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By Katalys Content Team●June 19, 2024

Welcome to Katalys Connect – your weekly shortcut to the latest in performance marketing.

[Read time: 4 minutes]

What’s in this issue? Each Tuesday, we pack the latest trends, actionable insights, and industry breakthroughs into a quick read – ensuring you’re not just keeping up, you’re staying ahead. 

Monetization: Discover how Google’s programmatic email ads, TikTok’s support for publishers, and the legal pushback against AI data usage are reshaping monetization strategies.
Growth: Explore Reddit’s brand safety enhancements, Instacart’s targeted YouTube ads, and GA4’s improved conversion tracking are fueling industry growth.
The Future of Commerce: Learn how Pinterest’s Performance+ tool, advanced e-commerce technologies, and the rise of retail media platforms like Amazon and Walmart are revolutionizing the future of commerce.

Email Marketing’s Next Move • Google Ad Manager’s new programmatic email ads offer a cookie-proof alternative, ushering in a new era of targeted marketing.

With tracking cookies set to disappear by 2025, email ads provide a reliable alternative for targeted advertising.

GAM’s support for programmatic ad slots simplifies ad delivery and personalization, making it easier for publishers to reach their audiences effectively.

Publishers’ TikTok Boost • While Meta and X retreat, TikTok seizes the moment to support publishers with new monetization opportunities.

TikTok’s new focus on publishers offers potential new income sources amid declining traffic from Meta and X.

Publishers like BBC Studios and The Hollywood Reporter are optimistic about TikTok’s potential for both marketing and revenue.

Common Crawl Faces Backlash • Publishers are pressuring Common Crawl to stop archiving their content to enable AI training, sparking a fierce debate over copyright and the future of web archives.

In a lawsuit filed against OpenAI last year, The New York Times cited that Common Crawl’s data was the most “highly weighted data set” in GPT-3.

Critics argue that restricting archives like Common Crawl risks stifling academic research, threatens web history preservation, and may further encourage big AI companies to do their own web crawling.

Upvotes for Safety • New partnerships with IAS and DoubleVerify enhance ad safety and measurement tools for advertisers.

Reddit’s collaboration with IAS and DoubleVerify ensures that ads are placed alongside content that aligns with brand values, reducing the risk of ads appearing next to controversial or harmful content.

By addressing brand safety concerns and offering robust verification tools, Reddit aims to attract more advertising revenue, supporting its goal of becoming a top platform for advertisers and improving its financial stability post-IPO.

Ads to Cart • InstaCart partners with YouTube to boost its ad business, utilizing shopper data to target precise audiences.

InstaCart’s partnership with YouTube lets brands target ads based on shoppers’ purchase history, enhancing the relevance and effectiveness of their marketing efforts.

This collaboration bolsters Instacart’s position in the retail media market, enabling it to compete more effectively with industry giants like Amazon by offering sophisticated and data-driven advertising solutions.

Attribution is Key • Google Analytics 4 updates attribution models to better credit-paid search campaigns, enhancing conversion accuracy.

This update ensures that paid search campaigns receive proper credit for driving conversions, correcting previous issues where conversions were incorrectly attributed to organic search, especially for single-page applications.

With more precise data on conversion sources, advertisers can make better investment decisions, optimize their campaigns based on actual performance, and allocate budgets more efficiently.

Pin This For Later • Pinterest’s Performance+ AI tool promises maximum ad performance with less effort, boosting Pinterest’s ad revenue potential.

Performance+ optimizes ad campaigns on Pinterest to reduce campaign creation time by 50% and allows advertisers to set key inputs like budget and target demographics.

By adopting AI-powered ad tools similar to Meta and Google, Pinterest aims to tackle the challenges of signal loss and improve ad performance, potentially increasing its ad revenue by 17.2% this year to $2.66 billion, up from a 5.8% growth rate in 2023.

E-Commerce Gets Smarter • New technologies are poised to tackle e-commerce challenges, enhancing fraud detection and efficiency.

AI-powered tools can quickly identify and manage fraudulent transactions, reducing the risk of chargebacks and disputes for e-commerce and B2B sellers.

Other integration opportunities include utilizing AI customer service chats to improve efficiency in routing or resolving requests.

Retail Media Boom • Retailers are transforming into powerful ad platforms, unlocking new growth and profit opportunities.

Retailers like Amazon and Walmart are seeing significant revenue boosts from retail media, with Amazon earning $46.9 billion in 2023 alone. This shift highlights a new, lucrative growth area beyond traditional retail operations.