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In This Issue:

🤔 Excessive emojis: Do they help or hurt your social media posts?

🎄 Meta introduces new ad tools for holiday season.

📱 Meta expands Horizon Worlds to mobile and web, but it’s not what you think

🚫 WhatsApp refutes plans to introduce ads on platform.

📺 Walmart launches Sponsored Video ads for holidays.

📉 Adobe sees 3Q digital ad revenue drop by 19%.

📊 LinkedIn receives MRC accreditation for key ad metrics.

🐞 A Facebook bug is apparently unpublishing Facebook brand pages.

🤖 Google removes "written by people" from documentation.

Do Lots of Emoji In Your Social Media Posts Work?

Have you ever seen one of those pitch messages from someone in a pyramid scheme?

They’re usually over-the-top effusive — language like “OMG girl, this is the absolutely most best thing I’ve done! You should do it too! You can make $100 a day from your phone!”

These messages are notable — ridiculed, actually — not only for the language, but also the overuse of emoji. Sometimes dozens in a single, short message.

And you, proper digital marketer, may have thought: “Does that actually work?" Should we be adding lots of emoji to our social media posts?”

Well, science now has the answer.

A research paper published this month in the Social Media + Society journal tested it.

They created three versions of a Facebook post — one with no emojis, one with 7, and one with 20. They made sure the emoji did not add any context to the message; they were just there for decoration.

And they found that the 7 emoji version brought the trustworthiness of the content way, way down. And that there was no difference between the 7 version and the 20 version.

In short, lots of emojis = bad.

And why does this happen? In short, because consumers of the content feel manipulated.

Meta Upgrades Some Ad Formats in Time for Q4

Some new ad tools coming to the Meta platform, as we all get ready for the holiday buying season.

Change Spend by Day/Time Automatically

First, there’s a new way to let you change your spend budget automatically based on the time of day. This will let you run more of your spend during hours you think will be more advantageous — maybe if you’re a snack food marketer, you run it over lunch hours.

Or, if you’d like to bump your spending up over the weekends, you can do that as well. The UI will give you the option to increase your daily budget by a dollar amount, or by a percentage.

After this promotional period ends, your budget will automatically revert back to the daily budget that you initially set.

I’ll be honest, this surprises me. Everything coming out of Meta in the last year or two has been to trust the AI — that it knows whether the weekend will be better for you; or to let it show your ad to specific people during times of the day it knows they’re more likely to convert.

So it’s a little weird — welcome, but weird — that Meta is giving media buyers back some of the fine-tuning control we had in the old days.

Promotional Ads

Meta’s also bringing the Promotional Ad format to more advertisers.

These are tied to discount codes and similar offers, which are shown to the consumer through the whole purchase journey.

They will be available now to brands in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia in the next quarter.

Reminder Ads

Meta’s also expanding Reminder Ads. These are Instagram ads for events, which will push people notifications before your event — a day before, 15 minutes before, and at the time of the event.

Specifically, the expansion is around letting you upload creative in Ads Manager. They’re also adding Stories as a placement for this format.

Shops Ads

Finally, Meta’s also testing Shops Ads which integrate direct purchase into an ad format. For now, that test involves adding integrations with Adobe Commerce, Magento Open Source, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

Meta already has integrations with BigCommerce, Feedonomics, ProductsUp, GoDataFeed and ChannelAdvisor.

The Metaverse is Not What Marketers Think

A couple of years ago, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg bet the farm on the metaverse. Hell, he changed the company’s name to match the new direction.

Marketers tried to follow, but it wasn’t easy. The metaverse was really in only one of two places: In videogames or inside virtual reality goggles, like the one Meta built called Horizon Worlds.

Needless to say, not much happened. A couple of big brands with money to burn set up shop there, only to abandon them a few months later.

Now, Meta is making a move it hopes to capture the imagination of the mainstream consumer and, of course, marketers: They are letting a bit of their VR world out of the googles and onto phones.

But it’s not what you think.

Most marketers, when they think of a metaverse, think of a world like the OG metaverse Second Life. This is a world which you can walk around in, build stores, staff them, provide support, talk to other people, trade things. It’s like a more colourful version of our existing world, only everything moves at 10 frames per second.

