Today in Digital Marketing - 171: This Podcast is Sick.

Episode Date: June 11, 2020

Some big changes to ad campaigns over on Google — especially if you are in certain categories. I know you thought you knew the restrictions to your ads, well.. Things are getting even MORE restrictive, and that’s causing a lot of digital marketers to scramble and check in on their active campaigns. Today in Digital Marketing is produced by engageQ.com. Can we help you with YOUR brand’s digital marketing and social media? Email [e-mail] or visit engageQ.com/contact Help Spread the Word! • Review this podcast at ratethispodcast.com/today • Click bit.ly/tweet-tidm to preview a tweet you can publish Advertising: Reach ~1,000 Digital Marketers • Classifieds ($20) — todayindigital.com/classifieds • Mid-Rolls — todayindigital.com/advertising TOD’S SOCIAL MEDIA: • Tod’s web site: TodMaffin.com • Tod’s agency: engageQ.com • LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/todmaffin • Twitter: twitter.com/todmaffin • Instagram: instagram.com/todmaffin • Facebook: facebook.com/tmaffin • TikTok: tiktok.com/@todmaffin • Mixer: mixer.com/HappyRadioGuy • Xbox Gamertag: Radio#9573 SOURCES: https://www.theq.live/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/youtube-customize-channel/371774/ https://www.marketingdive.com/news/big-advertisers-demand-delay-to-tv-upfronts-broader-media-buying-changes/579623/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/11/twitter-reactions/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/11/snapchat-redesigns-its-app-with-new-action-bar/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Some big changes to ad campaigns over on Google, especially if you are in the special campaigns category. I know you thought you knew the restrictions to your ad campaigns. Well, things are getting even more restrictive, and that is causing a lot of digital marketers to scramble and check in on their active campaigns today, Thursday, June 11th. Happy birthday, Prince Henrik of Denmark. I'm Todd Maffin, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing.

Google is expanding its policy prohibiting certain ad targeting if your ad promotes things like housing or employment or credit products. 10 years now, they have prohibited digital marketers like you from targeting users on the basis of certain things related to their identity or beliefs or sexuality or disabilities. Quoting from Google's news release, we are introducing a new personalized advertising policy for certain types of ads. This policy will prohibit impacted employment, housing and credit advertisers from targeting or excluding ads based on gender, age, parental status, marital status, or zip code, unquote. The company says it will be rolling this expansion of the prohibited categories out in the U.S. and Canada as soon as possible and elsewhere by the end of this year. One note I found telling in their release was this, quote, we've been working closely with the U.S. Department of Housing

and Urban Development on these changes for some time, and we appreciate their guidance in helping us make progress on these important issues, unquote. Yeah, I'm going to guess that the word guidance there was code for the government kindly reminded us that there is an open antitrust investigation about us. I don't know. Call me crazy. We may soon have a new way to measure brand sentiment on Twitter. Until now, measuring sentiment or the mood of public opinion has been mostly guesswork based on the words that people use in their tweets.

But this has always been an imperfect science. I should note, 20 years ago, I co-founded an artificial intelligence company called Mindful Eye that would analyze conversations on web forums to try to understand and report sentiment. Most of our clients were brokerages who wanted to get immediate warning of when the mood of a publicly traded stock shifted suddenly. I hired really smart people to build the engine, like PhD level computational linguists. But it still came down to trying to teach the engine English. And English is a hard language to learn. For instance, some words we can more or less safely assume the sentiment.

For instance, this company is shitty. Probably isn't debatable. That's negative. And I love these new Twizzlers is very likely to be positive. But what about the word sick? In the context of a fine dining restaurant where the average diner demographic is in their 60s, it's almost assuredly going to be negative. But in the context of fashion aimed at young millennials, sick is positive, as in these sneakers are sick. So using words to understand sentiment doesn't always work. Here at our agency, we handle the engagement and moderation for a number of large organizations, and we analyze sentiment manually.

Every incoming comment or post or review is manually tagged by someone on our team as either positive, negative, or neutral. This, by the way, is the actual reason Facebook expanded the like button to include other feelings like laughing, angry, or sad. Facebook calls these reactions, and they're not there as much as to help digital marketers understand the sentiment on their posts and ad campaigns. But back to Twitter. Twitter is apparently testing similar reactions now. As it stands today, the only reaction people have is to heart a tweet, which is kind of like a like on Facebook.

But software engineer Jane Wong has found other reactions hidden in Twitter's code base, including that red tilted 100, which usually indicates enthusiastic agreement, a red circle with a line through it, that crying with laughter emoji, a shocked face and a pair of hands pressed together, which is often used as a way of signaling yes, please. Also interesting, in addition to these emoji, it also appears they're letting people send a fleet response. That's Twitter's forthcoming vertical stories format.

