Today in Digital Marketing - And the Dark Clouds Finally Begin to Part...

Starting point is 00:00:01 It's Wednesday, November 23rd. Today, with recession looming, finally some potential good news for the digital ad industry. How marketers are getting around Minecraft's rules against, well, marketing. Facebook swaps politics for trash. Twitter advertisers are running out the back door. And Meta's new AI is its creepiest yet. I'm Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. And a very quick programming note off the top. Many of you know we publish a daily email newsletter with the full content of each day's show. But we have started a simpler, new, and free newsletter that contains the day's top story.

Starting point is 00:00:40 It is a LinkedIn newsletter. You can sign up at todayindigital.com slash top story. There's also a link in the show notes. Finally, a glimmer of hope for the advertising industry amid recessionary fears. According to new data from Standard Media Index, ad spend fell 3% year over year, declining for the fifth consecutive months. Now, although five straight months of declines are nothing to celebrate, the fact that the declines are slowing is a good sign, especially as we all head into the holiday season. The report also found that October spending outperformed all other months in 2022, while digital spend grew 5%, accounting for almost 60% of overall ad dollars last month. And although the market is

Starting point is 00:01:26 down compared to last year, the report notes that the advertising sector is still normalizing after an overly hot year in 2021. In the last quarter of 2021 and the first two months of this year, ad spend was up 20% over 2020, whereas normal ad growth for decades has been in the 2% to 5% realm. This October is still up a healthy 6% compared to 2020. In contrast to digital media's gains, linear TV and digital search continued to lag over the previous years. Google maintained the biggest share of digital search. However, the drop led the company's ad revenue to decline for the first time on record. Meanwhile, several categories

Starting point is 00:02:10 experienced their best October for ad spend since 2017, including pharma, restaurants, apparel and accessories, and travel. When it comes to brand activations in the metaverse, Minecraft may not be your first choice. However, one influencer is trying to bring advertisers to that platform. This Friday, Minecraft influencer Tubbo is officially launching Tubnet, a Minecraft server that will feature content and items collaborated with advertisers, including Kraft and Sony Pictures. Tubnet faced a big challenge in integrating advertisers into Minecraft without violating its developer's end-user license agreement, which restricts the presence of brand logos directly within the game. But a piece in Digiday today, which breaks all of this down,

Starting point is 00:03:03 said the network initially considered using in-stream overlays to create the appearance of in-game brand logos for Twitch users watching gameplay. But ultimately, they decided this skirted too closely around Minecraft's licensing guidelines. So instead, Tubnet chose to create in-game locations that are tied to advertising partners without explicitly displaying their logos. Craft Lunchables, for instance, has something called the Snack Shack inside the game. Users who play mini-games such as Snack Shack also receive in-game items that they can use elsewhere on the server, making Tubnet's branded experiences some of the most popular on the server. But, as this Tubbo fellow pointed out, his Minecraft server's success depends on its ability to involve brands without feeling like a giant commercial.

Starting point is 00:03:54 Currently, it's possible for a player to spend their entire time in the server without seeing an ad, and he hopes to keep it that way. While Twitter is pouring gasoline on a dumpster fire, Meta's brand safety efforts to reduce political content in feeds may actually be working. The company released its latest widely viewed content report for Facebook yesterday, and for the first time,

Starting point is 00:04:22 it shows political content on the decline. Although tabloid-style junk is taking its place. Some of the most viewed links include Elon Musk's mom sleeping in a garage, fan theories about the 1998 film The Parent Trap, pictures of women who peaked in high school, and vaginal tattoos. Data does indicate that politics is not as dominant as it was once on the platform, but it also shows that it is full of garbage.

Starting point is 00:04:54 As Social Media Today points out, the report doesn't suggest much to content marketers looking to expand their Facebook reach, and last year promotions can relate to the tabloid-style trends and celebrity gossip. As for the most viewed domains, YouTube remains at the top of the list, followed by tenor.co, that's where the GIFs are stored, then GoFundMe links, TikTok links, and Amazon links. Finally, 15% of the posts displayed in people's feeds came from Meta's automated feed recommendations, which show users content from sources they're not following, but may be interested in, but probably aren't.

