Happy Thursday. Chick-fil-A now has an e-commerce store, so if there’s someone in your life who’d love a pillow shaped like a chicken nugget for the holidays, you’re in luck.
In today’s edition:
—Kelsey Sutton, Ryan Barwick
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Francis Scialabba
It’s the most wonderful time of the year. AKA the time to frantically Google terms like “best gifts for moms who are hard to shop for” and “boyfriend gifts not lame.”
Annual gift-giving guides aren’t just potentially useful for frantic shoppers—they can be big wins for the brands that land on them. There’s a lot of money to be made: According to Gallup, US consumers expect to dish out an average of $932 on presents this holiday season.
But getting on a gift guide can take work, and that work often falls to PR and affiliate marketing firms that pitch products to media outlets year-round.
“Holiday and gift guides are kind of like the Super Bowl of PR,” Jessy Fofana, the founder and CEO of LaRue PR, which counts brands like Ban.do, Health-Ade, and Sips by as clients, said. “There’s a lot of focus and a lot of attention because it’s a time when the consumer is buying, and they’re looking for ideas.”
Guiding the guides
Making a great product doesn’t guarantee inclusion in a gift guide. That’s why many brands hire PR teams to send out pitches and product samples to editors and reporters in hopes of convincing them to recommend those products to readers.
When it works, the results can be tremendous for sales and brand recognition:
- One food and beverage brand represented by the firm Dreamday PR is on track to earn $120,000 solely in affiliate revenue in November, due mainly to the brand’s inclusion on various gift guides, Dreamday founder and CEO Lauren Kleinman said.
- Dreamday, which counts Our Place, Girlfriend Collective, and Brightland as clients, works with some brands that make half their annual revenue during the holiday shopping season, Kleinman said.
Continue reading here.—KS
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TOGETHER WITH SPECTRUM REACH
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Here’s a success story to get you motivated: Spectrum Reach partnered with a small Texas-based agency to see how an audience-based, multiscreen campaign could help boost marketing reach for a local car dealership.
Spectrum Reach set up an epic A/B test of a data-driven, multiscreen advertising strategy compared to a more traditional strategy for an auto dealer in two similar markets. Guess what? This audience-based approach reigned supreme, leading to:
- 57% higher response rate
- 35% higher frequency
- 23% more reach
- 3x more website traffic
If those stats sound good to you, check out all the deets in the full case study. Then let Spectrum Reach help you build a strategy for your own biz.
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Illustration: Francis Scialabba, Photo: YouTube
Like America’s attention span, videos on social platforms are getting shorter. After TikTok’s explosive growth, both Meta and Google introduced short-form video products aimed at copying capturing the endless scroll (and ad dollars) from the controversial platform.
Instagram’s pivot to Reels has been well-documented (and plenty criticized). Less explored is Google’s YouTube Shorts, which rolled out in more than 100 countries last summer.
By the numbers: During its Q3 earnings call this fall, Google executives shared that Shorts had 1.5 billion logged-in viewers every month, totaling 30 billion daily views. As of last fall, TikTok reported having more than a billion monthly users.
- “Engagement is strong. We’ve always said that we focus on building great user and creator experiences first and then follow that with monetization over time,” Philipp Schindler, Google’s chief business officer, told investors.
Google started running ads on Shorts globally in May, but they haven’t yet blown away the bottom line. “We continued to experience a slight headwind to revenues as Shorts viewership grew as a percentage of total YouTube watch time,” Schindler said on the call. “We’re focused on closing the monetization gap between Shorts and long-form content on YouTube over time.”
So far, Google gets less per impression for Shorts than it does with traditional YouTube pre-roll ads, according to Eric Seufert, a mobile marketing analyst and author of the blog Mobile Dev Memo. “The Shorts format just monetizes worse than the other formats. Part of that is because it’s a new format and the others are just a known quantity,” he said.
We talked to media buyers who have been experimenting with ads on YouTube Shorts. Keep reading here.—RB
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TOGETHER WITH BLACK CROW AI
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Got future shock? If you feel weary about your DTC biz’s profits for next year, you’re not alone. With volatile, changing markets + unpredictable consumer behavior, 2023 could be a doozy. Fortunately, Black Crow AI is here to help. They’re hosting a virtual panel with leading DTC marketing gurus that’ll help you strategize for the new year with profits in mind. Register here.
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Francis Scialabba
There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.
Pitch-er perfect: Tips for how to win your next new business pitch.
BookTok: Learn more about the TikTok community, whose hashtag has more than 90 billion views.
SEO pro: How to get your content noticed on TikTok without solely relying on hashtags.
Big flex: Economic uncertainty makes staff planning a whole new ball game. Luckily, WorkReduce provides flex talent + managed services to the biggest names in the ad industry. Go from flex to perm whenever necessary. Start hiring.*
Reduce, reuse, re-commerce: Due to weird economic vibes (to say the least), secondhand shopping and gifting are very popular this holiday season. Together with mntn, we examined how re-commerce is changing retail. Read more here.* *This is sponsored advertising content.
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Hey retail marketers,
I think we can all agree that customer engagement and loyalty are two of the hardest things to earn as a new brand.
Heck, even getting customers in the first place is hard. This guide contains three strategies that Mejuri and similar DTC brands use to keep customers coming back and spreading the word. Check it out for a breakdown of one of the most effective marketing strategies in the retail space.
Download your copy here.
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Apple reportedly hired mobile advertising veteran Vishal Gurbuxani last year to create a demand-side platform, per Insider.
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Amazon said that last weekend was its “biggest ever” for holiday shopping.
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Meta is reducing its presence at New York’s Hudson Yards and subleasing some of its space there as the online ad market slows.
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Elon Musk has been warned by a top EU official that Twitter “needs to beef up measures to protect users from hate speech, misinformation, and other harmful content” in order to comply with new rules outlined in the Digital Services Act.
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CNN announced layoffs yesterday.
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Glossier’s former CMO, Ali Weiss, has become CEO of baby-gear rental company Loop.
Snap poll: Branded merch seems to be everywhere—brands ranging from Hidden Valley Ranch to Dunkin’ to Cheez-It sell their own clothing. Are you getting sick of it?  Yes
 No
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IAB is out with the results of its 2023 Outlook Survey, based on a sample of more than 200 “buy-side ad investment decision makers,” like execs at brands and agencies. Here are a few takeaways from the survey, which was fielded from Oct. 18 to Nov. 7.
$$$: Ad spend is expected to increase by about 6% year over year.
- Every channel is on track for growth in 2023, except for linear TV and other traditional media like radio, print, and OOH.
- CTV, paid search, and podcasts are projected to see the highest growth percentages.
Categories: The B2B, travel, and financial services sectors are expected to see double-digit growth in ad spend compared to 2022.
- So is the “restaurants/beer/liquor/wine” category.
   
- Other categories, including retail and CPG, are predicted to have single-digit growth, while auto is expected to decline.
The metaverse: As of the time of the survey, 20% of respondents said they were currently investing in metaverse advertising or marketing. Another 36% were considering doing so.
- Building brand awareness was the top reason for investing in the metaverse, according to those who have invested in the space or are considering it.
- Of those who aren’t currently invested, 41% said it was because metaverse advertising is “too nascent.”
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Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.
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customer loyalty
