⃛Level Up ↴
Might grocers' price cuts ease inflation and the current vibe-cession?
Target began cutting prices on 5,000 grocery store items
Walmart, which started lowering prices to pre-pandemic levels in March.
Amazon said it was slashing grocery prices at its Fresh chain by up to 30%
Aldi has begun reducing prices on more than 250 items
Walgreens lowered prices on more than 1,500 items
Voting with dollars:
in addition to eating out less and spending less at the grocery store, many price-sensitive consumers are switching from brand-name to in-house items.
via The Daily Upside
All ads I want to try
Around half of streaming viewers have taken some action upon seeing a pause ad
…
67% said they’d interacted with an ad that they could click on to receive information via an email or device, while explorable ads and “click to buy” ads also saw high engagement, at 62% and 58% each. QR codes, meanwhile, were less popular: just 36% of survey respondents indicated that they’d interacted with one.
via Marketing Brew
Google is emailing advertisers to notify them it will soon begin automatically pausing low-activity keywords.
According to the email, positive keywords in search ad campaigns will be considered low-activity if they haven’t generated impressions in over a year.
This should make account manager easier and cleaner.
But I think it’s also a low-key signal that:
- We’ll continue to have less control in ad platforms
- Keywords are on their way out as the core of Google Ads targeting
And yes, this is mostly thanks to AI.
I posted the other day about sharing your strategy with everyone, then I read a Seth Godin piece that included this bit:
When you give away your work by building the network, you’re not giving it away at all. You’re building trust, authority, and a positive cycle of better.
Sharing is caring.
“Running with scissors is a cardio exercise that can increase your heart rate and require concentration and focus,” says Google’s new AI search feature. “Some say it can also improve your pores and give you strength.”
…
Google suggested that if you’re making pizza but the cheese won’t stick, you could add about an eighth of a cup of glue to the sauce to “give it more tackiness.”
At its core, AI is only as good as its training data. Why would we expect any different from a model that averages the internet?
It is only superhuman when it comes to speed.
via TechCrunch
Share Your Strategy with Everyone
It’s tempting to keep it to ourselves, but making it collaborative can be much more helpful. Especially in industries and relationships (like agencies) where this isn’t the norm.
Invite them in. Craft a strategy together.
Telling our story well and sharing openly brings together more allies, horsepower, and willingness to take that story to new heights.
when corporations talk about values, was it because of ethics? Or aesthetics?
Is it a value or a tactic?
It’ll come out eventually. One compounds goodwill, one erodes it.
via Mister Yam by Yeng Tan 📚
AI is a sea change.
For marketing:
Out: Control
In: Context
In many ways this is a return to an earlier era of marketing, just with a new technological underpinning meaning the mediums have changed.
Black Friday became the Turkey 5 weekend which feels like it’s becoming Black November with the way retailers are pushing sales earlier, but…
October’s and November’s share of US digital holiday consumer spending has not shown a consistent increase since 2018, despite retailers moving their holiday sales earlier
In retail, should you follow the competition so you don’t get left behind or follow the customer’s lead?
Creep or chill?
via Emarketer
Google Marketing Live continued a recent trend for Google Ads, making it more and more like social ad platforms as far as creation flow and targeting.
Social marketers will inherit the earth?
Which means, your creative is the most important part of your ad strategy.
Basically me, if you replace philosophy with marketing and the sign with a billboard promoting billboards.
While Google is Meta-fying its ad platform as fast as it can, Zuck+Co might be returning the favor.
Site links in your social feed!
The site links feature enables you to add multiple landing pages to your ads. Ads created without the site link feature can only include one primary landing page. The site links will appear as horizontally scrollable display labels under the main hero image or video. When someone clicks on one of the site links on your ad, they’ll be redirected to its designated landing page within the in-app browser to learn more about your business.
via Meta
I’m fully bought into the gospel according to Jon Loomer
When you obsess over targeting, it becomes an unnecessary distraction from what is most important: the ad copy and creative.
Stop creating unnecessary work for yourself. When possible, take advantage of automated features like Advantage+ Audience.
Creative is the biggest targeting lever we have these days.
Focus less on control and more on context.
(I love when laziness is a viable strategy.)
it’s teaming up with OpenAI to add the startup’s technology to iOS 18, the next version of the iPhone’s software
Sounds like OpenAI won the gig (Google always felt like a weird choice based on platform competition and default search payola scrutiny).
Now Apple gets to enter the consumer AI fray and establish a connection with its hardware platform while continuing to develop its edge differentiation and outsourcing hallucinatory reputational risk to someone else.
Functional fixedness is a cognitive bias that limits a person to use an object only in the way it is traditionally used.
…
Functional fixedness is this inability to see a hammer’s use as anything other than for pounding nails
How can you defy functional fixedness in your positioning, strategy, and marketing?
Or, how can you zig where others zag?
via Wikipedia (via The Ringer)
From The Guardian
fraudsters impersonated WPP’s CEO using a fake WhatsApp account, a voice clone and YouTube footage used in a virtual meet
Will AI make smaller better?
Scale is really only needed for data when it comes to model training. Larger headcount doesn’t equal better performance.
It’s hard to imagine this happening at a smaller company, especially one without a public-facing leader.
But, as always, humans are the weak link in the technological chain.
Benedict Evans’ prediction for WWDC:
More will probably be about how it uses LLMs to deliver new features, how much those can be run on the device (Apple is an edge computing company and its chips have had dedicated ML accelerators for years), and hence how much developers can do things on Apple silicon for no marginal cost instead of paying a cloud provider per token.
This could get minimal press but be the most interesting / impactful in terms of the average user.
This is what makes Apple different from the field and could turn its catchup attempts into a catapult.