The Consumer Buying Database You've Dreamed of Is Here

[00:00:00] It is Thursday May 9th. Today, everything they've ever bought. Imagine using that to

[00:00:07] target people in your ads? Well, that time has come. Also, Threads plans to reveal your

[00:00:13] view counts, Pinterest adds a new certification and the Apple ad that everyone seems to be

[00:00:20] mad about. I'm Tod Maffin. That's ahead today in Digital Marketing.

[00:00:27] Advertisers can now use Walmart's enormous trove of shopping data to more effectively reach

[00:00:32] people watching Disney Plus or Hulu, quoting the Verge.

[00:00:35] As part of the deal, Walmart advertisers will be able to match the retailer's shopping

[00:00:40] data with Disney's proprietary audience graph tools, helping them target audiences and

[00:00:45] measure data better. Data sets will be combined using clean room technologies so that,

[00:00:49] theoretically, user data can't be shared with other external parties.

[00:00:54] At the same time, Disney will join Walmart's partner lab, whose members include TikTok,

[00:00:59] Roku, NBCUniversal and other TV and social platforms. Each company works with Walmart

[00:01:04] to test new ad formats and measurement, unquote. About 145 million people buy something at

[00:01:09] Walmart each week, either online or in store, making it a formidable database of consumer

[00:01:15] brand preferences.

[00:01:17] So today's trivia question, which of the following is not a Walmart store format? Walmart

[00:01:25] discount store? Walmart neighborhood market? Walmart mega center or Bud's discount city?

[00:01:32] And I'm really sorry I forgot to give you the answer to the trivia question a couple

[00:01:35] of days ago. The question is, what was TikTok's Chinese sister app called before

[00:01:39] it was renamed to Doyin? Most people in the newsletter guessed video star. The correct

[00:01:42] answer is A.me.

[00:01:51] TikTok has started automatically labeling AI-generated content from other platforms.

[00:01:56] Starting today, videos created with external tools like OpenAI's Dali 3 will feature an

[00:02:02] AI-generated tag. This is all part of TikTok's adoption of content credentials technology

[00:02:08] developed by a group co-founded by Microsoft in Adobe.

[00:02:11] TikTok already labels its own creations, but it only applies it as a tag on the media.

[00:02:16] It plans to extend this metadata system to its own AI effect soon. This metadata will

[00:02:22] travel with the content even when downloaded, letting other platforms recognize and label

[00:02:27] the AI-generated material accordingly. The rollout did start today, but it might take

[00:02:32] a couple of weeks to get to all accounts.

[00:02:39] Threads will soon be exposing the view count of each of your brand's posts. This is

[00:02:44] something X has done for years, although X's owner Elon Musk keeps threatening to remove

[00:02:48] or hide those numbers from the public. Quoting the Verge,

[00:02:51] quote, as usual it'll take some time before everyone gets this option. I'm not seeing

[00:02:55] it in my app or on the web just yet, but it'll be a welcome window into performance

[00:03:00] for influencers, businesses and regular users. If nothing else, it's always nice

[00:03:05] to know you're not just shouting into the void, unquote.

[00:03:09] To be fair, not everyone wants this. When view counts were added to Instagram

[00:03:13] some time back, some creators there said it gave them a bit of anxiety, knowing that everyone

[00:03:18] could see how well their posts performed. Or didn't. Threads now has more than 150

[00:03:23] million monthly users. Blue Sky, another Twitter competitor, has been seeing falling usage

[00:03:29] over the last couple of months. And Jack Dorsey, that was Twitter's co-founder,

[00:03:33] announced Sunday that he had left the Blue Sky board.

[00:03:40] In case you're thinking of making your Pinterest ad campaigns a little smarter,

[00:03:44] the company has added a new Media Buyer certification to its learning portal.

[00:03:48] Quoting the company, the Pinterest Media Buyer certification exam measures and

[00:03:51] validates an individual's job related knowledge and real life Pinterest ad

[00:03:56] platform experience. It's designed to help marketers stand out across a

[00:04:00] competitive industry and get ahead in their career with a Pinterest standard

[00:04:04] of advertising excellence, unquote. Like most of these platform certificates,

[00:04:08] it does have an exam. It includes 60 questions. Once you launch it,

[00:04:11] you'll be given an hour and a half to complete it, and you won't be able to

[00:04:14] click in or out of the experience once you start. So it has to be completed in

[00:04:17] one sitting. You need to achieve a 70% score in order to pass. If you don't

[00:04:22] pass, you have to wait 14 days until you are able to retake the exam.

