There are a couple of stories that popped up this week about the big ad exchanges and the shifts in the ad buying landscape that paint a telling picture of the whole landscape. They are:
Meta pays Buzzfeed nearly $10 million to generate content for Facebook, Instagram
BuzzFeed says it will use AI tools from OpenAI to personalize its content
So there’s massive fraud in ad exchanges. We know this, but the above story is a BIG reminder of the huge costs of this fraud. Facebook is losing users to TikTok and TikTok, which comes with real potential security risks for users, is beginning to fight back on all the talks about banning the app.
Brian Morrissey at The Rebooting wraps up a lot of the Facebook/Google/Apple as exchange drama up really nicely in this piece. It’s a must read and provides much richer context than I could.
To me, so much of this giant moment of change can be understood through the lens trust and good creative content.
Brands need trust in ad exchanges to invest money in them. It’s why Truth Social is selling snake oil and can’t get any big brands, and also why brands pulled spend from Twitter once Elong Mush started mixing things up over there.
Also though, the social/tech platforms like Meta, YouTube and TikTok-Tok need the trust of creators to build active healthy networks. These creator generate the fuel of these networks and they want to know their work will be promoted, or at least get a fair share of views, that they can build revenue models and that the platforms themselves won’t evolve away from what they originally were. These networks absolutely need the creators to embrace them.
The news that Meta is hiring Buzzfeed as a sort of content studio to create videos seems to me like a sign that Meta needs to prime the pump and get more interesting creative content back on the platform. Why? Because so many creators are now creating for Tik-Tok and users are following. I see this in the watch world, which I follow closely. The most interesting creators are on TikTok-Tok and they just syndicate their content to Instagram, but don’t actually create for Instagram anymore.
Without the trust of creatives, and the creatives themselves, you really don’t have much of a product to offer to users or advertisers.
It’s one reason I’m bullish on branded content in the coming year(s). Branded content is a way to message with very creative content in environments that are inherently trustworthy - something I think brands will want to embrace given the fraud and lack of trust around social media/tech platforms with waining creative influence.
Here’s some good content from this week.
Links
Speaking of trust: Journalism has a Davos Problem. Journalists, seriously just stop going. See also this (Heard through Context Collapse).
Why @dieworkwear is suddenly blowing up our feeds. @Dieworkwear, Twitter’s ‘Menswear Guy,’ Is Just as Perplexed as You Are
The Personal Brand Paradox, or why we should all just please stop talking about ourselves as brands.
Cal Newport is the most interesting person thinking about modern life and work in my opinion. Here he gets the NYT Magazine interview treatment.
50 Years of Texas Monthly. Here's how to keep a magazine going strong, from its founder.
Future Cringe is an amazingly refreshing piece, even if the word is “cringe” is well…cringe.
The Desks of Gear Patrol
I love content that reveals the seemingly mundane to peek inside someone’s work. This was essentially what the original Hand & Eye was all about - going into the creative spaces of makers to meet them and see how they work. Their tray of tools may not seem interesting to them, but to those of us on the outside (stuck in cubicles), it’s fascinating. With that in mind, Gear Patrol went fully remote during the pandemic with team members spreading out far and wide. Here's a look at how our editors have set up their workstations. Yes, my workspace (pictured above) made it in as well.
That’s it,
John