Today in Digital Marketing - Adam Smasher Will Kill You and Give You a Coupon Code

Episode Date: April 20, 2022

New interactive ad options on TikTok... Xbox could be getting in-game ads... Instagram kicks marketers as it prioritizes Reels... A web browser's attempts at De-AMPing the internet... And how to gain 100K followers with a 4/20 campaign...Go Premium! No ads, more stories, audio chapters, and extended weekend episodes — https://todayindigital.com/premiumGet each episode as a daily email newsletter (with images, videos, and links) — b.link/pod-newsletterADVERTISING as low as $20: https://todayindigital.com/ads JOIN OUR SLACK! https://todayindigital.com/slackFOLLOW US: https://todayindigital.com/socialmedia(TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit) ENJOYING THE SHOW?- Please tweet about us! https://b.link/pod-tweet- Rate and review us: https://todayindigital.com/reviewus/- Leave a voicemail: https://b.link/pod-voicemail FOLLOW TOD:- TikTok: https://b.link/pod-tiktok- Twitter: https://b.link/pod-twitter- LinkedIn: https://b.link/pod-linkedin- Twitch: https://twitch.tv/todmaffin Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin (https://b.link/pod-todsite) and produced by engageQ digital (https://b.link/pod-engageq). Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Does your brand need a podcast? Let us help: https://engageQ.com/podcastsOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, new interactive ad options on TikTok. at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. 100,000 followers with a 420 campaign. And on the Premium Podcast, with no ads, more stories, and deep dive weekend episodes, tap the link in the show notes for more. Consumers might be Netflix and chillin' with your brand's ads soon. It's Wednesday, April 20th. I'm Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

Starting off with a major development, and this story is exclusive to premium subscribers like you. Your next media buy might include a huge network that you have never advertised on before. Why do I know you've never run ads there? Because nobody has. Netflix announced during its disappointing Q1 earnings call yesterday that they are now considering a low-cost ad-supported subscription. It's a move that would reverse the company's long-standing aversion to ads and comes after losing subscribers en masse for the first time in over a decade. As a result, Netflix faces a multitude of problems that advertising could help solve. The move could bring Netflix on par with rivals like HBO Max,

Hulu in the U.S., Amazon's FreeV, and Disney+, which will introduce an ad-supported tier later this year. In an expanding connected TV market, streaming giants are responding to consumer demands for cheaper ad-supported content. A recent survey found that two-thirds of connected TV viewers in the U.S. prefer to watch ads if the service is cheaper. I know I would definitely consider it since Netflix seems to jack up the prices every year. With their introduction of ads, we digital marketers could have access to a new supply of inventory, offering greater diversity and scale for CTV campaigns. Marketing Dive has a great piece today about this.

It could also benefit the ad tech industry, as the company suggested it would collaborate with other providers to deliver its ad experience. Quoting Netflix, we can be a straight publisher and have other people do all the fancy ad matching and integrate all the data about people, so we can stay out of that and really be focused on our members creating that great experience, and then again getting monetized in a first-class way by a range of different companies who offer that service. TikTok has announced new ad options called Interactive Add-ons to help brands engage users with in-stream ads. The platform says these add-ons can be used to showcase additional information, boost engagement, and encourage users to act from your TikTok ads. These add-ons are categorized into premium and standard. Don't worry, they're not based on your ad spend, but rather on

your specific objectives. So the nomenclature is a little weird. But anyway, standard add-ons provide a way to reach lower funnel marketing goals like driving clicks and conversions, while premium add-ons are a way to reach upper funnel goals like brand awareness and community building. Here's a look at the new interactive ad products. First, Pop-Out Showcase. This features pop-out elements that are clickable and can drive to a landing page. Gesture invites users to tap or swipe on an ad in order to unveil rewards or more information. Display Card will let you add an additional customized image to your in-feed video

ad and functions kind of like a call to action button. And Gift Code Sticker lets you add an exclusive promotional code to your video ad. The interactive elements also include clickable stickers, like a voting sticker and a countdown sticker. Obviously, it's a little hard to describe these via audio only on the podcast. So now might be a good time to subscribe to our premium newsletter where we have videos and images of all these things. You can go to todayindigital.com Tap the link in the show notes. Remember when Microsoft accidentally put ads in File Explorer? Apparently now the company is considering a new potentially contentious ad placement, video games. Yes, Microsoft is supposedly building an advertising program that will allow, quote, select brands, unquote, to buy and place ads that appear in free-to-play Xbox games.

Sources say ads could appear as billboards in a racing game or an open-world adventure. Microsoft already sells some limited advertising space through dashboard ads and certain in-game ad deals through third parties. But a Business Insider report notes that the new program is an effort by the company to reach out to more brands looking for ways to reach the growing gaming audience. And I'm going to weigh in here as an avid gamer and an Xbox owner. I don't hate this. In fact, honestly, I kind of thought they'd been doing this all along.

