When ‘For You' Becomes ‘Forget You'

Your brand's TikTok videos are terrible, and I think you know they are.

Today's News

80% of Brand TikToks Are Getting Left “on Read”

Meta Business Updates

Shopify Adds PayPal to U.S. Payments

Marketers Boost Budgets for 2024

Roblox Unlocks In-Game Commerce with Shopify

Hackers Target WhatsApp Privacy Feature

80% of Brand TikToks Are Getting Left “on Read”

Not very mindful, not very demure — Your brand's TikTok may be more of a miss than a hit. New research has found that 8 out of 10 videos on the app fail to capture consumers' attention and generate positive emotions.

It’s giving… nothing

According to new research from ad agency DAIVID, 85% of brand videos on TikTok underperform, generating weak emotional responses and poor brand recall.

The data

The study also found:

A quarter of these videos triggered strong negative emotions like anxiety, fear, and discomfort, potentially risking brand reputations.

60% of brand videos were forgettable, ranking below average in both emotional engagement and brand recall.

Branded TikTok content was 10% less likely to generate intense positive emotions than the global average and attracted 2.5% less attention.

Meta Business Updates

Meta has been emailing a very scary sounding email to marketers the last few days — we’ve gotten a few emails asking if we know anything about it.

The Email

First, here’s the email [our highlights]:

The scary part reads:

Meta’s often unclear about, well, everything, and this one is no exception.

What are custom parameters?

Let’s back up. They’re talking about custom parameters here — that’s the data in UTM parameters. UTMs carry information about the link source, the medium, the campaign name, and so on.

They come at the end of a URL and are often used by advertisers to track the effectiveness of a campaign.

If you’re running 20 ads to the same URL — one from Meta, one from Google, one from an email newsletter, one from a QR code on a billboard — this lets you encode that URL with a signal that helps you track back the source of that click.

What Meta is actually talking about

Although it sounds like Meta is saying they’re dropping UTM parameters entirely, they’re not. As far as we can tell.

They seem to be talking about UTM data which can compromise a user’s privacy — specifically, UTM data that discloses what specific web page or path a user came from. This could be used to infer more information about that person than Meta wants — for instance, it could give away that they clicked that link on a web path about Chlamydia and, well, now that data’s potentially associated with the user.

Custom audiences may break

This also means that if you used this strategy, and you built custom audiences off data that included file paths, those audiences might break.

One person on LinkedIn said he believes audiences that combine URL paths and another rule (like device) don’t work any more and can’t be used in campaigns.

We’ve reached out to Meta to see if they can provide any other specific examples, and will update this story if we hear back.

Shopify Adds PayPal to U.S. Payments

Shopify merchants in the U.S. can now accept PayPal as a payment option.

PayPal announced its new role yesterday, letting the platform process credit and debit card transactions for Shopify Payments.

Joining forces with Stripe

This partnership brings PayPal alongside Stripe, Shopify's main payment processor in the U.S. It’s part of PayPal CEO Alex Chriss’ strategy to revitalize the company and stay competitive with faster-growing rivals like Stripe and Adyen.

A competitive edge

Part of the strategy included enhancing checkout experiences with features like Fastlane, which speeds up purchases by auto-filling card and shipping details, as well as forming more partnerships, even with direct competitors. Just a few weeks ago, PayPal announced that Adyen would offer Fastlane to some of its U.S. merchants.

Now, with this latest move, it seems PayPal is coming for Stripe’s territory.

Marketers Boost Budgets for 2024

Marketers are ramping up their ad budgets for 2024.

According to a new report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, ad spend projections have jumped to 12% from the 9.5% it forecasted at the end of last year.

Economic optimism

With a resilient economy fueling optimism, the report found a 2.5% rise in consumer spending in the second quarter of 2024, easing buyers' fears of instability.

Retail media is also seeing an increase. Buyers have revised their year-over-year projections from 22% to 25%.

Shifts in KPI focus

The study also found that buyers are prioritizing cross-funnel KPIs and shifting focus to reach optimization as interest in new KPIs wanes. Meanwhile, measurement challenges persist for the industry, despite subsiding economic concerns.

The report also notes that goals can differ by channel. For example, in digital video, buyers are determining success via business outcomes such as:

Sales

Store/website visits

Roblox Unlocks In-Game Commerce with Shopify

Roblox is leveling up virtual commerce by teaming up with Shopify to let brands sell real-world items within its metaverse.

A game-changing partnership

The gaming platform will soon integrate Shopify’s checkout feature, letting developers, creators, and brands on Shopify sell physical items directly within Roblox games, tapping into its audience of nearly 80 million daily active users as of the second quarter of 2024.

Metaverse merch

Retailers are increasingly exploring the Roblox platform to connect with Gen Z and Gen Alpha consumers. Walmart became the first to sell real-world items on the gaming platform in September 2022. Through its IRL commerce shop, the retail giant lets users purchase physical items and receive digital twins for their avatars.

Users can also:

Try on and buy trending content

Provide feedback to Walmart about featured products

Customize their virtual Walmart cart

Showcase favourite items

The new Shopify integration will expand this kind of “real-world” shopping on Roblox to a wider range of retailers.

Hackers Target WhatsApp Privacy Feature

Hackers are setting their sights on WhatsApp’s ‘View Once’ privacy feature, with developers from cryptowallet startup Zengo calling it “completely broken and trivially bypassed.”

View once, then again, and again

Zengo’s team discovered that the feature, designed to let messages be viewed only once before disappearing, was not properly enforced by the server. Instead of ensuring messages vanish, ‘View Once’ messages are treated like regular messages with a flag indicating they should only be viewed once. Attackers can easily remove this flag, turning these messages into regular ones that can be downloaded, forwarded, and shared.

Zengo also found code examples on GitHub of a modified Android client and a Chrome extension that exploited this flaw.

Meta’s response

The team alerted WhatsApp through Meta’s bug bounty program more than two weeks ago. A spokesperson confirmed the issue is under investigation, and that they are working on a fix, advising users to “only send View Once messages to people they know and trust.”

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