Make No Mistake. TikTok is Not F***ing Around Any More.

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In Today’s Issue:

🛠️ How to keep your Google Ads away from kids — it's not as simple as checking a box [Premium Exclusive]

🛍 TikTok Shop expected to suffer massive US losses

🚫 TikTok is banning external e-commerce connections

📊 Social media ad spending surges as ROI grows

📺 CTV ad expenditures break the billion-dollar mark in June

📍 Former Pinterest employee unveils rival AI app

🤝 LinkedIn introduces new brand partnership tags

✉️ LinkedIn enhances newsletter UI and expands options

🎯 Reddit broadens its ad interest targeting capabilities

⚙️ X announces API changes, phasing out old features

🎶 YouTube explores new subscription and music discovery layouts

📉 Marketers reassess and dial back on growth tactics

💰 TIKTOK: Global Commerce Domination... or Die Trying

Just how much money is TikTok prepared to lose in its pursuit of ecommerce domination? How many merchants? Maybe more than you think.

TheInformation.com today reporting its sources say the company expects to lose more than a half-billion dollars in the U.S. this year alone on the attempt — most of that money spent on hiring, building its own delivery network, and subsidizing merchants for discounts and free shipping.

But don't shed too many tears — TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, ended last year with $18 billion in operating profits.

Quoting TheInformation:

"Still, the enormous investment shows how the Chinese tech giant is continuing to pour money into a U.S. expansion despite the longstanding threat of a government ban. While the prospect of a ban may have receded from the headlines, the threat hasn’t disappeared. The expansion, particularly if it succeeds in making TikTok a retailer with the scale to compete with Amazon, is likely to reinforce anxieties about ByteDance’s influence in the U.S."

TikTok Shop does exist right now in the U.S., and it's growing, but the numbers are comparatively small — less than $4 million in daily sales in the U.S. Still, that's up from under $1 million a day just this past June. Sources inside the company say they expect daily volume to reach about $10 million by the end of the year.

That's a lot closer to the numbers in Southeast Asia where TikTok Shop’s daily volume is expected to reach around $90 million by the end of the year.

Again, from TheInformation.COM:

"TikTok is banking on merchants considering Shop important enough that they would be willing to pay up for it in the future. But TikTok Shop, which relies on videos to drive sales, is also a relatively high-effort sales channel, requiring merchants to pay an additional commission to TikTok creators or invest in creating videos themselves.

"Early on, TikTok had trouble signing up U.S.-based merchants... both because those merchants wanted to focus on expanding into bricks-and-mortar locations and because they feared regulators could ban the app. Some merchants have also balked at signing up because TikTok requires them to submit their social security number and passport information."

Also related, the company today announced it will shut down its “Storefronts” feature, which lets merchants connect their third-party shopping workflows into the TikTok UI.

Storefronts started as a way to link Shopify stores to TikTok, then expanded to other commerce platforms.

Now, TikTok wants retailers to use its own TikTok shop exclusively.

“Storefront will be officially discontinued and unavailable for use. This means your Storefront products will no longer be visible on your TikTok profile, or be eligible for inclusion in short videos, LIVEs and ads. You will also lose access to your Storefront on Store Manager. It’s important to migrate from your Storefront to TikTok Shop as soon as possible.”

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✨ PREMIUM COLUMN: Google Marketing Platform Update

Every Wednesday, exclusively in the Premium Newsletter, our Google ads correspondent Jyll Saskin Gales walks us through the latest platform changes.

✅ This week: What is behind all the controversy surrounding Google's targeting of children, and how does a brand ensure their ads are never seen by kids? It's not as easy as you think.

Jyll runs the Inside Google Ads training program [aff link].

📈 MEDIA SPEND: Marketers Boost Social Spend Due to Improved ROI

Marketers are increasing their investments in social media, with 51% of media decision-makers from brands and agencies now planning to boost their spending this year. This is a significant jump from April's 44%.

The numbers come from the research firm Advertiser Perceptions — their study of 300 executives from both brands and agencies found most polled say social media is pulling better ROI compared to last year. The sample size only included executives whose firms spent more than a million dollars in ads in the previous month.

