Fix / Friday — November 6

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Adtech

As the (delayed) implementation of the zeroed IDFA approaches, Facebook have shared how they plan to adjust their activity to accommodate Apple’s SKAdNetwork. People active in the market are already seeing early effects of these changes as people adopt iOS14.

And in his excellent new newsletter @thomasbcn tells us;

Afaik, Facebook isn’t showing MAI (Mobile App Install) ads to user without IDFA (this isn’t new or related to iOS14). A growing rate of IDFA-less users means FB MAI Ads inventory is shrinking!

As this adtech perfect storm rolls on there are some solutions emerging — Liveramp and Trade Desk are collaborating so brands using Trade Desk can buy against the Liveramp ID. It does feel like the ID solution that gets the widest distribution will probably prevail.

Merchant

Some effects of Covid are not that surprising. Increased ecommerce sales in a time of lockdown makes perfect sense. And, having experienced the convenience, people sticking with ecommerce even when shops reopen isn’t that surprising.

But the huge growth of meal kits is a surprise. With all that sourdough baking and time to shop local, one may have expected home cooking to grow. Which it has, but I was once staggered to hear how few people cook from scratch anymore. So into the gap between home cooking and takeaways, Meal Kits have seen amazing growth. Hello Fresh have reported a doubling of sales — almost €1billion for the last quarter — and a doubling of customers. Nestle just bought US rival Freshly — who have about half the sales — for $1.5bn.

And Fix friends Gousto have raised more funds, valuing them at $1billion — another UK Unicorn.

A friend who visited one of the Amazon Grocery stores mentioned how much shelf space was devoted to Meal Kits — could this be a space they invest more in? These adjacencies for grocery stores are a challenge — should they try and build out these new products or focus on core competence?

Delivery is becoming an issue as Instacart builds its US business. Given a large proportion of grocery items can be bought from just about any grocery store, there is a risk in giving up your customer to a third party. In the UK Waitrose learned this lesson through their Ocado partnership and now building their own delivery business. Is Asda taking a risk in partnering with Uber Eats? Uber acquired Cornershop, a Chilean online grocery service, and have launched services in Dallas and Miami.

Creative Tech

All the work we are doing on TikTok creative reinforces how each platform really needs bespoke creative, work that gets the grammar of that platform. This Creative best practice checklist from Snap makes this point too. And this detailed look at how to best manage Facebook Creative is a good resource.

For some of you this is already business as normal, but for many there is still a last minute struggle to get any social assets, let alone good ones. But the value of the right creative is huge — if you express it as the media value of improved performance.

What does that mean? Imagine you have a £1m social spend. The media team have done a good job and the campaign is well planned across the right set of platforms and formats. But poor creative that runs everywhere, can mean that money is wasted. Great creative — made to suit the grammar — can make the campaign hugely successful. If it performs 20% better, that’s £200k of value created.

There are a number of firms that can help here — and some can even let you keep improving the creative as the campaign runs. We have seen edits that make the campaign 40% more effective across the same flight. This is a promo video from Celtra that shows what is possible — as does this Cadbury case study — and we can introduce you to a number of people who do this, each with their own particular benefits.

One particular benefit of good Creative Tech is the ability to personalise ads — making them contextually relevant. A new report from IPG shows how effective this can be

“Relevance is a critical part of brand marketing strategy because people today are inundated with content on a daily basis and it can be overwhelming,” said Kara Manatt, SVP, Group Director, Intelligence Solutions at MAGNA Global. “Personalized messaging can not only help create more relevant ads, but also help amplify brand stories, forging stronger more solid personal connections.”

Again we have seen many examples where this has had a huge effect. Why would any brand treat its customers like strangers?

One client who gets it is Avon, whose CEO was quoted (in a good interview with Martin Sorrell) saying;

“MediaMonks industrialised the mass production that we needed to do and contemporised it, and they did it in a way that we could afford, was collaborative, and made us better.” MediaMonks has been “agile” and “responsive”, “making stuff for us almost constantly” and helping the beauty brand move from “long-form film” to “lots of different formats”,

Agencies that get this opportunity — like Media Monk — tend to be outside the holding companies.

The space is maturing fast — with all the platforms looking at how to improve creative — here Google are using AI to recreate webpages as video.

Tiktok

TikTok creators instigated a legal challenge to the proposed banning on the app — and won. And some UK creators now live in Collab Houses. In a good interview the European head of TiktOk sees some potential here;

“Some of the creative houses in the US and Europe are really interesting, are they coming up with the next generation of reality TV? We really see ourselves as a next generation platform, and I would include creative formats and options in that,

And our latest GoodTikTokCreative looks at Heinz and the fact ManU have — belatedly — launched on TikTok.

newTV

This is a good read on the scale of cord cutting . Basically it was 100m households and half have gone already. The industry expects another halving. With just 25m cable subscribers, none of the math adds up.

In this weeks deep dive on newTV we had lots of data and insight — and a focus on Sports, including the AI driven camera that mistook the linesman bald head for the football. Catch up here

China

Singles day or Double 11 kicks off on Tuesday and the expectations are high. But one issue that merits a bit more attention is the logistics — when a record amount of money is spent that means a record number of parcels need delivery. Alibaba owned Cainiao has set up about 20,000 self-service parcel pickup machines across 150 major cities in China. Customers use a QR code or facial recognition to collect their parcel. More on this logistics firm here.

I did another talk with our friends at Ezoic — this time on digital trends in China.

Plus+

In the Sorrell interview mentioned above he talks of Accenture as his real rival. It’s odd no one has asked him about the story that WPP has got McKinsey to help with their 5 year plan.

Market definitions and tech monopolies — Benedict Evans

How Discord (somewhat accidentally) invented the future of the internet — long profile of this voice messaging business

Riot Games hires first ever chief marketing officer

Google and Accenture on the Smart Home

The latest Activate report is out — lots of data. Essential read.

New York Times Hits 7 Million Subscribers as Digital Revenue Rises — digital subscriptions now bigger than print.

Finally… In a good piece from Google, Les Binet and Mark Ritson on how to use digital;

“I would say smart marketing these days involves having the bulk of your budget typically devoted to brand building. TV is still worth having in the mix, but supplemented with newer digital brand building,” says Binet. “Paid search is the digital activation medium power excellence. If I had three media to use, I would use TV, online video, and paid search.”

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