Welcome back to another edition of The Marketer’s Playbook! In today’s edition we will take a look at:

• The notoriously strange TikTok ban

• Meta comes for Apple

• Superbowl commercials can improve your ads

& More. But first, a word from today’s sponsor 👇

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EDITOR’S CORNER

Hello everyone, and welcome back!

It has been along time since we had an edition go out. The main reason for this is a big shift in my own life. As some of you may or may not have seen, I recently departed my role as CEO of Shoelace, and embarked on a new journey, starting an ad agency of my own.

If you’d like to learn more about what I’m doing now, you can check out my post on X below about it.

That said, the hiatus here is over, and I am excited to get back into the swing of bringing you weekly news round ups. In fact, I am debating whether or not to increase the cadence of these emails from once weekly to Mondays and Thursday, strictly because of how much there has been to share lately. What do you think of this? Let me know below.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy today’s edition, and I will see you again next week!

Happy learning,
Cory Dobbin

THE ROUND UP

Rounding up the most important marketing news of the week

TIKTOK’S WILD 24 HOURS

Everyone under the sun at this point has heard that the Supreme Court upheld the ban on TikTok from operating in the US, something that citizens were waiting eagerly for an update on. This vote to uphold the ban was certainly not unexpected, but many people withheld hope that the ban would fall through. Many people were already seeing a message notifying them that TikTok was no longer available in their region on Sunday, which made it all feel very real.

That is, of course, until TikTok decided to reinstate service, under the promise from Trump that when he enters office in a few days he will work with them to find an agreement and not hold them liable for continuing operations. Obviously, we need to ignore the irony that it was Trump who pushed this motion forward in the first place. But that’s neither here nor there.

So, within 24 hours, the Supreme Court upheld the ban, TikTok shut down service, Trump and TikTok came to a partial, temporary agreement, and service is being reinstated.

What a wild ride. What happens next for TikTok is unclear - whether that’s simply working with the US to create more rigorous security measures, or another forced-selling of ByteDance’s assets in the US, only time will tell.

Last minute addition: This video just came to me from a friend as a current conspiracy theory that kind of sounds possible? Some weirdness here for sure, though nothing yet confirmed. Decide for yourself!

@ethanlevinsz

Facebook likely has BOUGHT TIKTOK #savetiktok #meta #facebook

INSTAGRAM’S GOALS FOR 2025

Instagram’s CEO, Adam Mosseri, recently shared a video that breaks down their goals for improving the platform. These goals include creating best-in-class creative tools (an area they seriously lack when compared to something like CapCut), rewarding original content, improving their AI tools, and more. Overall, these sound like all good things, so I am eager to see how these pan out, especially that creative tool.

META WAGES WAR ON APPLE

On a recent episode of the Joe Rogan podcast, Mark Zuckerberg joined as a guest and spoke on a number of important things, including Apple’s monopoly and how it falsely hides anti-consumer tactics behind the guise of user privacy, which is just blatantly false in many cases. Sure, Meta has many monopoly-related things to answer for themselves, but for the past decade Apple has avoided all scrutiny while Meta has taken nearly all of it. For consumers to win, this narrative needs to be equal, and it feels like this is beginning. When we talk about these things, everyone wins. Check out this great thread from Tim Carden which breaks down some of these talking points, including clips from the podcast itself.

LET THE SUPERBOWL TEACH US

Platinum Rye Entertainment just published a very interesting study on Superbowl commercials, conducting feedback from viewers on what they felt was most important or impactful. Here’s a teaser":

71% of respondents prefer Super Bowl ads that make them laugh, while only 17% enjoy nostalgic "throwback" ads. Women are more likely than men to watch the Super Bowl "mostly for the commercials" (71% vs. 55%). Celebrities remain a popular draw, with Taylor Swift and Metallica being the top choices for a Super Bowl ad and halftime performer. The survey also found that 85% of respondents prefer to see Super Bowl ads for the first time during the game, and 62% are likely to engage with a brand's Super Bowl content after the event.

I can’t help but feel like this information can be extrapolated to improve our digital advertising content, especially feedback regarding tone. To see the full study, check out LBB’s article below.

NEWS BITES

Everything else you need to know

• GOOGLE ADDS QR CODES: A new update now allows advertisers to add QR codes and Barcodes (?) to promotional ads.

• META’S REACH FRAUD CASE CONTINUES: The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a bid by Meta Platforms to avoid a class action by advertisers that accused them of overcharging by inflating reach on ads.

• INSTAGRAM’S NEW UI SUCKS: Everyone is complaining about how bad the new IG UI update is. Not only did they violate the 1:1 feeds, but also the profile bios. For shame!

• MICROSOFT CLARITY x GOOGLE ADS: Microsoft Clarity has announced an integration with Google Ads that now allows advertisers to view the post-click journey more clearly.

• REDNOTE IS NOT THE NEW TIKTOK: Many people, for whatever reason, decided to move to RedNote from TikTok. This is confusing, because it is guilty of the exact same security concerns as TikTok, but possibly to an even greater degree.

• TRADE DESK ACQUIRES SINCERA: Trade Desk acquired Sincera, a data company that works to improve traffic quality and transparency for advertisers as to where their dollars are going, and optimizing this against fraud — funnily enough, my new agency runs programmatic for brands through Trade Desk. Let’s chat if you want to diversify your media mix!

• COMMUNITY NOTES WONT IMPACT ADS: In a bit of great news for advertisers (well, depending on where you sit) the newly incoming community notes feature will not be shown on ads.

• BLUESKY’S MASSIVE GROWTH: BlueSky recently shared their Moderation Review which shows that they have increased their user base 17x year over year to a currently active 26M users. Wow.

• PINTEREST’S PALETTE IS HERE: Pinterest has shared their annual colour palette, with this year featuring Cherry Red, Butter Yellow, Aura Indigo, Alpine Oat, and Dill Green.

CAMPAIGN MONITOR

Review recent and note-worthy marketing campaigns

LINKEDIN — UNWASTED SPEND

LinkedIn just launched a new ad campaign going after other ad platforms with messaging around how LinkedIn’s ad platform “actually” targets people and doesn’t waste spend.

The ad below is a great example of, in my opinion, a bad ad. It feels like its trying to appeal to a younger demo with the ‘that feeling when…’ messaging, but the image feels totally unrelated to the copy. Further, most people I speak to say they’ve never seen success on their ad platform, which makes the messaging around wasted spend a bit ironic.

This one is a miss for me, but if you’d like to learn more, you can check out LinkedIn’s explanation of the campaign on their own website below.

THANK YOU FOR READING

We will see you again next week!