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Google Reminds Advertisers To Prepare For End Of Third-Party Cookies

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Google is preparing to release in November additional tools for companies that evaluate their use of third-party cookies.

It’s a reminder to advertisers, publishers, platform providers, and the rest of the online community of its intension to disable third-party cookies in the first quarter of next year.

“We are building a DevTools extension to facilitate analysis of cookie usage during browsing sessions,” Rowan Merewood, developer relations for Privacy Sandbox, wrote in a post. “This will provide debugging pathways for cookies, and Privacy Sandbox features, with access points to learn and understand the different aspects of the Privacy Sandbox initiative.”

Privacy Sandbox aims to reduce cross-site tracking while keeping online content free. The plan is to deprecate cookies for 1% of users as of Q1 2024, and then increase to all users by Q3 2024. The move should address any remaining competition concerns of the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the company said.

Merewood, in the post, detailed what he called the “cookie countdown.”

Two milestones are approaching in Q4 2023 and Q1 2024 as part of Chrome-facilitated testing. The testing primarily is for companies testing the Privacy Sandbox relevance and measurement APIs, but as part of this Google will disable third-party cookies for 1% of Chrome Stable users.

“From the start of 2024, you can expect to see an increased portion of Chrome users on your site with third-party cookies disabled even if you are not actively participating in the Chrome-facilitated testing,” Merewood wrote. “This testing period continues through to Q3 2024 when, after consultation with the CMA and subject to resolving any competition concerns, we plan to begin disabling third-party cookies for all Chrome users.”

Earlier this year, the CMA accepted commitments from Google addressing the competition concerns that resulted in an investigation of Google’s proposals to remove third-party cookies and other functionalities from its Chrome browser. The CMA publishes quarterly reports.

It appears that the deprecation of third-party cookies continues to spur tighter collaboration related to data throughout the advertising industry.

On Tuesday, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced data-matching capabilities for advertisers using AWS Entity Resolution through integrations with LiveRamp, TransUnion, and Unified ID 2.0.

Last week, LiveRamp gave brands, publishers, and technology platforms better collaboration and a way to get more from first-party data from any environment. The company is also working on a sophisticated data platform, where marketers will have the ability to log in to see data available from companies. Some might include demand side platforms (DSPs) like The Trade Desk, publishers such as Paramount, or streaming partners such as Netflix or Peacock. Brands might also be included in that list.

Interoperability between different identity solutions will become more important, according to Insider Intelligence.

The research firm said collaboration will enable data partners to enrich first-party data to understand consumer behavior, provide a comprehensive view of the customer journey and its touchpoints, and maintain the frequency and recency caps across multiple platforms.

Citing IAB guidance, Insider Intelligence pointed to a few challenges to achieve interoperability, such as “matching IDs based on diverse data sets, matching IDs with different definitions of individuals and households, and consumer privacy-related methods like Apple’s “hide my email” that make it difficult to match identities across contexts.”

Merewood also provided guidelines for the industry to prepare, including auditing third-party cookie use, testing for breakage, cross-site cookies that store data on a per site basis, and more.

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Sourced from MediaPost

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Strategies to Know Before Selling a Business

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By Rob Csernyik

Selling a business may be the deal of a lifetime, but how these transactions are taxed can have implications for generations.

That’s why it is critical for business owners to consider the most tax-advantaged strategy for their financial goals—whether that’s funding their retirement lifestyle, philanthropic ventures, or maximizing the inheritance of their loved ones.

Individuals can employ varying approaches to deploying the cash they receive from a sale by depending on what they hope to accomplish, though there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, says Jere Doyle, a Boston-based estate planning strategist with BNY Mellon Wealth Management.

For instance, an owner could choose to defer gains through an installment sale, where purchasers make at least one payment in a different tax year. That strategy, however, comes with the risk (though not the certainty) of higher future tax rates. Earlier this year, the Biden administration called for doubling the capital gains tax rate over the current maximum of 20%.

Business owners who instead choose to give away business-related property to someone else while receiving nothing in return—or an amount below the property’s full value—will be required to pay gift taxes on the amount above the annual exemption of US$17,000 a year or US$12.92 million over a lifetime. The rates can range from 18% to 40%.

Before going this route, an owner should make sure their property receives an outside appraisal, Doyle says. Without it, discrepancies between how the IRS and the business owner value a closely held business can have tax implications.

For owners planning to pass along money to their heirs, using an intentionally defective grantor trust is among the most desirable strategies, he says. These trusts allow an individual to still get income from certain trust assets, such as business holdings or real estate. Though the owner pays taxes on this income when he or she is still alive, their estate is reduced and there are no estate taxes paid on the trust upon death.

Penta spoke with Doyle about various strategies investors can use to manage the windfall from the sale of their business.

Understand Asset Versus Stock Sales

Owners have a choice between selling shares in their business or selling the business’ individual assets and liabilities. Each choice has tax implications, yet, a lot of business owners aren’t familiar with the difference, Doyle says.

The DealStats business acquisition database estimates about 70% of business sales in the U.S. are asset sales. They are attractive because buyers can allocate high values to quickly depreciating items like equipment, and lower values to more slowly depreciating items, says Doyle. This approach reduces an owner’s tax burden sooner, yet it generates higher taxes for sellers who may pay ordinary income tax rates on certain assets.

A stock sale allows sellers to potentially be taxed at a lower rate of up to 20% in capital gains taxes on any profits.

