Their Is No Mistake In This Title.

Hacking the Algorithms With Intentional Errors

Cracking the code to TikTok's algorithm may be easier than you think. Want to go Viral? Make a mistake. 

Slate has an interesting piece up today about how making intentional errors is now an algorithmic growth hack.  

Take Dr. Joshua Landy for instance, a critical care physician who posted a video on TikTok explaining a dilemma presented by a patient who needed an MRI. An X-ray showed his patient's chest riddled with birdshot pellets from a shotgun accident 30 years ago. Prior to this post, his videos received anywhere from 1500 to 6000 views. 

But this video racked up more than 800,000 views. He soon realized a mistake was driving engagement. In his commentary, he referred to the projectiles as buckshot, when really it was birdshot. Over 1,600 people have now called him out on his error. 

🚨 Going Viral 101

As the article points out, with his honest mistake, Dr. Landy discovered a very intentional growth hack deployed by TikTok power users: creating a glitch that users have to scratch.

It turns out that people really like telling others they're wrong on the internet. 

Quoting the piece: 

I remember seeing just a few weeks ago a user on Reddit say that she uses mansplaining as a tool. She'll ask a question, then log out of her first account, and log into a throwaway that has a clearly female username and answer it incorrectly. Within minutes, people come rushing in to correct her.

She says this turns out to be a very effective way of getting a correct answer fast.

Image: Slate

Google’s Ad Revenue Slides...

Google yesterday posted its first drop in ad revenue since the start of the pandemic.

For the fourth quarter, Alphabet reported $59 billion in advertising revenue, a decrease of 3.5% from the same period last year. This marked only the second time ad sales fell since 2004.

YouTube, meanwhile, posted a second straight quarter of declining revenue for its fourth quarter, with sales falling nearly 8% from a year prior to $8 billion.

The Wall Street Journal notes that Google is facing one of its most challenging advertising environments in recent memory due to a worsening economy and new competitive forces in fields such as artificial intelligence.

🤖 New AI Coming Soon

To that end, Google's CEO said that the company would make its AI program, LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications, available to the public in the coming months. He also promised that new AI features would be coming to search "very soon."

...While Amazon’s Ad Revenue Thrives

As Google's ad business slows, Amazon's continues to thrive. 

During the last quarter, the e-commerce giant grew its advertising business by nearly 20% year-over-year, bringing in over $11.5 billion in ad sales in the last three months of 2022.

The company, however, expects weaker performance this quarter due to economic woes.

Still, research firm Insider Intelligence projects that Amazon ads will continue to grow this year by 20%, giving the company a 7% share of the overall digital ads market.

Did Bing's New AI Search Engine Just Leak?

Someone over at the Microsoft search engine Bing apparently hit a key too early — according to one user on social media, he saw Bing's home page show the rumoured new AI-forward screen.

Instead of the usual search field, a larger field was there, with the prompt "Ask me anything." This fellow took a screenshot, which shows one example reading "Arts and crafts ideas, with instructions for a toddler using only cardboard boxes, plastic bottles, paper and string."

He says the new UI disappeared seconds after.

Incidentally, if you're still not sure what the big deal is here and why the search engines are panicking about this — I tried that exact search in Google. The top result was a link to a Pinterest page that showed just one image, which looked like a thumbnail with the title: "20 Simple Cardboard Box Activities for Kids." Pinterest would not let me see the actual content until I logged in. Once I did, that image was a link to a blog post, which itself was just a list of links to other blog posts with kid activities — literally no content, just the link and a credit. That was Google's best answer.

I tried the same search with ChatGPT, a newer version of which Microsoft has licenced, and got an actual answer and a detailed one at that:

So expect a huge change in the very nature of search engines — perhaps weeks away.

Twitter Company Verification Ain't Cheap

With Twitter's drop in its user base and — more importantly — advertiser base, Elon Musk continues to look for pennies in the couch. And he thinks he's found some in a new program called Verified for Organizations.

Essentially, you'd pay to get a gold checkmark on your company's Twitter account, and your employees would get your brand's logo as a secondary verification mark. But not the gold checkmark, and only the blue one if they pay for Twitter Blue, which appears to be something only individuals can do? Or maybe any account can now? Perhaps unless they upgrade to the gold one? Or maybe it's an addition, not a replacement? Honestly, nobody's quite sure.

One user posted:

One thing Twitter is sure about now is the pricing.

Last night, company reps began emailing brands saying the Verified For Organizations program will cost brands $1,000 a month, plus $50 per enrolled employee per month.

So let's take a company of, say, 20 people. That's $24,000 a year. And what do you get for $24,000? A promise to make your brand's tweets, and those of your employees, rank a little higher in the algorithm. Oh, and a gold checkmark. But only for the company.

