Today in Digital Marketing - Emotion + Science + AI = Profit

Episode Date: May 17, 2024

Thousands of TV shows, paired with thousands of academic marketing papers — and what do you get? One TV network says an insanely good audience targeting AI. Also: a new report says podcast listeners might be a dark horse. Print magazines are back. And Samsung may have just pulled off the best ad campaign all year. JOIN US for the Unofficial Google Marketing Live Tailgate event. Tuesday May 21 at 11am ET: YouTube or LinkedIn 📰 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 hereOur Sponsors: Check out Dynadot: https://dynadot.com/marketing Check out Miro: https://miro.com/PODCAST GO 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 Friday, May 17th. Today, thousands of TV shows paired with thousands of academic marketing papers. And what do you get? One television network says an insanely great audience targeting AI. Also, a new report says podcast listeners might be a dark horse. Print magazines are back. And Samsung may have just pulled off the best ad campaign all year. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing.

Before we get started, here is your invitation to our third annual Google Marketing Live tailgate. It is an unofficial event that myself and Jill Saskengales, our Google Ads correspondent, host. This year, we'll be joined by ex-Googlers Matthew Grodin and Solange Abraham for a review of the last year of the Google Ads platforms and what we expect in this upcoming Google Marketing Live event. This is our most popular live event all year. If you do any Google Ads marketing, you should be at this. It'll be Tuesday. That's this Tuesday, May 21st at 11 a.m. Eastern Time. And you can find links to either the YouTube live feed or the LinkedIn live feed in the show notes today.

Go tap those links now because you will get a reminder when the event is live. Plus, premium members are getting access to an additional private members-only live show the day after. We will be recapping all the announcements that happened, talking about how those changes will affect your campaigns and have detailed analysis on the future of Google Ads. And you'll be able to ask Jill, who spent more than six years at Google Ads, all of your Google Ads questions. That will be exclusive for premium members, which you can join right now. Just tap the link at the top of the show notes that says go premium or go to todayindigital.com slash premium. Some things really don't change in the ad world.

Take this year's Upfronts, the annual pitch to advertisers by TV networks and now streaming services. All the usual was there, the celebrity cameos, the three martini lunches. But one thing, of course, was new, AI and how the networks believe their tech gives them a leg up in reaching better quality audiences. NBCU, for instance, has been working on AI generated audience segments, something apparently so new it was only briefly mentioned on a PowerPoint slide.

But the company later spoke to Digiday about the upcoming segment building technology. And it's kind of amazing. Quoting that Digiday piece, quote, Using large language models, NBCU trained its AI platform on every movie and show owned and created by NBCU,

along with hundreds of links to web-based content. After having the AI write summary descriptions for every piece, it trained the LLM on data from academic research about behavioral science, human emotion, and motivation theories.

The team then had the AI assimilate a system and mathematically map the content descriptions with the academic materials to score similarities between human emotions and the episodes of each show. In an alpha phase last year, NBCU took a handful of clients across travel, entertainment, auto, and quick service restaurants to test the AI-generated audience segments. According to an executive, the AI-generated audiences

led to between 22% and 46% more sales than the existing machine learning models, unquote. NBCU wasn't the only one with AI on the brain, of course. Disney says its new Magic Words ad product can identify the mood of any given scene and match that mood to ad creative. But don't get too drunk on the AI. A Forrester report this month said 60% of U.S. senior marketers are concerned that using generative AI in their marketing could create false or inaccurate information. A new report finds podcast audiences may be a hidden gem in the media buying world.

Edison Research's Podcast Consumer 2024 report found that podcast listeners are more affluent and receptive to brand messages than others. 56% of monthly podcast listeners have an annual household income of more than $75,000. 56% is that group that compares to 48% of the overall population. Almost half are college educated. More than two-thirds of Americans over the age of 12 have now listened to a podcast. Thirty-four percent tune in weekly. Perhaps more importantly to marketing audiences, the report found that nearly half of weekly listeners have bought a product or a service as a result of hearing an ad on a podcast. We have a link to the full report in today's email newsletter, which is free.

You can sign up at todayindigital.com slash newsletter or tap the link at the top of the show notes. Who said QR codes were dead? Pinterest and the print magazine Real Simple have launched a new digitally shoppable issue. Quoting Marketing Dive, quote, central to the experience are QR codes within each section, which consumers can scan to be brought to a corresponding Pinterest board, where they can explore

more than 120 items and make instant purchases. Nearly every page of the issue is shoppable. The effort is live on realsimple.com and on Pinterest's exclusive shoppable board and will be in the publication's June issue that hits newsstands May 17th.

This latest move from Pinterest continues a years-long effort by the platform to court publishers, unquote. Pinterest says it gets more than 6 billion searches each month on the platform. The company reported a 23% increase in year-over-year revenue for the first quarter. Gen Z now makes up more than 40% of its users, and that is its fastest-growing demographic. And finally, last week we reported on Apple's controversial iPad ad, which showed a number of creative objects, musical instruments, filmmaking tools, and so on, being crushed by a giant flattening machine. At the end, the machine lifts up and reveals a thin iPad. Creatives around the world posted on social media how they found it offensive.

Well, now Samsung has jumped on board with a video ad of its own. It shows a person wandering through what looks like the set of the Apple ad after all the crushing has happened. She picks up a damaged guitar and starts playing it. At the end, text appears reading, creativity cannot be crushed. The ad was produced by agency BBH USA. Don't forget this Tuesday, our third annual Google Marketing Live unofficial tailgate

with me and our Google Ads correspondent, Jill Saskengales, along with ex-Googlers Matthew Grodin and Solange Abraham. This is our most popular live event each year. Do not forget to join. It is live. It is free. And the links are at the top of the show notes. Again, that'll be Tuesday, May 21st at 11 o'clock Eastern.

That is 8 o'clock Pacific time. I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.