Today in Digital Marketing - Don’t Call It a Comeback

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

They're baaack — third-party cookies: Will they ever die? Stripe makes a big move away from payments. Threads now has more daily users than X. And a review of Meta's spanky new AI: Spoiler alert — it's not great.📰 Get our free daily newsletter📈 Advertising: Reach Thousands of Marketing Decision-Makers🌍 Follow us on social media or contact usLinks to all of today’s stories hereGO PREMIUM!Get these exclusive benefits when you upgrade:✅ Listen ad-free✅ Back catalog of 20+ marketing science interviews✅ Get the show earlier than the free version✅ “Skip to story” audio chapters✅ Member-only monthly livestreams with TodAnd a lot more! Check it out: todayindigital.com/premium✨ Already Premium? Update Credit Card • CancelMORE🆘 Need help with your social media? Check us out: engageQ digital📞 Need marketing advice? Leave us a voicemail and we’ll get an expert to help you free!🤝 Our Slack⭐ Review usUPGRADE YOUR SKILLSInside Google Ads with Jyll Saskin GalesGoogle Ads for Beginners with Jyll Saskin GalesFoxwell Slack Group and CoursesSome links in these show notes may provide affiliate revenue to us.Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Wednesday, April 24th. Today, they're back! Third-party cookies! Will they ever die? Stripe makes a big move away from payments. Threads now has more daily users than X. And a review of Meta's spanky new AI. Spoiler alert! It's not great. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. Well, here we are again. Google has once again delayed the deprecation of third-party cookies. For those keeping track, Google announced all the way back in 2020 that third-party cookies would be going away by 2022.

And they delayed that until 2023. And then 2024. And now 2025. What is going on? For more, we turn to our Google Ads correspondent, Jill Saskengales. Jill spent six years at Google Ads and now runs the Inside Google Ads training program for practitioners. Jill, we were talking kind of before we started recording on just how ridiculous this has become. Can we let's just quickly back up and talk about for those who are not fully up to speed on it. What are third party cookies? All right. So cookies are not delicious.

They are little text files that websites leave on your computer with your browser so that they can remember information about you. So, for example, if you go to a website and it already has your username and password filled in, that's from a cookie. Or if you go to a website and it has items in your shopping cart from the last time you visited, that's done via cookies. And so a third-party cookie just means it's a cookie that was placed by a website you're not currently on. So for example, if you're on the New York Times website, the New York Times probably has a Google Ads remarketing tag installed on their website. So that would be third party Google dropping information with you while you're on the New

York Times website. For example, a first party cookie as opposed to a third party would be if the New York Times itself is placing a cookie with you while you're on their website. So to keep you logged in or show you articles you've read recently. So all this cookie talk, we're talking about third party cookies. That's what Google has said they're deprecating. They claim they're still doing it, but it is much delayed. And why are they doing it? Just kind of write us back to the history. I mean, it seems like if Google is essentially an ad business, that would be a pretty important technological device for an ad platform. Why would they be pulling it? Privacy, pretty much. Privacy is considered more important. And so all the way back in 2020,

you know, Google announced something called the Privacy Sandbox. And we're going to find a way to make this work for everyone. We're not going to use cookies because they're not very privacy safe. We'll find a new system that works for advertisers to let you reach the users you want to reach, that works for publishers so you can continue to monetize your audience, and that protects user privacy. And this is a really ambitious thing to try to achieve. And at the time, Google laid out all of these different frameworks it was going to test. You may have heard of Flock or Topics API. And these tests have either failed or just not lived up to expectations. They've not been able to consistently deliver good results for advertisers. And so it's one of the reasons you're seeing this delay yet again is because as rudimentary as cookies are, you just have not been able to find a better solution that kind of hits all these goals of privacy and good results for advertisers and good results for publishers, etc.

It does seem to sort of be a seesaw where you move one in one direction and then the other is affected, you know, like I forget whether it was tops or flock or topics. Now, I think it was topics were basically their solution for a replacement for third party cookies was basically grouping people into a couple of topic buckets. And then when you would arrive at a website like, let's say, today, digital dot com, it would announce proudly, hey, this person who just arrived is really interested in pantyhose and fish and anime, which, you know, seemed like like even worse privacy violation. It's just it's trying to balance a lot of competing interests. And of course, governments are involved as well. With this recent announcement, Google announced how they're working really closely with a privacy regulator in the UK.

