Everyone's Personal Shopper

0 min read
March 11, 2021

I need to admit something, something that nearly everyone I have ever spoken with vehemently denies and yet the industry is predicted to generate $407 Billion in revenue this year - I have bought something after clicking on an ad. 


Even more so, I am proud of this behavior. I know it’s shocking to hear someone so brazenly declare that they enjoy seeing an ad and purchasing an item they need or want. I am in a select few who participate in an industry, eCommerce, that contributes to a large portion of the $86 Billion in Revenue that Facebook made in 2020. 


The term “personalized advertising” has been discussed at length given the updates from Apple and Google. Mobile web does not have platform neutrality. Apple and Google are the dominant mobile platforms, and they are the gatekeepers to who and how one plays on their hardware. Apple is unilaterally changing its rules and is forcing the industry to comply. 


I am a fan of experiencing this personalized advertising. When the prompt appears in various social apps asking “will you allow tracking”, I’ll be part of the tiny cohort expected to opt-in


What is the benefit of all this tracking to the end consumer? Outside of the 2015 study from Deloitte that Facebook’s as a platform created 4.5 MM jobs globally and contributed 227 Billion to the global economy that year alone.


Let’s explore a modest example. 


It’s Your Personal Shopper


Have you ever wanted to purchase an item? Perhaps you wanted to buy a new baseball cap and didn’t want to support Amazon. Welcome to the power of personalized advertising and it’s shopping experience!


All you need to do is visit any hat store that is well ranked in a google search. That store will more than likely have a Facebook Pixel in place. Click around the site a bit, maybe add a hat to your cart but here is the twist... don’t purchase anything.


Then go about your day. The average person consumes about 300 feet of newsfeed on Facebook or Instagram a day. Before you can hashtag the latest pic of you and your pup, you will start seeing ads in that newsfeed related to baseball caps. Click on the ads and window-shop a bit more in a given store.


Rinse and repeat until you find the perfect baseball cap for your needs. Facebook’s personal advertising experience eventually served me an ad from Sendero Provisions. 


Don’t know who Sendero Provisions is? Neither did I. 


I found a great hat that even donates to a national park I absolutely love - Yosemite. 


Imagine how scared I was by seeing this relevant item in my newsfeed


Personalized advertising allowed me to support a small start up of what appears to be three dudes who like the outdoors. The horror. 


This is the big, bad boogie-man at the center of all the news stories and Netflix documentaries.


"We should serve him a hat ad." This scene was cut from The Social Dilemma


If you are brave enough to participate in the $400 Billion industry of eCommerce, you too can use Facebook’s personal shopper feature to find new brands in all sorts of verticals: mattresses, bicycles, blenders, diapers, vitamins, shirts, cars, etc.


Simply follow these steps:


  1. Visit about any eCommerce site that has your product
  2. Go about your day. 
  3. Click on some ads in the product category you care about
  4. Buy the item if it meets your standards
  5. Bask in the wonder of technology finding an awesome item for you and potentially supporting a small business!


The A-Pixel-Lypse


This process of Facebook predicting that I am interested in hats and serving me more hat related ads is what is threatened by the pixel updates. We don’t want to discount the issues with user privacy; however, we have not seen one article written about how many small companies benefit from these algorithms. 


There are over 500,000 active merchants on Shopify. Unilateral changes by one platform or another will impact their ability to serve “hat” ads. Until we update our society to not be consumption driven, people buying goods and services are quite important to keeping the world turning. 


The phone book no longer exists and it is difficult/expensive to buy a TV ad. Social networks allow these SMBs access to new customers and personalized ad algorithms provide a useful service to both the store owner and end consumer.


Weirdly, none of these changes to advertising “privacy” will negatively impact Apple or Google’s ability to effectively reach people within their walled ad buys. The story is not the same for any competitor.


None of my business how this move benefits a company that the Supreme Court confirmed could be sued as a monopoly


Over the next several weeks we will be writing about the potential impacts and more specific predictions as we are ever closer to the A-Pixel-Lypse. Overall, we want to provide the market our recommendations on building resilient marketing systems. 


“Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire." Time to be a system that is energized by these winds of change.


