What's Behind the Huge Resurgence in Retail Media Spend?

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[00:00:57] Monday, December 11th. Today Retail Media is set for its biggest year ever and it's all because of cookies. Now you can tell how much traffic your site is getting from threads, the ad market is up but only on a technicality

[00:01:12] and we have the winner of the worst offer code of the year. I'm Tod Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. A big jump in the number of brands planning to spend on retail media.

[00:01:26] Digidae.com asked about a hundred brand marketers if they planned to put even a small portion of their Q3 marketing budgets with Amazon. About 55% said they would. To put that in perspective, that figure was just 15% in Q1 of this year. Which is a pretty crazy difference seemingly.

[00:01:47] Julia Tabis is the deputy managing editor at Digidae and author of the study. I spoke with her this afternoon. But throughout 2022, about 40% of brands were investing at least a very small portion of their marketing budgets on Amazon before that percentage fell off at the beginning of 2023.

[00:02:05] So it's actually seemingly a renewed interest in marketing on Amazon which I find very interesting because to me it looks like a potential indicator that retail advertising could be setting itself up for a really big year in 2024.

[00:02:23] Yeah, it's certainly been the quiet story I think this year that the retail media sector, Amazon, Walmart, Target and so on those platforms are going to see huge growth next year. Why do you think that is?

[00:02:35] I personally think it's coming from the seemingly actual real this time end of the third party cookie. You know, I think whether we're talking about, I mean here we're specifically talking about brand marketers

[00:02:47] but whether we're talking about brands, retailers, agency marketers, the industry really up to this point has not very clearly charted its path forward into a cookie-less world, right? And supposedly that cookie-less world is coming. There's still some kinks to work out, right?

[00:03:05] Like standardization and oversight. But I think if this particular channel can work out those kinks it's very likely that this retail advertising, retail media could be a really vital part of marketers path forward into this cookie-less world.

[00:03:22] Julia Tappens, her piece is at Digitey.com. It is a member exclusive report but we are members, there is a ton of value there. Highly recommend it. The piece is called Brands Spend More on Amazon as its importance to their holiday marketing spikes.

[00:03:36] A link to our full unedited interview is in today's newsletter which you can sign up to for free by going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter or tapping the link in the show notes. Two very nice updates for threads met as attempted filling the void left by Twitter.

[00:03:54] First they've changed the URL that clicks went to and previously when someone tapped a link it would first go to an Instagram domain name to be filtered through its spam system then passed on to the actual destination. That was fine but it lumped all clicks from Instagram

[00:04:09] and threads into the same bucket when viewed in your web analytics. Now they've added a dedicated domain L dot threads dot net so that you are able to break out traffic specifically from that app. If you use Google Analytics this is in the acquisition surface.

[00:04:27] And now that we have topic tags in the app their version of hashtags we can start to see which topics are getting traction. One web developer did this manually since there's no API yet and it only covers topics where a topic tag was used

[00:04:41] but the three top topics last week were NBA basketball, tech people introducing themselves and photography. The basketball topic particularly notable since some people believe one of the few things left keeping the former Twitter alive

[00:04:56] is its sports content. Topic tags are similar to hashtags but don't actually use a hashtag and you're limited to one tag per post. Mena says this is so spammers don't clutter up the feed plus you can't copy and paste them in they require manual input.

[00:05:14] It is not clear how these new topic tags would be implemented in a publishing API once that rolls out but presumably it would mirror the app's functionality. If you're not sure which tag to use Andrew Hutchinson writing in social media today has a nice hack

[00:05:27] just use the first letter of the topic you're thinking of using and it will show you the most popular tags with that letter sorted in order of usage. We have full charts on the top 15 topic tags and hashtags on threads in today's email newsletter

[00:05:42] which is free just tap the link in the show notes. More clear skies in the forecast for the global ad industry as Dentsu says global ad spending should increase by about 4.6% next year and while that's higher than this year's that's only because of media pricing inflation.

