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Many car manufacturers are selling car owners’ data to advertisers as a revenue boosting tactic, according to earlier reporting by Recorded Future News. Automakers are exponentially increasing the number of sensors they place in their cars every year with little regulation of the practice.
The OpenAI as platform company era has begun.
GPTs are a new way for anyone to create a tailored version of ChatGPT to be more helpful in their daily life, at specific tasks, at work, or at home—and then share that creation with others.
Anyone can easily build their own GPT—no coding is required. You can make them for yourself, just for your company’s internal use, or for everyone.
GPT Store coming soon. And maybe a phone (a Jony Ive collab)?
The Apple Playbook is in full effect.
Tag, You're It: How to Think About Google Tag Manager (GTM)
The Google Analytics 4 era is upon us, and to do GA4 right you're likely going to need Google Tag Manager.
There are more ways than GTM to GA4, but they work together pretty seamlessly. And GTM reduces the need for a developer, which is one reason I like it (I always feel bad asking a talented programmer to copy-paste this event code snippet just because I can't access the code base).
Google's vision for the GA4 era seems to be:
- GTM is the implementation layer
- GA4 is the intelligence/analysis layer
- Data Studio is the reporting layer.
The simplest way to think about GTM is as an extension of your site's code.
To make events and interactions "visible" to GTM, the information has to exist in the data layer.
A data layer is a JavaScript object that is used to pass information from your website to your Tag Manager container. You can then use that information to populate variables and activate triggers in your tag configurations.
With Tag Manager, there are now two code bases for your site (or app):
- The functional code - what your developers created to make the whole experience happen
- The marketing code - all the stuff we can do in GTM that isn't part of the user's core experience but facilitates most modern web work (social media pixels, Google Tags, event tracking, cookie banners, A/B testing tools, etc.)
GTM is a container for all that code that powers your digital marketing and analytics efforts but doesn't need to be in the core code base (there are some things that need to be added directly despite not being core to the user experience (like A/B testing tools) to avoid creating a bad user experience due to the way GTM handles code injection).
An added layer of data for your marketing and analytics needs.
What happens when I change something?
Edits in Tag Manager are not destructive to historical data. They change how things are handled moving forward (and may cause you headaches if you rename things and forget when you go to do time period comparisons).
An example question I was asked recently:
I am adjusting various triggers based on some new website updates. Will this effectively "erase" the event count of previous tags with the old triggers?
Short answer: nope!
Once an event hits GA4, GTM no longer holds sway over it, it just packages the information that gets sent and processed.
In this example, changing the trigger allows you to adapt/update the event criteria so you can send the same event name into GA4 even if the trigger changes.
How to think about Google Tag Manager:
Tag Manager is a supplementary code base where you can move (most) of your marketing, analytics, and related code to keep your core code base lightweight while giving you, the marketer, more flexibility and control over how your events and code snippets are implemented.
Need a new Meta Pixel event firing for better optimization? It's now just a few clicks away, no developer required.
GTM is an extension of the site code.
GA4 is a destination data is sent to.
Generative AI comes to Google Ads:
advertisers can generate all the assets they need for a campaign by simply providing the URL of a preferred landing page, rather than creating a range of text and image assets individually. From there, advertisers can view and edit AI-populated assets, including both stock and AI-generated images, with a guarantee that Google will never create two identical images, even when given the exact same prompt.
Platforms will increasingly give the levers advertisers are used to pulling to the robots.
We are all creative directors now.
Spirit Halloween runs on memes:
Memes of the Spirit Halloween banner taking over vacant department stores and of fake, hilarious costumes have taken the internet by storm every fall since around 2019.
Instead of shunning the memes, the company has embraced them, letting them be what every company wants — free, viral, grassroots marketing.
Luxury is coming out of lockdown:
Consumers are now shopping IRL for brand quality and prestige, setting up the US luxury retail market to exceed $75 billion in sales by the end of 2023.
Luxury shopping is as much about the experience as it is about the purchase, which means digital has a larger gap to close.
the expansion of luxury retail proves brand experience (even in the form of brick-and-mortar shops) still attracts big spenders.
Physical will go increasingly upscale and experiential (think: The Sphere) as digital eats the rest.
AI/AR/VR-powered customization and experiences will be the next gen of luxury.
The biggest challenge a marketer at a big company faces is the specter of industrial short-term thinking. Going along with the bean counters might be the worst marketing mistake you can make. Beans aren’t the point of the organization, they’re a side effect.
