Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Snapped For Cash
Snap is beta testing an ad revenue-sharing program with creators, Insider reports.
Since competing creator programs on social media platforms have been falling flat, Snap’s got a fresh influx of influencer demand on its hands.
For example, creators complain that TikTok’s influencer payout is paltry, while Meta decided to sunset its rewards program for Instagram Reels earlier this month.
Snap is really choosy about who it’s accepting into its Snap Stars beta program, several creators tell Insider. But many creators who made the cut have positive feedback.
“Snap helps make you more discoverable, which really helps with audience growth – even on other platforms like TikTok,” one creator says.
Snap also has a tip sheet for creators to make sure their posts get noticed, including using captions and posting 20 to 50 stories per day.
Erm. Twenty to 50 stories per day?
And therein lies the rub – it’s a lot of freaking work to proverbially live on Snapchat just to make a few bucks. Predictably, some creators bowed out, deciding it wasn’t worth it. “I suppose Snap is worth it for people who want followers to see every detail of their lives,” one influencer tells Insider.
Brand Madness
You’ve heard of March Madness. But are you familiar with Vas Madness?
The college basketball tournament coincides with an uptick in vasectomy procedures. Twisted Tea is capitalizing on the vasectomy connection with its “vasectomundies,” boxers with pouches for cold tea, PRNews reports.
Attention-grabbing March Madness messaging is de rigueur – but these days, brand activations often rest on a big bed of data.
Hormel garnered the insight that “consumers most invested in spring basketball over-index on bacon consumption” from its own research, outside research vendors and social media audience research. The finished product? A March Madness-themed Black Label Bacon product.
Similarly, DiGiorno found inspiration in viral videos of crying fans at sports games to inspire DiGiorno’s Cry Pies, onion pizzas people can eat to disguise their tears, which pokes fun at how there’s plenty of crying in basketball.
Politics And Programmatic
Political advertisers’ adoption of CTV advertising was one of the most covered marketing stories of the 2022 US midterm elections. But while CTV saw a surge of programmatic spending from political advertisers, programmatic’s piece of the pie was down overall compared to past election cycles as marketers spent more on direct buys, MediaPost reports.
Programmatic’s share of political spend dropped to 52% on Basis Technologies’ DSP, compared to 63% in 2020. Meanwhile, direct buys accounted for 21% of spend on Basis’s DSP in 2020 and 35% in 2022.
Direct spending rose compared to programmatic because CTV buys are still primarily conducted via direct deals, according to Basis’s Grace Briscoe. Almost half of direct spending on Basis’s platform went to CTV in 2022.
But programmatic CTV spend from political advertisers is also on the upswing. CTV represented 30% of programmatic political spend processed by Basis in 2022, compared to 19% in 2022.
As CTV rises up the ranks of political ad spending, one of its biggest competitors for ad dollars, social media, has been trending downward, likely due to bans on political ads by Twitter in 2019 and Facebook in 2020. Social represented 15% of ad spend on Basis’s platform in 2020 and only 10% in 2022.
But Wait, There’s More!
China’s Foreign Ministry criticizes the US for targeting TikTok. [WSJ]
Eric Seufert: What if Meta launches a mobile app store? [Mobile Dev Memo]
Yet another short-form video platform enters the social media space. [TechCrunch]
Speaking of short-form video, platforms need more than just creator funds to monetize. [Digiday]
Warner Bros. Discovery shares some details on its plans to merge Discovery+ and HBO Max. [Adweek]
AI chatbots compared: Bard vs. Bing vs. ChatGPT. [The Verge]
Twitter says it’s ending its legacy blue check verification program on April Fools’ Day. [The Verge]
