Today in Digital Marketing - 201: When Zuck Gets Drunk on the Cheap Gin

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, why your audience may be talking to your ads in the very near future, an optimistic forecast for marketers who buy digital TV ads, all the data you can eat, and the unlikely but profitable alliance between Spotify and a banana company. It's Friday, July 24th, 2020. Happy anniversary of your restoration of democracy, Greece. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. Numbers are interesting. Depending on the way you slice them, you can make numbers say whatever you like. Last month,

Starting point is 00:00:36 I talked about the important difference between a median average and a mean average, a distinction that could radically change the results you present in a marketing report to your boss. And another great example of that is making the rounds today. New York Times reporter Kevin Roos spent some time in CrowdTangle, that's the Facebook-owned content monitoring platform, and he published a list of what he called the, quote, top-performing Facebook link posts, almost all of which were from right-wing news brands like Fox News or Ben Shapiro. But here's the problem. What does top-performing link posts mean? Does it mean the posts that got the most eyeballs or the links that got clicked the most? Nope. In this case, it means the posts that got the most engagement. So you might expect political posts to be among the most commented and

Starting point is 00:01:24 liked and shared. This is one of the downfalls of many monitoring platforms. They only measure one thing, the thing that Facebook's API lets them, engagement. Even CrowdTangle, which, again, is owned by Facebook, even that platform can only see engagement data. What it can't see is reach data. In other words, rather than putting a list of most interacted with posts out, how about a list of posts that the most number of people saw? Well, earlier this week, Facebook did exactly that, apparently to counter this list from the New York Times, and it found a

Starting point is 00:01:58 much more diverse list of topics when you are looking at it by reach and not by engagement. Topics at the top were coronavirus, a listicle called the weirdest small towns in the US, and Kanye West announcing his run for president. So next time you're writing that report up for your boss or drafting a digital marketing plan for your client, make sure you're defining best and top performing. While we're on the topic of numbers, I'm going to guess that, since you're obviously in digital marketing here in some fashion, that you probably like data. Lots and lots of it. Hell, you probably get a little giddy when you know you'll be clicking the breakdown button in Facebook's ads manager, you freak. Data is important, but too much data can be paralyzing. As part of the reason why the programmatic ad industry

Starting point is 00:02:45 moved to consolidated reporting and aggregated reporting, nobody wants a line-by-line Excel file of every single time their ad was served to a unique browser, right? Well, turns out some people do. And independent audience exchange firm OpenX this week launched a way for advertisers and agencies to access server log-level reporting

Starting point is 00:03:06 to analyze their media spend. It's called the Bidding Intelligence Dataset. Get it? Bids? B-I-D-S? Nice job, acronym department. And lets you dive in as deep as you want. But why would the digital advertising industry suddenly want this data? Wouldn't it be even more overwhelming now that there's just more digital advertising as a whole? Yes, but, as a great article in Media Post mentions, in recent years, a combination of improved algorithmic technology to sort and organize data, as well as a push for greater first-hand transparency, has led many advertisers and agencies to begin requesting log-level data directly again, unquote. So good news for those who understand Excel, I guess.

Starting point is 00:03:49 I'm still trying to figure out how to get it to calculate basic exchange rates. The Media Post article is really interesting. If you want to dive deeper, there is a link, of course, in the notes of this episode. There's not much interactivity in radio. You turn it on, it broadcasts the same signal to everyone. You can't send different signals out to different people unless, I guess, you had thousands of separate antennas and you owned all the radio bandwidth. Except we kind of can now, at least with streaming radio, because, of course, it doesn't rely on physical transmission towers. And digital marketers are just starting to use that potential to deliver unique brand

Starting point is 00:04:28 experiences. Pandora, a streaming platform that competes with Spotify, this week announced it's getting closer to fully interactive audio ads. This is something they've been working on and testing for more than a year now. One of their first in that early test was an ad for Doritos. It started like a regular ad, and then suddenly a new voice took over and said, Nope, for 2019, it's a new kind of ad, one you can talk to. So say yes at the tone if you want us to keep it real.

Starting point is 00:04:54 If you said yes, you got the rest of the ad. If you said no or didn't say anything, the ad stopped and the music resumed. These platforms have been experimenting for some time with voice. Spotify has something similar. What nobody has, though, are benchmarks. That's partly why big brands like Acura, Home Depot, T-Mobile, and Volvo are joining Pandora's test group. Nothing really more here to report other than this is a thing now, and might be an arrow in your digital marketing quiver sometime soon. Take a little closer look at that banana next time you're at the grocery store.

