Today in Digital Marketing - 172: The Myth of the 51% Majority

Starting point is 00:00:00 Google has added something product marketers will probably appreciate. There's a new brand experience format available on Snapchat. Seems to be a lot of bugs out there today. And a warning, not all marketing surveys are trustworthy. It's Friday, June 12th. Happy Valentine's Day, Brazil. I'm Todd Maffin, and here is what you missed today in Digital Marketing. Google is now letting brands that sell products issue a new kind of takedown notice,

Starting point is 00:00:34 not one based on copyright, but rather counterfeit goods. Turns out they've been doing this for years with ads, but never before with organic search listings. In other words, if you find someone selling fake versions of your product, and those fake products are searchable in Google, you can now ask Google to remove those pages from its index. To be clear, the websites themselves won't go away, only the ability to find those sites in Google. And for now, it's a manual process. You fill in a web form, and an actual human being from Google will review your report. SCRoundtable.com has an interesting take on it. Quote, eventually Google will use what it has learned from collecting this data, i.e. the human submissions, to build something like the DMCA pirate algorithm that aims to algorithmically find and remove copyrighted content from Google's results.

Starting point is 00:01:20 It is far from perfect, so expect Google to use the human and manual method for a long time. A new option for delivering a brand experience via Snapchat, Snap Minis. Just announced this week, minis are tiny apps that are built in HTML and can pop up within the Snapchat app. So far, only a few brands are doing this. You can order movie tickets or festival tickets from Coachella or go through a guided meditation from Headspace, as some examples. You will need Snapchat's developer kit and, you know, a developer. What I thought was interesting was their head of product,

Starting point is 00:01:59 who kind of took a shot at the hype a couple of years back around message bots. Will Wu said, quote, I think we've always thought that these developers and brands shouldn't really be posing as your friends. That was one of the initial product concerns that we had with chatbots, unquote. Anyway, if Snapchat covers your demographic and you've got some kind of interactive brand experience you'd like them to have, maybe check out Snap Minis.

Starting point is 00:02:26 Well, you've seen them before. Articles from marketing blogs that report on some study that's been done telling you about all the success you could be having if only you added such and such technology to your digital marketing program. Hell, I've reported on some of them. But just a reminder that you don't leave your critical thinking skills at the door when you go online. Take the article Making the Rounds Today, one of the headlines.

Starting point is 00:02:48 Text messaging is the most effective marketing channel most retail brands aren't using. I have seen this article and variations of it maybe four times, five times today so far. It's all from a survey done by a company called Yotpo. And while these blogs and marketing sites are, you know, basically just rewriting Yotpo's news release, let's have a closer look. First, always check who is doing the study. In nearly all cases in our industry, it's not a polling firm or a think tank. It's a company that, hey, what a coincidence, also seems to sell what the study says you should be doing more of. What does Yotpo sell? Among other things, text messaging services for retail brands. And many of these sites reporting on this study are also saying that, quote, a majority of consumers are interested in being able to text with their

Starting point is 00:03:35 favorite brands. And that's technically true, although the actual number, 51%. Yes, literally as close to the wire of being able to say majority as you can get. And when you're looking at close numbers like that, another way to view that is this. Nearly half of all people polled said they are not interested in texting with a brand. So when the survey conductor summarizes their results like Yotpo did, quote, consumers expect and prefer to be able to text with their favorite brands, unquote. That's just not a fair way of stating the results. Only 51% of them do. Statistically speaking, an equal number of them say they most definitely do not. And finally, look at who were polled. This was an online survey of more than 800 people.

Starting point is 00:04:25 If it's online, that by itself skews the demographic. But worse, those 800 people were from 38 different countries. And culturally speaking, a technology like text messaging is received very different in different parts of the world. In India, lots of text messaging and few privacy concerns. In the US, people use text messaging less and have significantly larger privacy concerns. And look, I don't mean to jump all over Yachtpo. Putting out a survey is a legitimate marketing exercise to get news sites and daily marketing news podcasts to say your brand's name. And hey, SMS marketing probably is underused as a channel.

Starting point is 00:05:06 All I'm saying, think first. Some beautiful bastard on Reddit has hilariously found a very simple way to avoid ads on YouTube. Apparently, all you need to do is add a period to the URL. So we're talking desktop here, certainly not their mobile apps. You put the period right after the dot com in the URL. So instead of going to YouTube dot com slash video, you would enter YouTube dot com dot slash video. That is that is amazing. Quoting Android police dot com dot slash video. That is amazing. Quoting androidpolice.com,

Starting point is 00:05:48 this is purportedly caused by a website like YouTube neglecting to normalize the host name, causing the main content of the page to still be displayed while breaking a lot of other things, including advertisements. Because many websites serve their ads through a whitelist that does not contain the extra period, adding it onto the URL lets post content through but filters out advertisements. Reddit never ever fails to deliver.

Starting point is 00:06:21 Seems to be a buggy day out there right now. YouTube is having some problems with custom thumbnails. This has actually been going on for a week now. Apparently, it's buggy if the account that you are trying to upload videos to is a newly verified one. As a workaround, you can edit those custom thumbnails on mobile after your video has uploaded. Lots of people today reporting that something is up over on the Facebook side of things. Average order volumes way down. return on ad spend dropping dramatically. So if you're seeing those metrics pop up that way, you're not alone. Some people are saying that big chunks of their ad sets just aren't even spending at all today.

Starting point is 00:06:56 For its part, this morning, Facebook said there are some problems around reporting in ad campaigns, and they are looking into that. And Hootsuite has apparently fixed a glitch yesterday with Facebook page comments. People were getting the error unsupported post request when trying to comment. We also found Sprout Social to be a little glitchy in this regard yesterday, so maybe it was an API thing. I try really hard to make this a good use of your time,

Starting point is 00:07:22 short and punchy and hopefully not much rambling. And if you find this valuable, I. I'll talk to you on Monday.

Today in Digital Marketing - 172: The Myth of the 51% Majority

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