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How the election outcome could impact how you make marketing decisions in the years to come. Because the context you market within matters.
This is as close as I’m going to get to being political.
audio makes up 31% of media activity consumption in the U.S. in 2021, but only received 8.8% of the advertising spend
Opportunity!
When it comes to your marketing mix, audio always.
But one day you’ll be the last person writing words on the web and wonder where everyone went.
I read this and think that a text resurgence is a good bet.
Yes short-form video is hot like Hansel and NotebookLLM turns text into audio for people who don’t want to read, but text is our oldest technology.
And in the age of AI, people may not read text, but is it not the building block input of these models?
Perplexity (AI) is adding to its competition with Google (and most major tech platforms), trying to carve itself a slice of that sweet e-commerce pie.
The Pro Shop feature promises free shipping on items bought through Perplexity, enabling customers to complete transactions without leaving the platform. While browsing for products, users will notice a “Buy with Pro” option for eligible items. After selecting it, they will need to enter their billing and shipping details to finalize their purchase.Perplexity will estimate taxes and purchase the product on behalf of the users on Pro Shop, and users can track purchase status on the platform.
If successful, I imagine this feature will evolve over time and become less manual/personal shopper style on the Perplexity side.
Or maybe it leans into that AI-as-assistant approach to create a new angle on a competitive feature set.
Trick-or-Treating With Ad Platform Announcements from October
From Google:
Performance Max and Standard Shopping ads will now compete head-to-head in the auction instead of PMax getting preference. A sign that Standard Shopping is here to stay?
Testing: expandable search ads and in-ad search refinements.
The former is like a Google Shopping layout but for search ads when expanded. The latter is your classic search filter like what you see on ecomm sites.
A “For You” feed for Shopping.
Google will use your recent searches and YouTube history to figure out which products you like.
- Ads in AI overviews
- Conversational interface for Search ad creation
- “Better” AI image generation for ads
- New Customer High Value, Win-Back, and High Value Win-Back Mode
- “Search Bidding Exploration”: I’m guessing AI audience expansion for Search, next gen Dynamic Search Ads without needing a new campaign type?
- New stuff for Shorts & video ads
- Shopping discounts for new & loyal customers
- New Shopping ad format: Video Highlights
- New Shopping bidding type: optimize for gross profit
Demand Gen campaigns now offer creative-level controls for video assets, empowering you to choose which video appears in each format.
More Performance Max insights!
Select Google Ads accounts can now access a new “segment” option for Performance (PMax) Asset Group performance, offering a long-awaited layer of granularity to campaign insights.
The segmentation feature enables advertisers to break down Pmax Asset Group performance by:
- Time
- Click Type (consistently set to cross-network clicks)
- Conversions
- Device
- Network (showing cross-network by default)
- Top vs. Others
Use specific pages to guide PMax asset creation. (Assuming this means generative AI.)
From Snapchat:
Sponsored Snaps enable businesses to engage their customers through visual messaging, by delivering a full-screen vertical video Snap directly to Snapchatters. Snapchatters opt-in to opening the Snap and can reply by sending a message directly to the advertiser or using the call-to-action to open a predetermined link.
Pay to show up in the main inbox next to their friends.
Promoted Places highlight sponsored places of interest on the Snap Map, helping our community discover places that they want to visit. The Snap Map is used for exploration and browsing to learn more about what your friends are up to, what is happening nearby, and which places are “Top Picks” based on the Snapchat community’s visitation trends.
Sounds like this is paying to be a Top Pick.
From Meta:
Exactly what no one wanted:
Meta silently implemented “automatic adjustments” across several advertising accounts, giving its system authority to make significant changes to ad campaigns without explicit advertiser approval.
From Amazon:
Prime Video is turning the dial up in 2025:
- More ads: current load is in the range of 2-3.5 minutes of ads per hour, which could increase. Mid-stream ads could also be added.
- Shoppable ads: including carousel, pause, and trivia formats (absolutely not surprise on this one).
- Overhauled DSP experience, now with AI! (And the obligatory campaign type named Performance+)
- Frequency cap controls
- Amazon Ads 🤝 first-party data
- More generative AI: audio this time
- More full-funnel and audience tools through managed services and partnerships
From Pinterest:
The Performance+ Suite, which, yes, is a portmanteau of Google’s and Meta’s names for their AI-first ecommerce solutions.
Pinterest Performance+ campaigns can help any advertiser drive lower-funnel performance by optimizing targeting, managing budgets or deciding how much to bid.
I’ve been testing this with some success lately. The key is to be running upper-funnel campaigns in tandem. (A theme for a standalone post sometime soon.)
Tapping into the value zeitgeist:
- Personalized promotions “based on what they’ve searched and pinned”
- Deals ads modules “making ads more visible for consumers across the Home Feed”
From TikTok:
All the new toys…
- Smart+: Performance Advantage+ Max in TikTok for most objectives
- GMV Max: Performance Advantage+ Max in TikTok for shopping, focused on gross merchandise value
- Out of Phone: a clever play on out-of-home that places TikTok ads in in-store retail settings
- Conversion Lift Studies.
