Today in Digital Marketing - Aug 20 — Donald Trump is Destroying Your ROAS (Ep 219)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Yes, your CPMs are up, and you can blame Donald Trump for that. Snapchat cozies up to local bricks-and-mortar marketers. Some of Twitter's newest features are starting to make it out to the marketing platforms we all use. And Microsoft is the latest company to try its hand at automated digital ad recommendations. Here's a hint. Don't expect a lot. It's Thursday, August 20th, 2020. Happy International Radio Day! I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:33 Have you advertised in the US and you're noticing your CPMs are up? You are probably being caught in an artificially inflated ad market this week, all thanks to the American presidential campaign. Donald Trump's campaign this week blasted the internet with a massive dump of ad spend, taking over the homepage banner of YouTube for four days, blanketing major websites like the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post with banner ads, unskippable ads on both YouTube and Hulu. In total, more than $10 million in ad spend in a single four-day period. Why these last four days? Because that's when the Democratic Party was holding its convention.

Starting point is 00:01:15 And if there is one thing Trump doesn't like, it's competition for attention. And for a moment, think about how powerful unskippable YouTube ads are here. If you want to watch the live coverage of the Democratic Convention on the world's largest video platform, you are required to sit through an ad for the competing party. That is a much bigger deal than standard TV ads, which are a lot easier to ignore or just plain skip past if you have a DVR. But honestly, this might have been the Democrats' fault. The New York Times reporting that when they moved their convention dates from July to this month, they failed to move their media buy dates as well. And the Trump campaign swooped in and grabbed up everything they could.

Starting point is 00:02:03 A spokesperson for the Democratic presidential campaign called Trump's buy a stunt. A stunt it may be, but it's one the Dems quietly plan to copy. They have reserved a bunch of space on YouTube for the day after the Republican National Convention. When you think of local digital advertising, that is to say marketing local businesses like locksmiths or dentists or plumbers,

Starting point is 00:02:30 you might think of Google ads. You might think of Facebook's geo-targeting. Hell, you might think of radio stations or community papers. I'll bet you don't think about Snapchat. And Snapchat wants to change that. For a while now, they've been bulking up their services to local marketers. They have local lenses, which are geolocated augmented reality graphics. They have new Snap minis, which are tiny little apps that live inside their main app to handle things like local transactions. But it's their new Snap map that comes with local listings that is getting some attention this week.

Starting point is 00:03:04 As a marketer for a local business, you can add yourself to the map, whether you have one location or many. On your map listing, things like your address, website, hours of operation, and so on. If you're a restaurant, that opens up buttons like order takeout or make a reservation. And remember, despite everything you hear about TikTok's popularity, and despite the giant that is Facebook, Snapchat is absolutely holding their own. More than that, they're actually still growing. If you wanted to check out this new local marketing tool set out, you'll find it now in the Snapchat Ads Manager under a new campaign objective called Promote Local Place. They use the Foursquare business database, so there's a good chance you'll find a lot of your business info already in there

Starting point is 00:03:49 ready to go, but you can edit that if you want. As for the creative, there are design templates there. You'll set the targeting, like how wide a circle around your business you want the ad to reach and so on. What's not clear is whether Snapchat, as a platform, has the right user intent for you. Like Instagram, people are there mostly to browse, be entertained, kill time, and so on. That's very different than something like, say, Google, where users have one intent, to find something specific. But like everything in our world, the only real answer is we won't know until we test it. You know, those local stores and bricks and mortar operations don't get a lot of attention in digital marketing news coverage, but they absolutely are a part of our world.

Starting point is 00:04:41 For instance, the American chain store Target has now reported its strongest revenue growth ever. Thank you. the full story because 90% of those digital transactions were actually fulfilled at a physical store. But even sales where digital wasn't used at all, like in-store sales, those numbers were up two for Target by almost 11%. They're seeing about the same at Home Depot where sales also jumped about 25% over the previous Q2. Online sales doubled, and consumers picked up about 60% of all online orders at physical stores. Competing chain outlet Kohl's wasn't as fortunate. Net sales there fell about 23%. One thing is certain, pretty much anyone in retail is focused heavily

Starting point is 00:05:42 on planning for what may be a very volatile Black Friday Cyber Monday this year. Now that Twitter's shiny new API is out, as expected, we are now seeing some third-party platforms beginning to build those new features into their dashboards. Sprout Social yesterday announced that they will let you hide tweets now from their smart inbox. This functionality, of course, has been available natively on Twitter for some time, but now that it's also in the API, platforms like Sprout Social and Buffer and Agorapulse and Hootsuite and all the rest will soon be able to start adding this stuff. We don't have it yet in our Sprout account here at our agency, so it's obviously still rolling out. I will tell you, Sprout's rollouts aren't always the speediest, so it might take another week or two to get around to everyone. Just a reminder,

Starting point is 00:06:29 hiding is very different than deleting. Deleting is what it sounds like. You just straight up remove content. But hiding a tweet reply on Twitter means it will move it out of the main tweet thread and under a separate list of hidden tweets, which users can see if they choose to look at tweets that an account has hidden. In fact, Twitter actually sometimes pops up a box to tell users that you have hidden a tweet and they can find it right here, here with an arrow pointing to the show hidden replies button, which, you know, kind of defeats the whole damn purpose of hiding a tweet. Hiding a comment on Facebook is a little bit better.

Starting point is 00:07:12 What it means there is that once you hide it, that comment won't be able to be seen by anyone except the commenter and all their Facebook friends. And finally, yes, it is a short episode today. If you use Microsoft's desktop ad editor software, you may be interested in some updates they released this morning. First, they have, quote, harnessed the power of AI to automatically provide recommendations, unquote. I probably don't have to tell you that these AI-based suggestions,

Starting point is 00:07:47 no matter what platform they're on, are usually pretty terrible. In most cases, they amount to, you should spend more money. But if you like the quick and dirty tips, they'll be in there. Also, in cases where your campaigns are at the risk of not serving, like you don't have as many keywords as you should, you'll get a notification. And it will also suggest a stronger bid position if your ads are tending to be pushed down by competition. Yes, it is International Radio Day, a day that I really should make like a personal holiday and take off every year. Radio is my thing.

Starting point is 00:08:19 I have been a national public radio host and producer. I've done a tech column for private radio and my first radio gig ever. I was 13 years old at the campus radio station of the University of British Columbia, the famed CITR. And yes, I have an air check. Good morning, I'm Todd Maffin. Today we'll be talking with Brad Philly, who is the spokesperson for Expo 86. First of all, we'll just start out with the main basics. Approximately when will Expo take place? Well, it runs for 165 days.

Starting point is 00:08:52 Stop the tape right there. That's all you get. Talk to you tomorrow. in the sun we love forever one and all together standing tall It's the season for new styles and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just

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Today in Digital Marketing - Aug 20 — Donald Trump is Destroying Your ROAS (Ep 219)

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