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Advertising is the new subscription revenue for platforms and Apple wants a piece.

via Gizmodo

Apple just hired a 14-year ad executive from NBCUniversal, Joseph Cady, to further beef up its growing video advertising team

via 9TO5Mac

Apple is said to be testing an AI-powered ads platform with a select group of partners

A season of ch-ch-changes is coming.

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For most of us the key to the great commercial or ad or marketing idea or message lies within something that is already true about what we do. We just need the eyes to see it and the guts to go for it.

-Gabe the Bass Player

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Finished reading: The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner 📚

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😬

last year, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) published a two-part report finding that 15% of programmatic, open-web advertising dollars went to MFA websites, totaling about $10 billion in ad spend.

A new report found

H&R Block served more than 2,100 impressions to one user on an MFA site within an hour.
…
Comcast paid an effective CPM of $2,628 to reach one consumer on an MFA site.
…
an ad-spend analysis on behalf of a Fortune 500 company and found that in the second half of 2023, it had spent at least $10 million on MFA websites

MFA is made-for-advertising aka junk

via Marketing Brew

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Today a client said “it doesn’t matter what we think, let’s try stuff out and see what works.”

Music to my ears.

Defer to data.

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The Nudge podcast covered irrational prices, noting they essentially act as a hook cementing your brand in people’s minds (Costco’s $1.50 hot dog, Ryanair’s charging for everything, Supreme’s drop strategy, etc).

The gem is the bit at the end about loyalty programs.

[Pret A Manger] staff have a certain number of items or dollar amount they have to give away every week.

Random rewards.

Slot machine psychology meets unexpected moments of delight meets empowered employees meets positive emotions all around.

An equation for sharing.

A super cost effective marketing campaign.

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What the birth of the spreadsheet teaches us about generative AI

There is one very clear parallel between the digital spreadsheet and generative AI: both are computer apps that collapse time. A task that might have taken hours or days can suddenly be completed in seconds

But

When a tool is ubiquitous, and convenient, we kludge our way through without really understanding what the tool is doing or why. And that, as a parallel for generative AI, is alarmingly on the nose.

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Not great Bob!

Advertising still largely fails to adequately represent women with intersectional identities, either relying on stereotypes or failing to include them entirely

On the positive side

more women in ads are breaking free from their traditional placements in family and domestic settings, dropping from 66% of portrayals in 2022 to 30% in 2023.

Your customers should see themselves reflected in your brand and its ads.

via Campaign

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Are the algorithms starting to turn on generative AI?

Google has updated Search to derank spam including:

  • Scaled content abuse (aka made by AI)
  • Site reputation abuse (junk third-party content on quality sites)
  • Expired domain abuse (grabbing an expired domain and starting a spam farm)

The goal is to:

better understand if webpages are unhelpful, have a poor user experience or feel like they were created for search engines instead of people. This could include sites created primarily to match very specific search queries.

This change actually has teeth too, with plenty of manual actions.

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How To Connect To Your Clients' Meta Account

One of the most annoying things we have to deal with on a (fairly) regular basis with Blue Ion clients is getting access to various Meta properties and tools so we can manage their advertising.

This isn’t because of the clients, it’s because of Meta. It’s pretty much always a headache and 3x more clicks than you would think necessary.

Before I outline the process we’ve landed on lately (for now?), a few ground rules we play by:

  • This assumes the client already has a Meta Business Manager setup and they can access it (this can be a big assumption). If one doesn’t exist we’ll help create one for/with them.
  • We believe that these accounts belong to the client and if they choose to move away from us as an agency, they should easily be able to take the accounts with them. We are working on their behalf, they aren’t renting their advertising from us.
  • We set it up so the clients are billed direct by Meta, we don’t charge passthrough markups or CPC fees (see above point).

Now, on to the access!

We’ve found the easiest method is having the client add us to their Business Manager as a partner (official documentation here).

We grab our business ID from the main business settings URL for our agency Business Manager. This is the most reliable way I’ve found to get it in an easy copy-paste format.

We then share that with the client along with the documentation link.

