Today in Digital Marketing - "Genetic Predisposition" — The Next Facebook Targeting Option?

Episode Date: January 29, 2022

The next challenge for ecommerce sellers? A wave of returns. Plus: Will you soon be able to use "genetic predisposition" as ad targeting criteria? Wordpress takes a big leap forward. One of the world's biggest advertisers finds that spending more does indeed make them more. A bug at Google could be causing your search position to drop...Go Premium! No ads, more stories, and extended deep-dive weekend episodes — https://todayindigital.com/premiumADVERTISING as low as $20: https://todayindigital.com/ads JOIN OUR SLACK! https://todayindigital.com/slackFOLLOW US: https://todayindigital.com/socialmedia (TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit) ENJOYING THE SHOW?- Please tweet about us! https://b.link/pod-tweet- Rate and review us: https://todayindigital.com/rateus- Leave a voicemail: https://b.link/pod-voicemail FOLLOW TOD:- TikTok: https://b.link/pod-tiktok- Twitter: https://b.link/pod-twitter- LinkedIn: https://b.link/pod-linkedin Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin (https://b.link/pod-todsite) and produced by engageQ digital (https://b.link/pod-engageq). Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Does your brand need a podcast? Let us help: https://engageQ.com/podcastsOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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. Today, the next challenge for e-commerce sellers, Be protected. Be Zen. biggest advertisers finds that spending more on digital does indeed make them more. A bug at Google could be causing your search position to drop. And on the premium podcast with more stories, no ads and exclusive deep dive weekend episodes, tap the link in the show notes. How one big digital agency is keeping its people amidst the great resignation. And it's more than just raises.

It's Friday, January 28th, 2022. Happy Data Privacy Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 550. Looking for a place for your ad dollars? Check this out. Nearly $590 million was spent on podcast advertising last year. New research indicates that podcasts are booming, making them a worthy addition to your marketing strategy. It's estimated that more than a third of Americans listen to podcasts regularly now. In 2021, podcast ad spending increased by over 20%. Q4 ad spend was $160 million.

Again, that's just in Q4. Brands among the top 10 highest spending podcast advertisers are Amazon, Capital One, Comcast, and State Farms. When buying ads, you might be interested in what your competitors are doing. The most common ad placement is 30 seconds in length, which is a bit of a surprise since a lot of the ads that I hear, and certainly the ones we run here, are 60 seconds. But that was when they asked consumers what they thought the best format was, not necessarily advertiser reaction. Since they're less likely to be skipped, most ads are placed at the beginning or the middle of the podcast. 26% of ads are pre-roll, 55% are mid-roll, 19% are post-roll. With 79% of advertisers from 2020

continuing to buy in 2021, the study done by MediaRadar says that podcast advertising may prove effective for brands this year. In 2018, Spotify had an interesting marketing campaign. It offered its users the ability to upload their genetic data, which Spotify would then turn into custom playlists that matched their genetic ancestry. A few months later, Mexico's national air carrier Aeromexico launched a DNA discounts campaign, offering discounted flights to the country. The more Mexican you were, genetically speaking, the more of a discount you'd get. Welcome to the new world of genetics

marketing, one where we might soon see genetic predisposition listed in Facebook's ads manager as a targeting criteria. Earlier today, I spoke with Remy Davia. He's an assistant professor of marketing at the Wisconsin School of Business. He and his colleagues recently published an academic paper called Genetic Data, Potential Uses and Misuses in Marketing. And I asked him how good this technology is actually getting. For instance, could a coffee shop use genetic data to target consumers who have a genetic potential to like espresso? Coffee shop is a specific case because there is a very specific genetic variation that changes your sensitivity to bitterness. So for coffee, we might have better actually predictive abilities and other traits that rely on thousands of variations.

But for most behavior, DNA by itself is not predictive enough to do individualized targeting. It could be good for populations, but not for individuals. But when we ran other studies where we added demographic data or behavioral data, we found that a prediction that could be already good based on demographics and past behavior will be even better at adding genetics. So once you combine all these data sets, that's when you have a really good targeting accuracy. In the full interview, we covered how the ad platforms might integrate this data, how genetic marketing might change the science of consumer research, whether the tech is good enough right now to identify family members who might also be interested in a product,

and a lot more. That interview is coming exclusively to the premium feed in a couple of weeks. Also coming in the next few weeks, the effect of brand-to-brand praise, and the result of a study which answered the question, does selling your product on Amazon, as well as on your own online store, help your overall sales, or cannibalize them? The premium feed with exclusive weekend editions like those, no ads in the Daily Show, and more stories. Check it out at todayindigital.com slash premium feed or tap the link in the show notes.

