Today in Digital Marketing - Are You Running Ads on X Without Knowing It?

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Starting point is 00:00:28 Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. 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. It is Wednesday, October 4th. Today, more AI seeping into the ad platforms on Meta and LinkedIn. While your brand might be running ads on X right now without you realizing it, and the deepfake ads are here. God help us all. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital

Starting point is 00:01:21 marketing. Meta's big push into AI in its ad manager continues. The company this morning announcing more generative AI powered features for ad creatives. There are three new features. Background creation does what you think it would. It creates multiple backgrounds to complement advertisers' product images. Image expansion will adjust your creative assets, videos, and images to fit different aspect ratios across multiple surfaces like feed or reels. Text Variations generates multiple versions of ad texts based on advertisers' original copy. set of new creative that you'll be able to approve ahead of time, or whether it will generate them on the fly for each individual user based on what Meta believes that person will respond best to. We've reached out to Meta for clarification. They did not respond by deadline, but from everything

Starting point is 00:02:15 I'm seeing in various industry Slack groups and so on, it's likely the former. We do know that the text variation tool can only generate up to six different versions of copy. Some of these tools may sound familiar. Meta's been testing these in a small number of ad accounts. Also, things like being able to use multiple variations of copy in images has been around for some time. The difference here being that previous versions of this had the advertiser creating these variations. Now it's Meta's AI. Also,

Starting point is 00:02:50 there are some limitations in the fine print. The backgrounds feature will be pretty basic, colors and patterns, and won't even be available unless you're using Meta's Advantage Plus catalog to create your ads. But the biggest issue, as I see it, is reporting. Meta won't tell you which version of the body copy is performing best. It says this is because its reporting architecture is built around ads, not what are essentially sub-ads, though that's something Meta could certainly build if they wanted to. I mean, there was a time when there were only two levels in an ad campaign, campaign and ad. Meta later added the ad set level in. These tools have started to roll out as of this morning and may take until next year to get to all accounts. So with Meta joining the club of ad platforms using generative AI for individual campaign elements,

Starting point is 00:03:40 how much longer before someone turns AI loose on the whole ad campaign? Well, that day has come to LinkedIn, which this week announced its latest ads manager update, will now let you automate almost the entire campaign creation process. They call it Accelerate, and here's how they describe how it works. Quote, in as little as five minutes, Accelerate will recommend an end-to-end campaign and automatic optimizations to reach the right B2B audience with engaging creatives, which you can adjust and fine-tune before you launch your campaign. We'll use AI to analyze the website you shared, your company's LinkedIn page, and your account's prior LinkedIn ads to recommend a campaign. Using this customer data will build creatives and an audience, allowing you to adjust copy images and refine targeting parameters by adding inclusions and exclusions like geography,

Starting point is 00:04:32 unquote. This is a fork in the road for many media buyers who have to weigh control over their campaigns against the potential for better results when those campaigns are handled by AI. Most industry analysts say machine learning's insertion into an ad campaign can provide better results, but it's not a guarantee, and those good results really only happen when you're advertising at scale. That's code word for spending a lot of money. This new Accelerate offering started rolling out yesterday to a handful of accounts and is growing to more in the weeks ahead. Your brand might be running ads on X, formerly Twitter, without you even realizing it.

Starting point is 00:05:17 Last week, Google announced a partnership where they will be helping X sell ads. Those ads would run on the Google Display Network. It's not hard to see what X gets out of this. Following Elon Musk's takeover last year, the company has lost nearly 60% of its U.S. ad revenue, and concerns about brand safety have kept many brands away. The deal means that X becomes a placement option for display ads, which means that if you accept the default automatic placements,

Starting point is 00:05:46 X might be in that pool. And honestly, Google seemed to downplay the announcement, making it sound like X was just another site. Quote, like a number of social apps and websites, X has signed up to monetize its home feed with Google Ad Manager, unquote. But X is not like other social apps and websites, of course. For some brands, it aligns better with their audience since the ownership changes.

Starting point is 00:06:12 For others, not so much. Google spokespeople also distributed details on how to manually opt out of X as a placement if you didn't want it, something I don't think I've seen them do for any other specific site. That said, Google has a lot of practice at finding the right people for an ad at scale. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. 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

Starting point is 00:06:46 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 YouTube star Mr. Beast is known for his huge stunts, giving away houses or cars for free, recreating the Squid Game with real contestants, but no deaths, obviously. Which is probably why his latest TikTok ad seemed completely normal. If you're watching this video, you're one of the 10,000 lucky people who'll get an iPhone 15 Pro for just $2. I'm MrBeast, and I'm doing the world's largest iPhone 15 giveaway. Posted by anyone else, it would be flagged as an obvious scam. Posted by Mr. Beast? Well, it's within the realm of possibilities. And that might explain why the ad slipped past the

Starting point is 00:07:36 moderation system at TikTok, which is run partly by humans and partly by, ironically, AI. The ad was, of course, a deep fake and a scam, but the rendering of his face in the video and his voice print was almost perfect. We have that post in today's free email newsletter. If you want to see it, you can sign up to the newsletter by tapping the link in the show notes. For its part,

Starting point is 00:07:58 TikTok removed the ad, but only after media pointed it out. And their policy doesn't actually prohibit ads being made by AI, as long as that's disclosed on the ad. This week, American news anchor Gayle King and actor Tom Hanks both warned their followers that fake versions of them were out there hawking various things that they had no part in.

Starting point is 00:08:24 All right, that'll bring us to the lightning round. Gmail has a new feature, emoji reactions in emails. So just like you can quickly tag a comment with a smiling face in a chat room, now you can do that in emails. Except if the recipient uses Gmail's corporate version or its educational version or doesn't use Gmail at all, then every little emoji reaction will be sent as a separate email. So that's great. The video game Roblox has poached

Starting point is 00:08:56 an ad executive from Meta. Stephanie Latham will become the company's VP of global operations. She had led Meta's entertainment, tech, and telecom sales organization in North America. After a tenure of just over a year, Netflix's global ad president, Jeremy Gorman, has decided to leave. He was instrumental in launching Netflix's ad-supported tier. And a legal case against McDonald's and Wendy's over how accurate online images of their burgers were has been dismissed by a judge. The lawsuit alleged that both fast food giants were misrepresenting the size of their burger patties in their advertisements, but the court found otherwise. Links to the full details of these lightning round stories are in today's free newsletter, which you can sign up to

Starting point is 00:09:42 by going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter or tapping the link in the show notes. And finally, when Meta last week announced it would let people use generative AI to create stickers for their reels and posts and stories, who amongst us thought to themselves, huh, what could go wrong? Well, now we know what could go wrong, and it was as predictable as clockwork. People are typing in all sorts of prompts, prompts that brand managers might not appreciate,

Starting point is 00:10:14 and some of the stickers coming out, Mickey Mouse holding a bloody knife, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wearing only underwear, and video game character Mario looking angry and holding a rifle. Meta's system does block some phrases. Child with gun, for instance, is blocked. But child with grenade has returned results for some people.

Starting point is 00:10:39 Results that also helpfully included a child with a gun. The news site Gizmodo did their own tests. Elon Musk large breasts was blocked, but Elon Musk mammaries, no problem. Other prompts generating results, school shooting, Syria gas attacks, and Pol Pot, which returned a sticker of the Cambodian dictator sitting on a throne made of babies and skulls. Nothing to say here. Thanks for listening. I'm Todd Maffin. See you tomorrow. or board the nearest plane but let's get away from it all pack your bags get ready to go

Starting point is 00:11:34 and we'll hit the road

Today in Digital Marketing - Are You Running Ads on X Without Knowing It?

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