Today in Digital Marketing - ⚠️ A TikTok Cyberattack is Underway

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Tuesday, June 4th. Today, a nasty cyber attack is targeting big TikTok accounts, and all you need to do for your account to be compromised is read a DM. Also, why Google may stop indexing your brand's website next month, which products sell more when you use an animated banner ad, and podcast audiences may have been massively undercounted. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. We start with some breaking news. TikTok today confirming it is trying to shut down a cyber attack that is currently underway, so far targeting the accounts of large brands and creators. It's not clear if these attacks are linked, but accounts like CNN, Sony and Paris Hilton's have been affected. CNN's account was offline for days after becoming a target.

Starting point is 00:00:53 The attempted breaches involve malware being sent as a direct message and can affect the owner's ability to access their own TikTok profiles. What's particularly frightening here is that this hack doesn't require the user to download anything, click anything, or do anything other than opening the direct message. That's different than the vulnerability Microsoft researchers found a few years back that let hackovers take over accounts

Starting point is 00:01:21 after someone clicked a malicious link in a DM. It's not clear what the hacker's end goal is as none of the breached accounts have been used to post content so far. Quoting a TikTok spokesperson, quote, we have taken measures to stop this attack and prevent it from happening in the future. We're working directly with affected account owners to restore access if needed, unquote. It's never a good time for a zero-day hack, but this seems to be a particularly bad time, especially given the American election coming this fall and the potential ban of the app looming in the U.S. As for securing your own brand's accounts, here are some steps you can take. First, make sure that you review who has access to your accounts through the TikTok business manager

Starting point is 00:02:02 and then set a recurring task in your task manager to do this at least monthly. Second, it might also be worth looking at your own personal account and reviewing which apps you've authorized. Most marketing tools that connect to TikTok are fine, of course, but if you're an early adopter and tend to try new things out a lot,

Starting point is 00:02:21 you may wanna delete connections to apps you're not using. And third, everyone who uses your brand's or client's TikTok account should have two-factor authentication turned on and login alerts enabled. If your account does get hacked, TikTok has a web page with some help on getting it back. You can also report DMs that seem a little sus. If your client or company still has a different website for mobile users than it does for desktop users, your desktop site is about to be relegated to irrelevance by Google. First, a bit of history. Back in the day, websites were only made for desktop browsers because that's all there was. Once cell phones started being able to display web pages, the people who ran those sites realized their desktop sites looked terrible on phones.

Starting point is 00:03:11 So they created separate scaled back websites that would be shown to those early adopters and their fancy web phones. This meant they had two websites to maintain and update. And that was the norm for a couple of years until responsive design became the norm. These sites would show full width for desktop users, but would automatically collapse down for easier viewing when a smartphone was viewing it. This meant admins only had one site to maintain, a smarter one that would adapt on the fly to the device viewing it. These responsive sites are what make up the vast majority of the web today. But there were still some holdouts. Companies that didn't bother to ever go responsive,

Starting point is 00:03:49 and some may still maintain separate sites for mobile and desktop. It's Stack Group that's being affected here. Google this week said it will stop indexing desktop-only sites almost entirely next month. Quoting the company, quote, Google crawls and indexes almost all websites using a smartphone crawler. Over the years, the number of sites that aren't accessible on mobile has continued to shrink. After July 5th, we'll crawl and index those sites with only Googlebot smartphone. If your site's content is not accessible at all with a mobile device, it will no longer be indexable, unquote.

Starting point is 00:04:28 Remember, this will only affect a very small number of websites out there. But if your client or brand has a website that simply cannot be viewed using a smartphone, you can expect it to disappear from Google's search listings. There are some exceptions. Google says it will maintain the desktop crawler for a couple of small edge cases like product listings and job listings. You can always double check the status of your sites in Google by using the Google Search Console URL inspection tool. Microsoft has added video and connected TV ads to its ads editor. This includes Netflix across 10 countries. Just going to quote from Martek, who had great coverage of this today, quote, this move allows advertisers to manage video campaigns in bulk, streamlining the process to reach audiences watching Netflix's popular content and more. Video and CTV ads are now

