But the latest App Store update by Apple might change things slightly. 

It is possible that in the future small business owners and influencers using iOS apps will incur some extra costs when advertising on Meta platforms.

But why?

Recently, Apple has updated its App Store rules to require that iOS developers have to use in-app purchases, giving Apple a 30% commission on all in-app purchases across the App Store. 

While Apple’s in-app purchase system is nothing new, Facebook and Instagram have never used it in their apps, meaning that the whole ‘boost’ amount went straight to Meta to pay for your ads. 

By forcing in-app purchases on all apps, Apple swung a big hit at Meta, but it’s the small businesses that depend on its advertising tools that might suffer the most.

Here’s why.

The current rules do not apply to Meta’s standalone ads manager, meaning that ads created off the iOS apps do not incur the same 30% tax. 

The problem is that normally an ads manager is used by larger companies and corporations with large spending budgets. 

It makes sense: their digital marketing activities can involve huge, complicated campaigns that need to be (you guessed it) ‘managed’.

If we look at the ‘Boost’ button option on Facebook and Instagram, it does not quite compare to the Ads Manager when it comes to tailoring audience targeting or personalising ad placements. 

But it’s simple. And simple does the job when you’ve got a small business to run. 

Until big tech says it doesn’t any more.

Meta argues that the aftermath of these changes by Apple will be felt the most by small businesses and influencers, potentially reducing the effectiveness of their advertising spend.

It is so far unclear whether the extra costs will be applied to iOS users only or spread out across all Meta advertisers. It’s also unclear when the changes will take place. But there might be something you can do in anticipation of what’s to come.

What do I do now?

If you can’t beat them, join them.

It is clear that using Meta’s Ads Manager does have its benefits. And if you’re an owner of an SME, it’s a good way to get around the new iOS tax. 

You probably have a lot of questions at this point and we’re here to guide you.

Here’s how we think Meta’s business manager works best.

Setup: Meta Business Manager

First of all, think of the Ads Manager as a tool that needs its own box. 

In the Meta suite, Meta Business Manager is the equivalent of the tool box. It is your main advertising hub for Facebook and Instagram, where you can manage all of your assets like Pages and Ad Accounts. 

It will also help keep your business and private accounts separate, as they should be –

especially if you expect your business to grow and more people will have to be involved. 

As an agency, we see the mix of business and private accounts way too often, and those setup mistakes can interfere with the advertising process and are very time consuming to fix. 

If they can be fixed at all.

To start your Meta Business Manager:

1. Go to business.facebook.com/overview.
2. Click Create account.
3. Enter a name for your business, your name and work email address and click Next.
4. Enter your business details and click Submit.

Business Info & Payments

Once you’ve got your Business manager open, you’ll be able to easily add the following by navigating the lefthand side menu:

• Business info (business name, address, Tax ID, etc.)
• Payment method (card you want to use to pay for your ads)

Connecting existing Pages and Accounts

If you already have an existing Facebook page, Instagram account, or ad account, follow the Setup Guide in the lefthand side menu to easily link those assets to your new Business account.

To create a new Ad Account:

1. Navigate to Ad Accounts.
2. Click Add.
3. Click Add a new ad account and follow instructions.

Ads Manager

Once you have all of your assets created or connected to your new Meta business manager, head to your Ads Manager and you’re ready to start advertising. 

Well, technically.

Since the setup of the Ads Manager is quite different from using the ‘Boost’ button, we recommend that you look into the Meta Blueprint, which provides free learning on all things Meta or check out a couple of Youtube tutorials for step by step guides, tips and tricks.

We know, it’s a lot. We didn’t say it was going to be easy. But it will be worth it knowing that your hard-earned advertising budget is being spent effectively.

A Temporary Fix

The Ads Manager method is a good short-term solution that will allow you to make the most of your digital advertising budget. 

At least in the meantime. 

However, it is likely that Apple will eventually require the same charge for Meta’s standalone ads manager app, which will have a larger impact on businesses as a whole. Watch this space for updates. 

We do not normally work with smaller clients, but we know that a situation like this can be overwhelming. If you need help or advice on the issue, feel free to get in touch, we’d be happy to help. 

The post Boosting on Facebook & Instagram may get 30% Pricier – Here’s Why appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Cannes 2022 is made up of those ads. 

Ad agencies from around the world compete to land a prize at Cannes Lions, hoping to take home one of the bronze, silver, or gold lions. These companies put their heart and soul into their work, and during Cannes Lions, they get to see that effort pay off. 

And, hey, even if they don’t land a lion, getting shortlisted is an incredible achievement in its own right. 

We’ve been following Cannes for years. This year’s offerings are something special. 

Here are nine of our top favourites, whether or not they landed a Lion – in no particular order. 

1. Ogilvy Asia – Spotify

Sound Tour (Japan)

Sound creates memories. After two years of pandemic lockdowns and restrictions, Ogilvy Asia wanted to bring back the memory of travelling in Japan – and they wanted to make sure that they used the best platform to do it with. Working with local artisans and Japan-based musician Matt Cab, Ogilvy constructed three larger-than-life Spotify codes that linked travellers in the location to the sound of that region. 

Truly, one of the most creative uses of squid at Cannes we’ve seen so far. And you can still listen to the songs on Spotify without having to scan the code. Here’s our personal favourite.

Melissa says, “What a brilliant and creative way to bridge an experience with their app. Not only did they create a playlist per location to enhance people’s experience while visiting, they made it incredibly easy to access it (the codes), by merging it with the culture (the lanterns, the flowers) – it honestly blew my mind how they collaborated with local artisans to create the codes, instead of opting for a printed banner that will look cheap and out of place, they managed to make the Spotify experience part of the landscape in the most subtle, yet visible way. Bloody brilliant. I bow to the team that managed to create both an aesthetically pleasing and functional jurney that enhances a person’s experience – a wonderful example of brand love.“

2. Wunderman-Thompson – Sherwin-Williams

Speaking in Colour

Colours can be deceptive; what you see on a screen or picture in your mind might not actually look the way you want it to in real life, and while it’s not the biggest problem in the world, Sherwin-Williams wanted to make sure that the colour you had in mind is the colour you wound up with. 

With Wunderman-Thompson’s help, they brought to life an AI-powered colour system that works with voice search. They ask you, ‘describe your dream colour’, and once you do, the AI trawls the internet’s images to create a custom colour palette. Besides helping people find the best colour for their walls, just the way they pictured it, it’s also helping to build one of the biggest known databases for colour attribution in the world – and lending a lot of insight into which colours are popular where and why. 

This one is great for a number of reasons; it’s innovative without being overwrought, and it leverages AI and voice search in a way that’s fun to play around with. Watching the AI generate a colour palette from a single word is effortlessly entertaining, which is one of the highest accolades tech in 2022 can achieve

. 

3. DAVID São Paulo – Burger King

Burger Glitch

We’ve all had at least one experience where something online doesn’t quite render the right way, and the results are one part horrifying to two parts funny. Burger King decided to capitalise on it by seeding glitches and easter eggs into their app, leaving them up to curious fans to come across them – and to incentivise the hunt for easter eggs, people who post their glitches to social media stand to win a discount coupon on top of the up-to-40% off that you get for finding one of those glitches regardless.

