Today in Digital Marketing - He Likes It! Hey Mikey!

Episode Date: September 12, 2024

If you’re not first, you’re last — and YouTube wants you to pay for the privilege. Has Bluesky finally added the one feature that’s held them back? How Gen-Z prefers to buy your products. And it’s the return of Mikey! He won’t eat it… he hates everything!Links to today's stories📰 Get our free daily newsletter📈 Advertising: Reach Thousands of Marketing Decision-Makers🌍 Follow us on social media or contact usGO PREMIUM!Get these exclusive benefits when you upgrade:✅ Listen ad-free✅ Back catalog of 20+ marketing science interviews✅ Get the show earlier than the free version✅ “Skip to story” audio chapters✅ Member-only monthly livestreams with TodAnd a lot more! Check it out: todayindigital.com/premium✨ Premium tools: Update Credit Card • CancelMORE🆘 Need help with your social media? Check us out: engageQ digital🌟 Rate and Review Us🤝 Our SlackUPGRADE YOUR SKILLSGoogle Ads for Beginners with Jyll Saskin GalesInside Google Ads: Advanced with Jyll Saskin GalesFoxwell Slack Group and CoursesToday 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. Associate producer: Steph Gunn.Some links in these show notes may provide affiliate revenue to us.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Thursday, September 12th. Today, if you're not first, you're last, and YouTube wants you to pay for that privilege. Has Blue Sky finally added the one feature that's held them back? How Gen Z prefers to buy your products? And it's SEO like you have never heard before. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. In the world of YouTube ads, first impressions matter. Google announced today that first position is now available across all YouTube content. This ensures that your ad is the first

in-stream ad that viewers see. Previously, First Position was limited to YouTube Select Inventory. That was bookable through Google Ads and Display and Video 360, but it was priced at a fixed rate CPM. Now, the feature is expanding to all any market with First Position. As First Position locks your ads prime placement, YouTube is pushing users for more interactive engagement with its new Add Yours sticker for shorts. This feature invites viewers to participate by creating their own versions of shorts clips. And if it feels a little bit like

deja vu, it's because it's basically the same feature on Instagram, which was also the same feature from TikTok, which called it Duet. YouTube has been testing this with select users for the past couple of months, and now the Add Yours sticker for shorts is being expanded to all users. Definitely a good application for marketers since it does ask users to create their own content and provide that sweet, sweet engagement. Well, despite economic concerns, ad spend in the final months of 2024 looks promising.

According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the number of advertisers worried about a slowing U.S. economy has dropped by 11% from November of last year to August of this year. It also forecasts a 12% increase in American ad spending, up from the 9.5% growth that it predicted last November. eMarketer says there are four driving factors boosting the ad industry for the rest of the year. First, the rise of retail media. These networks, like Walmart and so on, are leading in ad share, with the IAB increasing its growth forecast from 22% to 25%, fueled by increased spend in consumer packaged goods and beauty sectors. It's not difficult to see why these networks are so highly attractive to brands.

They have rich first-party data and expanding partnerships. Second, consumers are prioritizing value, particularly for consumer packaged goods. And as a result, brands are boosting their ad spend to target cost-conscious buyers. Third, political advertising. Expected to be more than $12 billion this year, that's about 3% of total media ad spend. Much of this, of course, concentrated around the Q4 presidential election in the US.

This, combined with events like the Olympics, is boosting linear TV as well, according to the IAB. And fourth, connected TV, that's streaming TV services, is also benefiting from an increased ad spend, with platforms expanding their inventory to capture a share of the almost $29 billion forecast for CTV ad spend this year. This may be your sign to get your brand on the Twitter competitor, Blue Sky. The platform now says it supports video. The platform announcing yesterday that users can share video clips on desktop and mobile,

but there is a 60 second cap. Videos will autoplay by default, but there is an option to turn this off in the settings menu. You can also add subtitles and apply labels to manage content like adult material. There are some other limitations. You are capped at 25 video uploads or 10 gigabytes per day. The platform will require email verification. It says this will help combat harmful content and spam. And if you keep breaching their community guidelines, your video posting privileges might be pulled. Videos will also be screened by Hives, AI, and Thorn, a nonprofit that fights child sexual abuse to check for illegal content or media that needs a warning. This is rolling out gradually, so it may not be available immediately.

To check to see if your account has it, just refresh the desktop site or update your mobile app. Gen Z has ushered in a new era of shopping. According to a new report from eMarketer today, here are three standout ways their purchasing journey is changing the game for marketers. First, the TikTok generation isn't just clicking buy on a whim. With less cash to splash, they're scrutinizing every purchase. And they're using all sorts of digital tools. Think Reddit reviews and mobile apps to vet products before they buy. They're also a generation more likely to check out a brand on social media. 20% of them do this versus 7% of older shoppers.