Hopefully they will rein it back to just those sort of incidental views because would you want to be the brand that interrupts a gamer moments before they reach the final boss youtube's connected tv is hoping to get a piece of your ad budget google announced it is partnering with nielsen to help advertisers understand how their reach delivers in comparison to other services. The release will include the deduplication of YouTube inventory across all of its platforms, connected TV, computers, mobile, and linear TV. Advertisers will also be able to view CTV device metrics within their MediaMix model data feed, which will enable them to measure the effectiveness of their YouTube connected TV investment. The company has also launched a new data platform for those MediaMix model providers and advertisers to request data, track the status of those requests, and ingest data directly.

Why do you hate us so much, Instagram? The platform announced yesterday it is testing removing the recent tab from hashtag searches in its continuing efforts to make marketers' lives miserable. I'm sorry, I have that wrong. In an attempt to, quote, connect with more interesting and relevant content, unquote. When you select the hashtag, you are taken to a page where you can browse through the content that has been posted with that hashtag via three categories currently, top, reels, and recent. But now users that are part of that test group will only see top and reels tabs on hashtag pages. to brand managers as they were able to use the recent tab to check whether their branded hashtags

were getting noticed. And it was reverse chronologically sorted, so there was no algorithm getting in the way. In many cases, brands used that recent tab as a huge part of their engagement strategy. And proving that Instagram executives live in a parallel world, the company says the test is part of an initiative to, quote, make hashtags as valuable as possible, unquote. I am not making that up. 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. The popular privacy-focused web browser Brave is sick of Google's accelerated mobile pages and has launched a new feature called D-AMP, which allows its users to bypass Google-hosted AMP pages and instead visit the content's publisher directly. The company says that AMP pages threaten users' privacy, security, and internet experience and help Google further control the direction of the web. It said that with the feature, it will help protect users from AMP in several ways, quoting the company, where possible,

D-AMP will rewrite links and URLs to prevent users from visiting AMP pages altogether. And in cases where that is not possible, Brave will watch as pages are being fetched and redirect users away from AMP pages before the page is even rendered, preventing AMP and Google code from being loaded and executed. Not a huge impact on digital marketers' lives, but if you spend some time in Google Analytics

and you notice some weird things happening around your AMP pages, this may be part of the reason why. According to a new court precedent that appears to have been set, scraping publicly accessible data from social media profiles is legal. LinkedIn has lost its latest appeal in its ongoing data scraping case against a rival company that scraped personal information from users' public profiles. The American Ninth Circuit of Appeals Court has ruled that scraping publicly accessible data on the Internet does not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The decision supports the original appeals court ruling from 2019, which also found that it's perfectly legal for any company to access and use

publicly available user data from any platform with users having no rights to govern this expanded usage. While it might seem like a major violation, data scraping has broader implications on archivists, academics, and researchers, since they also occasionally scrape information en masse for alternative purposes. People who run ads on Microsoft's network, who have been delaying the transition from expanded text ads to responsive search ads still have time. The company announced today that the deprecation of expanded text ads has been pushed back two months as it is extending the migration from June 30th to August 29th. After that, RSAs will be the only search ad type that can be created or edited in standard

search campaigns. So there you go, another 60 days to prepare. And finally, it is April 20th. That is 4-20, the date commonly associated with weed, marijuana, cannabis, and so on. So did your brand have a 420 campaign? Here's how a few companies decided to market the dankest day of the year. The fast food chain Jack in the Box is selling a pineapple express shake today named after the movie. It costs, yes, $4.20. The Texas-based restaurant chain Wingstop is marketing blazed and glazed chicken wings. By the way, kudos for the name, that it says are designed to taste like 420. That sounds awful. And finally, Slim Jim,

which I believe targets mostly stoned consumers inside of a gas station already, promised to follow everyone that retweeted its plea to get 200,000 followers by 420, and it worked. When we checked it today, the Twitter account had 201,000 and some change. So yesterday I learned that there is a middle finger emoji. I honestly did not know that

was a thing. After Steph and I had our little discussion and she told me how it was snowing out there and it's beautiful here, I kind of trolled her a little bit with that song at the end about how beautiful flowers were and everything. And when she noticed it, she went to Slack and sent me a middle finger emoji, which I was actually excited to see because I did not realize that was a thing. The wheelchair thingamabobby for our chair

was kind of installed. Most of it was installed. And it's really cool. Okay. First we have to open it. This is my wife demonstrating it for me last night. Oh. They tell me the little bumpy noise is because the rotors file off over time.

Oh. Except there appears to be one major, critical, hilarious flaw. Oh! Oh! That's a big f***ing problem. There's nothing to stop it from rolling away. Once it lowers the chair to the ground, if you

are parked on a hill, and our house is at the top of a hill, top of a three-block hill, I might add. Of course I'll grab it. The chair just started to roll away, which is fine because I was there and I can go catch it, but, you know, Jocelyn's paraplegic and is stuck in the car watching the chair roll away, which is fine because I was there and I can go catch it. But, you know, Jocelyn's paraplegic and is stuck in the car watching the chair roll

away. So we have yet to figure that little dealie out. But progress, right? See you tomorrow. We're ready to roll out. Ready for the show now. Uh. That was for Twitter. Oh, God. Roll out.

Roll out.