2023 Advertising and Marketing Predictions

2023 Advertising and Marketing Predictions

by Kurt Anagnostopoulos Advertising

Gather around advertisers, pull up a comfortable chair, and take a look at our advertising and marketing predictions for 2023! We take on some big topics, ranging from the rise of AI to the impact of the economic downturn. Oh, and TikTok and Twitter, too. Check out our predictions, and let us know yours!

The Economic Downturn Will Present an Opportunity

— Kurt Anagnostopoulos, co-founder

This is a time for companies to make smart decisions about their marketing spend. We’re clearly in an economic downturn. Over the next six months, the downturn will intensify although not to the extent of the Great Recession of 2008. When downturns occur and uncertainty happens, inevitably some businesses scale back on their marketing spend. History has demonstrated time and again that during lean times, the cost cutters lose out to the businesses that continue to invest in their brands. Companies that stay the course will come out the other side of the recession ahead. If you are smart about how you market and price yourself, you can leave your competitors behind when times are tough. It’s not necessarily about doubling down on marketing, and it’s not about cutting at the other end of the extreme. It’s about spending wisely.

A mentality of spending wisely could hurt the major ad platforms such as Google and Meta. They’ve become more expensive. With advertisers seeking to spend more wisely in 2023, Google and Meta might price themselves out of the running in favor of platforms that deliver better CPCs and performance for the money. An agency such as True Interactive can help businesses navigate the landscape by leveraging platforms in a more cost-effective manner.

The water is too murky to see too far out beyond the next six months. We need to see how things are going to play out for the second half.

Artificial Intelligence Will Need People More Than Ever

— Mark Smith, co-founder

You cannot spend a minute on LinkedIn these days without seeing someone talking about ChatGPT, the generative AI tool that makes it easy to do everything from write content to code. It’s understandable that ChatGPT has gained so much attention. OpenAI released the tool publicly in November 2022 and made it easy for anyone to use it. The public responded. But ChatGPT is just one in a growing number of AI tools being used to do everything from manage customer queries to create royalty-free music. Right now, a number of executives are experimenting with these tools to do the heavy lifting for them – the writing, image generation, and so on. But soon, the novelty will wear off. And everyone will realize what we know already: AI cannot do your work for you. People need to be involved managing AI like any other technology. If you use Google’s myriad advertising tools as we do, you likely understand. Our experience has consistently shown that automated ads powered by AI underperform without people involved to monitor and modulate them when necessary. The same is true of generative AI. These tools are slick, but they make mistakes, and they are notoriously biased. They are nowhere near the point of being self-sufficient. In 2023, some businesses will learn the hard way that AI alone is not the answer to making smart investments in digital marketing. They’ll realize that people matter more than ever.

Google Ads Will Get Costlier

— Beth Bauch, director

2023 could prove to be challenging for businesses highly invested in Google Ads. I anticipate more automation by Google, resulting in less control for marketers.

One of the most common suggestions in the “Recommendations” tab in the Google Ads platform is to convert keywords to “broad match,” away from the more traditional “exact and phrase match.” Exact and phrase match keywords are meant to only match to searches that contain your keyword, making search queries highly relevant. Broad match keywords allow your ad to show on searches that are related to the meaning of your keyword and can include searches that do not contain the keyword terms.

While we have seen some success when testing broad match keywords with Googles automated bidding strategies, we have also seen some significant failures resulting in high spend and poor conversion rates. So, you need to proceed with caution when using broad match. One of the ways we improve the quality of search queries is by adding negative keywords to prevent our ads from showing on searches that are irrelevant.

However, whereas in the past we had access to view all search queries matching our keywords, Google now limits that visibility, only showing the top search matches. This makes it more difficult to block irrelevant traffic resulting in more spend on searches with low conversion rates.

And poor-quality traffic is very costly, especially as we have seen significant increases in the cost-per-click (CPC) of both brand and non-brand keywords in 2022 – as high as 50 percent increases for brand terms alone year over year. For some clients, we saw rising CPCs even though we were not seeing an increase in competition on brand keyword bidding when reviewing the Google Auction Insights report. This is an indication that Google has raised the base price for participating in a specific auction, regardless of competition.

As Google looks to rebound and increase its profits, I expect to see even higher advertising costs for Google Ads in 2023.