Our Head of Studio, Andrea, is especially fond of this one: “Most of us have come across these weirdly hilarious glitches in games, or have seen videos of these, so we can easily make the connection with that one hilarious moment when things didn’t go as planned. But those imperfect moments are the ones we remember and stick with us the most.”

4. Gong – Netflix

The Art of Stealing

Gong is a Polish agency. ‘Lady with an Ermine’, a Leonardo Da Vinci work, is the most expensive painting in Poland. 

To promote Netflix’s Lupin, a series where gentleman thief Assane Diop carries out elaborate heists in the style of Arsène Lupin, they worked with the Polish National Museum to use the most famous painting in Poland as guerilla marketing. They set up a painting both inside and outside of the museum of the Lady with an Ermine missing her trademark black necklace, generating quite a lot of buzz from people who happened to see the painting. 

A few days later, Gong added one more thing to the campaign: a shot lifted from Lupin, where Assane Diop holds a black necklace and says, ‘merci madame’. 

A good public billboard can do a lot, and it’s easy to overlook the impact of a billboard when we have so much more technology at our disposal – however, Gong pulled off an incredible piece of guerilla marketing using one of the oldest forms of advertising, and invigorated a field where it’s easy to get lost in the noise of other adverts: incredible, stunning work, no matter which way you look at it. 

5. BBDO Canada – Canadian Paralympic Committee

Para Expansion Pack

Lego is one of the biggest toys in the world, beloved by adults and kids alike. Their expansion packs feature everything from astronauts to figures taken right from popular culture, with more coming along the way – and thanks to BBDO Canada and the Canadian Paralympic Committee, we now have a taste of what it looks like to have Paralympic minifigures to add to Lego’s considerable back catalogue. 

Product design that’s a force for good is always worth attention. The paralympic minifigure pack showcases a subset of society that has been overlooked in toys; it’s true that not every kid or adult needs to see themselves in product offerings, but seeing yourself reflected in society always helps. 

As Andrea said, “Lego needs to make this yesterday.”

6. Grey New York – Applebee’s

Fancy Like

Tiktok virality – any virality, actually – is hard to chase after. Most ads never reach that level of international acclaim, and that doesn’t mean that they’re bad ads; it just means that it wasn’t their turn. This ad by Applebee’s never had a chance not to go viral. Combining Tiktok dances, feel-good bouncy Southern music, and everyone’s favourite topic (food), it’s the kind of thing that gets pretty good when it’s done accidentally. 

Underneath the helm of Grey New York, it’s hilarious and light and an antidote to the really heavy couple of months that we’ve been through. 

Also, the song’s really catchy. 

7. Dentsu Creative Bengaluru – VICE

The Unfiltered History Tour

We live in an entirely different world now than we did, and that occasionally means reckoning with a past that is less than beautiful. For VICE, Dentsu Creative Bengaluru wanted to make a point about colonisation. 

But instead of an outright attack, Dentsu Creative went one step further, and created an educational experience that nobody can argue against. The Unfiltered History Tour was created to elevate under-reported issues and to reach out to a younger audience so we can start changing our future, even if we can’t change our past. 

The British Museum is full of artefacts taken from countries around the world, some of which have been fighting to reclaim their treasures for years. They’re not saying anything new – this history has been raked over the coals of social media for years – but by bringing it to national attention, there’s a hope it can prompt change. 

Our copywriter likes this one in particular: “History is a thorny subject for countries in power: it’s hard to sell a national glory when your past is full of things you’d rather not reckon with, but it is a history that needs to be known. Bringing it to awareness is the only way to affect a lasting change and make sure that you end up on the right side of history – the one that understands that you had a hand in shaping the current world, and that you’re trying to make amends for it.”

8. VMLY&R Commerce – Elena’s

Fan Heartbreak Ice Cream

The pandemic pushed a lot of stores into closing their doors and taking their businesses online, and for some, they were struggling to stand out in a market that had had decades to build a reasonable presence in real life. It happened to Elena’s, a Mexican ice-cream store that needed to come up with a way to stand out on the grocery store shelves immediately. 

To do so, they released a special edition ice-cream: The Fan Heartbreak Ice-cream, a five-tiered tub where each flavour has mood-lifting properties to get you through a hard time. They also restructured the entire website to guide you through the flavours themselves, and give you tips on how to boost your mood. 

Shortly after, they released limited edition packaging to poke fun at Mexico losing the Gold Cup finale, which further boosted the narrative of ice-cream as intrinsically tied to making you feel better. 

It’s a clean, beautifully shot campaign that turns a traditional story on its head, and really makes you think about why ice-cream has such a connection to heartbreak – and best of all, it made people laugh at a time when people really struggled to find something to laugh about. A great campaign all around. 

9. Performance Art – Black&Abroad

The Black Elevation Map

Data has blindspots: things that you miss out on if you’re not looking, and it isn’t a big stretch to understand that the data that most normally has those blindspots come from minority groups. Black travellers who want to trace out the impact Black Americans have had on the culture of the United States have few resources, and Black&Abroad wanted to change that and give travellers something to help. The Black Elevation Map charters a route through America where the influence of Black creators is taken into consideration: from restaurants that fuelled the Civil Rights movements to the accolades won by startup tech companies, the Black Elevation Map is designed to be easy to read, easy to parse, and easy to use. 

It’s an excellent use of data for something that can truly bring forward a better understanding of the Black American experience. 

10. Bonus! ReThink’s Multiple Entries

Fellow ICOM partner Rethink has had multiple entries win awards at Cannes, and they’ve been voted the third best independent agency network overall – so we can’t end this list without leaving at least one mention of Rethink’s work. From their ‘draw ketchup’ campaign for Heinz to the ‘Colours of Pride’ in support of gay rights, Rethink has had a banner year for awards, and they’re well deserved. 

The post Cannes Lions 2022 – A Retrospective appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

The internet has a habit of amplifying the human condition.

If there is something we’re great at, we get to see a lot of it – training dogs to perform tricks, recipes to make kale edible, breaking Olympic records, and how to tear a pair of jeans into an entire outfit.

If there is something that we suck at, then the internet amplifies this to an extreme. We don’t need examples of this. You surely have a memory of something horrifying you saw on the internet that made you doubt whether our species ought to persist.

But there is one thing we all struggle with. It is called cognitive dissonance. We are a species almost incapable of holding two opposing notions in our minds at the same time, even if they are both valid.

So we create a single view about absolutely everything in an attempt to simplify the world. If we love some stuff and hate some other stuff, there is this comforting binary space (the irony of which doesn’t go unnoticed) that is devoid of grey areas.

When anything happens anywhere in the world, we examine it and, undecided, read the opinions of people in our social streams. Unsurprisingly, there is a relatively homogeneous opinion – our spheres love it or hate it (there is an even worse fate – that of a whole lot of unimpressed ‘meh’ reactions).

Then we commit. We’re all in and invested or we’re hating the guts of whoever made the news.

Today, after a few weeks of typical Elon Musk cryptic tweets, Twitter seems to have agreed to go private, with Musk purchasing the shares for somewhere in the region of $44 billion.

Unsurprisingly, Twitter exploded once again. And just as predictable is an overwhelmingly binary set of reactions (along with the usual ‘if he spent so much money doing this why didn’t he spend them doing that?).

