The black box inside the black box: Google announced yesterday the availability of its Generative AI-based creative tools in Performance Max campaigns. What considerations should marketing teams make in expanding total campaign automation to creative production? (1/X) 2/ First, dispelling two myths. The first: marketing teams view Generative AI as a novelty or a toy that is not yet practically useful. This simply isn't true: I've seen marketing teams that have radically improved their workflow with Generative AI tools already.

Apple and Google race to attribute the internet

The control exerted by Apple & Google over the consumer internet is often expressed in terms of content discovery / distribution & payments. But a more subtle and esoteric form of control is emerging: advertising attribution. (1/X)
2/ Both Apple & Google have launched native advertising attribution frameworks for their mobile platforms & browsers. These dictate how and, crucially, how accurately digital advertising can be evaluated, based on rules set by these companies.

Meta announced changes to its Aggregated Event Measurement (AEM) protocol this May. Meta introduced AEM a few months after Apple revealed (but before it rolled out) the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) privacy policy. (1/X) 2/ AEM was initially modeled on Private Click Measurement, Apple's own privacy-focused attribution framework for web-to-web and web-to-app advertising campaigns. Meta stated as much in an early version of its documentation for AEM.

Yesterday, The Verge reported that Meta will introduce a direct-to-install advertising product on Android in the EU once the DMA goes into effect next year. Some thoughts on the efficacy of such a product and its impact. (1/X) 2/ First, I believe the DMA will be systemically disruptive (in the EU). It has broad implications for all "gatekeepers" / large platform operators, not just on mobile. To my mind, the DMA represents a fundamental reset on competition in consumer tech. mobiledevmemo.com/a-deep-dive-on…

Yesterday, Apple announced its new Privacy Manifests feature, which takes direct aim at device fingerprinting on iOS. Privacy Manifests will hold SDK publishers and app developers accountable for how user data is collected and utilized. (1/X) 2/ Apple explicitly stated in its blog post announcing Privacy Manifests that their intended purpose is to disrupt device fingerprinting to force app developers to indicate a legitimate use case for data collection by potentially non-compliant SDKs. From the post (emphasis mine):

Per this blog post, published today: Apple is taking direct aim at fingerprinting with Privacy Manifests. developer.apple.com/news/?id=av1ne…

https://twitter.com/eric_seufert/status/1665841378025254915

Apple seems to be saying that app developers will be held liable for the validity of SDK data use attestations through the privacy manifest system. Will a BigCo legal team be willing to sign off on data usage claims by a third party that it knows to be practicing fingerprinting?

EVERYTHING IS AN AD NETWORK: Back in 2021, I proposed that "Everything is an ad network" because foundational changes in digital privacy were "upending many of the fundamental precepts" of digital advertising. This trend has accelerated since. Thoughts in a thread (1/X). 2/ The Information reports that Instacart delivered perhaps 30% of its revenue in 2022 from advertising. Instacart operates a grocery marketplace; why does 1/3rd of its revenue derive from ads? Because Everything is an Ad Network. theinformation.com/articles/insta…

Interpreting Airbnb’s shift away from performance marketing: Back in February 2021, Airbnb announced that it had scaled back investment in performance marketing to focus on brand marketing campaigns that would "educate" consumers and potential users. (1/X) 2/ Brian Chesky revealed that, despite dramatically reducing spend on performance marketing in 2020, the company's traffic levels had returned to 95% of 2019 levels. Chesky stated that Airbnb would "never" spend as much as a percentage of revenue on marketing as it did in 2019.

Pinterest $PINS has always felt like a missed opportunity related to advertising, given the purchase intent inherent in the product's core use case. Last June, an exec from Google Commerce was appointed CEO, and the company appears to be overhauling its ads platform (1/X) 2/ Pinterest's global ARPU, at $1.96, lags that of Snap ($3.47) and Meta ($10.86). But its ARPU has grown more than that of those companies in the same timeframe.

With the prominence of Advantage+ and PMax, as well as Generative AI tools like Stable Diffusion, it's common for marketing teams to develop the ambition to build a wholly automated, end-to-end advertising system. My advice: build exoskeletons, not cyborgs (1/X). 2/ The desire to automate digital advertising is not new, but Advantage+ / PMax and text-to-image tools make it seem much more accessible now than it ever has -- deceptively so. Advertising automation appears to be as simple as connecting a few APIs.

