Between Meetings - November 13th
Friday round up of this week's top market stories
We’re less than two weeks away from Cyber 5, and with Amazon’s $10Bn Prime Day and Alibaba’s mind blowing $74Bn Singles Day this year, it’s going to be year like no other for eCommerce. As always, I’ll also be sharing A Book, A Show, and A Podcast from this week!
Facebook
Updates
Holiday Shopping Program Launch
Facebook is launching the Instagram Shop tab in time for the holidays. Facebook has a range of activations planned to ensure that people who come to Instagram Shop tab have a differentiated and exciting experience this holiday season. People in all countries with access to shopping will be able to see holiday collections from over ~82 holiday partners, including some exclusive items, through holiday-themed, checkout-only, curated collections. Well-known brands and SMBs including CO, The Hundreds, Huda Beauty, Mented Cosmetics, Sephora, Target and more are participating in this year’s holiday program, which will delight people who are shopping on Instagram Shop for the very first time. In addition, the holiday offering includes:
Consumer incentives of $5 and $10 off checkout purchases over $30
Instagram Shop and holiday marketing campaign; the holiday portion of the campaign includes boosted creator posts and a DPA ad campaign supporting seller provided inventory
Turn existing IG Stories Organic Content w/ Interactive Stickers into an Ad
Instagram is now enabling the ability for advertisers to turn existing organic IG Stories with interactive stickers (@mentions, locations, and hashtags) posts through the “Use Existing Post” feature in Ads Manager or via the API, as well as promote through the IG app.
IG Stories Ads Automatic Creative and Format Optimizations for Existing Feed Assets
On Thursday, November 12, Instagram is launching new automatic Instagram Stories creative and format optimizations that are designed to increase performance, while saving time and effort for advertisers in building their Stories ads. How it works: the machine learning dynamically determines which optimizations may increase the performance of the ad on Stories and adjusts to an advertiser’s target audience preferences. The
new automatic Instagram Stories creative and format optimizations that are launching include:
Automatic Stories templates when using existing Feed assets
Carousel transformation for displaying long primary text as an overlay on a second card
Launching Advertiser Ability to Launch Brand Collabs Ads from Creator’s Handle
Advertisers will now have the ability to launch branded content ads from the creator’s handle within Ads Manager. Previously, advertisers relied on creators to launch BC ads from Ads Manager, obtained creator login credentials to launch ads from the creator’s handle within Ads Manager, or asked creators to create and connect a Business Manager to the advertiser’s Business Manager. The new permissions help mitigate potential integrity issues and reduce friction associated with advertisers launching BC ads from the creator’s handle.
Case Studies
91up(APAC / Ecommerce) By finding inactive customers and reaching them with Facebook ad targeting tools, the marketplace increased its conversion rate and achieved a 4.5X return on ad spend.
Baci Perugina(EMEA / CPG) By finding inactive customers and reaching them with Facebook ad targeting tools, the marketplace increased its conversion rate and achieved a 4.5X return on ad spend.
SOFTGAMES(N. America / Gaming) By finding inactive customers and reaching them with Facebook ad targeting tools, the marketplace increased its conversion rate and achieved a 4.5X return on ad spend.
Mercedes-Benz USA(N. America / Automotive) To increase awareness and sales for its winter sales event, the luxury automotive company tested ads in In-Stream Reserve as a complement to TV ads, achieving a 32% incremental reach in light TV viewers aged 21–39.
Consumer Tech & Culture
The US Commerce Department has delayed enforcement of the ban on TikTok, after its parent company asked a federal appeals court earlier this week to overturn the order that ByteDance divest the company
Quite a few anti-trust actions this week
The European Commission has laid out charges against Amazon over concerns that third party sellers on the platform cannot compete with Amazon’s retail business due to their use of extensive merchant data to inform retail decisions
The US DoJ has filed an antitrust suit against Visa’s plans to buy fintech group Plaid for $5.3bn, stating that it would deprive merchants and consumers of an innovative alternative to Visa
India’s watchdog has opened an investigation into whether Google unfairly promotes Google Pay during Android smartphone setup
Apple has announced their new M1 processor, and three new Macs powered by the chip, which marks the start of a bold 2-year transition away from Intel chips to its own silicon
China’s Xiaomi has surpassed Apple to become the world’s third-largest smartphone maker by shipments in Q3, benefitting from a 45% increase in shipments from the same period in the previous year
Google is changing its cloud storage policies for free accounts “to keep pace with the growing demand”; Google Photos will be counted against the 15GB account limit from 1st June, and users will need to subscribe to a Google One account for additional storage
Twitter announced that it has labeled 300,000 tweets in the two weeks leading up to the election to combat misinformation (~0.2% of the total number of election-related tweets); this comes as
YouTube defends its decision to not remove videos with false election claims as it does not violate company policies
Business & Investing
DoorDash filed its IPO today to list its shares on the NYSE; Airbnb, Roblox and Wish are all expected to go public by the end of the year, although Airbnb is delaying theirs so as not to be overshadowed by the US election
US “stay-at-home” stocks such as Zoom and Netflix have taken a hit given news of an imminent vaccine; Chinese tech stocks have also tumbled almost $290bn in two days after the government launched new antitrust rules, another hit since Ant Financial’s IPO was halted last week
Google’s investment of $4.5bn in India’s largest telecom platform Jio Platforms has been approved, which will see the development of the Android mobile operating system to build low-cost, entry-level smartphones
Google’s investment of $4.5bn in India’s largest telecom platform Jio Platforms has been approved, which will see the development of the Android mobile operating system to build low-cost, entry-level smartphones
Spotify is buying podcast hosting company Megaphone for $235m, adding to its recent podcast acquisitions including Gimlet Media and The Ringer; this will give all podcast publishers on Megaphone access to Spotify’s technology which inserts targeted ads in real time
Online events platform Hopin has raised $125m at a $2bn valuation, having grown its registered users from 16,000 to 3.5 million in the last eight months, as the pandemic continues to push the growth of the virtual event industry
A Book, A Show, A Podcast
I’m reading Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built in honor of Alibaba’s $74Bn Singles Day event. Based on most recent numbers, they clocked over $56Bn in the first eight hours of the sale! That’s 5x Amazon’s entire Prime Day. Despite the incredible eCommerce performance, $BABA share prices continue to be depressed due to the delay of Ant Group’s IPO.
I’m watching The Stranger, a Netflix original adapted from Harlen Coben’s novel. I’m going to level with you, the first 7 episodes were pretty fantastic, and it kind of flops in the 4th quarter a bit. Good for a casual watch but I’m not sure if it’s worth 6 hours of your life. At least it’s a UK film so the accents are quite pleasant!
I’m listening to The [MAU] Talk Podcast, featuring Ian Simons and Jack Dempsey Southerland III of Facebook, talking about all things Value and Discovery Commerce. This is an exceptional wrap from two of our eCommerce and Measurement leads about how enterprise businesses should be thinking about the future of commerce and acquisition.