TikTok can get people to spend money in the app, but can they get people to shop?
users sent over $250 million in digital gifts to live-streamers in the app in Q3 alone
I’m still skeptical that The Clock App can pull off an everything app style ecomm takeover in the US (maybe anywhere in the west). Trust and ingrained behavior remain the sticking points for me.
TikTok could overtake Temu, but I think Amazon is safe (at least without the help of antitrust regulation).
So Walmart won Black Friday ads, right?
Refer-a-friend programs can make relationships feel like transactions, which isn’t ideal. Transparency might be the answer:
disclosing the referrer reward in the invitation message—a not yet widely adopted method—can promote referring by making the referring action seem more compatible with communal norms and reducing the experienced psychological barrier. They also document the potential of disclosing the referrer reward on increasing acceptance, conversion, and sales.
Routine is a core tenant of cult brands, this tip from [Arvid](Accessibility for Profit — The Bootstrapped Founder 261 https://www.newsblur.com/newsletters/story/9131573:c3dcaa) is the ritual dream:
Lean into anything that people want to do (and should be doing) daily. Embrace their willingness to create a habit and serve them ways to make it easier.
How many companies have been built on this premise?
I am pro blogging (obviously) in part because I think building a brand on someone else’s platform is a fool’s errand.
The big selling point of having a website or blog is that you own it. You aren’t beholden to any algorithmic whims, just your own.
But for as much as you can roll-your-own to truly control your web presence, you still have to renew your domain regularly. Which feels like a philosophical pretzel problem.
If your website is your digital home, should domain fees be thought of as rent or property taxes?
Especially interested in what @manton, author of Indie Microblogging thinks.
I recently wrote that the current splintering of social media is
maybe time for the rebirth of blogging?
Search may be splintering too, but the current version is [good for blogging](Study: Blogs appear most often in top Google positions https://searchengineland.com/blogs-top-google-positions-study-433630) too.
Blog posts are the most common content type found in the top 5 Google positions
Multiple CTR studies show most organic clicks go to the top 5 positions on Google Search (around 69% to 74%).
20-Trendy-3: The Year of the Splinter 🐀
I've referenced it a few times here and there, but here's my ✨ Trend of 2023: ✨
The Year of the Splinter
;or, The Age of Unbundling
Kyle Mensing
There is blood in the water basically everywhere. The tech titans are suddenly mortal. Animal spirits are running rampant. Entertainment consumption is changing and the strike in Hollywood is messing with a different supply chain. Consumers had savings thanks to Covid stimulus. But then it turned out Covid's longest lasting symptom was supply chain shenanigans, which caused inflation. We're heading toward a recession, or we aren't. Speaking of Covid, the pandemic is "over" but the "new normal" has yet to settle in. We're basically at the center of a Venn diagram of a bunch of overlapping liminal spaces.
Because of this, the playing field is more level than it has been for a while. Add in a generational shift caused by the inevitability of aging, and everything is up for grabs.
The Duopoly is Dead
Google and Meta’s stranglehold on the digital advertising ecosystem has been broken. Not only that, both tech giants have each entered their own existential crisis. One thanks to ChatGPT and its accompanying AI snowball, the other to privacy and its fallout (respectively). (Let’s be real, Google is probably kicking the crisis can down the road on the privacy front. How big a deal that becomes may hinge on how it handles its current crisis.)
Where will all those dollars flow (assuming they aren’t just removed from budgets)? Will 2023 be the year of retail media?
Amazon is on a trend line that will see it overtake Meta for share of spend according to some forecasts (though I think this forecast is wildly underestimating a post-AI Microsoft).
A survey of marketers' platform plans from last holiday season ranked the platforms like so:
- TikTok
- Google & Influencers
- Other social platforms like Snapchat, Pinterest, Twitter and YouTube
But TikTok still hasn't overtaken Meta platforms for ad dollars.
Things are getting interesting in channel land. Actual budget decisions might need to be made.
Search Shards
I think we're at the beginning of the end of Google's stranglehold on search, and it'll take monolithic search as a whole with it.
People are tired of 10 blue links for every search so they're turning to other platforms or specialized, niche engines. AI-powered chat will take some use cases, niche knowledge graphs others. Social search should improve. And one day we'll have personal AI agents that go searching for us—search will just be AIs talking to each other and delivering us an answer (plenty of dystopic sci-fi material there).
Search is now a feature, not a platform. The tools that enable search as a feature are constantly improving.
The most recent development is the DOJ antitrust case against Google. We'll learn some new things and other things will become more common knowledge to the general populous. I think Google's days as a top tech dawg might be numbered.
Social's Siren Song
TikTok shook up the social standbys and That Twitter Thing™ kicked off the clone wars. But that's not the real story, usage is changing.
