The Sad, Triumphant Return of Vaporware

Why are the digital ad platforms so good at announcing things, but bad at actually, you know, doing those things?

Today's News

TIKTOK • Dashboards and Duets: Upgraded Tools

TIKTOK • Big Layoffs Coming to Support Teams

META ADS • Videos in Catalog Product Ads

COMMERCE • Which Discount to Use? A Cheat Sheet

SOCIAL MEDIA • Best Times to Post Organically

YOUTUBE • Violations Timecodes and AI Music

TIKTOK • Dashboards and Duets: Upgraded Tools

Yesterday, it was Google’s big day. Today, it was TikTok’s turn to try to capture the hearts and minds of marketers.

At its TikTok World event, the company announced some new tools — no surprise, much of it focused on AI.

First, something they call TikTok One which will be a kind of dashboard for their all their creative tools, measurement tools, and agency partners. They’re throwing in the Creator Marketplace there too. So it sounds like some consolidation of their various surfaces.

Then, there’s TikTok Symphony — this sounds like roughly the same thing, but for all their AI tools.

Vaporware is Back

Beyond that, there wasn’t a lot of detail — which is, sadly, common these days.

In the push to show off how innovative they are, all these platforms announce stuff way in advance, some of which never actually comes into fruition. (Yesterday’s Google Marketing Live was a good example of that. Some of the things they “announced,” were actually announced last year too.)

Back in the COMDEX days, we used to call it Vaporware. It’s software, sure, but it’s not really out yet, so it’s more just kind of vapors.

Indeed neither of these two TikTok things — TikTok One and Symphony — are widely available yet. If you go to TikTok’s web site, there’s a form to sign up for a waitlist.

Automation Tools

They also announced some new automation tools for campaigns that will take over once you put in your budget, campaign objective, and some creative — TikTok’s AI will then choose the creative to show, the audience, and the timing of impressions. Presumably this is something you’ll be able to choose to turn on, and not something that will happen automatically.

Interactive Formats

They also showed off a new interactive add-ons for their TopView placement which will now let you add pop-out elements and countdown stickers.

There’s also something called “Duet with Branded Mission,” which lets advertisers participate in duets alongside creators.

Measurement

On the measurement side, the company launched Unified Lift, which will combine conversion and brand data to give a wider view of campaign results.

TIKTOK • Big Layoffs Coming to Support Teams

So while TikTok will be busy getting those things off the ground (whether soon or, you know, maybe next year), don’t expect a lot of support from the company’s support people.

The Information this week is reporting that “a large percentage” of the 1,000 employees in TikTok’s operations, content, and marketing departments will be laid off tomorrow.

Most significantly, TikTok will close down its global user operations team — this is the group that handles user support and user communications.

TikTok has laid people off before, but those layoffs have tended to be a few dozen at a time. This would be a rare instance of a large-scale layoff.

This is all happening just a few weeks after the U.S. passed legislation requiring TikTok’s U.S. operations to be sold to an American company by mid-January, or risk being banished from the country.

META ADS • Videos in Catalog Product Ads

There’s a new automated video ad option coming to Meta’s platform — Catalog Product Ads will be able to show video assets.

You might be familiar with their Catalog Product Ads — these are pulled from your connected catalog and shown dynamically to people Meta thinks are most likely to buy.

Until now, you’ve only been able to use images for these, but now you can add video into those product listing ads.

Meta says if you do decide to upload some videos, make sure you keep them short and punchy. A hook within the first two seconds, and a call-to-action within the first six.

They also remind marketers to not forget about the safe zones for videos, and to make sure you leave room in your video for the UI to get overlaid.

These updated Catalog Product Ads should now be available to all advertisers.

A glitch in the continuum

Incidentally, in case you were trying to access Meta’s ads manager this morning and got nothing but a white screen, it wasn’t just you — the platform did have some issues today, most of which seem to have been resolved.