2️⃣ Two other quick Twitter items today:

• Musk says Twitter will start sharing revenue with people who write tweets which have ads placed in the reply thread. But there's a catch: You have to pay to be paid. Only people who are subscribed to Twitter Blue will be eligible to receive the payments. No details on how much a cut Twitter plans to take.

• And accounts with the legit old-school blue checkmarks will lose their checkmarks in the next couple of months, unless they pony up for the subscription. So expect a whole new round of impersonations coming. 

Report: Performance Marketing FTW

Following disappointing results over the last quarter, paid media could start out in 2023 less optimistic than it has in decades. 

An analysis of fourth-quarter activity by marketing agency Tinuiti showed spend growth across digital media has slowed, including: 

• Streaming video

• Paid social

• Paid search

• E-commerce

But, Digiday reports that while the analysis indicated soft pricing for digital ads in Q4, Tinuiti's VP of research said it showed promise for performance channels. 

Quoting the exec: 

▶️ Streaming Video

According to the exec, the Q4 scatter market for video, including streamers, was quite soft, which let advertisers access more premium inventory than they typically could afford.

Due to weak demand, streaming video advertisers can expect to keep getting discounted inventory in early 2023 since the market hasn't really tightened.

📣 Paid Social 

As for paid social, comparing this past Q4 to the previous year's, the average CPM on Meta's platforms was down 22%. That's good news for media buyers. But when you compare it to the same quarter two years back, CPMs were 26% higher, and Instagram's CPM 15% higher. 

The report notes that the main saving grace for the company is the continued success of its TikTok clone Reels. Impressions across Meta properties grew 10%, the strongest growth since 2020, thanks to Reels inventory, which accounted for over 8% of Instagram ad impressions during the last quarter. 

🔍 Paid Search

In terms of paid search, over the last year and a half, Google's search ad clicks remained stable. However, weakening pricing growth saw text and shopping ads slow their growth patterns. Google search spending in the U.S. increased 10% year-over-year in Q4, but cost per clicks only rose 2%. 

🛒 Marketplaces

Finally, Amazon Sponsored Products' spend grew nearly 20% year over year in Q4, slower than the 25% growth in Q3, as CPCs fell in aggregate for the first time since 2020. 

Meanwhile, the report found Walmart sponsored products' clicks skyrocketed 98% in Q4 compared to Q4 '21, while the average CPC fell 60%.

YouTube Rolls Out Livestream Co-Hosting

YouTube now lets your brand collab on a livestream with other creators.

"Go Live Together" was first introduced last year, but the company has expanded its live-stream co-hosting feature across iOS and Android mobile devices.

The feature lets brands and creators with 50 or more subscribers invite a guest to livestream with them. There can only be one guest at a time, but guests can rotate during the same stream and do not require the 50 subscribers minimum – any creator can be invited to participate.

📲 Mobile Only

Desktop marketers — no soup for you. The feature is currently only available in the mobile app. You can, however, schedule a co-stream through YouTube on desktop, but both host and guest will need to connect to the scheduled stream through the app on a mobile device. 

Starbucks Has a New Payment Method

Some interesting news on the payments front...

Starbucks has a new partnership with the payment service Venmo that lets its rewards members use Venmo accounts to load and auto-reload their card funds. 

PayPal, which owns Venmo, said Venmo accounts can be added in the Starbucks app or the Starbucks Card section of the company’s web site. Customers can also pay directly from Venmo after adding their account to the app.

The companies are also enticing customers to try out the new payment method with a promotion. 

Rewards members will receive 100 bonus Stars (perks for spending money there) when they add $15 from Venmo to their Starbucks Card or spend $15 or more using Venmo as a direct payment in the app until February 10th.

In the wake of recent slowdowns, Engadget reports this isn't the first new partnership for the coffee giant. Last month it worked with DoorDash to offer 95% of its in-store menu items via the delivery service, and launched an alternative rewards system that lets customers collect NFTs.

Image: Starbucks

6-Year-Old Orders $1,000 of Food From Grubhub on Dad's Phone

Finally, what happens when a 6-year-old boy orders over $1,000 worth of food on GrubHub after borrowing his father's phone to play games? 

An ad campaign! 

Mason Stonehouse was left playing some games on his dad's phone. But instead started ordering delivery after delivery, which soon started literally piling up on the family's doorstep.

The boy’s mother told media that Grubhub reached out to the family and offered them a $1,000 gift card following the smorgasbord of unexpected deliveries. She also said that the company is considering using the family in an online promotional campaign. 

Image: GrubHub