Shoppability is the New Black
But like many Covid-driven trends, shoppable content has been accelerated by shifting circumstances. And now it’s on a collision course with the holiday season. This means that the companies that are positioned to capture that spend will reap the rewards this year. We’ve seen much jockeying in the ad tech world for this very reason.
Can a Pandemic Inflect Local Commerce Tech? Part II
What about the tech adoption accelerants happening on the supply side? Tech giants who provide marketing and operational tools for local businesses have been in hyperdrive over the past few months to roll out new Covid-era features.
Here are three areas where we’re seeing the most activity … and where we could correspondingly see the most local business evolution.
Social Distancing and Gen-Z
Social distancing and self-quarantining have changed the world in a matter of weeks. How is Gen-Z responding? They are flocking to apps like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat to pass time and interact with family and friends. Facebook and WhatsApp have lost their reign over the competition during lockdown.
To get a better understanding of Gen-Zers’ habits, routine, and lives during the pandemic, Brainly, the world’s largest peer-to-peer learning community, surveyed over 1,700 of them.
Google Considers Buying TikTok Rival
TikTok could be seen as a competitor for YouTube, the video platform owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet. TikTok is typically seen as a greater threat to Facebook in the social category, and the social giant is testing a copycat app of its own to crush the insurgent. But more time on TikTok could also mean less time on YouTube in a tight attention economy, and TikTok’s fervent teen users apparently have Google concerned enough to spark a potential Firework deal.
How Long Will Google’s “Calculative PR” Playbook Work in Local Search?
Mihm: The engineering mindset that millions of spammy listings in a corpus of hundreds of millions of legitimate listings worldwide, or a (hundred million?) spam reviews in a corpus of billions of legitimate reviews worldwide, are simply “edge cases” that are beneath Google to prioritize reflects a profound lack of empathy for how their technology impacts fellow human beings — both consumers and especially small business owners and their employees.
Blumenthal: Absolutely agree. And a related problem is that they see customer service in the same context: as an engineering/cost-benefit problem to solve, not as a way to improve their product. As such they see the last 5, 10 or 15% errors in their big data solutions as just a cost of doing business that they have no responsibility to solve.
Transparency and Brand Purpose Dominated Cannes
The big topic of the week was industry change, driven largely by transparency. Agencies are evaluating opportunities and challenges to their business model as buyers demand more oversight of media, fees, and attribution. Increasing interest in ad tech in-housing has also stoked soul-searching.
Every brand also talked about reflecting an authentic, real world in its marketing—from the people in front of and behind the cameras, to creative and targeting strategies. The campaigns that seemed the most likely to succeed were all “purpose-centric,” with the brand rallying around a specific and common cause.
Report: Fake Google Maps Listings Ensnare Consumers, Harm Legitimate Businesses
“Chronic” local listings fraud on Google Maps, where con artists pose as handymen and other local service providers, sometimes stealing the names of legitimate operations, is endangering consumers and sucking business away from viable local businesses, the Wall Street Journal reported.
As Google seeks to prop up its lucrative but “cresting” search business and consolidate its lead in local, the tech giant is struggling to address the fraud issue and perhaps even to care about it.
Brand Safety is a Brand Authenticity Problem
Marketers know that in a world of globalized competition, consumers are one click away from choosing a different product or service. Taking a stand can help brands appear righteous and earn consumer loyalty, which is why brand safety scandals necessitate a massive and speedy PR response. However, responding to or apologizing for such scandals can only be perceived as authentic the first time around—not the second time, and definitely not the third. The endless cycle of brand safety scandals reveals one of two things about today’s brands—they’re either lemmings, or they don’t really care about brand values.
Tim Cook Demands New Commitment to Responsibility from Big Tech
With the moral and commercial high ground in clear sight, Tim Cook used the spotlight at Stanford University’s commencement ceremony Saturday to slam Big Tech peers Google, Facebook, and Twitter for failing to take responsibility for the hateful content and disinformation on their platforms.
Human Judgment, Automation, and the Future of Ad Tech
For now, I propose two major concerns—two challenges, even, for further thought—surrounding AI for the ad tech industry. The first is that the datafication of human experience that has allowed for precise ad targeting needs to be radically reconsidered, not just in terms of what can be done to obtain the consent of consumers for data collection, as the rising privacy movement has called tech companies to consider, but also in terms of what is lost and what is truly gained when the attributes of real people are transformed into consumer data. The second is that the human-machine hybrid decision-making model, while surely the best available in a hypothetical set that also includes human-only and machine-only models, will have to grapple with the bias and poor decisions of the humans who program the machines that will take on the task of regulating large platforms at scale.
Alphabet Plays the Long Game, Expanding and Investing in R&D, with Focus on Video
Alphabet is investing in its future, spending record funds on R&D and pouring money into non-core businesses such as self-driving cars (Waymo) and its video platform (YouTube). While the company exceeded analyst expectations on the back of ever-strong growth from its core search business, it was actually trading down on Monday, reflecting investor anxiety over the cost and ultimately profitability of its many secondary businesses.
Street Fight Daily: Local Merchants Unfazed by Facebook Controversy, Consumers Apprehensive on Voice
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Most Local Merchants Unfazed by Facebook Controversies, Though Some Signs of Trouble… Report: Brands Abandoning Social Media Measurement… Microsoft’s GitHub Deal Marks Latest Shift from Windows…
Brand Shoppability Comes to YouTube Shorts
We can add one more channel to the list of shoppable apps: YouTube Shorts. The YouTube feature that’s meant to compete with TikTok for short-form video has announced that it will integrate shoppable content and affiliate revenue. This comes as it tries to attract creators and counteract revenue declines.