Today in Digital Marketing - Can Mastodon Ever Become "New Twitter" for Brands?

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Monday, November 7th. Today, streaming TV takes a bite out of mobile ad budgets. Will Mastodon ever be a brand-friendly platform? Layoffs looming at Meta. YouTube will let you go live with a guest. And the fact check that at least one tech CEO really, really did not like. I'm Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Despite a turbulent third quarter for advertising, Insider Intelligence's updated forecast shows it's not all doom and gloom. According to its most recent forecast published today,

Starting point is 00:00:37 ad spend is expected to grow 12.5% from last year. Spend grew 40% last year, but slowed significantly this year as it normalized from pandemic growth. However, ad dollars are flowing to digital. This year, digital will account for 70% of U.S. media ad spend. In 2019, digital accounted for 55%. Although the economy looks nothing like it did last year, the market research company's predictions for digital advertising hasn't changed much. However, the forecast suggests where spend is going will shift. For the first time this year, video will make up nearly one third of digital ad spending. Connected TV will eat into mobile ad spending, which currently accounts for 70% of digital compared to connected TV's eight and a half percent. Search will account for 70% of digital, compared to Connected TV's 8.5%.

Starting point is 00:01:28 Search will account for 40% of digital ad spending. That's up only about a point and a half from last year, but Search's stronghold within display will weaken over the next two years. Growth in display ads, which make up more than half of digital ad spending now, will slow to 10% this year, down from 40% in 2021. Furthermore, the forecast predicts that even though Meta continues to account for most U.S. display ad dollars, its share will drop unless the Metaverse miraculously takes off. Meta's ad dollars will go to Amazon, TikTok, and Connected TV. Finally, looking ahead, by 2026, digital ad spending will make up 80% of total ad spend.

Starting point is 00:02:10 As forecasts like that show Meta's dominance weakening comes word via the Wall Street Journal that Meta is preparing to notify employees of large-scale layoffs this week. Sources say thousands of employees are expected to be laid off, with an announcement expected as early as Wednesday. Company officials have already told staff to cancel non-essential travel beginning this week. Meta recently reported more than 87,000 employees. The Wall Street Journal noted this would be the first wide-scale layoffs to occur within the company's 18-year history. While smaller on a percentage basis than the cuts made by Twitter over the past week, which affected about half of the company's

Starting point is 00:02:49 staff, Meta's projected layoffs in terms of raw numbers could be the largest at a major tech company to date. The company spokesperson declined to comment, referring to Mark Zuckerberg's recent statement that the company would, quote, focus on a small number of high-priority growth areas. Mastodon, the ad-free open-source Twitter alternative, has doubled in size since Elon Musk took over as Twitter's sole owner. Earlier today, its founding developer announced the platform now has more than 1 million users. And momentum isn't slowing down. Despite only being a fraction of Twitter's 238 million daily active users, TechCrunch reports that Mastodon's user base is now growing by thousands of users per hour. Quote,

Starting point is 00:03:38 Twitter's controversial new ownership and recent product changes have supercharged Mastodon's expansion. Some users say they were inspired to switch to Mastodon over concerns about how Twitter's functionality may change under Musk's control, while others joined as a form of protest against Twitter's new paid verification scheme and Musk's heavy-handed approach to moderating certain forms of satire, unquote. Mastodon offers a similar experience to Twitter with features like hashtags, replies, bookmarking, and boosting, which is basically retweeting. Unlike Twitter, the network is ad-free, and it consists of thousands of independent servers organized around interests and regions run mostly by volunteers. There are downsides, though. One big one, at least for now,

Starting point is 00:04:21 is ease of use. Because the platform is a network of communities, users have to pick one community first as their home base. Once that's done, though, the user can reach any other user on Mastodon regardless of which community they're in. Mastodon incidentally calls these communities instances. The other downside is for brands. There's no such thing as a brand account or creator account or a professional profile. And culturally, Macedon feels very resistant to marketing efforts, partly because the platform doesn't even have any way to buy ads on it at all, but also from people wanting a different experience than other platforms. One software company over the weekend posted something

Starting point is 00:05:00 you'd see all the time on Twitter. Get this post to a thousand likes and we'll release our Android app. It was flooded with people telling them to, essentially, knock that Twitter shit off. Eventually, the company deleted their post and apologized. In that way, Mastodon's communities are a lot like Reddit communities, moderated by volunteers and particularly wary of people walking in with marketing goals to accomplish. So we marketers have to spend a bit of time on the sidelines, I think. If you'd like to start your own Mastodon account and see what all the fuss is, go to joinmastodon.org. That's joinmastodon.org. Scroll through the communities accepting new

Starting point is 00:05:43 people. Find a tribe you like and sign up. You can follow me at Todd. I spell my name with one D, so that's T-O-D at H-C-I dot social. There's also a link at the top of the show notes. is getting more vertical. The platform recently announcing a new mobile-only feature for live streamers called Go Live Together, which lets select creators invite a guest to go live with them. The video is then displayed in a vertical split screen. This is similar to TikTok's version or Instagram Live. Hosts will be able to rotate guests on their streams, but unlike other platforms, only one guest at a time will be allowed to take part in the broadcast. Instagram lets up to three, TikTok allows up to five. YouTube hosts will also be able to screen guests before going live, while the guest channel and user information will remain hidden. As for ads, pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll ads will show up on the streams, but revenue will solely be paid to the host channel of the stream.

