Today in Digital Marketing - 🎵 Guess It Must Be You 🎶

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, Amazon loosens the one restriction merchants have asked for since forever. Some upgrades on the Google Ad Platform, Meta takes heat about content moderation from its own advisory board, LinkedIn's new intent signals, and Snapchat for boomers. The Desktop Edition is here for everyone. It's Thursday, September 15th. I'm Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Good news for Amazon sellers. Bad news for your inbox. Yesterday, the biggest e-commerce company

Starting point is 00:00:30 in the world announced that it will expand its email marketing tools. The new tailored audiences tool lets merchants send marketing emails to shoppers beyond customers that choose to follow their brand page, including repeat customers, recent customers, and high spend customers. Using this tool, sellers select customer audience types, and Amazon sends marketing emails directly to them. Customers will be opted in automatically, and if they don't want to receive marketing emails, they have to unsubscribe. This is a big change for Amazon, which has been reluctant to let merchants have any sort of email communication with their buyers. With tailored audiences, sellers can also monitor the impact of their email marketing campaigns and customer engagement metrics like emails delivered, sales and conversion, as well as open, click-through, and opt-out rates.

Starting point is 00:01:17 The company is currently testing the tool in a beta program with plans to make it available to all U.S. sellers early next year. Once launched, the tool will be available at no cost in Seller Central. Google today announced new workflows and reports that combine ad extensions and assets. As a result, ad extensions will be part of the bigger bucket that's just called assets now. Previously, ads and assets were managed separately during the campaign creation process. Now, when creating a search or performance max campaign, you'll find them in the same step. Here's how it works. As you create and apply assets to your campaign, the preview tool will automatically update so you can see them in the context of your ad. Google Ads will also recommend assets based on your

Starting point is 00:02:05 chosen campaign goal. The assets you create as part of this new workflow will be available for other campaigns and ad groups as well. In the new ads and assets menu, the assets page will provide reporting for all the assets across your account. Finally, the combinations report will show assets such as site links, callouts, and images alongside your headlines and descriptions. The updates will roll out over the next few weeks. In news that probably won't surprise most digital marketers, a new report finds that Facebook's automated enforcement AI is broken. What is surprising is that this time, it's Meta's own oversight board reporting this.

Starting point is 00:02:49 The arm's length board released a statement today criticizing the company for removing a cartoon depicting police violence in Colombia. Now, the cartoon had been added to Meta's media matching service database, meaning its system flagged it automatically for takedown. Those takedowns did happen and users started appealing. However, despite more than 200 people appealing the removal and the appeals having an almost 100% success rate, Meta still did not remove

Starting point is 00:03:18 the cartoon from its bank until the oversight board intervened. Quoting the board, This case shows how, by using automated systems to remove content, media-matching service banks can amplify the impact of incorrect decisions by individual human reviewers. The stakes of mistaken additions to such banks are especially high when, as in this case, the content consists of political speech criticizing state actors. In response, Meta should develop mechanisms to quickly remove any non-violating content And we are talking about organic posts by users here, not ads by brands. But similar issues have been widely reported by advertisers for years. And with Meta now merging the advertising moderation teams with the organic content moderation teams, this is especially relevant.

Starting point is 00:04:18 There are several cases that raise questions about whether Facebook and Instagram's automatic moderation is calibrated to avoid overzealous removals. Quoting them again, The board is particularly concerned that Meta does not measure the accuracy of media matching service banks for specific content policies. Without this data, which is crucial for improving how these banks work, the company cannot tell whether this technology works more effectively for some community standards than others, unquote. Consequently, the oversight board is asking Meta to publish the error rate

Starting point is 00:04:50 for content that has been mistakenly included in its matching banks. 2B2B Marketing Now and LinkedIn announcing today that it's launching a new account dashboard, which lets sellers view their list of saved accounts and their level of interest based on a number of signals. The new account dashboard is part of LinkedIn's sales navigator suite of tools. Signals that determine the level of prospective buyers interest include engagement with your brand's ads or content both on and off platform, presumably through pixels, researching your product category, visiting your website, or submitting information as a lead. Sellers will also be able to monitor interest levels over time.

