Today in Digital Marketing - A Deal with the Devil 😈

Episode Date: July 13, 2022

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Today, the reckoning at Meta has begun. How is TikTok chipping into Google's search business? The decline of the top funnel? How physical mail may be your best tactic in the year ahead? And what's on the menu now? Extortion. It's Wednesday, July 13th. I'm Todd Maffin.

Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Meta's chronically buggy ad platform may have finally caught up with it. Business Insider reports this week that analysts expect the social giant to record zero growth in the second quarter, in a first for the company, and warns the company may not fully recover from it. To be fair, other ad platforms are feeling the economic downturn. But, quoting Business Insider, what's different is that Meta is in a perfect storm. As a result, more advertisers are not just increasingly willing to diversify away from Meta, but doing so for the first time. It's a big shift for a company that historically could always count on their dollars,

scandal after scandal, as long as their ads performed. The major ad forecasters have cut You can't be in this space and not consider the frustration that media buyers have long had with Meta's ad platform. It's buggy. Its policy enforcement is all over the map. Support, if you get any at all, is handled by outsourced and very junior people. All it would take is an upstart platform to challenge it for ad budgets, for Meta to feel the pinch. And that platform appears to be TikTok. TikTok is not only chipping into Meta's ad business, it's also affecting Google's search business. A senior VP at Google this week said at a conference that some of its core services, like search and maps, are being challenged by younger users' habit of turning to their favorite apps like TikTok and Instagram to do these searches.

He said, quote, These users don't tend to type in keywords, but rather look to discover content in new, more immersive ways. In our studies, something like almost 40% of young people, when they're looking for a place to lunch, they don't go to Google Maps or search. They go to TikTok or Instagram, unquote. What's especially interesting about his comments is that it may have been an inadvertent slip of the tongue. Google had not released that data publicly. Apparently, it came from an internal study of 18 to 24-year-old Americans. Quoting TechCrunch, while older internet users may not be able to wrap their minds around turning to a social video app to find a restaurant, Quoting TechCrunch, sort of Maps app for navigation purposes, this data indicates they don't necessarily start their

journey on Google anymore. That means all the work Google did over the years to organize, curate, and recommend various businesses, such as local restaurants, or its creation of discovery tools inside Google Maps, could be lost on these younger internet users. Unquote. So if you're looking for another boogeyman, other than young people, TikTok and Meta, consider the global economy. New data from Advertiser Perceptions has found that one in five marketers have cut their budgets in the face of rising inflation.

Budgets dropped by about 16% last quarter. And where are the cuts happening the most? In the face of rising inflation, budgets dropped by about 16% last quarter. And where are the cuts happening the most? Apparently, mostly in top funnel channels. Nearly half of the 300 marketers surveyed said they'd paused ad spending for connected TV platforms. Lower funnel areas like paid search were the least affected. In fact, it's possible lower funnel marketing may have benefited from the volatile economy. Quoting Marketing Dive, marketers have flocked to performance-oriented tactics like retail media to try and tie their efforts closer to last-click results. Advertiser Perceptions

expects the retail media boom will continue, supported by the current inventory overload that is pushing more merchants to hold closeout sales, unquote. That said, of course, digital media buying is almost always an auction. Where there are fewer players in the game, the cost of that game goes down. It's entirely possible that now that upper funnel tactics like digital video has less competition, marketers might end up getting more bang for their buck there. So if the platforms are down, top of funnel is out of favor, where does a marketer turn to

promote their brand? One suggestion, physical mail. The Marketing Brew newsletter this morning talked to a marketing manager who said she's doubled her company's direct mail budget and seeing results from it. The brand is actually a nonprofit, so their conversion goal is mostly donations. One young campaign recipient took a photo of the letter, posted it on social, tagged the organization, saying, This is so cool. Like, I never get letters from people that I donate to. When you think about it, physical mail might be the most privacy-aware form of marketing, at least after the letters dropped in the mail. There's no tracking. You can't get an open rate. Apple can't muck with your attribution.

One study showed that almost two out of three millennials will read ads that they get in the mail instead of just tossing it. Although, to be fair, that was a study done by the U.S. Postal Service. Direct mail isn't necessarily the opposite of digital, though. There's plenty of technology in play, like AI handwriting tools that approximate the look of an actual letter at scale. When that nonprofit I mentioned earlier ran an end-of-year campaign in 2019 with handwritten thank-you notes from kids involved with the organization, it doubled donations from the year prior when it only sent emails. Which brings us to another episode of... Nobody Asks or Thinks. I know this will shock you.

It's Instagram again. And here is proof that the people making the decisions at Instagram have just completely given up. A new test spotted out in the wild shows, and it's kind of hard to describe how this looks, but basically tweets at the top of the Instagram app, except they're not really tweets. They're called notes. They live in a shelf at the top of your inbox. We covered this a week or two ago when they announced they'd be testing it, but it was only this week when people got a look at it. Honestly, I thought notes was going to be like those big text status updates on Facebook, you know, the kind where they type in a small sentence and it'll center and bold it and put a background image behind it or color. Hell, sometimes people would screenshot that and post the screenshot on Instagram. And, you people would screenshot that and post the screenshot on Instagram. And, you know, that doesn't make a lot of sense to me as a platform that prioritizes

impactful imagery, but at least I could see the logic. But this version, this version looks like some bizarre Frankenstein hybrid where they're trying to cram every possible bit of functionality that has been popular on competing platforms, which is, of course, exactly what they've been trying to do for the last year or so. The usually measured socialmediatoday.com even called it an abomination. Quote, I really don't see this as being of any real value. And I can imagine that spammers, if they ever get access, will ruin that feed so fast you won't even remember what the heck it was for in the first place, unquote. If you still don't believe me, go check out the screenshot of it that I tweeted.

