How Do You Do, Fellow Boomers?

Boomers are taking up Tiktok. Teenagers are flocking to Facebook. What the hell is going on?!

BREAKING NEWS • Amazon Responsible for Recalls

Surprise across the ecommerce sector this morning, as the American product safety regulator ruled that Amazon bears legal responsibility for recalling defective and dangerous products.

Amazon, of course, argued that it shouldn’t have to manage recalls since it was just the intermediary between buyers and sellers. But the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission disagreed.

What led us here

In 2021, the Commission took Amazon to court, to force it to recall more than 400,000 products it said were dangerous. Some of these products included carbon monoxide detectors, hair dryers, and children’s pajamas.

Amazon did take down the product listings and notified customers of “potential safety issues,” but that didn’t go far enough for the regulator.

Media analysis

An Amazon spokesperson said that the company was “disappointed” by the ruling and plans to appeal.

Facebook Makes Gains Among… Young People?!

Facebook use is dwindling across all age groups except — and I didn’t have this on my Bingo card — Gen Z.

In fact, the number of Gen Z users in the US is expected to jump from 34 million to more than 40 million within a couple of years. They still trail older generations in terms of user numbers and daily time spent, but analysts say Facebook has some utility that they can’t get elsewhere. At least not at the scale of Facebook.

Remember, about half of Gen Z are over 18 now. And as their generation grows older, they're joining Facebook for things like event planning, community groups, and Marketplace. Three-quarters of Gen Z Facebook users made a purchase on Marketplace in the past year.

TikTok’s youth down; Boomers up

So how’s TikTok — the former Gen Z king — doing?

TikTok appears to be reaching saturation among young people and is growing among baby boomers, with 1 million more of those expected to adopt the app in the next year. That’s about a 10% rise for that cohort over the next year.

Some people think TikTok's ease of use is likely attracting boomers who want to connect with current trends and younger family members. This growth might be small compared to other generations, but it shows TikTok is slowing gaining broad appeal.

SurveyMonkey Rolls Out New CX Tools

One of the OG marketing tools — SurveyMonkey — has launched a new set of customer experience management tools.

The service has long been known for its surveys and feedback management product. Now, they’re adding a suite of CX tools, including a new direct integration with Salesforce, and more flexible branding.

Martech.org couldn’t find pricing details, nor could we, but they did say it looks simpler and more accessible than some other experience management solutions.

Specific features

AI-powered surveys, called SurveyMonkey Genius, which will let you map out a survey form with a text prompt, and make it easier to analyze the results. 

You’ll be able to track progress with your brand’s customer satisfaction score, Net Promoter Score, and customer effort score.

In addition to the native Salesforce integration, it also offers integrations with Marketo, HubSpot, Power BI, Tableau and a handful of other solutions.

X's Financial Struggles Continue

Despite Elon Musk’s claims of increasing popularity for X, the platform is facing bigger financial challenges than previously known.

Over the weekend, The New York Times revealed that X's U.S. revenue in Q2 was $114 million, a 25% drop from Q1 and a 53% decline from the previous year, highlighting the difficulty CEO Linda Yaccarino has faced in bringing advertisers back to the app.

The Times reports that even with anticipated boosts from events like the Olympics, X may struggle to reach half of last year’s revenue.

Google Can Auto-Populate Your GBP Menu Listing

Attention restaurant owners: Google Business Profiles will now let you upload a photo of your menu and the site will create a list of your menu items based on that photo.

Google’s help page on the new system reads:

So far, it seems to be quite limited. One person on social media reported you can only upload one image at a time.

How to use it

But if you have it and want to try it, here’s how:

Go to your Business Profile and select Edit menu.

At the top, select Photos of menu, then upload your images.

Then, click Generate a menu.

And finally, the Publish and edit button

Remember, menu items are considered when it comes to keyword discovery in Google. Those menu items are searchable and a successful hit may bring you more customers.

Canva Acquires Image Gen App Leonardo

Canva has acquired Leonardo.ai, an AI image generator. The financial details are undisclosed, but the deal includes both cash and stock. All 120 employees of Leonardo.ai, including the executive team, will join Canva.

Canva says it’s not going to just shut it down and merge it into their main tool; it’ll still operate independently.

The app was founded just two years ago in Sydney. Leonardo was initially intended to create video game assets but later expanded to AI models for image creation in fashion, advertising, and architecture.

Some clever tools

It’s a pretty robust platform and has collaboration tools, a private cloud, video generators, and APIs for customers to build on.

One cool item it’s got it something it calls Live Canvas, which combines text prompts with user sketches to create photorealistic images in real time.

But source data is still concealed

But, like many of its competitors, details on how Leonardo.ai trains its models remain vague, mentioning only “licensed, synthetic and publicly available/open source data.”

Canva is currently valued at $26 billion, and generates nearly $2 billion in revenue with 180 million monthly users globally.

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