TikTok is offering more modest help, in the form of a report on marketing trends for 2023. It’s exceptionally well organized, but the trust barrier is high: the federal government is poised to ban TikTok on government computers and a recent study found TikTok pushes self-harm and suicide videos to vulnerable youths within minutes of registration.
Meta also has a big “trust me” sticker attached to its latest offering, Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns. Similar to Google’s Performance Max, the service asks marketers to share customer lists, ad materials, campaign targets, and a budget, and then let Meta decide what ads to buy and offers to show. Like Google, Meta will tell advertisers how well it did rather than giving them data to judge for themselves.
One of this year’s most important meta-stories has been regulators’ increasingly effective pushback against seemingly unstoppable tech giants. We’ve had three examples in the past week, starting with Amazon’s agreement to reduce the advantages it gives to its own products and stop helping itself with data it collects about sales by independent merchants. Both changes are in response to European Union anti-trust activity and presumably apply only within Europe.
Changes in marketing channels and data access have made advertising measurement more important, and challenging, than ever. Taking advantage of growing interest in the topic, Bain Capital is selling Kantar Group’s audience measurement division, Kantar Media, to global investment firm H.I.G. Capital for “approximately $1 billion”. Kantar Media accounts for 4,500 of Kantar Group’s 25,000 employees.