Today in Digital Marketing - Facebook Sure Has a Weird Way of “Helping” Small Businesses

Episode Date: April 15, 2021

The study that will tell us if machine-learning was a mistake all along… Facebook’s idea of helping your business is to send people to your competitors… What is behind the mass exodus of Shopify’s most senior executives… Has Triller given up being the TikTok killer…. And Google introduces new technology to its consent mode — the time-honoured technique of guessing.Get the entire show content, with links and images, as a DAILY email newsletter! Subscribe at TodayInDigital.com/newsletterPodcast Perks: Exclusive Deals for ListenersAdvertising: Perks (free!) • Ads • Classifieds • Brand TakeoversJoin the Community: Slack or DiscordEnjoying the show? Please rate and review us!Follow Tod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok (daily digital marketing tips)Get this as a daily email newsletterLeave a VoicemailToday 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

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Get the Rakuten app or join at rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. Today, the study that will tell us if machine learning was a mistake all along. Facebook's idea of helping your business is to send people to your competitors. What is behind the mass exodus of Shopify's most senior executives? Has Triller given up being the TikTok killer? And Google introduces new technology to its consent mode, the time-honored technique of guessing. It's Thursday, April 15th, 2021. Happy National Poet Day, Peru! I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing.

Perhaps one of the worst movies ever made was the 1986 techno-horror film Chopping Mall. You can actually watch the whole thing on YouTube, but it's basically about a mall executive who decides to use robots instead of security guards. Before I open the floor, I'd like you all to meet your brand new security team. They look like the Three Stooges. Later, some mall employees stay behind for a late night party in one of the stores,

which confuses the robots, and they go on a killing spree. Eh, it was the mid-80s. We didn't expect a lot from plot lines back then. All through the 80s, the 90s, and right up to today, there's been this cultural fear of intelligent devices that can think for themselves. Robots that learn over time and maybe become smarter than us.

Facebook ran into this a couple of years ago when they were testing AI for messenger bots. The bots ended up creating their own unique language Facebook ran into this a couple of years ago when they were testing AI for messenger bots. The bots ended up creating their own unique language that the engineers at Facebook could not understand. And those bots began communicating with each other. Humans were completely out of the loop. Facebook shut the program down after that. These days, it's not killer robots or messenger bots most digital marketers are worried about. It's the social algorithms, which are designed to increase engagement at all costs. And they learn, too.

They learn what interests you have and very quickly drop you into an infinite loop of content that reinforces your own worldview. Nobody who studies this stuff thinks this is a good idea. But the social platforms haven't really cared. Engagement equals time spent in app equals increase of average revenue per user equals job security, which is why it's refreshing to see one platform starting to rethink the value that artificial intelligence plays in their own algorithm. That platform? Twitter. This morning, Twitter announced a new initiative, the Responsible Machine Learning Initiative.

They say they'll start watching the impacts of algorithmic shifts and maybe even intercede if it looks like the code is taking its users down a dark tunnel. Quoting the company, When Twitter uses machine learning, it can impact hundreds of millions of tweets per day, and sometimes the way a system was designed to help could start to behave differently than was intended. These subtle shifts can then start to impact the people using Twitter,

and we want to make sure we're studying those changes and using them to build a better product. Unquote. Well, the program has just started, so it will be interesting to see how this plays out in practice. After all, the corporate goal of maximizing engagement may often be at odds with the ethical and moral questions this initiative brings up. But kudos to Twitter for even thinking about this.

I, for one, welcome our research overlords. And now we turn to Facebook, the company which has spent millions saying Apple's privacy changes will hurt small businesses. Today, it launched a new post format which literally steers people away from the small businesses they're interested in and points them instead to that business's competitors. Quoting directly from Facebook here, starting in the U.S., we're beginning to test a new experience from News Feed where people can tap on topics they're interested in under posts and ads in feed, such as beauty, fitness, or clothing, and explore content from related businesses. People already discover businesses while scrolling through News Feed,

and this will make it easier to discover and consider new businesses they might not have found on their own, unquote. Indeed, the screenshot they show is of a restaurant post that the user sees, and underneath it, a box reading, Facebook, honestly, what are you thinking? While we're on the topic of Facebook, a couple of other updates here. They have added a new conversion leads goal for lead ads. And if you're thinking, wait, you weren't optimizing lead forms for leads before this? Yeah, same here. In fact, they say the new optimization will show it to people more likely to convert versus what Wait, you weren't optimizing lead forms for leads before this? Yeah, same here. In fact, they say the new optimization will show it to people more likely to convert versus what they describe as, quote, pure volume.