No word on when this will show up. They've actually been toying with the idea of expanding the heart button for five years now. But if it does show up and hopefully gets dropped into the ads platform as well, we might all have a much more effective way of measuring the mood of public opinions of our brands. YouTube will soon let you add even more customization to your brand's video channel. There wasn't a lot of detail in their announcement about this, other than saying you'll soon be able to customize your company's channel layout, branding, and basic information. But whatever it is, it's certainly going to be an expansion over what we have now, which is basically just channel headers and video thumbnails. One thing they did go out of their way to note, they say they will be taking a

quote, mobile first approach to the customization experience, unquote. I don't know, I kind of feel like mobile first is turning into a kind of placeholder buzzword that doesn't really mean much anymore. They didn't say what they meant here other than redesigning the featured channels option so you can display a collection of selected channels on your channel homepage. So I'm not entirely sure how that's mobile first, but whatever. Sadly, they didn't say when this would roll out, but apparently it is coming in case you are particular over how your brand is represented online. Does your business have a profile on that map website? You know the one you can look up your favorite places and tap a button to get the food delivered?

Yeah, that one. Snapchat. Yes, Snapchat is planning to compete directly with Google Maps. It is an expansion of their current Snap Map, which started as a way for you to share your location with your friends, but as of today, is rivaling Google Maps' level of functionality. Now you can see store hours, how busy a place is broken down by day and time, and even reviews from Foursquare and TripAdvisor.

And they say they will be adding millions of listings for businesses around the world. And, spoiler alert, you will be able to buy ads on the Snap Map if you want to highlight your business. They also unveiled a redesigned user interface that brings the map and their originals content more forward. Also starting today, you can use stickers that describe topics for your stories like life hacks or oddly satisfying. Do you remember the HQ trivia game? This was a smartphone app that every day a live host would pop up and do a fast-paced trivia game. If you won, you shared the prize money with other winners. It was ridiculously popular for a while, and then it spectacularly imploded with infighting at the board

level right down to the hosts getting absolutely plastered on their final episode. Although we've come to the end of the road still I can't

Hey! Not gonna lie this fucking sucks This is the last HQ ever I'm gonna let a broom host Bye And if you want all that for your brand Now you can I mean the game show not the drama

A company has developed It's own white label version of the show Called the Q-Kit It will let you plug a game show into your own mobile app, slap your branding on it, and start. They're working on a web interface as well. They say they've got a proprietary live video stack based in Amazon's cloud with dedicated servers for their customers' games.

You will find it at theq.live if you want to check it out. Not directly about digital marketing, but I like to keep you up to speed on the periphery as well. Some of the things that your other marketing colleagues are dealing with. And today comes word that some of the biggest advertisers in the world, like Unilever and Procter & Gamble, are asking TV networks to delay their upfronts. Upfronts are the marketplace that these buyers use for negotiating big TV ad deals. They say things are really unclear for them because of COVID-19, and they're just not ready to make those kinds of big budget decisions yet. Quoting Marketing Dive,

one of the proposals is to shift the upfront media buying marketplace to later in the year so that brands can better negotiate ad deals for the following calendar year. The current all-year negotiating process would remain in place, as would the fundamentals of the marketplace, but the shift in timing would provide a more accurate view of supply and demand while better aligning ad buying to marketers' fiscal years. My apologies, by the way, to those of you who only got the first half of yesterday's show. I have no idea what happened there. I actually caught this about maybe an hour or so after it went up, and I replaced the file with an apparently full-length version. But if your podcast had already grabbed the first version, well, you got shortchanged.

But for you folks, I will put yesterday's episode immediately after this episode. So if you missed yesterday's because of this file issue, just keep listening because it's coming next. Also, side note, you will hear that yesterday I said it was June 11th. I don't know why I said that because yesterday was June 10th. I blame the switch to decaf. My special thanks to Cameron Solu, who reviewed this show on iTunes, saying,

these quick episodes are an integral part of my industry news updates. After leaving the agency life to work for a brand last year, I noticed myself falling a little bit behind in industry news. Todd solved that. Definitely recommend. Thank you so much, Cameron.

And if you'd like a shout out as well, just rate and review this show. There is a link in this episode's notes that makes that a very simple one click process. Our theme music was composed by Mark Blevis. Ad sales by Podcorn. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow. Now here is yesterday's episode. Facebook is finding itself at the heart of a number of controversies these days, Thank you. leaving many other agencies to consider doing the same today, Wednesday, June 11th. Happy Portugal Day. I'm Todd Maffin, and here is what you missed today in Digital Marketing. A number of digital agencies are halting all their Facebook ad campaigns, not over metrics, but morality.

They say Facebook should be taking a more concrete stand against U.S. President Donald Trump's posts. The New York Times has a pretty detailed read on this today, linked to that piece in this episode's notes, of course. But of the agencies pulling back, one co-founder says they are encouraging their clients to hold back millions of advertising dollars from Facebook, saying, quote, these massive platforms have to care about free speech issues to some extent, but Facebook is on the extreme end of not caring, unquote. The piece notes that both Twitter and Snapchat have clamped down harder on the president's social media posts, but Facebook continues to leave his posts up and without any fact checking. I'm sure you don't need a refresher. On Trump's tweets and posts.

