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Apple continues its services push:
Any verified business can now create a consistent brand and location presence across apps that customers use every day, including Apple Maps, Wallet, and Mail.
Now more than just a Google Business Profile clone, Business Connect adds:
- Branded email: name and logo in Mail
- Branded payments: logo in Tap to Pay
- Branded incoming call screen with Business Caller ID (coming soon)
Apple is turning its hardware network into an integrated marketing platform.
data shows consumers remember and engage with emotionally-resonant ads.
- High-quality video should be emotional, not just technically sound
- Consumers want to feel included
- Remember social media is associated with negative emotions
- Funny is memorable
- Brands that make people feel happy get paid
Brands aren’t people, but they can act like people are behind them.
Are you not entertained?
Google giving us more control?
With brand guidelines, you can control how your brand is represented in your Performance Max campaign automated assets or formats.Your Performance Max campaigns use Google AI to infer key brand elements using your final URL. You’ll be able to review the brand information Google infers, then can fine-tune your brand guidelines based on your brand and campaign goals.
Guidelines help control generated videos and responsive display and include font, color, name, and logo(s).
Brand marketers rejoice!
Turn On, Tune In, Dropout: Business Lessons from College(Humor)
Sam Reich, CEO of Dropout (formerly CollegeHumor), sat down with Fast Company to talk about the brand’s journey (video embedded below, podcast version here to the subscription-based niche media company it is today.
On growing Dropout:
Because we’re not in the meta-sport of growing this business, we can be very slow and responsible and reasonable about it.
It’s important to know what game you’re playing. Otherwise you won’t know the rules and you’ll be using the wrong game board.
Be honest—at least with yourself—about what your true goals are for your brand. The best goals are the ones not derived from the covers of business magazines, hustle bro tweets, or scale-worshipping podcasts.
There’s more discussion around this idea in this episode of Seth Godin’s podcast (specifically around the 13:30 mark if you want just the growth talk).
On focus:
We are really 90% focused on growing the platform. And that focus, so far, has paid off.
Or, as the modern philosopher Ron Swanson says: “never half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing.”
But! don’t lose sight of the parts that make up the one thing.
For Dropout, growing the platform means attracting new audience and keeping existing audience happy and subscribing. Those are accomplished in different ways—but can leverage a common core approach.
Know the north star goal. Develop strategies and metrics for the highest leverage inputs for that goal. The C-suite / leadership mostly just wants the north star info, everyone else needs to focus on the core inputs.
On zigging to other’s zag:
This era of hyper-premium content has created a reactionary market where folks are really interested in stuff that feels a little bit more garage band-y and authentic.
A small player can come in and be disruptive because a big player can’t adopt their business model without disrupting their existing business model.
Trying to do what the industry heavyweight(s) does but a bit better is not a viable plan. Finding the gap in their model—the unserved audience—is a winning plan.
Know the game you’re playing. Know the way you want to play it. Know the strengths and weaknesses of the other players. Know your style. Know the loophole.
The podcast version gets into a lot more of the strategy and approach.
Pinterest Pushing Further Into Social Commerce
Talked with my Pinterest Ads rep today and got some more insight on a couple commerce features in beta.
ROAS Bidding
This is a tweak to Performance+ bidding to focus on conversion value, adjusting the bid based on the expected return.
It works best for those with a wide spread of price points. And, as always with algorithmic features, requires consistent signal of decent volume (current benchmark is 30 conversions a week).
Promotions
Mentioned this in the October platform updates roundup, but now have some more info.
It adds promos / offers to ads in campaigns geared to on-site actions using a selection of template options across 3 categories: discount, shipping, and conditional (spend $x, get $y off, etc).
Shopify integration available, including automatically applying promo codes at checkout. Not sure how it functions without Shopify, guessing there will be a Promotions section in the catalog area where you can manually add a template.
Bonus Best Practice
Pause ads that have been running for ~2 weeks with low/0% CTR and replace with a new one. The inflection point CTR is somewhere around 1% , I think.
The Federal Reserve has dropped the fed rate target another 1/4 point (0.25%), putting it in the 4.5-4.75% range.
CapCut has launched Commerce Pro, an AI-powered rapid asset creation studio.
- Image and video (from a URL) generation
- In-video product links
- Voice and audio generation
- Virtual try-on
- Licensed templates
The TikTok ban still lingers. Is ByteDance diversifying or entrenching? Or just a cash grab?
It seems Google is testing adding if there was a change to that score because of "competitive pressure" and might even list the competitor that is causing such pressure.
Might we be getting more helpful info from Google to help with ads management?
More context, more better.
How the election outcome could impact how you make marketing decisions in the years to come. Because the context you market within matters.
This is as close as I’m going to get to being political.
audio makes up 31% of media activity consumption in the U.S. in 2021, but only received 8.8% of the advertising spend
Opportunity!
When it comes to your marketing mix, audio always.
But one day you’ll be the last person writing words on the web and wonder where everyone went.
I read this and think that a text resurgence is a good bet.
Yes short-form video is hot like Hansel and NotebookLLM turns text into audio for people who don’t want to read, but text is our oldest technology.
And in the age of AI, people may not read text, but is it not the building block input of these models?
Perplexity (AI) is adding to its competition with Google (and most major tech platforms), trying to carve itself a slice of that sweet e-commerce pie.
The Pro Shop feature promises free shipping on items bought through Perplexity, enabling customers to complete transactions without leaving the platform. While browsing for products, users will notice a “Buy with Pro” option for eligible items. After selecting it, they will need to enter their billing and shipping details to finalize their purchase.Perplexity will estimate taxes and purchase the product on behalf of the users on Pro Shop, and users can track purchase status on the platform.
