The Shoppe- Working From Home, TikTok Shadowbanning, & More
Welcome back to The Shoppe! This week we’re talking about the silver lining of the pandemic, Nike’s data-driven marketing approach, TikTok’s shadowbanning setback, and NFL’s 10-year pact with Amazon Prime. Don’t forget to subscribe so you can be notified every time we post!
As we approach the 1 year mark of the pandemic, we are drawn to the question of “what’s next?” While this past year has been quite gloomy, it’s important to take note of a silver lining behind it all. The shift of consumer behavior has tremendously impacted and transformed the future of marketing. As you may guess, this is due to our increased at-home experience and how it has changed how we work, shop, and live in general. How we consume everything, from content to products, has been altered, causing businesses and brands to adapt alongside consumers. More specifically, there are four trends that are helping B2C and B2B relationships flourish. The first being that consumers will automatically expect more helpful and relevant shopping experiences as the digital possibilities are ever-rising. The second trend is consumers becoming both locally minded and collectively conscious as the value of our local community is heightened. For example, Google searches for “support local businesses” grew globally by over 20,000% year over year. Trend number three is recognized as brand value converging with personal values to shape spending decisions. The fourth trend is that marketers’ own at-home experiences are bringing out the next-level empathy in creative that consumers experience. Click here to read more about the four COVID-era trends.
A spotlight is being shined on Nike’s quarterly results by company executives as Nike generated $1 billion in digital revenue in North America for the first time in Q3. This past February, Nike acquired the machine learning platform, Datalogue, which prepares and integrates data from a variety of sources across an enterprise. For Nike, this means drawing on owned channels, such as their app ecosystem, that has been a major engagement driver with consumers during the pandemic. Even though the acquisition of Datalogue is still recent, Nike leadership explained that results are already forming as a result of more improved and personalized search results and product recommendations. Datalogue builds on other tech-oriented purchases by Nike, such as the predictive analytics company,
Celect. Other brand marketers are following a similar strategy to strengthen their first-party data expertise.
More and more brands have taken TikTok under their wing to incorporate into their marketing strategies. The social platform offers a remarkable opportunity to reach target audiences, yet, these brands have to understand a key issue that TikTok creators are currently facing: shadowbanning. This occurs when a platform hides or removes content without notifying the user that created it. Shadowbanning is usually suspected when a creator notices that their videos aren’t getting the numbers of views that they normally would. Perhaps the biggest issue surrounding shadowbanning is that there is just so much left to the unknown. Content could be suppressed because it somehow violated TikTok’s community guidelines or because the algorithm mistakenly flags the content as inappropriate. Here is where the fear kicks in, as creators don’t know what they did to cause their performance to dwindle. It’s becoming a common worry amongst the creator community that their accounts will get shadowbanned if they begin to create sponsored posts, so they end up not creating them altogether. This disrupts brands’ abilities to share their marketing messages on the social platform. Since users are unaware of how to avoid being shadowbanned, creators may eventually stop using the platform completely. The “shadow” part of shadowbanning is alarming for both creators and the brands that depend on TikTok as a part of their marketing efforts. With this being said, brands need to realize that this issue is not going away, and TikTok should be prepared to address these concerns and let creators know that they are seen and heard.
The pandemic has led streaming to become many consumers’ preferred way to view and watch content. The NFL recognizes this shift in media consumption habits and Amazon is making moves to fortify its media business. As a result, the two companies have formed a 10-year pact that grants Prime Video exclusive rights to broadcast 15 Thursday Night Football games and one pre-season match per year in the United States, beginning in 2023. This marks the first time a streamer has grasped an exclusive broadcasting package for NFL games but is just one of several long-term deals that the NFL has struck with media partners to direct more attention to digital channels. With this access to NFL games, Amazon will gain a powerful means of attracting ad dollars and help with securing a leadership position in an increasingly crowded streaming space. Additionally, NFL games streaming on Prime opens the door for brands to reach fans beyond static ad placement. The NFL and Amazon will continue to work together on exclusive content and “enhanced fan viewing experiences” well past 2023.
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