Impulse Decisions
What does the end of impulse shopping mean for advertising?
In ways big and small, impulse shopping has sort of gone away, at least in the United States.
Considering the number of people who impulsively purchase things online, that may seem overstated. But there is a type of purchase behavior that is decreasing.
Candy, snacks and soda are facing headwinds right now. Companies can blame Ozempic, tariffs, CVS for locking up candy bags, the price of chocolate, etc.
But one age-old shopping feature that’s largely removed from the online grocery experience is all the salty, sugary food within hands grasp just before reaching the cash register. That’s a lot harder to pull off when people are shopping on their phone or computer.
Consider how every snack or candy brand is trying to nail down a new kind of “on the go” consumer. Without so many of the usual impulse buy opportunities, where is there a chance to sell someone a snack nowadays?
QVC is dealing with the same problem, too, The New York Times reports. And social platforms like TikTok tried to fit into that gap in American consumption, but never quite did.
Plus or Minus
Remember Google+? Meta sure hopes you don’t.
During the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust trial against Meta last week, it was revealed that former COO Sheryl Sandberg recommended blocking ads for the rival social media network on Facebook in 2012, Bloomberg reports.
Although, to hear Sandberg’s testimony on Wednesday, she didn’t actually mean it.
Google+ initially launched in June 2011 as a competitor – or, in Sandberg’s words, “direct copy” – of Facebook. The platform allowed users to post photos, update their status, join groups and message “friends” via other linked Google products.
It’s funny to think now that anyone at Meta considered Google+ a serious threat given its reputation as a “ghost town” almost a year after launch, to say nothing of its unceremonious shutdown in 2019.
Still, the admission that Meta’s top leadership were willing to block the competition outright is certainly interesting, and not just in the context of this case. Just think how Google running a truly successful social media platform would have affected Google’s confirmed monopoly of an ad tech business!
Property Power
Maintaining intellectual property rights in the digital age has always been a bit of a mess. (Just ask your average fanfiction writer.)
But as Sam Klebanov writes for Morning Brew, tech entrepreneurs Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk seem obsessed with getting rid of IP law.
Their disdain is understandable, given both leaders’ investments in artificial intelligence. Most generative AI products on the market were trained by scraping at least some copyrighted works, which is why so many publishers and content owners have filed lawsuits against LLM operators.
In that sense, IP law is publishers’ best bet for protecting their traffic and ad revenue from being gobbled up by generative AI search.
But for Dorsey and Musk, the IP hate seems to go deeper. Both made promises not to enforce their own patents (on Twitter and Tesla, respectively) as far back as 10 years ago, and even launched their most recent AI products (codename goose for Dorsey and Grok for Musk) as open-source tech.
Open-source code is co-written and strengthened by outside sources, not plagiarized. So maybe there’s a fundamental misunderstanding here about the difference between writing code and, say, writing a book.
But Wait! There’s More
Google tries to reassure its employees that the ad tech monopoly ruling is “not the final word.” [Axios]
Netflix is working on a generative AI-driven search engine. [TechCrunch]
Trump finally acknowledges that putting further tariffs on China will hurt consumer spending. [Business Insider]
Influencers are already losing out in the impending trade war. [Mashable]
Boomers are much less likely to cancel streaming subscriptions than Gen Z, a new Vulture study claims. [Vulture]
Account verification seems to be coming to Bluesky. [post]
You’re Hired!
The Ad Council appoints 17 new members to its board of directors, including Comscore CMO Jackelyn Keller. [Adweek]
