AUDIO
Facebook and Spotify want to be like Clubhouse when they grow up
The battle for live audio is heating up (again).
Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg held the first test for live audio rooms on Facebook.
Today, Spotify debuted “Spotify Greenroom”, a live audio platform.
Just like Clubhouse: Facebook’s live audio screen looks awfully similar to Clubhouse. Spotify tried to be (somewhat) more innovative, but the look still feels Clubhouse-y.
The missing content format: For Spotify, getting into live audio fits in with what they already do. For Facebook however, audio might be the only content format they have not (yet) mastered.
Text: Done with status posts. Video: Done with Facebook Watch. Audio? Not there yet. Which seems to be one of the reasons why Facebook is working hard at this. Podcasts are also coming to the platform next week.
ADVERTISING
Surviving the Apple-calypse
After Apple rolled out its App Tracking Transparency update, we reported on Facebook advertisers complaining about rising CPM costs.
Not just Facebook: It turns out that TikTok and Google advertisers are experiencing the same thing, according to new data from Brian Bowman, founder of a large mobile advertising agency. This was especially true for mobile apps, which suffered the most as a result of Apple’s change.
Everything old is new again: How do you survive the Apple-calypse and the fact that the world is moving towards a privacy-first-advertising world? Embrace that creative is king, according to Bowman.
If you have grey hair, you will recall the good old days of direct advertising, when ‘creative is king’ was the mantra to live by.
Every marketing best practice eventually becomes a bad practice: What kind of creatives should you do, though? Just a few years ago, appearing “professional” was something advertisers worked hard to achieve in their materials.
Today, this doesn’t work so well. Even Facebook recommends trying “lo-fi” video ads because they perform better than ads with a “high degree of polish.”
The marketing world is a strange beast, which is why we love it.
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MARKETING
Wasted $1M investment shows why marketing personas are useless
Another day, another debate about marketing personas. This time with a twist: It’s a story about wasting more than $1M on personas. So, we’re listening.
Matt Lerner is the person that misspent that budget when he was working at PayPal.
As he said, the research uncovered fascinating information, like the risk tolerance, price sensitivity, ambition, and tech-savviness of each persona.
But these details had no application in their marketing activities. Basically, all that different personas wanted a payment system that:
- Has buyers trust.
- Makes checkouts easy.
- Works with merchants’ existing systems.
- Is not too expensive.
- Helps manage fraud.
- Has good customer service.
You don’t need to spend one million dollars to know this, right?
Matt Lerner’s solution is to answer these questions about your customers:
- What do prospects stress about? These are the pain points you can play with in your ads.
- Where do they look for solutions? This will tell you where to reach them.
- Which alternatives did they try and why did they fail? This will tell you how to position yourself against the competition.
- How do they describe success? This will tell you about their desires and it’s what you must use in your copy.
- What are they nervous about? These are the objections you want to address.
Matt Lerner discovers this information by interviewing people that have recently signed up for his service, as well as his competitors’ services.
And ask them the following questions:
- What were you hoping to do?
- Why is that important to you?
- Where did you look?
- What else did you try?
As this may seem like a shortcut, these questions should still be used to identify different personas. The problem is not that personas do not work. But sometimes marketers are asking the wrong questions.
You don’t care if an individual works in a bank or in a grocery store. What you care about is that they want to repair their roof – and, more importantly, why.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
GOOGLE: If you run Google Video Action or Discovery campaigns, you might want to take a look at this. Google will automatically broaden your audience to include new segments that may be (also) interested in what you have to offer.
MICROSOFT: It’s the beginning of summer, and travel is picking up. Microsoft appears to be aware of this and just made their “Tours and Activities Ads” available to all advertisers in the US and UK.
FACEBOOK: Ads in the real world are boring. You know what’s cool? Ads in the virtual world. Facebook started testing in-headset VR ads in the Oculus mobile app.
SEO: Is quality a site-level signal in search rankings? Google says yes.
PRODUCTIVITY: Great news for night owls! Slack now includes a scheduled-send-letter feature, allowing you to safely schedule sending that brilliant idea you had at 4 a.m. to your colleagues.
CONTENT MARKETING: We may soon be able to easily turn our image into video. Researchers at the University of Washington created an AI system that can convert a single photo into a video.
FACEBOOK: Managing a Facebook group is a pain in the you-know-what. Fortunately, Facebook just added a few group features to make things easier.
BRAIN TEASER
Two children were playing checkers and each played five games. Both children won the same number of games yet there were no ties. How is this possible?
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.
The internet is being sold as an NFT
Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve finally arrived. A part of the internet will sell as an NFT.
Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web, will sell the original code for the internet as a nonfungible token.
The whole thing will start as an auction, and the starting price will be $1000.
What will the lucky winner get: The original, time-stamped files that contain the source code written by Tim Berners-Lee himself. The winner will also get an animated visualization of the code, a letter that Berners-Lee wrote on the code and its creation, as well as a digital “poster” of the full code.
Oh, and everything above will be digitally signed by Tim Berners-Lee himself.