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How Will Marketing Survive AI?
Same As We’ve Always Done
It’s not about the platforms or the tactics (or the snake oil).
It’s about meeting the customer:
- where they are
- with a story that resonates
- while putting them at the center
- and sharing the energy you’re made of
In an effort to scale what customers love about your brand using the reach of digital.
Related
Kyle Mensing
Kyle MensingGoogle: where the algorithm’s made up and the prices don’t matter
The search engine “frequently” changes the auctions it uses to sell search ads, increasing the cost of ads and reserve pricing by as much as 5% for the average advertiser.
For some queries, the tech giant may have even raised prices by as much as 10%, according to Google Ad executive, Jerry Dischler at the federal antitrust trial.
Nothing like disclosing your monopolistic behavior while on trial for being a monopoly.
Incentives matter.
How to write good marketing messaging:
Write marketing copy, newsletters, emails, and messages as if to a sister, a best friend, or your mom/dad. And not for a state of the union or to a supreme court judge.
Act like you have a personality and the message was written by and for a human.
(That link also has a nice bit on identifying market gaps.)
What Can We Learn From Socks?
I love this question (paraphrased from the link above):
Is it a good use of marketing to come up with good ways to sell socks or shirts or notebooks or shoes or is that not the best use of people's time? Is there a modern equivalent for past marketing strategies that engendered a sense of belonging?
For 3 reasons:
- It gets deep
- It focuses on serving the customer
- I'm a Seth stan
I love the direction of the answer as well:
12 year old girls don't have a sock problem, they have a belonging problem. They have a culture problem. A problem of status and affiliation.
"Wanna see my socks," is a reasonably inexpensive way for a girl to indulge her desire to be part of something—maybe to one up a friend, have a conversation about fashion—for not a lot of money.
Lots of things in marketing exist not to do what it looks like they do, but to solve our emotional problems.
Not all of us are going to change the world or save lives. The rest of us might just be able to put a smile on someone's face. Produce something with a reduced set of side effects, that has effects that we can point to and say 'I made that.'
Marketing has its place. Not when it manipulates people or hustles them or hypes something. It has its place when it brings tension to the table in service of better.
Are you selling socks or are you selling solutions? (And no, this isn't just about socks.)
From Social Media Today: 3 Important Social Media Trends of Note for 2023
Hot = LinkedIn
Not = X (Twitter)
Still Hot = Instagram
Quick refresher on some brand settings in Google Ads.
If you want to use broad match keywords but also want them to be brand relevant, try brand restrictions:
For Search, brand restrictions limit traffic to serve only on search queries related to specified brands.
If you don’t want to use Performance Max for branded queries but more strictly for prospecting, try brand exclusions:
For Performance Max, brand exclusions provide added control so your campaigns won’t serve for branded queries you want to avoid on Search and Shopping inventory.
It's A Metric! Hook Rate
Are your videos thumb stopping?
Do they have the right hooks?
To find out, calculate the hook rate.
Solve for X
How do you pick a video length?
The easiest answer is that you go with what each platform gives you.
The current standard set by the Interactive Advertising Bureau is 2 seconds (I think this used to be 3 seconds), which makes it a common metric across platforms.
Meta reports on 2 second views (or at least has columns for it), 3 seconds, and ThruPlays—which are views up to 15 seconds (either entire video or 15 seconds if longer). You can optimize for 2 second views or 15 second thruplays.
TikTok reports on 2 second views and 6 second focused views. You optimize for focused views.
Pinterest reports on 2 second and 3 second video views. Bidding based on 2 second views.
LinkedIn reports on 2 second views. Or a click. Whichever comes first.
Google / YouTube counts a view as a duration up to 30 seconds depending on the length of the video. Anything shorter than 30 seconds counts a full play as a view. Clicking the video ad also counts as a view. And viewability is based on 1-2 second views depending on type. Honestly, a bit messy.
I do wish 5 second views was an easy-to-pull metric as this is the cutoff frequently cited by these platforms. Most best practices talk about what you need to include in the first 5 seconds. But they didn't ask me what should be in the reporting view, so oh well.
What's Good?
Every decision maker's favorite question and every analyst's least favorite.
The short answer: it depends!
The best approach would be to develop an internal baseline and then start keeping an eye out for outliers, good and bad.
But let’s say ~25%. Because that’s a nice round number that falls in line with this benchmark analysis.
Get Hooked Up
As with most metrics, hook rate is useless in a vacuum.
Here are a few use cases I can think of to incorporate hook rate into your strategic analytics toolbox:
- Compare hook rates across platforms to identify high performers and those that may need different creative to succeed.
- Compare videos within a platform to see what hooks viewers the most and adjust your (platform-specific) creative strategy accordingly.
- Monitor hook rate for each video over time to determine when effectiveness is waning and creative fatigue may be setting in.
