Google Demand Gen BETA opens
You can now sign up for access to Google Ads’ Demand Gen, the new campaign type announced at Google Marketing Live in May. Advertisers already in BETA will have their Discovery Campaigns automatically upgraded to Demand Gen. Demand Gen campaigns combine image and video ads in one place and can be used to drive conversions, site visits and actions like sign-up and add-to-cart across YouTube, Discover and Gmail. They also work across YouTube Shorts and YouTube in-stream.
Why is this important?
In January to March 2024 Google will launch automatic upgrades for all remaining Discovery campaigns to Demand Gen. Advertisers will be able to explore new features such as: different ad formats in one campaign, lookalike segments, unique goals, maximise clicks bidding, ad previews and a/b experimentation. Read more.
WPP’s consumer equality equation report addresses how advertisers can better reach people from ethnic minority groups
WPP’s consumer equality equation report sets out to address “hard to reach” audiences. By plunging into the relationship between ethnicity and the consumer experience in the UK, and working to close a significant data gap, it arms marketers and advertisers with more insights and tools than ever to better plan and buy media that deliver effective and engaging campaigns to people from minority ethnic groups - and truly reflect modern society.
WPP want to ensure that the rich insights about minority ethnic consumer experience in this report find their way through into campaign activation so we can authentically reach these growth consumers through the channels they most engage with and trust, not those we think they should be consuming.
Why is this important?
The report founded that media that is seen as reflecting a sense of community is more trusted, as is out-of-home and minority-owned media. Therefore it is vital to actively consider the role of these channels on a media plan to build and maintain trust with consumers from minority ethnic groups. Partnering with influencers can be a personal way to speak directly with minority ethnic groups, when part of a comprehensive communications strategy that considers influencers’ relevance to a community, and is not included tokenistically.
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Meta adds new features to Threads as user growth slows
Threads’, Meta’s newest social media app has now been live for just over a month, reaching over 100 million sign-ups in record time. However, this growth has slowed by 90% since its initial launch, with engagement fading quickly as the app remains without a desktop companion as well as being unavailable in the EU. With all this in mind Meta are still looking to regularly add new features, to constantly try and bring the app to a place where it will genuinely compete with other popular social media platforms on it’s own merits.
Why is this important?
While it’s easy to be impressed by Threads’ rapid growth, it’s starting to look like it largely stemmed from a place of longing from many users for a replacement for Twitter (or X), causing a lot of immediate hype on release. While many new features are being rolled out, many of them appear to be the kind of features users would expect to already be baked into a social media app, such as notification controls and the ability to look back through your own liked posts. Threads clearly has the full backing of Meta, but it may be a while before it can be seen as a fully functional competitor in the social media space.
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Train Hugger lets trees do the talking in debut work by Motel
Train Hugger, the sustainable rail ticketing platform which plants a tree in the UK every time a ticket is bought online, have released their first creative since partnering with creative agency Motel in May. The ads feature several varieties of tree which tell customers why they should use Train Hugger, the images for which took inspiration from on online trend where people have noticed face-like features in their surroundings. Ticket purchasers can register to see exactly where their tree has been planted and the encouraging creatives convey real personality to the trees, the campaign is running across digital out of home, social and CRM from the 14th August. The co-founder and chief creative officer at Motel said of the ads “To do a little good, and pay no more for your ticket, feels like a no-brainer. So much so, even the trees think so.”
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