Starting point is 00:05:35 Finally, LinkedIn noted that the dashboard now includes buyer intent information with new alerts about accounts showing intent in the homepage highlights section and a buyer intent filter in search. 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. Snapchat today announced it is making the

Starting point is 00:06:17 desktop version of its app, Snapchat for Web, available to all users globally. The web-based version is pretty basic, but allows users to log into the app from any device. This could be helpful for those of you who have lengthy messages to send, since you can work from a keyboard. Certainly, it's helpful for digital marketers who are on desktop frequently, as so much of our day-to-day work is there.

Starting point is 00:06:38 Similar to the mobile version, brands and social media managers and users alike can send messages and snaps, as well as chat via video and voice calls. It also features access to the mobile app's messaging features like chat reactions and a variety of lenses for video calls. A few other new features to report from Snapchat. First, the platform launched new chat shortcuts at the top of the chat tab. We're on mobile here, by the way, now, to see things like unread snaps and chats and missed calls.

Starting point is 00:07:05 Next, it is rolling out new lock screen widgets for iOS 16. This lets users create shortcuts to conversations. And finally, it is adding a new question sticker tool to Snapchat stories. Earlier this year, YouTube introduced a media kit tool for influencers. Now, so is Instagram. And despite the shade we sometimes throw at meta around here, this actually looks pretty solid. The tool will make a media kit directly within Instagram, summarizing an influencer's following, their engagement levels, and past social media experiences with brands, which creators can then use to pitch themselves for partnerships. According to screenshots that we've seen so far, the media kit option that Instagram's developing lets creators

Starting point is 00:07:48 write a bio, highlight their favorite posts, showcase previous collaborations, and provide some audience data and insights. So somewhat similar to Meta's creator marketplace platform, but as Social Media Today noted, quote, the difference here is that creators would have more direct input over how they represent themselves to potential partners, while they'd also be able to share this new media kit with potential collaborators themselves, as opposed to referring them to the creator marketplace listing. Which brings us to the lightning round. TikTok announced a new feature today called TikTok Now that is aggressively similar to BeReal. Not only does it use the front and back camera of your device, but you will even receive a daily prompt to capture a 10-second video or photo to share what you're up to.

Starting point is 00:08:37 Yes, this is BeReal's entire concept. Consumers in the UK are skeptical about brands paying tribute to the Queen following her death. YouGov's latest survey shows that most Britons believe brands were only motivated to pay their respects for PR reasons, with less than a third feeling the messages were a sincere desire. Google Analytics will now show you tailored recommendations, such as when it finds an unlinked Google Ads account. Recommendations appear in the Insights and Recommendations section of the homepage and contextually throughout Google Analytics. Sorry, Zuck, most Americans don't care about the metaverse.

Starting point is 00:09:11 This according to a recent survey, two out of five people do not find the metaverse personally interesting, and a fifth think it's just a lot of hype. Only 15% say they find it exciting. And if you're trying to remain relevant in your emoji game, Adobe has released its annual Emoji Trend Report. The most popular emojis in the U.S. are crying laughing face, thumbs up, red heart, crying face.

Starting point is 00:09:36 And I don't know what you call this one. It's officially called ROFL. That's rolling on the floor laughing. It's the one where it's a smiley face. There's tears coming out of the cheek. The eyes are squinted and it's rotated at kind of like a 20 degree angle. I use it for I'm really LOLing. I don't know. That's the best I can do. Meanwhile, here are some emojis your brand should avoid because nobody gets them. The top three most misunderstood emoji are cowboy hat face,

Starting point is 00:10:01 cherries, and upside down face. Apparently when your brand tweets those, your customers have no idea what you're trying to say. So we've had our first hot tub accident, injury, let's call it. It was me. I had not eaten as much as I should have. I was a little dehydrated. I don't think I really had any fluid since coffee in the morning. I went for a 3.8 kilometer walk. Then in the evening, my wife and I got into the hot tub, stayed a little too long. I got out and passed out.

Starting point is 00:10:39 Quite hard, like lost consciousness, actually, quite fast. Apparently had a tiny little seizure. The ambulance came. They put me in the thing at midnight in the ambulance and off to the ER where they gave me fluids. And I feel fine now. Lesson learned. Holy moly, lesson learned.

Starting point is 00:10:58 Hydration, kids. More important than I thought it was. Anyway, my thanks to Steph for filling in yesterday. On the show tomorrow, the results of a scientific study about how you should redesign the quantities field on all your product pages. You will not want to miss that. I'm Todd Maffin. See you

Starting point is 00:11:14 tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - 🎵 Guess It Must Be You 🎶

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