Meta
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Once you’re a large, publically-traded, profit-generating machine, the genie ain’t going back in the bottle. I doubt the unit economics work out for a monthly subscription amount users are cool with replacing the potential ad revenue. Think about how much more money these companies make compared to Spotify or Netflix (the money only matters because stock markets).
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They don’t believe users will actually enjoy a non-personalized, data-powered experience more.
- Backgrounds for product images
- Magic crops to stretch one asset across Meta’s many aspect ratios
- Text variations
- Chips (especially for AI)
- Batteries
- Nuclear
- Locations
- Minimum Age
- Custom Audience exclusion
- Languages
- Custom Audiences
- Age
- Gender
- Detailed targeting (demographics, interests, behaviors, etc)
- Jake Bailey, Head of Industry, Disruptors and Venture Capital at Meta
Google mulled offering paid-for no-logging private Search subscription
I think there are 2 reasons companies like Google and Meta won’t roll out paid ad-free versions:
More ads in the same places
Meta is turning its monetization focus to WhatsApp, including lead gen ads that launch a WhatsApp chat.
Maybe the Reels revenue machine can be refined, but Instagram and Big Blue have few growth avenues. Their ad revenue will grow as long as budgets do. Zuck+co’s messaging apps and Threads are where growth acceleration will happen.
Elsewhere, Fire TVs are about to become ad machines. And you know it will mint the Bezos Boys a fortune. If they don’t ruin the user experience. I’m less confident in that last part these days when it comes to The Everything Company.
What if I told you that
— Jess @ FireTeam 🔥 An agency on fire... (@HireFireTeam) November 2, 2023
Meta's new "feature" which tells you how much you can raise the budget before entering the learning phase (usually by up to 70%) is just a mind game to get you to spend more because the "learning phase" doesn't exist and never has.
Would you believe me?
Tell me more…
The argument, at least from my point of view is that there is no on/off state where an ad is in the learning phase. Meta has conditioned media buyers to accept a certain level of instability for new ads and for budget changes by calling this period "learning phase". But that…
— Jess @ FireTeam 🔥 An agency on fire... (@HireFireTeam) November 2, 2023
I mostly agree with this but it’s a bit over the top (it is on X so guess that’s not a surprise).
Machine learning algorithms have a training stage. A set of training data is used to “re-wire” a model to adapt the outputs. And can be done without overwriting prior states.
This is (partially) why you should wait a week or two before deciding if your campaign is working.
At Meta scale, more data is better. So that learning label is just saying you haven’t hit Meta scale. Your performance may not be optimally optimized but let your data tell you if it’s optimal enough.
I’ve said about Meta:
There really isn’t a company better at monetizing via ads.
Some might be yelling “but what about Google?!”
Big G is good at protecting their position to lock in default behavior and monetizing that way.
testimony in the trial revealed that Google spent a total of $26.3 billion in 2021 to be the default search engine in multiple browsers, phones, and platforms.
The end of Meta is regularly proclaimed, but Google is in a more precarious position.
Massive Meta Minithread
I’ve collected too many tabs of Meta related stuff, so here it all is.
Chat with AI in Messenger
This isn’t surprising, especially given Snap’s success with AI chatbots. The real question is: does Meta know their market? One persona appears based on Blender from Futurama, which feels like a miss for the youth.
Plus, AI Studio to let developers build custom chatbots. AI might make Meta’s messenger dreams for brands a reality…finally. It used to be like setting up a choose-your-own adventure chat.
Meta Posts 23% Growth as Ads Rebound, With Profit More Than Doubling.
There really isn’t a company better at monetizing via ads. I expected the headlines about decreasing spends and worries over ROI would amount to little.
Instagram Makes Reminder Ads Available for Stories Placement.
You know Zuck loves this one: How TikTokers are making tons of money on Facebook, an often overlooked ‘cash cow’ for short video (hint: Facebook boomers have money).
Meta’s adding some new ad optimization tools for the holiday push, including variable campaign budget options, new tools to entice purchase actions, and more direct linkage to buy products from ad displays.
Threads! It’s still a thing! A thing with almost 100 million monthly users (that’s 1/6 of the way to X). And now polls and GIFs (at least on mobile).
And a few tools & things curious marketers might enjoy:
When you optimize for value, we use machine learning to predict how much return on ad spend (ROAS) a person may generate. We then use this prediction to bid for your highest value customers. By bidding more for people who are likely to spend more, you can help ensure you are maximizing the value of conversions for your campaigns.
