Today in Digital Marketing - Deepfakes: The Next Brand Safety Challenge

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Thursday, June 6th. Today, deepfakes are the next challenge for brand safety. Reddit's ads API is out, barely. LinkedIn has a new video ad product. Instagram updates carousels. And the toggle switch inside Microsoft's ads platform, you might want to turn off. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. A lot of brand safety tools for advertisers deal with adjacency. How close your ads get to pro-Nazi content, for instance. Your brand might not want its ads for school backpacks to be directly below a post about silencers on AR-15s. Until now, the list of things to stay away from have been topic-driven. Violence, war, gambling, and so on. But now we're starting to see protection based on the origin of the content. Integral Ad Science says it's working on a new brand safety tool designed to keep deep fake content away from your ads.

Starting point is 00:01:05 This, of course, happening as AI-generated misinformation and fake images are continuing to grow. A recent BBC investigation found that TikTok's algorithm was recommending fake videos of political candidates making controversial statements. The IAS says its deepfake tool would be an industry first, though OpenAI has said it's working on one of its own. Both companies clearly trying to capitalize on brand safety anxieties. Most analysts say the issue of deepfake ad adjacency is likely to worsen in the coming years as generative AI becomes more widely available. We don't usually cover workplace software, but there is one update that I think could be pretty groundbreaking for marketers. Google's spreadsheets will soon be able to send conditional notifications, an email, whenever a specific cell or range of cells change.

Starting point is 00:01:53 For instance, an ad campaign planning spreadsheet that tracks daily results could give a senior executive a heads up whenever the CPA goes above a certain value. Google Sheets have had notifications for a while, but they've been pretty simple. Did something on the sheet change or not? Nothing at this cell level. These kinds of notifications have also existed in online databases like Airtable for some time. Excel can do it too, but it requires some heavy-duty coding for them. Google's email notification will show you what changed and who made the change, if it was human-generated. This started rolling out next week and should be to most accounts by

Starting point is 00:02:29 the end of the month. I say most because it's only going to be available on business, enterprise, or education plans. If you are using Google Sheets on a free personal account, you will be out of luck. Reddit continues to build out its ads platform today, announcing that the social media platform Sprinklr will be its first partner to use its ads API. This API gives Sprinklr customers direct access to near real-time public conversations on Reddit. Sprinklr will also be able to show relevant Reddit posts and comments in its app and collect metadata like sentiment, topic trends, and so on. It also provides a direct way to put ads onto the platform without having to go to Reddit's website. Reddit says now that they've got their first partner up and running, they've opened the new ads API to other developers and advertisers. What's not clear is just how open this is. Reddit recently clamped way down on its public API,

Starting point is 00:03:27 jacking up the price by several magnitudes, forcing a lot of popular and well-loved third-party apps into closure. Presumably, Reddit will be hand-picking which partners get into its API versus it being a truly open pathway. LinkedIn has a new ad product available. It's called The Wire. It lets you run in-stream video ads placed alongside content from publishers

Starting point is 00:03:52 that LinkedIn considers trustworthy. Those publishers include Bloomberg, Business Insider, Forbes, MarketWatch, NBCUniversal, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, and Yahoo Finance. Quoting LinkedIn, quote, knowing that U.S. viewers will spend 55 minutes more each day with digital video than traditional TV, aligning your brand's message to publisher content in a format that resonates with buyers

Starting point is 00:04:15 will support memory recall when it's time to buy, unquote. Social media today speculates that these publishers might even get a small cut of ad revenue placed beside their stories. Quoting their coverage of it today, quote, it could be a good way to reach key audience segments. And with video uploads on LinkedIn increasing 45 percent year over year, might also be a key path for tapping into emerging usage trends, unquote. LinkedIn is also adding some AI stuff, of course, image generation based on your own assets, those rarely helpful ad platform recommendations. And you'll also now be able to add targeting exclusions using third party lists. Instagram is testing some new content features, in particular, the ability to add text overlays on individual images inside of a carousel. This might be a helpful thing for explanations, how-tos, and so on. There are also some new

Starting point is 00:05:11 carousel formats. Original will display the photos in full size and whatever originally they came in. Portrait will be cropped to vertical format, square, of course, to a square format. Honestly, now that this is an option, I'm not sure why we wouldn't all just start using portraits since that would take up the most real estate on the screen. And finally, Microsoft is warning advertisers that if they've imported campaign data from Google Ads to their Microsoft Ads account, starting from about two weeks from now,

Starting point is 00:05:42 Microsoft will keep importing your Google conversion data automatically. You may or may not want this. Quoting from Microsoft's email to advertisers, quote, once you run an import, whether you haven't done so already to ensure that these new conversion goals are fully set up and can receive conversion events. If your imported campaigns use a conversion value-based bid strategy, such as Max Conversion, we will continue to use the same strategy and optimize those campaigns based on the new conversions. If you'd like to not import conversion goals, you can uncheck the import conversion goal setting in your customize your import setting step

Starting point is 00:06:31 of the import process, unquote. So my end game for this podcast is starting to get to fruition. No, it's not to sell. It's not to have an asset for retirement. It's so that I can amass a large enough audience so that when I have problems in my life, you guys will just send me tips. So I want to thank those of you who have sent me tips about the puppy.

Starting point is 00:06:57 It's very helpful. Got a great tip actually yesterday, I think, about a spray that we can use that we spray on the lawn and it apparently smells like pee and hopefully the dog will go there. So thank you, about a spray that we can use that we spray on the lawn. And it apparently smells like pee. And hopefully the dog will go there. So thank you, Carrie, for that tip. We've already bought the product that's coming tomorrow.

Starting point is 00:07:13 You know, it's like we get a day or two where everything is being placed in the place we want it to be. And then it just seems to go to hell. It's like she forgets all of the training. And I know parents, I know it's not the same. You guys do a much bigger job. But I've never had a puppy before. So this is all new to me. Also, as you may have been able to tell from my voice from the reading of today's podcast, I'm a little under the weather for some reason. This feels like one of those things that's going to get worse tonight and tomorrow. So heads up, there may not be an episode tomorrow. Normally, of course,

Starting point is 00:07:48 we would have our associate producer, the intrepid Steph Gunn in my stead. But Steph is still on mat leave. She comes back in the fall. And I've tried not to be sick until then. But this one, I may not be able to hold off on. But I'll do my best. I'll do my best for you. All right. Hopefully, see you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Deepfakes: The Next Brand Safety Challenge

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