Today in Digital Marketing - 191: WARNING 🚨 You Will Be Rickrolled In This Episode

Starting point is 00:00:00 On today's episode, how many consumers will turn off ads now that Instagram is letting them? A small bug yesterday at TikTok turned into a huge deal to the tin hat crowd. A new YouTube metric helps creators understand their revenue better. And the intellectual property takedown notice that was totally worth the legal risk. It's Friday, July 12th, 2020. Happy start to your Sea Festival, Latvia. I'm Todd Maffin, and here is what you missed today in Digital Marketing. Some maybe bad news for those of you who market in the alcohol space, the parenting space, or the pets space. The Instagram app today started prompting people that they could reduce the

Starting point is 00:00:45 number of ads they get served from each of those categories. And that prompt was a big, hard to miss button across the top. My guess is many people who see an option to reduce the ads will select it, perhaps not realizing that it doesn't actually reduce how many they see just of what kinds of businesses. And sure, I get the alcohol category. That's always been on the edge of the digital ad network's comfort zone. And for people like recovering alcoholics, not seeing alcohol ads in their feeds might be a good thing. But parenting ads? Pet ads? First of all, why are people seeing parenting ads at all if they're not parents? Facebook's ad platform, which Instagram uses, of course, has a very easy way to only advertise to parents.

Starting point is 00:01:31 It's literally a checkbox. Well, a few of them for different age ranges. Pet owners not quite as direct but easily inferred by targeting specific pet breeds or pet food brands. Just how many people will opt to turn off those categories, nobody knows, but it will certainly be some, and that's less reach for marketers in that space. Speaking of Instagram, they've released a couple of new tools that will help adjust how your IGTV preview is being shown in the made feed. IGTV is Instagram's long form video section. It's not used a ton, but some brands use it. They put a short preview video in the feed,

Starting point is 00:02:11 then it's a tap over to the full video on what is, let's face it, Instagram YouTube. The company says it'll let people earn money soon for their IGTV videos, again, like YouTube. And so that might increase use of it. In April, they added a bunch of features like letting you share the first 15 seconds of an IGTV video in stories. I have to say, we have used IGTV for some clients here at my agency, EngageQ, and it's performed really well. It's been really good when you need a couple of extra minutes to tell a story or explain a complicated product. The preview video in the feed encourages people to jump over and watch? What they don't have, and I wish they did, was a custom audience that targets people who do that jump.

Starting point is 00:02:54 Perhaps that is on its way soon as well. Conspiracy nuts were all agog yesterday afternoon when a bug on TikTok's platform stopped showing the number of likes on each video. Each video on the impacted accounts just showed a zero count for the likes. And that prompted a whole whack of people to say, see, the ban is happening. Donald Trump is at TikTok's headquarters right now, unplugging all the servers. Others thought that it was the start of a massive change to the 4U algorithm. But no, it wasn't either of those.

Starting point is 00:03:26 It was just a bug. TikTok, of course, has been under fire for its ties to the Chinese government, something it's tried to downplay by hiring an American CEO, setting up so-called transparency offices in Los Angeles. Even their tweet, once this bug was resolved, seemed awfully defensive. Quote, the issues appear to have been caused by higher traffic than normal on our servers in Virginia. They're in Virginia, people. Virginia. Google will start banning spyware and surveillance technology in Google Ads campaigns and the Google Shopping Catalog starting August 11th.

Starting point is 00:04:13 And while that might sound perfectly reasonable, caught up in that category are things like so-called nanny cams, which help parents watch their kids, or vehicle dash cams. Even some cameras and audio recorders will get caught up in the sweep. This is actually an expansion of an existing rule that bans spousal surveillance tools. If you sell any of these, you've got until August 11th to remove them from your product feeds and active campaigns. If they catch one after that, Google says they'll send a warning. Then if they're still up after seven days, they'll just straight up suspend your ads account. As Ginny Marvin, editor of Marketing Land, tweeted, There are a billion ads on the Nanny Cam search engine results pages waiting for rebranding as Pet Cams any minute now.

Starting point is 00:05:04 While many brands paused their ad campaigns at the start of the pandemic, we marketers witnessed an interesting, if predictable, trickle-down effect. And that effect is hitting some YouTube creators awfully hard. Fewer brands advertising meant less competition in YouTube's ad auction. Less competition meant lower CPM ad rates. Lower CPMs meant less revenue per video for those creators. Well, today, YouTube announced a new metric for creators, RPM, revenue per thousand views. Creators have always been able to see the CPM data, but

Starting point is 00:05:38 that's advertising focus. That shows how much brands are spending to show ads, which doesn't necessarily track with how much money the video creator will make off it. According to research from OneZero, ad rates on YouTube have dropped by almost 50% since the beginning of February. This despite viewership actually increasing during the lockdowns. Meet Matt Reed, just some guy who got a takedown notice the other day, like millions of people do every day. Only Matt's came not from YouTube's legal team, but from Zoom's, the online meeting app. Zoom says he was infringing on the intellectual property of someone. And that someone? Yes, Rick Astley. Well, probably more the rights of his

Starting point is 00:06:29 music label and the publisher. Hell, I can only use this song here because of fair use provisions in most countries. Earlier this month, Matt created a kind of manual Zoom meeting Rickroll. He set up a website where you'd put your company's next meeting information in, including the password, and Matt would pump the famous Rick Astley song into the meeting, including the video. If you don't understand why this is hilarious, by the way, just Google Rickroll. It's not the first funny Zoom crashing I've seen. One zoo actually turned theirs into a revenue center, charging groups to show up in their meeting with some cute animals. But Matt's service now is gone, thanks to a cease and desist from Zoom. Lawyers ruin everything. The scanner antenna is awesome, thanks for asking. I heard a magnificent fight between a cabbie and

Starting point is 00:07:19 his dispatcher last night. Never thought of using you Muppet as an insult before? See, you never know where we'll learn things. Our theme music is by Mark Blevis, ad sales by Podcorn, music licensing by Source Audio, and special thanks to Kendall Patrick from my hometown of Nanaimo, Canada for permission to use this song of hers.

Starting point is 00:07:40 Learn more about her at kendallpatrick.com. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend, friends. I'll talk to you on Monday. You remind me of fallen rain When I'm alone, I pretend I don't think about you Except when I'm alone

Starting point is 00:07:59 Cause I don't want to be taken seriously No, I don't want to be taken seriously No, I don't want to be taken at all And I'd like to stay here in my little home Dear and warm and alone Nobody, nobody knock on my door And follow me trying to make me

Starting point is 00:08:31 move forward You remind me of falling rain When I'm alone You remind me of falling rain When I'm alone, you remind me of falling rain When I'm alone, you remind me of falling rain When I'm alone, when I'm alone, when I'm alone

Starting point is 00:08:57 I keep pretending that I am alone

Today in Digital Marketing - 191: WARNING 🚨 You Will Be Rickrolled In This Episode

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