MarketingDojo#22: Digital Ads are Billboards on the Virtual Highway 🚗
Digital billboards on the virtual highway, NVIDIA & WPP, chatbots are sprouting up everywhere.
Hello there!
It's been a minute since I took a break. Getting back to writing and putting together the newsletter has been more challenging than I anticipated. Taiwan was excellent, and I am thankful for the summer break. Now, it’s time to get to work!
Here's what we will cover this week:
🛒Digital advertising and billboards have a lot in common
🌮TikTok had entered the chat
😎Marketing is not all fun and games
⚭Creativity meets tech with the new WPP & NVIDIA partnership
And lot's more. Before we start off, here are a couple of things.
First, if you haven't already, please subscribe to my weekly newsletter. Every Wednesday, I deliver a curated newsletter filled with marketing news & articles straight to your inbox.
Secondly, I was featured on the Marketer-Interview website. In this conversation, I discuss my journey as a marketer, my perspective on employee advocacy and influencer marketing, and the tools I use, among other things. Please, check it out!
Digital ads are like billboards on the virtual highway.
When I started as a marketer, I made more billboard ads than digital ones. We didn't reuse our newspaper or television ads for the billboards. You know why?
Because billboards are a glance medium.
The copy & the creative needed to be brief and on-point to convey our product's USP and yet be readable by the high-speed traffic on the roads.
So we had a strict rule for creating billboard ads:
7 Words or less
3 Seconds: the time taken to read
1 Core concept
When it comes to digital advertising, people's attention spans are short & speed of scrolling is fast, especially on mobile devices. That's why ensuring your digital ads catch their attention with just a glance is essential.
So if you are creating any digital ads, here are some filters:
Can someone get all the important information in under 3 seconds?
Is your ad copy short and sweet (7 words or less)? Edit, edit, edit.
Is your creative ad copy easy to read? High contrast between the background and text helps.
Does your ad convey one clear idea?
TL;DR: For an effective digital ad, try the billboard rule - 1 core concept explained in 7 words or less that your customers could understand in under 3 seconds.
TikTok has entered the chat.
The only way to have a good idea is to have many ideas.
TikTok is incredible at having many ideas, running quick experiments & finding out which ones work. TikTok announced its chatbot Tako's test run in the Philippines.
Tako is a third-party AI chatbot customized for TikTok. Tako sits on top of the other icons and suggests users video content based on their query.
Even though, Tiktok is an entertainment-first platform. Gen Z has already been using TikTok for search. Last year, TikTok expanded its character limit for captions to 2,200, providing an opportunity for Tiktok Search Engine Optimization.
The chatbot-based search capabilities will translate into the following:
Helpful, not just trending content, will have higher discoverability.
The lifetime value of content created will increase much as it does for Youtube, i.e. content will continue to generate views well past 30 days of publishing.
TikTok can continue to gain a share in video-based search that is quite popular with Gen Z audiences.
However, there is a big obstacle.
With negative reviews flooding the app stores, SnapChat's AI bot hasn't fared well. Besides the unfavourable reviews of the user experience, several questions have also been raised about the chatbot's safety, accuracy, and access to personal information.
TikTok is already on the back foot around access to personal information. Its bot might exasperate the concerns.
I like the idea of the Tako bot, but the jury is still out on its success.
It’s Meme time: The Glamourous Life of a Marketer.
Marketing is seen as a cool, fun and creative profession. It often is, but a lot of marketing is about stakeholder management, endless meetings and loads of crisis management.
This week’s meme is about the wonderful life of a marketer. I hope you like it.
Creative + Tech: A match made in heaven.
Have you ever tried to develop a terrific advertising campaign for your brand but then gave up after seeing how expensive it would be to shoot photos and videos?
I know I have!
The prohibitive costs of photo and video shoots meant that I repurposed our global assets for the 100th time or, even worse, used a stock image. With more enterprise solutions for generative AI, that might change. One enterprise solution that got me super excited is the announcement by WPP & NVIDIA.
NVIDIA & WPP are creating a content engine powered by NVIDIA Omniverse™ and AI that will enable creative teams to produce high-quality commercial content faster while fully aligning with the brand's needs.
WPP is the largest media holding group in the world. Its network includes Ogilvy, Mindshare, Mediacom and many others.
Adopting this technology will improve the ease of creating, modifying and improving creative content at scale and will benefit brands get more even with limited budgets.
An exciting announcement that holds great promise for the industry.
Google Marketing Live 2023:More AI, AI, Generative AI for Marketers.
Little or no surprise, Google Marketing Live was heavy on AI!
But the AI-powered tools look truly promising. There were some I felt the most excited about:
Chatbot to create Search Ads: Creating the first version of a Google search ad is always the trickiest. Google's new chatbot is designed to help develop copy ideas based on user prompts.
Source: Google Google's Automatically created assets & Performance Max got a Generative AI boost. Imagine searching for "skin care for dry, sensitive skin" and getting an AI-generated ad matching your query. Expect a dramatic increase in click-thru rates.
Source: Google Integrating ads into the new search generative experience is still a bit in the future. Google displayed its next-gen search experience at the Google I/O. Depending on the context, the ads will remain at the top and bottom, but some will find their way into conversations.
Google is clearly on an AI hyperdrive. A few days before the Google marketing live event, they unveiled the Generative AI capabilities for creating content. A pretty slick video for some pretty slick features- generating backgrounds, copy, voiceovers with language support and more.
Short Stuff:
Instagram shared how it works (Understanding the algorithm(s)).
Twitter alternative BlueSky hit 100K users before exiting beta. (Internet’s second town square?)
Live streaming service Twitch has a serious competitor - Kick. (Paywalled).
That’s a wrap for this week’s newsletter. I felt all rusted writing this week’s edition, but I hope to be back stronger next week.
If you like the newsletter, please leave a comment or a like. It’s the best, no-cost way to improve the visibility of the newsletter.
Thank you for your time, and see you in your inbox next week.
Ciao,
Garima
P.S: Start of the year I read the book “Moonwalking with Einstein”. One paragraph from the book left a deep impression on me:
Hence, I am working extra hard to create memories and make my short lifetime feel long. Does it resonate with you?