Today in Digital Marketing - Amazon's Secret Spy Program Revealed

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

Fake company, real products — inside the elaborate secret Amazon scheme. Also: How to get your ads beside the most popular Shorts content. Your brand's Facebook group might break on Monday. And X is having another very bad week.📰 Get our free daily newsletter📈 Advertising: Reach Thousands of Marketing Decision-Makers🌍 Follow us on social media or contact usLinks to all of today’s stories hereGO PREMIUM!Get these exclusive benefits when you upgrade:✅ Listen ad-free✅ Back catalog of 20+ marketing science interviews✅ Get the show earlier than the free version✅ “Skip to story” audio chapters✅ Member-only monthly livestreams with TodAnd a lot more! Check it out: todayindigital.com/premium✨ Already Premium? Update Credit Card • CancelMORE🆘 Need help with your social media? Check us out: engageQ digital📞 Need marketing advice? Leave us a voicemail and we’ll get an expert to help you free!🤝 Our Slack⭐ Review usUPGRADE YOUR SKILLSInside Google Ads with Jyll Saskin GalesGoogle Ads for Beginners with Jyll Saskin GalesFoxwell Slack Group and CoursesSome links in these show notes may provide affiliate revenue to us.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.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Friday, April 19th. Today, fake company, real products inside the elaborate secret Amazon scheme. Also, how to get your ads beside the most popular shorts content. Your brand's Facebook group might break on Monday and X is having another very bad week. I'm Todd Mathen. That's ahead today in digital marketing. 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. Word is getting out about a secret project Amazon ran in 2015 to allegedly spy on their competitors. The Wall Street Journal reporting this week that Amazon started a fake company

called Big River Services International. Get it? Big River. In 2015, this company made real products like photo frames and clothing and sold them through their competitors like Walmart and eBay, all apparently in an attempt to get more information on sales contracts and the likes. Quoting the Wall Street Journal, email addresses to use externally. In emails with people at Amazon, they used Amazon email addresses and took extraordinary measures to keep the project secret. They disseminated their reports to Amazon executives

using printed, numbered copies rather than email. Those who worked on the project weren't even supposed to discuss the relationship internally with most teams at Amazon. An internal crisis management paper gave advice on what to say if discovered.

The response to questions should be, we make a variety of products available to customers through a number of subsidiaries and online channels, unquote. But despite how well prepped they sounded, the alleged spies still made some amateur gumshoe mistakes. Some of these Big River team members actually listed Amazon as their employer on LinkedIn. For its part, Amazon said it was just collecting data

and nothing to see here. A spokesperson telling media, quote, benchmarking is a common practice in business, unquote. Quoting Business Insider's piece on this, quote, Amazon has faced scrutiny for its treatment of sellers on its own platform before. A US congressional committee found in 2020 that the company had used data on sales by third-party sellers to create its own version of the products, usually to the detriment of the independent sellers in their businesses.

A lawsuit from the FTC last year also claimed that Amazon effectively raised prices by increasing what the company charged its third-party sellers and punishing them for offering lower prices on websites besides Amazon. Unquote. A new option for brands wanting to capitalize on the vertical video trend, a way to place your ads alongside popular YouTube shorts. The new Select Shorts placement will show your ads among the most popular videos

in five content categories, entertainment, automotive, gaming, beauty and fashion, and food and recipes. This will, of course, give more opportunity to be seen with some of the platform's most viral content.

YouTube says shorts are now seen by 2 billion users each month. And viewership on TV has also gone up after they added a shorts interface to their connected TV apps. The company also updated its tips guide called ABCDs of Effective Ads to include shorts. Probably won't be much new here if you've seen similar tips from TikTok and Instagram Reels, but might be handy if you're just starting out with vertical. We have a link to that in today's email newsletter,

which is free to join. Just go to todayindigital.com slash newsletter or tap the link at the top of the show notes. Sunday is the last day that brands will be able to post to Facebook groups using a third-party tool. Meta is shutting down its Facebook groups API on Monday. This means that social media management tools like Buffer and Agorapulse and Hootsuite won't be able to post to Facebook groups for you.

Some platforms, like Sprout Social, simply no longer offer that posting ability anymore. Others, like Buffer, say they're considering a mobile reminder system, which would still let you schedule content on their platform, but you would have to manually post directly on Facebook. To be clear, we are talking about Facebook groups here, not Facebook pages. Your company's brand page is unaffected by this. This appears to be Meta's attempt to reduce the amount of spam and commercial content that has populated many groups. Snapchat has released a new report that looked at three years of ads within their app across five different verticals, commerce, tech, telecommunications, travel, and quick service restaurants. Although the data set represented more than $15 billion in ad spend, it came from

only 36 advertisers. And as you might expect a study funded by a platform, the research found that platform to be really strong. One of the headlines in the report literally reads, Spend more on Snapchat. Quoting social media today, Snap notes that, according to the analysis, brands could actually increase their Snap ad spend by up to 33%,

and they'd still continue to drive strong results. I'm fairly skeptical of estimations like this, as they assume a lot in predicting broader response patterns, but based on the data available, the figures do indicate that Snap advertisers could improve their results by increasing their ad budgets in the app, unquote. Snapchat says their app generated the highest return relative to all marketing channels

for three out of five verticals and outperformed paid social across all categories. 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. And finally, X, formerly Twitter, recently killed off its trending column, which used to have some human intervention, and replaced it with its AI bots summary of trending content. That bot, called Grok, does an okay job with that task, most of the time. But when it goes off the rails, it really goes off the rails. Earlier this week, X's trending session broke this news about a basketball star, quote, Clay Thompson accused in bizarre brick vandalism spree. Underneath it, the copy read, in a bizarre turn of events, NBA star Clay Thompson has been accused of vandalizing multiple houses with bricks in Sacramento. Authorities are investigating the claims after several individuals reported their houses being damaged with windows shattered by bricks.

Clay Thompson has not yet issued a statement regarding the accusations. The incidents have left the community shaken, but no injuries were reported. The motive behind the alleged vandalism remains unclear. Unquote. Except, and I'm sure you know where we're going with this, Clay Thompson did not commit criminal vandalism.

It seems the bot got confused by the slang term for missing a basketball shot, which is sometimes known as throwing bricks. As of this morning, when we checked, that completely made-up news item was still up on X. It has been a rough week for the beleaguered app. Yesterday, car manufacturer Hyundai announced it's pulling its ads from the platform after pro-Nazi content was placed beside their brand promotions. It happened just days after NBC said it found thousands of accounts posting or amplifying pro-Nazi content, at least 150 of those accounts sporting the paid Blue Verified checkmark. We have a couple of ad slots available in our newsletter in May, and those rates are going up.

So if you want to try it out, now is the time to lock in. Some ad slots are currently as low as $10. Just tap the link at the top of the show notes or go to todayindigital.com slash ads to see our rate card. And that will do it for the week. Today in Digital Marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Snunamic First Nation on Vancouver Island.

Our production coordinator is Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Blevis. Ad coordination by Red Circle. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend, friends, and I will see you on Monday.