Social Media is Dead. Long Live the DM.

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In This Issue:

🤖 All the details on Meta’s new Advantage+ Audience [Premium Exclusive]

🛍 Are you taking product photos all wrong? Science can tell you.

📊 Universal Analytics continues data processing post-official 'sunset'.

🖥 Microsoft Advertising introduces new product updates for September.

📘 Publishers re-evaluate their relationship with Facebook.

🚫 X's brand safety measures face renewed scrutiny.

📱 Decline social media posting; young people move to private communities.

Meta’s New Advantage+ Audience Updates [Premium Exclusive]

Every Tuesday, exclusively in the Premium Newsletter, our Meta ads correspondent Andrew Foxwell walks us through the latest platform changes. (Andrew runs the Foxwell Founders community of digital ad buyers and offers training in the digital ad space.)

This week: Shane Cicero sits in for Andrew, and we discuss the new Advantage+ Audience settings:

• How the new Advantage+ Audience works

• How it’s different than Broad audiences

• Is this just a newer version of Lookalikes?

• How long before we have no audience controls?

Advice from Infomercials: Where You Place Your Product Matters

I have a guilty habit.

I love TV infomercials.

You know the type: The over-the-top ones where people aren’t capable of basic living.

One of the first things you learn in marketing school is that to sell something, you need to position your product or service as the solution to a problem.

As corny as those TV ads are, they’re probably one of the best examples — the most pure version of “You have a problem, we have a solution.”

And marketing science is here to remind us that sometimes the simplest positioning is better than all the clever you can muster.

The Ariyh newsletter today highlighted a research paper published in the Journal of Consumer Research, called Judging Product Effectiveness from Perceived Spatial Proximity.

In short: Your product should be physically next to the problem it solves, in videos and photos, if you want consumers to think it’s effective.

Some examples:

• A bottle of laundry detergent next to a pile of clean clothes

• An image suggesting a security breach, next to cybersecurity software

• A pain-relief massage next to a person with back pain

In their experiments, the researchers found that:

• People believed a pain reliever was 21% more effective when the product was placed beside imagery suggesting a muscle injury

• People were 26% more likely to choose a skin-care product when it was shown beside someone with smooth, acne-free skin

There were two areas where the effect was weaker:

• If the person viewing the images already knew about the product

• The product was a long-term solution — like vitamins vs stain remover

So why does it work?

The study focused on functional products like skin care and insect spray, so it’s not clear how much of an effect this would have on hedonistic products. It also only looked at images of physical objects, so the researchers don’t know if text descriptions would also have a similar effect.

So, carpet cleaner marketers of the world — stop putting photos of your product on a white background; put them on a clean carpet instead.

And whatever you do, fellow marketers, keep the corny infomercials alive. They’re all I live for now.

Universal Analytics Lingers Post 'Sunset'

This past July 1 was supposed to be the cut-off date for Google Analytics’ old system — called Universal Analytics. The platform would still work, but no data would be collected after that date, and everyone needed to switch to the shiny new GA4.

And the warning messages all over the old platform were terrifying:

• “Any conversions and audiences you use with Google Ad campaigns will stop working.”

• “To avoid serious disruption to your ads, book a free support session…”

But more than two months later, it seems like UA is still collecting data for some accounts.

So what’s happening here?

Google hasn’t changed its mind. Instead, it seems to be shutting accounts down in stages. Some are still up and collecting, some are up and not collecting, and some are just gone.

But don’t take the presence of UA in your dashboard as a sign you can slack off. Google says UA will be completely gone by next July.

So, be sure you export your historical reports sooner than later.

Read more at martech.org

Microsoft Advertising Unveils September Updates

Some updates now from Microsoft’s ad platform:

Ad Editor Gets Audiences Support

First, a few changes to audiences are now available in their Advertising Editor.

They now support bulk associations for Remarketing, In-market audiences, Dynamic remarketing lists, Similar audiences, Customer match, Custom audiences, and Custom combination lists.

One important thing to note is that creating and managing your audiences should still be done via Microsoft Advertising online, but now their Advertising Editor can be used to make updates to associations in bulk.