They then access their Business Manager settings, navigate to Partners in the left menu, click the blue “Add” button, and “Give a partner access to your assets.”

The assets that need to be shared may change on a case-by-case basis, but we ask for:

  • Facebook Page
  • Instagram account
  • Ad Account
  • Pixel / Dataset

The ideal is to get manage access for all assets, but we just request the highest level they’re comfortable granting us.

Then we wait for them to appear in our Partners list and assign out asset access as needed.

Voilà! Happy advertising!

& stay curious

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It feels like the “new normal” we were promised / warned about during the height of the pandemic is starting to settle in, and it’s basically a more conservative (not in the political sense) version of the time leading up to Covid.

Three years ago, the U.S. economy went through an unprecedented upheaval…

It was called the “great resignation.”

Fast-forward to today, and the situation looks like a mirror image, economists say. Specifically, on average, few workers are leaving their jobs, though they still do not face the prospect of imminent layoffs.

via NBC News

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The Biden White House is backing a bipartisan bill that could lead to a ban on the hugely popular social media app TikTok in the United States.

The legislation would force ByteDance to sell TikTok if it wants to remain in U.S. app stores.

I wonder how this news will be received post-enshoppification

via Punchbowl News

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Finished reading: Head Lopper Volume 1: The Island Or a Plague of Beasts by Andrew Ross MacLean 📚

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Is the future of radio TV?

YouTube is the dominant player in podcasts (now with RSS feed ingestion).

The sports podcast network Locked On has turned their content into a 24/7 streaming sports show (YT link), and now has a Fire TV channel.

Big podcasts are basically small TV studios.

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I’ve said it before, but here’s someone else saying it:

Boring is the worst thing your brand can be.

via Inc

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How do you maximize your ads' ROI?

Better creative.

Creative quality is the primary lever we have left for targeting and the only aspect of advertising truly left within our control as marketers.

The magic doesn’t come from button pressing and knob twisting in an ads dashboard. It comes from great ads that are noticeable, memorable, and cause an emotional response that drives action.

Obsess about your brand’s creative.

via Demand Curve

Chart showing what factors multiply advertising profitability. Brand size has the biggest impact at 20x. Followed by Creative Quality at 12x and Budget Setting Across Geographies at 5x. Descending from there are budget setting across portfolios, multi-media, brand performance, budget setting across variants, cost / product seasonality, laydown / phasing, and target audience.
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Stanley is trying to dial back the drops frenzy by borrowing a page from the Taylor Swift playbook and getting people to sign up for the chance purchase a new product when it drops.

What goes into the screening process?

browser signals, location signals, fraud analysis, cohort signals and “assessing basically who looks like a real fan and who is using automation or otherwise to game the system,”
…
A red flag, for example, would be when the system detects that far too many people are entering from one IP address.

A lot of data science to sell an insulated straw cup.

via CNN

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Another Podcast’s episode Google Gemini and AI bias unpacks the weights and training data stuff I briefly mentioned yesterday.

Hidden patterns in data and models as bias amplifiers.

Also the excellent quote “the fake is in the caption,” because what is a prompt but a caption for a future image?

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I’m a big pedal steel fan, so when Jason Isbell started talking about it on the Broken Record podcast I took note.

The pedals are so small, and they’re so close together, that if you don’t wear the right kind of shoes you’ll accidentally hit more than one pedal at a time. So this is why pedal steel is a true cowboy instrument, because cowboy boots are what you wear in order to be able to hit just one pedal at a time.

Pedal steel (a key country music instrument) also has a learning curve.

What are the pedal steels and cowboy boots of what you’re trying to do? Are you using the right ones?

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From episode three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs:

Once you give a collection of things a name—the way people’s minds work—they start thinking because those things share a name, they’re the same kind of thing.

Names and genres and labels matter.

The human brain is designed to pattern match and categorize and bucket and metaphor to save on processing power.

(Neural networks are designed to do this for AI models via weights.)

In grocery aisles, “water company” usually means plastic bottles—it’s what shoppers expect. Liquid Death smashes that expectation, so it stands out.