ADVERTISING
Social media platforms make updates related to Russia and Ukraine
Sanctions, sanctions and more sanctions. We’ve all heard about governments and corporations taking actions to reduce the amount of money flowing to the Russian government.
Social media platforms are also making updates. Here are four that we’ve found so far:
- Ads on Twitter have been temporarily paused in Russia and Ukraine. The reason is to ensure that “critical public safety information is elevated and ads don’t detract from it.”
- Google Ads has updated its Legal Requirements policy to add two territories to its list of embargoed territories.
- Ukraine called on Apple to block App Store access in Russia. We’ve seen a lot of companies that budge under public pressure, and we won’t be surprised if Apple does the same at least temporarily.
- Meta has banned Russian state media from running ads anywhere in the world. Yes, this is not just within Russia but worldwide.
There will likely be more such updates coming in the next few days, and we’ll try to make sure you have them in your inbox.
E-COMMERCE
Etsy is still on the up and up
Last week we reported that eBay is bigger than you think. You can now add Etsy to this list.
The company has published its quarterly earnings report for Q4 2021. Here are some key stats:
- Revenue: $717 million.
- Active buyers: 96.3 million.
Why we care: If you’re into e-commerce and haven’t considered Etsy as a marketing channel, some of these stats might make you reconsider.
Etsy is still a massive marketplace, and it’s growing faster than expected. Its revenue and active buyer figures exceeded the expected figures of $685 million and 95.6 million, respectively.
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BUSINESS
The time when Facebook sunk a $75M business
How many million dollar businesses have been built on the lands of Facebook, Amazon, Shopify or YouTube?
Many!
One of them is LittleThings, a female focused feel good entertainment company. And in this thread Joe Speiser explained how its dependence on Facebook was their ruin.
In 2018, LittleThings was generating $75M a year in revenue, had 110 employees, and an OTT (over the top) streaming channel.
The business was built on the back of Facebook’s amazing reach, and at their peak they had:
- 20M social media followers.
- 15M live programming views per month.
- 900M video views per month.
Then in 2018 a major algorithm change happened.
Previous changes didn’t impact LittleThings. But Facebook decided that they didn’t like feel-good fluffy content anymore, that they wanted to prioritze actual news. And Facebook said that LittleThings had to pay for eyeballs.
90% of Little Things organic traffic was slashed.
Running paid campaigns would have destroyed margins. And without Facebook’s organic reach, they couldn’t afford to pay their staff and the New York office lease anymore.
Why didn’t they put their eggs in other baskets? Joe says that they tried but there weren’t any real alternatives at the time.
They tried YouTube, email, Pinterest, and OTT. But none of them gave LittleThings the insanely large reach that Facebook gave them.
It’s a sad business story. But there is a lesson you can bring home. It’s probably not the first time you hear this. Yet still many businesses make the same mistake.
It’s okay to leverage one platform as an acquisition channel. But at the same time you should create a direct connection with your audience.
Sometimes it’s not possible. But at least you should try.
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THE CREW’S INSIGHTS
Three mistakes beginner media buyers make
We have to confess we were guilty of making these three mistakes too… They are extremely common, and we’re hoping you can avoid them if you haven’t learned from your own mistake already.
1. Misunderstanding statistical significance and making decisions too quickly. Buying $10 worth of traffic on Facebook or any other platform won’t give you enough data to know if your product is any good.
You need to come up with a much more significant test budget. All too often we’ve seen beginners test a few campaigns with a total worth of under $1,000 and thinking that’s it, nothing more to do.
2. Making unclear ads by trying to reinvent the wheel. For some reason, many beginner marketers don’t like what other marketers are doing. So, they try to “do it differently” but without following proven principles.
Most beginners should draw inspiration from what their competition does, and adjust for their own products.
3. Mistaking Meta (ex-Facebook) Marketing Experts for account managers. OK, this can happen for other platforms too but… Those “Marketing Experts” from Facebook are sales people, they aren’t ad buyers that can help you improve campaigns.
They usually have zero relevant media buying experience and call you to get you to spend more money. We’ve seen countless posts in groups about advertisers “talking to their reps” when it was actually a generic “Marketing Expert”.
This doesn’t mean you should never talk to them, but adjust your expectations from “concrete campaign advice” to “guidance about new features and certain basics you might not follow”.
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GOOGLE: The search company has 2 new updates for Google Analytics 4 properties. You can use Google Ads audience targeting with the GA4 integration and you can now export data to the GA4 Big Query integration.
LINKEDIN: How are your LinkedIn posts doing? LinkedIn released several post analytics features to help you find the answer.
E-COMMERCE: Uh-oh. The UK is looking into introducing an Online Sales Tax. While still early days, this seems more and more likely to be implemented in several countries in the not too distant future.
INSTAGRAM: The Instagram “memes” pages are getting out of control. This time, there’s been “war pages” that report false news on the situation between Russia and Ukraine.
APPLE: Good news if you’re into mobile apps. The App Store small business program no longer prohibits app transfers.
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BRAIN TEASER
Which of the following words don’t belong in the group and why? CORSET, COSTER, SECTOR, ESCORT, COURTS
You can find the answer 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 Job-Hoppers
Your parents wanted a stable job. Your children will probably think that’s boring.
According to Axios, Gen Z is changing jobs at a rate 134% higher than 2019. And they aren’t stopping anytime soon. 25% of Gen Z say they plan to keep job-hopping within the next 6 months.
We’ll have to see if Gen Z still thinks that way in 10 years.