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Finished reading: Head Lopper Vol. 2: Crimson Tower by Andrew Maclean 📚

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Friday Marketing Links | 031524

  1. TikTok’s potential U.S. ban stirs marketers, spurs contingency planning

Meta could capture between 22.5% and 27.5% of TikTok’s U.S. ad revenues in the event of a ban.

YouTube stands to gain an additional $1.24 billion to $1.53 billion, with $410 million to $500 million of TikTok’s ad revenues redirected to Google’s display and search businesses

One of the early thought exercises I was given at Blue Ion was: what happens if Meta was shut down tomorrow?

It’s a good question to occasionally ask about any important distribution channels.

  1. Apple Buys Canadian AI Startup as It Races to Add Features

DarwinAI has developed AI technology for visually inspecting components during the manufacturing process and serves customers in a range of industries. But one of its core technologies is making artificial intelligence systems smaller and faster. That work that could be helpful to Apple, which is focused on running AI on devices rather than entirely in the cloud.

Apple was launching Vision Pro while the rest of the Valley Giants were pivoting to AI. But the benefit of a massive bank account is the ability to buy whatever you want.

Apple has also been really secretive about their AI plans, claiming “disclosure of strategic plans and initiatives harmful to our competitive position and would be premature in this developing area.”

Apple is at the forefront of ambient computing, and on-device AI will be a key component. Plus, Apple is the only one of the giants that isn’t really a cloud company and is most definitely a hardware company.

  1. Report Finds No Correlation Between Social Media Engagement and Content Readership

Social media apps are gradually becoming more valued as entertainment sources, while actual interaction shifts to smaller, enclosed chats and communities.

Notice how all the platforms focus on “discovery.”

Across all the articles and topics we analyzed, we found no clear connection between social engagement and actual readers of the news.

Understand vanity metrics vs. brand metrics vs. performance metrics.

  1. Podcast Frenzy Report

podcasting is taking over traditional media consumption time, with respondents reporting 28% of them watch less TV and 24% browse social media less often. Gen Z podcast discovery is a mix of methods. 46% of Gen Z respondents rely on social media recommendations, and 33% of younger Gen Z browse top charts and “best of” podcast lists.

Audio! Audio! Audio!

  1. What We Learned About Creative From Analyzing $3M in Podcast Media by Caroline Culbertson

Findings include midrolls outperforming both pre-rolls and post-rolls for placement. A quiet value-add for host-read contracts is hosts tend to go over their contracted ad length. Right Side Up found the sweet spot for “60 second” host-read ad performance was host-read creatives that landed between one to three minutes.

Podcasts foster parasocial relationships which gives host-read ads some extra oomph in the persuasion department.

  1. The bad ad ecosystem: Here’s what the research says

five types of bad ads, each varying in harm for the marketer: malicious ads, spoofed ads, scam ads, heavy ads and miscategorized ads.
…
The easiest thing is [ad buys] are cheap. [Bad ad creators] don’t wanna spend a ton of money on it. So they proliferate in places with really low CPMs
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marketers should work on making good ads. Ensuring the proper ads for the right environments is key, along with keeping on top of creative

  1. Layoffs could be coming as debt-laden firms navigate the pain of higher rates, economists say

Higher rates spell trouble for US companies with near-term debt maturities.

Rate changes and inflation measures are the important indicators this year.

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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

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“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

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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.
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Comcast paid an effective CPM of $2,628 to reach one consumer on an MFA site.
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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.