Today in Digital Marketing - What's Behind the Huge Resurgence in Retail Media Spend?

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Starting point is 00:00:28 Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. 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. It is Monday, December 11th. Today, retail media is set for its biggest year ever, and it's all because of cookies.

Starting point is 00:01:09 Now you can tell how much traffic your site's getting from threads, the ad market is up but only on a technicality, and we have the winner of the worst offer code of the year. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. A big jump in the number of brands planning to spend on retail media. Digiday.com asked about 100 brand marketers if they planned to put even a small portion of their Q3 marketing budgets with Amazon. About 55% said they would. To put that in perspective, that figure was just 15% in Q1 of this year. Which is a pretty crazy difference, seemingly.

Starting point is 00:01:51 Julia Tavis is the deputy managing editor at Digiday and author of the study. I spoke with her this afternoon. But throughout 2022, about 40% of brands were investing at least a very small portion of their marketing budgets on Amazon before that percentage fell off at the beginning of 2023. So it's actually seemingly a renewed interest in marketing on Amazon, which I find very interesting because to me, it looks like a potential indicator that, you know, retail advertising could be setting itself up for a really big year in 2024. Yeah, it's certainly been the quiet story, I think, this year that the retail media sector, Amazon, Walmart, Target, and so on, those platforms are going to see huge growth next year. Why do you think that is? I personally think it's coming

Starting point is 00:02:40 from the seemingly actual real this time and of the third party cookie. You know, I think whether we're talking about, I mean, here we're specifically talking about brand marketers, but whether we're talking about brands, retailers, agency marketers, the industry really up to this point has not very clearly charted its path forward into a cookie-less world, right? And supposedly that cookie-less world is coming. There's still some kinks to work out, right? Like standardization and oversight. But I think if this particular channel can work out those kinks, it's very likely that this retail advertising, retail media could be a really vital part of marketers' path forward into this

Starting point is 00:03:25 cookie-less world. Julia Tappas, her piece is at Digiday.com. It is a member-exclusive report, but we are members. There is a ton of value there. I highly recommend it. The piece is called Brands Spend More on Amazon as Its Importance to Their Holiday Marketing Spikes. A link to our full unedited interview is in today's newsletter, which you can sign up to for free by going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter or tapping the link in the show notes. Two very nice updates for Threads, Meta's attempt at filling the void left by Twitter. First, they've changed the URL that clicks went to. And previously, when someone tapped a link, it would first go to an Instagram domain name to be filtered through its spam system

Starting point is 00:04:07 then passed on to the actual destination. That was fine, but it lumped all clicks from Instagram and Threads into the same bucket when viewed in your web analytics. Now they've added a dedicated domain, l.threads.net, so that you're able to break out traffic specifically from that app. If you use Google Analytics, this is in the acquisition surface. And now that we have topic

Starting point is 00:04:33 tags in the app, their version of hashtags, we can start to see which topics are getting traction. One web developer did this manually since there's no API yet, and it only covers topics where a topic tag was used. But the three top topics last week were NBA basketball, tech people introducing themselves, and photography. The basketball topic particularly notable since some people believe one of the few things left keeping the former Twitter alive is its sports content. Topic tags are similar to hashtags, but don't actually use a hashtag. And you're limited to one tag per post. Meta says this is so spammers don't clutter up the feed.

Starting point is 00:05:15 Plus you can't copy and paste them in. They require manual input. It is not clear how these new topic tags would be implemented in a publishing API once that rolls out, but presumably it would mirror the app's functionality. If you're not sure which tag to use, Andrew Hutchinson writing in social media today has a nice hack. Just use the first letter of the topic you're thinking of using

Starting point is 00:05:34 and it will show you the most popular tags with that letter sorted in order of usage. We have full charts on the top 15 topic tags and hashtags on threads in today's email newsletter, which is free. Just tap the link in the show notes. More clear skies in the forecast for the global ad industry as Dentsu says global ad spending should increase by about 4.6% next year. And while that's higher than this year's, that's only because of media pricing inflation. Digital, of course, will still take the lion's share, just under 60% of the total ad market. That said, the growth of digital spend has slowed down in the last couple of years, dipping into the single digits for the first time. But why the optimism on a growth next year,

Starting point is 00:06:25 a number of big spending events, the Olympics, the Euro 2024 football championships, and the American presidential election? Quoting marketingdive.com, quote, brands also face increasingly higher costs to reach individual consumers in a highly fragmented media landscape. Advertisers next year will spend $139 per capita

Starting point is 00:06:47 at the global level, a roughly 75% increase from two decades ago, unquote. Breaking down the digital sector and growth rates specifically, retail media will grow at the fastest at about 17%. That's followed by social media ad spend at over 12% and programmatic at just over 10% growth. But that's just the growth rate. As for the actual portions of the pie, programmatic makes up about 70% of digital ad spend. Reddit is back up this afternoon after a major outage that took down most functionality of the site.

