Newsletter 11/25/2022: Black Friday Edition
From the Desk of Dennis:
Happy Thanksgiving and Happy Black Friday to my fellow marketing aficionados. Today is our Super Bowl, so let’s juice some sales and get this bread.
I finally actioned on the meltdown happening over at Twitter and started to wean myself off the service by uninstalling the app from my phone - if that security team is gone, I don’t want to have to find out 3 months (or more) down the line that some black hat had access to my location data.
Thank you again to everyone who supported my fundraiser for AACR in advance of the Philadelphia Marathon. We raised $665 for cancer research, beating my goal and adding to the total haul of over $535k across all runners’ fundraisers. I had a great race and finished with a net time of 5:57:31, beating my personal goal of 6 hours. And what perfect timing with the holiday - I’m eating whatever the hell I want to this week.
TGIF,
Dennis A. Wilson
This Week in Marketing and Technology:
CNBC, “Political advertisers shift spending from Facebook to streaming platforms ahead of midterms”
“I think the real culprit that you see is the privacy changes on the iPhone,” Carlson said. She said her organization is pushing the other half of its $10 million budget to areas like traditional email and text campaigns as well as newer platforms like connected TV and streaming services.”
I agree with the move to connected TV. As for traditional email and text campaigns, I am getting absolutely inundated and I feel like there has to be a saturation point for spending that both parties have left behind a long time ago. Frequency reporting is important, and I get the sense that somebody at any given congressional campaign headquarters could be stretching their dollars much further this year if they tried to determine where the diminishing returns began for direct outreach tactics.
NYMag, “Elon Musk Wants to Make Them Pay”
“Users will soon be able to get verified by signing up for an $8-a-month subscription, which would also give them “priority in replies, mentions & search, which is essential to defeat spam/scam.” Eventually, currently verified users who refuse to pay will lose their status.”
The only hypothetical scenario in which I would pay $8/month for a bluecheck is one where this is a secret, insiders-only offering. The verification symbol - once the gold standard for profile flair that would actually give you clout - is about to become as helpful as a Tinder Gold subscription.
SearchEngineJournal, “Google Announces Sunset Of Similar Audiences”
“The ongoing focus on consumer privacy has resulted in another Google Ads update, impacting similar audiences targeting.”
Good riddance, I never saw similar audiences do much except spend money in my campaigns.