[00:04:27] Pinterest says it's meant for people with two to five years of media

[00:04:29] buying experience, including at least one or two years, specifically

[00:04:33] using Pinterest's ad tools. Currently, Pinterest has about 518 million

[00:04:39] monthly active users.

[00:04:45] Revenues from podcast advertising slowed down last year, this after several

[00:04:49] back-to-back years of double digit growth. 2023 still saw growth, of

[00:04:53] course, but it only increased by about 5% over the previous year,

[00:04:57] this according to new data released today by the IAB. The slowdown was

[00:05:01] attributed to last year's somewhat challenging ad climate that particularly

[00:05:04] affected mid-tier companies. An IAB executive said there's no cause

[00:05:08] for concern though. This year is already showing revenue bouncing back,

[00:05:12] breaking down popularity by genre. The number of comedy podcasts out there

[00:05:15] grew by 4% in the last year. Sports is the second most popular

[00:05:20] genre though its share went down from 15% in 2022 to 13% last year.

[00:05:27] The IAB said more than a quarter of podcast revenues were in the

[00:05:30] other genre category. These are often small categories but are so

[00:05:35] highly targeted that they are quite appealing to advertisers who need

[00:05:38] to reach a niche audience affordably.

[00:05:44] LinkedIn has provided a new overview of the AI landscape and how the tech is

[00:05:48] being used in the workforce, quoting social media today. The report

[00:05:52] notes that the use of generative AI has nearly doubled in the last six

[00:05:55] months with 75% of knowledge workers now using AI tools in their

[00:06:00] regular process. That's not overly surprising but the real test

[00:06:04] is how helpful these tools can be and what people are actually

[00:06:08] using them for. A worker using chat GPT once every now and then to

[00:06:12] come up with an idea isn't a major shift but referring to an AI

[00:06:16] bot every day is significant and that context is somewhat missed by

[00:06:20] this question. Even so, 75% is a very high number which underlines

[00:06:25] the importance of AI tools and their potential in the modern

[00:06:28] workforce yet at the same time 53% of people who use AI at work

[00:06:34] also worry that using it on important work tasks could make

[00:06:38] them look replaceable. A look at the demographics of AI usage

[00:06:43] shows the younger generation adopting it more willingly, Gen Z at 75%

[00:06:47] usage but boomers at the bottom of the list are still quite high at 73%.

[00:06:56] And finally, it's the ad that everyone is talking about.

[00:07:00] Apple's latest ad for its thinner iPads is getting a lot of backlash

[00:07:03] in the places that social media people hang out in.

[00:07:06] The ad shows a bunch of tools used to make creative things, a piano,

[00:07:19] some paint, sculpting clay, a guitar. They all get crushed by this giant industrial machine.

[00:07:25] At the end, the machine lifts up and what's left is a thin iPad.

[00:07:33] I guess the idea being we compressed all your creative tools into something really thin.

[00:07:38] It is on park creatively with Apple's previous ads but this time,

[00:07:42] not everyone loves it. Some people are saying the ad is hostile to art.

[00:07:47] Quoting Marketing Dive,

[00:07:48] The video has been painted as the anti 1984 referencing an iconic

[00:07:53] Apple commercial that showed people freed from a Norwegian dystopia

[00:07:57] as a sledgehammer tossed by the protagonist smashes the screen of their oppressor.

[00:08:02] That ad is considered one of the best TV ads of all time.

[00:08:05] The critics of the new iPad Pro spot conversely see a dystopian vision

[00:08:10] brought to life as a variety of tangible art objects are violently crushed into

[00:08:15] a single piece of technology. Many creators and artists rely on Apple's products for works,

[00:08:20] adding a sense of betrayal to some of their sentiments.

[00:08:24] One person wrote on social media,

[00:08:26] It is a heartbreaking uncomfortable egotistic advertisement.

[00:08:30] When I see this result,

[00:08:31] I'm ashamed to have been buying Apple products for 19 years.

[00:08:36] Apple needs a hit. And quick, the company's second quarter had the sharpest drop-off in

[00:08:41] quarterly iPhone sales in years and its expensive VR headset has had a lukewarm response from the market.

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[00:09:42] Thanks for listening. See you then.

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