VIDEO MARKETING
Video streaming services are having a moment, and Amazon is seizing it
The average TV viewer in the United States now uses 5.7 TV sources, compared to 3.0 in 2018.
Streaming TV services (Hulu, Netflix, and more) account for a sizable portion of that number, with 79 percent of TV viewers now using at least one streaming service.
Free, ad-supported TV services are also on the rise, with 48% of TV viewers using them, up from 8% last year.
Amazon has just launched their own free, ad-supported service in India, called MiniTV. They’ve partnered with big content studios and major Indian influencers to bring original content to the platform.
Pushing ad-supported video: In our 4th of May issue, we wrote about Amazon’s ad-supported videos reaching more than 120M people each month. If MiniTV takes off, that number could be much larger.
What this trend means for you: If you use video to reach your audience, keep an eye on this trend. In addition, we expect more self-serving ad options in the near future. Last year, Hulu announced such an option for smaller businesses. Could Amazon be next?
ADVERTISING
Digital marketing’s lost decade
Number of impressions. Click-through rate. CPMs. What do these terms have in common?
They’re all vanity metrics, according to Dr. Augustine Fou, a researcher in ad fraud.
The lure of programmatic advertising: According to Dr. Fou, programmatic advertising has enticed advertisers because of high CTRs and low CPMs. It’s also a big plus that these metrics are simple to identify and quantify.
There’s only one problem with this, according to Dr. Fou: Bots. They’re rampant in programmatic advertising. These bots are like an ideal customer: They click a lot and they engage a lot. The problem? They don’t buy.
Nonetheless, advertisers have continued to press full steam ahead, focusing on vanity metrics while sometimes ignoring real metrics. This has been going on for the last decade, which Augustine refers to as the “digital marketing’s lost decade”.
What should you do about this: Instead of going programmatic, Dr. Fou advises you to “buy real ads from real publishers with real human audiences.” In other words, it’s not always smarter to advertise in a way that’ll yield wonderful CPMs. Sometimes, an engaged and organic audience is the much better option. (like our newsletter, maybe?)
Nobody’s telling you to stop advertising on Facebook or Google altogether. But, this is a good reminder to focus on real metrics instead of vanity.
SPONSORED BY MOTION
The things you don’t know about your ads… that are burning your cash
You probably won’t believe this right now: with 5 minutes of work, you could be making 91% more money out of your campaigns. Hear us out!
You already know about the importance of creatives, right?
What you might not know is how your creatives are impacting your revenue. Simple elements like the angle of your prospecting campaigns vs retargeting campaigns. Or whether or not the models in the images make eye contact.
A small tweak was stopping Tanner from delivering great results for a brand he was working with. He then discovered that dedicated landing pages for hero products were getting 34% higher returns than other landers.
So Tanner created a landing page for their top product, launched their campaigns, and… voilà, almost double revenue!
Motion provided Tanner with this insight. This platform helps you visualize which creatives are working and why within seconds.
It allows media buyers and agencies to create reports that tell a strong visual story to clients and creative teams (within minutes!), making them a critical part of the creative process.
You’re probably wondering how Motion works, and how it can be so powerful.
Sign up, connect your most complex ad account and be amazed.
Advanced tactics to level up your Twitter game
These are not growth strategies.
They’re tactics shared by Dickie Bush on how to make the most of Twitter.
According to Dickie, if you use it right, Twitter is the most powerful platform in the world. Yet the platform doesn’t make it easy to find advanced features.
Here are some you can use:
- Advanced search: Do you want to find someone’s best thread? In the search bar, type from:dickiebush min_faves:500. Where “dickiebush” is the account name of the person you’re targeting, and 500 is the number of likes of a tweet.
- Create different Lists of people you follow for each one of your interests.
- Do you want to see the tweets of somebody about a particular topic? If you wanted to see consistency tweets from Dickie, you’d type from:dickiebush “consistency” in the search bar.
- Do you want to remove somebody from your followers without blocking them? Block them, then unblock them. Twitter will remove them from your following list, and they’ll never know. Don’t
- Don’t start a thread by tagging someone. This will make Twitter think it’s a reply and the message from your followers.
- Do you want to stop receiving notifications from a conversation? Click to expand the details of the tweet, then click the three dots on the top right-hand corner. Click on “mute this conversation”. And there are even more advanced muting options.
- Twitter penalizes external links. So, place them in the reply to the main thread.
- For better formatting, use bullets rather than dashes when sharing lists.
- If you want to resurface a tweet back to the top of everyone’s timeline, don’t retweet it. Simply reply to it with a question or additional tweet. Twitter will resurface the top tweet and the most recent replies.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
SEO: Here’s a pretty cool report by Aira. They interviewed 250 SEO professionals to discover what most popular tools, metrics and link building approaches they use.
ADVERTISING: When life gives you lemons, come up with first-party tracking methods. This article delves into the tracking strategies used by publishers such as BuzzSumo in the post-third-party cookie era.
E-COMMERCE: Is e-commerce going to turn into QVC-style selling? This article goes into greater detail.
MARKETING: Lots of people, usually from outside the marketing world, think that it’s evil. Here, Rand Fishkin explains why that’s not true, and lays out a rational argument for the core of marketing.
GOOGLE: No matter whether you publish or change the date of your article, Google keeps an internal record of it.
BRAIN TEASER
Your parents have six sons, including you, and each son has one sister. How many people are in the family?
You can find the solution here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Wanna try vodka made in Chernobyl?
A group of British and Ukrainian scientists created 1.5k bottles of vodka from “radioactive” apples found near the Chernobyl power plant.
The liquor has a cool name too: Atomik. The goal of the liquor wasn’t to be cool, though; it was to see if it was possible to make a safe-to-consume product from crops that were grown in an environment that’s considered to be (still to some degree) contaminated.
The results were promising; there was no sign of unusual radiation found in the liquor. Atomik was ready for shipping and export to the UK… Until it wasn’t.
Unfortunately, the Ukranian security service seized the bottles while they were located at a distillery plant in the country. The reason wasn’t radiation though, it was a problem with customs.
Jim Smith, one of the scientists behind the project, said he has “no idea why” the bottles were seized and hopes everything was just a mistake.
Let’s hope the bottles get released soon. Atomik is receiving interest from all over the world. Why? Because people are strange, and they want to buy Chernobyl-made alcohol.
(We’re not saying The Crew isn’t included in that group of strange people, of course.)