KEEP THAT DIGITAL-FIRST ENERGY

Just a year ago we said we’d never go back. Not that we’d all never work in a common office again, but that we had seen all of the ridiculous inefficiencies that came with blindly trudging into a centralized location 5 days a week.

Remember that before COVID, even simple things that we now count as table stakes, like video meetings, were not common. I recall anticipating some executive education and a bit of last-minute tech support crisis with nearly every video conference that we scheduled in 2019.

WHY DO WE CARE ABOUT FIRST-PARTY ADS?

2019 was a magical time for digital marketers — ads were cheap, targeting was amazing, and the platforms were able to track your every move across the internet. Turns out, that wasn’t so great for our privacy. Bad actors abused the system, and data breaches were a regular occurrence, which led most major governments to introduce data-protection regulations. But it wasn’t governments that caused the biggest shift online, it was another tech company.

WHAT WE LEARNED FROM THE BIG SOCIAL EARNINGS

Last week all of the biggest platforms reported their earnings, which always cuts through the spin to reveal what’s actually going on under the hood. This time they all told roughly the same story: Growth is good, and so are earnings.

In Meta’s case, the big headline was that they have crossed 3 Billion users – just another sign of their dominance as the world’s largest social network, by a lot.

THE DIGITAL ADOPTION OPPORTUNITY GAP IS BIGGER THAN EVER

“We’re a mess - our competitors’ digital strategies are so well put together, why can’t we be more like them?”

Sound familiar? It’s a near-direct quote that I’ve heard hundreds of times.

HERE’S WHAT WE LEARNED FROM YOUTUBE’S REPORT ON CULTURE & TRENDS

YouTube is an absolute beast when it comes to popular culture and people’s preferences. If you were to ask anyone under the age of 25 who their favourite “celebrities” are, the list would almost certainly contain several names that can only be found on YouTube, so when they put together a Culture & Trends report, you know it’s going to be good.

IT’S A WEIRD TIME IN SOCIAL MEDIA

The only constant, as the say, is change – but this is getting ridiculous.

Just a year ago it seemed that the biggest adaptation we’d all have to make was the growth of TikTok and the shift to Reels-style video content.

Now, TikTok and Reels are still very much a thing; Twitter is melting down; Meta has launched an alternative called Threads that 100 million+ people signed up for, but no one seems to know what to do with it; and Canadian news organizations are getting shut out of their accounts.