I received some pushback on this piece / tweet storm that I felt deserved to be addressed. Some thoughts on Spotify's podcast advertising business in a thread: (1/X)

https://twitter.com/eric_seufert/status/1628483191777685504

2/ First: I wrote the piece to attempt to articulate the "why" of Spotify's abrupt about-face related to podcasting, not the "what," which I feel is incontrovertible: the company is reducing its investment into podcast content as its gross margin remains below target.

Between 2019 and 2022, Spotify $SPOT spent more than a billion dollars on acquisitions related to podcasting, across both content and advertising/analytics technology. And early this year, the company abruptly changed its strategy. (1/X) 2/ Spotify hired a television veteran to scale its content strategy in 2018, and the company subsequently went on a spending spree, buying up podcast publishing tech & exclusive publishing rights to tentpole content such as The Ringer, The JRE, Gimlet Media, and Call Her Daddy.

Champagne is being popped in Menlo Park tonight: not only is Meta's share price up ~18% after-hours on its Q4 earnings beat, but a judge also rejected the FTC's request for an injunction to block its acquisition of VR developer Within Unlimited today. bloomberg.com/news/articles/… 2/ Related: mobiledevmemo.com/unpacking-meta…

$META up 17% AH on:
- Revenue down 4% (consensus was -6%)
- Ad impressions up 23%
- Price per Ad up 22%

https://twitter.com/eric_seufert/status/1620894741440393216?s=20&t=gAkDBLAZLcI81HvXVkdRcA

The Department of Justice sued Google last week, accusing it of abusing its market power to suppress competition within the realm of open web display advertising. In this post, I attempt to outline and clarify the DoJ's 10 specific accusations (1/X) mobiledevmemo.com/doj-sues-googl… 2/ The DoJ's complaint is lengthy and dense, making for tedious reading. It's also rife with jargon that's likely inscrutable to non-practitioners. I don't evaluate the merit of the accusations in the post; I attempt to demystify them, plainly.

Attempting to project LTV to a timeline that's longer than the general settings of active user acquisition campaigns is reckless. I highlight here how much data is needed to forecast even 30-day LTV values (1/X) mobiledevmemo.com/much-data-need… 2/ This has been compounded by COVID, of course. 2020 and 2021 saw exceptional, aberrant levels of engagement across a number of consumer categories. That data is unreliable, as I discuss here mobiledevmemo.com/surviving-the-…

Worth noting re: Irish DPC / Meta: TikTok had planned to use the Legitimate Interest basis to avoid collecting consent for data processing related to behavioral advertising — and it abandoned that plan after substantial pushback. LI is not a panacea. edpb.europa.eu/news/national-… 2/ The belief that consent can be avoided where the contractual basis has been rejected simply by claiming legitimate interest feels credulous and unfounded, given TikTok’s experience. techcrunch.com/2022/07/12/tik…

The EDPB, the EU's privacy watchdog that was established to ensure compliance with GDPR, determined that WhatsApp may not use a contractual basis (ToS) to process user data "for the purposes of service improvement and security." It contends that this usage requires consent. (1/X) 2/ This is striking. Note that the Irish DPC, which is Meta's data regulator, initially determined this to not be the case; the EDPB overruled that decision and forced the sanction. The DPC has fined Meta €5.5MM.

The DTC's category's very existence is predicated on behavioral advertising targeting: the notion that a substantive audience for any niche product can be uncovered at the scale of the internet. (1/X) 2/ DTC brands largely outsourced their customer development and marketing functions to Facebook: behavioral purchasing histories could be used to aggregate a critical commercial mass on Facebook and Instagram for *any* niche product. quantmar.com/99/How-does-fa…

The App Tracking Transparency Recession: Pain in the digital advertising sector seems concentrated in social media; the broader advertising market appears healthy currently. I propose that social media platforms are experiencing an ATT recession. (1/X) mobiledevmemo.com/the-att-recess… 2/ When social media companies refer to macroeconomic weakness, they mean 'inflation'. I argue that no evidence supports the notion of a broader digital advertising downturn. What the social media platforms are experiencing appears to be the result of Apple's ATT privacy policy.

Back in October, Shopify announced that it has expanded Shopify Audiences to Google / YouTube. I view this as a tacit acknowledgment that Apple doesn’t consider Shopify Audiences to be a violation of ATT. A few thoughts on Shopify Audiences $SHOP (1/X) 2/ Shopify audiences flips the digital advertising value chain: prior to ATT, ad platforms owned conversion data because they received it from advertisers. Shopify Audiences changes that, as I wrote here in May mobiledevmemo.com/with-its-audie…