Today in Digital Marketing - AI is Coming for Thousands of Ad Agency Jobs

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Wednesday, June 21st. Today, Shopify extends shop pay to non-Shopify retailers. The U.S. is suing a huge commerce player for allegedly using dark pattern UI. Twitter now says a common organic content practice brands have used for years on the platform might get your account banned. And on the ad-free premium podcast, which you can learn more about by tapping Go Premium in the show notes, Google's new ads library, how you can use it to find out what your competitors are doing, and the big differences between it and Meta's version. I'm Todd Mathen. That's ahead today in digital marketing. PayPal and Apple Pay may have some new competition as Shopify announced its expansion into the payment service market today. ShopPay is now a commerce component that any brand can use. Previously, only retailers with Shopify-hosted websites could use it to process purchases, which powers the checkout

Starting point is 00:00:57 pages where consumers enter their payment information. Now it will be available even if you are not hosting on Shopify. The company is bringing this option to online merchants through a toolkit called Commerce Components, which lets large retailers integrate Shopify features into their websites. ShopPay, like other checkout services, lets customers save their email address, credit card, and shipping and billing information. It can also automatically recognize most returning customers without any user input if they've used the service recently. Shopify also expanded its partnership with Adyen, a payment processing platform for online retailers. The two are working on a new integration between their platforms to facilitate international financial services processing for online retailers, which will roll out later this year.

Starting point is 00:01:54 Meta's push to short form video continues, the company adding several new Reels ad options this week. First, it's expanding its ads on Reels feature to more brands on Instagram. It's an interesting ad format. It will let you add an image ad directly on Reels content without disrupting the viewer's experience. Meta is also bringing app promotion ads, these were formerly called app install ads, to Reels on both Facebook and Instagram. Meta is also testing music optimization for single image Reels ads on Facebook. The feature automatically applies free music from the MetaSound collection library to a single image ad. In terms of user functionality, Instagram now offers the option to download publicly posted Reels to users' camera rolls, similar to how TikTok has been able to forever, making it easier to share brand content to other platforms. The update, though, has come with some limitations, most notably audio problems with certain Reels contents, maybe due to music licensing agreements. If you'd rather people not download your brand's Reels, you can disable that in account settings. Currently, this is only available to a handful of users in the US.

Starting point is 00:02:59 On another front, Meta is also testing a new brand suitability inventory filter to help manage ad placement and is working with Zephyr to develop a new third party verification solution with select advertisers. The American trade regulator, the FTC, filed a lawsuit against Amazon today, accusing the company of employing deceptive tactics to trick millions of consumers into signing up for Prime memberships. The complaint alleges that the e-commerce giant used, quote, manipulative, coercive, or deceptive user interface designs, unquote, known as dark patterns, to enroll customers in automatically renewing Prime subscriptions without their consent. The FTC in its complaint said that Amazon deliberately made cancelling Prime memberships difficult, trying to prevent subscribers from terminating their memberships. For instance, the FTC describes the platform bombarding people with prominent options to

Starting point is 00:03:59 sign up for Prime, while options to shop without Prime were more difficult to spot. In some cases, a button to complete the purchase did not clearly state that it would also enroll the shopper in Prime. The FTC also said users attempting to cancel their subscriptions had to navigate through five pages, and that was just on desktop. It was actually six pages on the mobile app. It's also alleged that Amazon's leadership hindered or rejected changes that would have made subscription cancellation earlier, as these changes would have negatively impacted profits. More bizarrely, the complaint also revealed that

Starting point is 00:04:35 Amazon internally referred to the cancellation process as Iliad, apparently a reference to Homer's epic poem about the Trojan War. The complaint further accused Amazon of attempting to impede the investigation on multiple occasions and claims the company's executives failed to address the issues until they learned of the FTC investigation. An Amazon spokesperson disputed the FTC's claims, expressing the company's intention to prove its case in court. total sales across different shopping channels and optimize bids for in-store revenue. The process involves uploading and matching transaction data from your business to Google, and then you can see how your ads drive offline purchases. These store sales capabilities have been upgraded for advertisers using Performance Max campaigns with store goals and omni-channel bidding goals. With store sales, you can access reporting and optimization for

