11 Nov November 11, 2022 Newsletter
This week’s newsletter includes two articles that seemingly contradict each other: First, a great article on the growth of digital marketing over the past two years (up to 71% and growing!). Second, the unfortunate layoff of 11,000 META (Facebook) employees. While both are true, the rationale behind each is different.
Let’s first tackle the continued growth in “digital” marketing strategy. Tactics such as social, search, display, streaming audio, and CTV/OTT are available on more platforms than ever and will continue to evolve. This includes every device we touch: phones, computers/laptops, personal devices (Alexa, Google Home), TVs, billboards, and yes even your car as delivery methods.
Media companies are offering more digital media than ever and will continue to do so as technology becomes even that much “smarter.”
So, what happened with Facebook, and why the layoffs? As someone who has seen the rise and fall of many “platforms,” META is another example of a media company distracted by the shiny new objects CNBC-Meta plans to lose even more money building the metaverse while its ads business shrinks vs reinvesting into their products. For years, META relied too heavily on invasive advertising technologies and as a result, restrictions from Apple (Apple’s iOS Updates Hurts Facebook Ad Business) and legislatures everywhere are limiting their targeting abilities further.
What does this mean for your media investments? Our recommendation is to keep a close watch on the performance of each media and always be open to testing. Ad tech is evolving faster than ever.
Should you stop advertising on Facebook? Short answer is no! Facebook still works but now requires more monitoring of your campaigns. Small tweaks and FB/Instagram is still a powerful platform.
Have questions? Feel free to reach out, we love talking tech!
My best,
Ron
President and Founder, Engage Media
To learn about how Engage Media can help your business, please visit www.engagemedia.com or email us at info@engagemedia.com. Our team of professionals is ready to assist you with all your digital and traditional media needs.
News to know
6 data collection tactics for marketing in the cookieless future
When customers are more involved in the process, your marketing automation program will benefit from better data.
The end of the third-party cookie doesn’t have to be the end of getting good, useful data. Here are six tactics marketers can use with first-party and zero-party data to keep marketing automation programs working.
Dig deeper: Marketers should care about consumer privacy First-party vs. third-party data
The first thing to know is that first-party cookies, placed in a limited number of digital touchpoints, can be an important source of data and address privacy concerns.
“Currently third-party cookies are blocked by most major browsers, and they’re actually coming to the end of their lifespan by the end of 2022, moving into 2023, as Google has just recently announced that it will no longer be providing third-party cookie support for their Chrome web browsers,” said Jim Thao, marketing automation manager for Lively Inc., at The MarTech Conference.
Source: MarTech
Digital will account for 71.8% of US media ad spend this year, up 16 percentage points from 2019—and growing
Following a turbulent third quarter in advertising, our updated forecast shows it’s not all bad news. Digital ad spending will reach $248.72 billion in the US this year, up 12.5% over 2021, according to our forecast updated at the end of October. Spend grew by 37.2% last year, but slowed significantly in 2022 as it normalized from pandemic growth.
Our crystal ball: In 2026, digital ad spending will reach $385.47 billion and make up 80.9% of total media ad spend.
Here’s how digital ad spend breaks down:
Digital deep dive: Within total media spend, ad dollars are flowing to digital. In 2019, digital accounted for 55.6% of total US media ad spend. This year, it will account for 71.8%.
Source: Insider Intelligence | eMarketer
What to Know About the Push to Make Daylight Saving Time Permanent
Early Sunday morning at 2 a.m., clocks across the world moved back one hour to mark the end of Daylight Saving Time in a practice with origins that dates back more than a century.
Daylight Saving Time, which adjusts time to make better use of the sunlight, lasts from March to November. For the remaining four months of the year, the United States goes by Standard Time.
Many hold the opinion that the U.S. needs to adopt either Standard Time (ST) or Daylight Saving Time (DST) year-round.
There has been a bipartisan push to make Daylight Saving Time permanent in the U.S. among legislators, with many citing increased health and financial benefits if the bi-annual clock change didn’t happen.
Source: MSN
5 TikTok ad solutions to drive discovery, inspiration and purchases during the holiday season
We forecast that total retail holiday sales will total $1.297 trillion this year. Brands looking for a piece of the pie need to maximize their social media presence, which, of course, includes TikTok.
Why? Here’s what TikTok brings to the table, according to “TikTok’s 2022 Holiday Guide”:
Increased discoverability: Half of TikTok users turn to the platform to celebrate a winter holiday or shopping event, according to TikTok Marketing Science US Holiday Purchasing Research 2022, conducted by Material.
1 in 2 TikTok users turn to the platform to research a new product or brand, while the same number have discovered a new brand or product on the platform.
Source: Insider Intelligence | eMarketer
Hour and date dimensions now available in GA4
The new dimensions will be available across both Google Analytics 4 explorations and reporting customization.
Google has just added hour and date dimensions for Google Analytics 4.
A dimension is an attribute of your data. It describes your data and it’s usually text as opposed to numbers. An example of a dimension is Event name, which shows the name of an event that someone triggers on your website or application (such as “click”).
The new dimensions. An explanation of the new dimensions is below: Hour is the hour when an event was collected.