COMMERCE • Which Discount to Use? A Cheat Sheet

Science has discovered that there is a right way and a wrong way to create product offers — and it all comes down to the type of product you sell.

Research showcased today by the Ariyh newsletter found that:

If you sell products that are more fun than functional (like candy or cologne), your sale should use a price promotion — like $20 off or 30% off.

If you sell more practical products (like a garbage can), you’ll get better results with a quantity promotion — like “Buy 5, get 50% off.”

Why This Happens

The researchers say people reported a need to justify their purchase decision.

Pleasurable purchases come from our desire for fun, which might be a little harder to rationalize, so promotions based on price might justify the purchase as a “well, just this one time” indulgence.

Caveats

Researchers found this effect isn’t as strong if people are buying the pleasurable product as a gift, or if they keep that purchase private for whatever reason.

Also, the paper conducted their experiments as hypotheticals. There were lots of experiments and had solid methodology behind them, but the study did not measure any actual real-world sales data.

The paper is called The effects of promotions on hedonic versus utilitarian purchases. It was published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.

SOCIAL MEDIA • Best Times to Post Organically

Sprout Social has released another report of the best times to post on social media.

These numbers are a good general guide to when engagement is higher on the various platforms, but of course your brand’s best time to post might be something completely different. It’s important for you to measure your own audience’s activity, but these overall numbers sometimes do provide a guide.

Also, this is all based on engagement with posts from Sprout Social’s platform, but they say the averages come from 34,000 of its customers, so while that’s a pretty reliable sample size, of course it skews a little more toward medium- to large-scale brands, since that’s the majority of Sprout’s customer base.

Facebook

According to Sprout’s data, Facebook’s high activity times are weekdays between 9:00 a.m. and midday. There’s also a bump at about 5pm, presumably people opening up the app after work.

The worst day? Sundays.

Instagram

It’s about the same on Instagram — weekdays between 9am and 2pm are good there — but there’s less engagement on Friday and weekends.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn’s company pages get more engagement on Tuesdays and Wednesdays — specifically, between 10am and noon.

Pinterest

Pinterest’s most active time is Tuesdays to Fridays at one in the morning.

And you might be asking — why so early? Apparently so did Sprout, which went back to its data science team to double-check. Turns out, they believe early morning is when users seem struck with inspiration.

TikTok

Unlike the other platforms, TikTok seems to get better engagement in the afternoon, with a noticeable uplift between 2pm and 6pm on weekdays.

There’s also a small bump between 9am and 11am on Wednesdays and Thursdays.

✅ Sprout Social’s full report is here.

YOUTUBE • Violations Timecodes and AI Music

Some nice updates coming for YouTube channel administrators.

Policy violation timecodes

First, the platform will soon tell you the specific times of policy violations in your uploads. This is definitely helpful, as it was sometimes a little opaque as to what the enforcement bot got upset about.

If you get one of these and there’s no time stamp, YouTube says that’s because basically the whole video is against policy in some way.

This is important not only to stay on the right side of YouTube, but also because these kinds of policy violations can prevent monetization. So if it goes unaddressed, you won’t make any money from that video’s views.

Unfortunately, the workflow we’d all like still isn’t possible — that is to upload a replacement video at the same public URL, and have YouTube check that new version. Instead, you’ll have to delete the offending video and upload the replacement as a new video, meaning any links or embeds that are out there for that first video will break.

Also, this system isn’t available for uploads from the mobile app yet.

AI background music

Also, YouTube is now testing AI-generated instrumental soundtracks for Shorts.

You’ll be able to enter a text prompt, like “pulsating rythmic” and select a genre. It’ll then make you a 30-second, non-looping instrumental music bed to go underneath your Short, which will be unique for each generation and free of any rights issues.

This will be part of its other AI music tool, called Dream Track, which can generate short song clips in the style of participating artists like John Legend, T-Pain, and Sia.

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