So…first newsletter. I’ll be publishing 3 updates per week to start with. The goal of the newsletter is to write about marketing strategy in a non-MBA, actionable method.
In the light of more bad PR for the social media giants and increasing scale which makes reaching the right users harder, I wonder what would be the new marketing channels that will be unveiled in the near future.
I’m amazed video still works
Despite all the bots, the scandals and decreasing trust in social media ads people still watch a lot of video ads. As quoted from Google’s third quarter earning’s report (highlights by me)
The number of paid clicks through our advertising programs on Google properties increased from the three and nine months ended September 30, 2017 to the three and nine months ended September 30, 2018 primarily due to growth in YouTube engagement ads, and to a lesser extent, increases in mobile search queries, improvements we have made in ad formats and delivery, and continued global expansion of our products, advertisers and user base. The positive effect on our revenues from an increase in paid clicks was partially offset by a decrease in the cost-per-click paid by our advertisers. The decrease in cost-per-click was primarily driven by continued growth in YouTube Table of Contents Alphabet Inc. 36 engagement ads where cost-per-click remains lower than on our other advertising platforms.
This is also the reason why Google decided to embrace videos further with its introduction of Google AMP stories, which will deliver Instagram like story content on its search platform.
It is interesting to note that the type of video content that brands rely on (YouTube ads, Instagram stories) are kind of the anti-thesis of the organic growth and engagement that brands relied on a couple of years earlier. YouTube ads and stories are forced on you just like TV ads. Now that platforms have dethroned traditional media and established monopolies, is the advertising UX now shifting towards how it always was?
The sleeping giant of video advertising…
Has to be Amazon, and this is reflected in this excerpt from an analyst on their third quarter earnings call:
“By 2021, we believe it is likely that advertising operating income will exceed AWS [Amazon Web Services],” analyst Michael Olson wrote Monday. Olson expects advertising income to reach $16 billion in 2021 compared to AWS at $15 billion
Right now you need a minimum budget of $35,000 to start advertising on the Amazon DSP. Amazon faces a tough challenge in navigating adverting without affecting its core business and value of putting the customer first. They would probably take some time to figure it out before making the advertising DSP a self serve platform. Also, Amazon has Twitch in its portfolio which it has not fully tapped into.
The other bets
Voice interfaces - No one has found a use case for them escape to check the weather and set an oven timer (yet). As Benedict Evans put it, it’s like pen computing in the 90s. Everyone thinks there’s something there, but we all had to wait 10 years before touch interfaces became a thing.
Everyone except Facebook seems to think that they just can’t do hardware. The fact that Facebook is trying so eagerly to enter the home devices market and the VR market says that it is looking for ways to keep the juggernaut rolling. The launch of the $199 VR headset would tell if Facebook would keep pursuing its hardware dreams.
Crypto..anyone? The Basic Attention Token seems like an interesting idea that I would place a long bet on. It seems like the one thing that seems to break the mould of business as usual in digital advertising (After all thats how social media ads became a thing). I leave you with a quick dive into BAT by Sriram Krishnan who worked on creating advertising platforms at Facebook and Snap.
Reference read: The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs by the Obi Wan Kenobi of growth