Today in Digital Marketing - Digital Advertising Taxes Are Here. What Now?

Episode Date: February 16, 2021

Get the entire show content, with links and images, as a daily email newsletter! Subscribe at TodayInDigital.com/newsletterIt’s finally here — America’s first tax on digital advertising. What does it mean for your marketing budget? Also: Hate them all you like, but those irritating jingles work. Stop words aren’t a thing in SEO any more. A Vimeo launches an easy GIF maker. And why is Clubhouse feeding user data to Chinese servers?Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing us!About the Podcast:Join Our Free Slack CommunityGet this as a daily email newsletterReach Marketers: Ads • Classifieds • Brand TakeoversLeave a VoicemailFollow Tod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok • TwitchToday in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital. Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Today, it's finally here, America's first tax on digital advertising. What does it mean for your marketing budget? Also, hate them all you like, but those irritating jingles work. Stop words aren't a thing in SEO anymore. Vimeo launches an easy gif maker. And why is Clubhouse feeding user data to Chinese servers? It's Monday, February 16th, 2021. Happy Day of Restoration of the State of Lithuania.

I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. You knew it had to happen someday, and that day is here. The U.S. state of Maryland has become the first to impose a tax on digital ad revenue, which could, in theory, cause platforms like Google and Facebook to simply pass that on to us digital marketers. But don't worry, it's okay. The Republican governor there vetoed the bill. Oh wait, sorry, update. The legislature there just vetoed his veto.

So the law stands. And no, I can't explain how any of that works. I'm in Canada. Our lawmaking is much simpler. We just do whatever the queen tells us to do. The New York Times says the tax could bring in about $250 million in the first year. Lawmakers earmarked that money to schools. The president of the state senate wrote the bill is there to ensure, quote, big tech pays their fair share while making billions

of dollars a year using our personal data to sell digital ads, unquote. He posted that, of course, without irony on Facebook. The tax only applies to companies that make more than $100 million a year from selling digital ads. So what does this mean for us digital marketers? Look, I'm no political analyst, but I don't think it takes a high-end crystal ball to realize that all states will do this soon. 250 million bucks of free money? Who wouldn't? Similar legislation is already being worked on in Connecticut and Indiana. West Virginia and New York have already tried to do this, but didn't have the votes at the time. The lobby group for Google and Facebook and the likes said the tax would hurt small businesses, which, to be frank, is always their go-to line whenever they don't like something, Facebook especially.

So it's just one state so far, but if this spreads, expect to see those companies make up the difference in their bottom lines on the backs of your ad budgets. An alarming study from the Stanford Internet Observatory said it's discovered the audio chatroom app Clubhouse transmits user data to servers in China. Quoting The Verge, Shanghai-based company Agora Inc., which makes real-time engagement software, supplies the back-end infrastructure to the Clubhouse app.

The study further discovered that users to the Clubhouse app. The study further discovered that users' unique Clubhouse ID numbers, not usernames, and chatroom IDs are transmitted in plain text, which would give Agora access to raw Clubhouse audio. So anyone observing internet traffic could match the IDs on shared chatrooms to see who's talking to each other. Since Agora is a Chinese company, it would be legally required to assist the Chinese government locate and store audio messages if authorities there said the messages posed a national security threat, unquote. For its part, Agora says it doesn't actually store any of that audio or metadata other than to monitor network quality,

and any audio on American servers wouldn't be accessible by the Chinese government. it doesn't actually store any of that audio or metadata other than to monitor network quality, and any audio on American servers wouldn't be accessible by the Chinese government. There is a digital marketing component here for brands in regulated industries, of course. Investment firms, for instance, have strict regulations on data, and there are a lot of investor types on that app. These regulations apply to more than Clubhouse. In Canada, it's against the law to store a person's health data on any American data center, because the American Patriot Act gives the U.S. government the right to pop in and look at that data. So that means no Dropbox, no SurveyMonkey, no MailChimp. So if you're in any kind of regulated industry and thinking about checking Clubhouse out as a potential marketing platform, probably best to wait until the app adds the additional encryption it's promised to.

A big overhaul at one of the most popular project management tools used by digital marketers, Trello. The app started as a simple Kanban board to map out the progress of projects. Today, it announced a major redesign and a whack of new features. There are new card types, including link cards and mirror cards. The latter lets you pair cards across multiple boards, so changes to one are reflected in all the others. Also, five new board views, including a team table view that basically turns multiple Trello boards into a kind of scaled-down spreadsheet,

a timeline view to see tasks by deadlines, and a calendar view. Lots of marketing teams use Trello to move campaigns through an internal pipeline. The company says it has 50 million users. I'm not a particularly religious person. Being the child of an ordained Anglican priest will sometimes do that to you. But if there is a hell, I'll bet instead of elevator music, all the speakers are playing this on a loop. Liberty, liberty, liberty, liberty. Yes, Liberty Mutual's jingle is a special kind of torture.