---

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash


Nate Lorenzen
Founder
Jenner Kearns
Chief Delivery Officer
Jenner Kearns
Chief Delivery Officer
Jenner Kearns
Chief Delivery Officer
Kenneth Shen
Chief Executive Officer
Kenneth Shen
Chief Executive Officer
Kenneth Shen
Chief Executive Officer
Kenneth Shen
Chief Executive Officer
Jenner Kearns
Chief Delivery Officer
Kenneth Shen
Chief Executive Officer
Jenner Kearns
Chief Delivery Officer
Jenner Kearns
Chief Delivery Officer
Jenner Kearns
Chief Delivery Officer
Jenner Kearns
Chief Delivery Officer
Kenneth Shen
Chief Executive Officer
Jenner Kearns
Chief Delivery Officer
Kenneth Shen
Chief Executive Officer
Kenneth Shen
Chief Executive Officer
Isla Bruce
Head of Content
Isla Bruce
Head of Content
Isla Bruce
Head of Content
Jenner Kearns
Chief Delivery Officer
Isla Bruce
Head of Content
Kenneth Shen
Chief Executive Officer
Isla Bruce
Head of Content
Isla Bruce
Head of Content
Isla Bruce
Head of Content
Kenneth Shen
Chief Executive Officer
Isla Bruce
Head of Content

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*This article originally appeared in Forbes on February 26th, 2024. Link HERE

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Dysrupt is a 💎✋ marketing firm and not above the occasional meme trend. With all the news of r/wallstreetbets, RobinHood, $GME, etc. we want to take a step back and deep dive on this often used internet term with an interesting history - *meme.


Origin

Meme as a term predates internet culture. Originally coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 in his groundbreaking book The Selfish Gene. 


Dawkins conceived of memes as the cultural parallel to biological genes and considered them, in a manner similar to “selfish” genes, as being in control of their own reproduction and thus serving their own ends. Understood in those terms, memes carry information, are replicated, and are transmitted from one person to another, and they have the ability to evolve, mutating at random and undergoing natural selection, with or without impacts on human fitness (reproduction and survival). - link


Dawkins himself defined meme as a noun that "conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation."


The Selfish Gene was groundbreaking due to meme kicking off a deeper investigation in **academia around the extent of evolutionary processes that are unrelated to genes. 


Memes though are units of cultural significance. If they are repeated then they carry more significance than those that fail to replicate.


Here is a silly example: the cleaning crew in a hotel folding the toilet paper into a triangular shape is a meme. This happens worldwide now - even in some gas station bathrooms - and is an artifact of culture. It is a transfer of information in the network of humanity. This is a recent invention of culture which now carries a significance. Namely that the room was cleaned by a professional who spared no expense as they even decided to fold the toilet paper end into a small triangle.


In this light, the modern use of meme just being easily shareable phrases, images, gifs, etc. is a limited use of the term. It can extend to anything that is imitated within culture. Everything from the mundane - Fork, Knife, Spoon placement on a table - to the absurd - Qanon.



r/WallStreetBets and Community

We are a marketing firm and the recent explosion of meme stocks has been a fascinating watch in the power of community and how it empowers a movement. If you are in the business of brand building, you are trying to gain attention and direct it to action.


r/WallStreetBets created a movement of directing a group of disjointed individuals via the glue of memes. These memes allow the group to have a shared language and jokes that bond via an in group mentality. Their “units of imitation” are simple to replicate and share. 


The brazen ridiculousness of all the terms makes them even more mockable which requires sharing and imitation and bonding of the in-group. 




I’m an Advertiser and Don’t Care about Stonks

Budweiser made a meme with its “Wassupp” ad. TikTok’s Duet feature and many other product features on platforms are meme engines. (Memegins?) Share buttons are littered throughout the internet. Every piece of content screams to be replicated.


Yes r/WallstreetBets has a lot of weird language but after about 15 minutes you’ll start typing 🚀 🌕 with little thought and will start judging the 📜 ✋ in the midst who cost you tendies.


Easy to imitate and through the imitation the group improves upon the original idea. The successes are repeated and become even more shareable and immitatable. This is the evolutionary process Dawkins keyed into. Failure is easy to define as it is just content that is not replicated and shared.


The flywheel is that the sharing and imitation increases further sharing. Understanding how to bring this to your brand, your community, can be key to kickstarting your own movement.


What’s the Difference Between a Bad, Good and Great Story?

Bad stories are forgotten. Good stories are remembered. Great stories are retold.


The retelling and sharing within culture is the power of brand advertising. 


In fact, this might be the easiest way to differentiate between brand and direct response ads. Direct response ads are judged on product sales and perhaps help define a brand.


Brand ads should be judged on the great story criteria - are they retold? Shared? Imitated? Sales will come from causing this replication.



* How to pronounce: meme rhymes with gene. 

** Aaron Lynch in his book Thought Contagion defined 7 patterns of transmission for memes: Quantity of parenthood, Efficiency of parenthood, Proselytic, Preservational, Adversative, Cognitive, Motivational.