And of course, the privacy regulators have very different objectives than the other ad networks, right, who are relying on this framework as well, who have very different objectives than publishers. So, I mean, I don't envy the position Google's in. Google's probably one of the few companies in a position that could come up with a new framework. But yeah, nothing's quite been working out right now. So once again, we have a delay. Does this mean the end of remarketing, retargeting? It means a fundamental change in remarketing. And to be fair, even though third-party cookies are still around, if you're running display remarketing, whether it's Google,

Meta, whatever platform, you're probably not seeing as good results now as you used to, because like Apple, for example, has come up with their own privacy controls for people who use iPhones. So remarketing has already gotten less effective than it used to be, unless you're using one of the two more what I call durable kinds of remarketing. And that is remarketing either based on your own first party data, like a customer list that you upload to your ad platform that does not rely on third-party cookies, or advertising using a platform's first-party data. So on Google Ads, that would be remarketing based on how people interact with your YouTube content. On Meta, that would be remarketing based on how people interact with your Instagram or Facebook content. And again, that doesn't rely on third-party cookies because those are signed-in users that

the ad platforms recognize. So those two kinds of remarketing are still there and still powerful, and you should absolutely be using it if you're not using them already. But kind of the cookie-reliant remarketing has already gotten less effective and will continue to do so and eventually go away when these cookies, well, eventually get deprecated. And this, of course, is why we're seeing a lot of the retail sites, the big chains, CVS and Walmart, and even some smaller companies like Lyft and Uber developing their own ad platform because they have that first party data that you can essentially lease, really. Exactly. You're paying for access to the data they have on people.

I've seen, I think Chase Bank recently announced that they're coming out with their own advertising network, a lot of these retail media networks. It's very powerful. So on the one hand, it's creating these opportunities for all these other players to come in and offer these ad solutions. But in the end, I think this does really hurt the thousands, millions of small businesses out there who rely on being able to come to Meta or come to Google Google and just here's who I want to reach and let me reach them. Like that's getting harder and harder and harder and harder to protect user privacy. Totally

worthwhile goal. I'm not trying to knock that, but it's really competing interest between the ad platforms and the users and businesses and sites trying to monetize. It's a lot of cooks in that kitchen. A lot of bakers, I guess, in that cookie kitchen. You know, the Chase Bank one is fascinating to me because you think about the amount of purchase data they have through the credit card companies. I mean, that is a that is a real goldmine. Jill, one year from now, will we be sitting here across from each other? And I'll be asking you why they delayed it one more year. I'm going to put a stick in the ground and say, yeah, I think it's going to get delayed again.

I just don't see it. Keep pushing it on down the road. I mean, it was first announced 2020 and then COVID happened. So, yeah, let's I'll go for it. I'll say one more delay is going to happen next year. All right. We'll be back. We'll check on that.

Thanks, Jill. Thanks. Jill Saskin-Gales is our Google Ads correspondent. She's here every other Wednesday. You can learn more about her Google Ads training program at our affiliate link, which is b.link slash GA training. And you can watch our full unedited interview. There is a link to it in today's newsletter, which you can sign up to for free by tapping the link in the show notes or going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter. All right, to other stories now. And it was a big day for the payments processor Stripe today,

announcing it would no longer require its customers to use its payment services in order to access other tools like fraud detection and invoicing. Quoting TechCrunch, It signifies a shift in how Stripe views its wider platform. In the past, it took the approach that the launch of other services could help lure users to taking its payment services. Now it appears to be willing to explore how it can sell those non-payment services on their own. In an interview, Will Gabrick, Stripe's chief product officer, admitted that users had been asking for the company to open its walled garden for some time. But he claimed that one of the main reasons why it delayed doing so until now

was due to it being technically hard to create integrations for legacy services, unquote. Stripe also announced a couple of other things today. AI tools, of course, to try to personalize the payment flow and make more intelligent A-B tests. They're doubling the number of payment methods to 100. There's a new fraud detection tool that uses natural language commands and some more options for its subscription and billing products. Some surprising numbers from Threads,

that's Meta's attempt to move into the void left by X, formerly Twitter, numbers that show that Meta's plan might be working. Quoting Business Insider, quote, So far in April, Threads has averaged an estimated 28 million daily active users, people who've opened the app at least once in a 24-hour period. And while you might be tempted to think that it's just an anomaly or the Taylor Swift effect, it turns out Threads has had more daily actives in the US than X since December, when Threads became Apple's most downloaded app. Today, Threads is in third place among the free apps. X is in 78th place. This might be why Meta seems to be accelerating plans to open the app up for ad placements. Of course, those are daily actives, not monthly actives. In the battle for the less active users, quoting Social Media Today, quote, X's monthly active

users in the U.S. handily beat Threads. According to Apptopia estimates, Threads' U.S. monthlies have been around 100 million for the last three months, although Zuckerberg in February said total monthlies were close to 130 million. Either way, X's monthlies are just over 140 million in the US alone, although users have fluctuated over the last year between 135 million and the current 140 million, unquote.

