Today in Digital Marketing - Going Undercover: The Secret Life of a Google Ad Rep

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Monday, July 24th. Today, high workload, low pay. The real story behind Google's outsourced ad reps. Also, whatever brand equity was left in Twitter has been X'd out, and TikTok wants into space now. Your brand's business profile gets automated fax, and you'll never guess what an NFT of the world's first tweet sells for now. Spoiler alert, almost nothing. I'm Todd Maffin. That's Ahead, Today Digital Marketing. We've all gotten the email, hi, it's your Google ad rep,

Starting point is 00:00:34 and I saw some things in your account I think you can improve. We should get on a call and I can help. You only have to be on one of these calls to realize they're not consultants, they're salespeople. And their advice will probably be less about your specific account and more about just having you spend more or blindly accept the platform's AI-based recommendations. It's not just Google, of course. DTC marketer Barry Haught posted this last week on LinkedIn, quote, I took another call from a meta marketing pro, and it was completely useless for me again.

Starting point is 00:01:06 I asked if he could tell me about the new one-day engaged view option in compare attribution settings, and he had no clue what I was talking about, unquote. Some questions those reps won't answer are things like, how many other accounts are you managing? Where are you located? Are you paid an incentive if I increase my spend? Well, now we know some of those answers. At least those for reps hired by one company Google subcontracts this work to,

Starting point is 00:01:32 Teleperformance. The very name sounds like a sales call center from the 80s. Freelance Google ad consultant Boris Beterek also wondered about this, so he decided to apply for a job there. Not for the job, but for the information. And last week he told me they were pretty uninterested in his experience with, you know, ad campaigns. Most of the questions were around prior sales experience. If I had ever worked in an environment, I had to make outbound sales calls.

Starting point is 00:02:02 And you got an offer? I have the offer in front of me and it says annual gross salary, 24,310 euros. Just for comparison, that's a little over $27,000 US a year, which is just over $13 an hour. That is below the minimum wage in some US states like New York and New Jersey. And in case you've had one of these calls, they might have felt a little rushed, or at the very least, only surface deep, like they didn't really look at your account. Turns out, there's a reason for that. I confirmed with the team lead who interviewed me. He said I would start with 330 accounts. 330? Yeah, that's a lot of accounts, isn't it? Oh my God, yes. And you also have to implement with 35 to 40%. So push the recommendations of the day. So that's autoply recommendation and

Starting point is 00:02:55 check all the boxes, make things easier, remove redundant keywords, use bidding strategy, stuff like that. That's the day-to-day job of a teleperformance Google Ads rep. There's no time to look at the account. There's no time to get to know the client. There's no time for any of that. There's only for comment about the workload and wages, and they provided this statement, quote, Google partners with companies like Teleperformance to provide certain advertising account services. These companies are solely responsible

Starting point is 00:03:34 for determining the employment conditions for their workers and must comply with our global supplier code of conduct, which outlines requirements related to wages, fair treatment, and more, unquote. We reviewed that code of conduct. It doesn't actually reference low wages or workload, so we asked for clarification last Friday and did not hear back by deadline. In 2009, RadioShack, a global brand with huge name recognition recognition decided to modernize its image and rebranded itself as The Shack. It did not go well.

Starting point is 00:04:11 People were confused. Nobody really liked it. And the company filed for bankruptcy in 2015. Then, two years later, it went bankrupt again. One franchise store in Ohio, in its last Facebook post before being closed, posted, quote, We closed. F*** all of you. Rebrandings are hard. Comcast became Xfinity. Gatorade went down to one letter and became G. Even Prince rebranded to just a symbol.

Starting point is 00:04:39 This morning, Elon Musk joined that club and changed Twitter's name to X. Just the letter X. And the bird logo has been excised from the site. It's hard to know what effect this will have on the platform, but at least in the short term, it can't be good. That's a lot of brand equity being thrown out the door. Do we even call them tweets anymore? Apparently we don't.

