MarketingDojo #55: 🛍️Social Media's Shopping Apocalypse. 🌋
Commerce is taking over social, critiquing Super Bowl ,size of the search pie and more.
Hello Everyone,
Welcome to the 55th issue of The Marketing Dojo. Your inbox is a busy place, and I appreciate the privilege of your time and attention.
I'm pressing send on this week’s newsletter right before I get ready for a 35-hour journey back home. Last week, during my time in Minnesota, I finally got a glimpse into the scale of the Super Bowl mania. It's all over the TV and everyone's weekend plans. In 2023, the cost of a 30-second advertising sporting event reached a record $7 million ($233,333 per second). It's wild, and I am jealous. There’s even a meme dedicated to it to go along with this newsletter!
In today's issue, we will cover:
🛒Is eCommerce social media's kryptonite?
👛Meme time: Critics on a shoestring budget
🔍Bing is Big
🤖AI is neither a moat nor a long-term strategy
And lots more.
Also, 💖 Happy Valentine's Day 💖 Show this newsletter some love - share it with one more dear marketer today🌹.
Clicks Over Connections: The Costly Turn of Social Platforms
"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users, then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die." - Cory Doctorow.
Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification for the decay of platforms over time, and it became wildly popular. The beauty of finding a new term is that once you hear it, you see it everywhere.
Multiple social platforms have been hurtling towards enshittification at record speeds in the last few weeks.
TikTok is testing an option to make all its videos shoppable.
YouTube has secured a patent for technology that identifies products in videos, paving the way for enhanced shopping features.
Pinterest announced plans to make every pin shoppable in its latest earnings report.
In the short term, this will make sense for brands - 34% of customers discover new brands on social media. The ability to buy products on the platform will collapse the funnel.
However, the engagement on these platforms will deteriorate over the medium to long term. Social platforms are transforming from where you form social connections to where you stop talking to each other and buy things.
As a marketer, this is yet another reason to stop depending on the walled gardens and build an audience of your own. The enshittifcation of social media has started and social commerce is its kryptonite.
Tiny Slice, Big Pie: Bing's Big Bucks.
As of January 2024, Bing's market share in search is 3.42%. But search is a lucrative category. Bing's revenues from search & news advertising equal the combined quarterly revenues of Peloton, Papa John's, Etsy, Instacart and The New York Times.
No wonder players like TikTok, Instagram, and even Reddit are trying to capture parts of the search business.
Once Bitten, Twice Shy: Temu Is Rattling Its Rivals.
Temu, the online discount megastore, creates an outsized fear with its competitors. According to Tinuiti's Digital Ads Benchmark Report for the closing quarter of 2023, an astonishing 90% of retailers were vying against Temu for Shopping impressions within Google's Auction Insights.
However, Temu's Google ad impression market share is relatively low compared to Amazon and Walmart.
Since its launch in September 2022, Temu—backed by the PDD Group—has swiftly garnered attention, echoing the disruptive trajectory once charted by TikTok in the social media domain.
eCommerce giants are probably looking to avoid repeating the mistake of underestimating TikTok and have actively started competing with Temu even when the platform is nowhere close to being head-to-head with the OG e-commerce platform - Amazon.
It reflects a broader acknowledgement within the industry: today's nimble newcomer could be tomorrow's leading force.
AI-Generated Content Is NOT A Strategic Moat.
Leveraging AI to craft blog posts might seem an obvious choice in our tech-driven marketing landscape. But is this a sound strategy?
Ryan Law's article titled AI Content Is Short-Term Arbitrage, Not Long-Term Strategy, lays out compelling reasons why the answer is NO.
Ryan Law challenges this notion head-on in his thought-provoking piece, "AI Content Is Short-Term Arbitrage, Not Long-Term Strategy." He presents a critical viewpoint: AI-crafted content is proliferating across the web, leading to situations like an SEO coup that briefly siphoned traffic from competitors.
For a short while, yes, the AI-generated blogs did their bit to drive traffic. Law points out that such gains are fleeting, with traffic potentially dwindling to almost nothing.
This begs the question: Can AI content truly engage the right customers for your brand?
Consider the following limitations of AI-generated content:
It averages out the vast expanse of online information, often leading to no new insights.
Accuracy can be hit-or-miss, compromising trust in your brand.
It lacks a genuine understanding of your unique business essence.
Ultimately, our marketing goal is sales, not just traffic. AI can attract eyeballs, but content must resonate on a deeper level to convert visitors into customers.
As AI-generated blogs begin to pop up, here's a tweak we might need to make to our content
Interview real people
Collect original data
Tell personal stories
Authentic human experiences and original research are challenging endeavours, yet they will set us apart in an AI-saturated market.
Meme-Time: Grapes Are Sour.
Brands pay $233,333 per second to air their advertisements in SuperBowl. The math almost never adds up. But if nothing else, I get a sense of weird satisfaction when big brands crash and burn with some of these costly experiments. Do you relate?
Short Stuff:
BeReal, the anti-Instagram network, opens up to presence by brands and influencers (Is it even real anymore).
A distributed social media network and Twitter competitor, BlueSky, opened up to the public. (Fediverse is rising).
Move over crypto; snacks, sports and beer will dominate this Super Bowl. (Back to claim the Super Bowl).
That’s a wrap on this week. Thank you for your time and attention. If you liked this week’s newsletter or found something interesting - please give me a like or drop a comment. Your support helps drive the discoverability of the newsletter.
Once again, thank you for your time. See you in your inbox next Wednesday.
Regards,
Garima Mamgain
P.S.: I will participate in a panel at Seamless 2024 next week.
In the panel discussion at Seamless Asia, Swetha Vigraham, Leslie Daniel Chan, and I will unpack the essence of ecosystem mapping, pinpointing synergies for strategic partnerships, and the art of crafting collaborations that drive mutual growth.
If you are at Seamless Asia 2024, I'd love to meet you. Please stop by our session and say hello!