- PETs: no, not those ones. Privacy-Enhancing Technologies via third-party integrations.
From Microsoft:
Impression-based remarketing! (I’ve long wanted a more granular version of this on Meta.)
impression-based remarketing allows you to target users based on ad exposure. This means that you can reach people who saw your ad, and did not make it to your site.
As the AI search experience improves, so will the accompanying ads.
ads will be triggered considering the whole conversation within a single session and not just the last prompt. Before an ad block is shown, Copilot will share with the user how the following ad section connects to their conversation. For now, we are calling this feature ad voice
AI will also come to the ads manager to act as a…copilot for advertisers.
Plus some targeting and analytics updates.
From LinkedIn:
Boost a post directly from your page for lead generation (using lead gen forms).
I don’t know how well this avenue performs compared to building in the Ads Manager, but an easy way to test the concept for companies.
- More Live Events promo features
- Wire program expansion: videos in “trusted publisher” content
- Additional video options in automated campaigns
63% of B2B buyers say short-form social video content informs buying decisions.
From Reddit:
AI-powered keyword targeting features. Contextual advertising for a community-first platform.
From DoorDash:
Ads Manager for Enterprise Restaurants includes advanced targeting capabilities, marketing insights, new promos and collaborative marketing functionality aimed at regional marketing teams and franchisees.
The platform has made new high-visibility placements on the storefront and category pages widely available, helping CPG brands highlight seasonal moments, introduce new products and amplify promotions.
The ad platform now also offers advertisers offsite media, helping them reach consumers across search engines, programmatic displays and social media platforms with campaigns powered by DoorDash’s first-party data.
Any (large / public / venture funded) platform that has users and collects data on them will likely become an ad platform at some point.
From PayPal:
An ad network.
See the last line of the DoorDash section.
This post from Jyll is a must read for any paid account manager.
As it turns out, when we only show ads when people are searching for exactly what we offer, we don’t show many ads because not many people are searching for exactly what we offer 🙃
Performance marketing without brand marketing won’t actually perform.
Performance channels like paid search are demand capture channels.
That demand needs to be created somewhere. And in this era of content overload and distraction, it’s getting harder to capture attention and create demand.
Omni-channel is the only channel.
Meta is developing its AI search engine (and apparently has the “most-used AI assistant in the world”).
Now OpenAI is fully launching ChatGPT search
ChatGPT can now search the web in a much better way than before. You can get fast, timely answers with links to relevant web sources, which you would have previously needed to go to a search engine for. This blends the benefits of a natural language interface with the value of up-to-date sports scores, news, stock quotes, and more.
Search is now about your preferred interface, experience, and engine.
We always tell clients that what they think is boring is probably what they need to talk about the most.
Because it might be a mystery to the people you’re trying to talk to.
Your everyday is what someone else is trying to hire for. Or the problem they are trying to solve.
All this to say, I love this quote:
In the words of my late friend Jay Levinson, “Don’t change your story when you’re bored, or when your partner is bored, or when your team is bored. Change your story when your accountant is bored.”
More than 40% of leading brands secure 10% plus of their annual e-commerce revenue from holiday shopping events like Black Friday and Singles Day
Whilst the leading brands secure a significant proportion of revenue from holiday shopping events, 25% of laggards don’t even participate. The brands that capture revenue typically forge deals and partnerships, build inventory, align on promotions, and secure both budget and head count ahead of the shopping season.
This of course compounds as consumers wait for expected deals on shopping days, shifting more of their shopping activity there. Increasing the % of total revenue brands derive from smaller time frames.
Been doing this thing with TV ads lately where I unmute for the last second or, at most, two seconds (the now normalized ad countdown makes this easy), and seeing — that is, hearing — what makes the final sonic impression, and then trying gauge the extent to which advertisers are doing anything in that final moment to catch the ear of and appeal to vigilant ad-muters
Great test not just for ad-muters but to use the peak-end rule.
What are you leaving on? What’s your last moment? What’s your goodbye?
Some homework from Steven Soderbergh:
Just looking at something and going, I like that, and then trying to break down, why do I like that?
What is it about that… that I like?
What do I steal?
What can I repurpose or tweak to make it fit what we’re trying to do?
He steals like an artist. We can steal like marketers.
Pay attention to the messages and artifacts you encounter. If something resonates or stands out, figure out why. Use it in your own work.
via Austin Kleon
Everything is TV Now
Last year the flip happened, people spent more time on TikTok than watching TV.
There was an interesting article from Caroline Mimbs Nyce of The Atlantic, and the title was titled, You're Looking at TikTok All Wrong. The app is basically just broadcast TV now. It does seem like people are treating social media more like televisions, the share of time spent on social media where people are watching video has gone from, I think it was about a third before the pandemic to about two-thirds now.
Small improvements in our systems translate into large improvements to the customer experience.
Everything is customer service.