Broadly speaking, the two positions are:

• Now that this billionaire owns Twitter, he will single handedly control the narrative for the planet, eliminating free speech and turning the platform into the voice that suits him. This is the fault of woke culture and a win for the right wing. There will be an exodus from Twitter as a result.

• Now that this billionaire owns Twitter, he will have no investor interests to protect and can allow Twitter to self-regulate, bringing the terrifying prospect of a free platform to the masses. A truly free platform doesn’t censor people like Donald Trump and allows for their lies, hate speech, and misinformed positions. There will be an exodus from Twitter as a result.

So, if Elon Musk knew that the world would be divided by the news and that neither of the positions is apparently an ideal outcome, why did he make such an expensive move?

If we knew the inner workings of his mind, we’d be just as rich. We cannot presume to know the totality of all the moving parts that are in motion when a deal of this magnitude is struck. What we can observe is a pattern of behaviour.

The billionaire who is a fan of a Formula 1 team and sees it struggle as a result of poor business decisions wakes up one morning and buys the team. The same happens with favourite football teams, media outlets, retail giants… we’ve seen this happen before and there is no stopping it. After all, the world’s billionaires are getting younger and, paradoxically, give fewer fucks than their ageing counterparts.

What do we think of it?

At Switch, we have a healthy discussion going on about the news. We’re presenting a few quotes rather than editing them into a single position because, well, we’re not vanilla.

We’re conflicted

Tom was quite succinct, preferring to dig deeper before committing to a complete opinion but he is certain about one thing:

“I honestly haven’t read much into it though the thought of Donald Trump being given a platform on twitter again is pretty scary.”

Tom

Elise, always happy to handle conflicting points of view, says:

“I’m conflicted because while it does mean a big change for Twitter and a greater platform for far-right pundits, it’s not like Twitter doesn’t already have major issues – what we’re probably going to see is a mass exodus of people, which happens every time a social media becomes too big and therefore starts trying to implement changes. We saw it with Facebook: people are on Instagram. Then we saw it on Instagram: people are now on Twitter.

The only difference is that there isn’t a ready small platform to take over from Twitter now, but there will be eventually, or everyone will end up on Reddit/Tumblr.”

Elise

We’re against it

Rik lands quite firmly on one side of the debate:

“Makes sense that Elon Musk would buy the social media platform that’s mainly inhabited by bots – it tallies with his vision of a future for androids.

Seriously, though, my biggest concern with Musk buying Twitter is that we haven’t had a time in which one individual has owned a social media platform (when it was popular). Zuckerberg and Dorsey were limited because they are in charge of publicly listed companies. This will be different.

Rik

There’s also the bigger worry that this is Elon Musk. He’s always been a very shady individual, someone who put his personal gain and his ego over everything else, someone who does token moves of “free speech” from time to time, someone who has a god complex, and will go after people who show dissent in ways that are extremely unfair and irresponsible, for example:

• trying to get publicity with his submarine to save the kids in Thailand, then calling the diver who actually saved them a pedophile,
• Using his Twitter following to pump and dump stocks and crypto
• Asking his legal team to fire an employee because he was part of an investigation into his malpractice in an earlier job
• Getting a Tesla employee fired when he raised safety concerns about one of the cars (on his personal blog)
• a journalist who had been critical of the Tesla Model X launch event was called by Musk personally and had their order for a Model X canceled

The big worry with Musk owning Twitter is that he will allow it to become a romping ground for right wing conspiracy theorists, because he’s one of them himself.

There is a lot to be said about free speech, but he’s shown that he’s only a supporter of free speech as long as it works in his favour.

Rik

And he clearly doesn’t understand moderation or free speech – based on this interview he’d allow anything that was legal, and only stuff that’s legal. This would be a big problem in a country like the US (where hate speech, technically, is legal, and in countries with authoritarian leaders, where any dissent is illegal).

Will he allow tweets in favour of unionisation at Tesla?

There’s one ray of light. If he does make Twitter a platform in which everyone can be verified, then it would make it easier to spot bots, that’s about the only positive thing to come out of this, in my opinion. But then what would Tesla do without shills? 

Or will he make exceptions for the bots that help him line his pockets?“

We’re here for it

While Ed remains cautiously optimistic:

“Whether truthful or not, Elon has committed to his version of free speech, ostensibly his reason for making the acquisition in the first place. His tweet saying “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means” is out there, committed to the collective memory that the internet is.

My first move would be to restore Donald Trump’s account, even if I despise everything he stands for. I’m firm in my position about freedom of expression and reject every form of censorship. This starts with where it hurts most – those with opinions that are diametrically opposed to my own.

A truly free platform would be an exceptionally useful tool and, like every good tool, can be used for almost any purpose.

Ed

A knife can carve steak or fatally stab. A plane can take me across the Atlantic in a few hours and can be flown into a building. A truly free platform is a great idea if we are to accept the possibility that there will always be a sizeable chunk of its users with whom I have nothing in common. They will write stuff that will anger me. They will take the ‘wrong’ side of every debate. They will incite anger and hatred and resentment. They will reflect their humanity in a snack-sized chunk of words we call a tweet. They will do what the village square did for millennia. And when Twitter was first conceived, before it took the inevitably tortuous path that every public company takes, it was created to give the exact same 140 characters to every user.

Jack Dorsey was quick to endorse the move to privatization of the platform, whatever his opinion is worth, “The idea and service is all that matters to me, and I will do whatever it takes to protect both. Twitter as a company has always been my sole issue and my biggest regret. It has been owned by Wall Street and the ad model. Taking it back from Wall Street is the correct first step.” One must keep in mind that he will net close to $1 billion as a result of the deal.

Let’s remember something pretty obvious. We are talking about Twitter. We are discussing a platform that we voluntarily signed up for and use whenever we feel like it. We choose our feed by curating the list of people we follow. Talking about Twitter as if it were the sole bastion of democracy, as though we were part owners of the company, as if it were an oracle or a divine presence, is grossly missing the point. The news is that a billionaire bought a social media platform – we know the name of the platform, we know the name of the man, and he makes his interests very public as often as he can. He is entitled to turn it into his own broadcast medium, a cooking show, a kitten-video-only platform, or even to shut it down tomorrow.

In general, however, I remain cautiously optimistic. Musk is a renegade and has a mind the likes of which we see a handful of times in a generation. Of course, he is flawed. Of course, he has made moves that history may judge as mistakes. But I suspect that a $44 billion investment is one that not even he can take lightly. And if there is an initial exodus, a pruning of the platform that makes it a better place, I’m all for quality over quantity. I just hope that as many people I disagree with stay on, because without them Twitter would be a pretty boring place.”

We’re looking ahead

Luke, ever the pragmatic analyst, is already looking ahead at where the potential Twitter exodus will lead us:

“LinkedIn could also potentially become a place where Twitter users end up, if for example Trump is allowed back on the platform.”

Luke

A sentiment echoed by Lisa who considers us a utilitarian herd:

“People will go to different places depending on their need.”

Lisa

What does all of this mean for those of us using Twitter as a communications tool for their business?

As always, we don’t have a crystal ball. The deal itself has not yet properly gone through and here we are, attempting to gaze into the future and see how we can capitalize on the change.

