Today in Digital Marketing - 153: Facebook Just Paid $400 Million for Your Thoughts

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. Facebook just paid $400 million for your thoughts. How is consumer behavior shifting now that we are in the next phase of the pandemic? Your brand's Instagram live broadcasts can now live forever and the future of digital marketing in the B2B space. It's Friday, May 15th. Happy Teacher Day, Mexico. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. How much is an animated GIF worth? Yes, I know, it's GIF. Old habits die hard. Anyway,

Starting point is 00:00:57 if you're Facebook, apparently $400 million. That's what analysts say Mark Zuckerberg paid today for Jiffy.com. You've probably used Jiffy, even if you may not recognize the brand name. It's one of the main engines of those little animated GIFs. You know, you're making an Instagram or Snapchat story, and you search hot, and you get lots of little moving images of flames or of hot people or someone fanning themselves with the word hot animated below. That's Jiffy. And now, Facebook owns it.

Starting point is 00:01:23 What will be interesting to see here is how exclusive Facebook wants to be with it. It could, if it wanted to, just cut all the other social platforms off from it. Full stop. They say they won't do that. But maybe those other platforms will drop Jiffy themselves. As Bloomberg.com noted, keeping those integrations potentially gives Facebook insight into activity on competitors' platforms. And maybe even insight into the private messages you and I send. CNBC anchor John Fort tweeted this afternoon,

Starting point is 00:01:54 Even if Facebook can't see the private messages you're sending, if they can see the GIFs you're searching for, they can get a clue about how you're thinking and feeling. This was actually Facebook's second attempt at buying them. They tried back in 2015, but at the time, Jiffy turned them down to see what other offers they could get. That might have been a mistake. Their last private funding round valued them around $600 million. But the conspiracy theorists are already out. Not even an hour after announcing the acquisition today, a Jiffy executive had to say that rumors that they are taking down GIFs of Mark Zuckerberg?

Starting point is 00:02:31 Totally not true. I probably don't need to tell you that major events like a pandemic change consumer behavior. We're all still trying to figure out how, of course, but one new study says it's identified three significant shifts that digital marketers should pay attention to as they work in the year ahead. And those three are increased e-commerce shopping, a desire for good value on products, and a lift in local consumption. This from Kantar's COVID-19 barometer report, which surveyed 45,000 people across 50 different countries. So, good sample size. Quoting MarketingDive.com, while some 73% of consumers still feel anxious, anxiety levels appear to be coming down from their peak in mid-March. More than 40% of people said they have ramped up their exercise, reading, or sleeping habits to cope with the pandemic-related stress.

Starting point is 00:03:27 More than half said they're trying to eat healthier, trying new dishes, and 20% of consumers are avoiding alcohol in what's being dubbed dry-solation. 32% of consumers have increased their e-commerce spending during the pandemic. But 45% of households say their income has fallen during the pandemic and 26% expect their income to be hit in the future. Nearly half of respondents said they think companies should offer discounts during this time of economic downturn, unquote. You will find a link to the full study and Marketing Dive's coverage of that study in this episode's notes. Another impact on marketing from COVID-19, positioning. In particular, perhaps changing your positioning. That's what Hershey's is doing with their icebreakers mints. A new campaign is trying to convince consumers that they should eat a mint

Starting point is 00:04:20 before donning a mask. In the 15-second ad, a woman puts on a mask while the voiceover says, thank you for wearing a mask for grandparents, neighbors, and cashiers, and then adds, how about a mint before you mask? Because mask breath, it's real. Is it though? Like, is it real?

