The fallout from The End of Cookies has already (for the most part)  happened and now various crumbs are being swept up into assorted piles as marketers and platforms figure out what shape fits their needs.

On the marketers’ end, influencers and creators look to be the post-privacy strategy of choice on social platforms that were hit hard by The iOS-ening.

On the platforms’ end, APIs are the name of the game. Conversion APIs are the most common but there are others for various purposes. These APIs allow platforms to receive data directly from servers instead of using the browser as a proxy. In many cases this means data can be transferred without having to worry about ad blockers or privacy controls. Generally this is less plug-and-play than the pixels for end users.

Any company that wants to be (even tangentially) an AI company is rolling out generative tools to create images or videos, or turn images into videos, or etc etc. Microsoft is adding the feature to every tool they can think of. Soon (if it’s not possible somewhere already) there will be a prompt field or button in the ad creation flow of most major digital platforms that allow you to generate visual assets instead of or alongside “manually” created assets you upload.

The biggest draws of this route for marketers will be speed and no longer needing to worry about image licenses or permissions. You can’t get sued over an image an algorithm created based on your own words (probably, only precedent will truly tell). A potential drawback will be the terms and conditions the platforms apply and if it includes language that you don’t really own the image. Ultimately not a big deal if it’s just an ad campaign image, but the concern arises from where else it might surface or what it might be used in tandem with if the platform owns it.

Just as markets boom and bust, they also bundle and unbundle. We are currently in a phase of unbundling. 

Everyone that owns a tv show or movie now has a streaming service.

Search is unbundling from Google as specialized and niche alternatives pop up to fill the gaps Google leaves behind in its quest to realize The Future of Search™.

The shopping experience is splintering across platforms and surfaces as every company tries to shave off their sliver of the commerce pie.

Social is shifting from “one platform for everything” to “one thing per platform” (such as Facebook for groups, Snapchat for close friends, Instagram for broadcasting to connections, TikTok for discovery, YouTube learning and entertainment (and yes, it’s a bit of an overstatement)).

Plus podcasts, newsletters, slacks, discords, telegrams, messaging apps, etc. 

It appears the internet is niching back down. But the problem is all the providers and platforms still want to be monoliths.

The End of the Techno-Giants?

This unbundling could hit the current techno-giants (techno-tyrants?) the hardest. 

Google is flailing to find a post-cookie solution the market will latch onto. The current cookie ecosystem powers their money printing machine and they’ve parlayed it into a dominant market position. Content creators love to talk about not building your empire on rented land; the way things are currently shaping up, Google is poised to become a tenant of someone else’s tracking and targeting high rise.

Meta is floundering. The meta-pivot was too little, too soon (the timeline was probably accelerated to distract from all the bad headlines they were generating) and another example of techies chronically believing The Next Big Thing™ is much closer than it actually is. In this case, that’s VR. The metaverse is here, it’s just called Roblox or Minecraft or something else the kids are doing that I haven’t heard of. Meta is also getting hammered by the privacy-posturing of Apple (and others) and the years of trying to be everything for everyone is finally catching up with them.

Microsoft is no longer The Windows Company but is having one hell of a second (third?) act so far. Apple is probably just fine, unless they bet too big on The Next Big Thing™ or bet on the wrong one (that mysterious AppleCar project is getting mighty expensive), but it has more than enough money in the bank to weather plenty of storms. Amazon is in the awkward adolescent period, we may soon find out if it’s a goose or a swan.

The past week or so has felt like the dam breaking in terms of TikTok showing its ambition and illustrating the differing approach of eastern and western attention platforms.

First, why “attention platforms” and not “social media”? One reason is because TikTok refuses to call itself social media. More importantly is because this isn’t just about traditional social platforms. Social media as a discreet concept or experience type feels more archaic by the day. The guiding idea here comes from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings who said (something along the lines of) the company doesn’t (just) compete against other TV and movie platforms but all other ways people spend their time. Name-checking options like TikTok, YouTube, and even sleep.

Back to TikTok. While most social platforms have been rushing to TikTok-ify (or BeReal-ify), The Trend Machine has been ignoring all of them and setting its sights on other sectors.

I would categorize the Silicon Valley approach as a vertical one. Adding iterative features that are similar to what they already have with everything geared towards maximizing ad inventory and, therefore, revenue. For Facebook, everything since the creation of the News Feed has been just another feed. This might also explain why Horizon Worlds and the dream of the metaverse is going so poorly.

My take on the Chinese approach is solely informed by what I know of WeChat and TikTok, so consider it highly imperfect. As you might guess, I see it as horizontal. Instead of asking “what format don’t we have,” they ask “what activity don’t we have?” Announcements or leaks have come out about TikTok potentially getting into product distribution, music streaming and podcasts, and it continues to build out its commerce capabilities.

Silicon Valley typically tackles efforts like this through minimum viable products or partnerships / integrations. TikTok is doing it themselves, including buying warehouses. But it’s not just TikTok, Shein is getting into the reselling game by building their own, in-app functionality. American retailers just partner with someone like ThredUp.

