Today in Digital Marketing - From Stardom to Silence

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Thursday, August 31st. Today, they were all the rage. What happened to virtual influencers? The unholy union of Shopify and Amazon has arrived. What comes after the BeReal app? Why, the BeFake app, of course. And the fantastic news we've been waiting for about our associate producer, Steph Gunn.

Starting point is 00:00:24 I'm Todd Maffen. That's ahead today in digital marketing. It's the season for new styles and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal. Get the Rakuten app or join at rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dotN.ca. 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.

Starting point is 00:01:14 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. Well, I didn't have this on my bingo card. Amazon and Shopify, usually seen as direct competitors, announced this morning that Shopify merchants will now be able to offer Amazon integration on their Shopify store. Amazon's Buy With Prime feature lets people purchase items now from a Shopify store, even if those items are actually part of their Amazon inventory. Customers will check out either using Amazon Pay or Shopify's program. Because it's tied to Amazon's Prime program,

Starting point is 00:01:59 customers using that method will get free delivery on items. Amazon will handle returns through its own fulfillment network. The actual purchase will still be processed by Shopify payments, and merchants will be able to see all of their customers' info. This is also unexpected given that only a year ago, Shopify warned merchants to stop using Amazon's Buy With Prime because they said it was in violation of their Shopify terms of service.

Starting point is 00:02:28 Instead, they said, use our system, ShopPay. Merchants could still hack Amazon's tools into their store, but they had to do that outside the admin platform. Logistically, this will work through an app that you will add to your Shopify backend. For the time being, it will only work with American stores. As much as there are age-old truisms in marketing, so too are their fads. Things that come quickly in a flash of light and venture capital,

Starting point is 00:03:05 then disappear as fast as Twitter's brand equity. Is that what's happened to virtual influencers? You remember the stories back in the era when everyone was talking about the metaverse, 3D images of usually attractive young women posted on Instagram, claiming to do all the things Instagram models do, lie on a beach, buy Versace, and lie on a beach. But a think piece up today on Digiday.com suggests the virtual influencer trend appears to be dying down. Quote, virtual influencers were predicted to be an emerging area of influencer marketing. They offered brands more control over campaigns,

Starting point is 00:03:36 unlimited travel, and a seamless transition into the metaverse. But even as influencer marketing continues to mature and the AI boom persists, hype around these faux social media starlets has died down. Unquote. It's not the whole influencer scene that's down. Far from it. Content creators are still in high demand.

Starting point is 00:03:57 Digiday says 76% of agency professionals report their clients spent at least part of their media spend on influencers. Take the Hang4 creative agency. report their clients spent at least part of their media spend on influencers. Take the Hang4 creative agency. In 2020, they pitched about six or seven virtual influencer campaigns. This year, they've only done one, a promotion for a hip-hop artist, which generated a decent 1.3 million views on YouTube. Again, quoting Digiday's piece, the agency continues to pitch virtual influencers and immersive experiences, but clients and perhaps the industry at large is still apprehensive about those uses

Starting point is 00:04:31 of emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, the metaverse and web three. So if generated influencers are falling out of favor, that must be because of generative AI, right? Well, that certainly consumed some fascination for a while. But now it seems even generative AI is cooling off. SparkToro and Datos this week released a study they did showing that since May,

Starting point is 00:04:59 traffic to OpenAI.com, that's where ChatGPT lives, has dropped by almost 30%. The companies speculate this could be because people just kicking the tires have come, kicked the tires and left. They also think that students had been using a lot of it for their schoolwork, and then the summer came and they didn't need it anymore. Indeed, they found that nearly a quarter of prompts were related to education. That wasn't the biggest category, though. That went to programming-related prompts, which made up almost 30% of requests. Content creation was at about 20%. This is where most of the write-me-an-SEO-filled blog post about blank fell, though the study

Starting point is 00:05:37 authors also called out another popular subclass within that group, Dungeons & Dragons players needing riddles or quests generated for the game. Today's newsletter has a lot more details on the study, including a bunch of charts. In case you're curious, you can sign up by tapping Get Our Free Daily Newsletter at the top of today's show notes, or just go to todayindigital.com slash newsletter. The data came from an opt-in anonymized panel of 20 million devices covering more than 200 countries. Back in June, Reddit launched contextual keyword targeting, letting brands place ads alongside specified keywords as they appear across Reddit community discussions.

Starting point is 00:06:21 The company today shared some numbers on the new tools, claiming lower funnel objectives got a click-through rate lift of 29% and a 59% decrease in CPA. This morning, they announced keyword suggestions, basically providing more options for targetable words once you start by typing in a couple. For instance, type football, and their ad platform would suggest soccer and American football and others. The suggestions will be shown in the order of monthly views. Also, Reddit says it has now doubled the number of interests available for targeting. This update should be live now. 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 it's the season for new styles and you

Starting point is 00:07:27 love to shop for jackets and boots so when you do always make sure you get cash back from racketing and it's not just clothing and shoes you can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics holiday travel home decor and more it's easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at Rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal. Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N.C-A. When Meta's Twitter competitor Threads launched, it was pretty bare bones. You could post, read, and that was about it. There still aren't hashtags or a search or quote posts or even an API. But last week, they did add something people said they desperately wanted, a web UI, a way for desktop users to post and read content. So, it's there now.