It recently topped the list of the 10 most annoying jingles in a recent consumer study. Hate it all you like, but that study says it's all strategy because repetition works. In fact, that same jingle made it to the top 10 of another consumer study, the most catchiest. Thereby proving the point, said the study, that annoying doesn't necessarily mean ineffective. In the words of a 69-year-old woman from Florida, even if you hate it, you remember the product. In fact, the whole insurance industry dominated the survey. Four companies, Farmers, Nationwide, State Farm, and Liberty,

all ranked in the top third for recognizability. As for the most likable jingle, it was this one. About, above, actually, after, again, against, all, almost, and also. These are half of the A words in a recently published list of so-called SEO stop words. The idea behind a stopword is that Google doesn't index them, so you should stop using them. And once again, Google has thrown cold water on that. Google search engineer John Mueller said on Twitter, I wouldn't worry about stopwords at all, write naturally. I bring these kinds of stories up from time to time because anyone can write a blog post based on a hunch, and then it starts spreading around and soon enough people believe it. It's the same with

those best time to post on social media studies. They're nonsense. There's only one best time and that's the time of your community, not a statistical average of a million communities. Besides, some important phrases are made up entirely of stop words. Think of to be or not to be, one of the most widely quoted lines in modern English. So Google's advice remains what it's been for the last few years now. Don't worry about the algorithm. Instead, make your site's content the best resource possible and let the algorithm do its work for you.

Social media community managers know the value of a well-placed GIF, a cheeky reply to someone using that image of drag queen Jasmine Masters saying, I'm done. 359 million views in 2020, by the way. You may have thought, hey, we should make our own branded GIFs and use those instead.

So you go into Photoshop and after three miserable hours realize, you know, maybe Photoshop is not the right tool for this. Well, Vimeo has now launched a tool to turn your video uploads into GIFs. It's pretty easy. You select the six seconds you want to use, hit export, and there is no step three. Then, and did you know this? Once you have it, you can actually upload those images into the popular Jiffy platform

so that other regular users can use it as well and maybe even have a chance to go viral. Side note, why haven't third-party social media management tools integrated GIFs more widely into their platforms? In many ways, GIFs are the language of social. Hootsuite doesn't have it. Buffer doesn't have it. Agorapulse doesn't have it. Sprout Social doesn't have it. At least I couldn't find integration on those platforms when I logged into our test accounts today. Would it kill you guys to add a GIF search button? I mean, is licensing that much?

And that brings us to the lightning round. Google has added several new business categories to their Google Local service, which powers Maps and Google My Business and the likes. Among the new categories, pay-by-weight restaurants, government ration shops, and rickshaw stands. LinkedIn has published a new guide to account-based marketing and how businesses can use LinkedIn in the various stages and processes of their ABM approach. It's 33 pages and has some very pretty illustrations. That's a terrible ding. Hang on a second. Also at LinkedIn, a job posting there called Head of Community is cementing rumors that the platform plans to develop a creator payout system,

incentivizing people to post engaging content on the platform, something similar to TikTok's creator fund. Speaking of TikTok, it's testing a new education portal called TikTok Shop Seller University. It's available to Indonesian digital marketers right now, but it will likely roll out to the rest of us soon. Snapchat reports that 59 million users in the U.S. engaged with AR lenses on Super Bowl Sunday. As far as brand impressions on sponsored AR lenses, that number, more than 200 million impressions. And Facebook continues to prepare for the big changes in ad tracking coming to Apple devices,

today releasing a resource guide for digital marketers that have relied heavily on the audience network. Facebook says audience network will be the hardest hit once Apple turns on the prompt, asking people if they want to turn off behavior tracking in their mobile apps. Links to all of these are in our email newsletter. And yes, you can get this podcast as a daily email newsletter with images, related videos, links to dive deeper, even newsletter exclusive content. And there is a free tier as well.

You will get an abbreviated issue every other Friday. The newsletter comes out about an hour before the podcast drops. Just go to todayindigital.com slash newsletter to sign up or tap the link in this episode's notes. Well, I reached master provisioner in Elder Scrolls Online this weekend. But more importantly, on Valentine's Day, my wife and I renewed our vows at a shrine of Mara. You can actually see how it worked on my Twitter account. Now, together, and for the rest of our lives, we get a 10% XP buff. Love is grand, ain't it? Talk to you tomorrow.