Today in Digital Marketing - Bye Bye, Mid-Rolls ☹️

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Wednesday, February 5th, 2020. Happy Constitution Day, Mexico. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, Snapchat has some catching up to do. Facebook will now let you send price drop alerts to your customers. LinkedIn lets you spy on the ads your competitors are running now. And Twitter finally adds the one feature digital marketing managers have been asking for four years. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:31 Google says it will beef up its ads blocking efforts on its popular Chrome browser. And first on the block list, intrusive video ads. Apparently, Chrome will soon block certain pre-roll, mid-roll, and display ads. Apparently, Chrome will soon block certain pre-roll, mid-roll, and display ads. And you might be thinking, wait a minute, aren't those the ads that Google's own YouTube runs? And you would be right. They say this will force them to make some changes to the ad products that you might be buying for your brand or clients, notably, and this is a big deal, the elimination of all mid-roll ads on YouTube. Here's specifically what they're going to block. Mid-roll ads of any duration, pre-roll ads, or ads longer than 31 seconds that cannot be skipped in the first five seconds,

Starting point is 00:01:20 and text or display ads that appear in the middle third of a playing video or are larger than 20% of the video content. Quoting Marketing Land, the pre-roll standard looks tailored to YouTube's TrueView ads, which allow users to skip after the first five seconds. Bumper ads, which are unskippable but only six seconds long, won't be affected either. We may see changes to the appearance of display banners on YouTube videos, however. As for when all this happens, Google says the day will be August 5th. The last of the quarterly reports have trickled out,

Starting point is 00:01:59 and Snapchats contain some interesting information. They've added more than 8 million daily active users in Q4, so they're up to 218 million now. That's a 17% increase in users year over year. Good, but nowhere near Instagram. Instagram Stories alone has more than 500 million daily actives. As for Snapchat's overall revenue, it actually jumped 44% in 2019 to about $560 million. One thing concerning analysts, its continued reliance on outside cloud storage providers instead of building their own servers. Costs in that line item continue to mount. Interesting move from Facebook.

Starting point is 00:02:41 This week they launched a new so-called one-time notification API. This is for brands on Messenger, and the API will let companies reconnect with potential customers with updates about new products and things like that. In its announcement, Facebook said, the way the API works is simple. Businesses can send a message to the users asking if they want to be notified on a topic. If the user asks to be notified, the business receives a token and can use this token to send out the notification with the information the user requested at a later time. So what sort of notifications are they talking about?

Starting point is 00:03:17 Facebook says that they expect you'll use it for price drop alerts, back in stock alerts, you know, things like that. Until now, Facebook's Messenger API has been pretty tight about how often we digital marketers can spam customers. Sorry, did I say spam? I meant contact. Quoting social media today, up until January, businesses had 24 hours to respond to a message initiated by a person in Messenger when using standard messaging, with an additional allowance on top of that to send one more message after that 24-hour window.

Starting point is 00:03:49 This catered to instances where a business wasn't able to respond within that initial day, but that option has now been removed, quote, in line with people's expectations of faster responses from businesses. A handful of other small Facebook items for you today. First, John Loomer reported that the learning phase of ads appears to be broken, at least related to optimizing for leads from a Messenger ad. John says, quote, the results are during the past seven days, which should be generating more than enough volume.

Starting point is 00:04:21 It doesn't appear to be impacting delivery, but it's at minimum a display bug. Second, rumors are floating around that the forced move of all Facebook ad campaigns to CBO, that's campaign-based optimization, will happen in about three weeks on February 27th. Reports say all current ad set optimized campaigns, that is to say those that were started before this February 27th date, those will keep running, but you will have a smaller range of editing that you can do with those. And finally, Facebook says it will shut off part of its audience network come April 11th. You know the audience network, don't you? Those are the little banner ads at the bottom of free mobile apps or on websites. That latter part is what they say they'll be shutting down.

Starting point is 00:05:06 Audience Network will still be available on mobile apps just after April 11th. No more on mobile websites. A little bit of an embarrassment for TikTok yesterday. You know that blue checkmark, the verified checkmark? The idea behind it is they give it out to public figures, but only after that public figure or their, have confirmed that person's identity. In most cases, that means sending in a photo of government ID or something like that, which should, in theory, make it sort of foolproof.

Starting point is 00:05:37 Famous person Kendall Jenner created an account on TikTok on Monday, and right away she had her blue checkmark, so presumably her people worked with TikTok to get all that confirmed for her first post. Problem is, it wasn't her at all. It was some imposter who just copied over some of her Instagram photos. As Business Insider reported this afternoon, the implications of a platform giving legitimacy to a fake account are troubling. Parody and fan accounts for celebrities and public figures are abundant across social platforms, and a breakdown in the system could be cause for concern for the millions of users who rely on these verification systems to tell them who is real and not. That account was removed by TikTok yesterday.

Starting point is 00:06:30 LinkedIn has quietly added the ability for you to see ads being run by your competitors. Well, by any company, of course, but you'll probably want to use it to see what your competition is running. This is pretty much identical to Facebook's ads library, and it's easy as hell to use. You literally just slap slash ads at the end of a company's LinkedIn URL. So if you want to see Facebook's ads, you would go to linkedin.com slash company slash Facebook slash ads. Nice little touch. And finally today, if you are in the digital marketing space, chances are you manage more than one Twitter account, even if it's just your brand's account and your own personal account. Until now, using both of those accounts on the web has been a royal pain in the ass. Either you've got to manually log out

Starting point is 00:07:14 of one, then into the other, then log out of that one and log back into your first one, or you've kept your second account logged in via an incognito browser window or another browser entirely. Now Twitter has added multiple accounts to its main website. It works like account switching works on Instagram's mobile app. You can connect up to five accounts, then switch between them. To add an account, click the More link in Twitter's left nav bar, then click the new plus icon to the right of your avatar. Well, if you value a daily digital marketing news show, please do take a moment to rate and review this podcast. It really does help in getting the word out there. There's a link in

Starting point is 00:07:54 this episode's description that makes that an easy one-click process. And if your brand could use some help with your social media content, engagement, or digital marketing, check out our agency at engageq.com. Follow me on social, links to my channels and our agency are in this episode's description. I'm Todd Maffin. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Bye Bye, Mid-Rolls ☹️

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