Starting point is 00:08:24 How much did it help Thread's falling usage? Almost not at all. Quoting TechCrunch, In the U.S., Thread's website traffic jumped by 20% over the past week through Monday compared with the week prior, but it's not clear that this could be attributed to an influx of users rather than to switchers moving from the native mobile app to the web.

Starting point is 00:08:46 Worldwide, the traffic bump from the web app launch was only 3%. Unquote. SensorTower says Thread's daily active users are now only 18% of what it was at launch. That comes up to about 8 million daily users. Today, Meta announced it is testing search in Australia and New Zealand. It's also using Instagram to try to pull people over. Some people noticing this week a for you on threads carousel in Instagram with a button to open the threads app on your store. Again, quoting from TechCrunch's coverage of this, quote, for threads to work, it also has to court the

Starting point is 00:09:25 newsmakers and breakers to its platform, not just celebs you can already follow on Instagram. And so far, many of X's active users have either remained on the app or scattered elsewhere to networks like Blue Sky and Mastodon, or perhaps smaller rivals like T2, Spill, Post, and others. Completely leaving X has seemingly proven difficult for longtime users whose social connections remain on the platform. That means threads will have to do more than build the features users want in an X competitor.

Starting point is 00:09:55 It'll need to find a way to convince people to actually make the switch, then stick with it, unquote. Substack, the email newsletter platform, has been slowly building out its podcasting abilities, today announcing the ability to generate transcripts and audiograms. The transcript generates pretty fast. You can edit it and publish it in its own tab

Starting point is 00:10:19 on the episode post page. The audiogram lets you select some words and it'll generate a video with the transcript, words highlighted as they're spoken, and you can post that on social media. If you are a Substack user and you're looking for this in your dashboard, these tools only show up when you're in editing mode and have uploaded your audio. There's a toggle switch that makes the transcript appear alongside your episode if you want that. The audiogram you'll find after you have published your transcript. There should be a make audiogram button.

Starting point is 00:10:53 YouTube is expanding its monetization features to more accounts and introducing new analytics tools. Previously, YouTube had reduced the entry requirements for its partner program from 1,000 to 500 subscribers, granting more creators access to monetization features. Initially, this was limited to five countries, but as of earlier this week, it's available in 33 more. This new level offers accounts earlier access to features like Super Thanks, Super Chat, Super Stickers, and channel memberships. This is, of course, mostly a frontal attack on TikTok, which still lacks good monetization options, especially in countries outside of the US. But unlike the main

Starting point is 00:11:30 partner program, this new introductory level does not include ad revenue sharing by default. Creators must still meet higher engagement thresholds. YouTube is also upgrading some of its analytics, now letting channel managers analyze multiple videos at the same time in case you want to more easily compare video performance, and it is revamping its channel memberships offer screen. One of the breakout social apps that came around in the last year or two was BeReal. The idea was that it would take a photo from the front and back camera at a time

Starting point is 00:12:05 of the app's choosing, and there were no filters for you to, you know, touch things up. The app is still around, though it hasn't grabbed the attention of many users. It certainly hasn't grabbed the attention of marketers. So maybe this new app will. It's called, and I'm not kidding here, Be Fake. This works just like be real. You'll get prompted to take a front and back image, but then it will filter the living hell out of you using generative AI. If, by the way, you want to post outside of the 20 minute window when the app demands you take the photo, you'll need to spend credits. You get a handful when the app starts. But after that, you've got to pay with real money.

Starting point is 00:12:49 The whole thing actually isn't a bad idea when you consider that many other standalone apps offer AI self-portraits, or some, like Snapchat, are building this tech into their products. You know who else seems to like it? Investors, the company behind the app already raising more than $3 million in seed funding. The app is also a kind of lightweight social network. It has a friends feed, a top picks feed, and a discovery feed. Well, as you might know, if you have been around here for a while, our associate producer, the intrepid Steph Gunn, has been absent for a couple of weeks and will be absent for another year or more because she is having a while. Our associate producer, the intrepid Steph Gunn, has been absent for a couple of weeks and will be absent for another year or more because

Starting point is 00:13:27 she is having a baby. She has now had that baby. Mom and daughter are doing just fine. Her name is Pearl. There is a photo of her in our Slack community if you want to see what a perfect baby looks like. Congratulations, Steph and the husband. Thanks for listening. I'll see you

Starting point is 00:13:43 tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - From Stardom to Silence

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