by Tod Maffin (LinkedIn • social media)

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Today's News

AMAZON • Fake Company Spied on Competitors: Report …

YOUTUBE • Your Ad Beside Most Popular Shorts

FACEBOOK • 3rd Party Groups Posting Ending

SNAPCHAT • Strategy: “Just Spend More With Us!”

X • AI-Powered Trending Section Goes Off the Rails

AMAZON • Fake Company Spied on Competitors: Reports

Word is getting out about a secret project Amazon ran in 2015 to allegedly spy on their competitors.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Amazon started a fake company called Big River Services International (Get it? “Big River”?) in 2015.

This fake company made real products — like photo frames and clothing — and sold them through their competitors like Walmart and eBay, all apparently in an attempt to get more info on sales contracts and the likes.

But despite how well prepped they sounded, the alleged spies still made some amateur gumshoe mistakes. Some Big River team members listed Amazon as their employer on LinkedIn.

For its part, Amazon says it was just collecting data and nothing to see here — a spokesperson told media “Benchmarking is a common practice in business.”

YOUTUBE • Your Ad Beside Most Popular Shorts

A new ad option for brands wanting to capitalize on the vertical video trend: a way to place your ads alongside popular YouTube Shorts.

The new “Select Shorts” placement will show your ads among the most popular videos in five content categories:

Entertainment

Beauty, Fashion & Lifestyle

Food & Recipes

Gaming

Automotive

This will, of course, give more opportunity to be seen with some of the platform’s viral content.

YouTube says Shorts are now seen by 2 billion users each month, and viewership on TV has also gone up after they added a Shorts interface to their connected TV apps.

The company also updated its tips guide called “ABCD’s of Effective Ads” to include Shorts. Probably won’t be much new here, if you’ve seen similar tips from TikTok and Instagram Reels documents, but might be handy if you’re just starting out with vertical.

You can download YouTube Shorts ads tips here.

FACEBOOK • 3rd Party Groups Posting Ending

Sunday is the last day that brands will be able to post to Facebook Groups using a third-party tool.

Meta is shutting down its Facebook Groups API as of Monday.

This means that social media management tools like Buffer and Agorapulse and Hootsuite won’t be able to post to Facebook Groups for you.

Some platforms, like Sprout Social, simply no longer offer that posting ability any more. Others, like Buffer, say they’re considering a mobile reminder system which would still let you schedule content on their platform, but you would have to manually post directly on Facebook.

To be clear, we’re talking about Facebook Groups here, not Facebook Pages. Your company brand page is unaffected by this.

This appears to be Meta’s attempt to reduce the amount of spam and commercial content that has populated many groups.

SNAPCHAT • Strategy: “Just Spend More With Us!”

Snapchat has released a new report that looked at three years of ads in their app, across five different verticals.

Commerce

Tech

Telecommunications

Travel

Quick service restaurant

Although the dataset represented more than $15 billion in ad spend, it came from only 36 advertisers.

And, as you might expect from a study funded by a platform, the research found that platform to be really strong. (One of the headings in the report literally reads “Spend more on Snapchat!”)

Snapchat says their app garnered the highest return relative to all marketing channels for 3 out of 5 verticals, and outperformed paid social across all categories.

X • AI-Powered Trending Section Goes Off the Rails

X, formerly Twitter, recently killed off its Trending column — which used to have some human intervention — and replaced it with its AI bot’s summary of trending content.

That bot, called Grok, does a decent job of that task — most of the time.

But when it goes awry, it really goes awry.

Earlier this week, X’s trending section broke this news about a basketball star: “Klay Thompson Accused in Bizarre Brick-Vandalism Spree.”

Except Klay Thompson did not commit criminal vandalism.

It seems the bot got confused by the slang term for missing a basketball shot — sometimes known as “throwing bricks.”

As of this morning when we checked, that completely inaccurate news item was still up on X.

It’s been a rough week for the beleaguered app.

Another Advertising Pulling Out

Yesterday, the car manufacturer Hyundai announced that it’s pulling its ads from the platform after pro-Nazi content was placed beside their brand promotions.

It happened just days after NBC said it found thousands of accounts posting or amplifying pro-Nazi content — at least 150 of those accounts sporting the paid blue verified checkmark.