From Pixels to Paper: Retail’s Unexpected Full Circle

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In This Issue:

📰 Retail giants rediscover the allure of print marketing amidst digital saturation.

🛠️ Google Ads Update: How the change to Demand Gen ads will affect your campaigns.

📺 Linear TV viewership hits a historic low.

🎨 Adobe Express introduces AI-powered features, challenging Canva's dominance.

🔖 Bluesky unveils self-labeling for posts and a new media tab for user profiles.

🐦 X restricts Tweetdeck to subscribers; throttling access speeds to competing sites.

🔍 The deez nuts joke that could bring the era of Google search dominance to an end.

This Week in Google Ads: All About "Demand Gen" Campaigns

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

✅ This week: Google announced that Demand Gen campaigns will take over from Discovery campaigns — and soon. What are Demand Gen campaigns, and how will this switch affect your advertising?

📺 WATCH NOW

Print Advertising Enters its Renaissance Era

Should print be your next ad buy? As the digital space becomes more crowded, top retail brands are starting to invest in print again.

📕 Call It a Catalog Comeback

Digiday reported today that fashion retailer Nordstrom recently re-launched its anniversary sale catalog after phasing out the print publication a few years ago. While Amazon-owned online retailer Zappos is also ramping up its print efforts by launching its first back-to-school catalog.

Nordstrom and Zappos aren't the only companies investing in the space. Amazon has been mailing a printed holiday toy catalog to customers since 2018, while lifestyle brand Madhappy recently introduced a print magazine this month.

📰 Stepping Into Print

Nordstrom's marketing strategy when it comes to print has seen a shift. Back in 2018, the fashion giant was sending up to 12 catalogs per year, but the brand scaled back as digital gained traction, fueled by the pandemic, before refocusing on print this year.

While Zappos began experimenting with print media in 2019. The online retailer currently uses QR codes to measure catalog engagement, purchases, and traffic. Future plans include a holiday catalog and a continued investment in print marketing.

Both companies declined to disclose specifics about print and marketing spend.

Quoting Digiday:

“Over the last few years, digital marketing and ad spend has been steadily increasing, accounting for [60%] of global ad spend, according to Dentsu’s Global Ad Spend Forecast 2023. But with mounting data privacy changes and an increasingly crowded digital marketplace, the glory days of quick and digital customer acquisition may soon be numbered, per previous Digiday reporting. Meaning retailers, like Nordstrom and Zappos, are getting serious about investing in other channels like print marketing not only to boost brand awareness, but also to reach offline shoppers.”

Linear TV Hits New Low; Streaming Hits New High

As print makes a comeback, linear TV's viewership plummeted to a new low last month, dropping below 50% of total TV usage in the U.S. for the first time, while time spent streaming TV reached an all-time high, according to new data from Nielsen.

📺 Streaming Steals the Show

Streaming accounted for nearly 40% of total TV usage, fueled by shows like Suits, children’s programming like Bluey, and streaming YouTube videos on television screens. Streaming viewership increased by a quarter year-over-year.

The frontrunners among streaming platforms include:

• YouTube

• Netflix

• Hulu

Nielsen reported that time spent on broadcast TV and time spent on cable also represented record-low shares of total TV usage. Broadcast viewing was down 5%, and cable viewing was down 12% year-over-year.

Quoting Marketing Brew:

“The data underscores the business challenges media companies face as US viewers increasingly spend more time streaming and less time watching traditional television. TV titans are struggling to make money from streaming platforms, which require considerable programming costs, to offset losses from linear TV ratings declines and the continued erosion of the traditional cable bundle.”

Adobe Express Adds AI Updates

Adobe is coming for Canva. The company launched its latest version of Express suite for desktop web today, which now includes new AI features from its Firefly generative AI model, like its text-to-image and text-effects tools that are safe for commercial use. Users can also generate custom images and text effects using text prompts in more than 100 languages.

The update also brings video, Photoshop, Illustrator, PDF integration, real-time collaboration, and quick actions like automatic background removal, and using audio to create simple character animations to its all-in-one editor.

