Raisin Bread by MarketerHire - Would you sponsor a cookie?

New market alert! Brand-name metaverse outfits are IN. 

At least, Nike thinks they will be, according to its recent patent applications. 

It’s a tough biz, though! At least one Second Life clothing designer had trouble hiring avatar-staff for her virtual stores 😭

In this issue:

• The making of Snapchat’s ad platform
• Spon-stuffed fortune cookies
• 3 futuristic QR code use cases

This loaf of Raisin Bread is brought to you by… Drip.

Here’s a super simple guide to BFCM: 

The Holiday Helper.

It’s a 10-part guide that walks you through how to set up your holiday marketing strategy — from shipping hacks to the best promos for repeat customers.

That’s it, that’s the ad. 

Jingle all the way to a killer Q4, fam!

EXPERT Q&A

5 pros and cons of DIYing an ad platform, from the creator of Snapchat Ads

Despite iOS changes disrupting… everything this year, Snap brought in $1B+ in revenue in Q3 2021 — a first!

James Borow helped the social platform get there. He joined Snap in 2016 to lead development of Snapchat’s self-service ad products, including an ads API.

Back then, Snapchat sold ads through a sales team — but today, they sell ads via digital auction, a transition that has nearly 8Xed quarterly revenue since Q3 2016.

So why doesn’t every app build its own self-serve ad platform? Well, it involves a lot of “thrash,” Borow said — and it’s not for everyone.

CON: You need tons of users to even start.

Otherwise, “you're not going to be able to find pockets of users that are likely to install an application versus ones that are likely...  to buy a shoe,” Borow said.

Snapchat had 122M daily active users when Borow joined to lead ad product development — and now it’s at 306M.

CON: Your sales team can’t do manual favors for top advertisers anymore.

To optimize ad pricing and targeting, self-serve adtech needs to process every transaction on your platform, and your salespeople need to pivot into consultative roles.

“You need to commit to saying, ‘I'm going to build an economically rational marketplace,’” Borow said — like the stock market. 

CON: Your self-serve ad tool will be dumb at first.

The machine learning algorithms that optimize ad targeting need to learn (hence the name!) from actual transactions and performance. Fresh out of the box, they’re dumb.

If your ad product is good, “within a year [of launch you’ll]… be in a better spot than when you started,” Borow said.

But it takes a year!

PRO: They can get really smart.

Just look at Facebook’s ad algorithm, which is so spooky-precise that plenty of people think Facebook eavesdrops on their private conversations. (Facebook denies it.)

PRO: Long-term, you “own the relationship” with users.

Short-term, iOS changes have been disruptive — but long-term, Borow believes that winners on the privacy-first web will “own the relationship” with users and rent it to advertisers.

In other words, platforms like Snapchat will come out on top, and self-serve adtech “will end up being a good thing,” he predicts.

Our takeaway?

The future looks bright for social platforms with self-serve ad offerings.

But to get on their level, you have to achieve massive scale, invest major resources, “kill your old business” and then wait at least a year for the payoff. Not for the faint of heart!

TWEET TREAT

Dessert: a new marketing channel?

This week was our first time seeing ads on fortune cookie fortunes — and we weren’t alone.

A now-private tweet about the ad above prompted a lot of responses like “Marketers have gone too far this time!” (But with more cursing.) 

Here’s the thing: This isn’t new!

A brief history of fortune cookie ads

• 1968: Robert F. Kennedy used fortunes to promote his presidential campaign and foretell his victory. Our favorite? “Millions will love you. Vote KENNEDY.”

• 2010: OpenFortune, a platform dedicated to placing ads in fortune cookies, is founded. 

• 2013: A Manhattan City Council candidate promotes his campaign via cookie, collabing with two Chinese restaurants in his district.

• 2018: A photo of a fortune cookie ad from Capital One (and OpenFortune) gets 1.7K RTs. Caption: “Ad blockers ain’t got nothing on the nyc take out market.”

• 2021: Extra and OpenFortune run the ad above — the first we’ve seen with a QR code.

Our takeaway?

Fortune cookie ads are a marketing rarity: a long-standing channel that still gets social traction for existing. According to OpenFortune, 5.9% of recipients share their fortunes on social.

Those shares can veer negative, though.

 “NOTHING IS BEAUTIFUL NOR INNOCENT ANYMORE,” one recipient tweeted about promotional fortune. Caps hers!

SMALL BITES

Podcast ad insights, DIY furniture and more

The $20B creator economy now includes 50M people.

IKEA’s marketing history shows the power of “effort justification.” 

Is tech branding making a “return to specificity?” 

Like Facebook, Google is repositioning itself as an SMB ally ... not a monopoly!

An app that automatically saves FB and IG brand mentions just raised $4M. 

How do you market bottled water to eco-conscious consumers?

You can now use sounds from The Office in Snapchat videos. 

FYI for podcast ads: more people listen on Spotify than on Apple Podcasts. 

Supply chain issues hurting your brand? Buy a logistics company. #YOLO

70% of viewers don’t want to interact with Super Bowl ads.

Before the holidays, Google added in-stock filters for local searchers.

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FROM OUR BLOG

3 cool things marketers can do with QR codes

QR codes were invented in 1994, but they’re having a renaissance now — Bitly reports QR code use is up 750% since the start of the pandemic. 

They’re not just for touchless menus, either. Here are three other, cooler ways to use QR codes.

1. Make television interactive. 

On Telfar’s Tellyvision, exclusive QR codes occasionally pop up, linking to limited-time sales. Think of it as scannable QVC — but higher fashion!

2. Make merch with built-in links.

Social media platform Diem made branded sweatshirts with a QR code on the arm — so the merch promotes Diem’s brand and links scanners to Diem’s app in the App Store. Is this how social shopping goes offline?

3. Make everyday objects shoppable.  

Studio 96’s first book, Kiss & Fly, uses AR to make still images come to life when scanned. The technology makes any image or object — not just two-tone codes — scannable, linkable, and shoppable, and it could make QR codes obsolete. 

For more QR code inspo, check out our blog post. (JLo makes a cameo!)

DATA SNACK

The most hired marketing roles in October 2021

Even before Mariah Carey smashed a pumpkin on Halloween night — signaling the official start of the holidays and, uh, #MariahSZN —  companies were hiring boatloads of paid search marketers to fill holiday needs.

Why paid search is up

Paid search marketers’ slice of MarketerHire’s hiring pie 2Xed from September to October. Our sales team had a few ideas about why.

• Paid social ads still aren’t performing as well. Even if you use an updated playbook for paid social creative and measurement,performance is lagging post-iOS 14.5. 
• Brands are moving their ad dollars. More than 60% of e-commerce brands are diverting spend from Facebook, and many put it toward Google ads instead, the Wall Street Journal reports. 
• Paid search is a fast way to get eyes on Google. Bands are using Google ads to make sure their shops show up in Google search results this holiday season, our sales team says. (SEO is great, but a slower burn.)  

Our takeaway?

Companies hired more search marketers to get through the holiday rush, but they also started hiring more growth marketers in October. Time to prepare marketing strategies for Q1 2022!

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