This Week in Social is a weekly digest of some of the biggest stories in social media marketing news. These stories are the show notes for the Brave Ad World Podcast. Each story is discussed at a deeper level on the podcast.

TikTok Ups Its Ecommerce Chops

TikTok is ramping up its ecommerce ad formats to appeal to more advertisers looking to sell on the platform. The new ads will give brands the ability to better showcase their products, retarget users and gain more attention around promotions.

There are four new formats. There's Collection Ads, which will combine product catalogs with brand videos with a CTA to go to a product landing page. Dynamic Product Ads match products with users automatically based on behavior. Promo Tiles give advertisers the ability to launch in-feed video ads featuring sales or promotions. Lastly, there are Showcase Tiles, which elevate products promoted in videos with a CTA to go to a product page.

These new features will join TikTok's existing shoppable livestreaming tests that have been running with Walmart.

TikTok getting into the ecommerce game is a big deal because at the moment Facebook runs the show. Half of US social users have made purchases through social media, and most of those sales happen on Facebook, which moved aggressively in 2020 to rollout Shops on Instagram and Facebook. Despite Facebook's dominance, the space is still in growth mode, which makes TikTok's entrance to the space all the more interesting. Competition is going to heat up and with competition will mean greater adoption.

News Quick Hits

Google inadvertently shared unredacted court documents this week that revealed Project Bernanke. Project Bernanke used aggregate data from Google's ad exchange to land the best deals for itself and its clients. The data allowed Google to bid the minimum needed to win the bid, leading other ad buyers to lose more bids more often or pay higher prices.
Reddit is the latest of many platforms to try to develop a Clubhouse-like feature of its own. The feature would create audio rooms within individual subreddits hosted by moderators.
Twitter's planned steps of simplifying its ad offerings are underway. It just cut more than 20 ad inventory options to focus on five different ad formats that advertisers can choose from. There's Promoted Ads, Follower Ads, Twitter Amplify, Twitter Takeover and Twitter Live. Each of the five categories has sub-categories of specific formats. For example, under Twitter Takeover brands have the options of Timeline Takeover and Trend Takeover. In addition, it partnered with Nielsen to allow advertisers to better measure performance on the platform.
Facebook's oversight board will now hear cases about content that remains on its platforms. Up until this point, the board only reviewed cases related to content that was removed from Facebook and could decide whether or not to uphold the decision or reverse it. People can appeal to the board after going through all other potential avenues to have content removed or reinstated.
Instagram has launched a test that will allow users to toggle on or off like counts for their posts. The toggle gives users three options. They can turn off like counts for all posts, their own posts or leave like counts on altogether. The test is part of an effort Facebook launched last year to focus users on the content they share, rather than the numbers it generates in an effort to promote a healthy perspective on the platform.
Roku has added six new mobile measurement companies to its Measurement Partner Program. The companies will help with measuring broad brand metrics as well as direct response performance in the form of app downloads, sales and store visits. Roku has been aggressively expanding its capabilities, and it hopes these new partners will help convince more advertisers to shift budgets to connected TV (CTV).
Google's cookie replacement FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) has run into a fresh set of problems. It was announced that it would be delayed in Europe due to GDPR compliance a few weeks ago. Now, it's been announced that DuckDuck Go's Brave extension and the Firefox browser will not implement FLoC. That means Google has a problem. For FLoC to work, it needs browsers to support it. No browsers means no data.