to make you feel special).
Heed the Snap-Signal
Snap (parent company of Snapchat) may be acting as an early warning system for the social platform and ad-supported media ecosystem(s).
First, their money machine is slowing down (and implementing a hiring freeze like many others) and a big reason could be what they've had to do to become compliant with iOS privacy stuff. The CEO predicts IP obfuscation as the next step in "platform privacy" measures.
Second, they issued a revenue warning for Q2 and spilled some tea leaves that don’t look great for ad-supported media in the short term. The company basically said, “hey, did you know there’s some crazy shit happening out there in the world? Turns out there is, so we probably won’t print as many Benjamins as we thought.” If we see a similar trend to Early COVID Times™ connected TV / streaming could be the first to flounder, and Twitter is forecasted to fare the worst amongst the digital set. (Which leads me to believe The Elon Circus™ will continue until the dust settles and he sees what kind of deal he can get. (Assuming he actually wants one, that is.))
Privacy*
*This action may not be as private as you think.
The DuckDuckGo browser allows Microsoft tracking cookies as part of the agreement to use their index. So it’s more like privacy*.
More security? More like more targeting options for Twitter. At least that's how the FTC claims they treated 2FA info. More privacy*.
Lawsuit asks Google to rename it, more accurately, Not-So-Incognito Mode. Not really, but the allegation holds. Another one in the privacy* bucket.
Algorithms
Now in Snapchat, eBay! Living and dying by advertising is a dangerous game right now, seems like everyone thinks the answer is commerce.
We'll do it live! And by "it", I mean TikTok games. If “everyone” isn’t trying to crack the code on commerce, then they are on games. Looks like The Trend Machine™ is trying to do both at once.
More commerce in more places! TikTok has tied the knot with WooCommerce for direct catalog integration. Everything is shopping now.
Amazon goes to the mall. For you. And brings you your stuff. Mall Prime. The other angle to this is the mall as warehouse/logistics center transformation and/or mall as IRL-ification hub for the internet and D2C.
SEOs may scare you with the threat of toxic links, but official search advocate John Mueller says "Toxic links is all about selling tools." Just a reminder that there are lots of tools and solutions out there, but they don’t always solve problems you have. Or even things that are problems at all.
Your Tesla is not self-driving, unless you also like to hit cyclists and oncoming cars. This goes for all automated driver assist features. They assist, they don’t replace. Based on what this AAA study found, it seems like they do pretty good with interactions that allow for a slow change over time (the object is stopped or moving in the same direction), but objects harder for the sensors to categorize or vectors where the gap shrinks faster pose problems. Self driving cars could happen one day, but it’s going to take a tightly controlled transitional infrastructure phase to make it so. Human controlled cars and machine controlled cars don’t mix well. (But current cities are terribly designed for humans so a wholesale shift in the mindset of the country would be huge. Too bad cars (like guns) are so tightly interwoven with the American identity as it stands now.)
Instagram created their own font. It's squircle-y (their word). Inspired by their logo.
Ads
Shocking new study finds Gen Z doesn't like ads and skips them "99% of the time", or uses ad blockers. This is my shocked face 😐. The answer? Microinfluencers and, maybe, better ads.
Spotify commissions a study that finds it's good for ads.
Advertising drove a metric sh*t ton of sales last year, totaling $7.1T according to one study. No, the T is not a typo. This works out to (I didn’t check the math on Friday and I’m not checking it today) almost a $21 ROAS industry wide. Not too shabby.
Facebook Meta renamed some things, because of course they did! If you’re trying to figure out where your bid strategy of choice went, check for an alias.
Lowest cost is now Highest volume
Cost cap is now Cost per result goal
Minimum ROAS is now ROAS goal
The theme appears to be: don’t promise anything. Especially cheap results. Or maybe just results in general.
A new Twitter thread espousing the benefits of Cost Caps (as covered previously), with a twist! This is how to test multiple creative variants with cost caps for fun and profit (it’s about influencer content, but I imagine it’d work with just about anything):
Get a whole bunch of creative / assets together. Like, way more than you think. An idea pops into your head? Add it to the (digital) pile.
First, math. Figure out what your target for “profitability” is and set your cost cap 30% below it. (I know this gets really tricky if you don’t have purchase actions, or don’t have a tight purchase funnel or FB tracking integration, but you can probably work something out.)
Pick 4 creative ideas off the pile, these will be combined into 1 Dynamic Creative ad. This ad will be the only one in the ad set. Which will be the only one in the campaign. So 100 ad ideas = 25 campaigns. (This is all about avoiding a long learning phase.)
Increase budgets up to 15% a day, every day (this company spends 6-7 figures a month on FB so YMMV, etc.)
If a campaign spends more, it’s winning. Update the opposite of winning campaigns with a mix of content from the winners plus new ideas.
Wash, rinse, repeat, scale, profit?
Analytics
Consent Mode by default for (modeled) conversions in GA4.