Meta
- Trying to inch their way to regulatory approval
- Hoping transparency = user approval (Threads has embraced ActivityPub, maybe more openness is the future)
- Improving AI + increasing privacy makes the secret sauce less secret, so no need to act super sketchy (thought plenty see this as sketchy)
- Some forthcoming platform play
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Once you’re a large, publically-traded, profit-generating machine, the genie ain’t going back in the bottle. I doubt the unit economics work out for a monthly subscription amount users are cool with replacing the potential ad revenue. Think about how much more money these companies make compared to Spotify or Netflix (the money only matters because stock markets).
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They don’t believe users will actually enjoy a non-personalized, data-powered experience more.
- Backgrounds for product images
- Magic crops to stretch one asset across Meta’s many aspect ratios
- Text variations
Rumor has it the TikTok Shop team is 6 people strong.
More X than Meta.
The more I hear about TTS, the less I want any part of it.
Meta’s big new announcement is…browser history?
Facebook recently rolled out a new “Link History” setting that creates a special repository of all the links you click on in the Facebook mobile app.
A few (non-exclusionary) guesses why:
via Gizmodo
I knew Google paid Apple a lot for default search engine status, but seeing it put this way was still crazy:
Google pays Apple Inc. 36% of the revenue it earns from search advertising made through the Safari browser
This is why everyone (Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI) wants a hardware platform. They want to own the access point, because value accrues there.
Defaults are powerful. And the device can set the defaults.
An anecdote via Andrew Foxwell on Today in Digital Marketing(https://todayindigital.com/premium/):
A company is spending $300k / month on Meta ads and it’s all being spent on 2 Advantage+ Shopping campaigns.
Meta (& Google) is an AI platform.
(Still may want to curate your placements)
Instagram is a great illustration of the splintering of social media:
users now “post a lot more to stories, and send a lot more DMs, than they post to Feed”.
main IG feed now becoming more of a discovery platform, in highlighting the best trending, primarily video content, while the social elements shift out of public sight.
original posting has continued to decline. And without that, Meta’s apps lose a significant aspect of their appeal, and their power as connective engagement surfaces.
Meta also gleans major value from interaction, and facilitating participation
Battery tech is one of the developmental fields I’m most interested in, and this news is why:
Swedish battery-maker Northvolt announced proudly on Tuesday that it had developed a new kind of sodium-ion battery that’s just as efficient as batteries that use precious earth metals like lithium, cobalt, and nickel, but is totally free of them.
The electrification of everything means the batterification of many things. In order for that to be sustainable, we need more than one battery formula. Especially when the current formula is just replacing oil with rare earth metals.
Speaking of consumers wanting experiences and brand created content, Louis Vuitton (& Co) is delivering.
LVMH is building a luxury destination right in the heart of Paris, giving aspiring artisans and curious visitors a place to interact with the 280 skilled trades that power the fashion conglomerate’s 75 brands.
hope is access to artisans and the inner workings of how luxury goods are made will increase appreciation of the goods and inspire some to join the ranks.
Immersive experiential marketing meets talent recruitment. It’s like LinkedIn jumping into the metaverse.
Here’s more on pricing (this is turning into an informal Pricing Week).
Always place your price below the product, not above it.
This approach made the same price feel 9% lower on dental floss and increased sales 35% in a liquor store, in the experimental study.
One of the crucial metaphors ingrained in us as we grow up is:
Down is less and up is more
Metaphors are powerful because they’re essentially the cognitive interface between the brain and the world. Vehicles for experience.
While TikTok tries to make its content and discovery engine an ecommerce platform, Amazon is plugging its ecommerce engine into all the other content and discovery (formerly social media) platforms.
First, Pinterest. Now…
Meta lets Amazon shoppers buy products on Facebook and Instagram without leaving the apps
Google mulled offering paid-for no-logging private Search subscription
I think there are 2 reasons companies like Google and Meta won’t roll out paid ad-free versions:
More ads in the same places
Meta is turning its monetization focus to WhatsApp, including lead gen ads that launch a WhatsApp chat.
Maybe the Reels revenue machine can be refined, but Instagram and Big Blue have few growth avenues. Their ad revenue will grow as long as budgets do. Zuck+co’s messaging apps and Threads are where growth acceleration will happen.
Elsewhere, Fire TVs are about to become ad machines. And you know it will mint the Bezos Boys a fortune. If they don’t ruin the user experience. I’m less confident in that last part these days when it comes to The Everything Company.
