SOCIAL
Google Rolls Out Automated Performance Max Campaigns for Hotels

Google’s looking to help hotels maximize their promotional efforts with new Performance Max for Travel Goal ads, which effectively automate the ad creation process, based on your existing hotel listings.
As explained by Google:
“Performance Max for travel goals creates ads in multiple formats that will automatically serve across Google channels and inventory, including Google Maps, Search, YouTube and Hotel Ads (coming later this year). During campaign setup, just pick your hotel properties from a map using our hotel picker tool. Then it’ll pre-populate ads for your hotel – including creative elements like copy, images and URLs – in every format. You can edit any of these pre-populated assets or upload your own instead.”
The process streamlines the ad and campaign creation process, providing a range of automated prompts to build your ads from. Which could make it much easier to promote your hotels across all of the various Google formats – which is most likely where your target customers are searching.
Ad managers can maintain their Performance Max listings in Google Ads Manager, where you’ll have oversight of each element.

“The Insights page can help you better understand your performance, customers and business through information like demand forecasts and search trends. For example, search term insights show you what guests are searching for when they see your ad. Performance Max for travel goals gives you access to even more simplified property-level reporting and travel-specific campaign recommendations.”
Google says that a single Performance Max for travel goals campaign can support up to 100 hotel properties, and pre-populate recommended images, messages and other creative assets for each location. You can also measure and track campaign performance for each location in the ‘Hotels’ tab.
And the process has proven effective – Google says that advertisers who use Performance Max achieve 18% more conversions, at a similar cost per action.
It can be a bit disconcerting to trust your ad budget and process to AI tools, but increasingly, these options are getting better at maximizing performance. Meta has also reported similarly good results with its Advantage+ automated campaigns, and as machine learning systems improve at tracking and measuring user behavior, it stands to reason that they will eventually be better at allocating budgets, and maximizing ad performance.
It could be worth an experiment either way – you can learn more about Google’s Performance Max for Travel ads here.
SOCIAL
Musk regrets controversial post but won’t bow to advertiser ‘blackmail’

Elon Musk’s comments at the New York Times’ Dealbook conference drew a shocked silence – Copyright GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP Slaven Vlasic
Elon Musk apologized Wednesday for endorsing a social media post widely seen as anti-Semitic, but accused advertisers who are turning away from his social media platform X of “blackmail” and said anyone who does so can “go fuck yourself.”
The remark before corporate executives at the New York Times’ Dealbook conference drew a shocked silence.
Earlier, Musk had apologized for what he called “literally the worst and dumbest post that I’ve ever done.”
In a comment on X, formerly Twitter, Musk on November 15 called a post “the actual truth” that said Jewish communities advocated a “dialectical hatred against whites,” which was criticized as echoing longtime conspiracy theory among White supremacists.
The statement prompted a flood of departures from X of major advertisers, including Apple, Disney, Comcast and IBM who criticized Musk for anti-semitism.
“I’m sorry for that tweet or post,” Musk said Wednesday. “It was foolish of me.”
He told interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin that his post had been misinterpreted and that he had sought to clarify the remark in subsequent posts to the thread.
But Musk also said he wouldn’t be beholden to pressure from advertisers.
“If somebody’s gonna try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money?” Musk said. “Go fuck yourself.”
But the billionaire acknowledged that there were business implications to the advertiser actions.
“If the company fails… it will fail because of an advertiser boycott” Musk said. “And that will be what will bankrupt the company.”
Musk, who met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a visit to Israel earlier this week, insisted in the interview that he holds no discrimination against Jews, calling himself “philo-Semitic,” or an admirer of Judaism.
During the interview, Musk wore a necklace given to him by a parent of an Israeli hostage taken in the Hamas attack on October 7. The necklace reads, “Bring Them Home.”
Musk told Sorkin that the Israel trip had been planned earlier and was not an “apology tour” related to the controversial tweet.
SOCIAL
TikTok Encourages Creators To Make Longer Videos, With Focus On Ad Revenue 11/30/2023

A new report by The Information shows the company’s recent efforts to convince
creators to put out longer videos in order to provide more room for ad placements.
According to the …
SOCIAL
X Adds Option To Embed Videos in Isolation From Posts

Next time you go to embed an X post, you may notice a new step:
Now, X will enable you to choose whether you want to embed the video element in isolation, or the whole post, as normal.
And if you do choose to embed just the video (or GIF), it’ll look like this:
Which could be a helpful way to present X-originated video on third-party websites, and add context to, say, your blog post, without the clutter of the full X framing.
But it could also reduce brand exposure for X, which is likely why Twitter didn’t enable this before, though it did once provide an “embedded video widget” which essentially served the same purpose.

Twitter gradually seemed to phase that out as the platform evolved, and there’s no specific reason that I can find as to why it removed it as an option. But either way, now, it’s back, so you have more options for using X-originated content, and putting more focus on video elements specifically.
Though I don’t know why they didn’t also take the opportunity to remove the ‘Tweet’ reference. Since the re-brand to X, the platform seems to have gone to little effort to weed out all the tweet and bird terminology, but then again, with 80% fewer staff, that’s probably understandable as well.
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