If successful, I imagine this feature will evolve over time and become less manual/personal shopper style on the Perplexity side.
Or maybe it leans into that AI-as-assistant approach to create a new angle on a competitive feature set.
Trick-or-Treating With Ad Platform Announcements from October
From Google:
Performance Max and Standard Shopping ads will now compete head-to-head in the auction instead of PMax getting preference. A sign that Standard Shopping is here to stay?
Testing: expandable search ads and in-ad search refinements.
The former is like a Google Shopping layout but for search ads when expanded. The latter is your classic search filter like what you see on ecomm sites.
A “For You” feed for Shopping.
Google will use your recent searches and YouTube history to figure out which products you like.
- Ads in AI overviews
- Conversational interface for Search ad creation
- “Better” AI image generation for ads
- New Customer High Value, Win-Back, and High Value Win-Back Mode
- “Search Bidding Exploration”: I’m guessing AI audience expansion for Search, next gen Dynamic Search Ads without needing a new campaign type?
- New stuff for Shorts & video ads
- Shopping discounts for new & loyal customers
- New Shopping ad format: Video Highlights
- New Shopping bidding type: optimize for gross profit
Demand Gen campaigns now offer creative-level controls for video assets, empowering you to choose which video appears in each format.
More Performance Max insights!
Select Google Ads accounts can now access a new “segment” option for Performance (PMax) Asset Group performance, offering a long-awaited layer of granularity to campaign insights.
The segmentation feature enables advertisers to break down Pmax Asset Group performance by:
- Time
- Click Type (consistently set to cross-network clicks)
- Conversions
- Device
- Network (showing cross-network by default)
- Top vs. Others
Use specific pages to guide PMax asset creation. (Assuming this means generative AI.)
From Snapchat:
Sponsored Snaps enable businesses to engage their customers through visual messaging, by delivering a full-screen vertical video Snap directly to Snapchatters. Snapchatters opt-in to opening the Snap and can reply by sending a message directly to the advertiser or using the call-to-action to open a predetermined link.
Pay to show up in the main inbox next to their friends.
Promoted Places highlight sponsored places of interest on the Snap Map, helping our community discover places that they want to visit. The Snap Map is used for exploration and browsing to learn more about what your friends are up to, what is happening nearby, and which places are “Top Picks” based on the Snapchat community’s visitation trends.
Sounds like this is paying to be a Top Pick.
From Meta:
Exactly what no one wanted:
Meta silently implemented “automatic adjustments” across several advertising accounts, giving its system authority to make significant changes to ad campaigns without explicit advertiser approval.
From Amazon:
Prime Video is turning the dial up in 2025:
- More ads: current load is in the range of 2-3.5 minutes of ads per hour, which could increase. Mid-stream ads could also be added.
- Shoppable ads: including carousel, pause, and trivia formats (absolutely not surprise on this one).
- Overhauled DSP experience, now with AI! (And the obligatory campaign type named Performance+)
- Frequency cap controls
- Amazon Ads 🤝 first-party data
- More generative AI: audio this time
- More full-funnel and audience tools through managed services and partnerships
From Pinterest:
The Performance+ Suite, which, yes, is a portmanteau of Google’s and Meta’s names for their AI-first ecommerce solutions.
Pinterest Performance+ campaigns can help any advertiser drive lower-funnel performance by optimizing targeting, managing budgets or deciding how much to bid.
I’ve been testing this with some success lately. The key is to be running upper-funnel campaigns in tandem. (A theme for a standalone post sometime soon.)
Tapping into the value zeitgeist:
- Personalized promotions “based on what they’ve searched and pinned”
- Deals ads modules “making ads more visible for consumers across the Home Feed”
From TikTok:
All the new toys…
- Smart+: Performance Advantage+ Max in TikTok for most objectives
- GMV Max: Performance Advantage+ Max in TikTok for shopping, focused on gross merchandise value
- Out of Phone: a clever play on out-of-home that places TikTok ads in in-store retail settings
- Conversion Lift Studies.
- PETs: no, not those ones. Privacy-Enhancing Technologies via third-party integrations.
From Microsoft:
Impression-based remarketing! (I’ve long wanted a more granular version of this on Meta.)
impression-based remarketing allows you to target users based on ad exposure. This means that you can reach people who saw your ad, and did not make it to your site.
As the AI search experience improves, so will the accompanying ads.
ads will be triggered considering the whole conversation within a single session and not just the last prompt. Before an ad block is shown, Copilot will share with the user how the following ad section connects to their conversation. For now, we are calling this feature ad voice
AI will also come to the ads manager to act as a…copilot for advertisers.
Plus some targeting and analytics updates.
From LinkedIn:
Boost a post directly from your page for lead generation (using lead gen forms).
I don’t know how well this avenue performs compared to building in the Ads Manager, but an easy way to test the concept for companies.
- More Live Events promo features
- Wire program expansion: videos in “trusted publisher” content
- Additional video options in automated campaigns
63% of B2B buyers say short-form social video content informs buying decisions.
From Reddit:
AI-powered keyword targeting features. Contextual advertising for a community-first platform.
From DoorDash:
Ads Manager for Enterprise Restaurants includes advanced targeting capabilities, marketing insights, new promos and collaborative marketing functionality aimed at regional marketing teams and franchisees.
The platform has made new high-visibility placements on the storefront and category pages widely available, helping CPG brands highlight seasonal moments, introduce new products and amplify promotions.
The ad platform now also offers advertisers offsite media, helping them reach consumers across search engines, programmatic displays and social media platforms with campaigns powered by DoorDash’s first-party data.
Any (large / public / venture funded) platform that has users and collects data on them will likely become an ad platform at some point.
From PayPal:
An ad network.
See the last line of the DoorDash section.