The Meta Marketplace Where Nobody's Buying

Too little, too late: Instagram's influencer marketing program has stalled out. Also: Meta kills off the only app we wanted. Are auto-generated video ads coming? LinkedIn adds some new ad features...

September 29, 2022

Is 'Creator Marketplace' Already Dead?

A few months ago, Instagram began testing its "Creator Marketplace", which is similar to TikTok's program with the same name, as a new way to connect brands with influencers.

Business Insider has a great piece up today about how that test is coming along and the verdict is: Uh.... not so good.

🚨 Spoiler alert: Not good. 

Back in July, Instagram started testing the Marketplace with a handful of U.S.-based creators.

But now, two months in, influencers say it's failing to deliver brand deals. "It's crickets," said one influencer. 

Business Insider spoke with over a dozen creators who use the marketplace. Out of the twelve creators, only one of them has been able to get a deal. 

The article points out that a shortage of brands isn’t the problem – there are more than 100 businesses listed in the app's marketplace, many of them being big brands, like:

  • Nike  

  • Hotels.com 

Creators choose the brands they'd like to work with, along with up to 10 areas of interest. After adding their preferences, creators wait for brands to contact them via DM and offer a potential deal. 

As for that one influencer who landed a contract, the process went smoothly. But, he hasn't landed another since the summer.

⌛ Too Little, Too Late? 

So, why isn't the program catching on? The piece suggests Instagram took too long to enter the space. As a result, the broader influencer-marketing ecosystem has been dominated by third-party companies that connect brands with creators.

💭 Meta’s POV

What’s Meta’s POV on the experiment? A company spokesperson told Business Insider, "Creator Marketplace is still in early testing" but that it's "pleased to see many creators and brands already connecting and negotiating new deals through the platform."

Uh... okay.

Image: Instagram 

Meta Kills the Instagram We Want

Earlier this week, a third-party Instagram app called "The OG App" launched — it used Instagram's API to pull in content, which it then put in an ad-free feed.

So... time for a quiz!

What did Meta do when they heard about this?

Well, they haven't said specifically, but 24 hours later, it had been pulled from Apple's App Store.

At about the same time, the personal Facebook and Instagram accounts of the app's developers and everyone on the development team were banned from those platforms.

I mean, it doesn't take a genius...

The app was marketed to those that miss the old Instagram, and let users:

  • Remove ads 

  • Remove those irritating "suggested content" panels

  • Disable Reels 

  • Disable the explore page

  • Make custom feeds to see posts from specific people

In other words, the Instagram app we all want.

But no, you can't have it. At least not on Apple devices. The app is still available in the slightly more sketchy Android app store, though Meta has cut them off from the API, so it's just basically an empty shell now.

Apple told 9to5Mac that it removed the OG App because it used Instagram's API in an unauthorized way, violating both Meta's terms and its App Store Review guidelines. Apple also noted that this could have exposed users’ accounts to privacy and security vulnerabilities.

This sounds like a blatant spin to me. The app got its Instagram access through Instagram's own API. It's not like you manually type in your username and password into the app directly. No, you log in with Instagram, and Instagram's login API sends a token back to the app saying you're good or you're not.

If that's a security risk, then the entire Instagram authentication system is a security risk.

👀 It Gets Personal 

In response, the OG creators went down swinging.

Quoting them: 

Everyone knows Instagram sucks. We made it better and got a lot of love from users. But Facebook hates its own users so much, it’s willing to crush an alternative that gives them a clean, ad-free Instagram. 

Users deserve the right to control what they consume, and OG will continue to defend and fight for that right.

You can understand Instagram not wanting people to flock to an ad-free feed, though some platforms let third-party apps do this. Twitter, for instance, has no ads when you use any non-Twitter app. Even their own Tweetdeck has full real-time content with no ads.

The app gained traction fast. Prior to its removal, the OG App had racked up more than 10,000 downloads, in the top 50 of the most downloaded apps.

Images: OG App 

Auto-Gen Video Ads Coming?

Here’s another nice thing Meta won’t let us have.

Earlier today, the company announced Make-A-Video, a new AI system that lets people turn text prompts into video clips. Think AI text-to-image generators like DALL-E, but for video. 

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the work as “amazing progress". 

He said:

It's much harder to generate video than photos because beyond correctly generating each pixel, the system also has to predict how they'll change over time. 

However, like text-to-image AI, there's still a long way to go. It is obvious that the videos are artificial, as the subjects are blurry and the animation is distorted. The clips are no longer than five seconds and contain no audio, but they do cover a wide range of prompts, such as: 

  • “A young couple walking in a heavy rain”

  • “A teddy bear painting a portrait”

  • Or my favourite “A baby sloth with a knitted hat trying to figure out a laptop”

It's also worth noting that the clips in the announcement were selected by Meta, so they could have been curated to highlight the system's best features.