TikTok Will Extend Its Influence

— Bella Schneider, senior digital marketing manager

With the increasing popularity of TikTok, I predict that the brand will expand and improve its ads manager to be more comparable to Facebook Business Manager. Currently the platform is lacking in a few areas, and if TikTok is to compete with some of the larger social channels, then it will need to make adjustments to allow for easier advertising on the platform.

Meanwhile, thanks to TikTok, I predict the world of video will dominate the advertising space. More and more video content is starting to look and feel similar to the videos displayed on the TikTok native platform. Whether it’s dances, trends, or challenges, I predict that advertising will shift towards this style of video content.

Does Twitter Have a Future?

— Max Petrungaro, account manager

I have a difficult time seeing advertisers return to Twitter as long as Elon Musk is at the helm. When Musk bought the company, things immediately started poorly with most of Twitter’s top advertisers putting their ads on pause or stopping outright. In December 2022, the situation for Twitter deteriorated, with advertising spend being slashed by more than 70 percent. Twitter tried to combat this by offering incentives to the companies that would keep advertising, but I do not believe that this will be enough to overcome the polarization that Elon brings to the table.

With most of its revenue coming from advertising, and top spending advertisers not showing ads and/or slashing budgets, there may not be a Twitter by the time 2023 is over. As long as Elon is associated with Twitter, I believe that more advertisers will start to focus their advertisements on other popular platforms, like TikTok.

Customer Data Platforms Will Have a Big Year

— Héctor Ariza, senior manager

As the push for tighter data privacy in the digital world gains momentum, I expect 2023 to be a big year for customer data platforms (CDPs). With stricter data privacy regulations being imposed by governments around the world, and the imminent cookie-less era looming, companies and advertisers are already exploring privacy-enhancing technologies in their search of a more secure, yet accurate way of tracking user activity online.

Still, whatever the alternative to cookies and existing tracking methods may be, it will likely rely heavily on data aggregation/modeling. Thus, first-party data will become ever so more important in the digital advertising world. CDPs allow companies to manage what data is used, where it is used and how it is used more easily. These systems also help with data consistency across marketing/advertising platforms and reduce the risk of mishandling customer data.

Retail Ad Networks Will Lean into Mobile Even More

— Tim Colucci, vice president

One of the biggest stories in advertising in recent years is the rise of advertising networks managed by retailers ranging from Amazon to Macy’s to Walmart. Amazon’s own ad business has become so big that it is challenging the Google/Meta duopoly. These networks have succeeded because they tap into first-party data shared by people searching and shopping on their sites. The next phase of growth will happen when they more effectively integrate consumer shopping data from physical stores into the first-party data they use to sell targeted ads. This is why retailers that operate physical stores and ad networks will invest more into their mobile apps. With self-service mobile apps, in-store shoppers give retailers data about their interests in real time in a faster and more efficient way than they do by having their purchases shared via point-of-sale technology. Look for retailers to make it easier for consumers to search and purchase on their apps – and for advertisers to run ads via self-service such as sponsored listings. Walmart has an edge on most retailers in that regard. Given Walmart’s influence and resources, I expect the company will lean into its competitive advantage while Target tries to play catch-up.

Contact True Interactive

To succeed in the ever-changing world of online advertising, contact True Interactive. Read about some of our client work here.

Lessons from the 2022 Holiday Shopping Season

Lessons from the 2022 Holiday Shopping Season

by Kurt Anagnostopoulos Retail

How was your holiday sales season? For many retailers, the holiday shopping season felt as close to a return to normal as could be hoped for. This does not mean everyone had a great retail season; but some of the disruptive forces from 2020 and 2021 abated, such as supply chain woes and the impact of Covid-19 on in-store shopping. Instead, retailers managed against some of the variable conditions that affect shopping every season, including the state the economy and weather conditions. Here are some major takeaways from the 2022 holiday season:

  • Economic uncertainty has influenced spend – but by how much? U.S. retail sales grew 7.6 percent during the holiday shopping season, according to a Mastercard report. This was higher than the 7.1 percent growth that Mastercard had predicted in September but lower than the 8.5 percent growth achieved in 2021. Online sales grew 10.6 percent, slightly less than the 11 percent increase last year. Mastercard attributed the lower rates to consumers’ experiencing economic uncertainty. But given just how much uncertainty is in the air right now – including an ongoing war in Ukraine and a looming recession – the slowdown was really nowhere as bad as it could have been.
  • Retailers that offered price deals did especially well. Remember in 2021 when retailers were reluctant to offer discounts and deals because the supply chain crisis had hurt their inventory levels? That’s an example of an unusual problem that abated in 2022. Inventory levels returned to normal in 2022, and retailers even experienced excess inventory – which happens just about every year. So, they offered more discounts. According to Salesforce, the average U.S. discount rate stands at 19 percent, with the global discount rate at 18 percent an increase of 6 percent globally and in the U.S. year over year. Discounts increased two weeks after Cyber Week, rising 11 percent globally year over year and 14 percent in the U.S. as retailers tried to entice last-minute shoppers ahead of the shipping cutoff window.
  • Fall sales might have caused a returns problem. In 2022, retailers such as Amazon, Target, and Walmart continued to offer holiday sales in the early fall, continuing a pattern from recent years. Cyber Week was pre-empted by sales such as Amazon’s Prime Days II and Walmart’s Deals for Days. But then returns nearly doubled the week after Cyber Week compared to the previous year and have remained high since then. Salesforce says that the surge in returns could be attributable to people purchasing gifts earlier in the season and then returning them to buy something else on discount. This data underscores how much work retailers still need to do in order to synchronizes pre-Cyber Week sales with consumers’ buying habits and sentiment.
  • Social continues to fuel online shopping traffic. After hitting all-time highs during Cyber Week, social traffic referring to retailers’ sites grew 23 percent year over during the holiday shopping season, representing 12 percent of all mobile traffic, according to Salesforce. The U.S. is leading this trend, with social traffic growing 28 percent over the first three weeks of December.

Takeaways

  • Online advertising is as important as ever. Consumers surprised analysts by spending more than predicted even during a recession. Businesses that kept their brand names and merchandise visible were best positioned to win. Retailers that scaled back their online ad spending because they feared consumers were going to spend less ended up missing out.
  • Social media advertising in particular is essential. Industry watchers have been speculating that social commerce – or the actual purchase of a product on a social app – might be ebbing a bit. But commerce resulting from advertising on social apps appears to be alive and well.
  • Retailers need to focus on value, not deals. Consumers will continue to respond to deals amid uncertainty – but retailers need to be careful. Discounted products and lower-priced alternatives to name-brand products attracted consumers. But as noted, overselling deals throughout the holiday season may have backfired on retailers when consumers returned products in their quest to find better deals than they were offered.
  • Retailers need to be nimbler with their ad campaigns. As we saw, consumers continued to demonstrate an uncanny knack for surprising retailers, in this case buying more than expected and apparently being aggressive about trading up with holiday deals. We suggest capitalizing on tools such as Google’s demand forecasts on the Insights page. This predicts upcoming trends relevant to your business so that you can adjust your budget and bidding strategy to capture spikes in demand. Additionally, use Performance Planner to understand how these changes to your advertising spend will affect your predicted clicks, conversions, and conversion values. In addition, Product-specific insights are now at your disposal at the account level in the Google Ads products tab. These insights let you spot underperforming offers, identify products with missing feed attributes and compare your bidding strategy with your top competitors’.

Contact True Interactive

True Interactive has deep experience helping clients plan and implement shopping campaigns online during all seasons. We can help you, too. We understand how to create nimble search campaigns and multi-channel ad outreach to target consumers with the right message at the right time. Contact us to learn more.

Lead photo by Kayle Kaupanger on Unsplash

Three Takeaways from Cyber Monday 2022

Three Takeaways from Cyber Monday 2022

by Kurt Anagnostopoulos Retail

The numbers are in: Cyber Monday was a success. And not because inflation made purchasing volume seem bigger than what it was. No, demand fueled a big day for anyone selling online.

According to Adobe Analytics, Cyber Monday generated $11.3 billion in sales online. This is 5.8 percent more than consumers spent on the same day last year and a reversal of fortune. Consider that in 2021, Cyber Monday generated $10.7 billion, which was actually a drop from 2020. Meanwhile, Salesforce said Cyber Monday online sales hit $12.2 billion in the United States, representing an 8.3 percent increase over 2021.

Cyber Monday SalesAll told, about 196.7 million shoppers made purchases during the five-day holiday period from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday known as Cyber Week, the National Retail Federation said on Tuesday.

Adobe said that the Cyber Monday figures were based on more transactions overall – not spend boosted by inflation. At the peak, people were spending $12.8 million per minute on Monday.

