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Ad industry employment rises (a bit)
“Employment in advertising, public relations and related services increased by 1,200 jobs in July, a comparatively small gain following a big jump in June,” Ad Age Datacenter’s Bradley Johnson reports, citing the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “U.S. employment in the BLS classification of advertising, public relations and related services rose to 446,400 jobs in July, marking the sixth month of growth since ad jobs hit a pandemic period low of 432,100 in January.”
Keep reading here.
Dueling jobs data
“U.S. employers added a higher-than-expected 943,000 jobs last month, the Department of Labor said Friday, and the unemployment rate declined by a fraction of a percentage point to 5.4%,” Catherine Thorbecke of ABC News reports. “While the latest figures indicate the economic recovery is gaining steam, the unemployment rate still remains well above the pre-pandemic figure of 3.5% seen in February 2020.”
Essential context: “The official government data came after payroll processor ADP’s monthly tally of private-sector job growth fell far short of expectations when it was released Wednesday,” Martha C. White of NBC News reports. “The number of jobs added plunged from 680,000 in June to just 330,000 in July, sharply below the 653,000 anticipated.”
Inside job
“Google fired dozens of employees between 2018 and 2020 for abusing their access to the company’s tools or data,” Vice’s Joseph Cox reports, “with some workers potentially facing allegations of accessing Google user or employee data, according to an internal Google document obtained by Motherboard.” Motherboard is Vice’s tech-news vertical.
Essential context: “Insider abuse is a problem across the tech industry,” Cox notes. “Motherboard previously uncovered instances at Facebook, Snapchat, and MySpace, with employees in some cases using their access to stalk or otherwise spy on users.”
See all the winners of Ad Age’s 2021 Small Agency Awards here.
$19,300
That’s what a vintage designer coat—specifically, a Number (N)ine Fall/Winter 2003 “Touch Me I’m Sick” Heart Patchwork Coat—sold for on Grailed, the platform/app for collectible fashion, in July, making it the month’s highest-priced item.
To see the rest of the top 10, click here.
Carrots, not cookies
In a post-cookie world, digital marketing consultant Ryan Alford writes in a guest post for MarTech ...
Businesses that can implement both online and offline strategies for first-party data collection will win. For example, in-store QR codes, and the conversational chatbot can be used by businesses to persuade customers to give crucial first-party data that can be leveraged for targeted marketing and audience building. The most successful incentivization programs typically provide tangible value to consumers. These include rewards/loyalty programs, free shipping, exclusive discounts or free gifts with purchase.
Alford calls these sorts of data-collecting carrots, broadly, “data incentivization”—one of “four key factors that will determine if a business can adapt to this new data world.”
Keep reading here.
See also: “Bluecore raises $125M to drive retail customer retention with big data,” from VentureBeat.
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Short is big
Short videos, with a runtime of 60 seconds or less, are booming on YouTube, according to Tubular Labs, the video measurement platform that serves as the data supplier for the Global Video Measurement Alliance, which includes Group Nine, Discovery, Digitas, ViacomCBS, BuzzFeed and other major players (as well as Tubular itself). Key stats and insights:
• From early January to date, views for short YouTube videos have increased by 153%. YouTube, of course, has been putting major resources behind positioning so-called YouTube Shorts as a TikTok competitor. See, for instance, “YouTube’s $100 million Shorts Fund to challenge TikTok goes live,” as TechCrunch reported on Tuesday.
• YouTube defines YouTube Shorts as vertical-format videos of 60 seconds or less. Like TikTok videos, YouTube Shorts have an optional built-in musical-accompaniment component that lets Shorts creators easily soundtrack their videos with music clips via YouTube’s licensing agreements with industry conglomerates including Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, Sony Music and more.
• Tubular does comprehensive tracking of videos by various criteria on a real-time basis, but for the purposes of its current study of video engagement vis-à-vis runtime, it also did a week-over-week analysis across 2021 so far. Tubular’s weekly data shows that short videos racked up 33.2 billion views on YouTube from Jan. 4-10 and 83.9 billion from July 26-Aug. 1.
• Tubular points to YouTube creator Tsuriki Show, a family from Moldova—Vova and Anya and their two kids—that’s been on YouTube since July 10, 2019, but in pivoting to producing pretty much nothing but Shorts, managed to rack up the second-most unique viewers, 677.4 million, of any YouTube creator globally in June.
• In 2021 so far, Tsuriki Show, according to Tubular, accounts for an astonishing 7.2 billion of the 1.9 trillion global views for 60-seconds-or-less YouTube videos.
• Tubefilter’s James Hale, in a July profile of Tsuriki Show, characterized the channel as “a mix of comedy and lifestyle clips, all featuring peppy instrumental songs and no spoken words.”
• It’s not hard to imagine little kids binge-watching Tsuriki Show videos. See, for instance, the 21-second “Find your egg challenge,” which was uploaded on Monday and has already racked up more than 3 million views:
