Today in Digital Marketing - Curation Nation

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected, be Zen. It is Thursday, October 17th. Today, breaking down the latest ad tech buzzword, TikTok doubles down on live stream shopping, again, Meta's layoffs hit hard across its platforms, and Google Ads customizes customizations. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. There is a new trend quietly reshaping ad tech, curation, and it's already influencing how campaigns are run. Curation is still an evolving concept, and it's not really defined by industry standards yet, but it generally refers to private ad marketplaces where ad tech companies

Starting point is 00:01:06 provide hand-picked publishers and tailored audience targeting. Marketing Brew recently reported that programmatic ad tech firms like The Trade Desk, Index Exchange, and OpenX are already pitching premium packages tailored to specific publishers and audiences. This includes combining tailored ad placements, premium websites, specialized software, and even custom algorithms for a more controlled advertising experience. This push for a premium, more controlled internet comes as the digital ad industry faces growing scrutiny from marketers over reports of billions in wasted ad dollars and ads placed alongside controversial explicit content. The move toward curation represents a break from traditional programmatic advertising,

Starting point is 00:01:52 which focuses on wide-scale audience targeting across the broad open web. While this model offered large reach, it also led to issues like ads being placed on low-quality or made-for-advertising sites. One report found that $10 billion in ad budgets was spent on those sites from just September of 2022 to January of 2023 alone. Curation aims to limit these problems by directing spend toward more brand-safe content, steering away from the wild west of the open web. But critics warn this could leave smaller publishers behind, cutting them off from ad revenue.

Starting point is 00:02:33 Plus, even premium publishers aren't immune to challenges, raising questions about whether curation can fully address the industry's concerns about quality. Apple introduced new tools for brands using its Business Connect service yesterday. This service, launched last year, lets businesses manage their profiles across various Apple applications like Maps, Siri, Spotlight Search, and so on. Through this dashboard, businesses can provide details like their name, category, logo, and website, and preview how their place card will appear to consumers. This latest update lets businesses integrate their branding into more Apple products, including Mail, Tap to Pay on iPhone, and the Phone app. Business Connect will also open up to all types of businesses, not just those with a physical location. I mentioned it was coming to the Mail

Starting point is 00:03:22 app. Those are branded emails which are coming later in the year. You'll be able to customize how your emails will display in Apple's Mail app. Instead of a standard gray placeholder logo, emails will feature the brand's name and logo in the inbox. When opened, it'll showcase a vibrant header derived from the brand's logo as well as the business's name and logo. Businesses will also be able to manage multiple emails or branded domains like marketing emails versus order confirmation emails. Brands can sign up for this feature today and their logos will start appearing to customers later this year. The tap to pay function will also feature custom icons instead of generic ones, letting you display your names and logos during transactions. And next year, integration with the phone app

Starting point is 00:04:07 will help identify calls by showing customers your name, logo, and even department, making it easier for consumers to recognize legitimate calls. Apple says these features will be available to most businesses globally by signing up for Business Connect. TikTok is pulling out all the stops to boost TikTok shop sales in the U.S. Well, all the stops except wooing online merchants with cash.

Starting point is 00:04:36 The platform has slashed its subsidies for retailer discounts, a strategy it leaned on during last year's launch, and has even tripled its sales commission to 6%. But now TikTok is switching gears to keep merchants on board. The information reporting yesterday that the platform has been offering coaching to merchants to make it easier to go live. Those recommendations include longer and more frequent live streams, even stretching up to eight or 10 hours at a time.

Starting point is 00:05:01 TikTok staff have also suggested a strategy called pre-heating, where sellers tease upcoming sales or giveaways in advance to warm up potential shoppers. A former employee also told media that TikTok is working on AI-generated scripts so that creators have enough to say on livestream and can sell more products. And they're also considering a few gimmicks, like the digital prize wheels found on Timu that hand out discounts to shoppers. Meta is laying off more employees across various departments, including WhatsApp, Instagram, Threads, and Reality Labs. Unlike previous mass layoffs, these smaller cuts appear to be part of a reorganization within specific teams rather than affecting the whole company.

Starting point is 00:05:44 A spokesperson for Meta told media this restructuring involves relocating some teams and transitioning employees into different roles. This latest round of layoffs follows a series of job cuts in the company's Reality Labs division earlier this year. Reports also circulated today that Meta fired more than a dozen senior people who had been given a small food stipend because they occasionally, and perhaps accidentally, spent that stipend on household products like toothpaste. getting pushed into the Shorts feed, a change that has stirred up some confusion among brands and creators. Now the platform has confirmed how this affects your previously uploaded brand videos.

Starting point is 00:06:31 According to YouTube, vertical videos that are three minutes or shorter and were uploaded before October 15th of this year, that is to say two days ago, will still be categorized as long-form content and will not convert to shorts. Only new uploads that meet the criteria will be converted to shorts. YouTube says it will take several weeks for its systems to adjust to this change. A couple of other smaller updates. The platform is experimenting with letting creators upload custom membership badges during the onboarding process on both mobile and desktop. This feature was previously limited to mobile.

Starting point is 00:07:05 And it is also simplifying the tagging process for sponsored content, letting both short and long form videos be marked as promoted on web and mobile. And Shorts drafts will now also be accessible on mobile devices. And finally, Google Ads has customized customizations, renaming the formerly named text assets to customizations in the automatically created assets section of the platform. Customizations will let users generate personalized ad copy using text from their websites, landing pages, ads, and assets you upload. Nothing to say here. I'll see you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Curation Nation

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