The shape of Twitter is expected to change slightly almost immediately but that’s as much as we know. Apart from the ability to edit tweets (a big deal in the Twitter universe), a more inclusive way of verifying yourself as a human and not a bot, and a reversal of several censorship policies, we know very little of the plans for the platform’s future.

What is certain is that all eyes are on Twitter right now. Being part of the conversation is essential – today more than ever. Even the most vociferous naysayers are hanging around for a while, watching the events play out as they wait for the right moment to make a dramatic exit.

So while it would make plenty of sense to take to Twitter right now as it enjoys a surge in popularity, it also makes sense to listen to Luke and to Lisa and to look at the other platforms that could gain from a potential exodus. If your Twitter game has been on point so far, maybe dial it up a notch, but be sure to cozy up to LinkedIn as you do so.

The post Coping with divisive news. Or, how the Elon/Twitter debacle had us all in a twist appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Today, we’re talking about IAB and how their consent pop-ups are actually in breach of GDPR. 

Let’s get to it. 

What are you talking about?

We went over GDPR a week ago, but here’s the brief explainer: GDPR is your right to be forgotten, your right to have access to your personal data, your right to know what happens to that data in the interim. Any company that has access to your personal data, no matter if it’s Amazon, a shopping website, or a blog, has to protect that data from leaks and cybersecurity breaches. 

Violating GDPR means a fine on the low-end of the scale, and cessation of all trading activity on the high end. 

It’s a pretty big deal. 

GDPR is one of the main reasons  you have to consent to cookies every time you visit a new website or if you look at websites on incognito mode. GDPR is why you find out if your data is stolen. 

And GDPR is why Austria has ruled that Google Analytics is illegal in Europe. 

How?

Part of GDPR controls were you store your data and how you process that data. Any website that sends data from their website to a server in the United States runs the risk of violating GDPR – the primary protections that European countries place on data aren’t present in the United States, whose government can legally access any EU citizen data. 

What does this have to do with Europe?

Data is liquid gold. 

Non-profit organisations like noyb, Bits of Freedom, and Panoptykon Foundation know this. More importantly, they know that European law protects your data to a certain rigorous level. 

American data laws don’t have the same protections for third-party nationals. 

Since GDPR came into force in 2016, multiple organisations have filed complaints against websites that violate GDPR. One of their key arguments is that any data that’s sent to American servers is not protected by EU law, and therefore the website is in violation of GDPR. 

What’s IAB?

The International Advertising Bureau is an American business association that governs ad standards, conducts research, and supports the online advertising industry. It’s another nonprofit organisation, one that’s been around since 1996, and it’s the reason why there are advertising ‘standards’ for every ad format including video. 

There are 42 licensees in IAB, 27 of which are located in Europe. 

IAB Europe is the coalition of those 27 national IABs. 

It is also the creator of the Transparency & Consent Framework, one of the standardised pop-ups that crop up at the beginning of every new website to tailor how much data you want to provide the company, and give you a brief explanation of what that data is used for. 

International Advertising Bureau is in Europe, though. How is it illegal?

Being based in Europe isn’t enough to avoid GDPR violation. The Court of Justice takes GDPR violations extremely seriously, and it’s irrelevant where the website or server are placed. 

IAB didn’t just violate GDPR. It continuously violated GDPR by: 

• creating advertising profiles and showing them personal ads without adequately obfuscating identifying and personal information such as sexual orientation and health data. 
• making the privacy policy difficult to understand and available only in English. 
• hiding the reason they’re collecting this data. 
• not protecting the data it collects and not monitoring that websites which use IAB are compliant with GDPR. 
• not hiring a data protection officer. 

So violating GDPR is bad. What does this mean for business owners?

Google Analytics getting called out on their GDPR violations is one thing: one very big, ground-shaking thing. The story about data is still developing, and the way it’s developing is telling us a lot about the future of how businesses will work with data. 

But it’s not just GA. Everything that has been put in place to patch-job the risks of data violation is coming under scrutiny – and for a lot of reasons, it’s being found wanting. IAB is just the latest mark – and if you’re keeping up with Google’s continuing problems with data, it’s not going to be the only GDPR-related business problem we’ll see this year.  

Businesses need to take care of consumer data. They need to invest in the proper protections for that data. 

And they might need to invest in a different way of collecting and maintaining consumer data. If the bigger, better-known methods such as Google Analytics and IAB are in violation of GDPR, companies need to be prepared for the moment when those companies have to severely amend or change the way these services work. 

Any advice for businesses who had to deal with the Google Analytics ruling and IAB in the same week?

Be prepared to get more news along these lines.

Everyone panicked for a few months when GDPR went into force. Then, when no one was fined 20m for not putting up a Cookie Policy popup, we collectively swept the issue under the carpet. This is why GDPR was created, and now we’re seeing its true effects. 

Consumers aren’t stupid. They already don’t like the amount of information that organisations have on them. Add in these big rulings – rulings that even the everyman on the street will understand once the websites he uses more often have to change to maintain GDPR protocol – and this is the kind of problem that’s only going to get worse before it gets better. 

That’s a good thing. 

Nobody’s telling you you can’t collect consumer data. Nobody is going to outlaw Google Analytics and IAB tomorrow. 

But start figuring out if you need all that wide scale, top-down data to begin with, and then go from there. 

If you need help knowing how to read it, we’re here for that. Let us know. 

The post IAB and the great GDPR violation appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

In their latest released quarterly report, Meta has highlighted that there’s been a drop of one million in global daily users, taking their figures down from 1.93 to 1.929. Added to the flat net growth of new users for Instagram and WhatsApp, the figures do not paint a pretty future for Meta. 

Websites lose people all the time. Why is this such a big deal?

Facebook isn’t a website. It’s the reason social media is the way it is, and for 18 years, it’s grown continuously, with a bulletproof stock and a formidable portfolio that just subsumes all other competing websites. At the height of its power and popularity, Facebook bought Instagram; it bought WhatsApp. It could do that, unchecked, because it had market lead and power behind it, and other start-ups couldn’t compete. 

Mark Zuckerberg said it himself: “we can likely always just buy any competitive startup.”

Now, Facebook is struggling. The drop in daily users also wiped out 26% in stock value, triggered Wall Street’s worst one-day stock decline in history, and just erased $232 billion of Facebook’s worth. 

And it pulled other tech stocks with it. 

Think of it like an ecosystem. Every ecosystem, no matter how small, relies on balance. 

For the first time in 18 years, Facebook has stumbled, and the balance of the entire social media ecosystem is in flux. 

Okay, so how did this happen?

This has been four years in the making, and it happened because Facebook ignored the signs over those four years.

When Cambridge Analytica’s Christopher Wylie came out and said that Facebook had been mining personal data from a just-for-academic-use app called This Is Your Digital Life, it hit Facebook right where it mattered most: in its unchecked, overwhelming obsession over growth. In 2018, the year of Ted Cruz and Trump and Brexit, the last thing any Facebook user wanted to add to their plate was realising their personal information had been stolen to support these causes. 

What are you talking about?

This Is Your Digital Life actually paid people to complete a Facebook survey. This was only supposed to be for academic research, but Facebook allowed it to keep mining data – and that data was later used in Ted Cruz’s campaign in the United States, Donald Trump’s campaign, and the push for Brexit. 

