🗞️ Links & Thinks 3.31.23

01 Apr, 2023

Animal Spirits in Ad Markets

As has been discussed in this space previously, ad spending is cooling off as brands brace for a recession. Which could cause the recession they are bracing for?

Ad spending historically has lagged macroeconomic performance, meaning pullbacks weren’t as apparent until contractions had already occurred. That’s changed as the media buying window has shortened, making ad spending potentially more of a “leading indicator” of where the economy is heading, S&P Global Ratings argues

But some good(ish) news:

The research upheld that a recession is likely to take shape in the months ahead but will be “shallower” than previously thought.

Steal These Ideas

Elevar (a great Shopify app) shared a solid framework for conversion rate optimization in its recent email

Identify the biggest drop in your shopping behavior funnel
Find user actions that convert highly but happen infrequently
Hypothesize and experiment
Profit?

Wondering what ads your competitors are running on Google? Soon you may be able to take a peek thanks to the Ads Transparency Center. It doesn’t appear to be live, despite what Big G suggests, but this could be really useful.

Figuring out how much an influencer partnership is worth can be tricky but the new trend toward pay-for-performance could help (just don’t forget the value of branding).

Pay per performance is gaining traction among marketers as the second-most common form of payment used by 56% of marketers. This approach compensates influencers using performance-based metrics, such as sales, clicks, and impressions.

More Ads in More Places

Microsoft’s Bing chatbot is getting more ads / The AI-powered chatbot will start to show more ads — though exactly what those ads look like isn’t final just yet. (Sounds chaotic so far, in the typical new ad platform way, but it’s plenty intriguing.)

“This is how it’s always been done” is an instant red flag for me, so this quote from a piece on ads in audiobooks doesn’t hold much water in my opinion:

“It’s a premium, ad-free, transactional environment, full stop, and so I don’t really see the wisdom of changing that into an ad-supported [space] when there’s already a robust ad-supported ecosystem for audio, millions and millions and millions of people understand that audiobooks are a paid product, and podcasts are ad-supported, so it seems like a very expensive proposition to retrain people.”

rant mode: engaged

Millions and millions and millions of people also understood that you paid a cable provider to pipe a whole bunch of channels into your house instead of paying a channel directly, we all know how that worked out.

Ad supported tiers of other media types are also gaining tractions. You can stare in your rear view and hope the road ahead doesn’t have any curves, or you can be ready to adapt.

Everyone Hates Big Tech

There’s a “new” bill in Congress that essentially caps digital ad transactions at $20B, if a platform goes over that it has to start selling off parts to get back under. It would also prevent these large players from “owning more than one part of the digital ad ecosystem.” I understand what they’re going for with this, but it has unintended consequences written all over it.

Speaking of unintended consequences, turns out the legislation that would allow Joey White House to ban TikTok is a towering stack of them.

The RESTRICT Act contains “insanely broad” language and could lead to other apps or communications services with connections to foreign countries being banned in the U.S.

The bill could have implications not just for social networks, but potentially security tools such as virtual private networks (VPNs) that consumers use to encrypt and route their traffic.

Arkansas sues TikTok, ByteDance and Meta over mental health claims

Meta Is…

Launching "a new set of inventory filters for Facebook and Instagram Feeds, which will provide a simple way for brands to avoid unwanted association with potentially offensive, or otherwise undesirable content.”

“Planning to let European users of Facebook and Instagram opt out of certain highly personalized ads as part of plans to limit the impact of a European Union privacy order”

#headlines