According to Adobe, top sellers included games, gaming consoles, Legos, Hatchimals, Disney Encanto, Pokémon cards, Bluey, Dyson products, strollers, Apple Watches, drones, and digital cameras. Toys as a category saw a 452 percent boost in sales versus a day in October.

Wait a minute. Wasn’t this the year when inflation-wary shoppers were going to rein in their holiday spending? Wasn’t this the year when Amazon’s Prime Day I and II, Walmart’s Deals for Days, and Target’s virtual Black Friday sales throughout November were going to cannibalize Cyber Monday sales?

Not so fast. As it turns out, consumers were spending during the holiday promotions before Cyber Week but also holding out for deals – as they always do. And they did something else: they did their homework. Consumers knew that retailers were carrying excess inventory after two years of experiencing inventory shortages. They knew the deep discounts were going to happen. And so, they waited. As Tech Crunch reported, “Deep discounts — retailers perhaps anticipating needing to have something more to lure shoppers — have played a big role, too, as have the sheer availability of goods after shortages of the years before.”

Vivek Pandya, lead analyst, Adobe Digital Insights, said, “With oversupply and a softening consumer spending environment, retailers made the right call this season to drive demand through heavy discounting. It spurred online spending to levels that were higher than expected, and reinforced e-commerce as a major channel to drive volume and capture consumer interest.”

In addition, mobile influenced Cyber Monday shopping, accounting for 43 percent of all online sales. But it should be noted that the 43 percent share was much lower than Thanksgiving Day, when mobile accounted for 55 percent of purchases. That’s because people are back to work in Cyber Monday and using their desktops more.

So, what can retailers learn from the results?

  • The retailers that stayed committed to their online ad spend won. By keeping their brand names and merchandise visible, they were best positioned to capture the Cyber Monday traffic. Retailers that scaled back their online ad spending because they feared consumers were going to spend less ended up missing out.
  • As always, a strong blend of desktop-based and mobile ad spend was key to winning Cyber Monday traffic. True, the mobile traffic fell from Thanksgiving Day, but 43 percent is still a sizable number, and a well-balanced ad strategy was the way to go.
  • Winning Cyber Monday requires a strategy for winning Cyber Week. Demand was uniformly strong for the entire period of Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday. Advertisers that managed their budgets with an eye toward driving traffic and sales for the entire Cyber Week captured a “Cyber Monday bonus.”

Bottom line: if you kept your holiday advertising strong and ignored the naysayers, you won Cyber Monday.

Contact True Interactive

True Interactive has deep experience helping clients plan and implement holiday shopping campaigns online. We can help you, too. We understand how to create nimble search campaigns and multi-channel ad outreach to target consumers with the right message at the right time. Contact us to learn more.

Lead image source:
https://pixabay.com/vectors/cyber-monday-neon-sale-ecommerce-5240883/

Why Black Friday Is Alive and Well

Why Black Friday Is Alive and Well

by Kurt Anagnostopoulos Advertising

Over the past few years, there’s been considerable speculation that Black Friday is mattering less. That’s because major retailers such as Amazon and Walmart moved up Black Friday-style sales throughout the fall. Pre-empting Black Friday was especially apparent in 2020, when retailers needed to be resourceful with the COVID-19 pandemic discouraging in-store shopping. But in 2022, the hallowed shopping day is showing signs of life although it’s no longer an exclusively offline event. To wit:

