Meta

Mar 29, 2024 ∞

Friday Bits & Bytes | 032924

Why Marketers need to embrace the funny when it comes to podcasting

While there’s no sure-fire formula to being funny, brands that lean into comedic ads find the effort has a good success rate.

A funny ad is a sticky ad

Marketing (and business) doesn’t have to be that serious, have some fun. It may even make your work better.

If only there were a “holiday” coming up that would let you safely try humor for your brand…

How consumers find new brands and products on social media, marketplaces, and brick-and-mortar retail in 5 charts

Here are 2:



Over two-thirds (67%) of US 16-to 24-year-olds say they’ve learned about a product or service through a social media video that organically entered their feed

But

Social media is just one part of the discovery mix. Online marketplaces or search engines are the top places where US consumers start their shopping journey

Outside of impulse purchases, discovery and shopping are two different phases.

Are Lookalikes Still Relevant?

I get that lookalikes are technically a bit more specific, in theory. You could find people similar to your paying customers, for example. I wonder if advertisers simply don’t trust the newer options as much as the tried and true lookalikes.

I’m just not convinced that lookalikes are any better than these other methods. I’ve mostly abandoned them completely as a result.

I am now very interested in this question. Mostly because I’m interested in what’s working on Meta.

And because I just made a bunch of lookalikes earlier today for an upcoming campaign. Wonder if that was time wasted…

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Mar 20, 2024 ∞
What We Can Learn from Bad CEO Quotes
The CEOs of Kellogg and Wendy’s recently caused a bit of public outcry.
From the Kellogg end:
We’ve got to reach the consumer where they are, so we’re advertising about cereal for dinner. If you think about the cost of cereal for a family versus what they might otherwise do, that’s going to be much more affordable.
Meanwhile, at Wendy’s:
Beginning as early as 2025, we will begin testing more enhanced features like dynamic pricing and daypart offerings
(That’s fancy talk for surge pricing.)
Shockingly, customers (or at least social media users) didn’t love these statements.
But those customers (and social media users) weren’t the target audiences. These were said for Wall Street—intended to juice stock prices, not excite customer bases.
Just like with supply chains a couple years ago, inflation and interest rates and market prices are hot topics right now. Which means a wider audience for statements like these—wider than the CEOs may be used to.
Contrast these statements with this approach from a CEO used to being in the public eye:
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Mark Zuckerberg (@zuck)
You can be sure this was intended to double as a call to investors about the quality and positioning of Meta’s VR product compared to Apple. Just like how “internal” memos at tech giants are written with the understanding that they’ll be leaked and become very much external memos.
So, uh, why am I quoting CEOs?
These statements (and the ensuing backlash) highlight that words and messaging matter.
People feeling the pinch of the highest food prices in 30 years don’t want to hear a CEO making millions of dollars a year say that people should eat his company’s cereal for dinner because it’s affordable.
Thanks to Uber and similar services employing surge pricing, “surge” or “dynamic” pricing feels negative because it usually means more expensive. I’ll quote Tyler Cowen because he covers everything I would have said:
I predict this will fail. For one thing, “we will have discounts for Tuesdays at 3 p.m.” would have been better marketing. Furthermore, many Wendy’s buyers are not wealthy, and they care a good deal about predictable prices.
(They even botched the walk back.)
Once you say something in public, you can’t guarantee which audience(s) receive it. The larger you become (in notoriety, headcount, etc) the fewer private communication channels you have.
Your content matters. And that content is a combination of words and tone.
Respect your customers. Choose your words. Earn trust & don’t burn it.
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Also on Bluesky
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%.
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Also on Bluesky
Mar 18, 2024 ∞
It's A Metric!: First Time Impression Ratio
Today’s metric is one I just learned about: First Time Impression Ratio (FTIR)
According to Meta, FTIR is:
The percentage of your daily impressions that comes from people seeing your ad set for the first time.
FTIR = Reach / Impressions
The lower your FTIR, the higher your frequency.
This matters because you can’t survive on “moment of conversion” traffic alone. Such a small sliver of any platform’s user base is in-market for your given offer at any one moment that you should run campaigns to gain brand awareness (this is why you need both brand and performance marketing (and yes, smaller budgets can put these considerations on hold)).
Attention is gold.
A member of the Foxwell Digital community uncovered an interesting FTIR trend:
a dramatic decline from approximately 60-70% to 10-25% over the past 6-12 months [as of March 2024].
This drop suggests a saturation point where the same audiences are being reached repeatedly, leading to what can be termed as ‘audience fatigue,’ rather than just ad fatigue.
The root causes identified include a lack of creative differentiation, reduced influencer marketing budgets, and underinvestment in emerging platforms
A metric on its own isn’t very helpful, but First Time Impression Rate + Frequency could be a useful combo in your budget allocation and performance analysis arsenal when auditing your social accounts.

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Mar 15, 2024 ∞
Friday Marketing Links | 031524
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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!
5. 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.
6. 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
7. 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.
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