Brands and marketers can now access the free suite of content creation tools on desktop web, with plans for a mobile version coming soon.

Images: Adobe

Bluesky Has Good News for Marketers; X Has Bad News

Twitter competitor Bluesky is taking steps to make the platform more brand safe by letting users self-tag their posts so they can be automatically filtered.

With self-labeling, users can now tag posts with content warnings for NSFW categories like "Suggestive," "Nudity," or "Porn," by tapping the shield icon in the composer window. The platform plans to add more self-tagging categories over time.

Bluesky has a detailed moderation settings page, which lets users control warnings and visibility for explicit sexual content, nudity, spam, violence, and suggestive posts. While it already filters out some content automatically for users based on their settings, these new tags proactively add warnings or hide posts.

Bluesky is also adding a “Media” tab to profiles, which lets visitors look at images and videos a user has posted.

💰 TweetDeck Gets Paywalled

As Bluesky giveth, X taketh.

X – formerly Twitter – has officially made X Pro – formerly TweetDeck – a Premium subscriber-only tool.

Several users reported that while accessing TweetDeck they were shown a popup prompting them to buy a Blue checkmark.

The move comes 45 days after the company said that within 30 days TweetDeck would only be available to verified users... but who's keeping score?

Images: Bluesky / Twitter

X's Throttlegate: Slowing Rivals Down, One Link at a Time

Yesterday we reported some early signs that X was slowing down how long it takes to access links to several of its competitors.

Those reports have been confirmed, according to a New York Times analysis published yesterday. The company slowed down access to rival sites including:

• Substack

• Facebook

• Bluesky

• Instagram

• Threads

• Reuters

The delay in loading links was relatively minor, about 4.5 seconds, but still noticeable, according to the report. The delay, however, appeared to have lifted yesterday afternoon.

🔁 Déjà Vu Déjà X

This isn't the first time X has taken such actions. Last year, Musk briefly blocked Mastodon links and more recently temporarily banned users from sharing Substack links on the platform after the company said it planned to launch a Twitter competitor.

🚪 When Throttling Isn’t Enough

And if throttling traffic to websites you don't like isn't an option... what about banishing someone from the platform?

A marketing professor at NYU with more than half a million followers says he's been locked out of his X account for more than 2 weeks following a dispute with Elon Musk.

The prof, who posted on Threads said that:

“A mutual friend reached out and said Elon feels “unfairly attacked,” by me, and wants to meet. I declined.”

Two days later he was locked out.

Image: Threads

And finally... Has AI Killed Google Search?

Caught an interesting post on Mastodon last night — it seems that Google Search's increasing reliance on using AI guesses to summarize web content is proving to be, well, kinda dumb.

Several people yesterday posted screenshots of their Google search for this phrase: “country in Africa that starts with the letter K”

The accurate answer is Kenya. There's only one that starts with a K. Kenya.

But rather than give the accurate answer, the top result was an AI-generated summary of a web page, showing an inaccurate ChatGPT answer. That inaccurate answer reads, and please follow along closely because it's kind of a hilarious train-of-thought:

"While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter K. The closest is Kenya, which starts with a K sound, but is actually spelled with a K sound. It's always interesting to learn new trivia facts like these."

Again — top result on Google.

Rod Hilton, the fellow who discovered this, believes it's happening because ChatGPT at some point ingested this popular joke:

“There are no countries in Africa that start with K.” “What about Kenya?” “Kenya suck deez nuts?”

Top result on Google.

I tested other search engines this afternoon. Bing got it right. Brave Search, DuckDuckGo... they all got it right. For me, Google did have the right answer, though it was kind of in a somewhat rambling summary. But 4 of the top 10 results in Google claimed there were no African countries that started with K.

So I thought, well let me just check to make sure ChatGPT has it right now.

Here's its also-hilarious answer:

Artificial intelligence, ladies and gentlemen. Please don't rely on it.

Or, I guess, Google any more. :-(

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