🗞️ Links & Thinks from 2023.02.14
Speedbump for Livestream Shopping
There’s a lot of hype around livestream shopping (again), but I’m still skeptical. Mostly because of headlines like this:
Instagram is killing live shopping in March, will focus on ads instead
Meta needs engagement so I can’t see them pulling the plug on something keeping users in the app.
TikTok is also looking elsewhere to find growth:
Amid stalling growth in the US, the shortform video app is working on new initiatives to boost creation
Changing Topics
Google is reworking Topics to appease regulators. Topic categories are now assigned at the page level instead of at the domain level. This should make it a contextual advertising powerhouse, but it could also overly favor large publishers.
I’m interested to see if Google goes further down this path as it’s the next few steps that could make it really interesting. I also think this new crop of ChatGPT-style AI models could make contextual targeting really interesting in the near future.
Just The Headline
Four top euro carriers will use phone numbers to target ads and annoy Google & Facebook