71. Some Personal News
Q3 Results and Performance PR - Playbook to Get Started
A very warm welcome to all the new subscribers. I’m thrilled to have you as readers and truly appreciate your feedback and support.
Are your paid ads, email and reporting sitting in three separate systems? Do they struggle to talk to each other? Wouldn’t it be more efficient to have them all housed and integrated under one roof?
Then it sounds like you might find Feathr super valuable. Think Hubspot but built specifically for nonprofits. Check it out for yourself - feathr.co
Today’s SPN includes the following:
Why budget fluidity is key in your channel planning.
Snap’s strength in numbers.
Recording a mini YouTube series - an RFI/RFP-lite tool discovery convo with platform founders.
“Performance PR” - how to leverage secondary presence.
Reads of My Week - Unilever re-think “purpose” and reinstate role of CMO with added growth remit.
As with every edition of SPN please reach out with any questions or comments. I respond to every single one.
Let’s dig in.
Q3 Results
Lots of mentions of AI in the Q3 results investor calls. Everyone recognizes its importance and everyone is looking for use cases - which tend not to be that overwhelming.
Midsize vs Big Spenders
Amazon unveiled a slew of advertising products and shared a new way to help build ads through an AI image generator. If you fundraise for or around a product there’s likely tons of value in being able to quickly test different background images to place products in a lifestyle context.
Google seem to have shifted their sales strategy on Performance max - their AI ad product that chooses where to allocate your paid ad money across the Google product suite. They’re now positioning it as better for mid-size brands than the big spenders. I remain very wary of Pmax and how/where it spends on poor quality inventory. Get an opinion from your agency on this. And get a third opinion too. This is donor money you’re putting to work.
$ Q3 Results
Digital ad spend in the UK grew by 5% in the first half of this year with video performing best - up 11%. GAFA saw loadsa growth - earlier dips must have had more to do more with the impact Apple and its Privacy policy had than any ad recession.
YouTube figures are good. Shorts clocked 70bn views a day - A DAY! - up from 50bn at the start of the year. Eye-popping numbers.
Facebook user numbers keep creeping up - almost 4 billion monthly users for the family. And revenue surged - up 23%. It seems to reflect what we’ve heard all summer - the Meta ad product has overcome the issues caused by Apple privacy and is working better than ever. Smart Org’s that see immediate effects shift their money. Structure your budgets and strategies for 2024 accordingly.
Snap Deserves a Look
Snap shares jumped the other week when investors saw a leaked memo talking up performance - which was confirmed this Tuesday in their results.
Daily Average Users grew by 12 % - an extra 43m people - and use of the app grew too. Viewing of Spotlight is up by 200% and since launching My AI (their AI-powered chatbot) over 200 million people have sent over 20 billion messages. Lots of growth in Public Stories too. I wrote about the potential of Snap for nonprofit fundraising in edition 13, alongside a deep dive into measuring donor LTV.
But Snap’s revenue is only up by 5%, which may be a reflection of the strength of IG and TikTok amongst Agencies. Snap’s strength in AR and their investment in their tech stack may start to change that. IMO Snap is worth heavy consideration for a slot in your 2024 planning and channel/audience testing roadmap.
🎤Casting Call🎤
I’m recording a mini YouTube series. The premise is a straight talking, RFI/RFP-lite type conversation that explores tools and platforms.
I’ll interview the vendors - hopefully their founders - ask the hard questions, and try to put some color and personality behind each platform to enrich your assessment of what’s out there.
Who should I interview? Which tools are you looking at? What questions do you need a better answer to?
Hit “reply” - let me know.
Meet Performance PR (PPR)
Performance PR is an approach of using PR in a way that drives fundraising. There’s no agency of people pitching content that you’re holding out hope for a publisher to pick up. Instead, you decide what the content is, you write it, and you start driving traffic to it. It’s like if you could choose exactly what theSkimm or Betches would write.
Journalistic Integrity
I write this from the vantage point of someone who’s spent hundreds of thousands of dollars with PR agencies and buying sponsored editorial across different publishers (NYT, BuzzFeed, Refinery29, etc). You name it, I've probably bought an article on their site.
I remember paying $50k for an article on a Tier 1 publisher, only to get 6 donations as a result. When I asked them to alter the headline or the article’s hook, the response was “Sorry that doesn’t align with our journalistic integrity.” Mate, I’m paying for branded space in your publication... pure silliness!
Out of frustration we decided to explore our own way to craft the narratives we wanted and to get it in front of people who we knew were good donor prospects.
A friend of SPN calls this concept “Secondary Presence.” It’s the idea of using first-party data, insights, targeting, learnings, ad spend, and creative with third-party social proof, trust, validation, and storytelling. It ties your team effort together a little more too.
And Secondary Presence is also used when you see influencers whitelisted from brands. This isn’t much different, other than instead of videos from influencers, it’s articles from internet publishers.
Whitelisting: Ads that come from an influencer to sell a product or a mission. For example, when Save the Children partners with Jennifer Garner they’re not just getting content, they’re also borrowing the trust that she’s built with her content around what she consumes, and how she does her own diligence for giving. With all of that, they also get a piece of content that I hope they run as an ad, coming from Jennifer’s account, and blasted to the audience of their choosing.
In this scenario, you don’t have to worry about issues with email pop-ups, display ads, banner ads, ads with video and sound, etc.