Consider How Charitable Donations Can Help

Before a sale, many business owners will ask whether they can donate stock to charity and receive an income-tax deduction, Doyle says.

“If you’re going to do that to minimize your capital gains you want to make sure you give the stock to charity well in advance of the closing date,” he says. “You can’t wait until the last minute or the government will tax you.” In about four out of five cases, people try to gift stock after a deal is solidified, by which point it’s too late and they won’t receive the tax break.

Business owners can also use a charitable remainder trust to defer taxes before or after a sale. Assets that can be donated into this kind of trust include cash, private company stock, and real estate. The structure allows people to draw income from the trust at a rate of 5% a year for up to 20 years or the life of one or more beneficiaries, according to the IRS. When the term is up, any remaining dollars are passed on to a designated charitable organization.

An individual who uses this vehicle gets a charitable income tax deduction in the year the trust is funded equal to the remaining value the charity eventually receives.  Meanwhile, income taxes are due on the annual distributions.

“You’re really deferring the recognition of the gain to a future year so you avoid it in the current year,” Doyle says, paying instead in installments over the trust term.

Consider Opportunity Zones

One option owners have is to funnel any proceeds they receive from the sale of their business into an investment in an opportunity zone, which is a geographic area qualified as economically distressed by the federal government.

By investing in qualified businesses or real estate in these areas, or in opportunity-zone funds that own multiple qualified assets, owners can defer capital gains from a business sale. Available to accredited investors, opportunity zone funds often require a minimum US$100,000 investment. Knowing the status of the holdings of these funds is critical—funds must prove 90% of their assets qualify twice annually. If they don’t, the investment may get returned.

This type of investment not only defers taxes on invested gains until Dec. 31, 2026, according to the U.S. tax act of 2017, but if the investment is held for 10 years, investors can avoid paying capital gains taxes on appreciation over the initial amount. Because maximizing tax benefits happens long term, this is a good option for those who don’t need immediate cash for a portion of their business sale proceeds. Investors must also be comfortable with the risk levels in the underlying investment.

Feature Image Credit: Unsplash

By Rob Csernyik

Sourced from Barron’s

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YouTube’s Anti-Adblock Feature Frustrates Users

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By Peter Suciu

YouTube is running an adblocker that will greet users with a pop-up alert, warning that such apps aren’t allowed. Those users will be asked to either allow the ads or choose a paid subscription.

Currently, just closing the alert will allow the video to continue, but it is expected that soon anyone running adblockers won’t be able to watch videos on the platform.

“Adblockers are not allowed on YouTube. You can go ad-free with YouTube Premium, and creators can still get paid from your subscription,” the warning noted.

The video-sharing service first started testing the feature in June, and the company has said that ads are necessary to support its community of creators.

“Ads support a diverse ecosystem of creators globally and allow billions to access their favourite content on YouTube,” the Google-owned company said in a statement this week.

Swift Backlash

YouTube’s decision to issue the warning has upset a number of users, who have voiced their frustration on social media—with some suggesting they’d ditch the video service before accepting the ads. However, given that there is the premium option, it would seem that may be a short-sighted view to take—especially given that ads do, as YouTube noted, support smaller creators.

“People have gotten accustomed to ‘free’ on the Internet, so change is always difficult,” Susan Schreiner, technology analyst at C4 Trends said. “Creators, writers and others deserve to be compensated and as platforms experiment with new revenue models—it also seems the era of ‘free’ is coming to an end. Just consider that content creators and the platform make most of its revenue from ads and people using ad blockers prevent them from being compensated and making money.”

Enticing Users To Go Premium

This move by YouTube could also be a way to further promote its ad-free premium option.

“It also seems like YouTube might be experimenting with a new business model with its YouTube Premium,” Schreiner added . “At $13.99 per month, it’s positioned as a practical choice that streamlines one’s viewing experience as well as ensuring uninterrupted and gratifying content consumption.”

Many of the video streaming services have had to raise their subscriptions, but YouTube has long been a platform where users have enjoyed the free option.

“In these times when there is a movement away from ‘free’ as a premium service—there’s a shift towards the onus being on the consumer and forcing the user to make choices,” said Schreiner. “Is it worth it to subscribe to YouTube Premium? If the user relies on YouTube for their entertainment than comparatively it might be a good value since it also includes features such as unlimited daily use, background play for multitasking, seamless cross-device experiences and ad-free viewing.”

However, based on the responses on social media this week, warning users that the adblockers simply aren’t allowed, perhaps wasn’t the best way this could be handled.

“This is a coercive move by Google to force people to pay for an ad-free experience on YouTube or accept the ads and the corresponding targeting and tracking. If you look at this in a privacy context, Google and others are now trying to force people to pay for privacy—see Meta in Europe. In a purely advertising vein, Google doesn’t want to leave any money on the table. It’s less about supporting creators than maintaining ad-revenue growth,” suggested social media analyst Greg Sterling, co-founder of Near Media.

In other words, users can pay, allow ads or simply quit using YouTube.

“There are unfortunately no other options,” Sterling continued. “Nothing online, it seems, is free anymore.”

It is also likely consumers may need to reassess their streaming subscriptions, and choose to retain those that enhance their entertainment experience.

Feature Image Credit: NurPhoto via Getty Images

By Peter Suciu

Follow me on Twitter.

I am a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. I covered the Detroit bankruptcy for Reuters in 2014, and I currently cover international affairs for 19FortyFive and cybersecurity for ClearanceJobs.

Sourced from Forbes

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It’s Time to Target Those Holiday Shoppers. Ramp Up Your Email Marketing Efforts Now to Maximize Your Profits This Season.

