Changes Are Wild & Hard - Agency Inner Circle #11

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Big Changes

So, the last week in the real world was totally freakin’ insane. An attempted assassination and an incumbent dropping out of the race, a new candidate having the biggest political fundraising day ever and a single line of code stopping airlines, banks and hospitals in their tracks doesn’t really happen all that often.

Marketers across the globe saw wild results (mostly negative) during these news cycles. Even though I want to rail against it, presidential election years are more challenging for advertisers because there is so much NOISE.

You can’t handle business as usual during these times. These are external factors that are adjusting the attention of your target audiences. Don’t work as if things are usual. Because they ain’t.

It’s important to address these with your agency clients (if you are a marketing agency) not defensively, but rather in a way of exposition. Don’t blame news cycles for poor performance, but rather explain what you will do to to mitigate the impact. Maybe you want to boost bids to break through the noise, maybe you want to launch a meme campaign, maybe you want to pull back budget for another time during the month…but you want to be proactive, not reactive. It will help your clients feel like you are managing at east some of the chaos…they will be appreciative.

Expected Fallback

In a move that surprised exactly no one on this side of the keyboard, Google announced that they aren’t going to deprecate 3rd party cookies. (See the story in Digiday.) This didn’t happen because Google COULDN’T deprecate 3rd party cookies and make browsing more private, but they aren’t doing it to protect the stability of digital advertising. If Google completely wipes out advertising on the “open web”, it sends shivers through the market. Market shivers are bad for business…scared advertisers spend less.

Deprecating 3rd party cookies was positioned as a “privacy” issue, where less information could potentially be shared. This seemed pretty noble - after all, who doesn’t want more privacy? But Google would have become, essentially, the single source for web audience data (because FB doesn’t share much already). That would have made them the ultimate info-broker. But, there wasn’t a consensus on how to keep the rest of the ad market running happily. So Google caved and kept things EXACTLY as they are.

Progress (or change, at least) thwarted once again by money.

Prime Day Kicked Butt…Again

While Amazon was tight-lipped about its own growth YoY for Prime Day (which leads me to believe that it wasn’t super awesome growth for them…), but via Adobe Analytics & DigitalCommerce 360, sales off of Amazon, presumably by those riding in the Prime Day wake, jumped by 10% YoY to $14.2B. That’s some nice YoY growth when it seems like flat is the new growing like gangbusters.

Obviously, made up holidays work. Maybe I can come up with an International Tim Day or something and see $14.2B coming my way. Someday, maybe.

What’s New In Slack?

Greg Shenken is mashing on the mental health market & Tim Keen’s LinkedIn teachings generated 23K impressions from a single post for a super nice guy, Tom Fenton. Check it here. And if you aren’t part of the Agency Inner Circle Slack Channel, come join - it’s free, fun and easy.

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