But unlike DALL-E and the other text-to-image apps popping up everywhere, you can't play with it. It's just an internal prototype for now.

But still — represents a significant development in the field of AI content generation. 

Are the days of ad agencies making video ads coming to an end?

Images: Meta

LinkedIn Updates

A few updates to report from LinkedIn.

First, it announced 4 new ad features for B2B marketers yesterday.

Ad Updates

1. Offline Conversions

This lets advertisers connect offline conversations tracked through third-party tools directly to LinkedIn by manually uploading CSV files to Campaign Manager.

This offline data will be automatically incorporated into aggregate reporting on ad conversions.

2. Audience Insights 

Free audience insights are now available in Campaign Manager for both Matched and saved audiences. It generates aggregated insights based on topics and content they’ve engaged in, but also:

  • Job titles

  • Years of experience

  • Seniority

  • Location

  • Company name

  • And more

3. Document Ads

This lets advertisers promote long-format content directly into members’ feeds where they can read and download content without leaving the platform, such as: 

  • Whitepapers

  • Case studies

  • Reports without leaving the platform.

You can also gate your document with a Lead Gen Form to collect leads. 

4. Media Library 

The new Media Library provides advertisers with a single location for managing, selecting, storing, and uploading all media they use on the platform for single-image and video ads.

Company Page Updates

Select users already have access to these features, but this represents a wider rollout.

Post templates are now available: These are similar to Facebook's post templates but with more options to customize text posts. 

Link Stickers are also now available. 

And finally, LinkedIn will let all Company pages pin comments beneath their brands posts.

Images: LinkedIn 

Another First-Party Data Solution 

As the cookiepocolypse nears, more brands are focused on generating first-party data. 

One tech company, FullThrottle Technologies, has been quietly selling its API product called Audience Flume to agencies and publishers. In turn, these companies are offering it to their clients, Digiday reports. 

While the API product has been on the market for over a year, it is just now being formally launched. The company is still waiting for a patent. 

💡 How it Works

According to the company's CPO, Audience Flume is a high-speed Audience API that delivers first-party data. The tool latches onto the browser cache of a client’s web site to generate a household profile. The data can be used to generate privacy-compliant campaign tactics.

Quoting the CPO: 

Our technology on their site essentially transforms a lot of that data dying on the vine with an opt-in into first-party household data. 

That’s where our patent fits in: We figured out a way to better recognize returning devices from a previous household and … how to collate all that into a privacy-compliant household address that is essentially hydrated with more metadata.

According to a senior partner at GroupM's Medicom, the API seems promising. He's been using it for a major beverage client (who he declined to name) and said he hopes the tech will be adopted on a broader GroupM basis. 

⚡ Lightning Round

META: Hiring Freeze

Bad news if you were hoping Meta would hire more support people for advertisers... CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees this afternoon that the company will implement a hiring freeze, and that budgets for most teams will be cut. Quoting Bloomberg:

Meta's further cost cuts and hiring freeze are its starkest admission that advertising revenue growth is slowing...

What does this mean for your ad campaigns? Nothing good. While specific departments weren't named, support teams are often the first to get slashed when there's a tech pullback.

NEXTDOOR: Ads for Public Orgs

The social network Nextdoor is adding new ad targeting options for public organizations to reach people in specific neighbourhoods. The company says it will also make it easier for those agencies to target people across multiple markets.

AMAZON: Pay Hikes

Amazon said today it will increase its wages starting next month — the average starting wage for fulfilment employees will go from $18 to more than $19. They've also expanded a program that let people take up to 70% of their wages earlier than the usual weekly or bi-weekly schedule.

TIKTOK: Mo' Users, Mo' Problems

TikTok reports it deleted more than 113 million videos between April and June — that's up 11% over the previous quarter. More concerning, they report a 62% increase in fake profiles over the previous quarter.

INSTAGRAM: Likes Big Butts and They Do Not Try

Instagram has banned Pornhub from its app. I know, you're thinking: Well, of course they did, it's porn.

But no, it wasn't. Pornhub was well aware of the policies, so stuck to goofy memes. (Or so I'm told. I wasn't... I haven't....... Uh, moving on....)

Instagram, though, says they're rigid about their rules, and Pornhub penetrated its policies multiple times. A company spokesperson wouldn't say which specific policy was rammed hard, but it sounds like encouraging visitors to slide into their web site was enough to smash the ban hammer.

Pornhub says the somewhat acrobatic position Meta's taken will hurt the livelihoods of an already marginalized group of independent creators for whom Instagram is an important marketing tool. 

For the record, Kim Kardashian's Instagram account, which recently featured a giant photo of her backside.... is still online.

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