Starting point is 00:05:03 Musk tweeting today that we should call them X's. Musk is a little obsessed with the letter. There's a Tesla Model X. There's SpaceX. His youngest child is named XAEA12. His first big company was called X.com. His plan is to turn Twitter into an everything app like WeChat in China. But as Twitter rebrands, Mastodon's user base is skyrocketing, with the platform's CEO reporting that the number of monthly active users has climbed back up to more than 2.1 million over the past couple of weeks. Previously, Mastodon's monthly active users peaked at 2.5 million between October and November, shortly after Elon Musk acquired Twitter. Quoting TechCrunch,

Starting point is 00:05:50 The fate of Mastodon's growth seems often to be tied to Twitter's moves, or rather, its missteps. It's not immediately clear if Mastodon is now once again benefiting from Musk's missteps with Twitter, or if it's being lifted by the renewed interest in ActivityPub, the decentralized social networking protocol that powers the Mastodon network and other apps. Then again, Twitter users could simply be frustrated with Musk's recent move to enact rate limiting that reduced the number of tweets that could be viewed by users and subscribers, unquote. Of all of the competing platforms, and this is just my opinion, Mastodon and Threads seem to be best positioned. They'll both soon share the underlying network, ActivityPub, meaning you can subscribe to someone's account on Threads

Starting point is 00:06:29 from your Mastodon account or vice versa. Mastodon has no ads and user tracking. Threads is backed by Meta and has the benefit of that core architecture. Most importantly, platforms that use ActivityPub let users pick up their accounts and move them to another service, bringing their content and follower base along with them. So what then are X users up to on this

Starting point is 00:06:51 historic day? Trending this morning on X were the topics Welcome to X, Blue Sky, which is a Twitter competitor, and third, hashtag trans women are con men. 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. As the user base grows for text-based apps like Mastodon and Metis Threads,

Starting point is 00:07:40 TikTok is hopping on the bandwagon as well. The video-based platform added support for text posts today. The app's camera page now offers three options for content creation, video, photo, and text. Like Instagram Stories, Text Posts lets brands and creators customize content with background colors, tags, music, stickers, all within a 1,000-character limit. Viewers can also engage with text posts as they do with videos through stitching, duetting, and commenting. This new functionality is in the app, but not yet in the API, meaning that third-party tools used by marketers do not yet have this new feature.

Starting point is 00:08:22 Forget about writing your brand's frequently asked questions list. Google might just do it for you soon. Search Engine Roundtable reported today that the Google Business Profiles are rolling out a new feature that automatically will generate frequently asked questions using information from your business profile and your website. These automated facts can also be customized to the type of information you prefer. You can provide the platform with specific details for fact creation, including operating hours, appointment scheduling, contact information, payment methods, and delivery options. And finally, with all this turmoil around X, you might think,

Starting point is 00:09:04 well, at least that old Twitter memorabilia is probably gaining in value. And you would be wrong. We checked in on what is perhaps the single most prominent artifact from Twitter's glory days, the NFT of the first tweet ever posted. It was posted by Jack Dorsey, Twitter's co-founder, who is bankrolling Blue Sky now, by the way. The post was on March 21st, 2006, and it reads, Just setting up my Twitter. Back then they spelled Twitter in five characters, T-W-T-T-R. That NFT was sold back in March 2021 to a crypto bro named Sina Estabi.

Starting point is 00:09:43 He paid $2.9 million. Last year, he tried listing it at $48 million, but didn't get any bites. In fact, the highest bid was only about $277. This past weekend, we checked in on its most recent bid offer, $3.77. Did a very adult thing over the last week or so. One by one, I've been replacing everything that sits on our counter on the kitchen to

Starting point is 00:10:14 the same object, but in a specific color, in turquoise. We're kind of going for like a mid-century modern. You know that turquoise I'm thinking of, like the old retro radios. So yeah, new knife set, new compost box, new cereal containers. I mean, the old ones weren't bad, but they were, you know, hand-me-downs from, I don't know, 20 years ago. Never thought I'd be that guy, but here we are.

Starting point is 00:10:35 I'm Todd Mapp, and thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. Outro Music

Today in Digital Marketing - Going Undercover: The Secret Life of a Google Ad Rep

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