Today in Digital Marketing - 132: An Important Court Ruling about User-Generated Content

Starting point is 00:00:00 Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today,

Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. It is Thursday, April 16th, 2020. Happy National High Five Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, most digital agencies say they will be fine after the pandemic. Learn more about the ad campaigns your competitors are running. Are we about to see the end of 24-hour expiring stories? And a massive change to how brands are advertising on YouTube? Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. An interesting court decision in the U.S. may have implications for your brand if you tend to use a lot of user-generated content. Back in 2016, the website Mashable.com

Starting point is 00:01:07 embedded an Instagram photo from a professional photographer in one of their stories. This was a public photo on her Instagram timeline, and they had used Instagram's embed code to pop it onto their story. They did not seek her permission in advance for this. This is, of course, something you see all the time, not just with Instagram, but embedded tweets, Facebook posts, SoundCloud

Starting point is 00:01:30 audio, YouTube videos, and so on. But Stephanie Sinclair sued, saying that they had violated her copyright. The New York District Court has now ruled against her. In its decision, the court said, quote, plaintiff argues that it is unfair for Instagram to force a professional photographer to choose between remaining in private mode on one of the most popular public photo sharing platforms in the world and granting Instagram a right to sub-license her photographs to users like Mashable. Unquestionably, Instagram's dominance of photograph and video sharing social media, coupled with the expansive transfer of rights that Instagram demands from its users, means that the plaintiff's dilemma is a real one. But by posting the photograph to her public

Starting point is 00:02:18 Instagram account, plaintiff made her choice. Unquote. This, of course, does not mean it's free reign for you. First, this is an American court decision. Different countries will have their own opinions about this. And this doesn't mean you can just copy an Instagram photo and use it however you want. This applied specifically to embedding. If you didn't embed and just use the photo without Instagram's code, you would almost certainly be violating copyright. But embedding, at least in the U.S., is okay. Back in 2015, an artist took other people's Instagram photos without their permission, sized them up, printed them on large artboards, and then sold them.

Starting point is 00:03:00 Some for more than $100,000. And you might think that that was a huge violation of the copyright of the original photographer, but you would be wrong. Again, at least according to American courts. He has been sued by several of the original creators, but so far, every single case has failed because the court agreed with his assertion

Starting point is 00:03:21 that his work was transformative. Some of you who listen are brand marketers who work in-house, and some of you, like me, are agency marketers who work with brands. Until now, I've been mostly reporting on the impact of COVID-19 on brand marketers, but how are the agencies doing? Well, a new study from Orbit Medium, where they asked 122 agencies in its network a couple of weeks back, and most said, while it's certainly having a negative impact, the majority, 37%, say it's only going to be slightly negative. 23% said they're not expecting any change.

Starting point is 00:03:59 So when you add in those who said that they would actually come out with a positive impact on their bottom line, that is 80% of agencies who say they'll either be fine or experience only a slight dip. As for what services are most affected, no surprise, media buying has dropped way, way, way down, a stunning 95% down. Paid search is also down about 25%, but some services are growing. And if you're with an agency, these might be the items to double down on. Content marketing and graphic design are up a bit. Web development is up 26 percent. Maybe that's because e-commerce and online ordering has changed so much. And PR and communication services up 27 percent. A link to the full study is, of course, in this episode's description. Facebook has added a couple of new metrics to its ad library listings,

Starting point is 00:04:51 metrics that will make it easier to spy on what your competitors are doing in the ad market. If this whole ad library thing is news to you, it's basically a way to see what ads any given brand is running on the platform. It was introduced as a transparency measure, mostly for political campaigns, but it does work for most other industries too. You can get to it by going to facebook.com slash ads slash library. And what is this new metric?

Starting point is 00:05:18 Reach. Quoting social media today, up until now, you could somewhat estimate this manually based on ad spend and audience targeting, but the new listings will make it easier to sort ads based on their potential influence and get a better understanding of each campaign. Facebook will also now group similar ads together within the library,

Starting point is 00:05:39 making it easier to find related ad content, while it's also added more filters to better enable ad searches, such as the capacity to search by Instagram handle. Snapchat has released a new business hub specifically for the pandemic. It includes resources, insights, and links to help digital marketers like you and me manage through this all. Quoting social media today, the new mini-site showcases a heap of data points on the changes in Snapchat usage during the global lockdowns, highlighting relevant opportunities

Starting point is 00:06:10 and best practices based on examples. Snapchat plans to expand on these tools with new data updates over time, unquote. Earlier in the month, both Twitter and Facebook released similar mini-sites to help digital marketers navigate these very new waters. Many digital marketers are finding that with the right creative, the stories format can drive some solid results. But one downside to stories, at least organic stories with no ad spend behind them, is of course that they disappear after 24 hours. Now that may be changing. An independent software engineer has discovered that Facebook is testing letting brands and people keep their Facebook stories active for up to 72 hours.

Starting point is 00:06:55 This may be well in line with the way Facebook handles boosted posts. When you go to boost a post and ask it to run for fewer than four days, Facebook will recommend that you do at least four days. The rationale? People aren't on Facebook every day, so this longer window will catch more people. I'm guessing this is the same reason they might let you run your organic stories for three days.

Starting point is 00:07:14 It appears so far it'll be a choice. You can either run it for 24 hours or 72 hours, or, you know, put an ad budget behind it and run it for 10 years if that's what you want to do. An interesting new development at YouTube, as you might know, when you advertise digitally, most platforms, including YouTube, let you globally opt out of having your ad run in certain circumstances, specific websites, or on pages with specific keywords. Usually, digital marketers use these so-called block lists to avoid having their brand appear alongside information about things like alcohol or guns or cannabis. Well now, Search Engine Journal reports there's been a huge increase in the use of these block lists on the YouTube platform since March. Q1 normally sees a block rate of

Starting point is 00:08:02 about 3-6%, but now, literally millions of ads are being blocked from distribution. The New York Times alone, 36% of its ads were cancelled in March before they even began running. The inference is obvious, of course. Advertisers are trying to get ahead of public opinion and preventing their ads from showing up with content about COVID-19. Which is kind of weird, considering, quoting Search Engine Journal, according to a March study by Integral Ad Science, only 16% of respondents said they would have a less favorable attitude towards a brand if they saw their ads in conjunction with coronavirus content. In almost half these cases, those surveyed said they'd actually want to see ads

Starting point is 00:08:44 by certain types of companies alongside that content, including pharmaceuticals and health-oriented brands. By the way, I saw in one of the Facebook groups that I'm in that someone had their entire business manager account disabled for apparently violating Facebook's ad policies. The whole thing, with nearly 100 separate ad accounts in it. It got reversed after a day, but this is just another example of Facebook stepping up their automated reviews in the absence of a lot of its usual review staff, you know, human beings. So, heads up. Follow me on social.

Starting point is 00:09:23 All my links are in this episode's description. I'm Todd Baffin. Talk me on social. All my links are in this episode's description. I'm Todd Baffin. Talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - 132: An Important Court Ruling about User-Generated Content

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.