Today in Digital Marketing - When Brat is Not Brat

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Friday, August 2nd. Today, the risks of jumping on board a fast trend. Amazon's warning could foretell a slow quarter for us all. Google hates tax laws, and you'll pay because of it. And LinkedIn has a new badge that you can't even ask for. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in Digital Marketing. We marketers like to think that we're ahead of the curve, in touch with the youth, hip to memes. God, even saying that makes me feel old.

Starting point is 00:00:34 Many marketers track the latest social media trends and try to shoehorn them into their brand's ad campaigns, usually with mixed results. One of this summer's major trends was brat. If you're not familiar, it comes from an album by a British pop star and that star defines it as, quote, that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says dumb things sometimes. The trend really lifted off once this star, Charlie XCX,

Starting point is 00:01:01 posted on social media, Kamala is brat. The campaign of Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee in the forthcoming American elections, they ran with it. And so did brands. Agencies like No Fixed Address and Ogilvy both pitched clients on using it. The food brand Field Roast, which makes bratwurst products, bought up billboards in Toronto.

Starting point is 00:01:23 The beauty brand Makeup Forever used it in their ads. Even Lipton, the tea brand, declared its green tea product to be brat. Part of the trend, if you don't know, uses a kind of retro green color. But do consumers even care? A great think piece published at Digiday this morning questions jumping onto things too aggressively. Quote, as cultural episodes go, brat summer might be smaller than it appears. A YouGov survey of 3,200 British consumers conducted July 26th found that only 11% were aware and understood the term.

Starting point is 00:01:59 Furthermore, the number of brands that have aligned themselves with brat summer is causing some sector experts to back off, unquote. Indeed, the piece quotes the head of social media at Accenture Song as saying, quote, Once we started seeing the rapid commercialization of the trend, we made a conscious decision to pause any further development. The moment's authenticity and cultural relevance were diluted by the sheer volume of brands jumping on board, unquote. The problem, posits the Digiday piece, is that trends are just too fast now, the cycle too compressed. Just eight short weeks after the debut of the album that sparked Brat, some brands and agencies were calling it old news.

Starting point is 00:02:43 Again, quoting from the Digiday piece, quote, production and approval processes within marketing organizations move slower than media cycles, said Katie Mulligan, strategy director at creative agency BraveSpark. She estimated that it might take two weeks from an agency initially recognizing an opportunity

Starting point is 00:03:00 to creating work, getting it approved, and pushing it out on social platforms. The smaller brands might be able to creating work, getting it approved, and pushing it out on social platforms. The smaller brands might be able to react quicker, maybe buy up some really cheap last-minute space, but at an agency with bigger clients, it's hard to be responsive to trends, she said, unquote. Still, regardless of the practicality of jumping on board, marketers do tend to get serious cases of FOMO. According to a recent survey of 500 brand managers in the US and UK, nearly all said that 20% of their social media activity is related to a trend and 77% planned to increase that proportion over the next year. Well, there has been a lot of bellyaching

Starting point is 00:03:46 about Meta's ad performance and the buggy platform, but obviously something must be going right, at least for Meta. The company this week reported more than $13 billion in profits for Q2. For more insight on those earnings and other topics, our Meta ads correspondent, Andrew Foxwell, joins me. Andrew is a meta ads

Starting point is 00:04:05 buyer and has visibility into more than $300 million in meta ad spend through his Slack community called Foxwell Founders. Andrew, let's talk about the numbers. First of all, what caused this big jump? I mean, we've been hearing that things were not great with the meta platform. Yeah. So, I mean, it's two main things. One of them is that Reels, really, which was not a placement that was being utilized, let's say even two years ago, Meta, then the question always was,

Starting point is 00:04:36 can they monetize Reels? The answer is yes. And, you know, noted Meta ads expert, David Herman, who everybody loves on Twitter. He went and talked about actually how he's optimizing his creatives for Reels now. So that was a couple of days ago

Starting point is 00:04:55 he put out to be talking about that, which is like a great leading edge and kind of comes right into this. So I think that's the first one is that they've monetized Reels and ad impressions are up 10% year on year. So we know. Oh, so more inventory. More inventory. And they're finding ways to do multi placement. So, you know, I've seen even things where there's multiple ads that you're click on and you see an ad, you click on it shows another ad, you click on it shows another

