Today in Digital Marketing - 161: What’s that App Called Again? You Know The One...

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 Marketplace opens up to brands. We have a new Instagram ad placement. CMOs are becoming more diverse as a group. And the Spark AR Studio gets some suspiciously TikTok-like features. It's Thursday, May 28th. Happy Orthodox Ascension Day, Romania. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. Hey, you know that short form video app that everyone talks about? What's its name again? You know the one it's owned by a Chinese

Starting point is 00:00:57 firm? What is it called? It was at the top of the Apple Store in the US this week? You know it. Oh yeah, Zyn. That's it. Yes, Zyn, not TikTok, was at the top of the US app store charts this week. And what is Zyn, you ask? Yeah, it's pretty much TikTok. It's a clone, a shameless clone at that, complete with following and for you feeds, complete with exactly the same right-hand buttons to follow, like, comment, and share, the same video editing and effects. Like, they're not even trying here. And why is it getting so popular so suddenly? It has an interesting user invitation system that socialmediatoday.com calls,

Starting point is 00:01:37 quote, essentially an inbuilt pyramid scheme, unquote. Users earn points by watching videos on the app and inviting their friends to install it. And then those points can be spent on gift cards to places like Amazon or Walmart, or they'll even just straight up send you cash via PayPal. And it is all the talk on the YouTubes right now. And I'm going to show you how I made over a thousand dollars in 24 hours and then continue. People are going crazy with this application. All right. It's called the Zen app. It's this app called Zen. It's basically TikTok, but you're getting paid. Zen is owned by a Chinese company. In fact, the main competitor to TikTok's parent company,

Starting point is 00:02:23 ByteDance. All that to say, shit's about to get real, folks. And if your brand is producing regular TikTok videos, you might want to test a couple on Zyn. Or at the very least, reserve your brand's preferred account name. Big news for small businesses that sell things online. Facebook Marketplace. You know, the section where you sell your old VCRs to your neighbors, or you try to anyway, because nobody buys VCRs, I'm not bitter.

Starting point is 00:02:49 Anyway, that Facebook Marketplace is now opening up to businesses. Well, businesses in the US anyway. Yes, Facebook will take a cut of your online sales here, a 5% cut, but that's still a better deal than a lot of the other e-commerce platforms, some of which charge a fee just to list your inventory or take higher commissions depending on the product category or have higher fees for more functionality and so on. By way of example, Amazon takes a 17% cut of all clothing sales.

Starting point is 00:03:18 Setting yourself up on Facebook Marketplace, pretty much the same as setting up a product feed in Ads Manager. And that feed needs to have data on your inventory levels, of course. When Facebook was testing this with a few brands earlier, they saw some good signs. One brand found that shoppers converted twice as often if they did their purchase inside the Facebook app rather than doing it on the brand's website. And a nice touch here, since Instagram has been assimilated into the Facebook Borg, your setup will also let you use Instagram's checkout. Although you manually select specific products to sell on Instagram rather than this new Facebook Marketplace layout. Still, good news for digital marketers looking for another channel to sell their products.

Starting point is 00:03:59 Marketingland has a great write-up about it in detail, and there is a link in this episode's notes if you would like to check that out. The latest ad placement for your Facebook campaigns is here, IGTV, the long-form video section of Instagram. IGTV was created mostly as a way to compete with YouTube, and to that end, Facebook is also adopting YouTube's revenue model. In other words, the creators of the videos will get a cut of your ad dollars. That's very different than ads alongside your videos on Facebook, where Facebook keeps all that money. The ad placements are videos, of course, up to 15 seconds long. They start rolling out next week, and sometime later in the year, they plan to add the ability for users to skip your ad as well. Chief marketing officers, as a group, are becoming more diverse.

Starting point is 00:04:51 That's the finding from a study released this week that found 43% of CMOs at the world's 100 most advertised brands were women in 2019. 43%. That's up from 36% in 2018 and just 28% in 2017. The study also found that 19% of new CMOs last year were from racially or ethnically diverse backgrounds compared to, are you ready for this, zero in 2018. That was just new CMOs, though.

Starting point is 00:05:21 When you look at the pool of all CMOs, only 14% can be considered ethnically diverse. But that's up from 10% from the previous year. So progress, I guess. Kind of. The online ad platform Criteo has launched a new system to let you buy programmatic ads on retailer websites. And without the need for third-party cookies. It's called the Retail Media Platform and will support vendor marketing programs, search and national media campaigns, and targeting capabilities for brands. Among their clients, they claim PepsiCo, Kraft, Calvin Klein, and Disney.

Starting point is 00:05:58 It's available to you now if you are in the U.S. and Canada, and it will be coming to the rest of the world later in the year. Facebook is adding some new tools to its Spark AR Studio. That's the place where your developers can create augmented reality apps for your brand's marketing efforts. And among the new effects, a suspiciously TikTok-like green screen function. Also in there, you can now build effects that respond to music. You can use your own music or pick from their free library. And it's a pretty good library, I have to say, actually. A few thousand pieces in there. Which brings us to the lightning round. Sprout Social has changed its group report a bit. It's been renamed to Profile Performance and

Starting point is 00:06:41 contains some tweaks to the metrics in there. Looks like Facebook's ad campaign denial bot is drunk again. Some market is reporting that it is barfing error messages about your ad linking to a non-functioning landing page. As always, just appeal it and hopefully it'll sober up. YouTube is rolling out its new video chapters feature today to all users on desktop phones and tablets. We've talked about this before. It works just like the chapters in this very podcast.

Starting point is 00:07:07 You do know about podcast chapters, right? And not entirely sure what this means, but reports today that Snapchat is planning to let other companies build pared-down versions of their mobile apps within Snapchat. Apparently WeChat does something like this. We'll learn more next month when they make a formal announcement.

Starting point is 00:07:28 I have nothing special to talk to you about here, so follow me on social. All my links are in this episode's notes, and I will talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - 161: What’s that App Called Again? You Know The One...

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