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In This Issue:

🛍️ Amazon drops 2% merchant fee for not using their shipping services

🤖 Microsoft is launching a chatbot ad format that’s light on disclosure

📱 Instagram gets perfect score for “brand appropriateness” in survey

🎥 YouTube’s new AI tools: Has the era of automated video spam arrived?

🐘 Mastodon rolls out big upgrade today; allows for content searching

 📸 Instagram ad spend predicted to overtake Facebook 

📌 Pinterest says posting of video to its site has almost tripled

 👥 Meta now allows fake profiles on Facebook

Amazon Cancels Its “You Didn’t Use Our Services” Fee

Well, that didn’t last long.

Amazon says it’s changed its mind and will no longer bill merchants a 2% fee for not using its services.

The fee was announced last month and would have applied to thousands of third-party sellers who use Amazon’s prime fulfilment program but don’t use the shipping component.

Some analysts speculate Amazon got cold feet because of an expected antitrust lawsuit coming later this month — the case expected to focus on the company’s alleged efforts to force sellers to use its logistics services.

Amazon told media today that the fee was “intended to cover our costs” — which is an interesting position, since you’d think not doing something, like shipping a product, would be less expensive than doing something. But what do I know.

Fortune reported today that last year, for the first time, Amazon’s fees ate up about half the cost of each sale.

Almost 38% of U.S. online consumer spending goes to Amazon and its two million third-party merchants.

Microsoft’s New Ads — Good for Marketers; Misleading for Consumers?

Microsoft is launching a new ad category specifically designed for its chatbot — one that flies a little close to the “not disclosing advertising” sun.

Compare & Decide Ads

It’s called the “Conversational Ad” and will eventually have a number of products — the first of which was announced today: Compare & Decide Ads.

Here’s how Microsoft described them:

The image they used as an example appeared to be almost identical to what a consumer might expect a chatbot to generate organically.

It showed someone asking Bing Chat: “I’m looking for an SUV with a strong safety record that is also fuel efficient. Can you help me?”

And Bing Chat did its usual “searching for” stuff, it generated a paragraph that was identical to organic results…

Then output a table showing fields like condition, colour, trim level, dealer, and so on. Interestingly, no data on safety records.

That entire table is the ad unit. The only hint to a regular consumer that they’re looking at an ad is the very tiny word “Ad” in the top-right in light grey text. Honestly, it took me about 20 seconds of looking to even see it.

From a marketing point-of-view, of course, this would probably perform better than something with more clear disclosure, but it’s still an interesting design choice, given the increased scrutiny on ad transparency.

The Compare and Decide format will start to roll out in closed beta at the start of next year.

Chatbot Ads API

They also announced an API for ads inside a chatbot session which will let mobile app developers and web sites drop ads from Microsoft’s marketing platform into chat responses.

The example they used was from Snapchat’s newish chatbot, where a person asks “Do you have any dress recommendations for a birthday party I’m attending?” And the bot responds with a carousel of options.

That carousel is much more clear in its disclosure, with the words “Sponsored results” appearing at the top.

Ad Manager AI Catchup

The company also said it’s working on adding more AI tools into its ads manager — the usual now: headline recommendation, chatbot support, asset generation, and so on.

Instagram: The Little Photo App That Could

Instagram is up; Facebook is down.

Those are the top-line results from a Digiday survey of 200 publishers who said they are posting more content to their Instagram account than they are to their Facebook brand page.

That follows the yearly trend of increased Instagram activity — this year, 91% of publishers of news and entertainment sites said they’d posted to Instagram in the last month.

That number was 86% last year

And 84% the year prior

Also up: the number who post daily. That number on Facebook is trending downward.

Why Instagram? According to Digiday, it’s partly because brands are increasingly seeing Instagram as a place to make money, not just drive general brand awareness.

Eighty-three percent said Instagram is at least somewhat valuable to driving revenues. Last year, that number was only 62%.

More interestingly, not a single respondent in the Digiday survey said the platform is not appropriate for their brand. Last year, 8% said that.

