ROUND UP — Meta Ads, UGC, YouTube & More

Plenty of lawsuits, accusations, and fumbles in big tech this week

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SIDE NOTE 1: There's no real need to be scared of AI... yet. Which camp do you fall into? Are you nice to AI because you never know, or are you not nice to AI because it's just a dumb robot and a dystopian sci-fi-horror future is impossible? I'd love to get your vote on this thread:

META BEST PRACTICES

As part of a long discussion on Twitter, Yoni Levy, who heads up Marketing Solutions at Meta, shared a few insights that can help advertisers better understand how best practices apply to account management. Here, he shares an infographic demonstrating the importance of only adding more ad sets when you have enough budget to do so.

Further, he explains that, hypothetically, even if you have enough budget for 10 ad sets in a campaign, you should realistically max that out at 6 ad sets. This was a 'best practice' that I actually wasn't aware of. Learning something new every day.

Lastly, he explains why you should allocate enough budget to each ad set to allow it to leave the learning phase. While I personally have only seen marginal improvements in performance from leaving the learning phase, it seems that the average improvement in performance is good enough to strive for if you have the budget. A nearly 20% decrease in CPA on average is pretty damning if you ask me.

As always, check the tweets above and below for more context, and make sure to show Yoni some love because he shows the marketing community plenty.

UGC TRANSPARENCY

In a recent post from Sonya Robinson, we get to go behind the scenes into what it takes to produce great UGC. Here, she breaks down the script she created for the video, what she actually filmed, and explains what she was able to learn from the performance of the ad and what to do next time. It's interesting, at least from my perspective, to get a chance to take a look behind the camera and understand how creators are approaching UGC creation. Check out her post below to learn more:

YOUTUBE'S 2023 CULTURE & TRENDS REPORT

YouTube recently dropped its annual culture & trends report, which looks at how creators are using YouTube and various creator tools to push culture in new directions. Some interesting stats:

• 47% of Gen Z have watched videos made by fans of specific content in the past 12 months, showcasing that fandom is alive and well

• More than 1.7B views in 2023 can be attributed to AI-related content

• 87% of people have at least 4 of the content formats available on YouTube, highlighting the importance of maximizing the platform's placements

You can check out a summary of the report in the video below or in YouTube's report on their website here. 

TRUEVIEW ADS AREN'T WHAT THEY SEEM

According to Adalytics, Google’s TrueView video ad product may have misled dozens of business and government advertisers about the viewership of ads running on third-party websites and apps. The firm reviewed the ad campaigns of over 1,000 brands across the internet and found many of the TrueView ads did not meet Google’s own guidelines, "including some ads that were run in small video players in the corner or at the side of the screen, some which were fully muted, had no actual video content between ads." Of course, Google disagrees, so only time will tell whether this is accurate or not. Check out the article below for more info.

FRAUD OR SIMPLE IGNORANCE?

IRL, a platform dedicated to helping users with the discovery of online events, recently announced that they are shutting down while admitting that 95% of its users were fake. Yes, you read that right — 20 million were "automated or from bots." It's currently unclear whether or not this was deliberately done by the team, or not, but I am sure we will soon find out. Worse, the company just raised $200M in venture capital. Ouch. To learn more, check out TechCrunch's article here:

• YOUTUBE'S THUMBNAIL TESTER: YouTube Creator Insider just announced that they are releasing A/B testing for your YouTube thumbnails. This will help compare three thumbnails and then use the winner based on watch time.

• TIKTOK ADDS KEYWORD FILTERING: As part of an effort to give parents more parental controls, TikTok has rolled out keyword filtering. This actually sounds like a pretty great feature for everyone, considering that the algorithm can get a little crazy sometimes.

• YOU CAN NOW DOWNLOAD REELS: Instagram just rolled out a new update that will allow users to download publicly posted Reels.

• AMAZON IS BEING SUED BY THE FTC: According to the FTC, Amazon has been knowingly tricking customers into joining their Amazon Prime subscription. "Specifically, Amazon used manipulative, coercive, or deceptive user-interface designs known as 'dark patterns' to trick consumers into enrolling in automatically-renewing Prime subscriptions."

• THE EU JOINS THE ANTI-GOOGLE FIGHT:  The EU announced that they are joining the US to try and put an end to Google's adtech market dominance, pushing for a selloff order.

DOMINOS — PINPOINT DELIVERY

Dominos recently announced that they team up with Google Maps to improve their app, allowing users to drop a pin to their location for pizza delivery rather than having to manually search for an address. To highlight this new feature, Dominos released a visual ad campaign that does a great job of demonstrating the beautiful absurdity of this new system. Want to order pizza to your boat? Give it a shot. While I'm sure there's plenty that can go wrong in execution here, the ad perfectly balances fun and interesting visuals without straying from the purpose of the campaign — the new function.

DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME

While not exactly the campaign news you might expect, there's probably something that we, as marketers, can glean from this. According to a UK advertising watchdog, Toyota and Hyundai were recently caught lying about their product's capabilities and features in a series of new ads, subsequently leading to them being banned in the UK and Ireland. Worse, these weren't just video ads but deliberately printed misinformation in brochures and more.

The moral of the story? Simple: don't lie to your customers, or big brother will come knocking. For more information, check out the article on The Guardian below.

Have a great week,Cory