It’s All About Meme
Internet memes are synonymous with social media now, but they’ve been around a lot longer – and were even used in advertisements way back when. (Remember the dancing baby from “Ally McBeal”? Because it appeared in this 1999 commercial for the Japanese Toyota Cami, too.)
But, as Digiday reports, brands and agencies are doing more than just reacting to and referencing memes. They’re starting to invest in infrastructure that can better capitalize on these moments.
For many advertisers, that process involves hiring new talent who intimately understand the social media landscape, restructuring briefs to include secondary context and establishing a solid-enough brand identity that can serve as a baseline.
Not mentioned in Digiday’s coverage, however, is that the reason advertisers have to work so quickly is because their very presence has affected the larger meme economy.
Agency Marketing LTB figures that the average lifespan of a meme in 2008 was around 23 months; in 2023, it was four months. Another analysis that The Outline did in 2018 revealed a similar decline over time.
The general consensus online is that brands are to blame for this shortened shelf life. Which makes it all the more important, of course, that they figure out how to get memes right before a relevant one becomes popular, not after.
Money’s Expensive
Yahoo raised $1.6 billion last Friday. But Bloomberg reports that Yahoo offered investors “one of the highest-yielding deals of the year.” Which isn’t good news for anyone but the investors.
Yahoo paid dearly in the form of $700 million in high-interest loans (6.5% above the US benchmark) and $900 million in junk bonds (higher-risk securities, so the debt-holders will earn more, relatively, if Yahoo pays it off by 2031, per the plan).
Yahoo is partly beholden to the tricks of the trade of its owner, Apollo Global. In fact, Yahoo is refinancing loans from when Apollo acquired Yahoo from Verizon in 2021. When Apollo took out debt to finance the acquisition, the debt fell on the company, not the bank.
Although it doesn’t take a weatherman to see which way the wind is blowing.
In a note to clients on the financing, Moody’s Ratings writes that AI “will lead significant changes in the digital media landscape.” Moody’s identifies this disruption as a bad news bear for Yahoo, which the ratings firm says has an elevated dependence on desktop web traffic.
Thus, Yahoo’s debt required “juicy returns compared to other risky corporate debt sold this year” (Bloomberg’s words).
In-Game RMNs
Old-head gamers lament the rise of both ecommerce and advertising in games.
Well, these trends aren’t slowing down any time soon, especially in mobile games. And in-game purchases are poised to get a boost from an influx of mobile ads aimed at driving ecommerce performance.
Mobile ad platform AppLovin is banking on the “hybrid model” of in-app purchases combined with ads for future growth, writes Eric Seufert at Mobile Dev Memo in his report on the company’s Q1 earnings.
In-app purchasing (IAP) is currently a $100 billion market, according to AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi. But, typically, games that enable in-app purchases don’t allow advertising from other apps because they’re worried about losing their audience to competitors.
However, as AppLovin has courted more brand and retail advertisers, more mobile game developers have been opening up to ads, Foroughi says. It’s part of the reason AppLovin’s ad revenue grew 59% YOY in Q1.
Looking ahead, Foroughi sees IAP games parlaying their first-party sales data into retail media opportunities, such as remarketing and placing ads on checkout pages.
“There’s no desire or expectation that for the rest of our existence, we’re only going to serve videos and playables and gaming,” he says. “It’s very possible there’ll be other types of ad formats.”
But Wait! There’s More!
UK advertisers sue Google for $4 billion, accusing Google of abusing its dominance in online display advertising. [AFP]
Publicly traded caller ID company Truecaller blames a 44% drop in its Q1 ad revenue on algorithm changes by an unnamed programmatic partner (that an analyst identified as Google). [TechCrunch]
Meta’s embrace of AI and surveilling its employees to train AI models is making its workforce miserable. [NYT]
And now, for some levity: What does Meta actually do, anyway? [Good Work @ YouTube]
Sounds like Disney is also obsessed with making its employees use AI. [Business Insider]
New documents from Musk v. Altman reveal that Microsoft executives didn’t think much of OpenAI in 2018. [Wired]
Cloudflare cuts a fifth of its workforce due to the rise in agentic AI. [The Information]
