Today in Digital Marketing - Guess Who's Set to Dominate Influencer Marketing? (Hint: F___book)

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Starting point is 00:01:01 It is Thursday, December 19th, 2019. Happy St. Nicholas Day, Ukraine. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, Facebook tracks you even with location services off. And that's a good thing? Ad platforms other than the big two are starting to round up the wagons. Facebook's new Instagram influencer database is a bigger deal than it looks. And if your ads aren't producing the sales that they did last week, there's a reason for it.

Starting point is 00:01:29 And it's not your fault. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. I'm guessing there's a good chance that you are an admin on your brand's or client's Facebook page. And you may have fallen under an avalanche of email notifications that kept pestering you to come back and post something or check a notification on the page or look at your ad's reach. A piece in BuzzFeed this week may explain why you kept getting those and you're not going to like it. Quoting from the article here, the first ex-product manager said the team managing Facebook pages

Starting point is 00:02:02 gamed the system to grow the amount of monthly active businesses. When business page administrators did something with Facebook's tools within a month, they'd count as active. So the team would keep sending notifications about anything so that they'd sign back in, helping the team hit the metric, even if they knew it would annoy users. There is a link in this episode's description if you'd like to read the full piece, which is titled, Facebook is still prioritizing scale over safety. Here's one of those things that make me feel two very distinct ways. As a regular person, totally creeped out. As a digital marketer,

Starting point is 00:02:45 kind of excited. In a letter to a couple of American lawmakers, Facebook confirmed something that might actually surprise a lot of people, and that is this. Even if you turn location services for Facebook off in your smartphone, they still have ways to understand where you are. For instance, if you respond to an event on Facebook for a local music festival, or upload a photo where there is location information in the metadata, or even if a friend tags you while checking into the restaurant, Facebook assumes that you are at that restaurant too. For sure, creepy. But for those of us who rely on location to advertise to people, like a local mall or a retail store?

Starting point is 00:03:28 The growing advertising duopoly that is Facebook and Google is making some digital marketers make sure they have a handful of eggs in other baskets as well. And one of those baskets getting an increasing amount of attention, CTV, or connected TV. We're talking smart TVs here that have an internet connected menu. We're talking Roku, Amazon Fire, other streaming services and portals. And just today, two publicly traded ad tech firms, Rubicon Project and Teleria announced a stock for stock merger that will create the largest independent connected TV platform in the advertising industry. eMarketer recently says it expects spending on CTV to jump 38% to nearly $7 billion this year. The newly merged entity does not yet have a name.

Starting point is 00:04:23 Facebook has added Instagram to its brand collabs manager tool. That tool is basically a marketplace of influencers that brand managers can peruse to find the right person for their campaign. Matt Navarro on Twitter rightly points out that this is a much bigger deal than just adding another channel. Quote, Facebook already has control over influencer and creator KPIs, key platform APIs vital for rival third-party influencer marketing or publishing tools, and the social networks that dominate influencer marketing, for example, Instagram. By Facebook rolling out its own powerful publishing tool, Creator Studio, an influencer marketing platform brand collabs and integrating it all with business

Starting point is 00:05:08 manager ads manager pages groups profiles and messaging apps it is set to dominate the influencer marketing industry speaking of influencers some social media influencers have been caught up in a kind of sting operation they were asked to promote a diet drink to their Instagram followers and were brought in for a meeting with the brand. The brand told them that they wouldn't be able to try the product out before talking it up because it wasn't quite ready yet. No problem, said the influencers. One of them even confessed to telling her followers in the past that she had lost 28 pounds using a similar diet product when in fact she had never actually even touched the stuff. Oh, and one more thing about this diet drink that they were asked to promote. The fictional drink was made with cyanide.

Starting point is 00:05:56 You know, the compound that will kill you in about 30 seconds. No problem, the influencers told the fake brand. We are happy to promote it. Just give us the money. I'm guessing they didn't know what cyanide was. Maybe. One of the influencers, a fitness trainer, told the fake brand reps, from what I know, that all looks pretty natural. You know, which, to be fair, I guess cyanide is natural.

Starting point is 00:06:19 The representatives of another influencer caught in the trap said she had thought it was some kind of performance audition. Sure, honey. Sure. And finally, just a sanity reminder here. Don't worry if your sales are down right about now. It probably has very little to do with the quality of your ad creative or your targeting. This is very typical for this week prior to Christmas. Don't fret it. Facebook ads consultant Andrew Foxwell agrees, yesterday tweeting, every year it's bad this week. Last ship dates are today or have passed, and people have their gifts for the year. It's okay to turn things down a bit and do a loyalty play to customers thanking them.

Starting point is 00:07:03 David Herman, always a great source of information on digital direct response ads, also did a bit of a tweetstorm yesterday reporting on where he saw success over the past year, saying, quote, Dynamic Creative wasn't used by us for the holiday this year. We switched to it after Black Friday, Cyber Monday. And it, Dynamic Creative, has worked incredibly well. Dynamic Creative needs time to work, and we just didn't want to risk it. Also, video ads beat photo ads this year by a large margin.

Starting point is 00:07:31 Instagram Stories placement was the only placement we built out into its own campaigns. Otherwise, we used auto placements, unquote. And I thought that was a really interesting little factoid there by David. He manages accounts with millions of dollars in ad spend. And with the exception of Instagram stories, this guy trusts Facebook's automatic placements. I have to say that we have found that hacking our own version of automatic placements has worked a little bit better.

Starting point is 00:07:59 By that, I mean that we turn on everything we can, but we disable the audience network, which is almost always trash. But that does show that Facebook is getting better at putting ads where they believe they are performing the best. And so, my friends, that is it for 2019. Next week, our team mostly has the week off, except for engagement in moderation, of course. And I will be celebrating the holidays with family. That starts tomorrow, actually. So this will be the last time that we speak for a couple of weeks. Enjoy yourself, be good to your family, be safe, and I'll see you just prior to New Year.

Today in Digital Marketing - Guess Who's Set to Dominate Influencer Marketing? (Hint: F___book)

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