Today in Digital Marketing - Account Banned? Just Buy a New One!
Episode Date: September 20, 2022Did your ad account get banned? Don't worry... just buy a new one! Also: Meta joins the post-cookie party... how to get more InMail replies... the cameras in the sky that are watching your product...s... And the vote is in: Your brand's use of animated GIFs is cringe. ("Mesothelioma" mix by @thereiruinedit on TikTok)✅ VOTE HERE: How do you feel your company's Q4 will be, compared to last year's? BETTER or WORSE or THE SAME ✨ GO PREMIUM! ✨ ✓ Ad-free episodes ✓ Story links in show notes ✓ Deep-dive weekend editions ✓ Better audio quality ✓ Live event replays ✓ Audio chapters ✓ Earlier release time ✓ Exclusive marketing discounts ✓ and more! Check it out: todayindigital.com/premiumfeed ✉️ Contact Us: Email or Send Voicemail⚾ Pitch Us a Story: Fill in this form📰 Get the Newsletter: Get It (daily or weekly)📈 Reach Marketers: Book Ad • Classifieds🤝 Join our Slack: todayindigital.com/slack🙂 Share: Tweet About Us • Rate and Review 🎤 Follow: LinkedIn • TikTok • FB Page/Group👨🏻💼 Follow Tod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok ------------------------------------🎒UPGRADE YOUR SKILLS• Inside Google Ads with Jyll Saskin Gales• Foxwell Slack Group and Courses 👍 TOOLS WE RECOMMEND• Social media mgmt: Sprout Social and Agorapulse• Marketing tools: Appsumo• Podcast recording: Riverside.FM💡 MARKETING SPOTLIGHTNeed more leads for your business or agency?Malthus helps you connect with new prospects and leads for your business or agency needs to help drive sales and growth. Check it out! ------------------------------------ Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada. Associate Producer: Steph Gunn. Ad Coordination: RedCircle. Production Coordinator: Sarah Guild. Theme Composer: Mark Blevis. Music rights: Source AudioSome links in these show notes may provide affiliate revenue to us.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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It's Tuesday, September 20th. I'm Todd Maffin.
Today, did your ad account get banned?
Don't worry, just buy a new one.
Also, Meta joins the post-cookie party.
How to get more in-mail replies.
The cameras in the sky that are watching your products.
And the vote is in, friends.
Your brand's use of animated GIFs is cringe.
Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.
We begin today with a look at Amazon's grey market. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. buy these accounts to bypass bans imposed on their original accounts. These sales, of course,
break Amazon's rules and let shady sellers evade security and verification checks.
New merchants are subject to a range of checks, sometimes as detailed as mandatory video calls
and letters sent to their physical addresses to confirm their location. An existing and verified
account, though, lets sellers bypass these steps. Quoting Business Insider,
On Telegram and forums like Swapped and PlayerUp, thousands of brokers openly sell accounts with prices ranging from a few hundred bucks for a new account to thousands of dollars apiece for years-old accounts with established histories.
Some brokers are so confident in their ability to avoid Amazon security, they even offer a two week money back guarantee.
Also, these accounts sometimes steal random people's identities to disguise themselves and sellers use these fake credentials to engage in questionable behavior.
In some cases, the people whose names and addresses had been stolen have been bombarded with returns from unhappy customers. In response, an Amazon spokesperson said the company is, quote,
dedicated to protecting customers' brands, selling partners,
and its store from counterfeit, fraud, and other forms of abuse.
Everybody's got a privacy solution.
Google's got one.
Walmart has one.
And now, Meta is throwing their hat into the post-cookie ring.
It's called the Interoperable Private Attribution and is actually being developed by both Meta and Mozilla.
The companies say IPA is an attribution framework that doesn't track users across the web.
Quoting Adweek,
A key facet of the protocol is its basis in multi-party computation,
where the process of matching user and action is
shared between multiple servers. In other frameworks, all computing happens in one browser.
User data is broken up like pieces of a puzzle and encrypted in something called a match key,
which anyone on the web can operate. Parties only have access to data if their match keys
correspond to one another, indicating the same user visited a publisher as,
say, made a purchase on a website. However, once an advertiser gets access to this data,
it would be batched and aggregated, meaning the user's identity is never revealed, unquote.
Of course, IPA's backers don't account for much browser share market. Mozilla had 3% market share
last month. If you don't include the in-app browser, Meta doesn't even really have its own web browser.
But according to a source quoted by Adweek,
who claims to be an ad tech expert,
IPA's lack of incumbency might actually be an advantage.
Quoting them,
The big problem is a trust problem.
There's nothing wrong with Google's approach and Apple's approach,
but they do depend on you trusting that Google's or Apple's code is effective and non-biased,
even if it's open sourced and people don't trust it. Unquote. They added that while people may generally be in favor of IPA, the industry itself still has a long way to go before adopting a standard, which may end up actually combining a variety of solutions.
Big tech isn't sold either, quoting a Google spokesperson, we believe it's too early to tell whether the IPA proposal is the right solution for the ecosystem,
and we look forward to exploring it alongside other proposals from the industry.