You know, it was creepy when Google first showed it off, an automated assistant that could call companies for you, like a hairstylist, and book you an appointment. This is from their demo a couple of years ago, and to set this up, the person who is calling is not a real person. It's Google's AI. But the salon receptionist you'll hear is real. By the way, it's a little echoey because this is audio from when they first presented it at one of their Google I.O. conferences.

Hello, how can I help you? Hi, I'm calling to book a woman's haircut for a client. audio from when they first presented it at one of their Google I.O.m. We do not have a 12 p.m. available. The closest we have to that is a 1.15. Do you have anything between 10 a.m. and 12 p.m.? Depending on what service she would like. What service is she looking for? Just a woman's haircut for now. Okay, we have a 10 o'clock. 10 a.m. is fine.

Okay, what's her first name? The first name is Lisa. Okay, perfect. So I will see Lisa at 10 o'clock on May 3rd. Okay, great. Thanks. Great. Have a great day.

Bye. Oh, yes. The nerds at the conference loved it. Companies show this stuff off all the time. And a lot of them, particularly in Google's case, never actually make it out into the real world. Anyone remember the revolutionary real-time messaging product called Google Wave? Did that ever make it out? But this Google Assistant? It's real.

And today, I saw the first reports of people actually starting to receive these calls. So how do you train your staff to respond when a robot comes calling? People in the field suggest that you get in the habit of only having one thought per sentence so that it can understand you better, obviously speak clearly, maybe a touch slowly, and whatever you do, do not call her Alexa. Now that the holiday season is well behind us, a new report indicates that retailers expect consumers

to return more than $760 billion in merchandise from last year's holiday season. That is more than 16% of total U.S. retail sales. That's up 11% from 2020. And it's especially bad for e-commerce retailers. Online orders have a higher return rate and are a major driver of returns. About $218 billion of the $1 trillion spent last year

was returned by online shoppers. Yes, doing the math, that's 21%. $23 billion of that was just straight-up fraudulent. Retailers lost about $10 on every $100 in merchandise that was returned to them due to return fraud. That's up from $8.80 in 2019. Among the categories with the highest return rates, clothing, 12%, and home improvement and home goods both 11.5%.

The analysis provided by the National Retail Federation and Aprys Retail. Many brands use WordPress as their website platform and version 5.9, codenamed Josephine, is now available. This is actually a big update since it finally includes full site editing. This is something only themes like Divi or Genesis or Elementor offered. 5.9 also includes an improved list view, improved block controls, and some other enhancements. The major updates include a new default theme for building block-based websites as per their previous themes. This one is named after the year, 2022. 10 new blocks now exist for site editing,

including next post, previous post, post comments, and so on. And the ability to save theme changes for specific templates or globally across your entire site. If your web hosting platform doesn't update your WordPress install automatically, be sure to back your site up and go update to 5.9. 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. Three months after promising to increase its digital media investment, Procter & Gamble has reported a significant improvement in the effectiveness of its marketing spend. According to P&G's financial results for the second quarter of its fiscal year, it increased marketing spend by 50 basis points from the same period in 2020. Now, overall marketing expense as a percentage of sales decreased by

80 basis points, suggesting that marketing spend is what's driving sales here. The company CFO notes that the improvement was driven by sales leverage and savings in, quote, non-working marketing costs, unquote. The company did not disclose specifically which channels they invested in. Turning to market numbers overall, apparently consumers are not put off by price increases despite inflation taking a toll on the household budgets. Nine out of 10 product categories grew their share over the past three, six, and 12-month periods in the US. A combination of Omicron, inflation,

and supply chain issues are all driving up operational costs and impacting overall marketing budget growth. But one category looking good, market research, apparently, is now on the rise. A new report says 6% of companies increased their marketing budgets in the fourth quarter of 2021. Growth was almost double at 13% before economic pressures slowed it down. However, businesses have increased their investments in market research. The net balance increased from 0.7% in the third quarter of 2021 to 7.0% in the fourth. The data comes from the IPA Bellwether report. All right, a couple of small social media platform updates to tell you about before the weekend shows up.

First, this one likely won't have much of an impact on you, but Facebook is removing profile videos as of February the 7th. This was one of those things where you could, as a personal profile, either update an image of yourself or a short video of yourself. I think I had one where I was like making weird faces or something like that. It was only available at the profile level, never at the brand page level. So it doesn't really impact us. Why are they doing it? Well, it turns out no one was really using it. Last year, the platform stopped letting users insert videos into their profile pictures,

but for some reason kept the functionality around. So now it's removing that functionality entirely. Anyone that has a profile video will receive a notification to switch it to an image. As for the second update, Pinterest is testing a new highlights element for Idea Pins. Idea Pins, of course, their version of TikTok videos. This will allow creators to showcase their most popular pins at the top of their profile. Currently, Idea Pins are displayed in published order on your profile page under the created tab. The new highlights feature will appear above the existing content tabs and below your bio with up to six highlights per profile.

This is a good spot to feature your best idea pins to generate more engagement. If it sounds familiar, all the platforms are doing this. TikTok started it. You can pin three of your most popular videos or three of any videos, I suppose, really, to your profile. This feature on Pinterest is in the process of being rolled out to all users. Attention, Google advertisers, if you see a drop in clicks and impressions for images on your website in your performance report, don't panic. The company has confirmed there was a logging issue with search data for images, which may have resulted in a drop. This, by the way, is just a reporting issue.

It doesn't have any impact on your rankings or your Google search traffic. The issue started on January 24th and is still ongoing as the company works on resolving the issue. And finally, you may have heard earlier this week that Spotify agreed to pull Neil Young's music from their catalog after the musician said Spotify exclusive podcaster Joe Rogan had been spouting dangerous COVID misinformation. Enter Apple. Stage left. Yes, Apple. They compete with Spotify with their Apple Music subscription plans. And yesterday, well, they started trolling Spotify, sending out tweets about how they have Neil Young's music.

They made a bunch of Neil Young playlists. They created an entirely new section in their app called We Love Neil. They even doubled down on the troll by actually sending out a push notification, encouraging people to listen. Quoting The Verge, it's all a bit of theatrical silliness, of course. Neil Young is a legendary songwriter, yes, but his presence or absence won't decide the fate of this or that streaming platform. He's no Kanye or Taylor Swift. Instead, Apple is simply indulging in the time-honored corporate tradition of inserting itself into a relevant news cycle while the going is good. Spotify has actually been losing a little market share against rivals.

Recent data from analysis agency Media Research showed that while Spotify was the most popular music streaming service by a wide margin in 2021, with 31% of the market compared to second place Apple Music's 15%, that figure, 31%, had actually dipped from a 33% market share in 2020. Looking for player two. Giving my last quarter to you. I hope you like my character. It shows me. Got the high score, but never play with a trophy. Well, I am back to Overwatch again because I hate myself, apparently. I've come to realize that I'm actually a low gold player. That's bad, by the way. Occasionally, I get myself up to platinum and I think I'm all that.

But then I realize I've just spent a night pocketing a Smurf bastion, which I have no ethical problem with. Unless that Smurf is on the other team, then of course I report them. Had eight losses in a row last night before I finally turned the Xbox off. What is the definition of insanity again? By the way, if you play Overwatch

and you're on Xbox, add me. My gamertag is Radio9573. I'm a support main. I have 1,000 hours on Mercy, 1,800 damage amp per can. I have 10k heals on Moira and Lucio too. And yes, I recognize probably exactly two of you understood any of that.

Don't forget, if you enjoyed the podcast, you can get even more of it. More stories in each episode, weekend editions, no ads, and best of all, no whining about my video games. Tomorrow, we are diving into the practice of brand-to-brand praise. That's when you shout out your competitor on social media. Is it good for your brand? Harmful?

I'll be speaking with the author of a scientific study on the topic. You will only hear it if you're subscribed to the Premium Feed. Tap the link in the show notes or go to todayindigital.com slash premium feed. And yes, you will get access to all the back episodes as well. If you'd like to comment on what you hear, have me read your tweet out. Just include the hashtag TIDM in your tweet or leave a voicemail at todayindigital.com slash voicemail or by tapping the link in the show notes. Today in Digital Marketing is produced by Engage Q Digital on the traditional territories of the Tsunamic First Nation on Vancouver Island. Scripting and promotional support by Steph Gunn. Podcast music licensing by Source Audio.

And our theme composer, Mark Blevis, hears the drums echoing tonight. Thank you.