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By Liviu Tanase

Is your email marketing ready for the busiest shopping season? Take these five simple steps to set yourself up for success and increase email ROI during the holidays.

People spent $1.14 trillion online and $270 billion in the U.S. during last year’s holiday season. For businesses like yours, the coming months have the highest sales potential — and for that, you need a reliable strategy.

Email marketing is competitive 365 days a year, but the last quarter? It all comes to a head. With so many companies fighting for attention and dollars, you can’t afford to have anything go wrong.

From figuring out the right offers to preparing your email list, here are five steps you can take today to get better holiday email marketing results.

1. Create different offers for each audience segment

Your customers’ journey with your company can be wildly different. For instance, a repeat customer will have different needs compared to a prospect who just created an account on your website. So, when you and your team brainstorm holiday email campaigns, you must take these details into account and segment your audience.

If the effort of splitting your list intimidates you, stay focused on the benefits. Open rates are 14% higher for segmented campaigns, which means you’ll have higher chances to convert.

2. Verify your customers’ email addresses

Now that you’re clear on the offers for each customer segment, it’s time to check the health of your email lists. Looking at your most recent email marketing reports is a good place to start. For instance, if your bounce rate exceeds 2%, you know it’s time to run your databases through an email verifier. Otherwise, your email deliverability will suffer. This is not a time when you can risk having your emails go to spam.

After verifying more than six billion email addresses in a year, ZeroBounce found that only 57% of them were valid and safe to keep. Your email list decays monthly, so remove obsolete data and also check every new address you gather.

3. Run an email blacklist check

Have you noticed a steep decline in your open rates and clicks in the past few months? Your IP or domain could be blacklisted. Mailbox providers (like Yahoo or Gmail) and anti-spam organizations maintain email blacklists to block senders with a history of spam-sending. However, even senders with good intentions can land on a blacklist if they don’t maintain healthy email lists and follow best practices. In most cases, emails from blocked senders never make it to their recipients.

Email blacklists are updated in real-time. The best way to find out if your IP or domain is flagged is to use a blacklist checker. Such tools run tests against hundreds of blacklists and alert you if there’s trouble.

4. Part with subscribers who never click

Every email list has its devoted fans, who open every email, and subscribers who rarely or never click. While these email addresses don’t bounce, their lack of interaction sends Internet service providers (ISPs) the wrong message about you. If a large segment of your list doesn’t open your emails, are you relevant enough to be in the inbox? Unengaged subscribers may cause your campaigns to go to spam, so if you haven’t removed them in more than six months, now is the time.

You may be nervous about reducing your email list right before the holidays, but you’ll enjoy more engagement. Since they haven’t opened any of your emails in months, those subscribers weren’t likely to convert anyway.

5. Send a gift to boost engagement

To increase engagement ahead of the holidays, start warming up your prospects a few weeks before launching your campaigns. An effective tactic is to create a series of educational emails to relieve some of your customers’ pain points. Whether you run a B2B or a retail business, think of free content offers to create your emails around. A free e-book, infographic or useful video can go a long way in building trust and standing out in people’s inboxes.

Remember: healthy engagement feeds your email deliverability, showing ISPs that your content is relevant. Nurture your audience with outstanding emails before you go for the hard sell.

Bonus tip: keep sending those great emails

Aside from sending compelling content, sending it regularly is what helps your email marketing the most. If throughout the year you’ve been inconsistent, now you want to gradually ramp up volume. You’ll build a stronger connection to your customers, and your email deliverability will benefit.

Avoid sudden and drastic volume increases, as ISPs can flag that behaviour as suspicious. The more predictable you are, the better chance you have of getting your email campaigns in the inbox.

By Liviu Tanase

Founder & CEO of ZeroBounce

Liviu Tanase is a serial entrepreneur and telecommunication executive with extensive experience in the creation, growth and sale of novel technologies. He is currently the CEO of ZeroBounce, an email validation and deliverability platform.

Sourced from Entrepreneur

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Reach PLC brand, Belfast Live partners with Extern to launch Changing Lives campaign

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By Aimee Rourke

Each year, a Northern Ireland charity is providing support for thousands of children, young people, individuals and families. Extern enables them to overcome their challenges, empower positive change and support family unity. While most may know Extern for their work with the most vulnerable in society who present as homeless, it is much more than that.

With the cost of living crisis having devastating impacts on families and individuals right across the region, Reach PLC brand, Belfast Live is launching a new campaign to help Extern.

The ‘Changing Lives’ campaign will fundraise for money that will be used to directly support Extern’s local addiction services and provide service users with practical items needed, such as clothing, food and energy vouchers.

In the most recent NISRA figures on drug-related and drug-misuse deaths in Northern Ireland 2021, the number of drug-related deaths registered in Northern Ireland in 2021 (213) was the second highest on record, five less than the 2020 peak of 218 deaths.

The same was true for drug-misuse deaths, decreasing from the series high of 182 in 2020 to a second highest total of 175 in 2021. Belfast HSCT and Belfast LGD had the highest age-standardised rate of drug related deaths per 100,000 population – 19.2 and 21.1 respectively.

Drug-related and drug-misuse deaths continue to be higher in areas of highest deprivation, according to the NISRA stats. In the context of the UK in 2021, Scotland had the highest age-standardised rate of drug-misuse deaths at 25.0, Northern Ireland had the second highest rate at 9.4,and England and Wales had a rate of 5.3 deaths per 100,000 population.