Collected data was used to create individual profiles that would sway people into voting for these events. The full investigation concluded that Cambridge Analytica’s influence was likely negligible (except for the Ted Cruz campaign) but that didn’t really matter: Facebook had placed itself on a side of history nobody wanted to be on – as the catalyst for some of the most chaotic political events in history, pulling the strings to influence the outcome. 

But if Facebook wasn’t found guilty—

Facebook was found guilty. 

But nothing really happened except for a handful of fines. 

At its core, Cambridge Analytica is a research firm. It’s a conservative research firm, dealing with private intelligence and the military, but it’s still just a research firm. 

Facebook is a social media company with a reach of billions, the kind of reach that a research firm can’t even dream of possessing. 

And Cambridge Analytica – with Facebook – reached it. 

Without Facebook’s consent, and without Facebook’s reach, Cambridge Analytica wouldn’t have managed to farm so much data from so many people to use for their tampering.

How does something that happened in 2018 lead to Facebook losing users four years later?

Facebook didn’t do anything with the Cambridge Analytica scandal. There’s been no reform – except for stringent ad measures that make it impossible to use Facebook for advertising – and there’s been no transparency about whether or not they’re still collecting that data or using the data. Mark Zuckerberg is a closed box on everything to do with 2018. 

However, people don’t forget. 

And when you have one big violation of privacy and trust, it’s never just one. 

In 2021, Sophie Zhang, another whistleblower, put another nail in the ‘Facebook is negligent at best and actively harmful at worst’ coffin. As part of the Facebook Site Integrity fake engagement team – yes, that’s a real thing – her task was to investigate the use of likes, comments, shares, and reactions, and see if they were made by real people. 

What she found went much deeper than that. 

Authoritarian regimes, such as in Honduras and Azerbaijan, could artificially inflate their popularity using bots and other fake entities. 

Facebook knew about it. 

Facebook did nothing because the bottom line would suffer otherwise, and Facebook’s first priority has always been Facebook. 

Wait, but Mark Zuckerberg said Tiktok was the reason that Facebook was losing users!

He’s right. 

Partially. 

The problem with Facebook is that it spent so much time at the top of its market that other competitors it didn’t consider as competitors have started to climb in popularity. TikTok boomed in the pandemic because its format – short form, bite size videos – and relatively scandal-free background made it appealing. There’s no agenda to TikTok except giving creators the room to share their creativity, a thing that Facebook has long since dropped in the reach for greater profits. 

Tiktok is definitely a reason for Facebook’s decline in popularity, but it’s about 1% of that reason. The rest is just pure Facebook shenanigans. 

Facebook’s rebranded though! And it’s doing so well! 

It’s not. 

The rebrand to Meta came on the heels of – you guessed it, another information scandal! Gold star for you. 

This time, the whistleblower was Frances Haugen, who joined Facebook in 2019 after someone she was close to was radicalised through Facebook. 

By 2021, Frances Haugen leaked ‘The Facebook Files’ to the Wall Street Journal, a collection of internal Facebook documents, online employee discussions and research reports that showed Facebook consistently, continuously ignoring the damaging effects that Facebook and Instagram had on the world. 

From influencing teenagers through Instagram to Facebook activity propping up violent insurrections like the January 6th Capitol riots, the Facebook Files didn’t just highlight that Facebook knew about its effects on people, but also that it did nothing to control it – and what it did do, such as implement an AI to detect and remove violent content, had an algorithm so poor that it only managed to act correctly less than 0.6% of the time. 

A few weeks later, Zuckerberg said that Facebook was rebranding itself as Meta, and focusing its next phase of growth on the metaverse. 

Oh, yeah! How’s that going?

The problem with putting all your eggs into the metaverse basket is that the technology that you’re working with has to be better than the technology people are used to. 

And it has to be cost effective. 

Virtual worlds where people could connect with others aren’t new: they’ve been around since the days of Runescape, World of Warcraft, and Playstation Home, and while you can make the argument that the metaverse is different from a virtual world lobby, the early analysis of Facebook’s launched virtual world are not great, considering that it’s not new tech, only tech that should be – realistically – better than a free-to-play MMO. 

So, poorly. Facebook’s metaverse push is going poorly. 

Its entire VR/AR/XR reality wing is losing money. Last year, it was $10.2 billion. Facebook’s VR headset, the Quest, has only sold around 10 million units – barely a fraction of what early VR headsets sold with less-capable tech. Zuckerberg isn’t shy about letting people know that the company is going towards more investment for VR and AR, but there’s the issue: who’s going to pay for it?

Facebook, the social media which has paid for it so far, is struggling. 

If it breaks, so does Meta. 

So… will it?

This is hard to answer, but the likelihood – given the way Facebook operates, its stringent focus on protecting itself – the chances are that things will have to change in order for Facebook to maintain itself. 

Turning a profit is another story. 

People have long memories. And Facebook hasn’t had one scandal, or two, or three: it’s had three scandals focused on how badly it mistreats and how little it cares about anything besides itself. It’s pushing for a technology that will be – at its core – out of the price range of a wide number of its users. It’s not innovating anything that users want. 

It still hasn’t addressed its algorithm problems, the AI failure, or where the data from Cambridge Analytica went. 

We talk a lot about how brands have to change to survive; how they have to adapt to consumers, not the other way around. How there’s likely, in your field and in ours, at least ten other companies offering the same product with better benefits or a cheaper price. 

This goes for big corporations as well as smaller ones. 

But in Facebook’s case, it’s had four years to address these reports. It’s had longer than that to adapt itself to a world that was always going to be this way: transparent, bare to criticism, and very competitive. 

Facebook is no longer unique. Facebook refuses to innovate. Facebook doesn’t want to put its consumers first. 

And if it doesn’t start to make changes, Facebook will struggle more. 

What do you think can save Facebook?

A time machine. 

But failing that, there’s not going to be a Facebook that thrives with Mark Zuckerberg still on its board. 

As we’ve seen with Twitter, companies have a tendency to outgrow their founders. To succeed, those founders have to step back. 

We don’t think Zuckerberg will resign – not on paper. As a PR stunt, or the result of forced governmental intervention, maybe, but not out of his own volition. 

And that’s the reality Facebook has to grapple with. 

But what does this mean for businesses?

Facebook seceding its market share means everything for businesses, especially if you advertise on Facebook or Instagram – which, if you advertise online, you kind of have to. 

To clarify: neither Facebook nor Instagram is on the brink of complete catastrophic failure. They’re still powerful, profitable businesses. And you can still use them to drive great ROI if you know what you’re doing. 

But the ground they’re standing on is getting thinner, and if it ruptures, the problems for businesses will all boil down to communications. 

How can you talk to a global audience without a platform to talk to them on?

And how can you make a profit from that?

Facebook’s business struggles impact every enterprise that uses Facebook to advertise, that puts pictures on Instagram, that sends out targeted messages with Whatsapp. This has been the status quo for 18 years. Advertising standards have been built on this pattern. 

If it falls, businesses will have to find a different way of communicating. 

The good thing is that there’s no end of ways to talk online – but you need to start figuring that out from now. Don’t wait until Facebook and Instagram become more obtuse to use, become saddled with even more add-ons, with even greater problems. 

Twitter, Tiktok, Snapchat, Youtube: there’s different social medias out there that can be just as effective. 

You just need to pick a platform and start talking.

