The Top Three 🏆

The industry’s most important stories today.

🥇 2024’S MARKETING MISSES

And with that, the 2024 marketing season is coming to an end. As we wrap up the year, Marketing Brew asked CMOs and top marketers to call out the most overrated trends in marketing today. more

• Performance Marketing: There’s a reason ROAS is a four-letter word. It lies about incrementality. Enough said.

• AI-Generated Creative: While AI-generated fashion images are rising, the clothing brand will stick to real models and shoots for now.

• Curation & Identity in Ad Tech: Curation and identity are overhyped buzzwords. People care less now.

🥈 QUICK DELIVERIES? QUICK RETURNS.

Fast deliveries might seem like a win, but new research shows that e-commerce orders arriving earlier than expected can backfire, especially for new customers. When orders arrive too quickly, customers are more likely to question their purchase decision, increasing the chances of returns. more

• To avoid this, researchers suggest providing a more accurate delivery range, offering slower, cheaper, or eco-friendly options, and reminding customers why they made the purchase.

• While faster deliveries can trigger doubts about the purchase, longer delivery times give customers more time to rationalize and accept their decision.

🥉 TEMU REIGNS, THREADS RISES

The app download landscape is shifting: Apple’s 2024 app download charts reveal Temu reigning as the top app for the second year, after dethroning TikTok in 2023. more

• Threads, Meta’s X competitor, claims second place with 275 million MAUs, up from third last year.

• Despite the U.S. ban threat, TikTok takes third.

• OpenAI’s ChatGPT app secures fourth place.

• The Google app rounds out the top five.

The Interview 🎙️

A Deep-Dive Analysis from Our Podcast

This week, Tod speaks with Andrew Hutchinson of Social Media Today to get his predictions of what 2025 will look like for the major social media platforms, digital marketers, and the emerging platforms in the space.

Today’s Other News ☑︎

Everything else that matters.

Advertising & Influencer Marketing 📣

• Google Merchant Center now offers a “first order” discount field in the “Promotion conditions” section for Shopping Ads. more

• More influencer companies are looking to lure creators with talent platforms that offer CTV and AI tools. more

  • Swell.AI turns social content into interactive TV ads.

  • Foam provides talent managers access to a network of 40,000+ creators, along with data on audience, social feeds, and tools for pitching and credentialing.

Search 🔍

• Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, recommends tackling site reputation by treating different sections as “sites within a site”, basically mini-sites. more

  • 🎯 He explains that when third-party content exploits site signals built from first-party content, it can confuse users. Treating different sections as ‘sites within a site' helps solve this problem.

• 💣️ Google's John Mueller just dropped a truth bomb: He said SEOs and site owners shouldn't spend time disavowing “toxic” links, calling it a “billable waste of time” to use SEO tools for this task. more

• Is ChatGPT ACTUALLY a threat to Google? A new survey found that 2 out of 3 consumers believe AI will replace search engines in 3 years. more

  • 🎯 With 60% using AI daily and half seeing it as interchangeable with search, the future of search is changing.

Social Media 📱

• Threads has hit 100 million daily active users, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced yesterday. more

  • 👏 Big milestone, sure… not just for the number, but because it’s the first time Meta’s actually shared daily active user data.

• Just 32 days until D -Day: TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew was scheduled to meet with U.S. President-elect Donald Trump yesterday ahead of a potential U.S. ban on the app. Trump said he had “a warm spot” for TikTok at a news conference earlier in the day, adding they'd “take a look” at the app and a possible ban, which is set to go into effect just one day before his inauguration. more

Podcasts🎙️ 

• Podcast service, Podimo, released its 2024 Global Trend Report which shows a 45% increase year-over-year in local-language podcast and audiobook listening. more

• YouTube released its A 2024 recap of YouTube on TV which shows a surge in podcast viewing. With more than 400M hours of podcasts watched monthly on living room devices, viewers are tuning in like it's a late-night talk show. more

Tech & Policy News 📰 

• Google updated its Generative AI Prohibited Use Policy today. Key restrictions include prohibiting the creation of non-consensual intimate images, illegal activities, and content promoting violence, hate, or misinformation. more

• Meta gets hit with a $264 million fine for a 2018 data breach that exposed 30M accounts. The Irish Data Protection Commission announced today that the breach led to four GDPR violations. Meta plans to appeal (because of course they do). more

• AI search engine Perplexity recently launched a new revenue share model, but Digiday reports today that the revenue split for publishers depends on several factors, according to sources. Publishers earn a percentage of ad revenue when their pages are cited in response to user queries, though the range for each publisher varies. more

Marketing Tool of the Day 🔨

Best kept secrets of the digital marketing world¹

 

UNUM has everything you need to plan, create, schedule, and analyze social media content across channels—all in one convenient place.

• Design and organize social media content across all your brand’s channels

• Auto-post content on the best day and time to achieve maximum engagement

• Schedule social posts across multiple channels in advance

• Track performance, engagement, and audience behavior

Today’s Trivia Question 🧠

Tap your guess and you could win!

Spotted on Social 🔍

The social web’s best posts in the last 24 hours.

The biggest thing to know as a young marketer is that most of your customers are old. If you become an expert in selling to your parents or grandparents, that's where the money is. Literally.

People 75 to dead buy five times as many new cars as people 18-25. But we pander to young people like us.

— The Marketing Guy (@mktguy.bsky.social)
4:17 PM • Dec 17, 2024

This is the greatest chart which has ever been designed. Prove me wrong.

— Tod Maffin (@todmaffin.com)
4:26 PM • Dec 17, 2024