Today in Digital Marketing - He Came In Like a Wrecking Ball

Episode Date: November 30, 2023

Will there be any X advertisers left after Elon Musk’s unhinged tirade yesterday? Today might be your last day to save that grey account your brand has. Threads now lets you find and jump in on discussions about your products. And the head of Google Ads is gone..📰 Get our free daily newsletter📈 Advertising: Reach Thousands of Marketing Decision-Makers🌍 Follow us on social media or contact us.GO PREMIUM!Get these exclusive benefits when you upgrade:✅ Listen ad-free✅ Meta Ad platform updates with Andrew Foxwell✅ Google Ad platform updates with Jyll Saskin Gales✅ Back catalog of 20+ marketing science interviews✅ Get the show earlier than the free version✅ Story links in show notes✅ “Skip to story” audio chapters✅ Member-exclusive Slack channel✅ Member-only monthly livestreams with Tod✅ Discounts on marketing tools✅...and a lot more!Check it out: todayindigital.com/premium·GET MORE FROM US🆘 Need help with your social media? Check us out: engageQ digital🎙️ Our other podcast "Behind the Ad"🤝 Our Slack community⭐ Review the podcast·UPGRADE YOUR SKILLS• Inside Google Ads with Jyll Saskin Gales• Google Ads for Beginners with Jyll Saskin Gales• Foxwell Slack Group and CoursesSome links in these show notes may provide affiliate revenue to us.·Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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? 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.

It is Thursday, November 30th. Today, will there be any ex-advertisers left after Elon Musk's unhinged tirade yesterday? Today might be the last day to save that grey account your brand has. Threads now lets you find and jump in on discussions about your products. And the head of Google Ads is gone. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. Tomorrow, Google will begin a large-scale effort to delete inactive Gmail accounts. They say inactive accounts are 10 times less likely to have two-factor authentication enabled

and thus are a security risk. This is of particular importance to marketers and brand managers, many of whom set up a free Gmail account to handle website admin logins or login accounts generally, accounts that are sometimes not checked for months or years. If you are one of these marketers, it's easy to get off the deletion list. You just need to sign in and do something like read an email or send one or access Google Drive, use Google Search while you're signed in, or watch a YouTube video. Also, if you've ever used that account to upload a YouTube video, Google says your account should be safe. But if you haven't done any of those in the last two years, your account might very well get deleted permanently tomorrow. What's not clear is what happens to those usernames. Will they be freed up so competitors or squatters can move in?

Google hasn't said. Also, this applies only to the consumer-level Google accounts, not business accounts that use Google Workspace. Incidentally, there was a small Gmail outage today that was delaying email sends, so if you noticed that, it wasn't you. This afternoon, Threads, Meta's attempt at a Twitter killer, launched the ability to search for keywords in posts. To be clear, these are not hashtags. Rather, you can search for a word,

like your brand name, or a product name, or a topic, and it will find posts with those words in them. Here's how to do it. First, tap the search icon, then type a keyword or phrase into the search bar. You'll see a prompt to search for that topic. Tap on that prompt, and you'll land on a results page. I should note that once you get a results page, it has a unique URL, which you could bookmark and check daily if you're looking for people using your brand name out there. Also, there's nothing preventing you from engaging with posts you find in search. This is not in the API because there is no Threads API yet,

so all this has to happen on the desktop or in the app. Also, the Wall Street Journal reporting this week that Threads will soon be available in the app. Also, the Wall Street Journal reporting this week that threads will soon be available in the EU. Until now, it's stayed out, mostly for fear of getting on the bad side of the region's heightened regulations. The report says it's likely the company would let people view content without an account and only need one to post or engage.

So many people in the EU wanted to get in on threads that Meta apparently had to build in VPN blockers. During Meta's Q3 earnings call, the company said Threads has just under 100 million monthly active users. Pinterest is upgrading its Direct Links product. With regular Pinterest ads, users need to click twice to navigate to an advertiser's website. First tap, people see a close-up view of the ad, and then a second tap is the one that takes them off Pinterest to the landing page. But the Direct Links product goes directly to the advertiser's site.

The company first announced Direct Links at its ad summit back in September. This week, they've extended the feature to include more campaign types. You can now use Direct Links for both consideration and conversion campaigns across image and video formats. Pinterest says brands that started using Direct Links for consideration campaigns have seen an average of 96% more clicks to site compared to their previous campaigns. Direct links have already been applied automatically for Consideration campaigns, but for Conversion and Shopping campaigns, you will turn those on manually in the platform's Ads Manager within the Pin Review screen for a specific campaign. YouTube is also upgrading some of its marketing tools, this week announcing a bunch of small updates. First, they are updating their product drops in live streams, making them

available to more creators beyond those with Shopify or Google Merchant Center access. You'll also be able to launch drops at any time during a live stream. This is a particularly welcome improvement from the previous version, which required you to schedule those in advance of going live. They're also updating the community posts creation flow. Those are their text-only status updates the channels sometimes use to communicate with their subscribers. Perhaps as a response to Twitter's implosion, YouTube has been doubling down on the text posts lately, adding things like polls, quizzes, disappearing updates, and more. And YouTube is also adding more data to the total members insights. You'll find out where members joined from and why they canceled their memberships. Briefly, Jerry Dishler, who has run Google Ads since 2020, is leaving the company.

Dishler was with the department for more than 15 years. The company's current VP and GM of advertising will take over. A Google spokesperson took to social media to say, quote, this was his decision and not related to the antitrust trial. 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.ca. 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. And finally, I don't even know how to write this last one, so I'm just going to play it. This is Elon Musk yesterday at a New York Times event. After having been asked his thoughts on the massive advertiser boycott at X, and parents, there are some unbeaped, nasty words ahead. Go fuck yourself. But. Go fuck yourself. Is that clear?

I hope it is. Hey, Bob. That apparently a reference to Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, who is in the audience. Well, let me ask you then. That's how I feel. Don't advertise. How do you think then about the economics of X? If part of the underlying model, at least today, and maybe it needs to shift,

maybe the answer is it needs to shift away from advertising. If you believe that this is the one part of your business where you will be beholden to those who have this view, what do you do? G-F-Y. I understand that, but there's a reality, too. Right? Yes. No, no. I mean, Linda Iaccarino is right here, and she's got to sell advertising.

Absolutely. So, no, no, totally. So, no, actually, what this advertising boycott is going to do, it's going to kill the company. And do you think that the company... And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company, and we will document it in great detail. But those advertisers, I imagine, are going to say, they're going to say, we didn't kill the company. Oh, yeah., are going to say they're going to say we didn't kill the company. Oh, yeah. They're going to say tell to earth. But they're going to say that they're going to say, Elon, that you killed the company because you said these things and that

they were inappropriate things and that they didn't feel comfortable on the platform. Right. That's that's what they're going to say. And let's see how Earth responds to that. Estimates show X may lose up to 7575 million from the exodus of some of Earth's largest advertisers. Honestly, the best part of that whole thing came at the beginning when Musk said, Jonathan, the only reason I'm here is because you're a friend. To which the moderator replied, I'm Andrew. The old saying I'm Andrew.

On the show tomorrow, the effect of so-called doom spending on your holiday sales. And Meta is suing the U.S. government so it can keep monetizing the Facebook data of children. And if you're trying to reach marketing decision makers, consider an ad on this podcast or in our newsletter. Some ad slots are just five bucks. Tap the link at the top of the show notes or go to todayindigital.com slash ads. I'm Todd Maffin. Thank you so much for listening. I will see you tomorrow. 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.