Google made a slew – maybe even two slews – of announcements today at its Search On event. Most relevant to this newsletter were new features related to shopping, including visual search, personalized results, and buying guides compiled from multiple trusted sources. It’s probably safe to say that Google wants to reclaim its position as the top product search destination, now occupied by Amazon.
It’s great that AI can write marketing copy, but what if people don’t want marketing content from any source? This StoryStream study finds that just 38% of online shoppers find brand-created assets impactful, compared with 62% for user-generated content (UGC). In fact, more find UGC to be important (72%) than personalized content (49%). Did we mention that StoryStream sells UGC tools?
OpenAP, the identity graph provider owned by Fox, NBCUniversal, Paramount, and Warner Brothers Discovery, has convinced three major programmatic ad sales platforms to use its OpenID identifier. Advertisers buying through FreeWheel, Magnite, and Xander Monetize SSPs will be able to target and measure deduplicated OpenID audiences for both linear and connected TV. Media agency GroupM will be the first buying agency to adopt OpenID.
Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.