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As technology advanced we became increasingly more like computers—adapting to their way of working, of interfacing.
The promise of AI is that could open up the path to allow us to become more human again.
It's A Metric!: First Time Impression Ratio
Today’s metric is one I just learned about: First Time Impression Ratio (FTIR)
According to Meta, FTIR is:
The percentage of your daily impressions that comes from people seeing your ad set for the first time.
FTIR = Reach / Impressions
The lower your FTIR, the higher your frequency.
This matters because you can’t survive on “moment of conversion” traffic alone. Such a small sliver of any platform’s user base is in-market for your given offer at any one moment that you should run campaigns to gain brand awareness (this is why you need both brand and performance marketing (and yes, smaller budgets can put these considerations on hold)).
Attention is gold.
A member of the Foxwell Digital community uncovered an interesting FTIR trend:
a dramatic decline from approximately 60-70% to 10-25% over the past 6-12 months [as of March 2024].
This drop suggests a saturation point where the same audiences are being reached repeatedly, leading to what can be termed as ‘audience fatigue,’ rather than just ad fatigue.
The root causes identified include a lack of creative differentiation, reduced influencer marketing budgets, and underinvestment in emerging platforms
A metric on its own isn’t very helpful, but First Time Impression Rate + Frequency could be a useful combo in your budget allocation and performance analysis arsenal when auditing your social accounts.
Disguised as a post about a Substack feature is a reminder that:
- Most new platform features are attempts at moat building
- You don’t have to use every bell & whistle
- You can treat social media as a public journal that you repurpose elsewhere later
Are you trying to find a solution for a problem you haven’t created yet?
A hypothesis is useless without a test.
Pick a measuring stick and get going. Iterate over time.
You can’t have a return on investment if all you’ve invested in is planning out how to measure ROI.
via the Louder Than Words podcast
Saturday Marketing Links | 031624
AI Prompt Engineering Is Dead / Long live AI prompt engineering
According to one research team, no human should manually optimize prompts ever again.
There is an alternative to the trial-and-error-style prompt engineering that yielded such inconsistent results: Ask the language model to devise its own optimal prompt.
this automatically generated prompt did better than the best prompt found through trial-and-error. And, the process was much faster
The optimal prompts the algorithm spit out were so bizarre, no human is likely to have ever come up with them.
The centaur approach is usually better than all human or all AI (at least for a while).
Which makes sense since the two types of “brains” function differently. It’s about finding the optimal combination of the two, not one directing the other.
Speaking of…
Of top-notch algorithms and zoned-out humans
A low-grade algorithm and a switched-on human make better decisions together than a top-notch algorithm with a zoned-out human. And when the algorithm is top-notch, a zoned-out human turns out to be what you get.
…
rather than thinking of the machine as a replacement for the human, the most interesting questions focus on the sometimes-fraught collaboration between the two.
Gold, bitcoin and stocks hit record highs this week. Then came inflation data
investors shrugged off a higher-than-expected 3.2% annual rise in consumer prices and cheered a cooldown in some categories like food prices.
…
US wholesale inflation rose 1.6% for the 12 months ended in February, its fastest clip in months, due to a spike in energy prices.
…
Markets expect the central bank to hold rates steady this month and begin cutting in June or July
Consumer prices climbed 3.2% in February as 2% goal remains elusive
The 12-month inflation rate has been stuck between 3% and 4% since June, hovering just above the Federal Reserve’s official 2% target
Finished reading: Head Lopper Vol. 2: Crimson Tower by Andrew Maclean 📚
I like this take on new tech adoption from Douglas Adams.
any new technology is received differently by three different groups of people.
If you’re below the age of 15, it’s just the way things have always been.
If you’re between the ages of 15 and 35, it’s really cool and you might be able to get a job doing it.
If you’re above the age of 35, it’s unholy and against the order of society and will destroy everything.
via a16z
“Audio all the time” is one of my core marketing beliefs for 2024, so I always like more evidence that it’s a good idea.
88% of TikTok users agree that sound is vital to the TikTok experience. And for 73%, sound prompts them to “stop and look” at an ad, while also making them less likely to skip, watch longer on average and feel more positive.
via TikTok
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.
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.
Finished reading: The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner 📚
😬
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
Today a client said “it doesn’t matter what we think, let’s try stuff out and see what works.”
Music to my ears.
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.
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.
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
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.