Starting point is 00:05:34 There is a new Twitter rival in town. Yes, another one. We've recently covered Mastodon and Tumblr as potential contenders, but interest in another app called Hive Social has been growing rapidly. Currently, it's Apple's top social app, even beating TikTok. And with that much consumer attention being paid to a new app, we want to tell you about it. If for no other reason, then you may want to play with it, perhaps experiment with some marketing and so on. So Hive Social reportedly has now reached 2 million downloads and the pace of those downloads is accelerating. The platform is run by its 24-year-old founder and two other employees. Can Hive become the next Twitter? Well, there are a few kinks that need to be ironed out.

Starting point is 00:06:17 Yesterday, several new users reported on Twitter that they were having trouble setting up their accounts. Users also reported seeing accounts with the same usernames, allowing for possible impersonators. My favorite was the screenshot that showed 11 accounts with the handle Elon Musk. The founder says the duplicate username issue occurred when the server reached daily capacity last week, and they are working on a fix. As for content moderation, they plan to use both algorithms and human moderators, like every other platform. As of now, there are no content moderators on the app. But with funding, the founder says she hopes to hire more people to ensure the site filters out harmful content. Do you have business insurance?

Starting point is 00:07:03 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. advertisers since the takeover. Those 50 companies generated nearly $2 billion in advertising revenue since 2020 and more than $750 million this year alone. Some companies have publicly announced that they were stopping ads on the platform like Chevrolet, Ford, and Chipotle. But the report

Starting point is 00:07:58 suggests several others are quiet quitters because its data shows that they've stopped advertising for a significant period of time. Those brands include Meta, Coca-Cola, and Kellogg's. Despite the losses, Elon Musk continues to push the platform into dangerously brand unsafe places. A different study found proof that hate speech is more viral on his version of Twitter. To study how the takeover changed Twitter, researchers gained access to the full pipeline of all tweets. This is known as the firehose. They then created three lists, each with 20 keywords known to indicate hateful content.

Starting point is 00:08:38 One list for anti-LGBT sentiment, one for racist content, and one with anti-Semitic content. They then searched through tweets posted between March 1st and November 13th of this year. Prior to Musk's reign, only on average one tweet out of 60 keywords was considered hateful. But after Musk took over, an average of more than 21 of those 60 keywords triggered. Twitter did not respond to media inquiries. It should be noted that since the mass layoffs, Twitter no longer has a media relations team.

Starting point is 00:09:14 And finally, and I'm sure this is nothing to worry about, Meta announced Cicero yesterday, the first AI system that can use strategic reasoning and natural language to solve problems on its own, and it can probably beat you at diplomacy. Quoting Meta, Cicero is the first AI agent to achieve human-level performance in the popular strategy game Diplomacy. Diplomacy has been viewed as a nearly impossible challenge in AI because it requires players to understand people's motivations and perspectives, make complex plans and adjust strategies, and use language to convince people to form allies, unquote. Meta added that Cicero is only capable of playing diplomacy, for now, but the tech behind it is relevant to many other applications. Say it with me, friends. What could possibly go wrong? Well, my wife is still getting the rough side of COVID. As far as we can tell,

Starting point is 00:10:19 given the incubation period and all, we probably got it on the first day of our holiday. Maybe the plane. Yeah, probably the plane. It passed through me pretty quickly. I just have a lingering runny nose, but man, she is getting it all. The muscle pains, the sinus congestion. Long time listeners will know that we put a hot tub up on our deck this past spring and had wanted to soak in it to ease some of the pain. But we came back and the hot tub was off the charts in terms of high chlorine levels. We weren't there to add the daily chemicals, so we put these little puck things in a floater.

Starting point is 00:10:54 Clearly, I put way, way too many floaters in. They were all dissolved when we got back, but the green color on the test strip, which is supposed to be green, is almost completely black. So today I drained it all and I'm refilling it and starting it from scratch. I don't think I was briefed on how much work this hot tub would be, but it's still good. Tomorrow is American Thanksgiving. We have learned that nobody writes news releases or makes product announcements on that day.

Starting point is 00:11:22 So no show tomorrow, but we'll be back the following day with a special Black Friday episode. I'm Todd Maffin. Find me on Mastodon. Links in the show notes. See you Friday. Oh, I can hardly breathe. It's such a masterpiece.

Today in Digital Marketing - And the Dark Clouds Finally Begin to Part...

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