Starting point is 00:05:20 ad, and they're layering them on top of each other. So they're finding more ways to show ad impressions and also ad costs are up 10% year on year. So if ad costs are up, they're going to make more money. The thing that I found reading this, another one that I thought, you know, it's interesting listening to earnings call and reading about is like 7% more people are using the suite of apps daily compared to the previous year. So we also, you know, have more inventory, we have more people and we have add costs. So they've been able to keep all of those things going. The big one that surprising is like in our, you know, let's say Western United States, Canada, European mindset where things haven't been going well. It's been more, you know, unstable, I think,

Starting point is 00:06:09 like unstable in terms of, you know, bugs and everything else, what's going on. Really, the consensus on Wall Street and Meta confirmed as such is that Chinese-based advertisers are continuing to pump money into the ecosystem. So, you know, this is a huge one where, you know, the Temus of the world are actually disrupting the algorithm to some degree. It seems to have waned in the second half of the second quarter,

Starting point is 00:06:42 but in the first half, certainly people were reporting seeing, you know, Temu or Sheena was like every second or third at. It's like anecdotally what I was seeing and what others were seeing, I know, in Europe. So that's part of it, right? Is that there's just a lot more dollars coming in from that part of the business that, or those businesses that I think have larger implications, but we can get to that. But would we not have seen that same uplift from these sort

Starting point is 00:07:13 of large Chinese brands on other platforms like Google, like a, you know, giant lift on TikTok because they're there as well? Yeah, I think what I think personally, it's a strategic move. And here's where we get a little bit into like my theorizing and tin hat of like what's happening. But I actually think this is 21st century statecraft. And I think that and this comes from my background, too. I mean, just for full context for listeners, you know, I used to be a press secretary in the United States Congress. And the thing that we know about the Chinese is when you sort of think you have it covered, that's actually the worst place that you can be at.

Starting point is 00:07:54 Like when you're like, oh no, we're good. And so I think what they're doing, I think what the Chinese honestly are doing is utilizing the economic engine of meta in the Western United States, what they know, or like in the West, that they know a lot of businesses and small businesses and the economy is run on. And, you know, in terms of the overall economy shifting to more remote work, which means more companies that are, you know, D to C businesses or companies that utilize meta

Starting point is 00:08:23 as an advertising platform, which is, you know, a big part of sort of the underlying fabric, I think, especially in the United States, and I know in the UK and in parts of the EU, where they're trying to disrupt that. So they're basically trying to come in and raise prices and push people out in order to destabilize the economic environment alongside push people onto TikTok. I think it's a little bit like a Trojan horse strategy.

Starting point is 00:08:50 Oh. Personally. That's my feeling is, you know, they're going to say, well, look, you're going to ban TikTok. Well, now, are you really going to do that? Because we're going to, you know, now all these small businesses are saying, well, this isn't working. This isn't working. That is quite the long, what are they called? The long game, the long haul, the long con. Is that it? Yeah. Yeah. Now I know this is a, I know this

Starting point is 00:09:14 is a show based on facts. So, you know, that we don't need to get into that too much, but I do, I do think there is something greater that's taking place because they're clearly not they there's no way that you spend the volume of money that they're spending and have the return so it's not a fine it can't be being in direct response marketing for almost my whole career now like you know 13 years of doing this I know that you can't keep doing that and see the return that you want. Like, and so there's got to be another part of the equation there. And I think that's kind of what we're talking about. Right.

Starting point is 00:09:54 Yeah. All right, Andrew, we'll leave it there. Thank you. Thank you. If you want to hear the full length conversation that Andrew and I had, it is in today's email newsletter. You can sign up to it for free by going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter or tapping the link at the top of the show notes. You can learn more about Andrew's digital ads training at todayindigital.com slash Foxwell or his Slack community of senior meta ad buyers at todayindigital.com slash founders.

Starting point is 00:10:19 Both of those are affiliate links and you can find those links at the bottom of our show notes. Do you have business insurance? affiliate links, and you can find those customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Amazon is warning that the volatile news cycle will be partly to blame for its lower than expected sales forecast this quarter. The company's CFO telling a media briefing this week that high-profile events like the upcoming American elections and the Olympics occupy people's attention. When major news events happen, like the recent assassination attempt on former U.S. President Donald Trump, consumers shift their focus to the news, deferring purchases. In addition to the wild news cycle, Amazon is also dealing with a shift in consumer behavior. The CFO noted that cautious consumers are looking for deals

Starting point is 00:11:25 and trading down to lower-priced options. Amazon said that its lower-priced everyday essentials business saw brisk sales. Amazon also missed sales estimates in the second quarter of this year. It's going to become more expensive to target Canadians with Google ads come October. The Canadian government is introducing a digital sales tax on very large platforms,

