“If a brand like Glossier stops spending money on Facebook, they will lose money, as they get customers and revenue directly from Facebook. The DTC business model, for the vast majority of DTC brands, relies on Facebook to drive revenue,” digital marketer and consultant Kevin Simonson told Marketing Brew in 2020 during last summer’s Facebook boycotts.

Now, some DTC marketers are arguing that Facebook isn’t nearly as reliable a marketing platform as it was back then.

• That’s not only due to a lack of incoming reporting data after Apple’s iOS 14.5 update, but also because of the difficulty attributing the remaining data to different demographics.
• Many DTC marketers are beginning to look for a more diverse social media mix due to iOS 14.5’s impact on Facebook’s functionality as a marketing and analytics platform.

Why it matters

Exhibit A: “I think that the data is just less reliable on Facebook than it had been,” Simon Wool, who spoke to us as a growth marketer at DTC baby-food company Little Spoon, though he’s since moved to Cometeer as head of performance marketing, told us. “In the past, we could segment all our data by age, gender, location. Now if you go to these breakdowns you can see spend going to different ages, genders, locations, etc., but purchases are attributed only to ‘null.’”

Exhibit B: “This reporting can sometimes differ from what the Facebook dashboard reporting might communicate–making it important for advertisers to compare and contrast the data they are seeing from Facebook Ads Manager and their internal data tools,” Alex Realmuto, the CEO and founder of marketing agency Rubix, explained. Basically, a campaign that might look like it’s underperforming on Facebook could actually be driving a lot of performance.

Who gets hurt

Wool told us the changes are a bigger issue for newer, smaller DTCs—especially those created after this update rolled out—because they’ll essentially be going in blind with their demographic targeting. Plus, they might not have much of a marketing budget to toy around with.

• “For them, Facebook is their lifeline. I think that they do lose revenue, I do think that they are losing purchases,” he said.
• “What I wish more people understood is that it is really impacting these small and mid-sized businesses, and those businesses that were super reliant on Facebook. They’re definitely exploring other channels within the paid digital ecosystem,” Realmuto affirmed.

By the numbers: “Facebook is on the record saying that at minimum, 15% of total sales are [now] being underreported based on their dashboard. It’s safe to say that, given the amount of [retargeting] that a lot of e-commerce brands lean into, it’s probably significantly higher than that,” Realmuto said.

Bottom line: Realmuto added that his contemporaries no longer use the Facebook dashboard as a source of truth for sales “much at all” as a result of these changes. Additionally, he thinks it’s safe to say that sales are being negatively impacted for DTCs dependent on Facebook as a result of Apple’s choices—though it’s anyone’s guess by exactly how much.

Read the full story here.—PB

Snapchat on Monday announced a partnership with NBCUniversal, letting people use audio from a catalog of the media company’s films and series.

As TikTok and Instagram Reels have proven, sounds can be incredibly memeable. The idea seems to be for Snap to boost engagement by hosting popular quotes and snippets from movies and shows like Shrek, Back to the Future, The Office, and Parks and Recreation.

People who receive a snap with audio from NBC can swipe up to see more information about and be directed to where the title is streaming, according to the announcement.

Snap has come out with an array of new features and updates recently that appear to be efforts to give it an edge over TikTok and Instagram.

• This deal with NBCU comes on top of a slew of music licensing deals Snap has inked over the last year with studios such as Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Publishing. Snap added the ability to use music in its app last year.
• The app has doubled down on augmented reality as a social commerce tool. It wants marketers to use its virtual try-on features so users can check out clothing items and order them in the app. Social commerce is an area in which TikTok has also been expanding.
• Last year, Snap introduced a short-form-video feature mimicking TikTok called Spotlight.

Zoom out: Snap said in May that it has reached more than 500 million monthly active users worldwide. A few months later, TikTok boasted that it hit 1 billion users. The numbers might be fuzzy, though, as a study from financial firm Piper Sandler cited by the New York Times last month found that 35% of teens see Snapchat as their preferred social platform, while 30% said it was TikTok.—ZS

It’s no Bennifer, but another high-profile relationship has been making headlines lately: Jedi Blue. Alas, it has nothing to do with the new season of The Mandalorian.

It’s related to an anti-trust lawsuit brought against Google last year, led by more than a dozen state attorneys general accusing the company of relying on unfair practices and what look like secret deals between Google and Facebook to dominate digital advertising.

According to an unredacted suit, reported by the Wall Street Journal last month, Google is taking anywhere between 22% and 42% of US ad dollars spent on its platform.

• The suit also claims Google uses preferential strategies on its ad exchange AdX, helping its own ad-buying tools win 80% of auctions.
• It alleges publishers are paying between 19% and 22% in fees to Google’s exchange, which the suit argues is “double to quadruple the prices” of some of its competitors.

Because Google operates an exchange in addition to its buy-side and sell-side offerings, the suit says the company is “pitcher, batter, and umpire, all at the same time,” effectively giving it “monopoly power.” A senior Google employee is quoted in the suit as saying, “[t]he analogy would be if Goldman or Citibank owned the NYSE.”

Google’s response: “This lawsuit is riddled with inaccuracies and our ad tech fees are actually lower than reported industry averages,” Google spokesperson Peter Schottenfels told the Wall Street Journal.

Wait. What does this have to do with Star Wars? The suit highlights a deal Google and Facebook struck a few years ago called Jedi Blue that saw the latter give up support for its own header bidding (an industry attempt to knock down Google’s dominance by letting publishers offer up ad inventory to several exchanges at once) to get preferential treatment, like cheaper rates and quicker access to inventory, from Google’s bidding system.

Details about Jedi Blue emerged last year, but the recently unredacted suit includes more info about how it came to be. According to the suit, internal docs from Facebook show that the company “believed strongly” a deal with Google was “relatively cheap” when compared to having to compete in the “zero-sum ad tech game.” That “zero-sum ad tech game” is the game everyone else is playing.—RB

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Gaming guide: Everything you want to know about Super Bowl advertising, but were too afraid to ask, according to Ad Age.

Tweet it: Twitter’s ad offerings keep changing. Here’s a complete guide to advertising on the platform in 2021, courtesy of AdEspresso.

Personality: If you’re reading this newsletter, then you’re already an expert in brand purpose. But what the heck is brand personality? Well, Hubspot’s got the rundown.*

Listen up. Today’s connected consumer spends over six hours per week listening to digital audio, and as the rockstar marketer that you are, you should be capitalizing on that. StackAdapt has whipped up a Guide to Programmatic Audio Advertising—read it here.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content}

Stat: 10 publishers, including Breitbart and Newsmax, fuel “69% of all interactions with climate denial content on Facebook,” according to a new report from the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate.

Quote: “Not to make an excuse or anything, it’s just a different basketball. It doesn’t have the same touch or softness as the Spalding ball had. You’ll see this year, there’s going to be a lot of bad misses,” —NBA All-Star Paul George, talking about the league’s new Wilson partnership made over the summer

Read: How much are top agencies like Droga5 and Publicis Groupe paying? Business Insider has the scoop, from a TBWA media planning gig at $48,000 to a group creative director at Critical Mass for $260,000.

Nora and Scott from Morning Brew’s Business Casual sat down with Terry Nguyen, a reporter at Vox, to discuss the rise of fast fashion and the industry king Shein. Over the last couple years, fast fashion has taken the world by storm.

If you’re on TikTok, you know that Shein hauls have been flooding your pages for months, dominating the industry. The retailer just became the largest online-only retailer in the world and its app briefly surpassed Amazon...yes, Amazon...as the leading shopping app in the US. But how? Listen to the full episode to find out what’s behind the company’s meteoric rise.

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• Our event recap: What the heck is brand purpose?
• Why are celebs hawking crypto now?
• It’s Christmas already for marketers (and Mariah Carey fans).