Happy Pre-kend, My Digital Darlings,
The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is happening right now and they didn’t invite me. How rude! Don’t they know about Maddie Marinsider, the greatest digital marketing mind of the modern world?!?! Now I have to get updates from the festival from news articles and blogs like a normie… sigh. But nevertheless, I’ll share with you, dear readers, the biggest bits of digital news I’ve seen from the festival so far.
Commerce media networks are making a bigger play than ever before
As we’ve discussed in past editions, everyone is building an ad network – from Chase Bank to United Airlines. Both of those companies showed up to Cannes Lions to shake some hands and pitch advertisers on their new networks. Commerce media networks had more presence at the event than ever before, pitching deals and hosting parties for some of the advertising world's biggest players. It’s certainly good news for the future of retail media. So if you’re currently working in the industry… keep doing what you’re doing. Also at Cannes Lions…
Meta unveiled new AI-Powered tools for businesses
Three new features were announced. The first is an AI chatbot that businesses can use to converse with their customers. The bot can auto-respond to chats started by customers via click-to-chat ads or the ‘send message’ button on the company Facebook page. For example, a clothing retailer’s chatbot could discuss things like sizing and return policy with interested Meta users. Users will always have the option to request a human agent and customer success employees can take over the AI- powered convo at any time. So hopefully this feature can take some work off your support team’s plate.
The next new feature is Marketing Messages AKA ads in Facebook Messenger. Soon, advertisers will be able to use Ads Manager to send ads to users via Messenger. This one sounds a little annoying from a user perspective, but you can always opt out of contact from a brand. And for brands, it's a great way to automatically engage in conversation with users. Users can respond to your in-messenger ads and chat with an AI-powered chatbot to get answers to any questions.
The final announcement was the new Threads API. Threads is rapidly gaining market share from X and Meta knows it. They're launching an API so businesses and creators can more easily manage their presences on the platform. Via the API, creators will be able to publish posts, engage with replies, and pull reporting data such as views and likes. This sounds like the first step toward Threads becoming an ad platform, so stay tuned. In other Cannes Lions news...
Elon kinda apologized for telling advertisers to “go f**ck yourself”
Remember back in November 2023 when Elon told advertisers who were boycotting the platform due to hate speech to “go f**ck themselves”? Well, he backtracked on this statement during his session on Friday, saying the remark “wasn't to advertisers as a whole. It was with respect to freedom of speech.” He then doubled down, saying “we're going to support free speech rather than agree to be censored for money." This statement was seen as an attempt to win back ad dollars for X. Is this an attempt in making it a more ad safe platform? Stay tuned…
That’s enough Cannes Lions drama for now. Maybe they’ll get more attention from me next year if they invite me… Now let’s dish about Meta’s ad testing updates.
Meta phases out dynamic creative, removes CTA button testing
Meta is phasing out dynamic creatives that let advertisers submit multiple creative assets for an ad set that Meta mixes and matches in an attempt to get the best possible ad engagement, kinda like Responsive Search Ads. They replaced it with something called “Flexible Ad Format” which does almost the same thing. There are two noteworthy differences – first, the variations are controlled within the ad, whereas with dynamic creative the assets ran across the entire ad set. Second, you can’t include multiple CTA options with Flexible Ad Format. If you want to test CTAs moving forward, you’ll have to create an A/B test. Why would they do this? Hopefully it’s just an oversight that'll be resolved soon. I love my CTA variations. Now let’s dish about Disney…
Disney makes streaming ads more accessible to big companies
Disney+ is an active fighter in the streaming ads war, which has gotten more intense since Amazon Prime and Netflix entered the field. Now, they’re trying to make their ads more accessible to ‘mid-tier advertisers’ – Advertisers with budgets between $30 million and $300 million. Kinda wild that that’s considered ‘mid-market ad spend’, but Disney has traditionally only worked with massive advertisers.
They are expanding the accessibility of their BridgeID in hopes of bringing in more ‘mid-market’ customers that they think have ‘tons of room for growth’. Their BridgeID is what the platform uses for tracking and targeting in the cookieless world. It’s historically only been accessible via The Trade Desk, but now it’s accessible through Experian’s LUID, LiveRamp’s RampID, and Yahoo’s ConnectID too. So if you’re in that budget range and use one of those identifiers, consider expanding to Disney+. Now, time for some Amazon updates…
New Audiences Available in Amazon Marketing Cloud
If you use Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), you probably know that the ad-attributed data sets are free to access, but a paid Amazon Insights subscription grants you access to a goldmine of additional audience data. The subscription historically granted you access to unique audience insights (called Audience Segment Insights) and full organic data sets (called Flexible Shopping Insights). But on Monday, Amazon made those Insights accessible to everyone! This means that anyone who uses AMC can create an audience from those highly valuable data sets. Check out this article to understand the different insights and why creating audiences from them could vastly improve your ad targeting. Now for a bit of Google news…
Google Ads phasing out credit card payments
Apparently Google has seen cards decline one too many times. If you’re a “high-growth spender” (not entirely sure what that means), you should have received a notification that you must stop paying via credit or debit and switch to either monthly invoicing or direct debit by the end of July. If that’s you, make the switch by July 31st or risk account suspension. Google said this will provide “flexibility” and “control” for high growth spenders… sounds like they just don’t want to pay credit card processing fees anymore, but ok. In another bit of Google news…
Google added some new features to the DV360 API
The first new addition is keyword targeting. Advertisers can now pull and manage keyword lists via the API, making keyword analysis and management easier. The second is a new “optimizationObjective” field that was added to the InsertionOrder resource. This is only available for select advertisers, but it allows those lucky few to set optimization goals via API, making Google’s programmatic advertising more customizable at scale. Lastly, let's sync up about Reddit ads…
New Reddit conversation ads just dropped
The new and improved conversation ads are larger and appear between comments in users’ Reddit feed, making them look more native to the platform. For example, an ad for mascara would appear on r/makeup in a thread about mascara, right in between the comments. Reddit continues to emphasize the power of authentic conversations in the modern digital landscape, but is this really authentic? Like, I know an ad when I see one. Regardless, Reddit is looking more and more like the next big ad platform, so it’s time to test it out if you haven’t already.
And that’s all the juicy gossip from Cannes Lions and beyond. From Meta’s new AI tools to the rise of commerce media networks, it’s clear that the digital marketing world never sleeps. Until next week, keep winning the digital game.
You know you love me.
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