Today in Digital Marketing - 101: Oh, California…. 😬

Starting point is 00:00:00 Salut mon ami, it's Friday, February 21st, 2020. Happy International Mother Tongue Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, check your Facebook retargeting because it might have stalled out. Twitter's latest bug could expose your brand to some embarrassment. The opportunity to place ads alongside video game streams is bigger than you think. And guess who just bought out all of YouTube's ad inventory? Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:32 It's a little slow out there in the news today, so only a few items for you this Friday. First, if you are doing any Facebook retargeting, and your audience group includes people in the state of California, check your data. People on Twitter have been reporting that retargeting of California residents has basically come to a standstill. This is all likely due, of course, to California's new digital privacy legislation. This is Facebook, so, you know, they haven't really announced this or anything, but it's definitely worth checking in on your campaigns and doing a breakdown by state to see if you are getting any reach in California at all. So this was embarrassing. Apparently, Twitter had a nasty bug that, well, I'm just going

Starting point is 00:01:19 to read the notification that they sent some users. We recently discovered and fixed a bug that allowed people to see the titles of your lists, both public and private. For a few hours on between February 6th and 7th, it's a weird typo, the titles of all your lists were visible. However, the members of your private lists were not visible. We are very sorry about this bug and have taken steps to ensure this won't happen again. Unquote. Really, Twitter? Won't happen again? Because, you know, this is actually very similar to a bug that happened a few months back and exposed the private list names of a whole bunch of people, including some PR person from, was it Google,

Starting point is 00:02:01 I think? And one of her private lists was called The Haters or something like that, where she kept people that said bad things about Google. Maybe it was, was it Nest? Maybe it was Nest. Anyway, Twitter says they fixed it this time. And again, they said that when it happened a while back too. So maybe check the titles

Starting point is 00:02:17 of your corporate accounts private lists and change them to something that you and your colleagues will understand, but that their meaning isn't obvious to others. And look, bugs happen, right? Sometimes, like this one, bugs can be embarrassing as hell. Case in point, and you may not have even heard of this one, but back in November, Google had a nasty bug where if you downloaded your images from Google Photos via Google Takeout,

Starting point is 00:02:40 you might have gotten a complete stranger's photos instead. Or, to put it another way, people requesting their data may have gotten all of your photos. Google spun it by saying, you know, hey, that bug only affected less than one one-hundredth of a percent of users. But that still amounts to 100,000 people. I think we all know what this means, friends. Time to quit our digital marketing jobs, buy some property in Venezuela, and take up farming. Twitch, the video game streaming site, is expected to amount to 16% of the U.S. audience for digital video. These forecasts from eMarketer. That, of course, is a huge number when you think about YouTube and Netflix's share of

Starting point is 00:03:25 that pie. Twitch's viewership is expected to grow 14% this year to about 37 million people. Although, remember, always check the definitions of what these reports consider to be a viewer. In this case, eMarketer calls someone a viewer if they watch anything on Twitch in the last month. So wide range there. Game streaming is a big business. Microsoft's Mixer, which is a competitor to Twitch, has been dumping money into acquiring big-name streamers like Ninja. We're talking tens of millions of dollars for these streamers to leave Twitch and go to Mixer. Facebook, too, is trying to woo streamers over.

Starting point is 00:04:01 For Facebook, at least, more long video streams means more places to put video ads. They're obviously working hard on that. Just yesterday, for I'm pretty sure the first time, I saw a little checkbox in the Facebook ads manager saying, don't put this ad on any gaming streams. Thank you very much. It's a little peculiar to me why they would let brands opt out of gaming streams in particular. I mean, we can't opt out of, say, all live video streams. Maybe it's the higher than usual potential for profanity? And hey, speaking of profanity in video game streaming, you can watch me yell horrible things at my Overwatch teammates at Mixer.com slash HappyRadioGuy.

Starting point is 00:04:47 Finally, I told you this would be short. Hope you weren't planning to advertise on YouTube this November because one advertiser has just bought out the homepage in its entirety. And that advertiser is U.S. President Donald Trump. Quoting, and I recognize the irony here, quoting Bloomberg, that's Bloomberg the news site, not Bloomberg the guy who owns the news site and is also running for president, quoting Bloomberg, while the bulk of digital ad spending typically focuses on targeting specific messages to certain audiences, the top spot on YouTube is more akin to a Super Bowl TV ad. About three quarters of U.S. adults say they use YouTube,

Starting point is 00:05:32 exceeding the reach of even Facebook, according to the Pew Research Center. Ads on the YouTube masthead, as the video on the top of the homepage is known, generally run for an entire day. The exact duration of Trump's ad buy and financial details were unclear, This isn't entirely without precedent. In 2012, Barack Obama's campaign bought the YouTube masthead for Election Day before Mitt Romney had even secured the Republican nomination. eMarketer predicts that online political advertising in the current American election cycle will total $1.3 billion. That is more than double the levels of the last U.S. presidential election. So that's it for this week. Thank you all so much for the reviews.

Starting point is 00:06:25 They really do help get the word out. One American user with the username Cheesemachine said, The fact that the podcast gets into these specific changes with such precision is mighty helpful. Nice podcast to listen to. Thank you very much, Cheesemachine. Best username ever, by the way. And if you get value from this daily digital marketing news show please take a moment to rate and review this podcast also

Starting point is 00:06:48 you will find a link in this episode's description that makes that a very simple one click follow me on social links to my channel my video game stream channel by the way please don't watch honestly I'm terrible at overwatch and our agency are in this episode's description i'm todd maffin see you on monday

Today in Digital Marketing - 101: Oh, California…. 😬

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