Today in Digital Marketing - All Your Ads Are Belong to Us

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Thursday, August 1st. Today, Zuckerberg is coming for your ads, and he wants your hands off the steering wheel. The ad business is still growing, just a lot slower than before. TikTok has a new app marketplace for small businesses. And Paging Doctor tweets, emergency, emergency! I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in Digital Marketing. Most of the major ad platforms released their Q2 reports this week. We analyzed them to look at whether ad spend was growing or slowing. And in almost all cases, Q2 was slower in terms of growth.

Starting point is 00:00:38 We'll start with Meta, where investments in those properties rose by 10% year over year in Q2. That's down from 16% in Q1. Facebook, of course, still dominates Meta's ad spend, taking 68%, while Instagram's share increased to 32%. Facebook CPMs actually decreased by 1% year-over-year, partly due to the increasing share of cheaper reels and overlay ads. Instagram's ad spend growth rate cooled to 24% year-over-year in Q2. Over on Google, search advertisers there increased their budgets by 14% year-over-year in Q2. That's down from 17% in the previous quarter. Shopping ads rose by 16%, while text ads saw a drop in click-through rates.

Starting point is 00:01:30 Amazon's sponsored product spending growth decelerated to 8% year-over-year in Q2, but sales generated through sponsored product ads increased by 11%. YouTube was the only major platform that saw an increase in growth last quarter, with 28% year-over-year growth in ad spend. This was driven by a 74% increase in impression volume, despite a 26% decline in average CPMs. Those are the major platforms. As for the smaller ones, Walmart-sponsored products, TikTok, Snapchat, and Pinterest,

Starting point is 00:01:57 all experienced significant growth last quarter, with Walmart leading at 45% year-over-year growth. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the quarterly report to chat about his vision for advertising on the platform in the years ahead, and it's exactly what you think it is. AI is coming for your control. Quoting Zuckerberg, quote, Over the long term, advertisers will basically just be able to tell us a business objective Quoting Zuckerberg, this level of AI control, by definition, remove human oversight from the process. You need only look at how Google's Performance Max started to see this model in action. Limited creative control, and certainly no level of reporting that advertisers had been used to.

Starting point is 00:02:55 It's possible the industry did quietly clap back at the trend, since we've watched several of these AI products trickle some of that control, or at least some reporting back. But Zuckerberg is clear. He sees a future where, again, quoting him, quote, AI will be able to generate creative for advertisers as well, and will be able to personalize it as people see it, unquote. Creative generation is already here, of course, in the form of image enhancements, text options, and so on. But clearly, Zuckerberg sees a much deeper daddy-knows-best approach, an approach not everyone thinks is realistic. Quoting Mike Pruill, vice president and research director at Forrester,

Starting point is 00:03:34 quote, let's be clear that it's a long ways off, if ever, before CMOs will simply hand over the keys to an AI agent that will autonomously create ad creative on their behalf. While Gen-I's technical capabilities meaningfully mature at an accelerated pace, Meta cannot lose sight of the responsibility and the importance of human touch in the advertising process. Unquote. TikTok has launched a new app marketplace for small business users this week.

Starting point is 00:04:06 It features a collection of TikTok tools built by third-party developers that can help small brands maximize their performance in the app. The App Center includes listings of apps in different functional categories. These offer lightweight solutions as opposed to more comprehensive tools that are better suited to big brands. Most of the apps listed offer free trials, so you can try them out before signing up for their service. And finally, X has removed its Mac app from the App Store. The app hadn't really been updated since the rebranding from Twitter last year, but one big benefit to it is that it didn't display any ads. So, of course, it had to die. Instead, the company suggests users just use its iPad app instead. If you're not familiar, newer Macs with Apple Silicon can use iPad apps on their Macs,

Starting point is 00:04:58 although they tend to be less functional than Mac-specific apps. Oh, and one other small note. If you do decide to use the iPad app on your Mac, your X account might be suspended. Yes, people are reporting today that as soon as they logged in using the recommended iOS version, their X account was shut down.

Starting point is 00:05:19 It's probably a bug. We don't know for sure because X doesn't respond to media inquiries anymore. If you still have the old-school Twitter for Mac app on your computer, it does appear you can still use it. Just don't delete it because you'll never be able to get it back again. So I'm kind of in a weird video game funk. I've maxed out pretty much everything I could on Fallout 76. I've got all my legendary perk cards. They're all maxed out. I'm at of in a weird video game funk. I've maxed out pretty much everything I could on Fallout 76. I've got all my legendary perk cards.

Starting point is 00:05:47 They're all maxed out. I'm at max caps. Every one of my five shelters is at max budget. I have the bloodied fixer commando load. Like, I'm at end game. And I sort of haven't really played it in a few days. And I don't know what to play now. You know, I really wanted to play Cities Skylines 2, but it looks like it's

Starting point is 00:06:08 never coming to console. So I don't know. Xbox players, help me out. What should I play? Because I don't think any of us want me to go back to Overwatch. I spent months bitching about my performance. None of us. None of us need that again. And for my

Starting point is 00:06:24 fellow Canadians of a certain age, yes, this is the theme you think it is. A little present from me to you. I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - All Your Ads Are Belong to Us

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