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- Is the "Vertical Video" Trend Cooling Down?
Is the "Vertical Video" Trend Cooling Down?
Also: Consumer spending up, Amazon adds easy TV buys, and a pause button on YouTube comments
Tod Maffin
October 25, 2023
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In Today’s Issue:
📺 Google expands YouTube ad formats, lessens advertiser control over placements [Premium Exclusive]
🎄 Deloitte reports pre-pandemic holiday spending returns, focus on sustainability.
🛒 Amazon launches Sponsored TV, a self-service ad platform for brands.
🔒 YouTube tests "Pause" feature to control new comments on videos.
📱 YouTube and Snap face stagnant growth in short-form video.
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This week: More changes, less control. Jyll discusses the changes to YouTube ad buys.
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Consumer Spending to Rebound This Holiday Season: Study
Some potential good news for marketers as we head into Black Friday and the holidays — it’s looking like consumer spending will be getting a big lift this year.
Deloitte does a study every year on the holiday retail season and polls 4,000 American consumers. [Full Study Here in PDF]
This year, 95% said they were planning to shop for the holidays this year.
It was 92% last year
It was 88% in 2021
As for how much they’ll spend, the average is about $1,650 — that’s past pre-COVID levels for the first time, and 14% more than last year.
You might be wondering, as I did, how that’s possible given the high inflation. Turns out, that’s exactly why the average spend is what it is: Consumers were factoring in the higher prices in their estimates.
Also good news: Black Friday and Cyber Monday are back, after lower than average performance in previous years.
In 2021, 47% said they’d be buying during that period
Last year, it was only 2% higher
This year, 54% said they’ll take part
Copywriters take note: Three-quarters said they might even buy a gift for themselves.
Deloitte classified 43% of holiday shoppers as “sustainable gift shoppers,” up four percentage points from last year.
More than half of Gen Z and millennials (55%) said they are sustainable shoppers, a seven-point increase from 2022, and 35% of older generations said the same, a one-point increase from a year ago. S
ustainable gift shoppers are big spenders: On average, they spend 29% more than those who don’t shop for sustainable holidays gifts whenever possible, Deloitte found.
Meanwhile, AI doesn’t seem to be much of a priority for holiday shoppers: 79% of consumers said they have little to no trust that retailers can use AI responsibly, and only 16% said they plan to use generative AI for holiday shopping.
That share, though, is notably higher among Gen Z (29%) and millennials (32%) than Gen X (12%).
A Quick Path to Advertising on Amazon’s TV Placements
Amazon today announced a new self-service ad product that will let any brand that sells on its commerce platform advertise on streaming TV.
They call it “Sponsored TV” and there is no minimum campaign spend and no upfront advertising commitments.
If you have existing TV-quality assets, you can use that in your Sponsored TV campaigns, and they will even help you develop creative if you don’t have those ready-to-go assets.
Last week, the company added “Frequency groups” to their ads platform, which will let you limit the number of times a unique user is exposed to ads across multiple orders.
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Coming Soon: Pause Your Brand’s YouTube Comments
YouTube is testing a nice feature that will let you pause comments on specific videos for a period of time.
Being able to deactivate comments on videos isn’t new — that’s been around for years. But the current method is a blunt hammer: Either you let comments in, or the whole comment section is gone, even if previous comments existed.
This new version, if it launches widely (and there’s no reason to suggest it wouldn’t), would let you keep the comments you’ve already received, but prevent more from being added.
When you turn this on, viewers will see a “Comments are paused” message on the video.
A nice touch in case your brand comes under attack and you want the Internet to take a little breather.
The feature is currently in testing with a small group of channels. No word on when it will be released more widely.
Are Things Cooling for Vertical Videos?
Are we starting to see the slowdown of the vertical video trend?
Some analysts are wondering if things have started to cool a little, after reviewing the quarterly results of both Google and Snapchat, released this week.
At Snap, the company didn’t break out the monthly active users of its short-form video feature Spotlight, unlike in the second quarter, when Snap said the feature had more than 400 million monthly active users.
Snap did say time spent watching Spotlight clips in the September quarter rose 200% year-over-year.
But the absence of MAUs suggests there wasn’t much user growth to crow about.
Meanwhile, YouTube Shorts hasn’t picked up new users: parent company Alphabet said Shorts was watched by more than 2 billion logged-in users every month, the same as the second quarter. Daily views of Shorts reached 70 billion, up from 50 billion announced in February 2023.
On their financials, Snap’s revenue was up 5% to just over $1.1 billion, compared to last year’s Q3. Daily active users were up 12%, and the company said three times as many Stories were posted in the U.S. during the period.
Over at YouTube, 12% jump in revenue, almost hitting $8 billion. Apparently the recent deal to livestream Sunday games of the National Football League helped there.
Meta’s results release today, and we’ll have coverage of that tomorrow.
As for Google overall, it said Q3 sales were up 11% year-over-year to $76 billion. Its profit margin: 42%.
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