Edition #532
How did the FQ suddenly become everywhere? The real cost of Dull Advertising and Substack sells books.
I wanted to give a shout to the Female Quotient (FQ). If you’ve been to any major industry event recently, they seem to be there. In fact they seem to be everywhere, I first kind of noticed at Advertising Week last year, and then at Davos, then CES and Possible. But they’re also at the F1 too?
I don’t know what’s in the water over there, but hats off to them for getting such a consistent event roll out. Very impressive. The strategy seems to be, to be part of any major event, with a free & accessible (to all) line up. Highlighting and getting participation from women leaders. And naturally brand partners help come in to help. If you haven’t been to one, do check it out.
But I just like the, we’re not going to sit and advocate to get women on panels at conference. We’re just going to get the best women, and create a whole stage for them. Let them come to us, because we’ve got great programming and the best audience. Bravo. I’m sure there’s going to be a book or HBR case study on them at some point or prime for that NewYorker long form write up.
On creating community, Lena Dunham credits Substack coverage in helping her sell a reportedly 60,000 copies in her first week.
“Someone I trust told me that, in book sales at least, every single Substack follower is the equivalent of many more Instagram or X followers because Substackers are way more likely to follow through and buy a book. While I don’t have the actual numbers, that feels anecdotally true to me.”
Also last week OpenAI released an open source model for removing PII data. This might be useful across the advertising industry. A simple and easy way to remove (and derisk) datasets. Someone joked, you can then use the same model to seek out PII. Hackers mindset.
Notable stories this week
- Instagram cracks down on content aggregators.
- The Ankler moves to new publishing platform created by Ben Thompson.
- Brands are about to spend more boosting creator content than creators earn making it.
- How much of Substack is actually AI?
- Welcome to Washington’s new media landscape.
- Hershey bets on Agentic Ai to rethink $2b in marketing spend.
- Stagwell builds AI-powered outcome first TV advertising platform with Freewheel.
- You probably wouldn’t notice if an AI chatbot slipped ads into its responses.
- Patreon expands access to discovery network to grow creators paid audiences.
- How marketers are making experiences worth clipping.
- The Guardians US push.
- Programmatic peacekeeping.
- Dentsu bolsters Americas leadership as it seeks turnaround in key region.
- The pros and cons of adding AI to first party experiences.
- Audio’s old guard looks to consolidate.
- IAC rebrands to People Incorporated.
- PulsePoint launches Crossix programmatic optimizer.
- Major upgrades coming to X Ads Manager.
- Yahoo launches Sports Business Hub, Yahoo Sports meets Yahoo Finance.
- Omnicom’s new influencer Tool uses agentic AI to tweak content for brand standards.
- Paypal launches PayPal Ad ID.
- Google is testing AI chatbot search for YouTube.
- Omnicom tests AI gents to cut out the ad tech middlemen.
- Brands can now deploy their own agents inside publisher chatbots.
- News UK turns The Times first party data into synthetic audiences for advertisers.
- How Casey Newton is revamping his newsletter to compete with AI.
- Taylor Swift deepfakes are pushing scams on TikTok.
- HP quietly launched a streaming app to grow is advertising ambitions.
- Instagram launches a new app that’s a mix of Snapchat and BeReal.
- YouTube is turning audio into an ad product, SiriusXM is selling it.
- Snapchat users will soon be able to chat directly with agentic ads served to them via DM.
- Beehiiv lets you host live events on platform.
- N3on spent $1.4m on ‘clipper’s in just over a month to get his content in your feed.
- The videos clipping machine behind Claviculars viral fame?
- A warning for brands: be careful when ‘clipping’.
- How Netflix is rewriting the streaming ad playbook.
- Big brands boost creator spending but smaller firms dominate the deals.
- A boring business is soaring with better ads.
- The news consumption habits of teens and adults.
- [Smart take] It was just a podcast. Now it’s Kelce land.
Deals/M&A
- Adobe acquires SEMRush for $1.9b.
- Goldman Sachs, Bain and TheTradeDesk lead investment in Hightouch.
- Audion Raises $15m for US Expansion & Global Scaling of AI-based ‘Performance Audio’ Tool.
Campaign of the week
- JLo announced her new movie with a LinkedIn profile update. Puts in her old movie roles as jobs too ha.
- Sweet Greens, Faces of the Farm.
Smartest commentary
- “In the fifty years from 1960 to 2010, the world’s great FMCG brands – P&G, Unilever, Nestlé, Colgate-Palmolive – grew at roughly 8% compounded annually. P&G alone went from $1 billion to $79 billion in revenue. This was the era of mass media. Television. Radio. Outdoor. Advertising that was felt, not tracked….Since 2010, as digital and social came to dominate the media mix, those same companies have grown collectively at under 1% per year – a slowdown driven by multiple factors, but one that raises serious questions about whether modern media investment is delivering the growth it promised. Less than half the rate of the US economy.” =MediaOnline.
- ^ Referencing Michael Farmers analysis.
Datapoints of note
- Roblox bought their first 1500 users from Google for $1 each.
- Hershey typically ran MMM analysis three times a year for about five brands with results arriving months later. With Mutinex and Tracer, the company is now moving toward measuring its entire brand portfolio on a monthly basis—up to 12 times a year.
- System1 estimated that dull creativity, defined as work that generates no emotional response, is costing brands an additional $189 billion in media spend to achieve the same commercial impact as emotionally engaging campaigns.
- 28% of writing in top newsletters in Technology is fully or partially AI generated. It seems like the more analytical the content is, the more it’s likely to be generated by AI.
- Hovaness estimates that bid duplication costs the industry $5 billion a year.
- Meta lost 20m users last quarter.
- X will record the most monthly downloads in history this April. Beating their last record by 40%.
- OpenAI sees $8 ChatGPT driving consumer subscribers to 122m this year.
- [MrBeast] The average video right now does 140 million views in the first 30 days and in the first year it does 220 million”…”It’s literally the only way to reach that amount of people..”
- Chris Wilhelmi, global head of data and media at Monks, the marketing firm, said customers were saving 30 percent on the cost of campaigns. On content, it can be as much as 65 percent. Many are reinvesting those savings into testing and experimenting with new ad strategies.
- Fossil sees 57% brand recall lift with InMobi’s full funnel ad solution.
- Bing now has 1 billion monthly active users.
- A survey of more than 2,000 US adults and teens found many get daily news from television or streaming services (46%), digital news sites (41%), or social media (37%). Nearly half (49%) never use print or digital newspapers as a news source.
- More than half a billion users on each of Facebook and Instagram are now watching AI translated videos each week.
Events
- Watch this space.
That’s it for this week.
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