🗞️ Digital Marketing Must-Knows

Hi! Every Monday we round up 5 essential marketing stories ready for you to skim in 60 seconds.

📰 News

1. Amazon takes a crack at live stream commerce for Prime day. YouTube, Pinterest, & TikTok have all tried to create a platform to sell products live this year. But do we actually want to shop that way? It's the $400bn live commerce industry in China that try major players are looking to replicate in the west. (Financial Times ↗️)

• Amazon have an influencer marketing strategy in place to promote 'Amazon Live', incentivizing creators to bring their followings from YouTube / TikTok/ Instagram over to Amazon to sell promotional products.

• Amazon.com/Live is the destination for the streams, which Amazon launched in 2019.

• Viewers scroll through a carousel under the video and purchase the Prime Day deals.

2. While TikTok has shelved their expansion plans for their live shopping attempt, 'TikTok Shop'. TikTok is struggling to gain traction after their launch in the UK. A TikTok employee said “the market just isn’t there yet". YouTube, Instagram & Pinterest have also attempted social commerce but it's still all up for grabs. (Financial Times ↗️)

3. Pinterest launches Product Tagging on Pins. Pinterest has made it smoother for their users to buy products displayed in images. The tags show the price and description and links to the merchant's catalog. They also announced: Verified merchant badges, Shop tab on business profiles & Pinterest Shopping API. (Tech Crunch ↗️)

4. Twitter announces co-authored Tweets. 'Co-tweets' allows one user to invite another to contribute to a tweet. With both Twitter accounts given credit as the Tweeter. Designed for influencer collaborations and cross-promotions. (Twitter ↗️)

5. Google has created an official page showing organic search ranking algorithm updates. Google has limited the list to the ones they say are the most impactful. A little more transparency (SEO Roundtable ↗️) 

Plus

• Meta breaks down how to get the most from Reels

• Google adds diagnostics to Performance Max setup

• Twitter links are back to no-followed

✂️ TL;DR

WSJ published an article on whether online advertising spending is likely to slow down during an expected recession

🔧 Meta anticipated a slowdown and cut 30% of their engineering budget.

🐌 Advertising spend is still expected to grow 9% year over year, but this is a slow down from the 17% in Q1.

🍕 In the last financial crisis, advertising accounted for 12% of total spending. Advertising was 67% of total spending last year.

🛡️ But the resilience of the online advertising industry has never been tested.

🧰 Tools