Today in Digital Marketing - It's Temu's World. We Just Advertise In It.

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Starting point is 00:01:19 I'm Todd Maffin. That's all ahead today in a shorter than usual episode of Today in Digital Marketing. It's been a lot of profanity out there lately in DTC social media. I mean, there often is. Between Meta's volatile performance and marketing tools like cookies being pulled, there's a lot to complain about. But I don't think I've seen as much anger as I've seen in the last week or two, and it's all because of Timu. Timu, the e-commerce giant that sells extremely discounted products, is chewing up a lot of ad inventory. And in an auction like the ad platforms are, increased competition means higher prices. For whatever reason, most of the complaining seems to be about Meta's prices, and people checking the ads library are finding Timu deploying thousands of campaigns each week. Adweek has a great piece about all this today, in case you too are seeing higher-than-usual CPAs.

Starting point is 00:02:17 Quoting their piece, quote, Timu's strategic takeover of advertising space on Meta, Google, and other platforms is impossible to ignore. Reports and industry pros suggest an almost audacious investment from the Chinese e-commerce newcomer, with figures rumored around the $2 billion mark in 2023 alone. This colossal spend aims at carving a substantial footprint in the U.S. retail space. But the implications, challenges, and outcomes of such a move truly impact media buyers every day, unquote. Timu became one of Meta's top advertisers last year. The company is expected to reach more than $6 billion in revenue this year.

Starting point is 00:02:59 The piece also quotes DTC marketer David Herman as saying, quote, For 2024, on top of Timu and Sheehan, we have a presidential election coming. If we think things are high now, it may even go higher. Platforms like Timu come along every so often. Wish was the first. Timu is the first company, to my knowledge, to be spending this aggressively. However, is Meta still able to work for the majority of advertisers as a profitable choice of traffic?

Starting point is 00:03:28 I believe so, but it's not easy. And I feel for those in direct competition with a site like Timu. So that's why media buyers are struggling with the deluge of e-commerce ads. What about consumers? They too say they're feeling it. And one area they're most certainly not appreciative of it is TikTok.

Starting point is 00:03:52 American TikTok users in particular have been flooded with ads for products in TikTok shop. Other countries too. And that's affecting the business of influencers on the app. Business Insider today published an interesting piece about creators' frustration with this trend and their fellow influencers who are all too happy to use their feed to sell products. Quoting from the piece, quote, Manrika Kaira said TikTok used to be a fun place to be

Starting point is 00:04:17 with trends, dynamic discussions with other creators and hilarious jokes, but it's morphed into a pseudo-shopping channel, she said. Quote, I'm seeing some of my favorite creators promoting products that they don't know work or they know don't do what you are saying they do, she said. Kyra's criticism mirrors the feelings of many Gen Zers who are growing tired of seeing relentless ads on their social media feeds, unquote. The piece notes that while the cost of living has put financial pressure on people, still

Starting point is 00:04:47 retail sales went up last month, and that's despite prices going higher than the U.S.'s inflation target of 2%. The push to sell and sell has actually spawned a new kind of influencer, the de-influencer, a group of creators who tell their users to stop buying. Again, quoting from the Business Insider piece, quote, Samantha Zink, the founder and CEO of the talent management agency Zink Talent, told Business Influencer, the influencer industry has changed massively since it began in the early 2000s. Back then, it was more about passion than profit, she said, while now content creator is a fully fledged career with commissions and subscriptions. Quote, this shift has made influencer engagements seem less special because what was once a hobby or passion project is now a necessity to earn a living.

Starting point is 00:05:38 Influencers, some of whom are supporting families, must engage in brand collaborations to sustain themselves, unquote. And finally, see, I told you it was a short episode today. A strange bug or hack or sabotage or something affected Microsoft's corporate email servers last week in the funniest way possible. Microsoft's VP for Bing, Michael Schechter, said he checked his email one morning last week in the funniest way possible. Microsoft's VP for Bing, Michael Schechter, said he checked his email one morning last week and found a huge number of them waiting for him. His first thought? Oh, God, something bad has happened. And who'd blame him for thinking that? Hundreds of people in the company were also copied on the email threads.

Starting point is 00:06:21 Turns out, someone accidentally managed to add everyone named Mike or Michael across the entire company to a group email thread. So this being the world of AI, Michael Schechter ran all the threads in that group alias through Microsoft's co-pilot AI, and it summarized it like this. Many Michaels and Mikes introduced themselves, made jokes and expressed amusement at being part of the group. Some members suggested renaming it to Mike Rosoft. The purpose of the group remains unclear, but members are enjoying the opportunity to connect with each other.