Inflation is not scaring consumers away from shopping this spooky season.
According to a survey released yesterday by the National Retail Federation,
7 out of 10 American consumers plan to celebrate Halloween this year,
returning to pre-pandemic levels.
Due to spikes in participation,
spending on costumes, decorations, and candy is expected to reach record levels.
Consumers plan to spend $100 on average
for items like candy, decor, cards, and costumes.
Costumes, of course, make up the biggest category of purchases,
with kids and adult costumes expected to hit nearly $3 billion,
while dressing up your pet is also expected to exceed last year's record high.
As for where consumers will get inspiration for their Halloween costumes this year,
more than a third will search online,
a quarter will look inside retail stores,
and consumers apparently will be shopping early,
with half planning to start shopping this month.
Finally, where will consumers be spending their money this Halloween?
Two out of five will shop at discount stores,
while over a third plan to shop at specialty Halloween stores.
Only three out of ten say they'll make their purchases online.
The data comes from the NRF's survey of more than 8,000
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Hey B2B marketers, is your LinkedIn in-mail response rate a problem?
The Professional Network recently shared results from a study it commissioned to analyze emails
in order to gain a better understanding of what can be done to maximize your reach. They suggest five things. First,
the data showed that shorter in-mails turned out to be better. Cold emails, especially with 25 to
50 words, would receive 65% more responses than emails with 125 words. You probably hear this tip all the time, but here it is again.
Simplify your writing. 70% of in-mails are written at or beyond a 10th grade reading level. The study
found that if you take that 10th grade writing and bring it to a 5th grade reading level, you will see
50% more replies. Also, personalization is really important. The data showed, of course, that when you personalized the template, you saw twice as many replies. Four, passive language invites replies. LinkedIn says
information tones destroy reply rates, which are typically measured when you're talking about
yourself or trying to educate, air quotes, your buyer. Quoting LinkedIn, prospective customers
don't want to be talked at, they want to
be talked with. Instead of using an informative tone, try to create a more tentative, unassuming,
or even unsure tone, unquote. By asking questions like, if that sounds right, then let's connect,
you can invite engagement and align with the reader's thinking rather than telling them to
listen. And finally, after you've got the reply, stay curious.
LinkedIn's analysis says asking more questions and inviting further personalizations
once you've received a response will get you better results.
One of the biggest retailers in the world
is combating empty shelves
with artificial intelligence technology.
Walmart recently announced that in Canada,
it is rolling
out a new technology in its stores that uses AI to reduce out-of-stocks with real-time data.
In Walmart's terms, out-of-stock is when an item is not available on a shelf when a customer is
looking for it. So it doesn't necessarily mean it's sold out. It's just not physically out there
on the shelves. And it uses cameras to do this. Cameras are installed
throughout the store, pointed directly at shelves to target out-of-stock detection.
At predetermined intervals, the cameras scan the shelves. When a product goes out of stock,
it will trigger replenishment through Walmart's existing inventory systems. Employees will then
receive an alert and restock the shelf. With the rollout, Walmart Canada claims it is one of the first retailers in the country
to deploy an AI solution for on-shelf availability.
Which brings us to the lightning round.
Meta announced the launch of its Facebook Reels API yesterday,
which lets social media managers post content through third-party tools
like Sprout Social and Agorapulse.
The API enables a share-to-Reels feature and follows the Instagram Reels API which lets social media managers post content through third-party tools like Sprout Social and Aurora Pulse.
The API enables a share-to-reels feature and follows the Instagram Reels API,
which the company launched back in June.
LinkedIn recently announced a new focused inbox user interface,
which reroutes less valuable messages into a tab called Other,
which is basically a nicer word for kind of spam, not really spam.
You know what I mean. Some people call this bacon, by the way, B-A-C-N.
With the update, you will have access to two separate in-mail tabs, focused and other.
It'll be interesting to see where your sponsored in-mails end up.
Jiffy, the catalog of Jiffs, said young users think the format is for boomers, out of fashion, cringe.
And that it's seen an overall decline in use.
Why would Jiffy say this and kick itself in the face?
He made the remarks in filings with the UK's competition watchdog, which is trying to block
Meta's $400 million acquisition of it.
Jiffy also said it had, quote, no meaningful revenue generating business.
TikTok's clone of Be Real, TikTok Now,
launched over the weekend as a standalone app outside of the U.S. The new independent mobile
app is similar to the TikTok Now feature that was introduced into the U.S. TikTok app itself last
week. But less users opt in to receive push notifications, even if their TikTok notifications
are silenced. And finally, from the who-could-have-seen-this-coming archives,
the grocery chain Wegmans recently announced
that it is killing off its self-checkout app
after too much theft.
The app, called Wegmans Scan,
let customers scan, bag, and pay for groceries
while they were shopping and skip the checkout line entirely.
It turns out, funky cool app zero, shoplifters one.
A very quick survey happening in the show notes.
We'd love to know how you feel your company's Q4 will be compared to last year.
You can vote better, worse, or the same.
Just go to the show notes.
It is literally one tap.
See you tomorrow.
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