Or, if you really want to do the right thing, be on trend and focus on first-party data. Free yourself from the shackles of other platforms and build your own audience.

So – I’m okay for now?

For now. 

But all businesses have to start looking forward ten years into the future. This doesn’t even have anything to do with Facebook: it has to do with the way the world works now. 

As we’ve seen, things can change so rapidly, so blink-of-an-eye fast, that you can spend a year grappling to hold on. 

Start thinking about the worst case scenario now. Find your different social media of choice. Expand outwards. 

It makes for better storytelling, and it makes for a future-proof communication strategy. 

Facebook won’t fail this year or the next. 

But do you really want to take that risk?

The post What Facebook Losing Users Means for You appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Here’s why. 

NetDoktor isn’t available in any language other than German. There’s a strong possibility that before today you haven’t heard of it – even if you are from Germany. It focuses on medical news and diagnoses, a little bit like a German WebMD. 

Before today it had no obvious connection with Silicon Valley. 

Now, because it uses Google Analytics, it’s become embroiled in a discussion about what big Silicon Valley companies get to do with the data they collect from European websites. 

Let’s start at the beginning. 

What’s Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is one of the many ways Google collects data about you. 

Whenever you visit a website, a little piece of code embedded on the website transmits data about who you are and what you’re using to see that website to Google.

In the time it takes to load up a webpage, Google knows where you’re from, the language you speak, and all the pages on the website you’ve seen so far. This data gets logged underneath an identifying code, and Google can then use that information to hone its algorithm and figure out how to rank that page. 

Site owners also have access to Google Analytics, and to the data it collects. From there, they can figure out how to build a better website that works for the majority of their visitors. 

Ostensibly, Google Analytics benefits you: the business owner, the website user. In theory, every piece of data that goes through Google is only available to the person who owns that business. 

However, as Google Analytics can be integrated with Google Ads, it also benefits Google. The data that is generated from Google Analytics can then be fed back into Google Ads, which improves Google’s capacity to create personalised ads for your users, which in turn gives Google a lot of information about your users. 

Okay, and why is this a problem?

To get into that, we need to talk about everyone’s favourite European data privacy act: GDPR. 

The General Data Protection Act is only applicable to countries in Europe, and it’s trying to protect you. 

There’s been an unprecedented hike in user data ever since social media networks really took off. If you want, you can go even further back: there’s been a hike in user data ever since the technology to record data in bulk crawled its way out of Bill Gates’ mythical garage. 

What GDPR does is make sure all your identifying data – your name, your address, your location, your email – is protected. It makes sure you have access to this data. It makes sure that you can delete your entire self off the internet if you want to. 

It makes sure that if there’s something wrong, and your data is now broadcast across the internet, you know about it. 

Think about the last time you’ve visited a web-page. You know that pop-up that asks you if you’re okay with data collection?

That’s been imposed by GDPR. 

And not complying with GDPR can mean getting fined upwards of 20 million EURO.

(This is why some websites, such as Washington Post, are also difficult to access from Europe now). 

Yes, we know about GDPR. What does this have to do with Silicon Valley or NetDoktor or Google?

In December, the Austrian data regulator ruled that the way NetDoktor uses Google Analytics is in breach of GDPR and ruled that the use of Google Analytics is now illegal in Austria. 

What?! Why? If people consent to the website collecting their data, it isn’t in violation, right?

People might have consented. 

But it isn’t the consent that’s the problem; it’s the fact that all data that Google Analytics collects and stores is sent to the United States for hosting and storage. 

And US data laws might be protective over their own data for their own citizens, but their laws for people outside the United States aren’t as stringent as GDPR and don’t protect foreign citizen’s data as well as their own.

Data centres in the United States can still, theoretically, be accessed by the CIA, FBI, NSA, and other intelligence agencies. By law, they can do this: it’s data that’s now on American soil, which puts it in their jurisdiction and there’s a whole court law about how the government can access these communications basically at any point in time. 

To paraphrase Brooklyn Nine Nine, Datenschutzbehörde’s opinion of that is ‘cool story, still a felony.’

It’s just one website though, right? Fine that one website and move on with it. 

It’s not. 

It’s every website that uses Google Analytics.

That means your WordPress blog. It means your favourite coffee shop’s website. 

It means this website, too. 

Every website that currently uses Google Analytics can potentially be in violation of GDPR, which means £20M fines for all or 4% of annual turnover, whichever is higher.

Repeatedly, and continually, violating GDPR puts you at the mercy of each individual member state’s data protection act, who don’t stop at penalties: they’ll order the immediate cessation of data collection, suspend trading activities until the GDPR issues are fixed, and you’ve destroyed all the collected data. If further violations occur, criminal sanctions can be brought against the company.  

Why is this something people have noticed now?

It’s actually something that people have been arguing against basically one day after GDPR was implemented. 

Previously, the US could transfer and host European data without any issues under an agreement called Privacy Shield. In 2020, two years after GDPR was turned into European law, Privacy Shield was ruled illegal and the Court of Justice of the European Union stated that any business still using Privacy Shield would be fined. 

What’s Privacy Shield?

Privacy Shield was created to allow U.S. businesses to share personal information between borders – even though the United States doesn’t protect personal information to the same equivalence as GDPR does, and therefore shouldn’t have been allowed. 

It was a replacement for Safe Harbour, a framework that Facebook used to transfer data between its company in Europe and the company in the United States, which was found to be in violation of the CJEU’s data protection guidelines. 

This is important because…?

Privacy Shield is illegal because people complained. 

Actually: let’s rephrase. 

One person complained. 

Maximilien Schrems lodged a complaint to the Irish Data Protection Authority that transferring his data from Facebook Inc, Ireland to Facebook Inc, US was a violation of GDPR and his data was not being protected. The Irish Data Protection Commissioner rejected the complaint, but it made its way to the Court of Justice of the European Union. 

The Court ultimately ruled that Privacy Shield was no longer legal – and that businesses had to find a different way of transferring their data. 

So far, they haven’t. Negotiations for data transfer are still ongoing. 

What does this have to do with me?

If you’re a citizen of an EU country, you have a right to protect your own data. 

As a European citizen, your data can and will be accessed by United States intelligence agencies. They can also collect that data. They can use that data. 

The European Protection authorities don’t want that to happen. Transfer between the United States and Europe currently doesn’t have enough safety measures in place to avoid European data falling into the hands of United States intelligence agencies. 

Or, in other words, using Google Analytics violates GDPR, and you – as a website owner, not as a user – may be entitled to a fine. 

Seriously?

This is one decision for one case. 

There are currently over 100 other cases where data transfer to the United States is being investigated. They’ve been filed based on similar complaints, so it stands to reason that the outcomes will be the same – but the results might vary. 

Some European data regulators, like Austria, can rule that Google Analytics and other similar frameworks are illegal – which means websites can no longer use those measures or face having to pay a fine. Other data regulators might just want stricter measurements in place, but that it won’t lead to a fine. 

The greater issue is what this means for websites financially. If you are in contempt of a GDPR fine because of your cloud network, then are you liable for it? 

Or is the United States?

What does this mean for businesses?

Businesses don’t need to worry yet. 

But they should start looking at different cloud-based services if they’re based in Europe. 