[00:06:04] Digital of course will still take the lion's share just under 60% of the total ad market that said the growth of digital spend has slowed down in the last couple of years dipping into the single digits for the first time but why the optimism on a growth next year

[00:06:21] a number of big spending events the Olympics the Euro 2024 football championships and the American presidential election quoting marketing dive.com quote brands also face increasingly higher costs to reach individual consumers in a highly fragmented media landscape advertisers next year will spend $139 per capita at the global level

[00:06:44] a roughly 75% increase from two decades ago unquote. Breaking down the digital sector and growth rate specifically retail media will grow at the fastest at about 17% that's followed by social media ad spend at over 12% and programmatic at just over 10% growth but that's just the growth rate as to

[00:07:08] the actual portions of the pie programmatic makes up about 70% of digital ad spend. Reddit is back up this afternoon after a major outage that took down most functionality of the site people weren't able to see posts or comments and searches would end up with

[00:07:28] an error message the company confirmed the issue this afternoon and by about two o'clock eastern time the site was back up. The global agency holding company IPG media brands is first to the party with Amazon's

[00:07:44] forthcoming Prime Video ads. Amazon is launching an ad supported tier in the coming months and IPG's clients will be the first in that gives them first crack at new ad formats and content sponsorships quoting marketing dive quote Amazon's fledgling ad supported

[00:08:00] offering gains a large stable of potential advertisers via the three year deal giving them opportunity to come out of the gate strong when it launches in 2024 with plans to roll out to nine international markets while most streaming services already have

[00:08:15] their ad supported services up and running. Amazon is promising greater reach and frequency through its offering than its competitors and will need to prove its point unquote but it may be an uphill climb a recent study found consumers

[00:08:30] are seeing five percent less time watching ad supported content than they did five years ago

[00:09:33] Let's be honest retros can be boring and if you're the organizer you know it's more than just running a meeting you have to synthesize and categorize themes get the team involved to sign next steps

[00:09:47] and make it all a fun safe space where teammates want to participate. Miro is the visual collaboration platform that helps you run effective engaging and actionable retrospectives we use Miro at our agency to map out a client's messaging for our engagement team

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[00:10:33] that's three free boards at M I R O dot com and finally a subscription box company last week tried to capitalize on Elon Musk's bizarre tirade against his platform's own advertisers you might recall after dozens of brands pulled their advertising from X

[00:10:51] Musk told them and here's a clip go yourself so someone at Fab Fit Fun decided they would piggyback off that and offered new buyers a gift with their subscription if they use the code go yourself

[00:11:06] they also doubled down on supporting the social platform which has been basically abandoned now by most major brands after Musk made statements seen as anti-semitic the box company said it would pledge quote an additional $100,000 of X advertising in support of its free speech ideals unquote

[00:11:23] but it's subscribers mostly young wellness focused consumers didn't think much of the stunt some thought the offer code was a dig at them others were disappointed in the company for aligning itself so strongly with X's political leanings

[00:11:38] one customer posting quote the owners are right wing Trumpers who are enamored with Elon and snarl woke under their breath unquote the company eventually apologized using all sorts of words ham-handed out of character for our brand and dumb

[00:11:55] how's X's advertising doing anyway well I mean they still have ads in fact just today 404 media spotted some ads on the platform from a brand called Make a Mom which sells DIY artificial insemination kits promoting the theft of semen

[00:12:12] the ads showed a video of a woman collecting the fluid surreptitiously the ad copies included quote making him a dad without his permission and does he need to know right at this very moment a listener named Madame Blink is scrambling for the controls to shut off this extra

[00:12:46] they left a review on Apple Podcast recently that read quote great podcast except for the music at the end can't race to turn it off fast enough worst songs I've ever heard

[00:12:58] which makes me think two things first of all the Madame Blink has never heard dubstep before because that truly is horrible music however they got me thinking do I have this music thing all wrong at the end

[00:13:11] you know like I do spend a fair bit of time kind of mixing it so the lyrics pop up at the right time and I hit the post and all the fun little radio stuff that I used to do but

[00:13:21] do you people hate the music like is Madame Blink representative of the general population because I can replace it with you know the theme or something would be cheaper I wouldn't have to pay the music licensing fees so I'm curious

[00:13:35] do you like the music that I switch up at the end of every episode or do you hate it you can vote right now by tapping a special link I have in the show notes swipe over to find the notes and you'll find a

[00:13:45] I like the music or I don't like the music please vote can only vote once attracts your IP nice try haters

[00:13:52] so there you go you can also vote by a URL b.link slash option one if you like the music be dot link slash option two if you don't like the music that's it for today see you tomorrow

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