Clean Rooms Get Dirty
As data clean room tech traversed the hype cycle, the term has been co-opted to mean “whatever a company is doing with your data.”
CDPs underwent a similar process. Pure-play startups established the category and attracted incumbents like Salesforce, Adobe and Oracle.
Those giants bought and launched CDPs – as they were called – which did basic things like send or suppress marketing emails based on customer-service tickets. That cloud martech version of a CDP became the CDP, in the minds of many marketers.
A LinkedIn post by Lauren Wentzel, CEO of the data clean room vendor InfoSum, vents her frustration over the new entrants co-opting the term. Data brokers that “built their business on sharing, centralizing and commingling vast amounts of data” now call their products data clean rooms, “muddying the waters and causing confusion.”
InfoSum is partly taking shots at rivals LiveRamp (which now owns Habu) and other data brokers like Epsilon, Acxiom or TransUnion with clean room products.
Another pushback on data clean rooms is that they aren’t private; they’re secure. Clean rooms can enable user-level measurement and targeting, but without data being exposed. Most clean rooms, however, are now attached to a data company that operates an identity graph which is uses to make connections within its clean room.
So much for the pure-play nuance.
FTC v. DTC?
Digital-native brands who lean on influencers to promote their products skate a fine line between acceptable marketing and false advertising or illegal nondisclosures.
The cleanup started years ago with the FTC requiring influencer content to be tagged an #ad. But it’s more involved now, especially with the FTC updating its endorsement guidelines this month.
Foxwell Digital published a useful one-pager on these new baseline standards for DTC marketing.
One such requirement is for “clear and conspicuous disclosures” of paid relationships. On TikTok, for instance, influencers regularly rely on an integration with a “Paid Partner” program as a form of disclosure, without labeling the post itself an #ad or “sponsored by.” But they need to do both.
Other new rules involve manipulating reviews. In the ecommerce world, the number of reviews, overall star rating and a handful of positive reviews are key ways to encourage shoppers to trust the brand. But brands who manipulate reviews run afoul of FTC guidelines.
That means deleting negative Facebook comments or suppressing bad reviews is prohibited. If you solicit reviews – which is allowed – you can’t incentivize or require reviews to be positive. And the brand must disclose the review if it is negative.
“This kind of manipulation can lead to severe penalties,” per Foxwell.
Too Much Temu
Amazon has notified sellers of specifics regarding its new Temu clone in the making, the Low-Cost Store, The Information reports.
Unlike normal Amazon orders, the Low-Cost Store plans to fulfill orders in nine to 11 days. Amazon saves price and sustainability costs by consolidating these purchases to particular warehouses.
Temu sets prices on its marketplace. (Sellers get a fee per sale.) Amazon isn’t quite setting prices but is capping prices on certain products, “including an $8 limit for jewelry, $9 for bedding sets, $13 for guitars and $20 for sofas,” per notices sent to Amazon sellers.
If anything, the Low-Cost Store shows how crushingly poor this business model is. Temu spends billions of dollars on ads – and doesn’t collect ad revenue from sellers. For Low-Cost Store purchases, how could there be a margin for paid media?
A primary supply channel seems to be incineration. Literally.
Amazon plans to offer “returnless resolutions,” which means keep the crap and they’ll pay you back.
Amazon won’t send those low-cost items back to sellers. Anything returned will be “liquidated, donated, or disposed of by Amazon rather than shipped back.”
But Wait, There’s More!
Peacock’s Multiview feature will let users jump between three different livestreams on Election Night. [The Verge]
A radio station in Poland has replaced all its journalists with “virtual characters created by AI.” [Adweek]
Of course, Russian psyops used post-hurricane disinformation to divide Americans. [Axios]
You’re Hired
YouTube brand vet Jake O’Leary has joined Instagram as global head of marketing. [Adweek]
Dentsu promotes Stephen Kiely to CEO of Tag Americas. [release]
