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Edition #326 – Inflation Edition
Inflation, creator marketplaces and lots of B2B stats this week.
One big thing
The big chat was on inflation this week, Robin Sloan did a brilliant summary you should all read. I thought I’d endeavor to look at our industry and de-mystify what it might mean.
“Aphoristic Econ 101 definition of inflation is “too many dollars chasing too few goods”, which is actually pretty useful.”
For us that means more competition on talent, advertising, resources. As Robin points out, its not like we live in a perpetual auction, with rates going/up/down all the time.
But wait, on advertising we do. And if we peek Gupta Medias dashboard, which shares publicly the average CPM across their (tend towards) ecommerce Facebook spend. We see CPMs going from $2.25 in 2019 to $2.68 in 2021. The $1.44 in 2020, is well, hard to examine.
Even these snapshots are hard to examine, as the CPM is very volatile, swinging up and down, as compared to prior when it was flatter.
The other side of the inflation equation is too few goods. And this anecdotally seems very valid in some areas. With companies pulling back or consolidating, there tend to just be less products or services available in market. Yet more freelance talent available.
The thing to watch out for is deflation, where consumers want to hold on to their purchasing power, so wait to buy products, even amongst falling prices, if they wait a bit longer, they’ll get a better deal. But the providers of those services end up closing, so others drop prices and so it goes on.
Again these things don’t happen in real time or with the flip of a coin but as trends they can compound meaningfully over several years.
A more ideal outcome is modest inflation, small increase in prices.
Notable stories this week
- Twitter will now enable select Creators, Journalists and Nonprofits to accept tips.
- Snap to launch a new creator marketplace this month.
- An analysts point of view on Roblox, its digital currency, advertising/content opportunities.
- Why Heart’s digital-native food brand Delish is getting into print.
- IPG Mediabrand’s content studio inks partnership with Vice Media Group.
- Asking GPT-3 Ai to generate ad ideas for different brands.
- Dax Shepards, the Armchair Expert Podcast is going exclusively to Spotify.
- TikTok’s pandemic popularity got advertisers attention.
- [Long read] Market making on the internet. Smart take on how Twitter can aggregate the long tail of subscriptions.
Deals/M&A
- BuzzFeed in talks to buy Complex Networks.
- AirMail is looking to raise $15m.
- Following their merger, District M & Sharethrough will continue operating under the Sharethrough brand.
- Digital media companies pump the brakes on their rush to go public as SPAC market cools.
Campaign of the week
- 8 Family Trips that will instill a love for travel with your kids. Chase + Good Houskeeping. This certainly convinced me on San Diego!
Datapoints of note
- 68% of marketers said they’d use TikTok for influencer marketing, up from 16% last Feb.
- Half of B2B marketers in APAC lack an ROI target.
- 3/5 B2B marketers will spend more on content marketing in 2021.
- 2/3 of marketers operating in the B2B channel find it difficult to measure the performance of content marketing strategy. One in five marketers report using six or more tools to measure content marketing performance.
- There are 100m podcast listeners consuming 2m shows.
- Air Mail has 115,000 free, paid and trial subscribers.
- 85% Of UK Consumers Would Boycott Brands if Ads Appeared Near COVID-19 Conspiracies.
- Only 4% of iOS users are opting in to ad tracking.
That’s it for this week.
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