by Tod Maffin (LinkedIn • social media)

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Today's News

MEDIA BUYING • Temu Pushing Ad Costs Way Up

TIKTOK • Influencers Going Overboard on Ecomm

OOPS • We Are All Michaels Now

DATA • Climate Change Biggest Consumer Issue

MEDIA BUYING • Temu Pushing Ad Costs Way Up

There’s a lot of profanity out there in DTC social media — I mean, there often is: between Meta’s volatile performance and marketing tools like cookies being pulled, there’s a lot to complain about.

But I don’t think I’ve seen as much anger as I’ve seen in the last week or two — and it’s all because of Temu.

Temu — the ecommerce giant that sells extremely discounted products — is chewing up a lot of ad space. And, in an auction like the ads platforms are, increased competition means higher prices.

For whatever reason, most of the complaining seems to be about Meta’s prices, and people checking the Ads Library are finding Temu deploying thousands of campaigns each week.

AdWeek has a great piece about this all today, in case you too are seeing higher than usual CPMs.

Temu became one of Meta’s top advertisers last year, and the company is expected to reach $6 billion in revenue this year.

The piece quotes DTC marketer David Herrmann as saying:

TIKTOK • Influencers Going Overboard on Ecomm

So that’s why media buyers are struggling with the deluge of ecommerce ads; what about consumers?

They, too, say they’re feeling it — and one area they’re most certainly not appreciative of it is TikTok.

American TikTok users have been flooded with ads for products in TikTok Shop. Other countries too.

And that’s affecting the business of influencers on the app.

Business Insider today published an interesting piece about creators’ frustration with the trend — and their fellow influencers who are all too happy to use their feed to sell products.

The piece notes that while the cost of living has put financial pressure on people, retail sales still went up last month, despite prices going higher than the U.S.’s inflation target of 2%.

The push to sell and sell has actually spawned a new kind of influencer: The deinfluencer, a group of creators who tell their users to stop buying.

OOPS • We Are All Michaels Now

A strange bug… or hack… or sabotage… or something affected Microsoft’s corporate email servers last week in the funniest way possible.

Microsoft's VP for Bing, Michael Schechter, said he checked his email one morning last week and found a huge number waiting for him.

His first thought: Uh oh, something bad happened.

And who’d blame him for thinking that — hundreds of people in the company were also copied on the email thread.

Turns out, someone accidentally managed to add everyone named Mike or Michael to a group email thread.

So, this being the world of AI, Michael Schechter ran all the threads in that group alias through Microsoft’s Co-Pilot AI and it summarized it like this:

DATA • Climate Change Biggest Consumer Issue