Nth hour is the number of hours since the start of a specified date range.
Date + hour is the date and hour when an event was collected.
Week is the week of the event, a two-digit number from 01 to 53. Each week starts on Sunday, and January 1st is always in Week 1.
Month is the month of the event, a two-digit integer from 01 to 12.
Source: Search Engine Land
How to Leverage Mobility Data to Bring Consumers Back In-Store
Rising inflation is changing the way consumers shop and decreasing the number of trips people make to brick-and-mortar stores. While the change in behavior could be a stumbling block for some specialty retailers, it’s also providing brands with an opportunity to more effectively leverage mobility data to target consumers in ways that weren’t possible prior to the pandemic.
Rather than pulling back on ad spending as consumers begin shifting their shopping behavior and increasing their visits to discount stores, marketing insiders say now is the time for retail brands to go all- in on location-targeted advertising.
“Today, retailers are using visitation data to enable location-targeted ads, which means they’re limited to targeting consumers who are either already passing by or inside of their store,” says Fred Dimesa, head of aggregated data and advertising product lines at Arity, a firm that specializes in mobility data and behavioral insights. “Mobility data takes that a step further.”
Source: Street Fight
The Drum readers’ favorite brand mascot: Inside the Duolingo owl’s TikTok success
Duo the owl is much more than a cute cartoon owl that Duolingo users encounter while using the app – he’s a complex character with a huge social media following. Here’s a glimpse into how the language education app leaned into a meme trend to become a hit on TikTok.
Many people know the cute, cartoon face of Duo the owl from the popular language education app Duolingo. But on social media, he’s a six-foot-tall mascot with a fully-fledged personality – and he’s been helping the brand win millions of followers.
In a recent poll of The Drum readers, Duo was selected as the best brand mascot of all time. He also scored a top spot (tying for tenth place with the Cinnamon Toast Crunch Cinnamojis) in a similar recent survey from YouGov. That’s fairly incredible, considering Duolingo isn’t known for running high-budget Super Bowl ads. But it makes sense when you look at the brand’s social media following: its official TikTok account currently has a little under 5 million followers.
Source: The Drum
You’re Going To Have To Pay To Use Some Fancy Colors In Photoshop Now
Due to a change in how Adobe licenses Pantone colors, old PSD files could start being filled in black It’s very likely you don’t give a great deal of thought to where the digital colors you use originally came from. Nor, probably, have you wondered who might “own” a particular color, when you picked it when creating something in Photoshop. But a lot of people are about to give this a huge amount of their attention, as their collection of PSD files gets filled with unwanted black, due to a licensing change between Adobe and Pantone.
As of now, widely used Adobe apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign will no longer support Pantone-owned colors for free, and those wishing for those colors to appear in their saved files will need to pay for a separate license. And this is real life.
Pantone has been around since the 1950s, the New Jersey company originally refining printing inks, then later inventing the Pantone Color Matching System, used worldwide by designers to ensure a creation’s color will be exactly as desired, no matter where or how it’s manufactured. So, of course in becoming the industry-standard for color-matching, the company naturally asserts ownership of all its 2,161 hues, defending its intellectual property and preventing its unlicensed use. This extends as far as preventing others from creating “Pantone-compatible” color systems. Or, to put it another way, they claim to own colors.
Source: Kotaku
Why your brand needs to invest in TikTok in 5 charts
While other platforms are seeing declines in time spent, TikTok is growing. US adults will spend 18.6% of their social media time on TikTok in 2024, growing massively from 2019’s 4.5%. That ties TikTok with Instagram and narrows the gap with leader Facebook.
Among US users, TikTok will beat YouTube this year for time spent per day—and all other social platforms along the way.
Some 50% of US Gen Zers and 38% of adults overall buy via social media. Twelve percent of Gen Zers and millennials have made a purchase on TikTok. That’s behind leaders Facebook and Instagram, but TikTok’s social buyers will grow in the next few years.
Source: Insider Intelligence | eMarketer
Meta laying off 11,000 as tech industry slashes jobs
Facebook’s parent company is facing severe threats to its business model, including competition for users and advertising dollars from TikTok
Facebook parent company Meta plans to cut more than 11,000 jobs, or 13 percent of its workforce, as it seeks to scale back expenses and transform its business in a more competitive digital advertising market.
The social media giant also will cut discretionary spending and extend its hiring freeze through March in a bid to become “leaner and more efficient,” Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a Wednesday statement.
He called the layoffs “some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history” and noted that all employees would soon get an email “letting you know what this layoff means for you.”
Zuckerberg said the company would refocus on priorities such as its advertising business and elevating content from viral creators over friends and family, a strategy that has made the short-form video app TikTok so popular.
Source: Washington Post
Source: TechCrunch
How to win the internet, and win consumers along the way
“Social is everything we do. It’s the connective tissue.” That was the message from Meghan Myszkowski, global head of social media for Xbox and Game Pass, at Advertising Week New York. But social media is constantly changing, making brand relevance often hard to achieve. Here’s what brands should keep in mind.
