Today in Digital Marketing - Has YouTube Found a Crack in Apple's Ad Privacy Wall?

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected, be Zen. It is Friday, August 25th. Today, if YouTube can bypass Apple's ad tracking, can we all do it now? The generation least likely to block ad targeting, Reddit upgrades brand and conversion lift tools, and why marketers are watching this Halloween season closer than ever. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. Two years ago, Apple changed the online ad business significantly by requiring app developers to seek explicit permission to track users' behaviors.

Starting point is 00:01:00 Prior to that, users could revoke that permission, but that was buried in a setting screen deep in the OS. This new setup, though, which Apple called ATT, the App Tracking Transparency Framework, popped up a message on people's phones. Track or don't track? Not surprisingly, most consumers said don't track. And within an instant, poof, marketers lost a huge chunk of data and platforms like Meta, a whole bunch of ad revenue. But today, Adweek is reporting that YouTube may have found a way around ATT. The data comes from Analytics and finds that YouTube's iOS app adds a special identifier called WBraid to sessions where people watch and tap an ad and then land on the brand's website.

Starting point is 00:01:45 Quoting Adweek's coverage, WBraid is a parameter designed specifically to attribute conversions back to ad campaigns, according to Google documentation. WBraid is then available to other trackers and data brokers that communicate with the website. In the research, each WBraid appeared to be unique to each click on the ad, with the code changing significantly each time, unquote. For its part, back in 2021, Google said it wouldn't need to pop that ATT consent prompt up in front of its users anyway, because they didn't plan to use any signals banned by ATT for ad tracking. That's actually where WBRAID came came from as a response to ATT. At the time,

Starting point is 00:02:26 they described it as a privacy-compliant identifier that uses conversion modeling to hide actual user identities. An executive from Analytics says they believe WBraid falls well within the scope of what Apple intended to control. At the very least, he said, it certainly violates the spirit of the policy. One of the surprising things that came out of the ATT prompt is that more people actually said yes to tracking than anyone expected. And new research out this week suggests the generation most likely to not have an issue with that kind of tracking is Gen Z. Depending on who you ask, that generation is currently between the ages of 13 and 25. Quoting Marketing Diet's coverage of that today,

Starting point is 00:03:12 quote, compared to older consumers, Gen Zers are three times as likely to allow tracking when presented with prompts such as those for Apple's app tracking transparency, according to research from Tenuity. Approximately 37% of Gen Z consumers allowed tracking in order to see more relevant advertising. For baby boomers, the vast majority opted out, unquote. So how do Gen Z consumers use privacy tools online when they're shopping or moving around the web. The study found compared to other generations, Gen Z consumers were less likely to clear their browser cookies, 41% compared to 59%, less likely to use an ad blocker, 27% compared to 32%, and more likely to use a VPN,

Starting point is 00:04:01 32% compared to 27%. The numbers came from five different studies with a total pool of more than 5,000 people. The data was collected between February and April of this year. Also learned, Gen Z consumers are more likely to research a product online before buying it. The difference is especially notable when you compare it to the baby boomers, only 7% of whom will search for a product or brand on social media, while more than a third of Gen Zs will. And as we've learned from other young generations, they're not just looking for product information.

Starting point is 00:04:34 Almost three-quarters of Gen Z CPG shoppers say the values and belief of the brand are important. That's more than for any other generation. Reddit this week added some new measurement tools to help brands with their campaigns, specifically brand and conversion lift metrics. Brand lift is a measure of how many people will remember seeing your ad after a period of time. Met has had this as a campaign objective for a long time now, though unless you're spending millions, you will get a modeled estimate of that lift. When you bring the big bucks, Meta will actually put small surveys in users' feeds to get real numbers. Conversion Lift will pull data from the Reddit pixel to look at what actions were being taken after an ad impression.

Starting point is 00:05:20 And both of these can be pulled into third party platforms like Devil Verify if you want a second opinion. YouTube has released a video packed full of advice for marketing managers and creators all about Shorts, their TikTok competitor. First, this is something we hear from all the platforms. They say focus on your audience. Don't be obsessed about the algorithm. The Shorts algo is entirely different than the YouTube one, and people consume those videos differently. We also learned a little more about what they consider a view. Unlike other sites, where a view is counted as soon as the video is displayed on the screen, Shorts are a little more complicated. Quoting a YouTube spokesperson,

Starting point is 00:06:11 what we try to do with the view is to have it encode for your intent of watching that thing so that creators feel like that view has some meaningful threshold that the person decided to watch. It doesn't mean it's their favorite video ever. It just means they are deliberately watching it, unquote. So yes, there is a calculation involved here, and no, YouTube won't tell you what precisely it is for fear of people gaming the system. They also said they're not considering letting shorts go longer than 60 seconds

Starting point is 00:06:34 like TikTok has done, which I guess isn't a surprise considering that YouTube's bread and butter is long form video. As for why you can't add a YouTube-like thumbnail, the company says that's because most people come across a short by swiping into it from a previous video. Most people wouldn't see a thumbnail. Like TikTok, though, you can pick a frame from your video and annotate it to use as

