Your Weekly Pencil - April 27, 2021

New Signals

• P&G reported e-commerce sales grew 50% Y-over-Y, according to an earnings report released Tuesday. Tide, Charmin, Olay and other iconic CPG brands ramped up e-commerce investments to meet consumer trends driven by the pandemic.
• According to a recent Instagram report, mobile-shot Stories ads have a 63% chance of outperforming studio-shot ads.
• Facebook announced plans to release new audio tools to the platform. Facebook Live Audio Rooms will be available to all users this summer, but also in the works are Soundbites—snackable audio content, and Boombox—a collaboration with Spotify.
• Apple's iOS14.5 privacy update went live this week. Users will now be opted out of being tracked by default. For FB advertisers, this could mean:

- Decrease of audience sizes

- Performance fluctuations and increased CPAs

- Immediate changes to reporting

An ad as delicious as tea! - Watch Plum Deluxe as Pencil's ad of the week

• It’s about tea, but not as you know it—Plum Deluxe is about shared experiences, conversation, trading community jokes, and creating a community of people whom all have one thing in common - tea.
• Andy Hayes, CEO and Founder of Plum Deluxe, shares how he and his team came up with the ad: "We use Pencil to quickly generate video designs that include a variety of photography overlaid with text, and the occasional video reel thrown in. We also combine hand-manipulated text with AI-generated headlines. Doing this, we've achieved a ROAS double the typical ROAS."

Making the behind-the-scenes things work - Will's April Platform Update

• New insight - human-edited AI concepts perform 26% better than human-only concepts and 7% better than AI-only concepts.
• Improved platform reliability
• Faster copy generation
• UGC soundbites
• Revealing insights BETA

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Something deeper

• "No matter what, nobody can take away the dances you’ve already had." Gabriel García Márquez.