Starting point is 00:05:33 It might have music on it. Well, not music itself, but a scannable code on the sticker that leads to music. The Chiquita Banana Company has added codes to its stickers in some markets that, when scanned with the Spotify app, will take people to a Chiquita-inspired music playlist on Spotify. Actually, there are five different stickers, each leading to a different themed playlist. Themes like happy, tropical vibes, and something called cook and dance. There's also this little ditty. You should never put bananas in the refrigerator. dance. There's also this little ditty. Either Spotify nor Chiquita have said how many people

Starting point is 00:06:12 have listened to the playlists. One interesting result of the pandemic lockdowns is that, of course, people are spending more time at home. That's had a number of impacts on digital marketing, and we're just starting to get numbers now on another category, OTT. That's over-the-top, which is an industry acronym that basically means any video or television content that doesn't come from traditional cable or satellite or terrestrial means. So we're talking about everything from Disney+, to Netflix, to gaming consoles, to smart TVs, that kind of thing. One company in that space called SpotX this week published a report showing that viewership in that space has achieved what they call critical mass,

Starting point is 00:06:53 with 70 million American households now consuming content in that way. Quoting from their report, quote, the pandemic has led to an accelerated increase in OTT viewership, which in turn has caused ad inventory to grow by over 80% compared to early March. This scenario provides a huge opportunity to advertisers who want to reach and target specific audiences, unquote. For the record, traditional linear TV did actually see a rise in viewership, up 5% this past March and April when compared to a year ago, mostly of course, because everyone was in lockdown, but that viewership has now dropped by as much as 20% this month as compared to last July. All right, listen, get close, get close, get close. I'm going to tell you a secret here, a big secret, maybe the biggest of all in social media marketing,

Starting point is 00:07:49 and that is exactly how Facebook's content algorithm works, how certain types of posts like live videos get more priority in the news feed than others. You ready? Here's what happens. First, Mark Zuckerberg gets absolutely plastered on cheap gin. Okay. Then he goes into a pitch dark room in the basement of Facebook's headquarters. In that room are hundreds of large levers, each one with a different type of post control. Mark continues to drink and then eventually stumbles onto one, pushing it forward.

Starting point is 00:08:18 And now whatever content type he's changed is given more prominence in the newsfeed. I can't prove this, but it's certainly my ardent belief. Don't believe me? How else can we explain the sudden, almost urgent recommendations that come from Facebook every year to do a different type of post because, no, really guys, for real, this time you'll get way more reach with it. It was videos for a while, then live videos, then Facebook Watch, and we dutiful digital marketers and social media

Starting point is 00:08:46 managers jumped on board. What's that? Mark says more live videos. Somebody buy us a video camera. But when the headlines fade, how many of us are still doing the thing that they wanted us to do? Well, CNN is, for one, and actually killing it. Back when Zuckerberg was obsessed with Facebook Watch, CNN created a daily news show called Go There. Go There is a daily news show that takes you from Syria There's a possible strike. to Mount Everest.

Starting point is 00:09:15 We have just arrived to base camp. In the streets of Hong Kong. On the Texas border. And this week we got some numbers on the show, and they are impressive. Since its launch last year, it's had almost a billion views. One episode posted this January

Starting point is 00:09:34 about what it was like in Wuhan, China became the most watched hard news Facebook video, not just in this year, but in the last 10 years. The episodes are usually about 10 or 20 minutes long, and unlike its television grandfather, the show uses much more video straight from reporters' smartphones. One example, a reporter spent a day following an ER doctor around New York City during the height of the pandemic in that city. Two-thirds of the show's audience

Starting point is 00:10:01 come from Gen Z and millennials. A couple of smaller items. First, a warning. If you use promo.com, the web-based video production tool, the company yesterday emailing its customer base to notify them of a, quote, targeted breach of some of our servers, unquote. The data that was exposed included first name, last name, email address, IP address, user location, gender. I'd love to know how Promo got that data.

Starting point is 00:10:30 As well as encrypted passwords. They say no credit card information was compromised. And second, Sprout Social is rolling out a nice new addition to its smart inbox, search. You'll be able to find specific messages by using keywords. And then if you want bulk edit them to do things like tagging or exporting them, they're still rolling that out over the next day or two. So if you don't have it, it is on its way. It will be available for all plans. My thanks to CMS consultant Chris Brock in Atlanta who tweeted about this podcast to his followers.

Starting point is 00:11:01 He's at getbrock.com if you need some work done on your CMS. And digital marketing manager Paul Nelson, who works for the security firm Synetics Global, who tweeted, loving the daily dose of marketing news. Thanks to both of you. And if you want a shout out, all you have to do is tweet about the podcast. Look for the words tweet it in the show notes for a one-click way to do just that. Today's Closing Music is a collaboration between the artists Twink

Starting point is 00:11:30 and Moths and Locusts from my hometown of Nanaimo, Canada. My thanks to both of them for permission to use this song, Ain't Got a Clue. Find them both on Spotify. Follow me on social. All my links are in this episode's description. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful and safe weekend, friends. I'll talk to me on social. All my links are in this episode's description. I'm Todd Maffin.

Starting point is 00:11:45 Have a restful and safe weekend, friends. I'll talk to you on Monday. Thank you.

Today in Digital Marketing - 201: When Zuck Gets Drunk on the Cheap Gin

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