Starting point is 00:06:44 Finally, YouTube said that all channels with at least 50 subscribers but revenue will solely be paid to the host channel of the stream. Finally, YouTube said that all channels with at least 50 subscribers will soon be able to launch the feature with the rollout beginning later this week. First, it was TikTok, and now YouTube has announced that starting today, shorts are heading to TV screens. Watching shorts on TV will require a smart TV from 2019 or later, or a newer gaming console or a streaming device. YouTube chose a customized design

Starting point is 00:07:14 that fills in the side of the video with a blurred background and an outline around the screen that resembles the screen of a smartphone. The company added that it chose this format to add more functionality to the side of the video, including information about the brand or creator, the video sound, and even thumbs up and down buttons. Users can use their remote to interact with the content and to stop

Starting point is 00:07:35 and start the video. The short will continue to play until you advance to the next short using your remote. YouTube noted it was unusual for consumers to prefer using the remote control to move through Shorts videos since watching TV involves a more lax autoplay experience. But in this case, research indicated that people wanted control of the viewing experience, just like with Shorts on mobile. As part of this rollout, viewers can subscribe to a creator's channel and like or dislike videos after viewing. The company says it plans to introduce more community features over time. 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.

Starting point is 00:08:36 All right, a few smaller Twitter items just to catch you up in case you missed these over the weekend. First, the head of Twitter's trust and safety group said that even though 50% of the company was indeed fired last week, only 15% of his group was terminated, adding, quote, with our frontline moderation staff experiencing the least impact, unquote. He did not address the other teams which were excised in their entirety, like those teams handling ethics, communications and PR, accessibility, responsible AI, and perhaps most importantly for us, brand and advertiser relations. He did confirm that many of the moderation tools that the platform had used to help make the platform safe for advertisers were still offline for most staff members. He was a little vague on their return, but said the tools would come back, quote, in the coming days. The Verge also reported over the weekend that some employees that had been fired on Friday were receiving somewhat panicked emails from their ex-bosses asking them to come back.

Starting point is 00:09:35 And an interesting exchange unfolded over the weekend between Elon Musk and a senior advertising executive that was in the Zoom meeting between Twitter and the big budget advertisers. Replying to Musk's claim that it was activists causing an advertiser exodus, Lou Pascalis replied, Elon, great chat yesterday. As you heard overwhelmingly from senior advertisers on the call, the issue concerning us all is content moderation and its impact on brand safety and suitability. Advertisers are not being manipulated by activist groups. They are being And finally, by blocking him. And finally, last week, U.S. President Joe Biden took credit for an increase in Social Security payments with a tweet saying, seniors are getting the biggest increase in their Social Security checks in 10 years through President Biden's leadership, unquote.

Starting point is 00:10:41 A couple of hours later, Twitter's systems automatically attached a note to this tweet that read, Oops. An embarrassed White House quickly deleted their tweet. The note came from a system known as Birdwatch. Basically, if enough people report inaccuracies in a tweet, some AI kicks in and tries to provide some context. It only works in the U.S. right now. Elon Musk seemed to love the system, replying to the Biden tweet with, quote, The community notes feature is awesome. Our goal is to make Twitter the most accurate source of information on earth without regard to political affiliation, unquote.

Starting point is 00:11:29 Then came Friday. I told you about a tweet Musk posted, basically saying that advertisers were dropping like flies and it was all because of activists. Well, a couple of hours later, Birdwatch kicked in and added a context note to his tweet that read, Reporting shows advertisers suspending or cancelling ad buys over concerns with Twitter platform direction, especially as related to content moderation. We don't know what Elon thought of the Birdwatch system after it tried to correct him, but we do know one thing. By the end of the day, that context note had disappeared.

Starting point is 00:12:18 Yeah, you know, I consider myself to be pretty tech savvy, but I had trouble figuring out Mastodon at first as well. Here's what I really like about it. And you're not really hearing this in the media too much. Mastodon's underpinnings relies on this thing called ActivityPub. It's a protocol that works between different types of platforms. So you might consider Mastodon to be a Twitter clone. Cool. There are Instagram clones out there like PixelFed. There are Facebook clones out there. There are different types of software that emulate a lot of the kind of commercial ones that we've lived with. And here's the best part of all of it, I think,

Starting point is 00:12:49 anyway. ActivityPub, this protocol, links all of them. So, if someone has an account on an Instagram clone, like PixelFed, for instance, on a server there, you can follow that person's photos within your Mastodon feed, essentially,

Starting point is 00:13:06 right? They have something called PeerTube, which is like a YouTube clone as well. So it's kind of like if Twitter let you subscribe to your friend's Facebook posts or your favorite brand's Instagram posts, and you could all see it within your Twitter interface and filter it and all sorts of things. That part I find really cool. More than just the one kind of Twitter clone aspect of Mastodon. But anyway, lots to figure out, even just as a regular user,

Starting point is 00:13:31 let alone as a brand in there. So early days yet for sure. I'm Todd Mappin. Thanks for listening. I'll see you tomorrow. We don't want to be famous. We're not entirely blameless. We don't care kill to name us

Starting point is 00:13:45 Girls with favorites 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 clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first.

Starting point is 00:14:21 Join free at Rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by

Today in Digital Marketing - Can Mastodon Ever Become "New Twitter" for Brands?

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.