MediaCat Weekly #43 — IPA's Bellwether, Meet the Booktokers, and games marketing

Welcome to MediaCat Weekly, our short and sweet newsletter featuring some top stories from the past week, recent conversations, and a round-up of industry news.

This week, we continue with our monthly theme 'Out of Touch', looking at just how different marketers are from the general UK population. We also explore games marketing, revealing where marketers often go wrong and what gamers actually want. Outside of this theme, we have articles on leveraging playful nostalgia in ad creative and we question why there are no women at the top of YouTube rankings.

Enjoy the issue and listen to our October playlist, curated by Editor Mike Piggott.

IPA’s Bellwether should be viewed in context

By Tom Carter

I think it’s fair to say we’re due some good news. After months of political change, global unrest, depressing domestic headlines and, to top it off, interminable rain, it’d be nice if we could at least be distracted by industry-wide positivity while at work. Sadly, last week’s IPA Bellwether failed to deliver on that score. After 14 quarters of consecutive growth, it has been forecasted that Q3 will be flat.

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Is Generative AI safe for your brand?

By Mike Bell

In the 18 months since generative AI has been widely available, B2B marketers have faced questions about what role it can play in our jobs. The upsides are exciting. The hyper-fast speeds at which generative AI can quickly analyse data, streamline workflows, summarise documents, and assist with research are amazing. So are its blazingly fast capabilities to produce copy, images, videos and music — all from written or spoken prompts. But many are concerned about how safe it is to use.

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I’ve started living outside my usual bubble

By Joel Stein

In early August this year, my partner and I moved out of our house in South Manchester to hit the road. Now we’re housesitting full-time with no fixed address. That is, we’re looking after people’s pets in their homes whilst they’re away, and working nomadically as we go. This leftfield lifestyle is bringing us into unusually intimate contact with a spectrum of people far broader than we’d otherwise encounter. We usually arrive the day before they leave, and often spend some time together when they return.

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Why B2B brands should embrace taglines

By Charlotte Irwin

Iconic taglines like ‘Every little helps’ or ‘Because you’re worth it’ have made household names of brands Tesco and L’Oréal — and even become part of our everyday language. But in the world of B2B, taglines can seem like an afterthought, if they’re used at all. Why do so many B2B organisations fail to embrace taglines? I think it’s time they took advantage of this powerful branding tool.

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Conversations

Sam Missingham introduces Meet The Booktokers

In this podcast, MediaCat‘s Content and Social Media Editor, Svilena Keane, speaks to the founder of The Empowered Author and Meet The Booktokers, Samantha Missingham. They discuss the evolution of book marketing and the idea behind the newly-launched platform, Meet The BookTokers

News

• Dentsu has published its 2024 State of Gaming report in collaboration with GWI. The report features an analysis of the current landscape, revealing that the industry’s value is worth more than that of music and movies combined; specifically, gaming has a market value of $184 billion, while the global box office and the music industry are worth $33.9 billion and $28.6 billion, respectively. Despite this, gaming makes up less than 5% of advertising spend. read
• On 24 October, the customer acquisition specialist, esbconnect, announced that it has partnered with the data and analytics consultancy, Sagacity. This partnership will combine Sagacity’s Intra dataset with esb’s email dataset to help advertisers engage new and existing audiences through email, social, programmatic and postal. read
• The UAE-based out-of-home (OOH) media company BackLite Media announced that it has joined forces with the global digital out-of-home (DOOH) supply-side platform, VIOOH. This mutually beneficial partnership marks VIOOH’s entry into the region’s DOOH market and unlocks opportunities for advertisers worldwide. read

Seen elsewhere

• Media: The UK public’s positive feelings towards Christmas ads are at their highest levels since measurements began, owing much to a strong festive showing last year. Revealed by new data from insights firm Kantar, as many as 59% of people say they ‘love’ Christmas TV ads, up from 51% last year, with 56% adding that they were ‘really looking forward to seeing Christmas ads on TV’, up from 48% in 2023. (Marketing Beat)
• Media: Spotify is piloting an ad exchange, or a supply-side platform (SSP), to help scale its automated ad offerings, three sources familiar with the effort told Axios. The focus will be on video to start. In building its own exchange, Spotify can capture more ad revenue from small- and medium-sized businesses and make it easier for existing clients, including big brands, to spend more efficiently with the platform. (Axios)
• Tech: OpenAI and Microsoft are funding projects to bring more AI tools into the newsroom. The duo will give grants of up to $10 million to Chicago Public Media, the Minnesota Star Tribune, Newsday (in Long Island, NY), The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Seattle Times. Each of the publications will hire a two-year AI fellow to develop projects for implementing the technology and improving business sustainability. Three more outlets are expected to receive fellowship grants in a second round. (Engadget)
• Tech: Google is making SynthID Text, its technology that lets developers?watermark and detect?text written by generative AI models, generally available. SynthID Text can be downloaded from the AI platform Hugging Face and Google’s updated Responsible GenAI Toolkit. (Tech Crunch)
• Media: Ireland’s data protection commission has fined LinkedIn Ireland €310 million ($335 million) for illegally processing the personal data of users within the European Union to deliver targeted advertising. (Bloomberg)

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