In R.I.P. Social Media Managers I wrote:
Organic social media for brands is dead. And it has been for a while.
I’m not the only one saying this. A Digiday survey found:
This shift in investment in Facebook and Instagram, along with the decrease in usage and posting frequency on the platforms, is a strong indicator that, overall, agencies are seeing a lack of return on investment when it comes to Meta.
But some might be taking it too far, leaving opportunity for the rest:
Digiday’s surveys also found that far fewer agencies are buying ads on Meta’s platforms this year than last year.
Meta is bringing generative AI to ads with:
The first one is welcome news for any company with white background product shots, those don’t work well on social.
The last one is the AI-indication of an existing feature.
The second one is what I’m most excited about. Anything to streamline asset creation and optimization across placements is very welcome.
Magic crops plus text variation with more aesthetic automatic overlays would be a great next step to make it even easier to advertise across placements.
More social shifting to messaging as Meta starts testing broadcast channels on Facebook, following the features success on other platforms.
Distribution of social content by users is increasingly moving to private channels.
Everything old is new again, which is why Media Mix Modeling is the new attribution.
measurement has been so hampered by recently enacted privacy restrictions that Meta, Google and Amazon are finding that any measurement tool is better than not demonstrating attribution at all.
More ads in more places: the metaverse (but not the Meta version)
[Roblox has] made a notable hire [from Meta] in its partnerships division, a move that comes as it gets ready to open up its new advertising network more broadly and looks to get more brands creating virtual experiences.
Snapchat+ brings in almost $20M a month for the AR/camera/messaging platform.
Meta may offer an ad-free subscription for EU-users to satisfy regulators. Same with TikTok (not sure which markets though).
The internet continues to splinter across geopolitical divides and advertising is one of the fulcrum points.
3 developmental fields at the top of my interest list:
On #1, OpenAI is thinking about entering the chip game.
It would make sense, and make them comparable to the other mega-platform players with custom chip ops (Apple, Amazon, Google, (Meta?), etc).
I wonder if Cerebras was the acquisition target.
[Meta wants] to try to continue to shift advertisers from these lever pulling to creative iteration and creative innovation, and that’s where they want to put people.
-Andrew Foxwell
There is no such thing as in-platform secret sauce anymore in digital advertising. Your secret sauce is now your creative and content teams.
This is the future.
X (Twitter) has stopped showing meta data on links. Now (for me) they look like images with a little domain name tag in the corner.
I spent longer than I probably should have trying to figure out the first one I saw.
A reminder of the perils of building your brand on top of someone else’s.
After 81% of agency pros told Digiday last year that they purchased advertising on Facebook on behalf of clients in the plast month, just half (50%) said the same this year. And Instagram saw a similar drop, from 81% who said last year they’d bought ads on the platform for clients in the last month to 48% who said so this year.
This should mean less competition in the auction and cheaper results for those that remain.
Attribution (at least the iteration of the past few years) is essentially dead. I’m guessing relying on those models is leading to these decisions.
Zig when others zag.
Facebook can be sued over allegations that its advertising algorithm is discriminatory
This has already happened in verticals like housing and credit. The number of “special categories” might grow after this. How will this impact the Advantage push?
“Facebook does not merely proliferate and disseminate content as a publisher … it creates, shapes, or develops content” with the tools.
Big Tech is already on trial (Amazon, Google). AI is putting algorithms front-and-center. Section 230 has been targeted before.
This Meta ruling will just be the first of many, which means digital ad targeting is about to be overhauled. Is this the future?
Just got the new Meta ads manager audience setup flow. It’s 2 sections:
Audience Controls
Set criteria for where ads for this campaign can be delivered.
Advantage+ audience (optional)
Our ad technology automatically finds your audience. If you share an audience suggestion, we’ll prioritize audiences matching this profile before searching more widely.
More competitor spying! Er, I mean, competitive research and inspiration gathering.
Interested to see which feed users end up preferring. And how turning off the algorithm impacts ad performance.
Meta has confirmed that non-personalized content feeds are incoming on Facebook and Instagram in the European Union
content could be ordered and displayed chronological (such as based on the time a post was made) or ranked by local popularity (such as for ordering search results).
The expected customer action rate is the most important element of our [ad] auction.