Today in Digital Marketing - First, We Kill All the Chatbots.

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Tuesday, May 30th. Today, a change to Meta's offline conversions API isn't as scary as they make it sound. Ten straight months of ad spend declines, but is an end in sight? Also good news for marketers who use WhatsApp, new insights for Microsoft's AdPixel, and important Google data is now nearly three days behind. I'm Todd Mathen. That's ahead today in digital marketing. One of the first things I did when ChatGPT came out was, and you did it too, so shut up, was to ask it who I was. Who is Todd Maffin?

Starting point is 00:00:38 I got most of it right. Been in the digital marketing space for almost 25 years. Used to be a national radio host and producer. But then it started going off the rails. Been in the digital marketing space for almost 25 years. Used to be a national radio host and producer. But then it started going off the rails. Todd Maffin is an internationally recognized wine sommelier, it said, which is not true. And in fact, it's kind of funny considering that I'm in recovery and spent months in residential treatment 15 years ago, mostly for a wine addiction? I think we all know by now that chat GPT just straight up lies sometimes.

Starting point is 00:01:10 They're hallucinations. That's why while it might be a great tool for brainstorming or coming up with different copy variations, it's not something you'd want to trust for things like brand monitoring or market research. Or would you? An interesting think piece up today on Insider Intelligence asks, maybe we should. Quoting the piece, when it comes to assessing brand strength, these so-called hallucinations can be a tool for evaluating what brand associations really are. And those same hallucinations can be fed back into chatPT to generate customer profiles, marketing copy, and even new products.

Starting point is 00:01:47 For example, marketers can get AI to hallucinate any brand as a Dungeons and Dragons character sheet, determining its strengths, weaknesses, and core features. What might seem like a silly experiment can help advertisers in tangible ways, unquote. One interesting example cited was when a researcher asked ChatGPT to rewrite the Gettysburg Address in Coca-Cola's voice. The piece also suggests that these hallucinations might have a role in product generation with a prompt like this, quote,

Starting point is 00:02:21 imagine that you are a product ideas generator machine that contains three sliders that go from zero to 10, Quote, zero being the least cool for a given slide or setting i want you to describe a product that meets these attributes chat gpt could then churn out products descriptions and messaging for consumers of various ages genders and hipness levels unquote or they might just tell you you should change your business to become a wine sommelier brand well it's usually meta monday on mondays. Of course, this is the second Monday in a row where we had it off because of a holiday. So it is Meta Tuesday. Usually Andrew Foxwell joins me. However, Andrew is on holidays. And so in his stead, Shane Cicero, who is the VP

Starting point is 00:03:18 of operations for Foxwell Digital, is with me. Hello, Shane. Hi, how are you doing? I'm good. So I'm hoping you can help me because I must have misread this. I saw an announcement from Meta last week that said the offline conversions API, and that's the backend pipeline that takes data from a retailer's pointed system, pointed sales system,

Starting point is 00:03:39 and puts it into their backend. The offline conversions API will no longer support offline events. What is happening? Isn't that the whole point of an offline conversions API? What am I missing? Yeah, you're 100% accurate that, yes, that's what the offline conversion API is supposed to be doing.

Starting point is 00:03:59 What I think we're seeing here is, like I just previously said, consolidation, right? So I think what Meta is doing here is they have full capability with the conversion API in and of itself. And so they're not seeing the value of having a separate API for the offline events. So they're merging that into the conversion API as we go forward. I think what if we're reading between the lines here as well is that, you know, post iOS 14, you know, one of the kind of hacks out there was to kind of use the offline conversion API to kind of bring your website conversions in back into the platform. And while it didn't help optimize campaigns, it was at least helping advertisers for a period of time, be able to see what ad sets and campaigns were actually