Which I guess means all this time those leads were just being sent out as a reach objective? They say now that they're actually optimizing for those leads, they saw a 20% increase in conversions. Well, duh. And second, they have a new ad format called Call Ads, which are basically the Call Now CTA button, but you can now also optimize for calls, which is good. Some people are reporting an interesting test that appears to be underway at Google. As you probably know, people who sell things

in brick-and-mortar stores can upload their current inventory status as a product catalog. That's used mostly for running shopping ads. But the data, of course, tells Google whether you have a particular product in stock or not. And some people are seeing that when they search for something like, say, drain cleaners, in addition to the search result on mobile, Google now also shows if there's a store nearby that has that product and is open at that moment. Google hasn't publicly acknowledged the test, or if they have, I couldn't find it. But if they do end up rolling this out, and honestly, why wouldn't they, this has the potential to be huge. Last year, Google introduced Consent Mode, a beta feature to help advertisers operating in the European Economic Area and the UK

take a privacy-first approach to digital marketing. When a user doesn't consent to ads, cookies, or analytics cookies, Consent Mode automatically adjusts the relevant Google Tags behavior to not read or write cookies for advertising or analytics purposes. This lets advertisers respect users' choice

while helping them still capture some of the campaign insights. But without cookies, advertisers experience a gap in their measurement and lose visibility into user paths on their site. Google today announced that Consent Mode will now use conversion modeling to try to recover the attribution between ad click events and conversions measured in Google ads.

That's a very fancy way of saying they will guess. But they say those guesses are pretty good. In testing, they rebuilt more than 70% of ad click to conversion journeys lost due to user cookie consent choices. If you are a brand operating in the European Economic Area or the UK and have already implemented consent mode and are using Google Ads conversion tracking, conversion modeling from consent mode is available for you today. And if you aren't using consent mode yet, you can enable it on your website yourself

or get help from one of Google's consent management platforms partners. Something weird is happening at the e-commerce platform Shopify. A kind of exodus of senior executives. Like, really senior. C-suite people. Quoting from the Globe and Mail, The exodus of long-standing Shopify executives continued Wednesday as the CEO announced the chief talent officer, chief legal officer, and chief technology officer would all transition out of their current roles, which they have all held for at least

six years. The CEO said each of them has their individual reasons, but what was unanimous with all three was that this was the best for them and the best for Shopify, unquote. Best for Shopify? I don't know about that. But best for them? All three got huge gains from their options, and security filings show the trio cashed in tens of millions of dollars of them in the last year.

Everyone's trying to copy TikTok by dumping similar features into their existing apps, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels. But there are also a handful of standalone apps trying their best to carve out a little slice of the vertical world. Triller is probably the strongest competitor in that space right now, but some recent acquisitions may indicate they might be moving in a different direction, perhaps one focused on dominating specific content niches. The app's parent company has acquired Fight TV, a live and pay-per-view streaming platform focused on combat sports.

Earlier this week, it also bought up the AI platform Amplify and installed that firm's co-founder as its new CEO. Last month, it bought the live streaming platform Verzus, which started as a space for rap battles. A Triller rep says they've spent about a quarter billion dollars in acquisitions over the past 18 months. Oh, my thanks to UK user PTM Higgins, who reviewed this podcast saying, I listen while preparing breakfast and get a snackable update on what's happening in digital marketing each day. Love it. Thank you so much.

And if you too get value from this daily news podcast, please consider doing the same. You'll find a link in this episode's description that makes rating and reviewing us a simple one-click process. All right, that's it for today. Talk to you tomorrow. I can let it loose, or I can lock it down Just to get a kiss on the top of my All these instrumentals on a stocked pad Or I could lock it down Just to get a kiss on the top of that

All these instrumentals on a stocked and packed Got buttered and baked before I popped it out See I was laying low But it's rocking now