Starting point is 00:07:29 People weren't able to see posts or comments, and searches would end up with an error message. The company confirmed the issue this afternoon, and by about 2 o'clock Eastern Time, the site was back up. The global agency holding company IPG Media Brands is first to the party with Amazon's forthcoming Prime Video ads. Amazon is launching an ad-supported tier in the coming months, and IPG's clients will be the first in. That gives them first crack at new ad formats and content sponsorships. Quoting Marketing Dive, quote, Amazon's fledgling ad-supported offering gains a large stable of potential advertisers via the three-year deal, giving it an opportunity to

Starting point is 00:08:10 come out of the gate strong when it launches in 2024, with plans to roll out to nine international markets. While most streaming services already have their ad-supported services up and running, Amazon is promising greater reach and frequency through its offering than its competitors and will need to prove its point, unquote. But it may be an uphill climb. A recent study found consumers are spending 5% less time watching ad-supported content than they did five years ago.

Starting point is 00:08:44 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. And finally,

Starting point is 00:09:11 a subscription box company last week tried to capitalize on Elon Musk's bizarre tirade against his platform's own advertisers. You might recall after dozens of brands pulled their advertising from X,

Starting point is 00:09:23 Musk told them, and here's a clip. Go f*** yourself. So someone at FabFitFun decided they would piggyback off that and offered new buyers a gift with their subscription if they used the code. Go f*** yourself. They also doubled down on supporting the social platform, which has been basically abandoned now by most major brands after Musk made statements seen as anti-Semitic. The box company said it would pledge, quote, an additional $100,000 of X advertising in support of its free speech ideals, unquote.

Starting point is 00:09:54 But its subscribers, mostly young, wellness-focused consumers, didn't think much of the stunt. Some thought the offer code was a dig at them. Others were disappointed in the company for aligning itself so strongly with X's political leanings. One customer posting, quote, the owners are right-wing Trumpers who are enamored with Elon

Starting point is 00:10:14 and snarl woke under their breath, unquote. The company eventually apologized using all sorts of words, ham-handed, out of character for our brand, and dumb. How's X's advertising doing anyway? Well, I mean, they still have ads. In fact, just today, 404 Media spotted some ads on the platform from a brand called Make-A-Mom,

Starting point is 00:10:36 which sells DIY artificial insemination kits promoting the theft of semen. The ads showed a video of a woman collecting the fluid surreptitiously. The ad copies included, quote, making him a dad without his permission? And does he need to know? Right at this very moment, a listener named Madame Blink is scrambling for the controls to shut off this extra. They left a review on Apple Podcasts recently that read, quote, Great podcast, except for the music at the end. Can't race to turn it off fast enough.

Starting point is 00:11:26 Worst songs I've ever heard. Which makes me think two things. First of all, that Madame Blank has never heard dubstep before, because that truly is horrible music. However, it got me thinking, do I have this music thing all wrong at the end? You know, like, I do spend a fair bit of time kind of mixing it so that the lyrics pop up at the right time

Starting point is 00:11:47 and I hit the post and all the fun little radio stuff that I used to do, but do people hate the music? Like, is Madame Blink representative of the general population? Because I can replace it with, you know, the theme or something. It would be cheaper. I wouldn't have to pay the music licensing fees, so I'm curious.

Starting point is 00:12:06 Do you like the music that I switch up at the end of every episode or do you hate it? You can vote right now by tapping a special link I have in the show notes. Swipe over to find the notes and you'll find a I like the music or I don't like the music. Please vote. You can only vote once. It tracks your IP. Nice try, haters. So there you go.

Starting point is 00:12:24 You can also vote by a URL, b.link slash option one. If you like the music, b.link slash option two. If you don't like the music. That's it for today. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - What's Behind the Huge Resurgence in Retail Media Spend?

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