Media Enquiries:  Aimee Rourke / email: [email protected] / tel: 077 4511 8411

Justin Millar Senior Marketing Executive Sheena McStravick Editor of Belfast Live and Orlaith Clinton Reporter at Belfast Live pictured with the team at Ext (002)

Photo 2 – L-R Justin Millar Senior Marketing Executive Sheena McStravick Editor of Belfast Live and Orlaith Clinton Reporter at Belfast Live (002)

Photo 3 – Colin Hayburn CEO at Extern with Sheena McStravick Editor of Belfast Live (002)

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Harness the Power of Strategic Creativity for More Effective Marketing

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By Robin Landa

A blueprint for galvanizing marketing that yields results.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Robin Landa

Sourced from Inc.

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5 Creative Ways To Use Virtual Reality At Home

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By Daniel Trock

Strange as it is to think, we are definitively living in an era of virtual reality, or at least the beginning of one.

Only a few decades ago, this was strictly in the realm of science fiction, yet nowadays, anyone anywhere can buy a VR headset and enter a world apart from our own. We’re not quite in “Ready Player One” territory yet, but creative minds have already managed to cook up all sorts of cool applications for this burgeoning technology.

When thinking about uses for virtual reality, most ideas are business-oriented, such as creating walkable virtual stores, product catalogues, and video games. However, not all usage of virtual reality needs to be profit-seeking. Instead, you can use virtual reality for self-development, hang with friends, or tackle tedious tasks. If you’re at home and have a headset and some time to kill, you can use your VR setup for all kinds of nifty things, controlling your virtual world and experiencing fantastical sights.

Interior design

Designing a home is an incredibly arduous process due to various physical and logistical limitations. Your only real options are to stare at a house’s blueprints and try to abstract the placement of furniture and decorations in your head. Worse, physically lug everything through the front door and pray it all fits in the available dimensions, which it usually doesn’t. If only you could freely experiment with the layout of your home the same way you can arrange buildings in a strategy game. With VR, it is possible.

Real estate companies have been using VR for a few years now to create virtual mockups of homes on the market to take prospective buyers on virtual tours. However, this technology isn’t owned by the real estate industry. Anyone can download apps like Live Home 3D to create a home from scratch and fill it with virtual furniture, freely manipulating sizes and placements without all the back-breaking labour. Whether you’re designing your dream home or just spit balling on how to make your apartment a little nicer, you can flex your imagination to its limits.

Touring the world

They say that traveling is good for your mind and soul, as it broadens your perspective of the world and exposes you to cultures outside your own. This is mostly true, with one caveat: The world’s destinations are lovely, but the actual act of traveling, including putting up with airlines and booking hotels, can be stressful, not to mention potentially expensive. Not everyone can be bothered with long-distance traveling, so if you’d like an easier travel itinerary, try strapping on a VR headset.

Through virtual reality apps like Wander and BRINK Traveller, you can explore some of the world’s most breath-taking vistas from the comfort of your home. While it’s not quite the same as being in the thick of it, it’s a great way to get a taste of the wider world, see the sights, and do a bit of people-watching. You could also consider it a preview of sorts for a prospective real trip, helping you to select a destination you’d like to know more about.

Outfit coordination

Shopping has never been more convenient than now, as massive online catalogues give you access to just about any clothing or accessories you could want. Of course, seeing a picture of a cool shirt or fancy dress isn’t quite the same thing as actually wearing it, and once you receive it, it may not look as flattering as you had hoped. If you enjoy shopping for clothes at home, you can improve your experience with virtual assistance.

Thanks to advancements in virtual imaging, certain apps and storefronts can simulate the appearance of clothes on your person in a virtual view with a combination of VR and AR tech. With this technology, you can try on various outfits and styles to find what works for you and what doesn’t. Even if you’re not planning on buying anything, you can try stuff on for the fun of it. It’s like the next step up from window shopping!

Viewing parties

As the world grows metaphorically smaller, it’s become easier to maintain friendships and relationships from anywhere in the world. Since you’re not physically next to each other, though, there are some social activities you can’t do together, such as enjoying a movie in each other’s company. While there are apps for sharing Netflix views, for instance, it’s more fun to have someone next to you that you can turn to whisper at. If you want that kind of experience, VR can provide it.

Through the built-in software on Meta Quest heads and virtual ecosystems like VRChat, you can organize virtual viewing parties with movies showing on a big screen while you and your friends enjoy the show from theatre seats. It’s all the fun of going to the movies with your friends without the chattering randos or sticky floors, plus you’re in complete control of the movie playlist.

Meditation and therapy

The ideas of meditation and mindfulness may seem antithetical to the flash and noise of modern technology. Still, depending on your perspective, they can intersect quite well with one another. If your home life is a little too rowdy for your taste, a VR headset, perhaps paired with noise-cancelling headphones, can make for an excellent getaway. With apps like Innerworld and Hoame, you can transport yourself to a faraway mountaintop or serene spring, surrounded by natural sounds as you enjoy meditative peace.

Additionally, if you’re looking to conquer a particular aspect of yourself, VR can provide a safe environment to do so. If you have a fear of heights, for example, you can simulate various high-elevation environments for exposure therapy without actually putting yourself in physical danger. It’s a great way to start a personal journey of self-improvement and discovery and make the gradual transition to real-life environments a little easier on you.