There is a split, though — it's the brand-side/client-side people who prefer social. The agency folks said they're more likely to ramp up their digital and linear TV investments.

As MarketingDive reminded us today:

"Agencies have typically acted as key intermediaries in the types of upfront negotiations that drive the TV business and are an increasingly important piece of brokering advertising deals with streamers.

"Meanwhile, entrenched heavyweights like Meta Platforms have seen growth return in recent months."

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📺 CTV: Ad Spend on Connected TV Hit $1 Billion in June

Digital streaming TV, sometimes called "connected TV" is indeed doing very well. The sector hit a record $1 billion in ad spend this past June, thanks to the continued shift away from cable TV.

Household supplies and beverage brands quadrupled their spend, but some categories like pets and beauty sectors didn't trend as strong.

But while all that's good, connected TV's growth rate is still three times slower than retail media at a similar stage. Analysts say this is because so much of the CTV market is fragmented, and money that comes in comes from existing budget pools, not from new budgets.

GroupM forecasts that globally CTV advertising is expected to grow by more than 13% this year. In the U.S., Insider Intelligence pegs that growth at 21%.

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📌 PINTEREST: Ex-Staffer Launches AI App, Challenging Pinterest

Lots of sites have their share of competitors — BeReal came for Instagram. Everyone's coming for Twitter. But not many have tried to compete with Pinterest.

At least, until now.

The app Crate launched today — like everything these days, it talks incessantly about how much AI is in it. In truth, from my short testing of it, the AI seems a little weak. Basically, you add pictures and TikTok videos and products and stuff from the Internet to a board, and it will recommend more content to you that's similar.

(Am I crazy here, or is that what Pinterest and Instagram and all these platforms have been doing for years now anyway, just not wearing a big Captain AI cape? Anyway.)

One thing the mention of AI probably did help was funding — the app receiving $5 million in venture capital.

The founder used to work at Pinterest in partnerships. They have seven employees in Los Angeles right now.

As for how marketers can play here, the company says it'll start by charging brands to suggest their products to users. They also might try a subscription plan for users down the road.

But are we starting to see the end of the AI ride? Quoting TheInformation.com:

"Consumer AI startups trying to ride the OpenAI and Stable Diffusion waves have floundered a bit. AI image editing app Lensa, for instance, saw a rapid rise and fall in popularity, and even OpenAI’s ChatGPT has experienced slowing usage in recent months..."

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🤝 LINKEDIN: Introduces Brand Partnership Tags for Collaborations

LinkedIn is rolling out its own version of brand partnership tags as part of a program to move more toward collaboration with B2B influencers.

Some people are starting to see a new section in the post settings screen, indicating an on/off toggle for "Brand partnership."

When a user toggles it on, LinkedIn will add the words "Brand partnership" in the headline bio of the person posting. You've probably seen these before on LinkedIn's feed — the person's name, and a summary of what they do.

There's an example of what it looks like in today's newsletter, which you can subscribe free to by tapping the link in the show notes. I'll be honest, it looks a little too blended in to me. I don't think many people read or even really see that text under someone's name. Which, I guess, is a good thing if you'd rather not draw attention to the financial transaction that went into that post.

This is one of a few updates LinkedIn's made to make the platform more friendly to influencers. Earlier this year, they added shared analytics so brands could peer in on the performance of content they sponsored.

Also, as SocialMediaToday.com wisely noted:

"The update also likely relates to the coming EU Digital Services Act (DSA), which includes a range of provisions around transparency in advertising in social apps. LinkedIn also notes that, in accordance with the law, any posts labeled as brand partnerships will be publicly searchable by members and visitors. Searchability of ads is a key requirement of the new DSA regulations."

The new Brand Partnership tags are rolling out now, and should be to all accounts by the end of the week.

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📰 LINKEDIN: More Newsletter Updates

Also with LinkedIn, the company today said it would update its newsletter editing and publishing workflow, specifically improving the creation of issues.

This is very welcome indeed... we have a daily LinkedIn newsletter (which you can find at https://todayindigital.com/topstory) but its editor has always been a little gummy.

They say they'll be rebuilding the editor's UI, letting you save drafts, tweak metadata, and so on.

They're also letting brands or creators host multiple newsletters on the site, in case you have different markets or segments you want to reach out to. You can have up to five newsletters, each with different designs and posting frequency.

Finally, they're adding auto-follow for newsletter subscribers, so when someone joins your newsletter, they'll also automatically start following your regular LinkedIn updates as well.

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👾 REDDIT: Expands Interest Targeting Categories for Advertisers

As the major platforms like Meta continue to move away from broad interest targeting, one platform this week has jumped even deeper into it.

Reddit has expanded its interest targeting categories, saying:

“Interest targeting is our most popular form of targeting. That’s why we’re... expanding the number of interests available to target from 66 to 152. We’ll be rolling out this update over the next few weeks, so be sure to check back on your campaigns to implement any targeting updates.”

It's certainly easier to give Reddit a category, like "Parenting," rather than try to research and input every parenting-related community on the platform.

The update comes as Reddit rather forcefully squashed a site-wide protest against its sudden and massive API hikes, which forced some of the most popular Reddit mobile apps offline. Many community moderators essentially went on strike, and Reddit responded by threatening — and then delivering on that threat — to remove those moderators.

Reddit's user base has almost certainly declined since the whole dust-up, though Reddit, of course, hasn't revealed updated user numbers.

The new interest categories should be in your ad manager by the end of the week.

Incidentally, side note, some people reported today that comments weren't loading on the site properly. So if you noticed that too, it wasn't just you.

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🛠️ API: "X" (Formerly Twitter) Retires Legacy Tiers and Endpoints

Expect your work on X, the former Twitter, to become more expensive soon — the company this week announcing it will shut down some of its older API endpoints.

This would mean third-party tools that marketers use, like Agorapulse or Hootsuite or Sprout Social, will need to change their code to align with the new API version.

Many already made that change when the new version came out, but the closure of the older API means that some parts of accessing the platform will become more expensive for those third-party tools.

The issue is that accessing some of the old API didn't count toward the monthly limits you pay for when you buy access to the stream — notably, the retrieval of tweets. But now, tweets that a third-party tool pulls through the API will count toward the limit. And that could be very costly. Those third-party tools would, of course, have to pass on the costs to their customers — usually marketing managers or social media managers at brands and agencies.

Some tools already went that route when the first price increase happened — Agorapulse, which has always tried to be budget-friendly for its marketing customers — had to add a special Twitter add-on product to try to recoup some of the new fees.

The least-expensive plan (other than their free and extremely limited plan) costs $42,000 a month. Why 42? Because Elon thinks that the number 420 is funny because of its association with cannabis. No, really. That's why it's $42,000. Beyond that, tiers cost upwards of $210,000 a month.

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Do you run Meta Ads?

A shoutout for my friend Barry Hott — if you're looking to better understand your Meta ad and creative performance, you owe it to yourself to check out Barry's newsletter.

It's called Haveaclues — you'll get his weekly insights, learn about how “ugly” ads perform better, and how to better understand the complicated data surrounding Meta advertising.

Barry is a legend in the Meta media buying and ad creative space — he's been at it for more than 15 years. You can subscribe to Haveaclues by going to https://www.haveaclues.com

In Brief

YouTube is testing a new display for its Subscriptions feed. This feature groups multiple uploads from a single creator. It aims to make content discovery easier and reduce upload pressure on creators. Additionally, YouTube is experimenting with a song discovery feature. Users can hum or record a song to find it on the platform. This feature is currently available to a limited number of Android users. read more

Marketers are reducing their use of growth marketing strategies, a report by digital agency Dept reveals. The study shows a 40% decline in growth marketing usage compared to last year. Economic conditions have led marketers to focus on proven strategies. The report also indicates a decrease in investments in strategy, planning, and data analytics. However, spending on creative processes has seen a smaller decline. read more

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