TikTok sues back, Apple ad missing the mark, Temu and AI affect Meta paid platform, Google SGE losing to non-AI queries and other🔥marketing topics
Whatagraph
The fast and easy-to-use platform for monitoring and reporting on marketing performance.
Welcome to the May issue of Summarized, a marketing newsletter by Whatagraph, where we share our latest articles, case studies, top news from the digital marketing world, and platform updates each month.
TikTok fires back!
Last month the U.S. President Biden has signed the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which gives ByteDance , named there as "unacceptable owners", 270 days to divest their ownership stake from TikTok . The U.S. Congress threatens to enforce compliance by banning the app and imposing a financial penalty upon both ByteDance, as well as any appstore and website host that works with the app. That penalty is to be $5,000 multiplied by the number of U.S. users of the violating app - which adds up to about the expected U.S. defense budget of 2024.
On Tuesday May 7th, TikTok filed a lawsuit which claims the new law violates the First Amendment, the freedom of expression and the Fifth's Amendment's due process guarantees. TikTok lawyers also argue violation of the U.S. Constitution's prohibition of bills of attainder, laws that declare a party guilty without a trial. The complaint views the law not as forced divestment, but as a de facto ban. Such divestment, they say, would not be commercially, technologically, or legally feasible. They claim severing the U.S. version of the app from its global users would destroy TikTok's value to the user and retraining new engineers to work on the immense source of code to maintain and update the app is functionally impossible.
The Chinese Government is also expected by TikTok's lawyers not to permit a divestment of the recommendations engine that is key to the success of TikTok in the United States. They gave a comparison to the U.S. limiting the exports or hand-off of some "dual-use" technologies, which may have research or military value. Some analysts indicate that this admission is TikTok saying the quiet part out loud. For years TikTok claimed that there was no issue of CCP control over the app, and now, suddenly, it is an issue. Proponents of the law indicate that this should not suprise anyone who has been following the national security threat that the app allegedly poses. In response within the complaint, the lawyers emphasized that it's the goverment's burden to prove it had a legally "compelling interest" to enact such law before taking away a massive platform from people who use it to communicate.
This seems like TikTok lawyers have little to no way to avoid the forced ban. What will happen to your campaigns when TikTok vanishes from the U.S. market? Have you started planning? Are you ready?
Apple apologizes for the iPad Pro "Crush" ad
The brand-new iPad Pro was recently showcased in a commercial called "Crush!" which has rubbed many people, especially creatives, the wrong way. In the ad, a large unstoppable hydraulic press is crushing just about every creative instrument artists and consumers have used over the centuries - from a piano exploding into splinters of wood, a record player, to cans of paint spilling out, books, cameras, toys, and relics of arcade games exploding in electric sparks. From the destruction emerges a pristine new iPad Pro. A narrator says "The most powerful iPad ever is also the thinnest."
In a great and broadly heard backlash, the ad's critics have immediately called it tone-deaf. Several marketing experts have noted that the campaign's execution didn't stick the landing. Americus Reed II, professor emeritus of marketing at University of Pennsylvania, described his reaction to the ad as "disturbing", and said "it came across as technology crushing the life out of the nostalgic sort of joy from former times." Actor Hugh Grant called it "a destruction of the human experience" and Handmaid's Tale director Reed Morano bluntly asked Apple CEO Tim Cook to "read the room."
The ad has also aplified already strong fear and anxiety of replacement by technological advances among artists, creative folks, and others who have recently been made redundant or suffered in other fashion. Watching beloved items get smashed into oblivion in a grotesque show of uncaring, relentless violence did nothing to assuage those fears, especially in face of the ongoing, rapid commercialization of generative artificial intelligence. Those people saw themselves and their skills, art, years of dedication and achievements, crushed under that press and were clearly dismayed.
In their apology, Apple stated:
Creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it’s incredibly important to us to design products that empower creatives all over the world. Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad. We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry.
Despite this language of the apology, however, the advertisement is still being displayed as current ad campaign for iPad Pro, and has not been taken down. This puts the sincerity of the supposed apology into serious question and may result in further pushback against Apple.
How would your brands handle "missing the mark" in such a spectacular way? How do you think such backlash should be handled best?
Are Temu and Meta the death of paid and performance based marketing?
