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.
😬
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.
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