Elon wants to build (or turn Twitter into) an Everything App like WeChat. If he manages it, it will likely be in some crypto-ish decentralized way. TikTok is actively working towards building the American version of WeChat, in a very centralized way (much like the Chinese government). (I am highly skeptical that a true WeChat clone will happen in the US. The Everything App is more-or-less a digital representation of the state, so users didn’t have to adapt to the idea. It is also dangerous to map across countries on different points of their development and adoption curves.)

Only time will tell if their bets pay off, but we’re watching the fallout of one approach to building an attention platform while witnessing an attempt at another approach.

The market is mixing signals like a middle school dance.

Housing prices and mortgage rates are up. Inventory and home sales are down. But the high end of the market seems unphased. Spec builds might decrease as builders race to catch up on fulfilling existing orders. Lumber and container prices are dropping. Along with the valuations of tech companies. And levels of VC funding. And capital in biotech. Digital prices didn't move much. But inflation and gas prices did. Crypto skipped fall and went straight from summer to winter. Travel is exploding, both in volume and infrastructure stability. Extra income is down, but consumer spending might go up.

When markets or sectors are running hot, I always wonder who will be left holding the bag. I'm still waiting for that one hotel or apartment project in the local market here to realize they were the one that marked the overbuilt point. I've been waiting for years. CNN+ marked that point in the Great Unbundling Race a.k.a. The Streaming Wars. (Let The Great Rebundling begin!) Substack is playing this game with...itself?

Being left holding the bag isn't always a bad thing though. In some markets that bag is full of money. Grocery delivery companies are scrambling to be the one that secures the bag. Social media platforms seem to take a misguided approach to this (believing they must all be TikTok now).

Everything is either in a phase of unbundling or rebundling (yeah, you'll have to stretch those terms a ways to make them fit plenty of areas).

Hey, I thought this was a newsletter about marketing and (tenuously) marketing-related news?

It is.

How can you plan your marketing if you have no idea what the larger market and economy is doing? (Tesla started with a luxury sports car because that's the market that could handle the prices required to manufacture an EV at that time. As scale could be reached, prices could drop, and vehicles with broader appeal (except Cyber Truck) could be launched.(I am not an Elon fanboy, but this is the best example I could think of off the top))

What makes everything so messy now is that the signals are all over the place and the causes are unprecedented. The housing market explosion wasn't toxic like 2008 (I think, we really won't know for a few years). It was driven by pandemic-induced lockdowns that had people spending more time in their homes than ever before and with very few other avenues to spend money. "I could really use a [insert: 'home office', 'play room for the kids', 'bigger kitchen', 'actual kitchen', 'second / third bathroom', etc.]. I know, I'll buy a house that has one!" Wash, rinse, repeat. Thousands of times.

That same pandemic messed up supply chains like a kid kinking the hose to get you to look into the nozzle.

And then a war was started by a country that exports a lot of oil.

And then we collectively got to a point where we were over the pandemic and decided, at the population level, to do things outside our homes again. Like roleplaying as sardines and getting the hell out of where we are for literally anywhere else and calling it a vacation.

The money that turned the housing market into Shark Week didn't disappear. It just went somewhere else. Substitute goods reappeared and people yelled "praise be the flying spaghetti monster." And they went and spent their money.

So, in conclusion: the market is up. But also down. And people don't have any money. But people are also spending money. Don't panic. Yet. But understand what's happening out there when you're analyzing your marketing. Or business performance. Or personal budgeting. Etc, etc, etc.

You think about yourself / your business more than you think about the market (probably). Others think about the market more than they think about your business / you (unless they're family, maybe).

Welcome to Hot Weird Summer.

Your GDPR-compliant cookie banner is actually a violation of GDPR.

And so is your analytics platform. (If you’re using Google.)

And so is Facebook Meta. (This is unlikely to impact non-European targeting advertisers directly (if it were to actually happen) but the fallout, at least financially, from such a move could cripple Big Blue Infinity / Upside-down Spider-Man Mask Eyes)

More importantly, this is another sign of the de-centering of America in the digital sphere and the splintering internet. We essentially have two internets now: The West v. China. But these headlines could signal a Web Trinity: America v Europe v China.

To be overly reductive of the West v China split: the western internet is bottom up while China is top down. Wild west versus total control. This has been getting more dramatic lately with full blown tall poppy syndrome taking effect, as illustrated by the recent Tencent drops.

The US v (western) Europe division is more nuanced but built on items grabbing more (marketing / tech) headlines: privacy, competition, data sovereignty, and user experience. European authorities don’t want their citizens’ data in reach of US spy orgs (and no one wants it within reach of China) and they want privacy by default. The thorny bits are related to data handling for international tech platforms and the fact that privacy typically benefits incumbents since they get to keep their data locked up tight. And how does all of this impact the user experience of the web? (I’m guessing no one enjoys ubiquitous cookie banners.)

The ad-based internet gets a lot of flak; some of it warranted, some of it overblown. (I’d wager people will like depersonalized advertising a lot less than the current setup, remember ye olden days of banner ads?) Combining recent lawsuits in various European countries hints at a trend of making advertising harder while forcing the platforms that rely on it for money to pay for the content they make accessible (you know, because News Corp needs more money).

This will be an interesting space to watch over the next few years, especially if laws and regulations remain ambiguously written.