Black Friday and Cyber Monday have merged into a single acronym – BFCM – and four days crammed with shopping deals.
On this week’s podcast, whether you were busy running ads or shopping for family and friends while eating leftover pie on your couch, we have the rundown for you.
Between rising costs for consumer goods, skittish consumers and an obliviously soaring stock market, the economy continues to be strange. Analysts had muted sales expectations, but people were spending. Black Friday sales were up 6% globally and 3% in the US, according to Salesforce data. And the whole of Cyber Weekend and Cyber Monday showed a 7% increase, according to the same context.
But there is some missing context here. Prices overall are up around 7% – which means people are buying the same amount of stuff, only it’s costing more. And we are also in a K-shaped economy, where the top 10% most affluent consumers account for half of all spending in the US. Meanwhile, lower-income people in the US are struggling, facing the loss of SNAP benefits and rising consumer prices.
More brands are relying on a smaller potential audience of consumers to drive sales, which poses a risk for marketers who want to reach large audiences inexpensively.
For the people with their joysticks on advertising platforms, Black Friday Cyber Monday means the arrival of Glitchmas. Our senior editor James Hercher spoke to the disenchanted ad buyers who manage spend on these platforms and see Meta as their villain, with its perfunctory, AI customer support and lack of transparency. A little pop-up window letting you know of a reporting delay? Pfft. That’s for the challenger platforms. Hercher explains what can go wrong when the stakes are high.
And we end with a story of thriving B2B scams, with each iteration getting more sophisticated, as scammers experiment with novel tactics. Once again, they are deploying sneaky techniques to trick ad buyers into entering their log-in information into seemingly real portals. Then, scammers sneak their own ad buyers onto the platform or lock out advertisers from their accounts. This tale will make your spine run cold and send you running to your IT and security team.