What if I told you that
— Jess @ FireTeam 🔥 An agency on fire... (@HireFireTeam) November 2, 2023
Meta's new "feature" which tells you how much you can raise the budget before entering the learning phase (usually by up to 70%) is just a mind game to get you to spend more because the "learning phase" doesn't exist and never has.
Would you believe me?
Tell me more…
The argument, at least from my point of view is that there is no on/off state where an ad is in the learning phase. Meta has conditioned media buyers to accept a certain level of instability for new ads and for budget changes by calling this period "learning phase". But that…
— Jess @ FireTeam 🔥 An agency on fire... (@HireFireTeam) November 2, 2023
I mostly agree with this but it’s a bit over the top (it is on X so guess that’s not a surprise).
Machine learning algorithms have a training stage. A set of training data is used to “re-wire” a model to adapt the outputs. And can be done without overwriting prior states.
This is (partially) why you should wait a week or two before deciding if your campaign is working.
At Meta scale, more data is better. So that learning label is just saying you haven’t hit Meta scale. Your performance may not be optimally optimized but let your data tell you if it’s optimal enough.
I’ve said about Meta:
There really isn’t a company better at monetizing via ads.
Some might be yelling “but what about Google?!”
Big G is good at protecting their position to lock in default behavior and monetizing that way.
testimony in the trial revealed that Google spent a total of $26.3 billion in 2021 to be the default search engine in multiple browsers, phones, and platforms.
The end of Meta is regularly proclaimed, but Google is in a more precarious position.
Massive Meta Minithread
I’ve collected too many tabs of Meta related stuff, so here it all is.
Chat with AI in Messenger
This isn’t surprising, especially given Snap’s success with AI chatbots. The real question is: does Meta know their market? One persona appears based on Blender from Futurama, which feels like a miss for the youth.
Plus, AI Studio to let developers build custom chatbots. AI might make Meta’s messenger dreams for brands a reality…finally. It used to be like setting up a choose-your-own adventure chat.
Meta Posts 23% Growth as Ads Rebound, With Profit More Than Doubling.
There really isn’t a company better at monetizing via ads. I expected the headlines about decreasing spends and worries over ROI would amount to little.
Instagram Makes Reminder Ads Available for Stories Placement.
You know Zuck loves this one: How TikTokers are making tons of money on Facebook, an often overlooked ‘cash cow’ for short video (hint: Facebook boomers have money).
Meta’s adding some new ad optimization tools for the holiday push, including variable campaign budget options, new tools to entice purchase actions, and more direct linkage to buy products from ad displays.
Threads! It’s still a thing! A thing with almost 100 million monthly users (that’s 1/6 of the way to X). And now polls and GIFs (at least on mobile).
And a few tools & things curious marketers might enjoy:
When you optimize for value, we use machine learning to predict how much return on ad spend (ROAS) a person may generate. We then use this prediction to bid for your highest value customers. By bidding more for people who are likely to spend more, you can help ensure you are maximizing the value of conversions for your campaigns.
In R.I.P. Social Media Managers I wrote:
Organic social media for brands is dead. And it has been for a while.
I’m not the only one saying this. A Digiday survey found:
This shift in investment in Facebook and Instagram, along with the decrease in usage and posting frequency on the platforms, is a strong indicator that, overall, agencies are seeing a lack of return on investment when it comes to Meta.
But some might be taking it too far, leaving opportunity for the rest:
Digiday’s surveys also found that far fewer agencies are buying ads on Meta’s platforms this year than last year.
Meta is bringing generative AI to ads with:
The first one is welcome news for any company with white background product shots, those don’t work well on social.
The last one is the AI-indication of an existing feature.
The second one is what I’m most excited about. Anything to streamline asset creation and optimization across placements is very welcome.
Magic crops plus text variation with more aesthetic automatic overlays would be a great next step to make it even easier to advertise across placements.
More social shifting to messaging as Meta starts testing broadcast channels on Facebook, following the features success on other platforms.
Distribution of social content by users is increasingly moving to private channels.
Everything old is new again, which is why Media Mix Modeling is the new attribution.
measurement has been so hampered by recently enacted privacy restrictions that Meta, Google and Amazon are finding that any measurement tool is better than not demonstrating attribution at all.
More ads in more places: the metaverse (but not the Meta version)
[Roblox has] made a notable hire [from Meta] in its partnerships division, a move that comes as it gets ready to open up its new advertising network more broadly and looks to get more brands creating virtual experiences.
Snapchat+ brings in almost $20M a month for the AR/camera/messaging platform.
Meta may offer an ad-free subscription for EU-users to satisfy regulators. Same with TikTok (not sure which markets though).
The internet continues to splinter across geopolitical divides and advertising is one of the fulcrum points.