Two themes were persistently present on social media and Reddit, Inc. in the past few months. They attempted to highlight structural deficiencies on Meta 's advertising platform and explain poor account-specific advertising performance. One claimed that Temu has saturated Meta's advertising platform to such degree that other advertisers are crowded out. The other stated that it's Meta's AI-powered tools that are experiencing bugs, or have become polluted with bad data over time to such an extent that it has rendered them ineffective.
Temu's ad spend, while extraordinary, doesn't seem to be meaningful enough at the scale of Meta's platforms to broadly distort prices. Furthermore, Temu doesn't seem to be pursuing high-value audiences, and the metrics released by Meta for Q1 simply do not support the idea that auction dynamics in the U.S. have materially changed since Temu launched on that market. Meta's CFO explicitly stated in the company's Q4 earnings report that "two thirds of Meta's China ad revenue came from advertisers outside the top 10 spenders in that country in 2023."
If Meta's advertising was truly broken, resulting in degraded advertising performance across the board, then no one told most advertisers. Meta's advertising revenue grew 27% YoY in Q1. It seems entirely possible that Meta's targeting tools have grown so effective at delivering value that some advertisers, who sell low-priced generic products to broad audiences, are no longer competetive simply because their products do not monetize or convert well enough. The saturation explanation for poor campaign performance is not a strong one either. User acquisition managers should avoid using it before examining fundamental aspects of their marketing campaigns.
What's your experience with ad performance on Meta's platforms these last few months? Have your brands suffered? Do you think Temu's pervasiveness is to blame?
Is Google's Search Generative Experience fading away?
Mid-April, the number of Google Search queries without SGE has increased from 25% to 65%. This big chance is even more surprising in the face or rumors about the SGE feature launching as default ahead of, or during, Google I/O this week. In addition to SGE showing on fewer queries, the amount of screen space SGE occupies has been getting smaller, from 1200px to under 1050px, over the part month. The apparel carousel type of result format has gained more visibility, while Product Viewer results have shrunk during the same period. A new, universally applied warning has also appeared in April. It states "Generative AI is experimental" across industries and query types.
Many SEOs have been concerned about the day Google SGE moves from an opt-in experiment to the default experience, as it could have a potentially devastating effect on how much organic traffic Google sends to websites. It seems though that Google has been patiently and cautiously testing a variety of factors during the past year, with the goal of improving SGE for a wider launch.
It seems that SEO for Classic Search will remain important for the foreseeable future, however it's also becoming clear that Artificial Intelligence Optimization may become equally, if not more important for AI Search according to Jim Yu, founder and executive chair at BrightEdge.
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Google search has undergone massive changes in the past few months to test and perfect SGE, with the goal of providing the best possible search experience. For marketers, it is essential to stay in lockstep with these changes to adapt to the new ways of optimizing for generative AI search.
- Jim Yu, founder, BrightEdge
Is your marketing staff trained to adapt the AI optimization of Search? How soon do you think we should expect SGE as the default Google Search experience?
What's new at Whatagraph?
There were some considerable updates for the Data Transfer space in April and other changes, some more visible than others. If you have any questions or requests or wish to track the updates live, you are welcome to visit our Canny Changelog!
Big Changes to the "Data Transfer"
There are multiple improvements to the Data Transfer environment:
Learn more about the changes here and feel free to test it out!
Source and widget-level filters working together
Previously, working with source and widget-level filters simultaneously in the same report could sometimes be cumbersome. Source-level filters would override any widget-level filtering.
We launched an update that helps you navigate the report filters with ease. The most important part is that you can combine filtering on the source level (all the data coming from a source) with more specific filters applied to a single widget.
Learn more about how it works.
Adding data labels to charts
Your reports and dashboards can now include data labels in graphs and charts. The setting to display data labels has been added to every chart widget.
This highly requested update is especially handy to make what you share with clients or stakeholders easier for them to understand, read, and navigate.
Data comparison in table summary mode
Previously, when you enabled the "Compare to the previous period" setting in your reports and dashboards, table summary rows were unaffected.
With this update, you will also see how the totals changed overtime in the summary rows.
This is turned on by default in all tables with the summary row enabled after you pick a date range for data comparison in the report (or widget) calendar.
That's all for this month! If you enjoyed this issue, please follow us on LinkedIn and stay subscribed to the Summarized to receive more updates in the future.
The Whatagraph Team