But hey here's a good example from just yesterday. You know that elderly man. Police knocked down to the pavement. Where he ended up unconscious. And bleeding from the head. Trump posted yesterday. That the man was actually using his cell phone. To jam police radio transmissions.

And look. No matter where on the political spectrum you land, I think we can all agree that's not at all how cell phones work. Cell phones cannot jam police transmissions. But Facebook has chosen to leave posts like that untouched. The Trump campaign spent more than $2.8 million in advertising on Facebook last month alone. That makes the president Facebook's 10th largest ad client. One bright spot in the digital marketing landscape during the pandemic has been email campaigns.

That, according to new research from Campaign Monitor, they analyzed emails sent in March and April and found that engagement with email campaigns was actually up for most industries during the height of COVID-19. Compared to a year ago, the average open rate across all industries was about 4% in March and about 3.5% in April. But lest you think that's because simply fewer email campaigns were going out, no, apparently total send volume was about the same as last March and April. There were, of course, variations by industry, some significant variations. The average open rate for education was up 13% in March, but the automotive industry was down about 5%. You know those e-commerce pages where there's a bunch of product links up top

and then some poor bastard has written like eight paragraphs of copy at the bottom to make Google rank it better? Maybe you are said poor bastard. Well, friends, I'm here to tell you, you have been working too hard. At least those of you responsible for writing that content. John Mueller, a Google search engineer, revealed on a podcast this week that 90% of the content you're writing on your e-commerce pages actually doesn't matter that much to Google at all. In fact, it might be making things worse. When, especially the e-commerce category pages don't have any other content at all other than links to

the product then it's really hard for us to make those pages so i'm not saying all of that text on the bottom of your page is bad but maybe 90 95 of that text is unnecessary the other thing where i i could imagine better algorithms sometimes get confused is when they have a list of products on top and essentially a giant article on the bottom, when our algorithms have to figure out what is the intent of this page. Is this something that is meant for commercial intent, or is this informational page? What is kind of the primary reason for this page to exist? And I could imagine that our algorithms sometimes get confused by this big chunk of text. You'll find a link to the full episode in the notes.

Yesterday, I reported you can now put custom hours on your Google My Business profile, hours that are different from your usual hours. Like instead of regular grocery shopping hours, you have a special set of hours for frontline workers or something like that. Now, it looks like there might be a bug with this. Some brand managers are reporting that when they went to add custom hours, it wouldn't take. And even worse, businesses that had temporarily closed during the height of the pandemic and now are reopened, weren't able to remove that temporarily closed flag on their profile. Google says they believe it is not a widespread issue, but they are looking into it. If you want to run ads when people search for things, of course, most of us go to Google,

but Microsoft's Bing is still in there and not giving up. They've just launched a new feature in their webmaster tools called SiteScan. It's basically an audit tool that can point out problems with your website that is providing Bing from indexing your site. And some people do use Bing instead of Google. I do. Not that I think Bing results are better. I don't. But because Bing is owned by Microsoft,

and Microsoft's rewards program gives me three points with every search I do on Bing, points I then cash in for Xbox gift cards. So if you want to make sure your site is also Bing-friendly, just go to their webmaster tools, click Site Scan, and then Start New Scan. One nice touch, like Google, it will report issues sorted by severity. So you can focus on fixing the biggest issues first. And finally, a couple of weeks ago, I reported on a TikTok clone called Zin, which monetized viewership. The more people you referred, the more videos you watched, the more money it would send to your PayPal account. And at the time, I mentioned just how much of a clone it seemed to be. Everything from the font, to the layout, to the icons, pretty much identical to TikTok.

Only now it seems it was even more identical than we thought. Right down to the very same videos that were originally on TikTok. And the creators of those videos say they didn't put them there. In fact, when you look a little closer at the accounts that did upload these copied videos, something fishy is going on. According to app monitoring firm Sensor Tower, many of these imposter accounts uploaded their first posts on February 19th. Which is weird, considering the app itself didn't even launch on the Apple or Google App Store until weeks after that date. Apparently, Zyn has now been removed from the Google Play Store, and Apple says it's investigating.

I have a bit of a web problem that I'm hoping one of you can help me out with. My website, todayindigital.com, works just fine. Until you put www in front of it, and then it just doesn't work for some reason. I have been around the block with my hosting provider, Bluehost, and have been deep in CNAME records. They say it's the podcast page provider's fault, but it looks like it's set up right over there, and they say it's Bluehost's fault.

I'm sure you've been through this game before. Anyway, if anyone is good at this stuff, please hit me up on Twitter. I would really love to get this fixed. I'm at Todd Maffin, T-O-D-M-A-F-F-I-N. There is a link in this episode's notes. Also, I'm doing a quick poll on whether or not ad spend has increased among people who have listened or are listening to this podcast, rather. Again, a link in this episode's notes that will take you right to that Twitter poll. Well, if you found this podcast through one of those recommended for you listings, that happened because people rated and reviewed the show.

If you're getting value from this daily news podcast, please consider paying it forward by doing the same. You'll find a link in this episode's description that makes that a simple one-click process. Our theme was composed by Mark Blevis, ad sales by Podcorn. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow.