Today in Digital Marketing - Go Home, Chatbot. You're Drunk.

Starting point is 00:00:01 It is Friday, February 16th. Today, your chatbot could land you in court. TikTok is playing hardball, Snapchat's new measurement announcement, a nice Google update for salespeople, and the five colors Pinterest says you should not sleep on. I'm Todd Mathen. That's ahead today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:23 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 dot C-A. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit?

Starting point is 00:01:07 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.

Starting point is 00:01:23 Air Canada has been ordered by a tribunal to compensate a man because it's chatbot. Be protected. Be Zen. death of an immediate family member. The site popped up a chat bot, and this fellow asked the bot how the process worked. And the bot told him he could get a partial fare refund retroactively as long as he filed it within three months of the ticket being issued. So he did exactly that, along with a copy of the conversation he had with the chat bot, and for good measure, a copy of his grandmother's death certificate. And Air Canada, not exactly known in this country as having the best customer service, refused his request. It dragged on for months with Air Canada saying the chatbot had used, quote, misleading words, unquote, but said it couldn't possibly be held liable for what the bot said.

Starting point is 00:02:25 Well, quoting the tribunal, quote, in effect, Air Canada suggests the chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions. This is a remarkable submission. While a chatbot has an interactive component, it is still just a part of Air Canada's website.

Starting point is 00:02:41 It should be obvious to Air Canada that it is responsible for all the information on its website. It makes no difference whether the information comes from a static page or a chatbot, unquote. Air Canada was ordered to pay what its chatbot had promised

Starting point is 00:02:56 with interest and fees. And here's where it could start to get worse for our industry. Chatbots have been around forever, the simple ones anyway. You click from a set list of questions or prompts and it spits out a programmed answer. The only issue of accuracy comes from perhaps that information becoming out of date. But now, these chatbot providers are branching out into AI.

Starting point is 00:03:20 And why wouldn't they? We've seen the industry trend move toward offering AI as a paid add-on, not just a simple free upgrade to keep pace with the times. AI, as I'm sure you know, is well known for making things up. Hallucinating is the actual term the industry uses. So whose brand will be the first to answer with a completely fictionalized response? Not out of date, but perhaps even the literal opposite of what the answer should be. Tread carefully.

Starting point is 00:03:54 An interesting piece in Business Insider today talks about the heavy-handed and aggressive nature of TikTok's growth strategy, from pushing its shop maybe a little too hard to picking a fight with a giant music label and by all accounts losing. Quoting from the piece, quote, TikTok's ability to survive the next phase of the social media wars could be threatened if it destroys its goodwill with music partners, creators and users. Short video feeds from competitors can easily service users and advertisers, taking its access to music for granted or force-feeding shopping content onto users at the expense of creator videos could spell the end of TikTok's winning streak. But TikTok's greatest risk, as it barrels forward

Starting point is 00:04:36 on business strategies like e-commerce, is pissing off its users. If TikTok no longer offers a stream of fun, serendipitous videos and instead becomes a social media version of the home shopping network, users may jump ship for Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, or Snapchat Spotlight. how it would serve up content perfectly tailored to me. Now, it feels like the algorithm is less a diagnostic tool of my soul and is instead assessing me as a potential consumer, unquote. It is a long read, definitely worth it if you are looking for something this weekend to get into. We have a link to it in today's email newsletter, of course, which is free to subscribe to. You can tap the link at the top of the show notes or go to Business Insider. Look for the piece called TikTok's Aggressive Growth Tactics Are Upsetting Partners, Creators and Everyday Users. Snapchat has a new partnership with digital measurement platform FOSFA, with the company providing third party verification of your Snapchat campaign

Starting point is 00:05:43 results. Quoting from Snapchat, quote, the partnership will help marketers measure the impact and effectiveness of their Snapchat campaigns with an emphasis on cross-platform ROAS. Plastel leverages a combination of multi-touch attribution and media mix modeling to model for the impact of clicks and impressions throughout the full marketing funnel, unquote. As Social Media Today noted in its coverage of this, this will help marketers transition from cookie tracking and into more privacy-aligned data. This brings Snapchat's partner listing

Starting point is 00:06:13 to more than 70 outside providers who have hooks into the platform to help advertisers run more complicated or better-tracked campaigns. We don't usually report on changes to office software, but this one is really a nice touch if you do sales presentations using Google Meet. Starting today, they are adding a way for you to put a live video of your camera into your presentation slides.

Starting point is 00:06:41 This is something that other smaller providers like Loom have done for a while. You've also been sort of able to hack something together using other tools to do this within Google Slides, but it's always been a bit messy. With this new update, which Google calls Speaker Spotlight, you can insert a variety of camera cutout shapes directly into their slides and then format them to your liking. Once in slideshow mode, your camera feed will appear in that shape. It also integrates with Meet and Slides recordings. To add the spotlight shape into slides, go to Insert and then Speaker Spotlight or click the new Spotlight button in the toolbar. This has started to roll out today and could take up to two weeks to get to all accounts. Thanks for watching. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit?

Starting point is 00:08:08 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. Imagine not having to wait on hold ever again when you call customer service. Google is testing a feature that could make this dream a reality.

Starting point is 00:08:35 It currently has the slightly unwieldy name of Talk to a Live Representative. It is designed to handle the process of contacting businesses for you. It navigates through their phone menus. It waits on hold. It only connects you when a real person is ready to talk. This is being tested right now on both iOS and Android devices.

Starting point is 00:08:54 While Google Pixel phones have a similar feature called Hold For Me, users still need to dial and navigate through the company's phone system. This new system would do it all. But right now, it's limited to certain businesses, major airlines like Delta and United, phone providers like Sprint and Samsung, retail giants like Walmart and Best Buy,

Starting point is 00:09:15 and some shipping services including FedEx and UPS. If you are in the test group and want to try it out, you can opt in through Google's Search Labs at labs.google.com slash search. Gummy pink, desert orange, aqua blue, moss green, and mocha brown. Those are your marching orders, designers. At least Pinterest's suggestion, anyway.

Starting point is 00:09:42 The platform today releasing its annual Pinterest Palette Color Trends Report, which is a collection of the most used colors from pins on its platform over the last year. Quoting from their report, Our internal creative team distilled the search terms specifically related to color. Blue jellyfish, blue chrome nails, aqua makeup looks, and so on. We then pulled out the most persistent hues from the trending keywords. The team also did a deep dive into the cultural zeitgeist, digging into the worlds of fashion, interior design, graphic design, and the culture at large to compare Pinterest's data

Starting point is 00:10:17 to the more macro industry color trends, unquote. Their full report has a fairly detailed chart for each of these five colors with different variations, hex codes, CMYK codes, RGB codes, and so on. We have a link to their full report in today's email newsletter. Again, tap the link at the top of the show notes or go to todayindigital.com slash newsletter. A handful of you have messaged and emailed asking where the music went. As you might know, we often used to have different types of music in here at the end. The simple answer is we have temporarily cut it for workflow and time issues. We onboarded a new client here at the agency and it is taking up a bit more time than we expected.

Starting point is 00:10:59 So, and I'll be honest, I spent sometimes more time on the mix of that closing song than on the entire episode. So not a wise use of an executive's time for sure. So at least for the time being, we have we have dropped that music. We're just using the theme as you can hear. And that will do it for the week. Today in digital marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Snunamic First Nation on Vancouver Island. Our production coordinator is Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Blevis.

Starting point is 00:11:28 Ad coordination by Red Circle. Monday is a stat holiday in Canada, so have a restful weekend. I will see you on Tuesday.

Today in Digital Marketing - Go Home, Chatbot. You're Drunk.

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