Starting point is 00:04:53 converting, because it was bringing that website data over that technically goes against, you know, these guidelines that have, you know, privacy and whatnot that Apple implemented here with the iOS opt out. So I think if we're reading between the lines here, the conversion API and merging offline conversions API into that is going to probably break that down. So you can no longer do that. And to be fair, this doesn't really affect most marketers directly. Is that right? Like, I would think that the API for the majority of small and medium sized businesses, they're accessing this API indirectly through a third party tool. Am I right there? Or does it being a very direct impact. I think where it is going to be an impact is if somebody has been kind of using it in the way I just previously mentioned, or it could certainly affect or at least have some additional work to be updated and reconnected for those who maybe are a local retailer and know and understand that, you know, meta ads are actually driving foot traffic and they're using that offline conversion to actually attribute that information. This is where we say goodbye to those of you on the free podcast. But for those of you on the premium feed, our chat continues. Let's start with the bad news. The ad market's yearlong

Starting point is 00:06:24 declined of spend is still happening. March was the ninth straight month that ad spending was down, falling 8.4% according to numbers by Tenuity. But in April, the year-over-year decline was only 1.4%, a much better number. Still down, but, you know, better. In fact, April's decline was the smallest since last September. Some analysts think this might forecast numbers going back into the black soon, but, you know, better. In fact, April's decline was the smallest since last September. Some

Starting point is 00:06:45 analysts think this might forecast numbers going back into the black soon, especially as we get closer to the summer season. Quoting Insider Intelligence, context is everything. Since the second half of 2022, ad spend has contracted considerably as the pandemic boom cooled. Social media companies posted significantly lower ad revenues, long-time advertisers slashed marketing teams and budgets, and interest rates forced companies to hold their wallets close. The end of third-party cookies, privacy crackdowns, and TikTok's controversies all pose additional challenges that advertisers are struggling to handle. One of the most irritating parts of using WhatsApp as a digital marketer is that when you first booted up the app, it insisted on you logging in with a

Starting point is 00:07:33 phone number. That's fine if you're just a single person using the app, but if you're a brand or an agency, you might not want to assign your specific phone number to a brand account. Instead, you'd use a username, but that hasn't been possible until now. The username feature in WhatsApp has been spotted in a beta release and will let you select one for your account. This is, of course, great news for brands and agencies and will make logging in and managing a company account much simpler without playing the whose phone number did we use for this again game? Also, eagle-eyed beta testers spotted a new screen sharing ability,

Starting point is 00:08:10 which will let you broadcast whatever's on your phone's screen to people in a WhatsApp call. They also appear to be working on a status archive setting that will let you archive your statuses after 24 hours and then reshare them later if you want. So far, that appears to only be working

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Starting point is 00:08:50 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Some nice new data coming soon from Microsoft's ad platform. Starting July 3rd, they'll be launching UET Insights. That's essentially deeper analytics on your existing UET tags. These tags, sometimes we call these pixels, ride along with a user session and help with things like conversion tracking, remarketing, and automated bidding strategies. Among the new data points to expect, a session breakdown by country and device, quick backs, those are customers who stay on your website for just a few seconds, and time spent on your website. You don't need to do any coding for this. Microsoft says existing tags will automatically be updated on the back end, and all new tags created in the future will be automatically enabled with UET Insights.

Starting point is 00:09:37 Also, nice little touch, they say the data dashboard should show you insights in near real time, and it's all actual data, no sampling or modeling. Now, if for some reason you'd rather not have this automatic upgrade, you can opt out on their website. You'll need to provide either the UET tag IDs for each specific tag you would like to opt out, or the manager account ID if you want to opt out of all UET tags within that manager account.

Starting point is 00:10:09 Something is up with the Google Search Console performance report. SE Roundtable reports the data is delayed by more than 60 hours. This is an important report for many marketers who have responsibility for SEO. Sure, there are third-party tools that can get you part of the way there, but it's usually better going right to the source. No word if what's actually delayed is the source data itself, which would affect third-party tools also, or if it's just the generation of the report from live data. Sometimes when these things happen, it's deliberate, and the platform later announces they've slowed things down for one reason or another. That is not the case here.

