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No Snappy Comeback
In 2021, when Apple announced ATT, Snapchat Co-Founder and CEO Evan Spiegel said he was “happy to see [Apple] making the right decision for their customers.”
Fast-forward a couple of years, and Spiegel is less glowing about ATT, which severely hamstrung Snapchat’s revenue.
But Eric Seufert of Mobile Dev Memo argues Snapchat was way late adapting to ATT. It was a full year before the company started seriously developing measurement alternatives and pushing server-side integrations, which Google and Facebook were all over almost at once.
There are telling points regarding Apple’s hit to Snapchat’s ad biz.
Spiegel told investors this week that the platform had more total active advertisers in the past three months than any prior period. Yet total ad revenue decreased YOY by 4%. Daily active users were up around the world by 4%, and Snapchat did even better in terms of growing its share of attention and time spent.
Still, average revenue per user was down almost everywhere in the world.
Snapchat’s legit gains as a popular social network are not counterbalancing the losses from ad platform and attribution setbacks.
The Boy Who Cried Alt Currency
The hype surrounding TV currency alternatives to Nielsen is wearing thin.
What do they have to show for it?
Despite the promotional pep rallies about alt currency transactions in the lead-up to this year’s upfronts, new alt currencies hardly encroached on Nielsen’s turf – which could have also been (and was) said last year.
“It’s shocking how little they seemed to play into the negotiations,” one agency buyer tells Digiday.
It’s likely agencies and advertisers stuck to familiar Nielsen panels rather than invest more in alternatives because the economy (and ad market) is still subpar. But they can’t delay alternative currencies for much longer.
Nielsen plans to transition from a pure panel model to panels plus other direct and digital-first data collection for its new go-to currency Nielsen ONE, which means next year’s upfront deals will technically have to rely on “alt currencies” (as in, not panels).
Buyers could buy more time to familiarize themselves with different currencies if Nielsen pushes back its deadline (which it has already done once this year). But the point still stands: When it comes to alt currencies, the industry is running out of time to move out of its perpetual “test and learn” phase.
Made In China, Comes To America
Following in the footsteps of cheap-and-fast Chinese shopping businesses Shein and Temu, TikTok will launch US ecommerce for goods made in China, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The video-sharing app will sell, store and ship products from China-based sellers in an online marketplace starting in August.
TikTok is all-in on social commerce. Now it just needs America to buy in, too.
TikTok debuted TikTok Shop last November, but that was only with American vendors, relatively few of which adopted the platform. TikTok scrapped a full rollout of a fulfillment platform for US third-party sellers due to lukewarm adoption.
But US merchants were wary due to potential TikTok bans in Congress or by the White House.
Chinese ecommerce sellers like Temu, though, are desperate for ways to reach American consumers without spending billions of dollars on ads (which Temu does). A potential organic channel, like TikTok, could be a godsend, even with lucrative commissions and a big cut to TikTok.
But Wait, There’s More!
Shopify rolls out its ecommerce-focused generative AI tool, Sidekick. [TechCrunch]
The agency review logjam has broken. [Ad Age]
Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and TomTom are teaming up to create open-source maps. [The Verge]
Is the sunset of the smartphone age already upon us? [Bloomberg]
You’re Hired!
OpenX names Danner Close as VP of strategic relationships. [release]
