ADVERTISING
We be high…
GroupM is in charge of more than $53B (yes, that’s a B) in annual media spend. In other words, they have a lot of data to analyze and draw conclusions from.
The numbers: According to the GroupM report, digital advertising is on track to grow by 31 percent in 2021, accounting for 64.4% of all advertising this year. This is up from 60.5 percent in 2020 and 52.1 percent in 2019.
Furthermore, global advertising revenue (not counting US political ads) is expected to grow by 22 percent in 2021. In dollar figures, that’s $763B
Yay for digital ads, nay for TV ads: Global TV advertising, on the other hand, is expected to grow by only 11.7 percent in 2021. This will not be enough to compensate for the decline caused by the pandemic in 2020.
The main players: Outside of China, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon get the lion’s share of digital advertising revenue. ByteDance (which owns TikTok) is the rising star here, and is now the world’s third largest seller of advertising (after Alphabet and Meta).
Instagram will host shoppable livestreams for a full week
And the first one starts in a few hours.
The details: Instagram has announced that they’ll be hosting a series of holiday shopping events from December 7 (yup, that’s today) through December 15. The shows will feature Instagram celebrities like Nia Sioux and Lisa Rinna.
To tune in, you just need to head over to Instagram’s Shop tab. The first event will start today, at 2:00 PT / 5:00 ET.
Why you (should) care: Inspiration. Shoppable live streaming is a $170 billion industry in China and is rapidly expanding in the West. If things continue at this rate, there’s a good chance that your industry will start organizing a few shoppable live streams in 2022. So spending an hour or two observing how they’re done now might be a good idea if you want to get a head start.
SPONSORED BY DRIP
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These are some of the ways Drip can help you grow your revenue:
- Behavior-based automation: Drip triggers communications based on events that users complete in your store.
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- Laser-focused personalization: Drip sends different email campaigns to each customer based on their past purchases, products visited, and other behaviors.
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BUSINESS
4 business lessons from McDonald’s
Chances are that you stepped foot into a McDonald at least once in your life…
They’re, without any doubt, one of the most successful companies in history. And Chris Hladczuk shared 5 business lessons we can learn from:
1) Kill choice: Originally, “McDonald’s Barbecue” served pulled pork sandwiches, burgers, and more. Then the McDonald’s brothers cut the menu from 25 to 9 items.
We discussed this recently: Reduce choice.
2) Standardize: McDonald’s standardized every order. Every hamburger is made in the exact same way, using the same amount of ingredients.
If there’s a process that can be standardized in your business, you should do it. Standardizing eliminates errors, drives process improvements, and makes them more efficient.
3) You can change your direction: McDonald’s started as a BBQ restaurant. Then it pivoted to be a hamburger factory with the vision of serving a customer in 20 seconds.
Uber started as a limousine service.
Don’t get married to your idea. Pivot if you see a growth chance.
3) Compete (and prevail) on price: When they pivoted to the hamburger business, McDonald’s prices were half their competitors’.
This can be difficult these days with Amazon being the low prices leader. But remember that customers love to save money.
4) Understand your real revenue driver: Former McDonald’s CFO, Harry J. Sonneborn, is quoted as saying,
“We are not technically in the food business. We are in the real estate business.”
McDonald’s owns about 45% of the land and 70% of the buildings at their 36,000+ locations (the rest is leased).
They buy real estate and rent them to franchisers. This means that part of their revenue comes from renting real estate, rather than selling burgers. This revenue comes with higher margins than selling burgers. Moreover, this helps McDonald’s protect themselves from the ups and downs of the business of flippin’ burgers.
Amazon is not just an e-commerce marketplace. They are a logistics company with the best warehouse and delivery systems in the world.
The lesson here is to look at your business and try to unlock different sources of revenue.
Didn’t this post cause you an instant urge to watch The Founder?
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THE CREW’S INSIGHTS
The keys to advertising in newsletters
You’ve heard this one before, “We like newsletters!”
We’ve advertised in countless ones, and countless partners advertised in ours.
We think we know a thing or two about advertising in newsletters. Here’s what we think are the key information you need:
- Unique clicks per sponsored post. This stat will tell you the amount of visitors you can expect to your website from a post.
- Unique opens. The term “open rate” has been redefined by some newsletters out there to include repeat opens. Focus on how many people actually see your ad and ask for the unique opens.
- Price. Obviously you want to calculate an estimated CPM and CPC with the numbers above.
Whether it’s brand awareness or conversions that you are looking for, that’s the key information you need. But let’s also give you some red flags when it comes to newsletters that should make you sceptical:
- You can’t get a straight answer for the stats above. If someone cannot tell you an estimate of unique clicks per sponsored post, unique opens, or a clear price, they either are trying to mislead you or they don’t know what they are doing.
- They brag about subscribers. Do you really care how many inboxes your message gets lost in? Or do you care about how many people read your message?
- They push “total” clicks or opens as a way to show engagement. If one person opens an email a million times, does it really help you? Focus on uniques!
- Low open rates. If a newsletter has under 20% unique open rate, no matter how good the stats look otherwise, it’s bad. There’s a significant chance the remaining openers are actually just corporate firewalls (aka, bots) and you will get very few humans reading your message.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
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PPC: Another day, another Google Ads bug being fixed. This one is related to spend fluctuations for tROAS and Maximize Conversion Value bid strategies.
TIKTOK: What makes TikTok so addictive? The New York Times has obtained a leaked document on this topic.
SEO: December’s Google Product Reviews Update has already shaken things up.
TWITTER: Will Twitter become the next direct advertising behemoth? They surely have the potential, according to this analysis.
GOOGLE: You’ll no longer need those pesky campaign drafts if you want to run a Google Ads experiment.
*This is a sponsored post.
BRAIN TEASER
How can you leave a room with two legs and return with six legs?
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.
RyanAir has a wacky social media account. And we now know the person behind it
We marketers have idols too, and one of them is the content manager of RyanAir’s hilarious TikTok account. And we now know who she is, Lily Rafferty.
Lily has helped RyanAir get 140 million views over the past 6 months, making wacky videos like this one. Or this one.
What’s her secret? According to Lily, it’s about “knowing how to jump on trends that may be viewed as obscure.” She did this with two TikTok trends. The ‘couch guy’ and ‘Dom Torreto.’ Both videos received 39M and 23M views respectively.
In addition, Lily stated that keeping up with mainstream trends and turning them into Ryanair’s brand has been crucial to her success.
Let’s hope Lily continues to inspire us with even wackier Ryanair videos.