Feature Image Credit: Viorel Kurnosov/Getty Images

By Daniel Trock

Sourced from Slash Gear

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Could TikTok help transform your small business – or will you be a slave to the algorithm? We speak to business owners about how they use it

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By Angharad Carrick

  • TikTok launched in the UK in 2018 and boasts around 150m users in Europe 
  • The algorithm and shop feature mean many business owners now use TikTok
  • We speak to entrepreneurs using the platform about the benefits and challenges 

When Karim Ullah opened his restaurant in March 2020, he didn’t expect to be forced to close 11 days later.

Karim Ullah, owner of Brohmon restaurant in Essex, joined TikTok three months ago

Karim Ullah, owner of Brohmon restaurant in Essex, joined TikTok three months ago

During the pandemic, Karim was pushed to stay open for takeaways to stay afloat, and since then the restaurant has successfully launched its own craft beer and gin.

Now he’s looking to TikTok to bring his business to the masses after his daughter found success on the platform with her own musical ventures.

The current economic climate is tougher than ever for smaller businesses and, like Karim, many business owners are looking for new channels to promote their products on.

Given its popularity with a younger audience and more and more businesses moving to TikTok, could it be the answer for small businesses?

Can TikTok help my small business?

Platforms like Instagram, Facebook and Twitter can be a great way to reach a larger audience and both big and small businesses have stood to benefit.

There have been some runaway successes who have used social media to build their own business.

Joe Wicks, who shot to fame during the pandemic offering PE lessons to the nation, has spun out his own fitness app, while Grace Beverley, another fitness influencer, launched her own clothing line and recently secured investment.

TikTok is the newest kid on the block. It now boasts 1billion active users and launched in the UK in 2018.

Unlike other social media apps which prioritise connections, TikTok’s ‘For You Page’ presents users with videos related to their their interests through its unique algorithm.

It now also has its own shopping feature, where creators and businesses can sell their products, from which TikTok takes a small commission.

For many it might not seem the most obvious place to advertise your business, but for many business owners it has proved to be a risk worth taking.

Candice Mason, founder of Mother Cuppa, found initial success on TikTok

Candice Mason, founder of Mother Cuppa, found initial success on TikTok 

A new Oxford Economics report found that one in five businesses founded less than five years ago spend more than half of their social media budgets on TikTok.

Candice Mason joined TikTok just six months after launching her business Mother Cuppa Tea and found near-instant success.

‘I tried to build a following across a variety of platforms,’ she said. ‘I found TikTok to be a really lovely and friendly place. There were ladies of a similar age that joined at a similar time and we built our own little community over there. Very early on the videos did incredibly well.’

The Oxford Economics report found that 47 per cent of TikTok users have bought a product or service on the platform and 45 per cent have visited a restaurant or tourist attraction as a result of seeing it on TikTok.

Karim, who runs Brohmon restaurant in Essex, only started posting on TikTok three months ago and has had limited success so far, but he remains confident it will be an important part of the business.

‘I think we may be a little early on our journey,’ he said. ‘As we go further down the road, I expect TikTok to be very successful [for us].

‘TikTok is known as something that young people use to post on but I’m amazed at how many people my age have joined TikTok to see what’s happening. I think every business should be on TikTok.’

How does TikTok compare to other platforms?

One of TikTok’s defining features is its algorithm, which is based on interests rather than followers, so there is no need to gain thousands of followers to succeed.

Users view content based on the topics they’re interested in and other videos they have interacted with, which can make it a great way for small businesses to reach a new audience.

One of the benefits is that TikTok prefers users to upload videos between 15 and 30 seconds, rather than 3+ minutes as on Facebook.

I think every business should be on TikTok 
Karim Ullah, owner of Brohmon restaurant 

 

Claire Gleave, founder of maternity brand Natal Active said: ‘Sometimes I’ve done videos where I’ve been at soft play with my kids running around in the background and I’ve answered a question on video.’

A video platform might not best work for the product or service you’re selling, though.

Ben Spray, founder of digital marketing agency We Are Marketable, said: ‘On Facebook, we find you can do different types of creatives – images, videos, carousel posts, text, so that’s where we find it wins a lot more.

‘There are other features like instant lead forms where Facebook and Instagram can pull details from your profile… I haven’t seen that available on TikTok.’

Crucially, Spray found that small businesses tend to get a higher return on ad spend on Facebook compared to TikTok, where prices of products tend to be lower.

‘You’re making about three to five times ad spend on TikTok, whereas on Facebook it’s about £5-10 for every pound spent.’

For Candice, who found initial success, investing in TikTok did little to help: ‘I spent £350 on marketing and it all it did was get me a few 1000 views. I didn’t get any sales out of it.’

She was offered one-to-one coaching to help with marketing but she said it ‘became more about trying to get sales and money going through the platform and it just leaves a bit of a bad taste.

Digital marketer Ben Spray thinks business owners advertising to a younger audience should join TikTok

Digital marketer Ben Spray thinks business owners advertising to a younger audience should join TikTok 

‘I basically sit at a very steady number of views, very, very little interaction, a lot of effort for very little outcome.’

Most importantly, how successful TikTok can be for your business depends on the type of product you’re selling and who you’re trying to sell to.

Spray said: ‘I personally would recommend [TikTok] for people that are targeting a younger demographic, because that’s the majority of the market on there. And also from the clients that we’ve worked with, a service or product that’s a lower cost, because seems to perform better than higher cost services, on the clients we’ve tested.’

TikTok’s shop is flooded with discounted goods, everything from clothes to kitchen utensils, and Claire has found it difficult to sell her products as a result.