- Determine if there is a correlation between hook rate and business goal performance.
- For A/B testing, of course.
To Review
Hook rate is the number of video views of a certain length divided by the number of impressions that video delivered.
As an example, a client's Meta account has a video with 6,902 3-second views so far this month on 15,970 impressions.
6,902 / 15,970 = 43% hook rate
Go forth and measure!
Syllabus:
- Benchmarking Facebook Video Ad Hook Rates
- What is a Hook Rate? (I find the written explanation of the formula sub-par in this, but it includes more platforms and context if you’re interested.)
- Google: Overview of Viewability and Active View
Google will now use AI to tell you how to optimize your video ads based on their “data-backed creative best practices”.
Basically, it’ll tell you if you didn’t check a box on the list.
That list includes:
- Show your brand off the bat and continue to show it often
- Have the right video length
- Use a voice-over
- Include all 3 aspect ratios
More ABCD compliant attributes coming soon.
There is an expression in Japanese that says that someone who makes things of poor quality is in fact worse than a thief because he doesn’t make things that will last or provide true satisfaction. Athief at least redistributes the wealth of a society.
-Andrew Juniper
The core of good marketing is a providing more value than the customer expects. This is built on a quality product or service.
If the quality is missing, the value doesn’t exist, and everything else is a lie.
Podcasts remain an underrated messaging medium for brands (whether via content or advertising).
Over half of business owners are daily podcast listeners, study shows
Majority of executives would buy from brands promoted on podcasts
More ads in more places: Spotify will let artists pay to appear as homescreen recommendations
Surprised this wasn’t an option already.
Steal This: Your Haters' Words to Your Stans Ears
No matter what you do, you'll have fans and you'll have haters.
As I said previously:
Here is that concept in action.
It's like Subpar Parks, but the brand is owning the negative reviews.
These 1-star experiences are someone else's dream day on the slopes. This is a brilliant way to attract that group, tout the "benefits," warn those that don't want this kind of experience, and have a little fun all at the same time.
Grail level messaging right here.
🚨 Zero-Day Security Vulnerability Found in Chrome, Firefox and Other Browsers
Update your browsers
(HBO) Max is keeping its ad load light compared to other streaming platforms. Why?
buying commercials in a scarce and premium inventory pool has “more value and impact” for the advertiser
Exclusivity and scarcity increase the perceived value of a good. Which typically correlates to higher prices.
The advertisers that can afford it typicall benefit from less competition for recall.
Win-win
Interesting…
Some search results on TikTok now include a snippet and link to Wikipedia.
More heartburn for Google. Or maybe not, since they are going to trial for being a search monopoly.
I still wonder how much of the Google disclosure around how many people use TikTok to search was about setting the stage to argue they aren’t a gatekeeper on the internet.
But another reminder that search is no longer a defendable platform, it’s a feature.
You Can't Please Everyone. It's Science!
I consider this empirical evidence that you can't please everyone.
A bat and a ball cost $110 in total.
The bat costs $100 more than the ball.
How much does the ball cost?
The answer is $5.
Please enter the number 5 in the blank below.
$_____
Remarkably, even when told to consider $5, most people continue to answer $10. Even more shockingly, most people get the answer right when they are explicitly told the answer and instructed to enter it, yet 23% still get the answer wrong!
The authors of the study that uncovered that mindblowing (and hopelessness inducing?) gem concluded that respondents fall into 3 groups:
- Reflective - solve it the first time (they started without all the giving-the-answer-away bits)
- Careless - get it wrong at first, but—after a few nudges in the right direction—catch on and answer correctly
- Hopeless (their word this time) - "are unable or unwilling to compute the correct response, even after being told that 10 is incorrect"
That third category? You can give them the answer and they'll still get it wrong. You literally cannot help them.
For brands, these translate to 3 audience types:
- Stans - your ride or dies, they're all in. Speak to them. Stand for them.
- Casuals - just passing through. Or could enter the ranks of one of the other 2 audiences based on how you nudge.
- Haters - no matter what you do, they won't like you. Gotta have 'em, right?
Focus on #1 to grow from #2 and don't worry about #3.
Want cult status? Attract your stans by doubling down on the reasons you have haters.
🚨 Password-stealing malware targets thousands of Facebook business
Be very careful how you use Messenger.
This is a malware-based cookie stealing attack so it’s serious stuff.
Trends.co is watching the growth of the “joyconomy,” which is basically just people wanting to loosen up a little bit and have some fun.
What’s this mean for your brand? Consider:
- Embracing optimism
- Encouraging people to embrace their inner child
- Be positive, share compliments
- Have fun
Biggest surprise (sarcasm) announcement from Pinterest Presents:
The platform will be launching a new tool powered by generative AI to bring image creation to product catalogs for more engaging pin images.