Cancel culture: Whether you’re for it or against it, getting “canceled” online happens to the best (or the worst?) of us. And while 2016’s #TaylorSwiftIsOverParty clearly didn’t stop Swift from dominating the charts, not everyone who gets canceled is so lucky.

For instance, when influencers—whose entire careers arguably depend on their social media following—bleed followers en masse post-cancellation, they risk losing the brand sponsorships that keep the $$ + free products coming in.

The latest season of ABC’s reality dating show Bachelor in Paradise provides a case study for what can happen to an influencer’s brand deals when they lose a significant amount of followers.

• After contestants Brendan Morais and Pieper James were accused of coming on the show to gain larger Instagram followings, viewers and co-stars were quick to criticize Morais for stringing fellow contestant Natasha Parker along, lying to her in order to stay on the show and gain more screen time.
• Because of the drama, Morais lost roughly 100,000 followers from his original 350k, while James lost around 10,000 from her original 88k.

But do their brand partners care? While each brand that Marketing Brew spoke with responded to the drama differently, none of them were concerned about follower counts specifically.

Brand by brand

Marketing Brew spoke with brands that gifted James products (without monetary payment) before her follower loss—and they each reacted to the scenario differently.

BitterSweet: The clothing boutique isn’t interested in working with James after the fiasco. But owner Paula Pekic told Marketing Brew that it wasn’t so much the follower drop-off itself that concerned her, but its impetus. “Pieper’s actions are definitely not something we support, so at this time, she is not an influencer that we would work with in the future,” Pekic explained.

Saint Liz: “I don’t promote cancel culture because I think it’s very unfair. But what I will do is, at the time, not work with that person,” the jewelry brand’s founder Elizabeth Acosta told us regarding James, adding that her decisions had nothing to do with the follower-count decrease.

Recreational Habits: The clothing brand’s cofounder Jackie Skye Muller told us she’s “not at all” worried about James’s follower loss. She compared the situation with James to another influencer from the Bachelor franchise that Recreational Habits has worked with, Kit Keenan. “From my understanding…she wasn’t portrayed well on the show, but we knew her and that she was a fan of our brand, so we were happy to send her the product,” Skye Muller told us.

Ask an expert: Influencer agency FamePick’s VP of talent Kristina Milova said brands working with influencers suffering major follower losses should look into why those creators lost the followers to begin with. “If they lost 100k, you know they did something wrong,” she said, adding that she would recommend a brand working with that creator pause any immediate campaigns with them.

Read the full story here.—PB

In a win for humans and a loss for marketers, another tech giant is making it harder for advertisers to get their hands on user data. Amazon is masking some of the connected TV, or CTV, data it shares with advertisers—specifically IP addresses on IMDb TV and Twitch—Ad Age reported last week.

• An IP address is a data point that identifies a device on a network. It can be used to identify specific devices, like your cell phone.
• It’s one of the main ways advertisers identify who’s watching whatever’s being streamed on CTV. It also helps them “frequency cap,” or (try) to prevent the same ad from being shown over and over again to the same person.

So what? The move essentially makes it more difficult for an advertiser to know someone’s viewing data on Twitch or IMDb TV, both of which Amazon owns, and if that person made a purchase inspired by an ad.

More broadly, as Apple, Google, and now Amazon crack down on privacy, there are fewer signals advertisers can track.

• After Apple’s recent iOS updates started allowing users to opt out of tracking on apps, Facebook marketers have struggled to get accurate metrics for brands.
• In June, Apple announced its own measure to safeguard IP addresses, but it’s currently in beta-testing mode.

Unless you’re heavily targeting gamers via Twitch, or you spend a ton of ad $$ on IMDb TV, the move won’t affect much, Mohammad Chughtai, global head of advanced TV at programmatic media firm MiQ, told Marketing Brew.

But, but, but: It could signal the direction Amazon is going—starting with its owned apps, before moving on to all the ones across its CTV platform, Fire TV, which captures nearly 20% of market share.

“If you’re locking down IP-address access at the platform level, that becomes a pretty big issue,” Chughtai said, explaining that targeting and measuring conversions is one of the biggest selling points of connected TV.

We spoke with two CTV marketers about the impact of Amazon’s move. Read on here.—RB

The robots are watching our commercials . No, this isn’t the premise for the lamest sci-fi flick of all time. But machine learning just might be the future of commercial testing.

Kantar, a company that measures audience insights through tests and surveys, has a tool it claims can predict and dissect how consumers will react to a commercial—all powered through artificial intelligence.

Link AI made its debut in 2020, and it’s already been used by Google, Coke, and Unilever (among at least 15 other clients, including creative agencies) to fine-tune creative campaigns.

This type of work is typically done by good old-fashioned people, asked to take a survey or join a focus group. When advertisers want to test ads before they’re ready, the process is called “copy testing,” which qualitatively gauges the impact of an ad (What did you like about this Trix ad?) and quantitatively measures how audiences respond to an ad (On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to switch from Fruity Pebbles to Trix?).

Now, Kantar thinks Link AI could replace both tactics.

Here’s how it works:

The AI is built upon nearly 230,000 advertisements (half of them for insurance companies. We’re kidding...) and the audience reactions Kantar’s been collecting since the early 1990s.

• Clients upload their creative to Link AI’s self-service portal—most test a standard 15- to 30-second spot.
• The machine breaks down a commercial’s visual features, audio, and on-screen text, then compares the ad against its library of advertisements.

Within 15 minutes, Link AI will spit out a prediction based on the industry’s most common KPIs: How persuadable was the ad? Was it enjoyable? How might it impact short-term sales? All responses are based on Kantar’s historical advertising data.

But, but, but...Testing can only get a brand so far. “Marketers are looking to predict a hit and avoid a disaster before they make a significant investment,” Elizabeth Paul, chief strategy officer at The Martin Agency, told the Brew. “The challenge you hear from creatives is that copy-testing can lead to paint-by-number creative.”

Click here to read the rest of the story.—RB

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

List: Here’s the Forbes list of the top 50 most influential CMOs in 2021. For the first time, Forbes used AI to help determine the list. I guess even computers know marketers at Netflix are important.

Free conference: The 3rd Annual Data Privacy Conference is being held virtually today, and it’s free to attend. Speakers this year include senators Amy Klobuchar and Ed Markey, representatives from the IAB, and basically every tech trade group you’ve ever heard of.are important.

Influencers: Sorry, it’s another list. Here are the 14 influencer brands you should know on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, according to Ad Age.

Red alert: There’s an easy way to reach podcast listeners. RedCircle lets you target the right demographics and measure the right metrics across thousands of independent shows, all with just a few clicks. Learn how to plug and play your brand here.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content}

Stat: US households viewing baseball on broadcast and cable has fallen 14% to 289,000 compared to the 2019 season, per Nielsen data cited by the Wall Street Journal. Go Mets .

Read: An ad-tech expert tries to get to the bottom of what the heck is happening at Ozy. And here’s Business Insider’s look at how Ozy’s advertisers are responding. If you missed it, here’s the original piece from the New York Times that set everything off.

Quote: “This is the worst kind of algorithm, because there is no intention to make it fair or equitable or not objectifying or non-racist or non-beauty-biased. It’s just human eye-tracking,” Twitter’s Jutta Williams told Emerging Tech Brew’s Hayden Field. Read the feature about how Twitter opened up its algorithm to the public.

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• A roundup of all our cannabis coverage.
• Why Heineken is spending nearly half its budget on nonalcoholic beer.
• Weber Shandwick wants to help brands combat fake articles.