‘If you’re spending £55 on a pair of maternity leggings, you wouldn’t necessarily impulse buy,’ she said. ‘You’d want to know the brand, read the reviews and learn a bit more about the product before you do it.’

Slave to the algorithm?

TikTok’s algorithm can be very hit and miss and, while you might have built up a loyal following, users might not always see your posts, unlike Instagram or Facebook.

Karim is as bemused as other creators: ‘The algorithm is crazy, I know why it’s doing what it’s doing. When my daughter started, she would get 500 people view her videos. Then as she started putting up more posts, she was getting thousands watching her. She doesn’t know [why] either.

‘I think it’s a case of just posting videos and building your brand and channel. I would love to find a good reason as to why some things work, I think it’s anyone’s guess.’

Claire Gleave, founder of Natal Active, has had mixed experiences with TikTok after going viral

Claire Gleave, founder of Natal Active, has had mixed experiences with TikTok after going viral 

This lack of understanding means it can be difficult to keep up momentum, and some creators have found themselves having to post more and more.

Candice said: ‘As time went on, I was finding I was needing to post more than once a day to get the same traction of views and interaction.’

And while the TikTok algorithm might seem to work for its billions of users who are presented with relevant content, it can also bring some unwanted attention.

‘I had a few videos that went viral and attracted the wrong kind of people, which is a complete waste of my time,’ said Claire. ‘I’m not interested in vanity metrics on TikTok, I want to attract my ideal customer. I don’t want a million followers if they’re all men that are interested in breastfeeding.

‘My understanding of the way the algorithm works is, it will throw your video out to say, 300 random people, and it will see who engages with it. Whoever engages with it, it will show to more of those kinds of people. If I get dodgy blokes engaging with a breastfeeding video, it just shows it to more and more of those people that have those kinds of predilections.

‘It’s not showing it to mums that are breastfeeding, which are the people that I want to target.’

Candice had a similar experience: ‘My product is aimed at women over 30, it couldn’t be any clearer. When I put my money behind it and looked at the stats, I was getting 14 year old boys. That’s such a waste of my money. It just didn’t make sense.’

Building brand awareness

What’s clear is that TikTok isn’t for every small business. The algorithm can be confusing and if you’re looking to directly communicate with your loyal followers, it’s probably not the platform for you.

Business owners who are not particularly clued up on social media might struggle with just how regularly you need to post on TikTok.

Candice said: ‘You need time to really put your energy into [social media platforms] to get momentum. I’m still working full-time trying to launch a business and trying to be on all of these platforms. You end up feeling like you’re spreading yourself too thin and not actually doing a very good job on any of your platforms.’

What it might help with is building brand awareness. Claire found she gets lots of traffic to her website from the platform when she’s regularly using it, and particularly when her videos have gone viral.

Dave Fishwick

‘I find it’s very much about brand awareness,’ she said. ‘When the wrong people drop off and the right people filter through, then we remarket through Instagram and Facebook adverts, and the occasional TikTok advert when I’m running them.’

For Claire, TikTok might not be the runaway success she might have thought it would be, but after a few viral videos she’s willing to try.

Her top tip for business owners is: ‘Get your face in front of the camera and try different things. I strongly advise going against anything that’s not in your niche, because follower numbers don’t mean much if they’re the wrong followers. You want people that are your ideal customers that want to buy your products.’

Candice is not so sure: ‘I don’t think it’s a business platform. I think it’s an influencer platform, and I think it’s a fun platform.’

By Angharad Carrick

Sourced from This is MONEY.co.uk

 

 

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Your Phone Isn’t Spying on You to Show You Ads (It’s Worse Than That)

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By Stephen Johnson

Your iPhone is not eavesdropping on your conversations to sell you things. It’s actually much worse.

Yesterday I asked my wife what she wanted for her birthday. She told me she’d like a cordless Dremel. Later, I was served an advertisement for—you guessed it—a cordless Dremel.

Now, we’d never talked about hand-drills before; I have no interest in power tools, I’d never done a search for them or looked at them on Amazon, so the phone must have been listening to what we were saying. It has a microphone right there, so why wouldn’t it be sending our voices to Google headquarters or wherever so they can send me an ad? What other explanation is there? It turns out there is another explanation, and it’s stranger and more insidious than high-tech eavesdropping.

Your phone isn’t listening to you (at least not how you think it is)

Your phone is listening to you at all times, sort of. If it wasn’t, personal assistant apps wouldn’t be able to spring into action when you say “Siri” or “Alexa.” But that’s a different kind of listening. Your device is only always listening for a specific word (or the “wake word”). Only after it hears that do the smarter parts of its digital brain light up.

Your conversations are not routinely transmitted to distant advertising companies so they can pick up random words and serve you commercials. This would take a lot of resources, and probably violate wiretapping and other privacy laws. It also just doesn’t make sense: There would be too much noise in listening to everything everyone says, and not enough signal to bother—especially since advertisers already know everything relevant about you without having listen to you prattle on to your dumb friends.

What data your phone is actually collecting

Instead of eavesdropping and storing your voice as many assume, your apps, phone, watch, game system, computer, and probably your oven are greedily collecting every data point they possibly can, including but not limited to your:

  • Location information (both through your device’s location settings and IP address)
  • Search history
  • Browsing history
  • Purchase history
  • Physical interactions (that is, how you physically use your device)

This information, taken as a whole, is way more valuable and useful than whatever you talk about, and basically anyone who wants to can buy it. Advertising companies don’t, as a rule, connect this data to anything that can specifically identify you (like your name and address). That wouldn’t be hard to do, but there isn’t much in it for advertisers. They know everything you do, 24 hours a day, so what difference does your name make? The process itself is called fingerprinting, and it allows advertisers to track you across sites and apps.