Starting point is 00:05:18 supported in Microsoft Ad Editor. Bulk campaign creation and direct video creative uploads are there. Auto-created device targeting based on campaign type. And Netflix inventory is available for CTV campaigns in the US, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Australia, unquote. So you're launching a 24-hour sale on your travel site. A pop-up banner and a countdown announce the sale, complete with an animated airplane and flashing neon lights. Despite the attention-grabbing design, sales are lower than expected. Some data published recently in the Journal of Business Research suggests those flashy ads might be the problem. For high involvement purchases

Starting point is 00:06:07 like holidays or expensive gadgets, the researchers found it's best to avoid dynamic banners. These are ones with moving features or countdowns. Static banners are better for those products. But for low involvement purchases, like say t-shirts or shampoo, dynamic banners can work well. Among their experiments, the researchers found a static banner offering a discount on laptops increased purchase intentions by almost 10%, while a dynamic ad had no effect.

Starting point is 00:06:37 And when framed as a limited-time offer, 65% remembered the price with a static ad, but only 48% with a dynamic ad. The dynamic ad also lowered purchase intentions by a little over 10%. Here's a low involvement purchase example. A countdown timer for electric toothbrushes reduced purchase intentions by almost 10% compared to a static banner. So why does this happen?

Starting point is 00:07:04 Researchers speculate that dynamic banners grab attention, but they distract buyers from processing important information. This then makes them less confident in their purchase. The study used artificial environments, so real-world effects might vary. It focused on laptops, USB drives, and electric toothbrushes. Results, of course, may differ for other products. The paper is called The Effect of Dynamic Promotion Display on Purchase Intention. It is in the Journal of Business Research, and we have a link to it in today's free email newsletter, which you can sign up to by tapping the link at the top of the show notes or going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter. People who measure podcast audiences as they relate to

Starting point is 00:07:49 advertising may have been dramatically undercounting the reach. This is one of the key findings from a cumulus media study released yesterday. It found that more people than originally thought listen to podcasts with someone else. Think about a car ride where two people are listening. Using digital data points only, downloads specifically, the podcast platform would count that as a single listener. The only way to measure actual listenership would be by surveying or reaching an industry-wide accepted estimate.

Starting point is 00:08:20 TV audience metrics, for instance, often assume multiple viewers. In the study, 14% of people surveyed said they frequently listen with someone else. Genres like kids and family, that 31%, and rewatch podcasts at 26% see higher co-listening rates. Mobile devices dominate podcast listening at 69%, but smart speakers are at 11% and connected TV at 6%. In cars, 17% of podcast time includes potential co-listeners. Side hustles are also prevalent among heavy podcast users. Half report having a side gig, with men and video podcast viewers most likely to do so. Among 18 to 34-year-olds, 60% of podcast listeners have a side

Starting point is 00:09:07 hustle. Most podcast consumption happens quickly, with 71% listening within one day of the podcast episode's release. Women and longtime listeners are more likely to revisit past episodes. As for where they're listening, the study found that YouTube leads as the top podcast platform, used by 31% of listeners, followed by Spotify at 21% and Apple at 12%. The study was conducted a couple of weeks ago. It did have a somewhat low number of participants, about 600 weekly podcast consumers, but still some interesting findings in that study. And finally, a strange bug being reported by some YouTube users. The thumbs up like button is disappearing after being clicked. The like still seems to be registered, but after clicking it,

Starting point is 00:09:59 the button just vanishes and an empty gray space is left. This seems to be a desktop issue, not mobile. Some Reddit users reported a similar bug some months ago. So the puppy training has come to this because she's not getting it. She's cute. She's really cute, but she is not really getting the whole, we do the toilet things outside. So all the advice that we've been getting is that we should tether her to us basically all the time. Keep her within our eyesight because apparently they don't want to do it when you're looking or when you're around, which is true. Whenever she's pooped in the hallway, she's gone away from our eyesight.

Starting point is 00:10:38 Do you want to hear this? Do you even stop if you don't want to hear this? I won't be offended. Anyway, so my poor wife is the tetherer. She's the one that is attached to the dog. And we think it's working. We've had two days of outside poops. So knock on wood.

Starting point is 00:10:59 Anyway, that's my life now. I guess there are worse things that could be happening. All right, I'll see you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - ⚠️ A TikTok Cyberattack is Underway

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