  • Amazon’s Fall Prime Day Sale, while popular, did not rake in the cash that it was expected to generate. According to consumer data firm Numerator, the average order size during the Prime Early Access sale in October was $46.68, down nearly 23 percent from Prime Day in July. Numerator said the most popular categories sold were in order, household essentials, health and beauty, apparel and shoes, toys and video games, and electronics. Interestingly, only 29 percent of Fall Prime Day shoppers said they used the sale to buy holiday gifts, and 95 percent said they’re likely to shop Amazon for more gifts as the season continues. This suggests that shoppers are holding out for more shopping down the road, which bodes well for Black Friday.
  • According to the National Retail Federation, holiday shoppers will spend at a healthy pace albeit at a slower one than previous years. The NRF says that holiday retail sales during November and December will grow between 6 percent and 8 percent over 2021 to between $942.6 billion and $960.4 billion. Last year’s holiday sales grew 13.5 percent over 2020 and totaled $889.3 billion – but of course in 2022, shoppers are up against chronic inflation and economic uncertainty. The NRF expects that online and other non-store sales, which are included in the total, to increase between 10 percent and 12 percent to between $262.8 billion and $267.6 billion. This figure is up from $238.9 billion last year, which saw incredible growth in digital channels as consumers turned to online shopping to meet their holiday needs during the pandemic.
  • One in five consumers planning to shop for the holidays say they’ll spend less because their economic situation has changed, according to an NPD survey. More than a third of U.S. consumers can’t afford gifts this year due to inflation and higher costs of living, and nearly half plan to spend less this season, according to research from Credit Karma. But that may mean that they’re waiting to shop, as 40 percent told Credit Karma that they are waiting for annual sales, including Black Friday.
  • On the other hand, retailers such as Target and Walmart are pumping up Black Friday, but they’re once again extending the day throughout November. Walmart is running three Black Friday style deals throughout November, including Cyber Monday. This of course suggests that retailers are hedging their bets as Amazon has done with its October Prime Day sale. Based on Amazon’s experience, retailers should expect more hold-outs for Black Friday weekend November 25-28 (counting Cyber Monday). One reason: retailer are carrying a lot of inventory in 2022. Consumers are in a stronger position. They know it. And they’ll expect more deals as 2022 comes to a close during the biggest shopping day of the year.

Advice for Brands

  • Accept the reality that deals will drive sales more than ever. Discounted products and lower-priced alternatives to name-brand products are going to win the day, as reported in The Wall Street Journal. House brands are going to have a strong year.
  • Complement your online advertising approach with strong organic content that amplifies your holiday deals. Google just released a number of features to do that. For instance, Google added new ways to find deals across the web using Google Search through new coupons and promotions, side-by-side deal views, and a new price insights navigator. Clearly, Google wants more retailers to manage their product listings on Google!

Contact True Interactive

True Interactive has deep experience helping clients plan and implement holiday shopping campaigns online. We can help you, too. We understand how to create nimble search campaigns and multi-channel ad outreach to target consumers with the right message at the right time. Contact us to learn more.

Image source: https://unsplash.com/photos/pwxESDWRwDE

Tips for Winning the 2022 Holiday Shopping Season

Tips for Winning the 2022 Holiday Shopping Season

by Kurt Anagnostopoulos Retail

How is the 2022 holiday shopping season shaping up? We’re already getting some important clues. Here’s what we are learning:

1 It’s Already Here

According to Google, nearly one out of five consumers had started their holiday shopping, and more than a third (36 percent) already had ideas for gifts they were going to buy – back in May!

Retailers are ready for them. In August, Walmart unveiled its annual top toy list, nearly a month earlier than in 2021. And when Walmart acts, others follow. Retailers should expect Best Buy, Target, and Amazon to dial up the heat on Walmart by promoting their holiday deals sooner.

2 Consumers Are Cost Conscious

Amid high inflation, retailers expect consumers to be choosier and cost conscious. Walmart’s top toy included a new budget-friendly category — toys under $25. According to Walmart, Walmart the list includes “more Rollbacks on toys” to give consumers “deeper savings” on top of “everyday low prices.”

And Walmart is not alone. As reported in CNN, executives at stores such as Best Buy, Gap, and Ulta expect the holiday season to be loaded with discounts amid economic uncertainty:

In addition to toys, shoppers will likely find discounts on clothing, televisions, beauty products, sporting goods and other items.

Some chains have stockpiled too much inventory in recent months and will increase promotions to try to sell the glut of goods during the holiday stretch.

Other companies are also ramping up promotions to give incentives to inflation-strained shoppers who might otherwise be priced out of holiday gifts.

Best Buy CEO Corie Barry told CNN, “We’re seeing a customer who’s more value-oriented, who is definitely moving more towards some of those sale events. You’re going to see a holiday that starts to look a little bit more like what we saw pre-pandemic.”

