Rabbbits Weeekly: Like Elon
A day late, and a dollar short. Plus, other market happenings and headlines and things about the æconomy, algorithms, ads, audiences, analytics, and attack vectors.
In The Room Where It Happens
The markets have not been kind to the tech sector lately. (Former) Unicorns are slashing valuations left and right. Crypto is skipping summer, not collecting $200, and returning to winter. And now, the digital ad giants are feeling the heat from the ad side, amidst speculation that the online ad market could continue to slow.
3 news items stand out as potential signals of where the seismic shifts could happen. (I mean, probably not “seismic,” but I can’t resist the alliteration.)
First, Elon is backing out of the Twitter deal. Which means I can finally trash all those half baked notes about what his potential purchase could mean, if it were to actually happen, and get back to regrading him as our time’s P.T. Barnum. To that end, Twitter didn’t pull any punches in their suit against him. Basically, Elon is a sophomoric (his offer price was a 420 reference) troll (the poop emoji has entered the legal sphere) who got bored, wanted attention, watched his net worth go down, and then thought he wasn’t beholden by the rules that govern us mere peasants. This circus isn’t over, but at least we stop pretending like it’s super important.
Second, Pinterest could be getting the Twitter treatment. Thankfully with far less Elon. The Inspiration Platform’s performance of late has been sporadic. The pandemic was good and now the (fatigue induced) post-pandemic present has been bad. I think people want more action after 2+ years of living off inspiration and aspiration. But this is relevant to the markets intro because activist investor Elliott Management has grown its stake in the platform. Elliott is the same group that forced Jack Dorsey out of Twitter (which, you know, probably wasn’t a bad thing). The CEO of Pinning recently stepped down, but still has a massive share, so who knows if there is any fire behind this smoke. Regardless, there are investors looking to shake things up in the social media sphere, by force if needed. (No, not mafia force, boring Wall Street force since we live in stock market SkyNet.)
Third, and last, is tangential. And it’s also TikTok. (You thought TikTok somehow wouldn’t be involved?) Meta’s fear of The Trend Machine is pretty common knowledge at this point (is this what a midlife crisis looks like?). But now Google is saying The Chinese Spy App Trend Machine is posing a threat to their core business of search and discovery. The saying used to be “software eats the world.” It might be more accurate to say, “TikTok eats the internet.” At least until Western governments start banning it.
An OG of Social has been shaken out of its complete indifference to development and is throwing spaghetti at the wall while being unsure of who is in charge, or, in fact, even owns it; a former upstart in the space is floundering but also convinced its future is in commerce; and the new kid on the block is stealing everyone’s lunch money but might get expelled. You got your popcorn ready?
Æconomy
What goes up, must come down. Even mortgage rates. Rates dropped nearly half a percent earlier this month, but we're far from the market settling in. This is just the beginning, at least until supply picks back up.
Home sales are getting canceled. June hit a cancellation rate high since the early pandemic days. It's only up a few percentage points since last year, but is it the start of a trend?
June was also the month of inflation. The 9.1% mark reached last month is the highest in decades. Not a great month for economic things.
Companies are worried about the impending recession, and marketing budgets might feel the squeeze.
Audiences
Inflation just hits different for different groups.
Should you shout out your competitors? Maybe. This episode previews some research that says it may play well with customers.
Algorithms
Let’s say, hypothetically, you’re an ad-driven digital property that is on hard times and needs a boost to keep the money flowing, what do you do? Get more eyeballs. Well, the metric massagers at Facebook have figured out how to do just that: let people create more profiles! They’re testing letting people create up to 5 “fake” profiles connected to their personal account. Bet each one counts as a new user for reach calculations.
TikTok wants to train small businesses on how to use TikTok for their small business. Via email.
Guess the shopping revolution won’t be live-streamed. At least not via ShopTok, it’s abandoning plans to launch livestream commerce outside of Asia (Except maybe not in the UK?).
Did Google change their search algo? There's a page for that.
Twitter links are nofollow again. It was good while it lasted?
But, The Bird will now let you control how much cess you want in your pool with Unmentions.
Trying to find influencers for your influencer marketing campaign? Instagram is beta testing a tool for that.
Ads
Microsoft won the race to be Netflix's adtech partner. Not a streaming competitor, which makes sense. It'll be interesting to see how Netflix data could be integrated with Bing and LinkedIn stuff.
Twitter has rolled out ad A/B testing via the API. Watching how this develops may be more interesting than this announcement.
The newest ad placement option on Instagram may be your profile feed.
Google has rolled out a bunch of new stuff for Performance Max campaigns, including: actual location targeting, explanations, and diagnostic insights.
Android users may be getting the Kindle treatment as it sounds like ads are coming to the lock screen. As long as there have been lock screens, this possibility has existed.
Podcast ad frequency has more than doubled since the end of 2020, that means fewer people are hearing these ads more often. Not exactly a recipe for success. (Some repetition is good, but my rule of thumb is around 3, these ads are over 6.) This increase in frequency is causing a drop in conversion rates too.
Here are 3 tips from Westwood One to get your freq on:
Expand your show portfolio. Yes, your audience probably listens to shows directly related to your product/service, but they probably listen to more than that. Data point of one, my podcast list is exactly as chaotic as you'd expect if you've been reading this newsletter thing for any length of time.
Use audience size as your main decision metric, not a buying power index.
Go for the long-tail, not just the top-of-the-leaderboard shows.
Analytics
Get more visibility on your free vs. paid shopping performance with Google's auto-tagging updates.
Search Console Insights have come to Google Analytics 4. It’s weird to me that integrations like this are just now rolling out when they’ve been pushing for GA4 adoption for a while now and we’re a year out from no other choice.
Attack Vectors
Today in Update Your Shit: update Google Chrome.
Republican lawmakers are tired of being shadowbanned. By which I mean, they are tired of their emails going to spam because recipients mark them as such. So Google has waved the white flag and said “fine, you want people to be forced to see your steaming pile of hot garbage?” and asked the Federal Election Commission to let them exempt political campaign emails from being subject to spam filtering. Aren’t these assholes supposed to be working on our behalf?
The US might be doing the stars & stripes version of GDPR. This seems inevitable, but the timing also doesn’t seem likely right now. Congress might be a bit distracted at the moment.
Quantum computing is cool, confusing, and a main seal of the coming encryption apocalypse. Now the race is on to create next-gen encryption algorithms that can compete.
Want to turn your phone security to 11? Apple’s got you covered with Lockdown Mode, coming soon.
Alternates & Assorteds
Uber nerd alert. This is a surprisingly zen video where they use soundwaves to move things around without any physical contact. They glue shit together using a pair of oversized headphones and a fancy flashlight. As Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This is magic.