Starting point is 00:10:46 This is a bug and Google is aware of it. You'll know if you're affected by going to the search performance report and you see a long time period after the last updated line. Barry Schwartz from SE Roundtable says this has happened many, many times before and that the search console always does catch up in the end. And finally, earlier we mentioned the amusing hallucinations that generative text AI has been doing. We're certainly not the first to cover it. Hell, it's been one of the most commonly reported stories of the new technology. But maybe Stephen Schwartz of the law firm Levadau, Levadau and Oberman didn't see any of those stories. He was working for a client suing an airline.

Starting point is 00:11:31 Allegedly, a metal serving card hit the guy and it caused an injury or something. The airline asked the judge to toss out the case. But Mr. Schwartz fired back last week with a 10-page brief that cited more than a half dozen relevant presidents. There was Martinez versus Delta Airlines, Zickerman versus Korea Airlines, and, of course, I probably don't even need to remind you about this one, the infamous Varghese versus China Southern Airlines. It was an impressive document. You know where this is going, right? Yes, it turns out none of these cases actually existed. Mr. Schwartz, who by the way has practiced law for more than three decades, used ChatGPT to write part of the document,

Starting point is 00:12:14 and ChatGPT did what ChatGPT does, make shit up. Quoting the New York Times, Schwartz threw himself on the mercy of the court Thursday, saying in an affidavit that he'd used the artificial intelligence program to do his legal research quote a source that has revealed itself to be unreliable unquote he said that he had never used chat gpt and therefore was unaware of the possibility that its content could be false he had he told judge, even asked the program to verify that the cases were real. It had said yes, unquote.

Starting point is 00:12:51 The judge has ordered a hearing for June 8th to discuss potential sanctions. Dear friend, I need to rant for a little bit. And the rant is about televisions. You know, we used to have good things with televisions like, oh, I don't know, speakers. You notice this in the last, God, like 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, maybe even. There are no speakers anymore at the front of TVs. I mean, I guess they want it to look nice. They want it to be a big screen.

Starting point is 00:13:27 So instead of putting speakers there in the front, they put them at the back. I guess the idea being that it will just bounce off the back of the wall and then come forward. The problem with that theory, of course, is that there's a giant TV in the way, so the sound waves don't get there. But the industry has a solution, friends.

Starting point is 00:13:47 And it's to buy more things. In particular, a sound bar. Which I finally did. Because we had an old Onkyo amplifier that was like 20 years old. And it was down to one speaker. And the subwoofer was crappy. And my wife hated it. Mostly because there were wires everywhere.

Starting point is 00:14:03 It didn't do Bluetooth. It didn't do anything. So I bought yesterday a new sound bar. I hated it mostly because there were wires everywhere. It didn't do Bluetooth. It didn't do anything. So I bought yesterday a new soundbar. It's beautiful. It does AirPlay, Bluetooth. It sounds fantastic. The only problem is it was like $1,200.

Starting point is 00:14:21 But it's worth it. And it's going to go on the TV that my wife uses to play Xbox. Because honestly, the sound quality that was before was just offensive. And she plays these big games. Dragon Age Inquisition and Skyrim. If you're a gamer, you'll know these are epic games with music and battles. And it should sound glorious. But it's always sound terrible. So I got it all hooked up yesterday.

Starting point is 00:14:44 She went to play the game. I was so excited. And she spent two hours on the inventory management screen of Dragon Age Inquisition, which has no music whatsoever. In fact, no sound at all whatsoever. Now, it's an important part of the game,

Starting point is 00:15:02 inventory management. Don't get me wrong. It's not like she was stuck there. But, yeah, I was a little disappointed, let's say. Don't forget the premium version of this podcast. You can learn more about it by tapping the link in the show notes or going to todayindigital.com slash premium. See you tomorrow.

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Today in Digital Marketing - First, We Kill All the Chatbots.

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