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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.
About that ad-supported plan…
Netflix’s cheaper, ad-supported tier now has 40 million global monthly active users, nearly double the 23 million the company reported in January.
via CNBC
Netflix will launch an in-house advertising technology platform, by the end of 2025
…
This summer, Netflix will also expand its buying capabilities to include The Trade Desk, Google’s Display & Video 360, and Magnite who will join Microsoft as the main programmatic partners for advertisers.
The streaming platform removed the Basic plan for new subscribers last July, not it’ll get rid of it for good.
I wrote this last March:
If Netflix goes the roll-your-own route to replace the Microsoft stack, I wonder how long the ad-free basic tier will last.
A mystery no more.
A year ago, Google said that it believed AI was the future of search. That future is apparently here: Google is starting to roll out “AI Overviews,” previously known as the Search Generative Experience, or SGE, to users in the US and soon around the world. Pretty soon, billions of Google users will see an AI-generated summary at the top of many of their search results.
How does this impact your ad strategy?
via The Verge
Instagram is going small?
The platform is introducing a ranking change that will give smaller creators more distribution, replacing reposts with original content in recommendations, adding labels to reposted content and removing content aggregators from recommendations.
Plus…
a new way to rank recommendations that will show eligible content to a small audience that it thinks will enjoy it. As people engage with the content, the top performing set of Reels will be shown to a slightly wider audience, then the best of these will be shown to an even wider group and so on.
via TechCrunch
More Shiny New Ad Toys
Meta
Marketers get ready: ads are coming to Threads a lot sooner than expected.
The tech platform recently told ad execs that they will be able to buy ads on its X-rival, text-based platform as early as the second half of this year
Increase revenue potential and decrease CPMs (maybe), sounds like exactly what Meta wants right now.
If experimenting on Threads was on your 2024 To Do list, now is the time.
via Digiday
Snapchat
Use GenAI to create AR ads and filters.
& place them next to unconventional sports like extreme ironing.
via TechCrunch
Amazon
New ad types are coming to Prime Video, which should garner a lot of attention as ads are added to the streaming platform (which won a chunk of NBA broadcast rights).
The new formats include shoppable carousel ads, pause ads and brand trivia ads.
via Adweek
Microsoft
starting to test ads inside the Start menu on Windows 11. The software maker will use the Recommended section of the Start menu, which usually shows file recommendations, to suggest apps from the Microsoft Store.
A new ad channel for app developers enters the chat?
via The Verge
Roku
The patent centers around the idea of displaying ads on these TVs whenever they’re tuned to an HDMI input that’s paused or idle. Theoretically, this would allow Roku to present ads throughout your whole TV experience — and in places where it’s not viable to do so today.
Advertising is the go-to revenue stream for companies seeking bottom line growth. Even more so when consumers are especially price sensitive.
via The Verge
New AI-powered features are coming to Performance Max campaigns. Here are the ones that should be more widely available now/soon:
- Detailed demographics
Detailed demographics in audience insights empower you to understand your untapped demographics so you can craft ads that resonate directly with specific age and gender groups.
- Spending transparency
At a glance, you can analyze your campaign pacing to identify potential areas for strategic budget shifts, such as moving budget from a campaign that’s underpacing to a campaign that is close to becoming budget limited.
- IP (internal traffic) exclusions
exclude specific IP addresses (e.g., your company), reducing wasted budget on unwanted ad interactions.
Apple
Apple is really leaning into being the anti-Google. Enter “Web Eraser”:
The feature is expected to build upon existing privacy features within Safari and will allow users to erase unwanted content from any webpage of their choosing. Users will have the option to erase banner ads, images, text or even entire page sections, all with relative ease.
Also, Safari may act a little more like Arc—the current new browser on the block pulling a Hansel (I like the Arc Search app).
Expect more on-device AI features soon, this is Apple’s differentiator in the space.
via Apple Insider
Questions tend to be framed from the perspective of making existing audio content reach more people. Nuzum argues the audience should be the core of the question, and the answer. The first step is to identify the audience to be served, understand them, and then determine what can be done to best serve them.
This is also how you do good marketing.
No brand is owed an existence or an audience. Do the work to earn it.
Walmart advertisers will be able to match the retailer’s shopper data with Disney’s proprietary Audience Graph tools, helping them target audiences and measure data better.
Collab of the year for retail marketers?
via The Verge
Consumers have different preferences. It’s ultimately about removing friction in the experience, but what removing friction looks like is very different depending on who that customer is.
Reducing friction usually revolves around being faster or cheaper (both of which get easier with scale).
But there are more options, like:
- Simpler
- Longer lasting
- Stronger
- Easier
- More focused
- Deeper integration
- More flexible
Reduce your customers’ friction, not generic friction.
via the Behind the Numbers podcast