📰 Growth Daily - Friday, Jan 27

Thursday's news, tips, & tools you need to know

January 27, 2023

🕹 Twitch Is Changing Their Ad Displays

📰 TL;DR - Apparently lots of users on the largest video game streaming platform / social network complain that ads on the platform are way too annoying and intrusive. Well Twitch, which was bought by Amazon in 2014, heard their complaints and just announced they are going to update "the way disabling pre-roll (ads) work for channels... Second, we are applying our Picture-by-Picture experience to the majority of pre-rolls that viewers do see."

💡 Insight - On one hand this makes it seem like people are going to be able to skip over ads much faster, devaluing ads on the platform significantly. But perhaps this will make ads on the platform actually more valuable because people won't immediately dismiss all ads on the platform. Net net, twitch ads were not on our radar at all but now they are!

👻 Is Snapchat Right For Your Brand?

📰 TL;DR - Social Media Today has been dropping a series of tips and tricks for maximizing social efforts every week and this week they touched on Snapchat. One trick they recommend in particular is truly brilliant. They recommended using the Snapchat Ads Manager to see if your target audience is even on Snapchat before deciding to post organic content on the platform. This is brilliant and can work for so many "alt" platforms!

💡 Insight - Brands waste hundreds of hours and lots of ad spend $ on platforms where their audience doesn't really exist. This is a great trick to find out if any particular "alt" platform is worth your time and money investment! Fire up Pinterest's ad platform, Snapchat's ad platform, or Reddit's ad platform and see if you can build an audience of millions of their users who are interested in what you are selling, to target through their ads. This test will tell you if you should be creating organic content.

For example, when we fire up the Reddit Ads manager, we see there are only about 200,000 people on the platform who are interested in e-commerce so our time might be better spent creating content on Twitter for our sister newsletter, DTC Daily.

🔥 How To 3X Your Community Growth In 7 Days

📰 TL;DR - One of our favorite twitters Matt Grey just dropped a thread with some pretty clever ways to grow your community faster. Here are our biggest takeaways:

+ Ask existing community members to create content promoting your community+ You need a content pipeline that consistently delivers new content since content is your 24/7 salesperson for you that brings new community members and stirs conversation amongst existing community members+Collect an email list because it becomes easier to welcome members to your community with automation and activate your community with launches or events

🔎 Google Doesn't Care About You

📰 TL;DR - Ok that was clickbait but now you can decide just how devious the headline was, related to this bit of news. Ever since the news broke that Google's parent company Alphabet is laying off 12,000 people, media buyers, analysts, and marketers alike have reported virtual radio silence from Google Ads to support teams.

It seems as though a good chunk of the 12,000 lay-offs were Google ads and analytics support staff who were there to help you optimize your investment with Google. In fact, many in the industry told DIGIDAY that Google has been increasingly encouraging advertisers to engage with its network of approved resellers as of late.

💡 Insight - We never really trusted the people who would call us every 90 days introducing themselves as our new Google Ads rep to help us optimize our campaigns. Regardless, the notion that these are the jobs they are laying off shows a lack of care and priority for its advertisers. Even though we didn't trust them, we always appreciated that they were there to help push denied ads through or fix bugs. It's disappointing.

🐤 Twitter Coming For Google's Ad Business?

📰 TL;DR - Twitter is testing a new ad placement option that shows your tweet first or second when someone searches for a specific keyword. For context:

Google makes around $200b a year selling ads when someone types in something specific. Facebook & Instagram combined is just about $150b a year. So it's pretty clear that they are trying to tap into the gold of search advertising which is a more contextually relevant form of advertising that commands a premium price point compared to what we like to call " interruption ads" aka Facebook and Google ads that interrupt your scrolling other content that might not be remotely related to the ad you are seeing.

💡 Insight - This is brilliant for so many reasons! First, they can charge more for these types of ads so that should help Elon's profit issue if they can scale this. Second, the effectiveness of these ads will crush! So as marketers, we can't wait to try these placements. Third and finally, we wish more platforms had this as an ad placement option! Could you imagine if we had the option to make it so that anytime someone types in our competitor's brand name on Instagram, we showed up first? Ugh, we are drooling!

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