Today in Digital Marketing - Generation Scroll: How Teens Navigate the Social Seas

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected, be Zen. It is Tuesday, December 12th. Today, Instagram continues its retreat from public sharing. YouTube gets two big brand safety nods of approval. Google Analytics is rolling out its interest grouping API. And maybe your ad campaign featuring body bags might not have been the most well-timed? Just a thought. I'm Todd Maffin. That's Ahead, Today in Digital Marketing. Time to check in again on where young people spend their time with some new research from the Pew Research Center. They found 63% of American teens use TikTok, 60% use Snapchat, and 59% use Instagram. Facebook, which was once a favorite

Starting point is 00:01:09 among teens, saw a huge decline in usage. Only 33% of teenagers now report they use the platform. This is in stark contrast to 2015, when 71% of teens were active on Facebook. Other platforms like X and Be Real did not fare well with only 13% and 5% of teens reporting usage, respectively. When you break it down by gender and race, two-thirds of teen girls use Instagram compared to 53% of boys. Boys are more likely to use Discord and Twitch than girls are. And black teens are the most likely to use TikTok, followed by Hispanic and white teens. Some platforms saw major fluctuations in popularity, others remained relatively unchanged. Snapchat, for example, maintained its user base from 2022 to 2023, while Tumblr's influence continues to decline, with Pew Research no longer even asking teens about Tumblr.

Starting point is 00:02:08 The survey polled almost 1,500 American teenagers. Instagram is developing a new feature called Flipside that lets users create a private space with a select group of friends. This essentially gives users a built-in alternative to Finstas, the slang term for secondary Instagram accounts where people post their, shall we say, less curated content. The only screenshots we've seen of this flip side thing so far have been found through reverse engineering the code. Here's what we know about flip side so far. First, only friends that you choose will be able to see your Flipside

Starting point is 00:02:45 and the content you post there. You'll be able to create a unique profile picture, name, and bio for your Flipside, distinct from your regular public profile. And instead of managing a separate account, you can now just swipe down on your profile to access it. Instagram hasn't confirmed a launch date, but it certainly shows that Meta continues to see the writing on the wall that public sharing is out and private groups are in. On the marketing side of this, it's unlikely that additional flip side accounts will swell our reporting. Even if someone views your campaign from their main and their secondary accounts, Meta has been reporting people as the single entity which contains all those additional personas.

Starting point is 00:03:31 Ads placed around YouTube's Shorts videos have gained a little bit more brand safety. Both Integral Ad Science and Double Verify have expanded their measurement options to the Shorts inventory. Quoting socialmediatoday.com, quote, Shorts has been YouTube's fastest growing content format, increasing some 120% year over year and now

Starting point is 00:03:51 driving over 70 billion daily views. As such, advertisers are keen to get in on the action, with YouTube now offering a range of Shorts ads options, which also helps Shorts creators generate income from their creations. But ensuring optimal placement for Shorts ads Advertisers make smarter decisions about their shorts ad spend, unquote. All right, that'll bring us to the lightning round. Google Analytics 4 is adding enhanced conversions and they're moving up the rollout of the Protected Audiences API. You might know this as its former name, Fledge. This is the tech that came under criticism last year. And let's add tech platforms, see what interest groups a visiting web user is likely in. TikTok has become the first mobile app that's not a game to earn $10 billion of in-app

Starting point is 00:04:47 spending. To put that in perspective, the top app is a game, and so far, it has made $12 billion. Actually, it could be higher given that these numbers don't include the third-party Android app stores in China. The spending comes from people buying coins, which they can use to buy digital gift stickers for creators, among other things. X may be adding video to its Live Spaces feature. Platform owner Elon Musk says they'll have it up and running by the end of this year or early in next year. Musk does have a habit of announcing things only to abandon them later. So, you know, grain of salt, this one.

Starting point is 00:05:19 And starting today, Amazon users can say, Alexa, thank my driver into their app or smart speaker. And the driver who completed the customer's most recent delivery will be given $5 paid from Amazon's bank account, not the customer's. And finally, the fashion brand Zara has yanked an ad campaign after some people accused the company of exploiting the conflict in Israel and Gaza. The ad campaign showed a model standing in front of broken drywall with mannequin parts strewn around and wrapped in white sheets that, to be fair, did look a lot like body bags. The company says it shot the campaign in September, a month before the attacks in Israel. The British ad regulator said it had received more than 100 complaints about the ad campaign. The votes are in.

Starting point is 00:06:18 Yesterday I asked you whether or not you thought we should stick with this kind of rotating music at the end as opposed to just a boring theme song. The votes are in. The majority has ruled and said, that's right, you can't stop the music. It stays by a vote of about

Starting point is 00:06:33 three to one in total. It does mean I have to keep paying music licensing fees, which, you know, kind of sucks, but I suppose whatever. I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. See you tomorrow. It's rock and roll.

Today in Digital Marketing - Generation Scroll: How Teens Navigate the Social Seas

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