Have you ever gone to the Forbes website on your phone? It’s impossible to read anything. And considerably reduces the value of their Forbes Brand Voice or CMO Council content plays.
The benefit of working with media publishers who understand performance marketing, is they have none of this garbage cluttering the feed. It’s helpful to think of these publisher pages where your ads will sit as landing pages that need to be extremely optimized to drive a click to the your website.
Ok now that we have the context, let’s get into PPR.
The Plan
The idea is to create a written piece of content with high quality multimedia baked into it, pay a publisher to host this content on their site, then drive paid dollars to it.
It allows you to focus on engaging donor segments that you haven’t been able to convert, or had a hard time earning some consideration from. This is pure upper-funnel content to bridge new audiences into your mission.
Advertorials vs your Regular Ads
When Supporters open Instagram, Facebook or TikTok, they’re there to be entertained, not sold to with your fanciest 15-second quick-cut Instagram ad. However, like any good video ad, a good advertorial (ad x editorial article) has a solid hook.
In the feed, when you have an advertorial populate as an ad it feels natural and contextually native to the feed being scrolled. It doesn’t come off as an ad. You want to ensure the article title, image, and caption feel natural like an editorial piece of content would. And you’ll need to add the Paid Partnership tag to your own ad but that’s it.
I love being able to test even 1 advertorial with 5-6 different headlines, images, and ad captions to understand what angles work best. Even with a good advertorial, you need to get traffic there.
Sniply is a Handy Alternative
Sniply does what it says on the tin. You send traffic to an existing piece of press and just add a banner at the bottom of the page with a CTA. If you’re sharing press from your Twitter or Instagram definitely use Sniply so you can at least pixel all that traffic back to Meta and Google. It’s just not as great as working with a publisher that really understands performance marketing though.
Performance PR vs your internal Ad Account
Don’t publish this type of ad from your main ads account.
First of all, set up a second ad account because you want to be able to run an incrementality test. Why? To understand how much more efficient your main ad account gets as a result of advertorials driving better, faster, and more efficient brand awareness for you.
The other reason to publish this through a second ad account in your business manager versus an external business manager entirely, is that you won't compete with your other ad account in ad actions, which would otherwise drive up your CPM.
At times I’ve been able to spend about 2-3x the amount my Org was spending in our main account for certain ad groups (coming from our own brand handles) without any decrease in efficiency. How? Because we led with entertainment first, not with an immediate ask for dollars.
I wrote in last week’s edition about Reach and called out Paul Feldwick’s excellent book “Why Does the Pedlar Sing: What Creativity Really Means in Advertising.” In it he talks about the power of entertainment in messaging.
And by entertainment it doesn’t have to be “ha ha funny” or “lol cute” unless you know that works for your Org. Rather have a hook and prioritize getting fantastic imagery, video, multimedia that’s captivating and compelling. The job of the advertorial is to take the entertainment and turn it into a fundraising pitch.
The PPR-101 Playbook to Get Started
There are a two ways to implement advertorials and leverage secondary presence. Have an agency do it or find a publisher willing to work with you and get this content live. The latter is way more fun and IMO satisfying.
A publisher here doesn’t need to be Vanity Fair or Bloomberg, it can be any editorial website. I’ve used sites that are “Tier 1” publishers, as well as sites you’ve never heard of. They work equally the same.
It all comes back to the UX and cleanliness of the publisher itself (i.e. no pop-ups, banner ads, auto-playing video, etc).
Two Main Things
Once the publisher is locked and loaded, you need to think about the content that goes up. Who are you “selling” to? What is the angle? Why will someone click on the content? How will they feel heard when they see your article in their feed? How will you turn it from an engaging editorial piece to a fundraising pitch about your mission or product? How will you continue to iterate and optimize the content to sustain its longevity?
Answer those questions in your content and that’s how you solve the editorial side.
The other side of the equation is making this work with paid media, to get your traffic to the article in the first place.
Whether you’re driving traffic from Meta, Google, TikTok, Taboola or anywhere else, you have to constantly optimize imagery, headlines and ad copy to drive high CTR. The better (and more native-feeling) your creative is, the lower your CPMs are. And the lower your CPM is, the more chances you have to drive that donation.
Optimized LPs
Treat these advertorials sitting on publishing sites like landing pages. They need to be incredibly fast loading, ad-free, optimized font sizes and layouts, and built to have a high time on site.
Couple rich imagery with inspiring content as the hook and, you’ll garner tons of engagement on the ads (likes, comments, shares), which is direct social proof you can leverage and build off.
Many of these articles have resulted in a few thousand organic shares too, so this is a full funnel play - connecting brand and performance - and why I call it Performance PR (PPR).
Now onto the fun stuff!
Reads of My Week
Matthew Ball on Parallel Bets, Microsoft, and AI Strategies.
Unilever’s focus on “purpose” across its brands was walked back by its ceo, who recognized there are some brands where the concept isn’t relevant.
More from Unilever, who shared that they’re bringing back the CMO role - here’s why.
Brian Wieser predicts that US TV ad inventory will fall by a quarter in the next 4 years.
Piper Sandler’s twice-yearly US teenager survey. 87% have an iPhone (and 34% an Apple watch) and Shein is the second-favorite e-commerce brand after Amazon.
The Information interviewed Amazon’s Andy Jassey on their generative AI plans.
From Underdogs to TikTok Titans: The digital campaign that rewrote New Zealand’s political playbook.
Rising costs mean TV’s payback advantage is now in question.