All that said, we will likely have more numbers to chew on soon. Meta reports its Q1 results after the market closes tonight. Rest assured we will have full coverage of that tomorrow. Reddit has added dynamic product ads to its ads platform. Here's how they describe the new format, quote, ads auto-populate in real time with the latest images, pricing, and product images from an advertiser's catalog. Two new targeting options, retargeting, which serves ads to people based on the products they've previously engaged with on the advertiser's site, and prospecting, which serves the most relevant products based on what people engage with on Reddit or advertiser sites. Plus, feed and conversion placement, as well as single image or carousel format, adds to

reach Reddit users in the discovery, consideration, or decision-making mindset, unquote. In its announcement, it quoted Jim Squires, one of their executive vice presidents, as saying, quote, Reddit shoppers are worth more because they spend more time on the platform in the research and consideration phases of their purchase journeys, which ultimately drives a more confident and higher value purchase decisions. With dynamic product ads, brands can tap into the rich, high intent product conversations that people come to Reddit for, unquote. Dynamic product ads have been in private testing for a few months. Reddit claims a new format drove 1.9 times greater ROAS compared to the old school conversion campaigns. They are now ROAS compared to the old-school conversion campaigns.

They are now available globally in English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese. Reddit also today announced some updates to its mobile app, which should let comments load faster, among other changes. Reddit's own mobile app is considered to be mediocre at best. The company used to welcome a host of excellent third-party apps like Apollo, but many of those had to close after Reddit introduced new and eye-wateringly high API pricing. Meta is the latest entrant in a growing list of companies jamming AI into their apps, whether users want it or not. If you think I'm exaggerating, go look at the comments under Instagram's head

who was proud to announce that they'd replaced search with an AI prompt field. I scrolled through about 100 replies. Not one was positive. Most of them were along the lines of, nobody is asking for this, and how do I turn this off? Spoiler alert, you can't. It's been a few days now.

People have put Meta's AI to the test. So how is it? Eh, not great. Quoting Brian Chen from the New York Times, quote, the new bot invites you to ask Meta AI anything. But my advice, after testing it for six days, is to approach it with caution.

It makes a lot of mistakes when you treat it as a search engine. Meta announced its chatbot as a replacement for web search. I'll be blunt. Don't do this. Meta AI fails spectacularly at basic search queries like looking up recipes, airfares, and weekend activities. In my response to a request to look up flights from New York to Colorado, the chatbot listed instructions on how to take public transportation from the Denver airport to downtown, unquote. When the reporter asked Meta's AI about himself,

it reported back that he worked at The Verge, which not only he doesn't, he never has. It's also hilariously bad at basic math. Asking it for a four-syllable word will offer a three-syllable word instead. To be fair, Gemini and ChatGPT also struggle with this kind of query. But it's not all terrible. Apparently, Meta's AI is pretty good at editing existing text. Again, Brian Chen, quote, for example, when I fed Meta AI paragraphs that felt verbose and asked for the paragraph to be tightened, the chatbot trimmed all the unnecessary words.

When I asked it to improve a sentence written in the passive voice, the bot rewrote it in the active voice and added more context. When I asked it to remove jargon from a paragraph written by a text blog, it rewrote highly technical terms in plain language, unquote. It's also pretty good at image generation and faster too, though it has trouble with limbs and fingers and eyes like the other models. So probably put Meta's AI in the same boat as the others. As US President Ronald said, trust, but verify. And finally, among the many tropes of TV crime dramas, perhaps the most well-known, certainly the most mocked, is this. They have a photo of the suspect.

He's wearing glasses. We can see something in his glasses. If only there were a way to, I don't know, press a magical enhance button. Let's enhance it. Enhance section A6. I enhanced the detail and... I think there's enough to enhance. Release it to my screen. Enhance the reflection in her eye. Let's run this through video enhancement.

Edgar, can you enhance this? Hang on. Turns out we might not be too far from that future. Adobe researchers say they've developed a new AI model capable of upscaling videos up to eight times their original resolution. They released it as a research preview about a week ago, and some industry experts say the model can indeed upscale to high-definition videos

without the common distortions seen in other methods. This kind of tech is part of a group called generative adversarial networks, and they're commonly used for enhancing still images, but they often falter with videos, typically causing flickering and other inconsistencies. Adobe's tech, which it calls Video Giga Can, can maintain natural textures and details so fine you might not realize it's been enhanced. In particular, it can add skin textures and fine hairs that remain stable even during motion, creating a lifelike appearance without the artificial jitters often associated with other upscaling technologies.

As I said, this is just a research preview for now. Adobe hasn't commented on any plans for consumer release. Don't forget the premium version of this podcast is just like this one, but with no ads, better sound quality, audio chapters. It comes with access to more than 20 deep dive interviews with marketing scientists, my course on building a small agency,

and a bunch more. Tap Go Premium in the show notes to sign up. I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.