The scary world of online behavioural advertising

A few basic data points would be all anyone would need to get a rough idea of how to advertise to you. If your location is “Beverly Hills” and you recently spent an hour looking at the Lexus website, you’re probably a rich guy in the market for a new car. In olden times, that’s all they’d need to target you, maybe with a billboard in your neighbourhood or something. But online behavioural advertising collects so much other information—you bought a tent last month, you watched Star Trek on Sunday night—that targeting becomes scarily precise, to the point that it can feel supernatural.

One way to beat tracking is by using a VPN while you browse the internet on your smartphone. A VPN will encrypt your traffic and route it through a remote server, making it difficult for trackers to identify you or your location. PCMag reviewed the top VPNs available on iPhone and Android, ranking the following among the best options:

The hidden connections that bind us together

That explains how ads can be so specific to your interests, but not why you’d get ads after having a conversation with someone. That’s where things get creepier: Advertisers compare your “anonymous” identity with the identities you spend a lot of time around (like your spouse) to predict your buying interests. So they know you hang out at a squash court with Gary (although they don’t know his name) and that Gary spends a lot of time looking at Audi’s website. They know what other rich guys into cars like you and Gary think about, what they buy, and how they feel. So if an ad for an Audi appears, it’s not because Gary told you about his car. It’s because Gary is into Audi, and you hang with Gary.

In the case of my wife and the drill, advertisers know my wife’s ad profile spends a lot of time in the same location as my ad profile. They know she’s been searching for cordless drills online, and that her birthday is a month away. So throwing me an ad for a drill makes sense, even if it feels like an invasion of privacy.

You are depressingly predictable

Even knowing how it works, targeted advertising can seem eerily, impossibly accurate. Sometimes you’re served ads for things you’re just thinking about, that really can’t be connected to your search history, location, who you’re hanging around with, or anything else. But that can be explained too.

“Rich guys like expensive cars” is the kind association humans make, based on past experiences, expectations, and personal bias. But computers don’t have assumptions or the limitations we have. They dispassionately compare mind-bogglingly huge datasets, and I assume they are making connections that are not apparent and can’t be readily explained. Maybe people just like you tend to be interested in learning to play the banjo when they turn 35, and that’s why that ad popped up on your birthday.

The other forces at play: Manufactured coincidence and pattern recognition

Coincidence comes into play somewhat, too. Even if online ads were random, people would still sometimes wonder if their phones were spying on them. It’s human nature to pay attention to unusual occurrences (like an ad for a candy bar popping up just as you thought about having a snack) while ignoring mundane ones (the ad for a movie you don’t care about that preceded it). Given that there is a sophisticated attempt to manufacture meaningful “coincidences,” it shouldn’t be surprising that targeted ads occasionally hit seemingly impossible shots—that’s what they’re aiming for.

Don’t worry, it’s going to get worse

The next logical step in targeted advertising will likely come from generative AI. Advertising companies are already experimenting with using AI to create more effective ad copy and visuals. This CNBC article imagines, “Facebook users in Utah being shown AI-generated graphics of people cycling through desert canyons, while users in San Francisco could be shown cyclists cruising over the Golden Gate Bridge,” but that seems crude and only a few months in the future. When AI gets really good, things will get exponentially more depressing.

Advertisers already know almost everything about you. Now imagine a computer that can craft instant, on-the-fly advertising aimed at you, and only you—not an educated guess based on people like you, but you as an individual. Advertising already feels invasive; imagine ads that target your personal insecurities and secret dreams. Picture a commercial for a Dremel starring your dead mother or your childhood crush. I have a feeling we’re going to wish our phones were literally spying on us.

Until then, things are getting (a bit) better

It’s not all going downhill from a privacy perspective: Tech companies are slowly adding new tools to help users keep their data private from online trackers. Remember Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature? The company released it two years ago to force apps to ask your permission to track you across apps and websites. (The answer, of course, should be, “Hell no.”)

Its wide adoption pissed off companies like Facebook, whose entire business models relied on selling the data from this tracking. Ever since, your iPhone data has been a little less transparent to the advertisers of the world. (For those on Android, DuckDuckGo has a similar feature to keep your apps a little more secure.)

Privacy controls across all operating systems and browsers have become more robust as well. Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS now offer more controls than ever for seeing which apps request which data points, and blocking those apps from accessing them. Browsers like Safari, Edge, and Firefox continually add new ways to hide your data from trackers even by default, and especially if you go in and tinker with your settings. Plus, many sites and apps that serve you ads now let you turn off targeted advertising: You might still see the same number of ads, but they won’t be based on your identifiers. (No Dremel for you.)

Using a smartphone may never be “private,” but at least there are more tools than ever to make the experience as private as can be. Until the AI get too smart for them, anyway.

Feature Image Credit: Alberto Garcia Guillen (Shutterstock)

By Stephen Johnson

Sourced from lifehacker

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Is Your Brand Trusted Significantly More Than ChatGPT?

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By Chad S. White

Brands have two major levers they can pull to protect themselves from the negative effects of growing use of generative AI.

The Gist

  • AI disruption. Generative AI is set to disrupt SEO significantly.
  • Content shielding. Brands need strategies to protect their content from AI.
  • Direct relationships. Building strong direct relationships is key.