My handle is at Todd Maffin. Oh, and still, in the nobody asked for this files, someone else spotted another test underway with Instagram, a toggle switch in settings that will, and I'm not kidding here, turn on the display of ads on your profile. Back to socialmediatoday.com. While these are experiments, for now, with no official plans for a full release, they do have a sense of desperation about them. A whiff of fear and concern as TikTok continues to eat into its market share and users gradually

turn away from the app? I don't think that Instagram's current push to add more content from profiles you don't follow into your main feed is working to reverse this, unquote. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. One of the primary ways marketers track ad data

may be going away soon. There are lots of methods for linking view sessions together and seeing the journey a consumer went through our campaigns like the third-party cookie, but that and similar tools like it are quickly falling out of favor. One of those used heavily in the connected TV ad world is the IP address.

This can tie households together for targeting and measurement. But IP addresses, quote, a wildly sophisticated second to none approach on using latitude and longitude with IP to get really targeted to the household level, unquote. But they also said, quote, the second IP goes away, that entire thing is going to break, unquote. But will it really go away? Fact is, it already is. Quoting the Digiday piece, the IP address has already become personally identifiable information. California privacy law defines it as such. And the recently introduced American Data Privacy and Protection Act would require companies to provide an opt-out option that would preclude the transfer of covered data, for example, an IP address, unquote. Already, some consumer-facing tools are negating the value of

the IP address. The VPN provider Surfshark, for instance, can rotate your IP address every 10 minutes to help prevent fingerprinting. Another agency leader interviewed by Digiday said, quote, I see the IP address as the next third party cookie and something that will become personally identifiable information and make it really difficult for a lot of people to survive the 2020s of advertising, unquote. Full disclosure, Surfshark has advertised on our podcast and I am a paying customer. Gee, this is a nice restaurant profile you have. It'd be a shame if something happened to it. In a nutshell, that's how a new scam targeting high-end restaurants appears to be unfolding. People are leaving one-star reviews on the Google profiles of dining establishments,

often with no description or photos, then demanding a $75 Google Play gift card to remove the ratings. If no card is coughed up, they threaten even more bad ratings. The New York Times says restaurants from San Francisco to New York, many with Michelin stars, have been hit by this. The demand email is roughly the same, saying the perpetrator lives in India and the resale value of the gift card could provide several weeks of income for their family. Google says it's aware of the scam and is removing those reviews when they find them. What I think is a little sus here is that Google has said in the past that those kind of reviews shouldn't really show up at all if a reviewer isn't in the same country or hasn't been geotracked at that location in the past.

Indeed, the New York Times reports some restaurant owners said they've had a hard time trying to find a human being at Google to help them and that they've flagged those reviews multiple times with nothing happening. Or worse, as in the case of one Chicago eatery, Google ruled Monday that one of these fake reviews didn't violate any policies and would not be removed. Law enforcement reminds people that this is more than a scam. It's a crime called extortion, and they can report these to their local police and in the U.S., the FBI and the Federal Trade Commission. TikTok is adding a nice new feature, giving users more granular control over their For You page. Soon, you will be able to specify words or hashtags that you don't want to see in your feeds,

and the app will remove those videos before they get to you. TikTok has long had a Not Interested button, but it's never been clear precisely how that affects the algorithm, because you couldn't tell it specifically what you weren't interested in. The length of video, the content, the lighting, the music. All you got from the app was a note saying, we'll stop showing videos like this in the future. This new muting feature, which sounds a lot like Twitter's, should reach your app in the coming weeks. And finally, just a reminder that the Google My Business app has now hit the graveyard. The app no longer works.

There is no replacement. You might be wondering, but wait, what about those private messages that people send my business? I used to get those in the app. Correct. And now you won't because that app no longer exists. Google says, though, you'll be able to get those messages from your business profile in, of all places, the Google Maps mobile app. And that you can still manage your profile, but you'll be doing it from Google search. The observant among you will notice that this is episode number 666.

So hopefully no satanic influences. Although maybe this was not the day for me to install the beta profile on my iPhone of iOS 16, given the fact that it's episode 666. It just seems like something bad could happen. So far, very stable. I am liking it. I have a backup iPhone. I put that on it first for a couple of days.

It seemed to be fairly stable. I'm really liking the new lock screen. I am not going to try to install the Mac OS beta since this is my only real workstation. And, you know, we've already had a technical issue last week where my computer kind of blew up on me. So I don't want to risk that. Hey, by the way, is there a reason you are not in our Slack yet? We are past 900 members sharing advice, getting help. You get an inside peek of what's coming up in each day's episode.

There's even a channel you can promote yourself in. And it's free to join. Just tap the link in the show notes or go to todayindigital.com slash Slack. That's it for today. See you tomorrow. I could be with the devil. Because if you're with the devil, you might run out of time.