by Tod Maffin and Steph Gunn
Today's News
Big Bank Abandons Payment Processors. What Now?
FTC Requires Easy Subscription Cancellation
Google Giving Your Leads to Your Competitors?!
Experiential Marketing Spend to Rise
Advertisers Misunderstand Streaming TV
Big Bank Abandons Payment Processors. What Now?
Wells Fargo has stopped providing a critical service to fintech companies, leaving a huge problem for payment providers and, in turn, marketers.
The bank's exit from the “BIN sponsorship” business means companies like Square, Stripe, and Paypal need to find new partners to process credit card transactions.
Why They’re Pulling Out
The fintech sector is facing a major threat as banks become more cautious about working with these businesses. Banks are under pressure from regulators to ensure their fintech partners comply with laws and regulations. This has made it riskier and more expensive for banks to work with fintechs.
The Search for New Partners
Some fintechs are turning to smaller banks or alternative partners.
Deutsche Bank has emerged as a possible replacement for Wells Fargo, but it's being selective about which merchants it will work with.
Square is still looking for a new partner to replace Wells Fargo, and is currently relying on JPMorgan Chase, but they are currently without a backup.
How It Could Affect You
The exit of Wells Fargo from the BIN sponsorship business has significant implications for marketers and merchants. It could lead to disruptions and increased costs for companies like Square and Stripe, which would likely pass that down the line.
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FTC Requires Easy Subscription Cancellation
If you sell any recurring service that can be bought online, the American trade regulator is about to make it easier for your customers to cancel their subscriptions.
The Federal Trade Commission has a new “click-to-cancel” rule will require sellers to make cancellation as simple as signing up was.
The rule applies to most subscription services and will go into effect in about six months.
What's Changing
The new rule is part of the FTC's effort to update its 1973 Negative Option Rule.
The FTC received more than 16,000 comments on the proposed rule, including complaints from consumers and feedback from businesses.
The new regulation also prohibit sellers from misrepresenting facts, failing to disclose terms, and making it hard to cancel.
Everything Is Politics
The FTC says it will enforce the rule, but it was hardly a guaranteed thing: In the end, the FTC board vote was 3-2. One board member, in her dissenting statement, said the only reason the majority wanted it passed was because it favoured their political candidate in the upcoming American elections.
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Google Giving Your Leads to Your Competitors?!
If you sell home services and use Google’s Local Service Ads (LSAs), you’re not going to like this.
The company is testing letting users request quotes from multiple of your competitors, even after they've selected your specific business.
How It Works
For those in the test, when a user clicks on a business in LSAs, a Request competitive quotes button appears, letting them select multiple businesses to get quotes from.
The user can then enter a message and their email address, and Google sends the request to all the selected businesses simultaneously.
Who Pays?
The new feature, if it comes to pass (and judging from past history, it will), raises questions about how advertisers will be charged for these leads.
Will all businesses that receive the request be charged, or just the one that was originally selected? Google has not provided clear answers to these questions.
Par for the Course
This is not the first time Google has tested features that allow competitors to appear alongside a specific business's listing.
In January, Google introduced a feature that showed competitors after a user messaged a business directly.
NEW! STUDY OF THE DAY
How and Why Consumers Are Shopping in 2024
Consumers in 2024 are prioritizing value, with many shifting toward private-label and off-brand products due to inflation and economic pressures. Sustainability, while still a concern, has become less of a priority as shoppers focus more on affordability.
Ad Blocker Gets Blocked
You might soon see a small uplift in ad impressions for your campaigns.
Google has started disabling uBlock Origin, a free ad blocker, on its Chrome browser.
This move is part of the company's plan to phase out older extensions that use its previous Manifest v2 framework. Now, some users are reporting that Chrome has indeed disabled the ad blocker in an update.
Developer's Response
Raymond Hill, the developer of uBlock Origin, confirmed the depreciation of the extension in the Chrome Web Store. Hill had previously warned that the phase out was coming, and has been critical of Google's decision to limit the capabilities of third-party Chrome extensions like his.
How Users Are Adapting
Some Chrome users are switching to alternative browsers, such as Brave or Firefox, that still support uBlock Origin.
For its part, Google says its Manifest V3 framework can still allow developers to create ad blockers for Chrome, including uBlock's own uBlock Origin Lite.
Experiential Marketing Spend to Rise
Spending on experiential marketing like live events is expected to hit $128 billion this year, surpassing pre-pandemic levels for the first time.
This is a 10.5% jump from last year
That beats the 9.7% growth seen in 2023
Spending Breakdown
B2C companies will spend the most, with a predicted $90 billion this year.
B2B companies will spend $38 billion
This data comes from a recently released study by PQ Media.
Industry Recovery
The study says the industry is recovering from the pandemic, with the US remaining the largest market.
In 2023, the US spent $52 billion on experiential marketing, making up more than 45% of global spending. According to Patrick Quinn, CEO of PQ Media, experiential marketing is becoming more important due to better metrics and customer engagement.
Live Events Drive Growth
The return of live events has contributed to the spending rebound. Live events were the fastest-growing channel in the B2C space, up almost 10% last year.
Marketers are expected to focus on in-person experiences, such as music festivals, to connect with consumers. B2B marketers have found value in conferences and industry events, especially with the rise of AI tools.
Advertisers Misunderstand Streaming TV
An interesting piece at AdExchanger says that while many advertisers are rushing to buy up streaming inventory, they're missing some key differences between what's labeled as streaming and what it actually means.
To some, streaming means content delivered via a platform like Amazon Prime Video. But what about live feeds, like Thursday Night Football?
The CTV Scene
The terminology gets muddy when it comes to connected advertising (CTV).
CTV is available in nearly 90% of US households and takes up a third of viewing time.
However, only 40% of CTV audiences are exposed to ads in this environment.
A significant amount of the inventory distributed to that 40% is actually sold via traditional TV channels, known these days as “linear.”
A Deeper Look
Let's look at a one-hour prime-time program that airs on both linear TV and a free, ad-supported TV channel (FAST).
The program has 20 minutes of commercial time:
18 minutes are sold by the cable network on a national basis.
The remaining two minutes are sold by the streaming platform.
But the 18 minutes of national ad time are actually sold as linear, not streaming.
This means that ad buyers would need to make linear purchases to access the majority of inventory on a FAST channel. In fact, between 20% and 25% of all ad-supported streaming can only be purchased via linear.
This limited inventory is often sold at CPMs 5x greater than what linear commands, for the same impression.
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