Separation

Edition #422

LinkedIn influencers, the separation of social media content & content marketing & meta shares metaverse use cases.

If you’re seeing this note for the first time, my apologies there was a snafu, where people who signed up to the newsletter, weren’t receiving it! We fixed that. But so please enjoy.

With earnings announcements this weeks note has a lot of datapoints of note & stories. I’m going to table some of the chat on them till the next edition.

It wasn’t long ago brands were looking at integrations, get my Insta to get to the blog, to do the white paper.

Now they’re more, we can’t get click outs from social, so we’re just going to do that channel really well and the most engaged will come through. Or when they peek a link in bio, we have the opportunity to share more of what we’re working on.

It’s a mutual trade off, if you get me (platform owner) enough eyeballs, from keeping other users on the site entertained. We can ration some of them, that wish to leave. But in the meantime, help improve their experience.

It’s like an attention marketplace, you contribute your attention getting content, and you’ll get some eyeballs, minus the platform tax. Don’t want to work to create the attention with content? Pay for it. Or better yet, do both.

Why do I mention this? I think with AI and this effect, we’re seeing a resurgence and reinvestment back into the website, into the content there, and more of a desire to get it to work.

Finally a bit of fun this week was browsing some of the Internet Artifacts.

Notable stories this week

• LinkedIn influencers are a thing now – and brands like Intel and Hootsuite are courting them.
• Google to “experiment with new formats native to SGE that use generative AI to create relevant, high-quality ads, customized to every step of the search journey.”
• How IKEA’s in-house agency content factory is building a glorious future.
• Should AI pay you for your content?
• WTF are content credentials?
• How do ads affect website visitor behavior?
• Could fashion week survive without sponsorships?
• A global news nonprofit wooed top foundations with exaggerated reach.
• X usage plummets in Musk’s first year. Musk tweets that two new tiers of X Premium subscriptions launching soon.
• Spotify is getting closer to podcast profitability.
• TikTok is testing 15 minute uploads with some users.
• BuzzFeed shutters Catalyst, Complex Media’s Audience network.
• The junk is winning. A piece on TikTok’s experiment in shopping.
• Can Sir Martin Sorrell return S4 Capital to top table of the ad world?
• Microsoft relaunches PubCenter its Google Adsense alternative.
• Amazon Ads announced a self service advertising platform for its streaming TV services.
• Time spent with ads on TV sets to drop sharply by 2027, new forecast suggests.
• Disney continues to iterate on their self service (prior Hulu Ads Manager) ad platform. And AMC brings real-time biddable programmatic to linear tv.
• As more brands use generative AI to create social content, agencies are changing how they measure its success.
• [Long form] The glory of storytelling.

Deals/M&A

• Automattic is acquiring Texts and betting big on the future of messaging.
• Silver Lake says it’s working on offer to buy Endeavor Group.
• Tofu raises $5m seed round to put B2B marketing on autopilot.
• Marketing firm Mod Op buys Crenshaw Communications.
• Her Campus Media acquires Zfluence.
• Trouble afoot at The Messenger.
• Flying Media Group acquires marine print titles from Bonnier.

Campaign of the week

• These are the ways businesses are using the metaverse today. A content hub from Meta highlighting some of the Metaverse use cases.

View all 2023 best campaigns.

Smartest commentary

• [On LinkedIn] “This is one of the only text-heavy platforms that have a really high engagement rate. And so when it came to that I knew there was such a unique way that LinkedIn creators operated, and a unique format that I found a lot of LinkedIn posts followed” –Eileen Kwok, Social Marketing Specialist, HootSuite.

Datapoints of note

• There are just under 100m monthly actives for Threads.
• $20b of programmatic ad spend wasted each year.
• Users spent more time on-site when they received a mix of ads.
• Reels has driven more than 40% increase in time spent on Instagram since launch.
• AI-driven feed recommendations continue to grow their impact on incremental engagement. This year alone, Meta has seen a 7% increase in time spent on Facebook and a 6% increase on Instagram as a result of recommendation improvements.
• Shorts now average over 70 billion daily views and are watched by over 2 billion signed-in users every month.
• Google has ‘seen 4X “deals’’ queries during the holidays versus other periods.’
• According to Nielsen. 150 million+ people are watching YouTube on CTV screens every month in the U.S.
• LinkedIn sessions grew 12% with record engagement.
• Bing users have engaged in more than one billion chats and created more than 750m images.
• Snapchat+, the company’s subscription service that costs $3.99 a month, reached over five million subscribers in its recent quarter, up from four million during the prior quarter.
• Snapchat is seeing more creators posting content to Snapchat, with nearly three times more public Stories posted in the US compared to Q3 2022
• Snap made considerable progress with 7/0 Pixel Purchase optimization, which enables advertisers to bid for attributed 7-day click- through conversions. For example, activewear brand Fabletics partnered with Snapchat to focus on customer acquisition — after adopting 7/0 optimization, customer acquisition costs decreased approximately 50%, positioning Snapchat as a top-performing social channel for Fabletics.
• 200m Snapchatters have sent over 20b messages.
• TikTok Shop is doing an estimated $70m in weekly US GMV.

That’s it for this week.

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