YouTube’s New Tools: Supportive or Spammy?

YouTube today announced a whole bunch of things coming to its service — and if you like endless content generated by AI, you’ll love these.

More AI-Made Videos, God Help Us

There’s something they’re calling Dream Screen that will generated photos and videos that you can run behind your main content in Shorts. So if you want a bunch of twerking pineapples behind your content, soon you’ll be able to.

Don’t know what video to make at all? Let a bot tell you!

Coming to YouTube Studio, a topic generator which will even spit out a content outline for you to follow, in case you’re incapable of basic creativity. The ideas it comes up with will be informed both by what you’ve posted in the past, and by what’s trending out there on that day, so that should be some high-quality content.

All snark aside, there are a couple of nice additions on their way:

A text-to-music tool where it’ll suggest music you can use as background

A way to dub the audio of videos into other languages

Editing Software

They also said they’re working on a new app called YouTube Create which sounds a lot like a clone of the popular CapCut video editing software owned by TikTok’s parent company.

CapCut is free, works on desktop and mobile, and is a remarkable editor — honestly rivals software like Final Cut Pro.

Like CapCut, YouTube Create will provide editing and trimming, automatic captioning, voiceover filters, effects, transitions and royalty-free music.

It should be out soon on Android in the US, the UK, Germany, France, Indonesia, India, Korea, and Singapore. They say they’ll make an iOS app next year.

Headline of the Year

But I’ll give the last word on this to Gizmodo, who nailed this story with its headline:

In Brief

The Twitter competitor Mastodon is getting a big upgrade today. The software will make it easier to search for content on the platform. Until now, you’ve only been able to search for hashtags, not words and phrases. Users will have to turn on the ability for their account to be searchable in that way. [read more]

If trends continue, Instagram will soon outpace Facebook as the largest social media platform by ad revenue. WARC Media forecasts almost 20% revenue growth this year, compared to last. Even last year’s flat ad market saw Instagram revenues climb almost 6%. [read more]

Pinterest this week said it’s seen a 170% increase in video uploads so far compared to last year. The company recently added mobile deep linking to let brands send users directly to a shopping page within the app. [read more]

And finally…

Back in the day, I had two Facebook accounts. One with my name, and one with the name “Congolia Breckenridge” — a George Carlin joke, if you don’t get the reference.

I used Congolia’s account the way people use finstas today — to have a secondary view of the platform, each with its own friends and feed.

But Facebook caught me and shut Congolia’s account down, citing its policy that users must be authentic and use their real name — a policy it said as recently as today is still in effect.

Which is why it’s weird that they also announced today you can now create multiple fake personas using made-up names, and not violate its still-in-effect policy against fake personas using made-up names.

No, I can’t wrap my head around the dissonance either.

In a mind-boggling display of policy gymnastics, Meta today announced it will now let Facebook users create and use multiple personal profiles — as many as five, including your real one. Unlike an actual grey account, this would be tied to your main account, so you wouldn’t need to maintain separate email addresses and passwords and the likes.

This is something they started testing a year ago, and is different than the change that let you more easily swap between different accounts, like if you have a personal Instagram account and a brand Instagram account.

There are a couple of limitations for your porn accounts — I mean “secondary accounts” — you can’t use Messenger or Marketplace as your fake you’s.

Meta somehow managed to shoehorn this into its longstanding policy called Account Integrity and Authentic Identity which says that you have to use your real name.

But now, they say they interpret it this way: You have to use your real name on your main account, but can make up any names you like for your finstas, as long as you don’t pretend to be another real person. So, no creating an army of fake Elon Musks — as is possible right now on the Elon Musk-owned X.

From a marketing point of view, this shouldn’t have any real impact on campaigns or metrics — since these fake accounts are all pooled under one central account, we can only assume they won’t duplicate reach counts.

I can’t imagine they’d be bold enough to start reporting user counts based on profiles, not actual people. Right? They wouldn’t do that…. right?

This starts rolling out globally today and will take a couple of months.

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