Be aware of your audience
Social approaches must be tailored to platforms. Facebook’s users skew older: 62.9% are 35 and older, while on TikTok just 30.8% are. Facebook social strategy should look different from TikTok, which should look different from Twitter.
For Hot Pockets, a shift in targeting paid off. “We made a concerted effort to really focus on the younger side of the business,” shifting away from a previous focus on parents, said brand marketing manager at Nestlé Bryan Waddell.
Source: Insider Intelligence | eMarketer
Ad Council Targets Mental Health Crisis In Its Largest Initiative Ever
The Ad Council has announced the largest initiative in its 80-year history: a planned $65 million seven- year Mental Health Initiative, not including the value of donated media.
That would surpass the $50+ million raised for the Council’s COVID-19 Vaccine Education Initiative, which the Council says has reached 75% of all Americans eligible to be vaccinated since launching in February 2021.
The Huntsman Mental Health Institute at the University of Utah has already committed $15 million to the new initiative, which the Ad Council said aims to “change social norms, reduce stigma around mental health and encourage people to take a proactive approach to their mental health issues.”
Source: MediaPost
Channel groups: Getting started with Google Analytics 4
Channel groups are rules-based definitions of website’s traffic sources that let you monitor the performance of those sources.
Channel groups are rule-based definitions of your website’s traffic sources that let you monitor the performance of all of the channels sending traffic to your website.
“Default channel grouping is one of those reports that everybody loves and kind of becomes that first
individualized report to use.” says Harris. “Because it wouldn’t be Google without making new things available in these metrics, there are now going to be both user related reports and traffic related reports.”
This is an important distinction and one you have to keep in mind. This is really and truly about using the same type of metric throughout your entire report analysis work that you’re doing.
Source: MarTech
Instagram is updating its web interface to take advantage of large screens
If you have used Instagram on your desktop system, you know that it looks like a badly made copy of its mobile website. The company is now introducing a refreshed design that takes advantage of large screens.
Instagram’s head Adam Mosseri made this announcement through a post on Tuesday along with a feature that enables professional accounts to schedule their posts.
“We know a lot of people use the web to multitask and we wanted to make sure Instagram was as great an experience as possible online,” he said. He added this new design is cleaner, faster and easier to use.
Source: TechCrunch
Walmart Taps ‘Office Space’ Cast for Black Friday on Mondays Ads — Don’t Miss These Hot Deals
If you get a case of the Mondays this month, Walmart has something to cheer you up: special “Black Friday Deals for Days” events that begin each Monday in November. And to help spread the word, the retail giant has enlisted a couple of cast members from the 1999 cult comedy classic “Office Space” for a new ad campaign.
Actors Gary Cole and Ajay Naidu will take part in the ad campaign, Variety reported. Cole played the passive-aggressive corporate manager Bill Lumbergh (he of the infamous TPS reports) in “Office Space,” while Naidu played embittered tech worker Samir Nagheenanajar. As Variety noted, even though their employer — the fictional Initech — burned to the ground at the end of the movie, Lumbergh and Samir are back on the job in the Walmart ads. Iconic singer Michael Bolton cheekily replaces the “Office Space” character of the same name in the Walmart ad, and Diedrich Bader reprises his role as the laid-back Lawrence.
Source: Yahoo Finance
How trends help women break through on TikTok
A look at how TikTok is making it easier for women to be seen and heard online. Featuring insights from Creator @lyllistapper.
POV: You’re a female creator trying to make digital content in 2022 and it’s harder than ever to break through. The hurdles you face as a woman IRL exist online, too, and make it harder to be seen and connect with followers. It feels like unless you’re white, wealthy, young, and in a straight-sized body, you’re out of luck. What do you do?
If you ask creator Lylli Stapper, your best is to get on TikTok. Before downloading the app in 2020, she was active on other platforms, making content that accommodated the “societal norms and beauty standards” placed on her. But when she joined TikTok, she discovered a new realm of possibilities for reaching viewers and expressing herself.
Source: Ads TikTok
25 tips to optimize your content for people and search engines
Content optimization today should combine a user-first approach with a good grounding in SEO. Here’s how to get the right balance.
Google’s helpful content update has finished rolling out, and while it didn’t create the impact many anticipated, it’s certainly turned our attention to reviewing and improving content.
What we have determined is that Google is making more steps toward serving content written for people, by people. With this in mind, optimizing content for both people and search engines should be possible. Here are my top tips for enhancing your content for better search results and happy readers.
Source: Search Engine Land
Audience Deep Dive: A Look at Older Adult CTV Usage
Move over Gen Zs, Millennials and Gen Xers—the older generations are using Connected TV in large numbers.
Millennials may have recently become the largest living generation¹, but with ~54M people 65 years or older living in the U.S.², older adult customer segments shouldn’t be overlooked.
They might not be up to date on the newest social media or pop culture trends, however, the senior generations are using Connected TV (CTV) in force. In fact, nearly half of U.S. adults aged 65+ are CTV users³.
Older adults aren’t simply consuming content on CTV, they’re contributing significantly to the cord-cutting revolution. In 2021, 20%⁴ of adults 55 years of age or older said that they planned to get rid of their cable subscriptions, up from just 8% the year before.
Source: MNTN Research