Today in Digital Marketing - 202: Your Next Ad Campaign: Masks or No Masks? 😷

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, should you show people wearing masks in your next online campaign? Be protected. Be Zen. ad boycott may have been bigger than anyone thought? And is the AMP format dead? It's Monday, July 27th, 2020. Happy Bagpipe Appreciation Day. And a special hello to those of you coming over from the TechNeme ride home. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. And here is what you missed today in digital marketing. Who would have guessed that this year, one of the biggest challenges that we people who make online ads or run social media campaigns would have is finding stock photos of people wearing masks. I don't know, maybe you're having better luck than we are.

Starting point is 00:01:13 But in the U.S. especially, the decision about whether to wear a mask at all is, in many circles, a political one. And that leaves marketers with a conundrum. Do we show people in our ads wearing masks? Is the public health benefit worth the potential backlash? Some new research from Ace Metrics appears to answer that question. And the answer is, it shouldn't really matter. But if you want to be on the side of caution, you probably should show people with masks in your campaigns. In their study, when ads mentioned masks, even subtly, nearly half, 48% of the audience expressed positive sentiment toward that brand. 33% were negative, 19% were neutral or mixed.

Starting point is 00:01:57 But here's what I think was one of the most interesting parts of their study. Most people didn't notice any mask content one way or the other. Quoting MarketingDive.com, fewer than 5% of viewers mentioned the portrayal of face masks in their verbatim comments about the ads. When shown ads portraying people without masks, fewer than 1% of viewers mentioned their absence. However, among that small group of people who commented on the lack of face masks,

Starting point is 00:02:21 most tended to have a negative reaction. Unquote. One ad campaign that was a bomb, the breath mint icebreakers, tried promoting its mints as a new way to help what it called mask breath. Most people who saw that campaign ended up having a less favorable view of the brand as a result. Some not so good news in the digital brand loyalty department. Some new research from Ketchum out today shows that 45% of consumers have changed at least one brand preference

Starting point is 00:02:53 and 62% expect their brand preferences will change permanently by the time this whole COVID stuff is past us. We've known for some time about the importance of brand stories and ethical corporate behavior. The pandemic has only solidified that. 88% of people Ketchum polled said the coronavirus has made it more important for companies to be ethical. It's all in a new study called Brand Reckoning 2020, how crisis culture is redefining consumer behavior, loyalty, and values. It's not just COVID.

Starting point is 00:03:24 Nearly three quarters of consumers polled said the recent Black Lives Matter protests has made them more value businesses that work to improve diversity and inclusion. Microsoft is the latest brand to take advantage of Snapchat's augmented reality features for a clever campaign. Their Xbox gaming division made 12 unique Snapchat lenses,

Starting point is 00:03:48 all based on some of the games they announced in their big press conference last week. Quoting social media today, this is the first time that a company has launched 12 new themed AR lenses at once, making it a significant promotional push and underlining the value of Snapchat as a connective tool for those looking to reach younger audiences. Indeed, as Snapchat has previously noted, the app now reaches some 90% of 13 to 24 year olds and 75% of 13 to 34 year olds in the US, which it claims is more than Facebook or Instagram.

Starting point is 00:04:21 And those users are increasingly engaging with the app's AR options. In Snapchat's latest quarterly update, it reported that user time spent engaging with lenses has grown 37% year over year. A lot of what we cover here on Today in Digital Marketing are things like social media, online ad campaigns, and the likes. But digital marketing is about more than Facebook. Take the new campaign of science fiction network SyFy. They're planning an interactive TV special that will let people buy things they see on screen with their smartphones. Here's how it will work. This Saturday, the show called SyFy Wire After Dark will show a curated collection of items like graphic novels and

Starting point is 00:05:05 sunglasses. And on screen at the same time as the products, a special kind of QR code. Viewers scan the code and they can buy the product. And it's not just TV. This online commerce experience will run across all of Sci-Fi's properties, digital, editorial, and social. If it all goes well, they plan to make it a weekly show. They are using the new NBC Universal checkout system to do this, by the way. That technology, which they call Shoppable TV, launched last year. Seems to be some growing discontent around the AMP format. That stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages.

Starting point is 00:05:45 The way it works for most sites is that they've got a plugin for the website CMS that generates these lightweight pages, which are then cached on Google servers so that they load much faster than just having someone go to your website and loading it all there. But you give up a lot with AMP. For one, time. Time to set it all up and troubleshoot it. And you lose a lot of the branding elements you worked hard to design into your website. Google's recent announcement that it will no longer require AMP to be considered for inclusion in the top news stories carousel has caused a few publishers to just abandon the format entirely. But not so fast, says a piece this morning in searchengineland.com. Quote, the impact of page speed on page views, engagement, and conversions found that it increased brand loyalty and revenue from even tiny increases in site speed. The site is quoting from a study from Perficient Digital. To be clear, this was a small study, only 27 publishers and e-commerce sites.

Starting point is 00:07:04 That said, these results do track with previous studies on page speed. A more recent study from Milestone found that AMP has a significant impact on rankings on search, search sessions, impressions, page views, and traffic share. AMP pages boosted ranking on average by two positions after AMP was implemented. They also saw roughly 380% more search impressions than non-AMP sites. So probably something you don't want to give up, and maybe something you may want to implement on your brand's website if you haven't already. All right, time for the lightning round. Looks like some volatility over the weekend in Google search results. That's usually the sign of an algorithm update. Just so you know, Google

Starting point is 00:07:52 updates its search algorithm several times a day, but every month or so we see these larger blips. So if you track your brand's average position in Google, maybe give it a check. More brands are doubling down on digital marketing in the executive boardroom, and the parent company of Dunkin' Donuts is the latest. They've now created a new C-suite position, Chief Digital and Strategy Officer. Again, if you've missed it, this is a donut company. Google is responding to many complaints about the planned removal of its structured data testing tool. SEO consultants and brand managers used this to help rank their websites higher. They replaced it with something called the Rich Results Testing Tool, which many people said fell short.

Starting point is 00:08:33 A senior Google engineer confirmed, yes, they're working on making it better, saying, we've been looking at all the feedback that we're getting where people are like, oh, this is terrible. And the boycott of Facebook advertising this month may have started out slow, but may have been bigger than it seemed. A new study by Digiday found 56% of media buyers they polled participated in the boycott. Yes, it is Bagpipe Appreciation Day.

Starting point is 00:09:02 I hope you've got your bagpipe posts lined up on social media. It is one of the oldest musical instruments. There's a Hittite wall carving of one that dates back from a thousand years before biblical times. And bagpipes were really the world's first slack group. Field commanders at war would use bagpipers to send messages to their soldiers to signal movements, attacks, and retreats. Well, if this is your first time listening, welcome. I promise bagpipes are not usually in the show. to their soldiers to signal movements, attacks, and retreats. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - 202: Your Next Ad Campaign: Masks or No Masks? 😷

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