In-Market Audiences

Also, in-market audiences are now available in all Microsoft Advertising markets.

Auto-Generated Assets

They’ve also released auto-generated assets for responsive search ads (RSA). Yes, they’ll start making assets for you, and will start serving them alongside the assets you’ve uploaded. This is something you’d enable in Campaign Settings, if you want it.

Microsoft says auto-generated assets are giving an 8% lift in CTR.

Logo Extensions

Also, you can now add your brand’s logo to your ad with new Logo extensions. These can appear with other ad extensions and can be associated at account, campaign, or ad group level.

Hightouch and Zapier Integration

And you can now use new Customer Data Platform integrations from Hightouch and Zapier to set up and manage Customer match on Microsoft Advertising.

Social Media Posting Declines Among Users

An interesting think piece up on Business Insider was making the rounds on Mastodon over the weekend.

Basically, the premise was that social media is dead — and has been killed by group DMs on platforms like Snapchat and Instagram.

Rather than posting to a public feed, an increasing number of younger users, post to a group chat — letting them control who sees it more effectively, and prevents an algorithm from sorting and hiding their content from people the platforms think wouldn’t be interested in it.

This is something the platforms have acknowledged and tried to get ahead of — Instagram has a Close Friends group, which you can post to, but it’s not a DM thread and is still subject to algorithmic sorting and hiding.

One 22-year-old interviewed said:

Adding to that was Instagram’s own attempt to morph itself into whatever the executives were chasing that month.

This is partly why apps like BeReal have jumped into the fray. And platforms like Discord — which offer more of a person-to-person chat experience — have gotten more popular.

All of this, of course, makes it hard for brands to reach younger audiences that aren’t embracing traditional platforms. How do you show up in a Discord server and sell your energy drink? Some brands have set up their own Discord server, or group DM, but managing membership is a much more labour-intensive job than posting content twice a week.

The piece is definitely worth a read.

Read it at businessinsider.com

Are Publishers Turning Away from Facebook?

So if young people are keeping off social, what are the brands doing?

One bellweather to how brands are changing their organic strategy is the Publisher category — news web sites, entertainment sites… the kind of web sites that these days rely on social to get their content out.

And even those sites are showing signs of slowing down on the main platforms.

For the last three years, Digiday has surveyed about 200 of these sites to learn how they’re posting on social.

And the big finding: These brands are slowing down on Facebook.

It’s not all bad news for Facebook:

• Nearly three-quarters said they’re still buying ads on Facebook. That number did drop this year, but only by a tiny bit.

• More than a third say Facebook is extremely valuable to their branding — that number has been rising each year. It was only a quarter of those polled last year, and less than a fifth the year before.

Read more at digiday.com

X's Brand Safety Credentials Under Scrutiny

Elon Musk’s X is facing an uphill battle maintaining or securing industry-recognized brand safety certification.

Its accreditation by the Media Rating Council continues to be delayed.

• The company did a a pre-assessment last December

• But the CEO of MRC confirms that while the two parties are talking, there’s still no decision about whether they’ll get it

These accreditations are important because many large brands look to them as a seal of approval — a sign that both their ad results are accurate, and that their brand’s goodwill won’t be at risk if they run ads there.

It’s not hard to see why X is having trouble.

Just this past weekend, X’s owner Elon Musk bizarrely accused the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish group formed to fight extremism of being anti-antisemitic. He said that group’s activities was the main reason the company’s US advertising revenue is still down 60%, and that he’d conduct a poll to see if he should kick them off the platform.

But even without Elon, the company formerly known as Twitter had hurdles.

Back in 2017, the MRC said Twitter did a pre-audit but then never followed through. After a while, the MRC took its “in-process” status off.

It also doesn’t help that X’s head of brand safety and ad quality left in June, and it doesn’t look like they’ve filled that role yet.

It does have one important approval — the TAG accreditation.

Though TAG’s CEO confirmed to media this week that X is now being investigated, after a formal report that the platform was in breach of its brand safety guidelines, due to the questionable and incendiary content live on the app.

Read more at digiday.com

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