There is a chance that, like Privacy Shield and Safe Harbour, Google Analytics will have to go the way of the dodo. It’s better to have a back-up plan if the Court of Justice in the European Union decides data transfer – which will impact trade, small businesses, and basically everything in between – to the United States violates GDPR, and is therefore illegal.

There’s an upside to selecting an EU – and therefore GDPR-compliant – service: it removes the extensive cost of maintaining GDPR. 

Why is this important now? Data leaks have been a thing since the early internet. 

The early internet didn’t have the scale and quantity of data that there is available today. 

We’re talking about it now because people have started to understand what that means, and to be concerned about where all this data is going. We’ve spoken a little bit about it in our Marketing Trends 2022 blog, but here’s the summary: consumers don’t like it when big corporations have so much data on them. 

Unhappy consumers complain. 

Every consumer complaint to a European data protection agency is now followed by court action – no matter how long it takes. 

What does Google think about all this?

Google wants a new data protection agreement, and threw its support behind the ongoing transatlantic data discussion. It did reiterate that Google had never received a request for the kind of data that the Austrian protection agency spoke about – but that’s largely irrelevant. On paper, in European courts, Google and other cloud-based providers that transfer data to the United States are still in violation of GDPR. 

Can it just not go away?

If the United States and Europe can reach an agreement over how to protect European citizens’ data once it’s in the United States – which means, to a certain extent, removing the Congressional and governmental access to that data – then there’s no need for any business to worry. 

But don’t hold your breath on that. Everyone knows how the U.S. considers data. 

Frequently Asked Questions

Can businesses still use Google Analytics in the EU?

Yes, definitely. Only one court case in Austria has ruled Google Analytics illegal; the rest of Europe hasn’t weighed in yet. 

Is Google Analytics illegal in the EU?

No, Google Analytics is only illegal in Austria as of the time this article is published. 

That said, with an EU-US data transfer protocol still under negotiations, and more claims filed against Google Analytics throughout Europe, there’s no telling if Google Analytics will remain legal in Europe with their current practices in place.

What we anticipate will happen is that Google will create a server network in Europe to mitigate more GDPR fallout, which will semi-solve the problem.

Can anyone access Google Analytics?

Absolutely! Google Analytics is free to all users who have a Google account and want to see where their traffic is coming from. However, once you hit a certain traffic threshold, or if you want more advanced features, you have to pay a subscription fee that varies depending on the features you want.

What information does Google Analytics access?

Website activity: how long do people stay on your website, what do they do while they’re there, their general location. There’s a version available for mobile browsers as well, but it’s not on the same scale as Google Analytics for web and also doesn’t allow for users to choose to opt out of sending data to Google, which web allows for.

The post Here’s how Austria’s anti-Google Analytics ruling will affect your business appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

The CEO of Twitter stepping down is one of them. 

Social media networks are run like little empires. Unless the king dies or gets his head chopped off, the creator who makes the social media platform keeps hold of it as it grows, as it wanes, and as it starts over. There are exceptions: Tom from MySpace, Karp from Tumblr. 

But those are outliers. 

This is different. 

Jack Dorsey runs a successful social media site. It isn’t as popular as Facebook or Instagram and it doesn’t have the same reach as Tiktok, but it’s a fringe social network that’s popular with the people on it. Brands can build a decent following on it. People are happy to participate in the latest Twitter discourse. 

When Facebook and Instagram went down a few months ago, everyone flocked to Twitter as a replacement. 

It’s not a site you step down from.

Let’s talk about what it means. 

What happened: 

Jack Dorsey, the founder and CEO of Twitter, resigned from his post and appointed Parag Agrawal as his successor. Dorsey, who also owns Square, posted a screenshot of his resignation email to Twitter on the 29th of November. 

Why did he step down?

In his email, Dorsey stated that founder-led companies are limited in their reach and prone to failure.  He also stated that the time for him to step away is right: with Parag taking over as CEO and Bret Taylor as board chair, the implication is that Twitter no longer needs him to stay as CEO. 

At the bottom, he added a note: he wants Twitter to become ‘the most transparent company in the world’. 

Theories: 

The internet is a puzzle box of opinions. Here is a collection of the theories that  are trending about Jack Dorsey’s resignation:

1. Jack Dorsey resigned to focus more on his fintech and blockchain endeavours. 

Square, his payment company, is up and coming. Since 2019, Dorsey has been vocal about wanting to devote more and more of his time to blockchain, fintech, cryptocurrency: all the neo-financial buzzwords. With the advent of Bluesky, a decentralised social media project, maybe Dorsey’s finally moving on from tech and into a different flavour of tech – one that he’s been passionate enough about to tell a crowd, ‘if I wasn’t at Twitter or Square, I’d be in cryptocurrency’. 

2. Twitter is failing and Dorsey wants to get out before it collapses. 

Twitter is the crowning glory of awful social media habits. You’ve heard of ‘cancel culture’? Well, Twitter is where it started. Doxxing, bullying, no support from staff – everything that Twitter went through in the past year or so has just cemented the idea that no good can come from Twitter. 

But it has a dedicated core user base, and big plans for the future. 

Leaving all of that now doesn’t make a lot of sense. 

3. Jack Dorsey didn’t want to come back to Twitter in the first place. 

Dorsey was ousted from his role early on in Twitter’s rise, and he only came back after a few short years. From the looks of it, this is just par for the course for Dorsey. And it tracks with the beliefs that pushed him to make Twitter the first company that allowed its employees to work from home indefinitely. 

What does it mean for marketers?

At this it doesn’t mean anything for marketers. 

Twitter isn’t a sound platform to advertise on. To talk on, and build brand love, it’s excellent – but you have to set your brand aside a little bit to do it. 

And you have to make sure you don’t end up talking to yourself. Big corporations who own multiple brands are called out for this often. 

As a platform, Twitter’s core users are only slightly less reactionary than Reddit’s for advertising. Jack Dorsey’s departure doesn’t really make a difference to that kind of attitude. 

What does it mean for other social media platforms?

If it’s a direct dig at some of the other CEOs, it’s not going to convince them to step down (looking at you, Mark Zuckerberg). When all you have to show for your tenure is strife, and you still don’t want to relinquish control, a dig by another social media CEO isn’t going to get you to quit. 

What it could do is open up a conversation about whether social media should be democratised from their owners, and if founders should have so much control over them. Think ‘Death of the Author’, but if it was social networks: a social media without the original founder, and therefore the original vision, and the differences it could make to how that social media runs. 

When platforms get too big, and then they have too much power, to have that resting in the vision of a single person is risky. 

And the step from ‘I know best’ to ‘do as I say’ is small, and slippery, and easy to miss. 

However, most CEOs won’t take that step, even when it would be better for them to do so. 

The Outcome 

Dorsey’s left. His vision was what guided Twitter into becoming the place it is today. 

But he hadn’t been invested in Twitter for a while. 

Staying in his role when his interest in running Twitter has gone isn’t going to help anyone, least of all Twitter. 

With Dorsey gone, Twitter has some room to grow. 

Whether it does, or not, no longer has anything to do with Dorsey. 

What we think will happen: 

Twitter won’t change – not externally. 

But one of their biggest challenges is to increase revenue and users. 

And one of the best ways to do that is to add more brand tools to the platform that’ll allow brands to advertise more effectively. These tools have already been around for a little while, but Dorsey was famously ambivalent towards brands, and gave control of the big decisions over to employees. 