That’s not what Meta’s rolling out here.

Instead, this is more like competing with Roblox, the multiplayer gaming platform aimed at 12 year olds that some people liken to a virtual world, but really isn’t.

In fact, read far enough into Meta’s news release on this, and you discover that the only thing you’ll be able to do on phones or the web is play one game called Super Rumble.

Super Rumble is a multiplayer shooter, similar to Apex Legends or Call of Duty. There’s no lobby, no stores, and no walking around. (In fact, Meta still hasn’t figured legs out for its virtual world, so players are actually just a bunch of torsos disembodied from the waist up.)

It’s going to a test group on Android this week; iOS coming next week.

They also say they’ll add more later — spaces that might be more traditionally thought of as virtual worlds: comedy shows, concerts, and so on.

So what to make of it all?

Well, it’s clear that Meta’s fascination with VR is more about entertainment than commerce. And that’s probably a smart move, considering that the platforms can’t even get live shopping to work in North America.

What’s peculiar to me, though, is its positioning so far of the Metaverse as a toy for gamers and teens. Gamers have hardware — both Xbox and Playstation recently released their next-gen consoles, and both have huge marketing budgets behind them.

Perhaps behind the scenes they’re thinking about how brands might participate in a metaverse, but for now, unless your marketing manager is really good at headshots, it’s probably not the droid you’re looking for.

Whatsapp Will Not Get Ads: Meta

Meta this morning disputed a report saying they were getting ready to bring ads to WhatsApp.

But Meta says they were neither testing it, nor working on it, and that they didn’t have any plans to do so.

It’s not like WhatsApp doesn’t make money, though. More than 200 million monthly active users interact with WhatsApp Business, which adds some commerce and customer support layers into the app.

You can also run ads that bring people to your WhatsApp profile. Last year, Meta reported it made $1.5 billion on those ads, and that the format grew 80% compared to the previous year.

Bug With Message Templates

By the way, there is a bug today over on the WhatsApp platform — apparently accounts with lots of message templates are affected.

Meta says they’re working on it, but recommend deleting any outdated templates, or those you don’t use regularly.

Walmart’s First Video Ads Will Appear in Search

Walmart is rolling out a sponsored video ad format — their first video ad placement.

Sponsored Videos appear in the search results and are available now to all brands that are in the Walmart Brand Portal. Campaigns can be managed either through their own ads manager or third-party tools.

Walmart says 93% of the 100 most-searched keywords on its services are non-branded words or phrases — suggesting that consumers might be open to new brands.

The company’s advertising unit sales were up 36% last quarter compared to the same quarter last year.

Adobe Ad Revenue Down 20%

While Walmart ad sales were up, Adobe’s were down — third-quarter digital ad revenue was down almost 20% from the previous quarter and from the same quarter the previous year.

Some LinkedIn Ad Metrics Get Accredited

Some LinkedIn ad metrics have been given accreditation by the Media Ratings Council (MRC). This is an independent body which verifies the accuracy of the numbers platforms report to advertisers.

Specifically, LinkedIn now has the nod of approval for:

• Gross impression

• Net impression

• Gross click

• Net click

This accreditation covers Sponsored Content Ads, Text, and Dynamic Ad formats.

You’ll also now start to see a new MRC-accredited metrics column view in Campaign Manager.

Facebook Pages Being Randomly Unpublished: Reports

I’m seeing some reports on social media today that Facebook is randomly unpublishing brand pages, then sending the page admins a notice that their page goes against community standards.

Then, according to reports, the page shows back up after about 30 minutes.

This does appear to just be a bug. No word from Meta on this, but if this is happening to your brand page, maybe just give it an hour or two to see if it sorts itself out.

And finally…

Google deleted just three words from one of their help pages recently. It was noticed by the sharp-eyed Barry Schwartz from SERoundtable:

In their page titled “Google Search’s helpful content system and your website,” it used to say that Google’s ranking system prioritized “helpful content written by people, for people.”

But now, the phrase “written by people” is gone — suggesting that Google will equally prioritize content written by AI as it will that penned by a human.

Welcome to future. ☹️

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