Kyle Mensing
Posting is now largely done by "creators" and engagement is sharing posts with friends via private messaging channels. No one talks about the social graph anymore, they talk about their discovery engines.
I don't know if large public social networks as a class are done—a failed experiment—or just permanent public posting on them. Either way, it's a time of flux for the social network idea. And maybe time for the rebirth of blogging?
Societal Lockstep
This specific splinter bundles up many others.
It started with social media echo amplification and accelerated during the Trump campaign. It intensified under Covid, as different regions and groups experienced/approached it differently. It then continued through the inflationary rollercoaster and the recession-like-but-not-quite phase we're in now.
The monoculture is dead and the internet allows sub-cultures and splinters to grow larger than ever before via connection at scale.
Society more resembles an aspen stand or mushroom colony now. We are all connected and impact each other, but do so as a network. There is no societal organism, there are organisms in society.
On a global scale, the internet is splintering. This instance is the digital manifestation of various idealogical standoffs.
Kyle MensingThe West v China on political grounds: democracy v authoritarianism (a tension that certainly isn't limited to the Cold War Pt. II).
But within The West there are divides, like America v EU.
Digitally speaking, the US appears to be placing companies first (perhaps to the detriment of people), while the EU is placing people first (perhaps to the detriment of companies).
Is the "World Wide Web" dying as a true global network?
Metatrend: Splinter & Sow
I'm thinking more and more of this phase as the composting of the modern internet. Things are breaking down, it all smells a bit weird, but it's creating a rich soil for something new to grow.
As marketers, the best way to handle this splintering is to stay flexible and experiment widely. Now is not the time to get dogmatic about tactics, but to develop strong strategic chops that can be applied across channels and platforms, regardless of which ones they might be.
In Conclusion
In 2023, the future will start to appear. The current crop of tech giants are faltering and a new generation of youths are stepping into the cultural crosshairs (does that mean us millennials can finally take a breather?). The next wave of go to ad platforms (types/formats) and must have marketing tactics may start to coalesce (the true gift of BFCM for marketers).
The timing is right, it might just come down to how the market fares. I don’t think The Metaverse™ and VR are those things yet, nor will one calendar year change that dramatically. AR on the other hand…
Who knew?!
Intrusive ads that disrupt consumers’ browsing experiences or shopping journeys risk lower engagement and, crucially, lost conversion and sales opportunities
Most ads are interruptions, but they don’t have to be bad ones.
Steal This: Easy VIP Experience
This is a third hand anecdote, but the idea is brilliant.
There is a doctor's office at Johns Hopkins that is very difficult to get an appointment at, but if you call to schedule one you're offered one the same day.
I don't know the exact wording, but the gist of the communication isn't "we're booked up for 3 months, but how does your calendar look on this day you can't possibly have thought about yet." The experience is "we can see you now."
Think about how different those two feel to the customer.
One makes them feel like an inconvenience. Like they're bothering you by trying to schedule an appointment.
The other makes them feel important. Like they know people. Like they have connections and are getting special treatment.
How can Johns Hopkins do this?
They have data. Only 4% of people take the same day appointment.
Sometimes asking a question where you know the answer is "no" is worth it.
This isn’t surprising:
November is when that spend really starts to play out, though, with 53% of respondents saying that’s when they’ll exhaust most of their holiday budget.
That spend is likely from ecommerce brands or retailers that make their quarter during Black Friday. For those brands, December is about riding the fumes and saving cash for a post-Christmas push.
Ad spend can be a leading economic indicator, so this is good news:
Concerns about a recession or inflation seem to be fading among the marketers surveyed, with 86% saying they plan to spend at least as much on holiday ads this year as they did last.
Google is going Apple and hiding IP addresses.
The feature is called IP Protection (formerly Gnatcatcher, which sounds cooler, tbh), and it will limit IP tracking by third parties.
This “could mean that the IP address is not the viable post-cookie alternative some thought it might be.”
I don’t know why it was ever considered a viable alternative in the current privacy environment. Part of the reason GA4 dropped IP addresses was to conform with privacy regulations.
3rd party IP access is going the way of 3rd party cookies, not replacing them.
Sephora with a timely example of the good and bad of sales.
First the good, they’ve created routines and anticipations around their sales because they only do 2 a year. Constant sales can devalue brand perception. This approach maintains luxury standing while making the sale feel like a treat for customers vs. a money grab.
The bad, you gotta be prepared. General infrastructure stability seems like an internet-wide issue right now, but if you know this is one of your biggest moments you need to provide a good experience. It’s TSwift Ticketmaster all over again.