Starting point is 00:05:45 your Performance Max campaigns like smart bidding that will optimize Google Ads for store sales conversions, holistic measurement with ROAS calculations for both online and offline conversions, and an alignment of reporting methodology across store visit and store sales. Next, Google Analytics now lets you choose which channels are eligible for a conversion credit for web conversions shared with Google Ads. The default channel is Google Paid Channels. However, you can select Paid and Organic Channels. One important note, only credit assigned to Google Ads Channels will appear in your ads account. To view the eligible channels, you go to the conversion summary, conversions detail, and campaigns tabs in Google Ads, and in attribution

Starting point is 00:06:31 settings in Google Analytics. Then you can edit this setting under the admin section, then attribution settings in Google Analytics. You can change this setting at any time, and the changes will apply to future conversions. 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.

Starting point is 00:07:13 AI is coming for your job. That's something we hear all the time. But now, there might be a timeline for when the AI overlords might supplant us. A recent report by Forrester Research predicts that by 2030, some 33,000 ad agency jobs could be automated. That's about 8% of the entire agency workforce. Of these, one third, but 11,000 jobs will directly result from generative AI. Is the shift already underway? There are conflicting reports about AI's effect on ad industry employment. The report suggests that the majority of job losts won't materialize in the next two years. Another study found that 3,900 positions across various industries were displaced by AI in May alone.

Starting point is 00:07:59 According to Forrester, the top three job categories most vulnerable to replacement are clerical, secretarial, and administrative jobs, sales jobs and people in market research. A quick warning to parents, there are some derogatory words at the end of this story. A common organic content practice may now land your brand's Twitter account in jail. Elon Musk recently addressed concerns about scammers exploiting replies to popular tweets, saying, quote, gaming replies to generate free advertising will result in account suspension, unquote. This raises concerns about the impact on traditional Twitter content strategies, particularly newsjacking or tapping into trending topics for increased exposure, which has long been a tactic used by many brands and marketers to gain traction on the platform. Many marketers were, of course, confused.

Starting point is 00:08:58 Musk later clarified that he was really only talking about spammers engaging in non-sequitur self-promotion or misleading advertising. Quoting social media today, so initially Musk seemed to imply that all brands who look to get free advertising via tweet replies could fall foul of seemingly a new Twitter rule. But he later added the non-sequitur self-promotion element, which basically means that replies which are out of context and that seek to advertise a brand in a tweet's replies will now be suspended if caught. With that additional qualification, that should mean that trend jacking and engaging with trending events is still okay, but it does depend on how Twitter looks to enforce such if this is indeed implemented as a new rule. Right now, we're only going on Elon's comments, and there's no specific ruling on what this means exactly

Starting point is 00:09:50 within Twitter's ad policies, unquote. Also, last night, Elon added another policy to the platform, banning use of the term cisgender. He tweeted, quote, the words cis or cisgender are considered slurs on this platform, unquote. Cisgender, of course, is not a slur. It's a dictionary word that describes someone whose gender identity matches their sex at birth. It was just two months ago when Twitter quietly rolled back the part of its hateful conduct policy that included specific protections for transgender people. So, cisgender is a banned term that could get your account removed, but words like faggot and tranny are welcome on the platform without consequence. Of all the AI that I'm excited for, certainly text-to-video, text-to-image, it's all really cool. I mean, I can't wait until my voice is perfected.

Starting point is 00:10:48 But the one I'm really looking forward to is when they finally nail the ability to imitate different singers in different styles. And they're getting awfully close. Have a listen to this. This is AI Elvis singing a song that Elvis obviously never sang. I filled out a massive rabbit hole last night on TikTok watching just a ton of them. A great TikTok account, by the way. There I ruined it is the name of it. So go check it out.

Starting point is 00:11:32 I'm out of the country tomorrow on some agency business. And so our associate producer, the intrepid Steph Gunn, will be here instead. She'll see you tomorrow. I will see you on Friday. bat from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal. Get the Rakuten app or join at rakuten.ca.

Today in Digital Marketing - AI is Coming for Thousands of Ad Agency Jobs

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