What It All Means

  • A bigger Black Friday? Black Friday 2021 proved to be a return to pre-pandemic form, with sales increasing nearly 30 percent over 2020. Traditionally, consumers have been conditioned to expect doorbuster sales on this most hallowed of shopping days, but in recent years, retailers have reimagined the concept of Black Friday to feature Black Friday sales that happen long before the actual day. But in 2022, retailers will be eager to shed excess inventory to budget-conscious consumers, positioning Black Friday to reclaim its stature.
  • Retailers need to be nimbler with their ad campaigns. It’s not just that retailers need to plan earlier. They need to adapt to shifts in consumer behavior. Why? Because choosy consumers are going to be less brand loyal and more careful about looking for deals online, which could cause rapid shifts in demand at the store and product level – in your favor and sometimes in a competitor’s favor. We suggest capitalizing on tools such as Google’s demand forecasts on the Insights page. This predicts upcoming trends relevant to your business so that you can adjust your budget and bidding strategy to capture spikes in demand. Additionally, use Performance Planner to understand how these changes to your advertising spend will affect your predicted clicks, conversions and conversion values. In addition, Product-specific insights are now at your disposal at the account level in the Google Ads products tab. These insights let you spot underperforming offers, identify products with missing feed attributes and compare your bidding strategy with your top competitors’.

Contact True Interactive

True Interactive has deep experience helping clients plan and implement holiday shopping campaigns online. We can help you, too. We understand how to create nimble search campaigns and multi-channel ad outreach to target consumers with the right message at the right time. Contact us to learn more.

Image source: https://unsplash.com/photos/_3Q3tsJ01nc

Celebrating 15 Years of Growth at True Interactive

Celebrating 15 Years of Growth at True Interactive

by Kurt Anagnostopoulos Advertising

2022 marks a big milestone: True Interactive celebrates our 15th birthday. We’re now old enough for a learner’s permit to drive a car in Illinois.

Our story, and the story of the internet, has been shaped enormously by the actions of a few influential companies:

  • Google organized the world’s information online and taught everyone how to find it.
  • Meta connected people through social media.
  • Thanks to Apple, we took the internet with us on our mobile phones.
  • YouTube changed how we consume content with video.
  • Amazon made the world comfortable conducting commerce online.

These and a handful of other companies rewrote the rules for how businesses and people discover each other and build relationships.

Online advertising is at the center of this change. At True Interactive, we are grateful to the clients who have trusted us to help them figure out how to succeed in the digital age, and to our own people who’ve brought to our client relationships a spirit of hard work, collaboration, transparency, and a commitment to results. Businesses like to say that their people are their strongest assets, but people are more than that: they form our culture. Both the people who work for us and the people who work with us.

And we are proud of that culture. The magic that happens when great people and clients collaborate has produced remarkable results, such as triple-digit returns on ad spend and a dramatic reduction in costs. (You can read more about our work here.) And from our experiences, we’ve developed services ranging from search engine marketing to social media advertising that create a foundation for our team to innovate.

The next 15 years will evolve differently than the last. We’re probably nearing the end of an era when single companies could wield such enormous impact. The industry has become far too diversified for one business to change consumer behavior in far-reaching ways as Google did with its founding in 1998. And the fast-moving digital world still has few barriers to entry, which opens up the playing field.

Consider TikTok, which didn’t even exist until 2016 and has now challenged YouTube’s dominance with inventive short-form video. Or Snapchat, which keeps nudging the marketing world to embrace augmented reality even though its main rivals such as Meta had a long head start. The connected TV space still feels wide open.

And then there’s the metaverse. It’s just too vast and far-reaching for any single company to dominate. In fact, the fundamental notion of the metaverse is predicated upon the development of a decentralized web, Web 3.0. We’re only six months into 2022, and we’ve already seen just how much of a free-for-all that this emerging world feels like right now. Some of the building blocks of the metaverse, such as cryptocurrencies and nonfungible tokens (NFTs), sounded so fresh and exciting at the beginning of the year. Now businesses and people everywhere are learning (sometimes the hard way) how far those technologies still have to go before they redefine the landscape the way search, mobile computing, and video did.

We’re as bullish on emerging technologies and forms of computing as we were 15 years ago when we figured out how to help businesses build powerful brands even as human beings were learning how to search online. We can promise you that regardless of how the digital world evolves, we will always:

  • Not succumb to hype. We’re on the forefront of change, but everything we need to do must be grounded in reality, not wild speculation.
  • Deliver measurable results. If we can’t deliver measurable value, we won’t do it.
  • Be totally transparent. Our clients know what they’re getting from us. And they know how we deliver value. Trust is a wonderful thing. It must be earned through openness.