Starting point is 00:06:56 Some members expressed concerns that the group might be a trap or that they might be hunted for sport. Unquote. Kind of reminds me back in, I don't know, the early 2000s, I was the national tech columnist for CBC,

Starting point is 00:07:17 which was Canada's public broadcaster. And at the time, CBC used GroupWise, which if you've never heard of it, I don't blame you. It was invented in the 1700s, basically. It was like a group calendar and email system. But one of the things that they had in this GroupWise was you could create groups that lived in your email folder. So basically, you would create a group and share it with a bunch of your colleagues. And it was a shared email folder that people could, you know,

Starting point is 00:07:45 kind of like a Usenet group back in the day. Anyway, so I created one, right? Because I was a tech columnist. I was comfortable with technology. I saw that it was possible. So I created a thing called the buy and sell for everyone in BC, everyone in my province. I thought, you know, why go to Facebook marketplace or whatever? Why don't we just sell and buy things among trusted colleagues? And the problem with GroupWise is at the time, it would send out, whenever you created a group like this, it would send a separate email to everyone in the group saying, Todd Maffin has created a folder in your email account. It wasn't very descriptive or accurate in its terminology.

Starting point is 00:08:22 So needless to say, a whole bunch of people thought that I was in their email somehow. They thought that because most of the people there to be charitable were not particularly technologically savvy. So, I thought, okay, I'm just going to...

Starting point is 00:08:36 And IT even called and said, why are you doing... I actually got in trouble for this. Like, why are you creating folders? I'm like, well, dude, just disable the ability if you don't want us doing that. Like I said,

Starting point is 00:08:44 they thought no one would. So, they said, could you just delete it, please? Like, like, well, dude, it's like just disable the ability if you don't want us doing that. Like I said, I thought no one would. So they said, could you just delete it, please? Like take it out. So I did. So I deleted the folder. Well, guess what GroupWise does when you delete a shared folder is it sends an even more vague email out

Starting point is 00:08:59 to everybody who was attached to that. And all it says is something like, Todd Maffin has deleted a folder from your email so my office was underground most of the studios in the Vancouver CBC building were at the time were underground and I could hear footsteps like a few dozen people it sounded like they're coming down the stairsdum-dum-dum-dum-dum, coming down the stairs. Why are you deleting my emails? Anyway, that was the week that I learned that you could buy from Subway Sandwiches, you could buy like a 12-foot sandwich,

Starting point is 00:09:33 like an enormous thing. Maybe it was six feet or eight feet or something like that. Anyway, I know that because I bought that for the IT people because they had to deal with all of that stuff. I felt really bad. Anyway, you may notice that today is a short episode. And last week and for the last couple of weeks on Mondays, we've been experimenting with interviews with marketing scientists. That's probably the direction we're

Starting point is 00:09:54 going. We did a bit of a poll to see whether or not people liked it. It was I think it was unanimous. Everyone seemed to like on Mondays having those interviews with marketing scientists. They're brief, they're short, they're punchy. The reason we don't have one this week is that we just simply didn't have an interesting enough study. Like we get probably a dozen pitches a day from people that want us to interview their agency CEO about how to 10x their sales and just bullshit like that, right? So you will not hear that on the Monday episode. That is a promise from me to you. And you can, you know, if you want to hear those guys, and they're almost all guys,

Starting point is 00:10:30 they're on every other marketing podcast in the world. You listen to us because we're different than what you get elsewhere. So sometimes, hopefully, we are always asking marketing scientists to come on the show and talk to us about their findings. For instance, there's one study that just came out that found whether you use square buttons or round buttons convert better. Like, that's the stuff that really interests me. Sometimes scientists are a little hesitant, for whatever reason, to be on a podcast. They're awfully busy this time of year. They get pitched by a lot of spammy journal stuff.

Starting point is 00:11:02 Like, it's tough reaching them. And I would say probably out of every 10 scientists we reach out to about their studies, maybe two reply and maybe one comes on the show. So rest assured we're trying. And if you know someone or you have a topic that you think would be interesting and that would fit there on Mondays as sort of a long-form interview that lasts about, I don't know, eight or nine minutes, by all means, reach out to us. There's a contact link at the top of the show notes. But that is why. We are, as they would say on the breaking news shows, we are efforting to get more of these people on the show. But our quality bar is pretty high.

Starting point is 00:11:37 So that's why today's episode was a regular one. That's why it was shorter than usual, because Mondays is just not a lot of news for whatever reason. All right. Thanks for listening for today. I'll see you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - It's Temu's World. We Just Advertise In It.

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