Today in Digital Marketing - Banks: The Only Winning Move is Not to Play

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Monday, October 21st. Today, an e-commerce crisis brews as payment processors scramble to form new banking partnerships to maintain operations. Plus, the FTC's new click-to-cancel rule, how it will affect your campaigns. Why is Google-y... Google-y? Screw it, I'm leaving it in. Why is Google handing your leads to your competitors? And pulling a fast one, why your streaming media buy might not be what you think it is. I'm Todd Maffin. That's Ahead. Today, digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:35 Wells Fargo has stopped providing a critical service to fintech companies, leaving a huge problem for payment providers and, in turn, marketers. The bank's exit from the BIN sponsorship business means companies like Square, Stripe, and PayPal need to find new partners to process credit card transactions. The fintech sector is facing a major threat as banks become more cautious about working with their businesses. Banks are under pressure from regulators to ensure their fintech partners comply with laws and regulations. This has made it riskier and more expensive for banks to work with fintechs. So some fintechs are having to turn to smaller banks or alternative partners. Deutsche Bank has emerged as a possible replacement for Wells Fargo, but it is being selective about which merchants it will work with.

Starting point is 00:01:27 Square is still looking for a new partner to replace Wells Fargo. It's currently relying on JPMorgan Chase, but they're currently without a backup. The exit of Wells Fargo from the BIN sponsorship business has significant implications for merchants and marketers, it could lead to disruptions and increased costs for companies like Square and Stripe, which would likely pass that down the line. The website, The Information, has a great piece about that today. You can read it on their website.

Starting point is 00:01:56 Look for the piece called Bank Drama for PayPal and Square after Wells Fargo bows out. We have a direct link to it in today's email newsletter. If you sell any recurring service that can be bought online, the American Trade Regulator is about to make it easier for your customers to cancel their subscriptions. The Federal Trade Commission has a new click-to-cancel rule that will require sellers to make cancellation as simple as signing up was.

Starting point is 00:02:28 The rule applies to most subscription services and will go into effect in about six months. The new rule is part of the FTC's effort to update its 1973 negative option rule. The FTC received more than 16,000 comments on the proposed rule, including complaints from consumers and feedback from businesses. The new regulation will also prohibit sellers from misrepresenting facts, failing to disclose terms, and of course making it hard to cancel. The FTC says it will enforce the rule, but it was hardly a guaranteed thing. In the end, the FTC board vote was 3-2. One board member, in her dissenting statement, said the only reason the majority wanted it passed

Starting point is 00:03:11 was because it favored their political candidate in the upcoming American elections. If you sell home services and use Google's local service ads, you're not going to like this. The company is testing letting users request quotes from multiple of your competitors even after they've selected your specific business. For those in the test, when a user clicks on a business in LSAs, a request competitive quotes button now appears, letting the user select multiple businesses to get quotes from. The user can then enter a message and their email address, and Google sends the request to all the selected businesses simultaneously. The new feature, if it comes to pass, and judging from past history, it probably will,

Starting point is 00:04:02 it raises questions about how advertisers will be charged for those leads. Will all businesses that receive the request be charged or just the one that was originally selected? Google has not provided answers to those questions. This isn't the first time Google has tested features that allow competitors to appear alongside a specific business's listing. In January, Google introduced a feature that showed competitors after a user messaged a business directly. You might soon see a small uplift in ad impressions for your campaigns.

Starting point is 00:04:39 Google has started disabling uBlock Origin, a free ad blocker on its Chrome browser. The move part of the company's plan to phase out older extensions that use its previous Manifest Version 2 framework. Now, some users are reporting that Chrome has indeed disabled the ad blocker in an update. Raymond Hill, the developer of uBlock Origin, confirmed the deprecation of the extension in the Chrome Web Store. Hill had previously warned that the phase-out was coming and had been critical of Google's decision to limit the capabilities of third-party Chrome extensions like his. Some Chrome users are switching to alternative browsers like Brave or Firefox that still

Starting point is 00:05:18 support uBlock Origin. For its part, Google says its new Manifest version 3 framework can still allow developers to create ad blockers for Chrome, including uBlock's own Origin Lite. Spending on experiential marketing like live events is expected to hit $128 billion this year, surpassing pre-pandemic levels for the first time. This is a 10.5% jump from last year. That beats the 9.7% growth seen in 2023. B2C companies will spend the most, a predicted $90 billion this year there, and B2B companies will spend about $38 billion. The data from a recently released study by PQ Media. The study says the industry is still recovering from the pandemic, with the U.S. remaining the largest market. In 2023, the U.S. spent $52 billion on experiential marketing. That makes up more than 45% of global

Starting point is 00:06:19 spending. According to Patrick Quinn, CEO of PQ Media, experiential marketing is becoming more important because of better metrics and customer engagement. The return of live events has contributed to the spending rebound. Live events were the fastest growing channel in the B2C space, up almost 10% last year. Marketers are expected to focus on in-person experiences like music festivals to connect with consumers. B2B marketers have found value in conferences and industry events, especially with the rise of AI tools. We have a link to the full study in today's email newsletter. You can sign up for free by tapping the link

Starting point is 00:06:57 at the top of the show notes or going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter. 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,

Starting point is 00:07:20 and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today, starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. An interesting piece at AdExchanger says that while many advertisers are rushing to buy up streaming inventory, they're missing some key differences between what's labeled as streaming and what it actually means. To some, streaming means content delivered via a platform like Amazon Prime Video. But what about live feeds, like Thursday Night Football? The terminology gets muddy when it comes to connected advertising, sometimes called CTV. CTV is available in nearly 90% of U.S. households and makes up a third of viewing time.

Starting point is 00:08:04 But only 40% of CTV audiences are exposed to ads in this environment. A significant amount of the inventory distributed to that 40% is actually sold via traditional TV channels, sometimes known as linear. Let's look at a one-hour primetime program that airs on both linear TV and a free ad-supported TV channel. Those are sometimes called fast channels. So the program has 20 minutes of commercial time. 18 minutes are sold by the cable network on a national basis. The remaining two minutes are sold by the streaming platform.

Starting point is 00:08:42 But the 18 minutes of national ad time are actually sold as linear, not streaming. This means that ad buyers would need to make linear purchases to access the majority of inventory on a fast channel. In fact, between 20% and 25% of all ad-supported streaming can only be purchased via linear. This limited inventory is often sold at CPMs five times greater than what linear commands for the same impression. The full piece is definitely worth a read. It's called Pulling a Fast One.

Starting point is 00:09:16 You can find a link to it in today's email newsletter. We have started something new in the newsletter. It is the study in the newsletter. It is the study of the day. Often people email and want access to research about the marketing world, the e-commerce world, consumer behavior, and so on. There are a ton of studies out there, many more than we have time to cover in the podcast. But every day or almost every day in the newsletter, we have started putting a link to a story, to a study that we have selected.

Starting point is 00:09:46 Today's is called How and Why Consumers Are Shopping in 2024. It is definitely worth a read. And as usual, that is in our email newsletter. The link is at the top of the show notes. All right, that's it for today. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Banks: The Only Winning Move is Not to Play

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