With Parag, there is a chance that Twitter can become a better platform for brands to advertise on, but there’s a caveat: Twitter users are tired of brands talking the same way as they do about things they don’t understand. 

So the challenges to increase Twitter’s reach might not go anywhere, even with Dorsey no longer there.

But we do think Twitter can grow from this. 

It’ll never be a brand platform on the same level as Facebook and Instagram. They’ve had too much time to grow, too much time to take over the biggest portion of the playing field, and too much time to figure out what they need to do. 

But it can be a contender. And it can become very, very excellent for some brands who can communicate at the level of their consumers, and talk to them like real people. 

Our advice: wait and see. 

And don’t knock Twitter out of the advertising game yet. 

There’s a lot more to it than memes.

The post Jack Dorsey and Where Twitter Can Go From Here appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

And then there’s the European Super League. 

From a brand perspective, the European Super League is the kind of PR nightmare that no amount of spin or publicising can really improve on. Like decorating a sneeze-and-it’ll-fall-off bumper with a sticker, trying to justify the existence of the European Super League in the face of overwhelmingly negative reactions isn’t going to do much except stave off the inevitable downfall. 

Which, as of this moment, has happened: the League is cancelled. All the teams have withdrawn. 

The European Super League: A brief explainer

On the 19th of April, 2021, the Times published that six English clubs signed up to play in a 20-team-only European Super League. The League, which would have had 15 permanent members as ‘founder clubs’ (12 of which had signed up at the start), would abolish what it viewed as ‘poor quality’ games while also (and this is important) help elite European clubs recover earnings lost during the COVID-19 period. The fifteen founder clubs would govern the competition, and matches would be played both home and away. 

The competition would feature uncapped solidarity payments, much higher than those offered by existing European competitors, as well as €3.5 billion to offset the infrastructure costs. Brands such as JPMorgan Chase added extra incentive by backing the competition to the tune of $5billion. 

Winnings would be split at: 32.5% to the founding teams, 32.5% to participating and invited teams, 20% on merit, and 15% on broadcast audience size. 

On paper, it isn’t a bad idea. On paper, it’s been something in the works since 1998. 

What happened?

Pre-COVID, there is every possibility that the European Super League would’ve succeeded. 

Post-COVID, the world is trickier. 

Backlash was near immediate. Everyone from football governing bodies to government entities to avid sports fans spoke out against the creation of the European Super League. Players released written statements. Bans for the competing teams – from domestic, European, and world football competitions – were in the works. Analysts tore apart the European Super League’s plans, pointing out that their proposed hybrid system would lead to a hoarding of the majority of the winnings by the founder clubs, while reflecting back any financial fallout on the rest of the European football teams. 

One by one, clubs that had initially been announced as founder members withdrew: first the six English clubs, then Italian Internazionale. With six of their biggest draws down, the Super League released a statement that the project would be ‘reshaped’. 

On April 21st, 2021, the project was nearly, if not already, dead. 

Two days. 

That’s all it took. 

But why would it have worked?

Fan support carries a lot of weight. 

Think about it in terms of football fanatics. These are people who will travel to see their favourite team in person. Who follow each match religiously. Who spend money on merch. There is nothing as powerful for any brand as a dedicated fan, and football being one of the most popular viewing sports in the world, on paper having a league dedicated and created to showcasing the most ‘valuable’ teams only makes sense. 

In theory: football fans would pay for it. 

An avid Manchester United fan would visit all the games, both home and away. They’d buy the kit. They’d go to each and every fan event. Because of the play style of the competition, that’s thousands in ticket sales and merch sales, not including hotels and accommodation. 

So why didn’t it work?

Fan support carries a lot of weight. 

But so does what’s going on. 

The European Super League comes on the heels of an entire year and a half’s worth of existing in the same reality as a global pandemic. Not being able to travel, not being able to see and support teams in person, not really having much to look forward to except the idea that, one day, this’ll be behind us and everything will be fine again. 

In addition, it comes after a year of the slow realisation of the masses that big businesses and corporations will do whatever it takes to get money – at the cost and the harm of the consumer.

Beyond that, the fundamental tenet of football – that teams qualify to play in important competitions based on merit on the pitch, not based on how much they’re worth or whether they were already purchased a place in the line-up – was forgotten in the bid to create a European Super League and prevent something like COVID-19 from ever cutting back into profits. 

Profits earned and kept by teams which already made more money than their lesser-supported European peers. 

There’s more. 

Most of these teams are ancient, in the sporting world. They have stories and backgrounds and personalities, whether true or ascribed by the fan and later canonised into reality. These stories matter to the fans. 

These stories were not taken into account when it came to creating the European Super League. To make an event that capitalised on the bottom line, sacrifices needed to be made – and the sacrifices made was the story behind the brand itself, the story that drew and held fans from the moment they saw their first game to however old they are now.

However, the people who created this League, the owners, don’t see the stories. They see profit. They see a pandemic cutting into their means. They see a crisis to be fixed. The stories are something to be monetised, not protected. 

And in ignoring how the teams came to be to create a money machine, they also ignored how important story is to supporting those same teams. When the backlash hit, it wasn’t just for the money; it was for wandering so far from purpose and story that they couldn’t see the point of view of the audience any longer. 

In a nutshell

Brands can learn a lot from the European super league fiasco. 

Here’s our top five lessons. 

1. If you have brand values, stick to them. They’re there for a reason. While it might not be evident that fans support you for them, brand values are what distinguishes you from your competitors. Hold onto them. 
2. Listen to your audience. When it comes to power plays, brands have to bend to the needs of the present and their audiences, or risk fading into obscurity. We all know about KODAK. 
3. Reach out to your audience. Take their feedback. Listen and do better the next time along. When you listen to your audience, you’re listening to the people who support you the most. 
4. If you’ve made a mistake, never double-down on it. It’s the worst thing you can do. Apologise with sincerity, move on. The internet won’t forget easily, so give them something better to talk about; redeem yourself with community outreach, with honest change, with visible regret. More than ever, brands are seen as extensions of humanity. So humanise. 
5. Don’t focus on your bottom line. It needs to be something kept in mind – you need money to run a business, after all – but doing things for your bottom line will ultimately break you if you prioritise your bottom line over your audience. 

Most importantly? Don’t drop the very thing that your audience supports you for. 

That’s just crazy. 

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• Marketing Account Manager

• Accounting Executive

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Then the borders became fuzzy

The specialist digital team worked more closely with the creative pool and vice versa until there was no internal distinction any more. All we were left with was the headache of managing two social streams and two sites when we only needed one drinking session for the entire team. Which page do we post the more embarrassing shots to? So we looked at ourselves as we would look at a client and told ourselves what we would tell a client. Sort your shit out and communicate like the single brand that you are. So here we are. We’re Switch. We’re adept at telling stories to an audience, wherever that audience may be.
What this means for our clients and partners is that the incredible pool of talent and specialised digital marketing that was available under the Switch Digital brand is still around and growing as fast as we can possibly manage it. The creative team that has crafted so many stories for so many years within the Switch umbrella is also here, and also growing steadily to add skills, perspectives and personalities. You just have an easier way of getting in touch with us. Isn’t that what you’d have wanted us to recommend to you?

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