Greetings, Digital Darlings,
Your thirst for the freshest, most tantalizing digital marketing tea is insatiable, and who am I to deny you the pleasure? So, buckle up as we embark on this week's journey through the labyrinth of likes, links, and LinkedIn Ads news…
Marketers can easily turn articles into paid ads on LinkedIn with this new sponsored post option.
Any time a company page shares an ‘article’ like a blog post or case study on LinkedIn, its admins can now promote that post and add a CTA button that requires users to sign up for their email list to read the rest. This makes it easier than ever to turn existing content into paid ads, which is great for B2B marketers like me. And LinkedIn gates the content for you, so you can easily grow your email list?? Sign me up baby!
And in some other LinkedIn news that I’m not so excited about…
LinkedIn is retiring lookalike audiences.
Starting February 29th, no new lookalike audiences will be created, and existing ones will become static and uneditable. I think this has something to do with data privacy… but who knows. They recommend using Predictive Audiences and Audience Expansion in lieu of lookalikes… so best to read up on those now and prepare for the switch if you run ads on LinkedIn. Now let’s pivot to some Amazon ads chat…
Amazon Prime Video now has commercials.
Bad news for my binging habits, but good news for advertisers. They’re offering a subscription-free version for $2.99 though, which is so cheap compared to other streaming platforms’ premium options that I’ll probably do it. That said, Amazon noted that they aim to have “meaningfully fewer ads” than their competitors. If Amazon manages to include ads in their streaming platform without those ads being super disruptive, repetitive, and annoying, well… this may be the next big frontier for streaming ads. Now for some cookieless world drama…
Chrome Users are apparently worth 30% less money without cookies.
Google disabled tracking cookies for 30 million Chrome users this month (30 million = just 1% of users btw). By 2025, they plan to disable all tracking cookies. If you work in marketing or read my emails, I’m sure you already know this. But the fresh tea is that Raptive, an ad tech firm, claimed that Google’s cookieless users are bringing in 30% less revenue for them. But the CSO at Rapture thinks that’s a good thing… the article quotes him saying-
“If you had asked me what I thought the numbers could be, I would have said cookieless users would perform 50% worse, so I’m optimistic,” said Paul Bannister, Chief Strategy Officer at Raptive. “The goal is to design a system to increase privacy and also help publishers keep making money, and a 30% drop in monetization feels like a hill that can be climbed.”
Lastly, I need to talk about Neuralink implanting its first brain chip in a human.
Every day I wake up and ask myself “am I living in an episode of Black Mirror written by Elon Musk?” Dude seriously needs to chill. His Neuralink chip is enabling people to control their phone or computer just by thinking... Excuse me while I go scream into the void…
Alright, now that that’s taken care of, you may be asking what this has to do with digital marketing. And I just think we should take a second to ponder the implications of this. Will people start seeing ads inside their own minds?! I’m scared!
And in other, slightly less concerning AI news…
You can block OpenAIs web crawler from scraping your site.
Turns out the majority of top news sites already block them. So if you don’t want OpenAI to use your site data to train its GPT bots, you’re free to stop them. I’m not sure how much of a difference it’ll make… but if you’re scared of the power of ChatGPT, at least this gives you some power. If you’re scared of ChatGPT you might also enjoy this reel I can’t stop thinking about… Alright, let’s wrap it up before I think too hard about the future of art in an AI-powered world, quit my writing job, and go live off the grid.
And just like that, we've twirled through another chapter of our digital saga. Cherish these insights, wield them wisely, and may your digital endeavors flourish until our paths intertwine again.
You know you love me.
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