What Do Uber, Bing & TurboTax Have in Common?

WHY DO WE CARE ABOUT FIRST-PARTY ADS?

2019 was a magical time for digital marketers — ads were cheap, targeting was amazing, and the platforms were able to track your every move across the internet. Turns out, that wasn’t so great for our privacy. Bad actors abused the system, and data breaches were a regular occurrence, which led most major governments to introduce data-protection regulations. But it wasn’t governments that caused the biggest shift online, it was another tech company.

When Apple released its ATT update in 2021, it capped off a series of restrictions that made it much more difficult for platforms to use our own data to sell us stuff without our permission. As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention, and since that moment the platforms have been hard at work shifting the way that we all buy ads online. The result is that platforms that can use their own user information have become increasingly more viable as advertising platforms.

“First-party data” is information collected by a website or app that relates to people on its own properties. For example, if you have a site that people log into, you have the ability to use that information to run targeted ads to them the next time they visit you. What you can’t do anymore is sell that information to data brokers who would help brands target people wherever they go.

I’m sure you can think of a bunch of websites you use that collect a ton of your information (Uber, DoorDash, Microsoft Office… QuickBooks?) Until recently, none of those companies would called themselves advertisers, but shifts in the market and resulting innovations have made their first-party data so enticing to advertisers that it would be ridiculous not to capitalize.

That’s why you’ve likely started to notice stories (some of them here in The Brief) about strange new ad sellers, and our prediction is that this trend is only going to continue to gather steam. Rather than buying all of our ads from a single source, like a programmatic ad network, we’ll go to partners that have the most relevant info about our target audience.

But don’t feel bad for Meta & Google, they’re going to be just fine — the biggest platforms, of course, have the most first-party data — we’re just not going to be aggregating multiple sources into neat and tidy ad campaigns the same way that we used to.

Instead, here are a few of those new ad sellers that have sprung up recently and should probably be in your channels-to-check out list if you’re planning a media spend in 2024:

• Microsoft Performance Max — Serve ads across Bing, AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Edge, and Outlook using Microsoft’s AI tools
• Uber Journey Ads — Target riders based on where they’ve been, where they’re going, and what they’ve ordered on Uber Eats
• Intuit — Built for B2B, target users based on their activity on QuickBooks, TurboTax, Credit Karma, and Mailchimp

And one final datapoint to drive it home: The world’s largest retailer, Amazon, just reported that their advertising revenue is up 22%, likely because they can use their own purchase and search data to target potential buyers.

NOW BOOKING FALL 2023 DIGITAL ADOPTION PROJECTS

UP YOUR DIGITAL GAME WITH US

Fall is just around the corner (where did the Summer go?), and it’s the time of year when everyone gets back to business, looking to crush those big goals that we all set at the start of the year.

That’s why Junction has just opened up our project bookings ahead of time. If you’ve been thinking of upgrading the way that you and your organization use digital, we’d love to talk about reserving you a spot.

Plus, if you’re a Canadian incorporated business, there’s a good chance you’ll qualify for the CDAP Boost grant that can cover up to 90% of your project cost.

To start a conversation, hit Reply, or email us at hello@wearejunction.com

WHAT TO EXPECT FOR HOLIDAY 2023

PLENTY OF SHOPPING… FOR DEALS?

When it comes to economic trends, it seems like everyone is an expert, and none of them seem to be able to agree of what the future is going to hold. But there is one source that does seem to hold up, no matter what the trend line is, and that’s the retail sector.

This week, Retail Dive released its analysis of what to expect for the coming holiday season, and what they found can help to shape your plans for the rest of the year, no matter which industry you operate in:

1. Consumer sentiment is up — A University of Michigan Survey of Consumers found that consumer sentiment rose for the second straight month “soaring 11% above June and reaching its most favorable reading since October 2021”
2. People are excited about a “return to normal” — Search volume is high for Labour Day-related products, and interest in holiday deals is already 450% above where it was at this time last year.
3. Despite the good vibes, people are going to be deal hunting — Debt levels are high, and so are interest rates, and people have gotten really good at navigating the internet to find the best deals, so they are going to be increasingly price-conscious.

The theme this season seems to be that people will be craving the type of holiday shopping/travelling/other purchases that they remember from pre-pandemic days, but they’re going to need to be enticed with what they believe is a bargain in order to checkout.

Read the full report here

MORE DATA TO SUPPORT POSTING VIDEO CONTENT

IG REELS GET 55% MORE ENGAGEMENT THAN PHOTOS

At this point, I think that we all intuitively know that Instagram Reels are a winner, and they they typically outperform all other content formats, but a recent study Emplifi shows just how pronounced that fact is.

They analyzed over 3 million posts from over 70k brands and found the following:

• Reels on IG get 55% more interactions than image posts, and 29% more than standard video
• On Facebook, Carousel posts are the winner, with Reels in second place
• Brands on TikTok get more followers than they do on IG, but their TikTok posts reach fewer people than their Reels do

Read the full breakdown of the study here

CHAT GPT INTRODUCES CUSTOM INSTRUCTIONS

IT’S A GAME CHANGER

If you’ve experimented with ChatGPT you know just how powerful it can be, but you also know that it can take a lot of tweaking, adjusting, and testing your prompts in order to get it to do exactly what you need.

‘Custom Instructions’ will save a lot of us a lot of headache by serving as a framework for all future prompts. Here’s how it works:

Right now when you fire up ChatGPT it’s a blank slate. It has no idea who you are, what you need, or who you need it to be for you. Using custom instructions, you can program the ChatGPT tool to be whatever/whoever you want, and give it guidance on how to respond to your prompts.

Here’s an example: Let’s say that you’re a small hotel and you want ChatGPT to come up with a bunch of marketing ideas for you, then plan them out, putting them into a calendar, and even writing some draft copy for you. To do that, you’ll need to give it lots of background information in the prompt, like “You are a hotel marketer” or “your objective is to attract people to your hotel,” and “your tone of voice is casual, and a bit sarcastic.” With custom instructions, you can write out all of that stuff, and load it into ChatGPT once so that all of your following prompts can be as simple as: “how should we respond to the following guest review?”

The new feature will not only save time, but will likely open up some creative thinking in terms of who we need our AI assistants to be, and what kind of background info we can feed them in order to help them to make our lives easier.

Check out the full story on TechCrunch

A FEW MORE STORIES WORTH A CLICK

STUFF THAT WILL MAKE YOU JUST A BIT SMARTER THIS WEEK

• Email open rates are toast, but that doesn’t mean we can’t analyze our email marketing — a quick guide from Martech.org
• The GA4 update probably has more useful features than you realize — here are 10 from Moz.com
• Remember Etsy? It just hit an all-time record for active buyers
• More signs that the economy may not be all bad — the ad market is seeing a bit of a surge

Written by Conner Galway, Junction Consulting