Today in Digital Marketing - The Future of Meta Ads: A Single Budget Slider?

Episode Date: July 15, 2022

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Today, why are consumers scared of augmented reality? The sorry state of review replies? Pinterest could be in chaos soon? Is Amazon dropping its own products? And Meta proudly announces that it has invented something that A. already exists and B. you can't touch. It's Friday, July 15th. I'm Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

Yesterday, we told you about a Digiday report that found live stream shopping having a hard time gaining traction in some parts of the world. Today, new numbers show the same kind of consumer hesitancy appears to be happening in the augmented reality shopping space. Research from Forrester shows only one in five American adults are comfortable using content within AR spaces. Younger people, of course, being a little less hesitant. That said, most who have used the tech to try on or test products say it did influence their purchase decision. Quoting RetailDive.com, because of this lack of awareness and adoption, retailers who invest in virtual experiences may want to focus more on community building than immediate revenue results. Other digital capability improvements for things like personalization and store experience might be a higher priority for retailers right now.

Plenty of retailers have been focused on expanding augmented reality try-on features this year, as opposed to virtual reality experiences, which involve headsets. Amazon launched a virtual try-on feature for sneakers in June. Following the release of its new AR tools for its app, Walmart announced it would acquire AR optical tech firm, Memomi, last month, unquote. Some better reporting coming to TikTok ad campaigns in the form of some bolstered sales lift measurement tools.

The company announcing this week they now have a partnership with NC Solutions to provide sales lift numbers based on that company's methodology. Quoting TikTok. The process measures the incremental sales lift of in-person and online purchases after seeing an ad on TikTok. Through partnerships with retailers and machine learning technology, NCS quantifies the effectiveness of advertising campaigns and is used by many of the most trusted brands in the United States. Unquote. TikTok says they did a test run of this with NCS and found that 33 of 36 campaigns drove statistically significant lift, with an average return on ad spend about 2.4 times better than those without the intervention.

If you're interested in incorporating this into your campaigns, for now, you'll need to speak to a human TikTok ad rep. So you've got a bad review on your Google page or Yelp or Facebook or whatever. What should you do about it? Well, if you're like 56% of British businesses, you ignore it. A new study from the marketing agency DAC Group has found that just 44% of UK businesses respond to online reviews at all. They found that automotive companies tend to be the reviews at all. They found that automotive companies tend to be the best at responding.

84% of those businesses do. The news wasn't so good for financial companies with only 37% responding to reviews and they could not find a single supermarket brand that replied. Interestingly, they also measured how many companies use UTM tracking and found that only 42% were. This, says marketingtechnews.com, quote, means that they lack visibility on website performance.

Again, automotive is the category employing UTM most effectively with 75% usage. By comparison, three quarters of food and beverage and 72% of land and property businesses don't use UTM. Those categories lose out on the data insights identifying exactly where searches are conducted and what marketing channels are most successful in driving engagement, unquote. By the way, the DAC Group has a great piece on their blog called Five Ways to Use Bad Reviews to Your Advantage. You'll find it at dacgroup.com slash blog. Could Pinterest be the next company to experience chaos in its stock listing? The activist investor group Elliott Management is reported to have taken a big stake in the company.

It comes as Pinterest tries to bounce back from a surprising decline in users. If that name, Elliott Management, sounds familiar, that's because it's the same firm that bought a $1 billion stake in Twitter, then went to work forcing co-founder Jack Dorsey out. Elliott says it's now the largest investor in Pinterest, with more than 9% of the company's stock being bought up in the past few months. Even more interesting, the Wall Street Journal reports that the investor group has already been in discussions with Pinterest over the past few weeks, though the journal's source would not share exactly what they were discussing. Quoting the journal, it's been a time of turmoil for Pinterest. Several Pinterest executives

departed in recent months, including its head of global business operations and its investor relations chief. Pinterest business grew dramatically during the pandemic, and in February, the company reported its first full-year profit and more than $2 billion in annual revenue. But while revenue grew 18% in the quarter that ended in March from a year earlier, global active monthly users fell 9%. And the company posted a net loss of $5 million as COVID restrictions eased and people began spending more time offline, unquote. Shares in Pinterest are down about 50% year to date. That is worse than the Nasdaq Composite Index, which has fallen by about 30%. Last year, PayPal was in talks to buy Pinterest,

but the deal stalled when one of PayPal's major shareholders got cold feet. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Some potentially good news if you have something that Amazon has cloned and recreated under its private label brands. The company is reported to be cutting its private label brands. The company is reported to be cutting back on those items. The Wall Street Journal says Amazon executives have

ordered the private label team to reduce how many items they reorder. It's not entirely clear whether this is about disappointing sales or the increased level of antitrust scrutiny the company is facing. In fact, the Journal reports Amazon's even thought about just getting out of the line entirely, something that Amazon denies. They gave a statement to RetailDive.com saying, quote, we never seriously considered closing our private label business and we continue to invest in this area just as our many retail competitors have done for decades and continue to do today, unquote. It is true that this is nothing new. Walmart has its private label brand called Great Value.

Target has one. The Canadian chain Loblaws has one called President's Choice. But for some reason, Amazon's has become the target of more attention, with American lawmakers particularly interested in the role Amazon's ad platform might play in helping it get an unfair advantage. And finally, there's this cool bit of web software out there. Basically, you type in any scene description, like a horse using social media, and it will spit out AI-generated images that match that. It's quite fun to play with. I highly recommend the search term

Donald Trump dances with a banana. The software is called the Dal-E project. I'm sure you've heard of it by now. Well, enter Meta, stage left. Proving the case it has no original ideas anymore, Meta has copied Dal-E for its own uses. They call it the Make-A-Scene system. They even had the audacity in a news release today to call the technology empowering.

But I'll give them this. They have improved it a little. Quoting the company, prior image-generating AI systems typically used text descriptions as input, but the results could be difficult to predict. For example, the text image, a painting of a zebra riding a bike, might not reflect exactly what you imagined. The bicycle might be facing sideways, or the zebra could be too large or small. This model focuses on learning key aspects of the imagery that are more likely to be important to the creator, like objects or animals, unquote. For now, despite the breathless news release announcing it, the project is not actually available to the public.

Here's what I'm worried about. How much longer before Meta's ad platform just stops accepting image uploads entirely, and instead will render an AI-generated image based on text you provide? No, wait, actually, you won't even be able to provide text. It'll check your website and just pluck off whatever it finds there. Soon, I predict there will be but one option available in setting up a meta ads campaign, your budget. And right beside it, a little pop-up dialogue helper reading, this looks a little low. Have you tried increasing your budget? Steph is back from holidays next week, which is great because it is clear I have forgotten how to do any of this.

There's lots of stuff that happens with each day's show. We archive the transcript. We log the music rights, send the newsletter, schedule two versions of each podcast show. Stuff I used to know how to do, but holy, you get away from it for like a couple of months and you lose like all that muscle memory. You know what I mean? So I am glad that she will be back. And judging from the reduced quality of the last two weeks of scripts, I expect you will

be too. Today in Digital Marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Sunamic First Nation on Vancouver Island. Our associate producer is Steph Gunn, podcast coordinator Sarah Guild, podcast music licensing by Source Audio, ad coordination by Red Circle, and not many people know this, but our theme composer, Mark Blevins, has one of the world's largest collections of retro luxury cars. It's true. He's been spending a lot more time lately in his pink Cadillac crushed velvet seats, riding in the back, oozing down the street, waving to the the girls. Peeling out of sight.

Spending all his money on a Saturday night. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend, friends. I'll see you on Monday. Outro Music