Starting point is 00:04:43 This mint before you mask idea apparently came from a hershey employee's fiance who works at a hospital but it really came from necessity mint sales are down because with social distancing the main function of the mint as a kind of breath confidence is no longer relevant said a hershey's executive if you use Instagram live broadcast for marketing your brand or client, the new feature I reported on a couple of weeks ago is here now. The ability for you to save your Instagram lives as an IGTV video. This way you can keep it around for as long as you like. Until now, people could only watch your video live or in the 24 hours after it was broadcast. But there are catches that you should know about. First, these live replays will not include any likes or comments from your original

Starting point is 00:05:31 live video. The number of viewers for your live video will restart once you share it to IGTV, and you won't be able to edit or trim your live video before sharing it. The workaround there is to just download the video after it's broadcast, edit it offline, then re-upload to IGTV. But if you are looking for a quick and dirty method, there it is. Which brings us to the lightning round. Web domain thenewnormal.com is now owned by someone and they are selling it already for a half million dollars U.S. The video game industry says it had the best quarter it has ever had, nearly $11 billion just in the U.S. And just between January and March of this year, that's up 9% over the same quarter last year.

Starting point is 00:06:17 Apple has been all in on augmented reality lately, but they haven't forgotten about full VR. They just bought VR broadcast startup NextVR. It's been speculation for a while now that it is working on some kind of headset device that combines the two. For more than a year now, the top downloaded mobile app each month has been either TikTok or WhatsApp. But this month, a new winner, the Zoom mobile app. And a bit of an embarrassing moment for the city of Vancouver today. After earlier saying that COVID-19 was resulting in an economic hit of $27 billion to the city, they now say, yeah, sorry about that. Actually, that should have been 27 percent, not 27 billion,

Starting point is 00:06:59 a difference of about $25 billion. And you thought you were having a bad day. Finally, here's something I think I could say with confidence. Every single one of you who are listening right now uses some kind of martech, marketing technology. Most of us rely on a web service, whether it's a CRM or analytics tool or whatever. Even just this podcast, for instance, I use seven separate web tools. Google Docs for the script, Evernote, where I archive the scripts, Anchors, where the audio files are hosted, Shorby for the small website at todayindigital.com, PlinkHQ auto redirects people to subscribe in their own app, Podcorn is the ads marketplace I work with, and RateThisPodcast.com, well, does what you think it

Starting point is 00:07:42 does. But with the economy taking as big a hit as it seems to be, what does the future hold for these small MarTech firms that are very much the glue of our digital marketing efforts? So there are 8,000 MarTech vendors out there. Earlier this week, I talked to Mark Emmond, CEO of revenue marketing agency DemandSpring. There will be certainly some of them that the capital runway will run out. And I suspect given the economic impact of what we're going through that capital, venture capital financing, private equity financing will not flow as freely as before. So I think you're going to see probably a culling of some of the firms that are out there. I think you'll see a strengthening of some of the strong players, folks like Adobe and Salesforce, for example. HubSpot obviously have the wherewithal to withstand this timeframe, and they've built a great vision and set of technologies.

Starting point is 00:08:39 But I think you'll also see a real flourishing of innovation coming from this as well. We tend to see, if you look back on the last two cycles of recessions, in 2001, companies like Salesforce and Eloqua that was later bought by Oracle that really was the pioneer in marketing automation, they emerged from the 2001 dot-com bubble and burst. In 2008, firms like Marketo and HubSpot and Hootsuite emerged during those times. So you tend to see when there's market disruption and economic disruption, entrepreneurialism we know flourishes during those times. People lose their jobs and they turn to entrepreneurism. Not everyone certainly, but some people do. And that's where innovation flourishes. So I think we're setting up, I think this timeframe is going to see a culling of the

Starting point is 00:09:27 folks who, you know, 8,000, there's definitely some, as I said in my article, some wheat and some chaff in 8,000 vendors. I think you're going to see a culling of the chaff. I think you'll see the continued strengthening of the heavyweights. But I also think you'll see the next class of innovation come from this time. Our full interview, which focuses on the post-pandemic future of digital marketing in the B2B space, is coming to you Monday in a special Stat Holiday Edition. If your agency or company is looking for a little extra help, whether it's weekend and

Starting point is 00:10:00 evening coverage for engagement and moderation of your social channels or content work or social ad campaigns, do check out our agency at engageq.com. There is a link to us in this episode's notes. I'm Todd Maffin. Enjoy the special extended episode this holiday Monday. I'll be back Tuesday with all the regular digital marketing news of the day.

Today in Digital Marketing - 153: Facebook Just Paid $400 Million for Your Thoughts

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