Top Advertising Trends (September 2023)

As Facebook has become more entangled in the political spotlight, the company has become more transparent about who advertises and who they target. This has created an ecosystem of market intelligence companies that scrape Facebook's ad intelligence tool and provide search features to help advertisers see the ads their competitors are running.

AdSpy, one of these companies, is a popular enough brand name that it's also a generic term: competitors like BigSpy and PowerAdSpy refer to themselves as "AdSpy tools" to capture some of the brand's search traffic.

The ad intelligence business is a naturally challenging one: every company relies on the same supplier, so it's naturally commoditized, and that supplier can change their offering at will. The ecosystem around Google's search ads has slowly been squeezed as Google gives up less and less information to advertisers, forcing them to optimize with Google's in-house tools rather than external tools. In the short term, auction-based ad platforms benefit from these advertising tools: they mean that any ad price arbitrage gets identified quickly, and competition pushes prices up, which means the profits accrue to the company selling ads, rather than the one buying them.

Much in the way that Shopify provides infrastructure for people selling physical products, Streamelements provides infrastructure for gaming streamers to grow and monetize their following.

As gaming increasingly competes for time with other activities like television, social drinking, and even sex (according to the CDC Youth Risk Behavior Data), there's a growing pool of gaming influencers with cult-like youth followings.

The platform lets streamers set up everything from tipping pages, to song request pages, merch stores, and even merch logistics. By focusing on their streaming content and leaving the infrastructure to Streamelements, streamers are able to extract more support from their audience, a chunk of which goes back to Streamelements as part of a positive growth engine.

At the same time, brands are struggling in their attempts to reach Gen Z and Millennial consumers via traditional advertising. And while this demographic holds considerable buying power and cultural influence, TV subscriptions are low, ad blocking is high, and media use is severely fragmented. Live streamed content is rapidly becoming the preferred mode of entertainment, especially when it comes to eSports and gaming, and brands are consequently seeing huge value in partnering with streamers and their communities.

As many stock photo sites struggle to compete with the growing abundance of free high resolution images online, Unsplash has embraced this shift by flipping the stock photo licensing model on its head.

Rather than charging for the stock photos like their competitors do, the photos are free to consumers while brands pay to rank their product lifestyle photos high in search results, among other organically ranking photos that fit users’ search queries.

This lets brands reach a massive audience. More than 300M people use the service, downloading more than 100M images per month. The result is a new mode of advertising that better aligns incentives all around and as there is more demand, the supply grows, leading to a better product for end users.

Much like how Airbnb encourages users to monetize their extra bedrooms, many Brands’ sponsored images are simply leftovers from photoshoots. Brands, like Square and Brandless, upload these images and even run campaigns on the site. Curology, a fast-growing DTC dermatology startup, did so and racked up nearly 150,000 downloads and placements on sites like Buzzfeed and Cosmopolitan.

As Lyfts and Ubers become increasingly ubiquitous, Firefly sees an opportunity to create a fleet of mobile billboards and sell valuable city data to governments.

Unlike the static ads atop New York City taxis, though, Firefly use location and weather data to deliver relevant advertisements to pedestrians as drivers shuttle between pickups and drop-offs. For drivers, the ads offer an opportunity to make an extra $300 per month on average — which, given the economics of ridesharing, could help cover costs that drivers have to shoulder themselves, like car maintenance. Some drivers are also installing in-car vending machines to add to their earnings, thanks to startups like Cargo and Vendy.

But what's particularly interesting about Firefly isn't their ads. With their hardware constantly moving around cities, they've been able to collect data that governments are after, such as block-by-block air quality and patterns in pedestrian movement. Through selling to these governments, Firefly can give themselves an advantage in cost structure over their competitors who are just selling ad space.

In a future where the convenience and cost of transportation via self-driving cars means lower car ownership, we can expect to see more products like Firefly.