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Social Butterflies
Are we entering an era of celebrity-owned social media?
That’s the question posed by The Atlantic in light of Kanye West’s recent purchase of Truth Social, a conservative social platform, and Elon Musk’s will-they-won’t-they Twitter drama.
Immediate fears are overblown. Truth Social’s user base is made up of a small fraction of US adults relevant to just a few conservative politicians. Kanye probably picked it up for a billion doll hairs.
At least Twitter’s contractual valuation of $44 billion for the Musk deal buoys its $38.5 billion market cap. Snap, with similar revenue and user counts, is worth just $12.5 billion. Pinterest sits at $14.3 billion.
Year over year, Twitter, Snap and Pinterest are down from $61 billion, $131 billion and $56 billion peaks, respectively, so maybe other acquisition-minded celebs can snag a bargain.
Social platforms now risk dipping below the $10-billion threshold for large-cap stocks. The number is seemingly arbitrary, but it’s a commonly used benchmark because $10 billion is usually the tipping point at which scaled systems start to pay dividends.
If SNAP and PINS experience another savage (not in a good way) quarter like they did in Q3, they’ll be priced close to pro sports teams or superyachts – a doable range for a celebrity with investor backers.
Social platforms may have no choice. The data-driven ad targeting that used to fuel their growth plans is simply not defensible post-ATT.
Get With The Program
On Friday, MTV announced Project Supergroup, a music competition reality show premiering next month.
Most of the sponsors are intuitive, including apparel brands worn during the show and instrument makers. But one sponsor jumps out: Colgate Optic White.
The show is an interesting example of how CPGs and other large advertisers that historically ceded direct customer or audience relationships to TV networks and retailers are now involving themselves more directly in audience development and content production, beyond making commercials.
On stage at AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O event in New York City last week, Jeff Giacchetti, Colgate Palmolive’s programmatic media lead for North America, made the point that this kind of brand-backed TV content can even help empower the programmatic trading team.
But Colgate isn’t alone as it jumps into programming.
Jägermeister recently co-produced a show with Roku’s brand studio group about lesbian bar owners, and TripAdvisor, not one to miss a trend, just released a series called “The Wanderer” on Amazon Prime built around TripAdvisor travel packages for cool destinations. TripAdvisor launched an in-house content studio called Wanderlab in September that produced the show.
Retail Me, Me, Media
Delivery and rideshare apps, retailers, hotels and all sorts of other companies are building their programmatic chops.
While retailers slap screens on storefronts and strike partnerships with tech vendors to attribute sales to ad inventory, apps like Uber and DoorDash are expanding targeting capabilities based on location and other preferences.
Signal loss is partially behind the retail media explosion, Ad Age reports. Insider Intelligence projects $51.4 billion in retail media spend in 2023, up from about $45 billion.
Now that third-party data is slipping away, brands without one-to-one customer relationships hope to use retail media as an attribution barometer for web or CTV campaigns.
Retailers like Lowe’s are only too happy to oblige.
When Lowe’s launched its One Roof Media Network last year, it primarily offered display and sponsored search ads on its own sites, John Storms, head of sales for the media network, tells Ad Age.
“There is not this tremendous amount, or abundance of traffic, that just shows up to Lowes.com,” Storms said. But earlier this month, Lowe’s added Yahoo to do programmatic off-site extension.
But Wait, There’s More!
YouTube adds more monetization tools to its creator platform. [Insider]
AI-generated art is a few months old, but it’s already changing creative industry roles. [NYT]
Snap needs some subscription juice. [The Information]
Twitch CEO Emmett Shear says video game streamers could benefit from more internet-savvy employment laws. [Bloomberg]
Brands and media agencies outsource content creation as it becomes more difficult. [Digiday]
The risks of media “greenwashing.” [MediaPost]
You’re Hired!
Former NYT data governance chief Robin Berjon joins Protocol Labs. [tweet]
