Today in Digital Marketing - Even Movie Theatres Are Going Vertical Now

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Thursday, November 3rd. Today, Google kills off an audience tool. We have expert analysis. TikTok admits its Chinese employees can see your data. Tumblr tries to entice Twitter defectors with naked people. New Zealand plans to regulate buy now, pay later. NYU may be seeing vertical videos soon, up on the big movie screens. I'm Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed

Starting point is 00:00:26 today in digital marketing. Google this week announced it is doing away with similar audience segments. Starting in May, new similar audience segments will no longer be generated in Google ads. And in August, existing segments will be removed entirely. For more on this, we turn to our resident Google Ads whisperer, Jill Saskengales. Jill, what are similar audiences and is this a big deal? I'd say this is a small to medium deal. So similar segments, which used to be called similar audiences, work very similarly to a lookalike audience in Facebook. Google looks at one of your remarketing lists, whether that's website visitors or a customer list, and then finds people who exhibit similar behavior online so that you can show ads

Starting point is 00:01:10 to them. That sounds like something we'd want. Why would they take this away? It is something we want and it is something useful, but Google actually has other features that are more powerful than similar segments. For example, and I actually just learned this today when I was looking at the Google Ads documentation, when you use a similar segment on search, it only looks at a user's search behavior to find similar people, so people who've searched for similar things. Whereas when you use a similar segment on the display network, it will only look at the display network activity of users to find similar people. So that's actually only medium powerful. Google has a different feature called optimized targeting. And the way it works

Starting point is 00:01:51 is, in my opinion, much better. Rather than looking at your remarketing list, it looks at your converters. So people who've actually done the thing you want them to do from your ad campaigns, and then it finds other people who exhibit similar online behavior to your converters, whether it's things they've searched for, websites they visited, apps they use, etc. So though I had never even realized this before the announcement, optimized targeting is just a much more comprehensive and powerful version of similar segments. The only downside, I guess, is that optimized targeting is not available for search. It is only available for display discovery and YouTube.

Starting point is 00:02:28 Jill Saskengales, her training program is called Inside Google Ads. It is one of the best out there. You can find a link to it at the bottom of our show notes or use our affiliate link b.link slash GA training. TikTok shared an update to its privacy policy yesterday for European users, stating that their data can be accessed by its employees worldwide, including China. For the record, there are other countries where employees can access user data, like Singapore, where the EU user data is currently stored, Canada, Israel, the US, and a handful of other countries. The company said staff in these countries are allowed to access user data to ensure their experience on the platform is enjoyable and safe, quoting the company, based on a demonstrated need

Starting point is 00:03:15 to do their job, subject to a series of robust security controls and approval protocols. And by way of methods that are recognized under the GDPR, we allow certain employees within our corporate group remote access to TikTok European user data. Our security controls include system access controls, encryption, and network security, unquote. In the past, TikTok has acknowledged that some user data is accessed by employees of its parent company ByteDance in China, but not to this degree. This comes amid concerns about Chinese access to user information on the platform. The privacy policy goes live next month on December 2nd and is applicable to the UK, the European Economic Area, and Switzerland.

Starting point is 00:04:03 Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. announced a collaboration with TikTok yesterday that lets advertisers bring their TikTok content to the big screen during the pre-show. Cineplex says its curated TikTok integration with brands

Starting point is 00:04:51 will be featured in its vertical format and will be displayed in two-minute segments, featuring videos from Canadian and international creators. The company says it's the first theater chain to partner with the social platform to offer the new ad format. A beauty brand will be the first advertiser to debut the program starting tomorrow, followed by the Interac brand in December. In other TikTok news, more brand safety features are coming. The platform partnered with Double Verify last September to measure viewability and invalid traffic. Now, the two companies announced today that the partnership has been expanded to include post-campaign brand safety and suitability measurement for advertisers. The Twitter exodus is benefiting a number of platforms like Discord, LinkedIn, and even Substack, which today launched a chat feature for its newsletters. Tumblr wants a piece of that action too, and perhaps in a way to entice people over, is once again allowing nudity. It's been four years since

Starting point is 00:05:52 the company announced it was banning explicit content. After the ban, Tumblr lost about a third of its user base. But that could all be about to change, the platform announcing it will now welcome quote, a broader range of art, including content depicting the human form, unquote. So yes, that includes naked people. Content can include nudity, mature subject matter, or sexual themes, as long as those posts are tagged with the appropriate community labels. However, guidelines noted, visual depictions of sexually explicit acts remain off-limits on Tumblr. So, will nudes bring Tumblr's user base back? With consumers increasingly using buy-now-pay-later services, New Zealand plans to crack down on the industry by requiring providers to conduct an affordability check on customers. Yesterday, the government announced it's proposing checks for loans above $350 US,

Starting point is 00:06:50 meaning borrowers will receive the same kind of protections to borrowers using other credit contracts like credit cards or personal loans. Loans under this threshold would not have to undergo the same process. The need for protection comes as BNPL spending in New Zealand grew to nearly $1 billion last year, from just $400 million in 2020. According to the press release, all providers will be required to have hardship processes in place and belong to a dispute resolution scheme. Options for how the checks should be carried out will be consulted on before final regulations roll out next year.

Starting point is 00:07:29 And finally, Google announced yesterday it is introducing a new interactive timeline view that lets you track projects in Google Sheets. The new visual layer displays project information like the tasks start and end date, the description, and the owner. If you click a card within the timeline, you can view more information about the project in a sidebar, as well as look at your timeline at different points in time. You may have heard me mention that Substack has a chat app now. I've signed up for it. I was not aware I was going to email everyone on the newsletter. My apologies for that.

Starting point is 00:08:02 But if you have the Substack app and have an iPhone, it only works on iPhones right now, you can join in the chat. I am in there. I'll be in there evenings as well because, you know, don't really have any friends or life. So there you go. I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. Right now. Are you ready?

Starting point is 00:08:22 Are you ready? Let's get this started. Right now. Are you ready? Are you ready? Whoa.

Today in Digital Marketing - Even Movie Theatres Are Going Vertical Now

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.