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Mar 18, 2024 ∞

Monday Marketing Links | 031824

Cookie Deprecation is Coming - Should Advertisers be Worried?

Apple blocked third party cookies for 100% of traffic back in 2020, and most brands see almost half of their traffic from Safari (!!!) So that impact has already been felt for a while now.
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as long as you’re using ad platforms platforms (Google, Meta, TikTok, Email/SMS) and aren’t super reliant on display networks, there likely won’t be a major impact.
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building out a CDP, beefing up first-party data capture, etc. Those are considered best practices anyway, and will become even more beneficial with all of the privacy changes on the horizon and beyond.

Cookies crumbled a while ago, Chrome phasing out third-party cookies is just the final nail in the crumb filled coffin.

Survey: Retailers should focus on loyalty, brand awareness

The vast majority of retailers believe that their customer experience is at or better than their peers, but new data says otherwise.
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The top three strategic outcomes experienced retailers should be focused on, according to IDC and SAP, are improving customer loyalty (59%), improving brand awareness (50%), and empowering employees with the right data and tools (43%) to improve the customer experience.

Everyone thinks they’re above average, but that’s not how average works. And there’s usually room for improvement regardless.

Customer experience is a moat. The better the experience, the bigger the moat.

Big Tech accounts for nearly two-thirds of the US digital ad market

Big Tech (Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft) will attract nearly two-thirds of US digital ad dollars this year

That’s more than double its share since we began tracking it in 2008.

LinkedIn plans to add gaming to its platform

boost the time people are spending on the platform, the company is breaking into a totally new area: gaming.
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tapping into the same wave of puzzle-mania that helped simple games like Wordle find viral success
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one idea LinkedIn appears to be experimenting with involves player scores being organised by places of work, with companies getting “ranked” by those scores.

Taking a page out of the old Facebook playbook and reinventing Solitaire for the browser-first workforce.

Money Stuff: Slorg is Sorry He Burnt Slerf

Basically the way crypto works is that a guy named Slorg makes up a token named Slerf, which is distinguished from other tokens by having a cartoon sloth logo. You send $10 million of Solana crypto tokens to Slorg, and he makes a note to himself that he owes you some Slerfs. Then he accidentally flushes that note down the toilet and, due to the irreversible nature of the blockchain, you get no Slerfs and your money is permanently gone, though Slorg is very sorry.

And now we know how crypto works!

mistake was very good for attention, and attention is the true value of any memecoin. So the obvious thing happened and the new tokens that were released shot up around 5,000%.

Mar 15, 2024 ∞

Friday Marketing Links | 031524

TikTok’s potential U.S. ban stirs marketers, spurs contingency planning

Meta could capture between 22.5% and 27.5% of TikTok’s U.S. ad revenues in the event of a ban.

YouTube stands to gain an additional $1.24 billion to $1.53 billion, with $410 million to $500 million of TikTok’s ad revenues redirected to Google’s display and search businesses

One of the early thought exercises I was given at Blue Ion was: what happens if Meta was shut down tomorrow?

It’s a good question to occasionally ask about any important distribution channels.

Apple Buys Canadian AI Startup as It Races to Add Features

DarwinAI has developed AI technology for visually inspecting components during the manufacturing process and serves customers in a range of industries. But one of its core technologies is making artificial intelligence systems smaller and faster. That work that could be helpful to Apple, which is focused on running AI on devices rather than entirely in the cloud.

Apple was launching Vision Pro while the rest of the Valley Giants were pivoting to AI. But the benefit of a massive bank account is the ability to buy whatever you want.

Apple has also been really secretive about their AI plans, claiming “disclosure of strategic plans and initiatives harmful to our competitive position and would be premature in this developing area.”

Apple is at the forefront of ambient computing, and on-device AI will be a key component. Plus, Apple is the only one of the giants that isn’t really a cloud company and is most definitely a hardware company.

Report Finds No Correlation Between Social Media Engagement and Content Readership

Social media apps are gradually becoming more valued as entertainment sources, while actual interaction shifts to smaller, enclosed chats and communities.

Notice how all the platforms focus on “discovery.”

Across all the articles and topics we analyzed, we found no clear connection between social engagement and actual readers of the news.

Understand vanity metrics vs. brand metrics vs. performance metrics.

Podcast Frenzy Report

podcasting is taking over traditional media consumption time, with respondents reporting 28% of them watch less TV and 24% browse social media less often. Gen Z podcast discovery is a mix of methods. 46% of Gen Z respondents rely on social media recommendations, and 33% of younger Gen Z browse top charts and “best of” podcast lists.

Audio! Audio! Audio!

What We Learned About Creative From Analyzing $3M in Podcast Media by Caroline Culbertson

Findings include midrolls outperforming both pre-rolls and post-rolls for placement. A quiet value-add for host-read contracts is hosts tend to go over their contracted ad length. Right Side Up found the sweet spot for “60 second” host-read ad performance was host-read creatives that landed between one to three minutes.

Podcasts foster parasocial relationships which gives host-read ads some extra oomph in the persuasion department.

The bad ad ecosystem: Here’s what the research says

five types of bad ads, each varying in harm for the marketer: malicious ads, spoofed ads, scam ads, heavy ads and miscategorized ads.
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The easiest thing is [ad buys] are cheap. [Bad ad creators] don’t wanna spend a ton of money on it. So they proliferate in places with really low CPMs
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marketers should work on making good ads. Ensuring the proper ads for the right environments is key, along with keeping on top of creative

Layoffs could be coming as debt-laden firms navigate the pain of higher rates, economists say

Higher rates spell trouble for US companies with near-term debt maturities.

Rate changes and inflation measures are the important indicators this year.

Mar 9, 2024 ∞

Are the algorithms starting to turn on generative AI?

Google has updated Search to derank spam including:

Scaled content abuse (aka made by AI)
Site reputation abuse (junk third-party content on quality sites)
Expired domain abuse (grabbing an expired domain and starting a spam farm)

The goal is to:

better understand if webpages are unhelpful, have a poor user experience or feel like they were created for search engines instead of people. This could include sites created primarily to match very specific search queries.

This change actually has teeth too, with plenty of manual actions.

Mar 4, 2024 ∞

Another Podcast’s episode Google Gemini and AI bias unpacks the weights and training data stuff I briefly mentioned yesterday.

Hidden patterns in data and models as bias amplifiers.

Also the excellent quote “the fake is in the caption,” because what is a prompt but a caption for a future image?

Feb 25, 2024 ∞

Quick Hit Google Bits

Google Analytics 4 launches new trend detection insight

trend change detection focuses on slower changes happening over a longer time. This gives users a detailed view of data changes, making it a useful tool to spot both quick and long-term trends.

GA4 is introducing two dedicated spaces – one for marketers to track and analyze campaigns, and another for behavioral insights.

The Reports section provides insights into how users engage with your websites and apps so you can improve your product and user experience.

The Advertising section will become the hub to monitor and analyze your campaigns whether you’re a publisher or an advertiser.

Reddit signs AI content licensing deal with Google

reportedly paying Reddit $60 million per year to train its artificial intelligence models (e.g., Gemini).