Curation Nation

Today's News

• The Ad-Tech World’s Quiet Shift to ‘Curation’

• Apple Takes Your Branding To New Places

• TikTok Shop Offers Merchants Coaching

• Meta Cuts More Jobs

• YouTube Updates to Shorts Feed

• Google Ads Renames Tect Assests

The Ad-Tech World’s Quiet Shift to ‘Curation’

There’s a new trend quietly reshaping ad-tech: curation—and it’s already influencing how campaigns are run.

Curation, still an evolving concept, isn’t defined by industry standards yet, but it generally refers to private marketplaces where ad-tech companies provide handpicked publishers and tailored audience targeting.

Curation: Ad-tech's new buzzword

Marketing Brew recently reported that programmatic ad-tech firms like The Trade Desk, Xandr, Index Exchange, and OpenX are already pitching premium packages tailored to specific publishers and audiences.

This includes combining tailored ad placements, premium web publishers, specialized software, and custom algorithms for a more controlled advertising experience.

Taming the Wild West

The push for a premium, more controlled internet comes as the digital advertising industry faces growing scrutiny from marketers over reports of billions in wasted ad dollars and ads placed alongside controversial, explicit content.

The move towards curation represents a break from traditional programmatic advertising, which focused on wide-scale audience targeting across the open web.

• While this model offered broad reach, it also led to issues like ads being placed on low-quality or made-for-advertising (MFA) sites.

• A report found that $10 billion in ad budgets was spent on MFA sites from September 2022 to January 2023 alone.

Curation aims to limit these problems by directing spend toward more brand-safe content, steering away from the Wild West of the open web.

The price of perfection

However, critics warn that this could leave smaller publishers behind, cutting them off from advertising revenue.

Plus, even premium publishers aren’t immune to challenges, raising questions about whether curation can fully address the industry’s concerns about quality.

Apple Takes Your Branding To New Places

Apple announced new tools for brands using its Business Connect service yesterday.

This service, launched last year, lets businesses manage their profiles across various Apple applications, including Maps, Siri, Spotlight search, Safari, and Wallet.

Through the dashboard, businesses can provide details like name, category, logo, and website, and preview how their place card will appear to consumers.

Enhanced branding

The latest updates let businesses integrate their branding into more Apple products, including Mail, Tap to Pay on iPhone, and the Phone app.

Business Connect will also open up to all types of businesses, not just those with a physical location.

Branded emails

Branded emails are coming later this year — businesses will be able to customize how their emails will display in Apple’s Mail app.

• Instead of a standard gray placeholder logo, emails will feature the brand’s name and logo in the inbox.

• When opened, the email will showcase a vibrant header derived from the brand’s logo, as well as the business’s name and logo.

• Businesses will also be able to manage multiple emails or branded domains — like marketing emails versus order confirmation emails.

Brands can sign up for this feature today, and their logos will start appearing to customers later this year.

Tap to Pay

The Tap to Pay function will also feature custom icons instead of generic ones, letting businesses display their names and logos during transactions.

Enhanced call feature

Next year, integration with the Phone app will help identify calls by showcasing the business name, logo, and department, making it easier for consumers to recognize legitimate calls.

Apple says these features will be available to "most" businesses globally by signing up for Business Connect.

TikTok Shop Offers Merchants Coaching

TikTok is pulling out all the stops to boost TikTok Shop sales in the U.S.—well, all the stops except wooing online merchants with cash.

The platform has slashed its subsidies for retailer discounts, a strategy it leaned on during last year's launch, and has even tripled its sales commission to 6%.

Don’t worry, there’s coaching!

Now, TikTok is switching gears to keep merchants on board. The Information reported yesterday that the platform has been offering coaching to merchants to make it easier to go live.

These recommendations include:

• Longer and more frequent livestreams—streaming for 2 hours minimum, with some sessions stretching to 8 or even 10 hours at a time.

• 10-15 minute long stream segments to keep viewers entertained.

• Letting new hosts speak on livestreams.

Preheating

TikTok staff have also suggested a strategy called "preheating," where sellers tease upcoming sales or giveaways in advance to warm up potential shoppers, according to an online seller.

More features

• A former employee also told media that TikTok is working on AI-generated scripts, so creators have enough to say and can sell more products during livestreams.

• The platform is also considering more gimmicks to shop livestreams to fuel impulse buys, like the digital prize wheels on rival Temu’s site that hand out discounts to shoppers.

Meta Cuts More Jobs

Meta is laying off more employees across various departments, including WhatsApp, Instagram, Threads, and Reality Labs, according to people familiar with the situation.

Unlike previous mass layoffs, these smaller cuts appear to be part of a reorganization within specific teams rather than affecting the entire company.

A spokesperson for the company told media that this restructuring involves relocating some teams and transitioning employees into different roles.

This latest round of layoffs follows a series of job cuts in the company’s Reality Labs division earlier this year.

The toothpaste firings

Reports also circulated today that Meta fired about a dozen senior people who had been given a small food stipend because they occasionally, and perhaps accidentally, spendt that stipend on household products like toothpaste.

YouTube Updates to Shorts Feed

YouTube videos that are up to three minutes long are now getting pushed out in the Shorts Feed, a change that has stirred up some confusion among brands and creators.

Now, the platform has confirmed how this affects your previously uploaded brand videos.

Older videos get a reprieve

According to YouTube, vertical videos that are three minutes or shorter and were uploaded before October 15, 2024, will still be categorized as long-form content and will not convert to Shorts.

Only new uploads that meet the criteria will be recognized as Shorts.

YouTube says that it will take several weeks for its systems to adjust to this change.

Other updates

In terms of other updates:

• YouTube is experimenting with letting creators upload custom membership badges during the onboarding process on both mobile and desktop. Previously, this feature was limited to mobile.

• The platform is also simplifying the tagging process for sponsored content, letting both short and long-form videos be marked as promoted on web and mobile.

  

• Shorts drafts will also now be accessible on Android and iOS devices.

Google Ads Renames Tect Assests

Google Ads has renamed "text assets" to "customizations" in the Automatically created assets section.

Customizations let users generate personalized ad copy using text from their websites, landing pages, ads, and provided assets.

A user on X noticed the change and commented:

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