Starting point is 00:11:51 but it's not just the tax you'll pay. Google this week said it's going to add an additional 2.5% surcharge on all ads that reach Canadians. A surcharge they say covers basically the pain in the ass it is to comply with government tax laws. That was not a verbatim quote. The company this week sent out an email to some advertisers saying they will add the additional fee to quote, cover the costs associated with complying with the digital services tax legislation in Canada, unquote. And in case you're wondering, this will apply no matter where the advertising brand is located. And just to add insult to injury, that tax to cover the cost of complying with the tax law is itself taxable. This isn't something new to Google.

Starting point is 00:12:38 They call this extra fee a jurisdiction-specific surcharge. And it's also charged for Austria, Spain, France, the United Kingdom, India, Italy, and a handful of others. Reddit has acquired Memorable AI, which claims to be able to analyze human reactions and create more effective ads as a result. From social media today, quote, it seems like a good acquisition, and with Reddit working to maximize its ad opportunities as a newly listed public, it seems like a good acquisition and with Reddit working to maximize its ad opportunities as a newly listed public company,

Starting point is 00:13:08 now is a good time for the platform to build upon its ad tools. It'll be interesting to see how Memorable's tools are able to evolve based on Reddit data, which could lead to more valuable and powerful ad campaigns. Your brand page on LinkedIn might be verified soon and you won't have to lift a finger to make it happen. The company recently let regular users verify their accounts by uploading government-issued ID. This gives users a little badge and LinkedIn claims verified users will get

Starting point is 00:13:40 an algorithmic boost for their content. Now they're coming out with company page verification. And here's how to get your brand that badge. Wait, because there's nothing you can do to get it. You just have to wait for LinkedIn to get around to slapping that badge on. If that is, your company qualifies. LinkedIn says it will only hand out page badges to company which list their location accurately, have a real website listed, the page is claimed, there are active admins managing it, and it hasn't run afoul of any policies. If that's all in line, LinkedIn says you'll get the gray tick mark badge. Maybe. There are 58 million company pages on the platform, so it might take a while.

Starting point is 00:14:29 And finally, Google says it is removing a product category from its naughty list and letting brands that sell that product run ads on their network. That category? Pubic hair grooming services. But not everywhere. Only in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Japan, Poland, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States. There are still some rules. Your ads can't even hint at anything sexual. They can't imply that

Starting point is 00:14:56 leaving things untidy is a bad thing. And they can't, of course, feature or target minors. This policy change is effective September 3rd. We had a puppy breakthrough, a big puppy breakthrough yesterday. As you might know, we adopted a puppy about, I don't know, maybe three months ago now, two or three months ago. She's adorable, but not really good at, well, she's a puppy. So, you know, I mean, I am learning as I've always been a cat person. This is my first puppy, um, that you have to train puppies and man, it's been tough. You know, she walks and she just sees anyone even like way down the road and she just loses

Starting point is 00:15:39 her mind. We've been going to puppy training classes. We're on like level two right now. And level two came with a little game they play called Magic Hands. And basically what you do is you walk with your dog, let's say on the left, and then you hold your hand above them and the hand has treats in it. And then as you're walking every between 10 seconds and every three minutes or so, you have to vary it. You drop a treat. And this trains them to always be wondering, to always be staying close to you because they're wondering when the next treat will drop, right?

Starting point is 00:16:09 And I thought, okay, maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. Let me tell you, this works like a hot damn. Our dog not only was right in line with us when we were walking her, people would walk up to us, she would not even bark. Three people and another dog. Usually she loses her shit. To us, she would not even bark. Three people and another dog. Usually she loses her shit. But she was, you know, just so intently focused on my hand that has treats.

Starting point is 00:16:35 And I guess the idea is that over time, you don't even have to have treats, but they'll always be wondering if there's treats there. You just have to have your hand in that position. So let me tell you, yesterday was a good day. We had some serious dark nights of the soul. My wife and I have a great relationship. We are two penguins in love. We barely argue, but let me tell you, there was marital discord during the early days. So anyway, fingers crossed. I hope that that, we both hope that that continues.

Starting point is 00:17:03 Well, that will do it for the week. Today in Digital Marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Stunamic First Nation on Vancouver Island. Our production coordinator is Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Blevis, ad coordination by Red Circle. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend, friends, and I will see you on Tuesday.

Today in Digital Marketing - When Brat is Not Brat

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