Do your customers trust your brand more than ChatGPT?

The answer to that question will determine which brands truly have credibility and authority in the years ahead and which do not.

Those who are more trustworthy than generative AI engines will:

  1. Be destinations for answer-seekers, generating strong direct traffic to their websites and robust app usage.
  2. Be able to build large first-party audiences via email, SMS, push and other channels.

Both of those will be critical for any brand wanting to insulate themselves from the search engine optimization (SEO) traffic loss that will be caused by generative AI.

The Threat to SEO

Despite racking up 100 million users just two months after launching — an all-time record — ChatGPT doesn’t appear to be having a noticeable impact on the many billions of searches that happen every day yet. However, it’s not hard to imagine it and other large language models (LLMs) taking a sizable bite out of search market share as they improve and become more reliable.

And improve they will. After all, Microsoft, Google and others are investing tens of billions of dollars into generative AI engines. Long dominating the search engine market, Google in particular is keenly aware of the enormous risk to its business, which is why it declared a Code Red and marshalled all available resources into AI development.

If you accept that generative AI will improve significantly over the next few years — and probably dramatically by the end of the decade — and therefore consumers will inevitability get more answers to their questions through zero-click engagements, which are already sizable, then it begs the question:

What should brands consider doing to maintain brand visibility and authority, as well as avoid losing value on the investments they’ve made in content?

Protective Measures From Negative Generative AI Effects

Brands have two major levers they can pull to protect themselves from the negative effects of growing use of generative AI.

1. Shielding Content From Generative AI Training

Major legal battles will be fought in the years ahead to clarify what rights copyright holders have in this new age and what still constitutes Fair Use. Content and social media platforms are likely to try to redefine the copyright landscape in their favor, amending their user agreements to give themselves more rights over the content that’s shared on their platforms.

A white robot hand holds a gavel above a sound block sitting on a wooden table.
Andrey Popov on Adobe Stock Photo

You can already see the split in how companies are deciding to proceed. For example, while Getty Images’ is suing Stable Diffusion over copyright violations in training its AI, Shutterstock is instead partnering with OpenAI, having decided that it has the right to sell its contributors’ content as training material to AI engines. Although Shutterstock says it doesn’t need to compensate its contributors, it has created a contributors fund to pay those whose works are used most by AI engines. It is also giving contributors the ability to opt out of having their content used as AI training material.

Since Google was permitted to scan and share copyrighted books without compensating authors, it’s entirely reasonable to assume that generative AI will also be allowed to use copyrighted works without agreements or compensation of copyright holders. So, content providers shouldn’t expect the law to protect them.

Given all of that, brands can protect themselves by:

  • Gating more of their web content, whether that’s behind paywalls, account logins or lead generation forms. Although there are disputes, both search and AI engines shouldn’t be crawling behind paywalls.
  • Releasing some content in password-protected PDFs. While web-hosted PDFs are crawlable, password-protected ones are not. Because consumers aren’t used to frequently encountering password-protected PDFs, some education would be necessary. Moreover, this approach would be most appropriate for your highest-value content.
  • Distributing more content via subscriber-exclusive channels, including email, push and print. Inboxes are considered privacy spaces, so crawling this content is already a no-no. While print publications like books have been scanned in the past by Google and others, smaller publications would likely be safe from scanning efforts.

In addition to those, hopefully brands will gain a noindex equivalent to tell companies not to train their large language models (LLMs) and other AI tools on the content of their webpages.

Of course, while shielding their content from external generative AI engines, brands could also deploy generative AI within their own sites as a way to help visitors and customers find the information they’re looking for. For most brands, this would be a welcome augmentation to their site search functionality.

2. Building Stronger Direct Relationships

While shielding your content is the defensive play, building your first-party audiences is the offensive play. Put another way, now that you’ve kept your valuable content out of the hands of generative AI engines, you need to get it into the hands of your target audience.

You do that by building out your subscription-based channels like email and push. On your email signup forms, highlight the exclusive nature of the content you’ll be sharing. If you’re going to be personalizing the content that you send, highlight that, too.

Brands have the opportunity to both turn their emails into personalized homepages for their subscribers, as well as to turn their subscribers’ inboxes into personalized search engines.

Email Marketing Reinvents Itself Again

Brands already have urgent reasons to build out their first-party audiences. One is the sunsetting of third-party cookies and the need for more customer data. Email marketing and loyalty programs, in particular, along with SMS, are great at collecting both zero-party data through preference centers and progressive profiling, as well as first-party data through channel engagement data.

Another is the increasingly evident dangers of building on the “rented land” of social media. For example, Facebook is slowly declining, Twitter has cut 80% of its staff to avoid bankruptcy as its value plunges, and TikTok faces growing bans around the world. Some are even claiming we’re witnessing the beginning of the end of the age of social media. I wouldn’t go that far, but brands certainly have lots of reasons to focus more on those channels they have much more control over, including the web, loyalty, SMS, and, of course, email.

So, the disruption of search engine optimization by generative AI is just providing another compelling reason to invest more into email programs, or to acquire them. It’s hard not to see this as just another case of email marketing reinventing itself and making itself more relevant to brands yet again.

Feature Image Credit: Andrey Popov on Adobe Stock Photo

By Chad S. White

Chad S. White is the author of four editions of Email Marketing Rules and Head of Research for Oracle Marketing Consulting, a global full-service digital marketing agency inside of Oracle. Connect with Chad S. White:  

Sourced from CMSWIRE

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