Starting point is 00:06:57 a thumbnail. YouTube also says hashtags might indeed help you get more reach. Quote, sometimes a hashtag can be associated with a real world thing that's happened, like an event, and you want to associate with it. Other times they're focused on topics. And I think in both those cases, creators should consider using them, unquote. And on the age old question of quantity or quality, YouTube says, aim for quality,

Starting point is 00:07:24 hinting that if you keep posting low-quality videos that get minimal engagement, that could hurt your reach of future uploads. And the rumor that deleting and re-uploading a short can improve reach is, according to the company, not true and, in fact, might get your video flagged as spam. YouTube says more than 50 billion shorts are viewed each day. Today's newsletter has a link to the video. You can sign up for the newsletter for free by tapping the link near the top of today's show notes. Do you have business insurance?

Starting point is 00:08:01 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.

Starting point is 00:08:22 Be protected. Be Zen. Well, it finally happened. Podcasts have killed the radio star. Well, not killed exactly, but certainly beat it. Edison Research says that on-demand audio, that's podcasts plus paid streaming and music you own, has for the first time consumed more listen time than linear audio like terrestrial and satellite radio. Quoting their research, at the end of 2015, a scant seven and one half years ago, the margin between linear listening and on-demand listening was 38 percentage points.

Starting point is 00:08:59 But drop by drop, quarter by quarter, and year by year, the margin was erased, and now on-demand leads. The growth of podcast listening is part of the reason for this change. Podcasting has attuned hundreds of millions of listeners worldwide to the habit of choosing the right audio content at the right time and hitting play. The same goes for music. Once people got used to the ability to choose a specific song or playlist, and of course skip songs, it became hard for many to go back to the lean back experience of listening to radio or linear streams, unquote.

Starting point is 00:09:36 So, pour one out for the Wolfman Jacks, the Art Bells, the Garrison Keillors, the Stuart McLeans. Tuned out, but not forgotten. Some early trends going into the holiday buying season looked like cloudy skies might be ahead. After the pandemic, U.S. consumers spent big on items like TVs and experiences like travel. The industry even had a name for this, revenge spending. But now, some analysts quoted in a New York Times piece this morning say, a change is again coming, driven by inflation eroding savings accounts,

Starting point is 00:10:16 and the fact that 44 million Americans will start making student loan repayments in October after a pandemic relief measure put those payments on hold. Big stores like Macy's and Foot Locker are seeing this change. They report that people are buying less of what they want and more of what they need. Stores that offer discounts like Walmart and Dollar Tree are doing well. People are buying cheaper brands and cutting back on extras. Meanwhile, retail executives told investors this week that credit card delinquencies and retail theft are both on the rise. There is a canary in the marketing coal mine, though, a historical indicator which could tell us how Christmas will be. That canary

Starting point is 00:10:59 is Halloween. It's a season which is entirely optional. No gifts to give, no social pressure to do much at all. If people don't spend much for Halloween, it could spell lowered sales for the important holiday buying season at the end of the year. And finally, yesterday we reported on a 404 media investigation that found Instagram was allowing all sorts of crazy ads on its platform from hacked credit cards to guns to illegal drugs. Well, the news site says just hours after posting its story online, Instagram restricted the reach of its story because the story contained information about, you guessed it, hacked credit cards, guns, and illegal drugs. The author of the piece says right after getting a notice that their article didn't follow the platform's recommended guidelines, he got an ad for the illegal sale of MDMA. Instagram removed the block once 404 Media removed the words guns, meth, pills, and weapons from their caption.

Starting point is 00:12:02 Meta did not respond to a request for comment. I got a whole bunch of stuff I'm selling. It's nothing urgent, but you know how technology just kind of collects? You know, like I got in like a gift exchange, a Google Nest camera. I've never really used it, but it's probably worth, I don't know, used, $40, something like that. So this weekend, my wife and I are going to like the city's big garage sale that they have twice a year. Everyone shows up on the lawn of a high school and it's like a trunk sale. Anyway, what I really want to sell is I have like 200 cables audio cables that I have been collecting no joke

Starting point is 00:12:47 some of them for three decades honestly even if like two of them sell I will be happy and that will do it for the week today in digital marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Tsunamic First Nation

Starting point is 00:13:04 on Vancouver Island. Our associate producer is the intrepid Steph Gunn. Production assistant, Lana Katyuka. Production coordinator, Sarah Guild. Music licensing by Source Audio. Ad coordination by Red Circle. And our theme composer,

Starting point is 00:13:21 Mark Blevins' dad joke of the week. Why did the audio cable go to school? To improve its sound knowledge. Look, I never promised you quality dad jokes. I just promised dad jokes. I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. Have yourselves a restful week, friends.

Starting point is 00:13:42 I'll see you on Monday.

Today in Digital Marketing - Has YouTube Found a Crack in Apple's Ad Privacy Wall?

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