What excites us most? The unknown. The next wave of change that no one sees coming. The unknown creates a level playing field. The unknown is a vast well of opportunity. Much of the digital world was unknown when we were founded, and look where we are now thanks to our people and our clients. Whatever happens next, our culture of hard work, collaboration, transparency, and commitment to delivering results will ensure that we thrive. Together.

Happy 15, everyone! 

— Kurt Anagnostopoulos and Mark Smith

What’s Next for Advertisers on Twitter with Elon Musk as an Owner?

What’s Next for Advertisers on Twitter with Elon Musk as an Owner?

by Kurt Anagnostopoulos Twitter

Will advertisers leave Twitter under Elon Musk’s ownership? That question is getting bandied about a lot these days. That’s because of widespread speculation that Musk will relax Twitter’s content moderation policies. This, in turn, could conceivably create brand safety issues by making controversial content more prevalent on the app, which has nearly 400 million monthly active users. For example, Advertising Age reported that “Marketers are worried that Musk will reopen the floodgates on uncivil behavior on the platform.” Ad agencies consulted by Ad Age said that their clients are increasingly asking about the risks of staying on Twitter. Here’s what I think will happen:

  • Some advertisers will flee Twitter and never return.
  • Some advertisers will put Twitter advertising on pause but eventually return to Twitter.
  • Most advertisers will do nothing.

The fact of the matter is this: advertisers have shown by their actions that they have a higher tolerance for social media controversy than news media reports might have you believe. We have seen time and again controversies erupt on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. Most recently, Facebook became the target of widespread public scorn after whistle blower Frances Haugen, an ex-Facebook employee, shared internal documents that showed Facebook executives knowingly allowed its algorithm to publish harmful and divisive content on users’ news feeds.

The resulting expose, published in The Wall Street Journal, also sparked speculation that advertisers would leave Facebook. Some did. But most did not. Why? Because the fact that a publisher and aggregator of news content (which is what Facebook does) knowingly shares divisive information was not exactly shocking news to advertisers. Mainstream news media have been attracting audiences by publishing divisive content for decades, long before the internet existed. And they’re doing so today. As a result, advertisers have a higher tolerance for conflict than Facebook’s critics did.

What really hurt Facebook was Apple. Facebook’s parent, Meta, disclosed recently that the company would suffer a $10 billion revenue hit in 2022 because of the impact of Apple’s iPhone privacy controls launched in 2021. Meta’s stock tanked dramatically so as a result. Why? Because privacy controls would likely make ad targeting more difficult on Facebook. It was ad targeting, not a Wall Street Journal expose about the company’s culture, governance, and content policies, that hurt Facebook.

The real concern among advertisers is not whether controversial content will appear on Twitter. The fact is that controversial content already does appear on Twitter. Advertisers are more concerned that their ads could appear alongside controversial content. This is more of an issue with how an app manages its algorithm. YouTube, for instance, landed in hot water recently because advertisers’ content was appearing alongside hate speech, but most advertisers understood then (and understand now) that it’s impossible to stamp out hate speech completely. Many more also understand that controversial content is not necessarily hate speech. These realities are part of being a brand on social media – and they always have been.

Twitter has been down this road before, too, such as when a major hack involving a crypto currency scam embarrassed the platform and cast a spotlight on how easy it is for bad actors to exploit Twitter to commit crimes. Or when the proliferation of trolls and bots threatened Twitter’s reputation. Advertisers were concerned, to be sure, but for the most part they reacted by pressuring Twitter to improve its algorithm as opposed to demanding wide-scale changes in how Twitter operates fundamentally.

My advice to advertisers is:

  • Keep advertising on Twitter if you are satisfied with your results so far.
  • Monitor brand safety closely, but that’s true whether you are advertising on Twitter or any other social media app.
  • Watch where your audience goes. There is a very real possibility that ongoing controversy at Twitter could cause a drop in users. The question is whether your audience will leave Twitter. It’s a question. It’s not a certainty. Work with your agency partner to keep tabs on the situation, but don’t make assumptions based on news headlines.

True Interactive monitors developments on social media all the time as part of being a well-informed partner to our clients. Keep watching this blog for updates.

Contact True Interactive

To maximize the value of your social media advertising, contact True Interactive. Our expertise in this area delivers measurable value to our clients.

Twitter image by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

Elon Musk image by https://pixabay.com/illustrations/elon-musk-space-elon-spacex-tesla-6222396/