Today in Digital Marketing - 138: I’m sorry, HOW did you know I’m pregnant?!

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. It is Friday, April 24th, 2020. Be protected. Be Zen. marketers soon be able to target people based on their medical condition, LinkedIn might be a little broken, and QR codes are back. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. You don't have to be on the internet long to come to the conclusion that YouTube's comment section is full of bottom-feeding parasitic trolls. Or maybe just kids. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. And if your brand has been on the end of a swarm of comments that just say,

Starting point is 00:01:10 totally gay, sucks you, suck retarded, then I have some bad news for you. It might get worse. Because YouTube is moving the comment section up on its mobile app. Way up. Right now, to get to the comments on mobile, people have to swipe all the way down to the bottom of that screen.

Starting point is 00:01:30 Soon, though, the comment section will have a preview that'll show up below a clip's description. When you tap it, it expands into the full comment section. This will, of course, only increase the number of comments that your brand's videos collect, and does nothing to address the quality of those comments. And in fact, here's where it gets worse. Google says that the comments in this expanded preview area will be sorted by engagement.

Starting point is 00:01:56 Not good engagement, just any engagement. And you might think to yourself, that's okay, that's okay. I know how to pin our comment to the top. Well, nope. Google says pinned comments won't necessarily show up until someone taps on that preview. All that to say, make sure that you are monitoring your YouTube comments closely. And if you are in the market for a third-party social media platform, perhaps add YouTube comment moderation to your RFP, because comments are about to get busier, which on YouTube means worse. Facebook has removed a targeting interest from its platform, an interest I was actually

Starting point is 00:02:37 surprised to find there in the first place. It sounds like even Facebook was surprised it was there. The interest? Pseudoseudoscience. Presumably an audience of people who think vaccines cause autism, 5G towers cause COVID-19, and believe U.S. President Trump's musings yesterday that maybe we'll all just inject household disinfectant into our veins. I'm not kidding, he actually said that. That's why hashtag inject disinfectant was trending today. This won't be a surprise to you, but it wasn't a small audience.

Starting point is 00:03:06 78 million people were in that pseudoscience targeting bucket. The implications, of course, are obvious. Any advertiser, including you or me, could have promoted content to people likely to believe that stuff, provided the content itself didn't violate policy. Obviously, a bit of an embarrassing moment for Facebook, which has fallen over itself in the last few weeks to stay on the legit side of science. Of course, you still can reach those people if you're clever. Just before I started recording the voice track for this podcast, I myself built a saved audience of people who are interested in UFOs and who are also interested in 5G towers.

Starting point is 00:03:43 I'm not saying they're conspiracy theorists, not saying they're wearing tinfoil hats, but, well, fill in the blanks there. By the way, there are 2.3 million people that are both interested in UFOs and in 5G towers, so go get them. Never thought I'd be talking about a digital ad campaign that was built around a QR code,

Starting point is 00:04:04 but here we are. And the campaign is from Burger King. The TV ad is pretty simple. It's just a single camera shot of their burger. The audio, just ambient sounds from one of their restaurants. The only thing that's happening on screen is a small QR code is bouncing around the screen. Kind of like the DVD screensaver. And the idea is try to catch it, try to scan it as it's moving around,

Starting point is 00:04:27 which, by the way, I tried this on the YouTube version of this. It's actually kind of hard to do. And if you scan it, at least the current iteration of the TV ad, you get nothing. Well, you get a message saying, scoring a Whopper is easy, but not this easy. Stay tuned on your TV for a real chance to score. Once the real ad runs, that QR code will apparently give free burgers to the first 10,000 viewers to scan it, as long as they redeem it with the Burger King app and buy something else. The American drugstore chain CVS is said to be

Starting point is 00:05:02 developing its own online advertising network to give digital marketers a way to target CVS customers when they are most ready to shop. Quoting MarketingDive.com, The CVS media exchange appears to be quite sophisticated, with dynamic advertising that marketers have grown to expect on digital platforms like Facebook and Google. Rather than blanketing consumers with the same sales pitch, dynamic ads let marketers set up more personalized marketing messages based on demographic criteria, time of day, and even local weather. Like Amazon, CVS has data about its customers, including their shopping histories. That is crucial to ad personalization and targeting, unquote. And look, I'm a marketer.

Starting point is 00:05:47 You're a marketer. You wouldn't be listening. This is where the two halves of our brains are most noticeable, right? Digital marketer half is like, oh my God, that's great targeting. I can finally reach people based on their past medical purchases. And regular consumer side of your brain is like, wait, wait, wait, don't target me by my medical history. Anyway, CVS Media Exchange joins a whole bunch of retailers that have built their own ad platforms like Kroger, Target, and Walmart. Heads up if you market in the B2B space. I'm

Starting point is 00:06:19 seeing reports today that links on LinkedIn are broken, at least perhaps for some people. What people are seeing is only the HTTP colon slash slash part of the URL is clickable or tappable. The rest of the URL is there, but it's rendered in plain text and tapping it does nothing. Apparently this is happening for posts that are both published on LinkedIn directly or through a third party social media management tool. I checked it at my end links on LinkedIn looked fine to me. But if you are running a mission-critical ad campaign on LinkedIn right now, it might be a good idea to check in on its metrics. Well, I've had a few people reach out to me in the last couple of months wondering if they could get a mention of a tool that they've built for marketers or something else that they want to promote but didn't have the budget for a

Starting point is 00:07:02 proper mid-roll ad. So I have created something new. Classified ads. You'll get 50 words. I'll read one at the end of each episode. And they are cheap, just 20 bucks. So if reaching about a thousand digital marketers for 20 bucks sounds good to you, there is a link in this episode's description to sign up.

Starting point is 00:07:20 Also there, links to all my social media channels. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful and safe weekend. Stay inside, and I will talk to you on Monday.

Today in Digital Marketing - 138: I’m sorry, HOW did you know I’m pregnant?!

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