And 45% will consult family and friends before finalizing a purchase. Second, this year, 70% of all American Gen Zs will use TikTok monthly. They will spend almost an hour per day on TikTok more than any other age group. Two-thirds say they discover new brands and products on TikTok. Instagram is close behind but is in second place. And third, despite their digital prowess, Gen Z hasn't abandoned physical stores. According to eMarketer's survey, half of Gen Z recently purchased a product they discovered in-store. For this generation, physical stores were the leading source of brand awareness across nine product categories, including clothing, shoes, and accessories. In-store shopping remains the most common method, in fact,

for Gen Z to make purchases, outpacing websites, mobile apps, and social media. We have eMarketer's full report in today's email newsletter, which you can sign up to for free by tapping the link in the show notes or going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter. And you thought your throwback Thursday posts were just a trip down memory lane. It turns out Meta had different plans. Meta acknowledged this week that since 2007, all publicly posted text and photos by adult Facebook and Instagram users have been used to train its AI models. Australia's ABC News recently reported that Meta's global privacy director initially denied using user data for AI training during a government inquiry, but later admitted it after further questioning. David Shoebridge, a Green Party

senator, pressed Meta's privacy director during the inquiry. He said, quote, the truth of the matter is that unless you have consciously set those posts to private since 2007, Mehta has just decided that you will scrape all of the photos and all of the text from every public post on Instagram or Facebook

since 2007, unless there was a conscious decision to set them on private. That's the reality, isn't it? Unquote. Meta's ironically titled privacy director responded with, correct. Now, European users can opt out due to local privacy regulations, and Meta faces a ban on using Brazilian data for AI training, but users in other regions can't opt out if they want to keep their posts public.

Meta's privacy director could not confirm if opt-out options will be available in the future. All right, first, I'm going to play the entire ad. It's only 30 seconds long, and people of a certain generation will know this ad. What's this stuff? Some cereal. It's supposed to be good for you. Did you try it? I'm not going to try it. You try it.

I'm not going to try it. Let's get Mikey. Yeah. He won't eat it. He hates everything. He likes it. Hey, Mikey. When you bring life home, don't tell the kids it's one of those nutritional cereals

you've been trying to get them to eat. You're the only one who has to know. That is the famous Life Cereal ad from the 70s. And the company announced this week they are resurrecting it with their first campaign in years. Mikey first debuted in 1972. The original ad was actually called Three Brothers, but most people just call it Hey Mikey. It became such a phenomenon, it ran for more than a decade. And now, Life Cereal is tapping into nostalgia,

which is the blending of nostalgia with a new modern twist. And according to the VP of Meal Occasions at PepsiCo, that's Life's parent company, instead of a simple 70s ad reboot, it will combine familiar elements with a contemporary context. As for the famous dialogue, it's still the same. The new spot starts airing today across multiple platforms like Disney+, Amazon, YouTube, and TikTok. Okay, get that finger off the skip button. You do it, I do it too. Whenever I hear the closing music of a podcast, I always hit skip. But there's more to come in this podcast. Let me explain. A couple of months ago, I always hit skip, but there's more to come in this podcast.

Let me explain. A couple of months ago, Google announced or rolled out in one of their big shows this thing that was really meant for the education market. It would automatically create essentially a podcast, a conversation, a casual conversation between two people when you fed it notes. And I guess the idea is that for for school age people or university students, they would put in the notes they've taken, and this would be another way of learning. Today, they released it. It's called Google Notebook LM. I'm sure they'll rename it to something involving Gemini.

And I'm going to play you what it generated. Now, just so you understand, the only data that I gave it was the Wikipedia page for SEO. Okay? That's the source that I gave it. Just literally just the URL for Wikipedia page for SEO. Okay, that's the source that I gave it. Just literally just the URL for Wikipedia's SEO entry. Everything you're about to hear is completely unedited. This is what it generated out of that. It absolutely blew my mind,

and I think it's going to blow yours as well. It runs about 10 minutes or so, and then the show will end for real, and I will see you tomorrow if I still have a job. Where did this all even begin? Well, our listeners pointed us to the mid-90s, the wild, wild west of the internet. Websites were way simpler back then. And search engines, AltaVista, Infoseek, those are the big players then.

Imagine submitting your website's URL and then just stuffing it. And I mean cramming it full of keywords, hoping something, anything would stick. Seriously, that was the strategy. Keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing. That sounds messy. Like a recipe for disaster. Yeah.

Kind of like adding every single spice in your cabinet to a dish and hoping for the best. That's a perfect analogy. And you know what? It kind of worked back then. But of course, search engines, they caught on pretty quick. They had to evolve, right? Imagine searching for, say, best hiking boots, and all you get are pages just repeating those three words over and over again. Not exactly helpful. No, not at all. So that's when this whole battle between SEOs and search engines really kicked off. Absolutely. It was like a digital duel from the get-go. AltaVista, InfoSeek, they all started tweaking their algorithms, trying to weed out the websites, clearly trying to game the system. But then, 1998, everything changed. Google arrived with

their revolutionary PageRank algorithm. Ah, Google. The king or queen of search, right? But PageRank, that's one of those things everyone's heard of, but maybe doesn't fully get. What's the deal with it? It's actually pretty simple. Imagine a massive online popularity contest. Okay. Websites earn votes through links from other sites. The more high quality votes a website gets, the higher its page rank.

And boom, the more likely it is to show up at the top of those search results. So let's say I have this website, right? It's all about collecting vintage cameras. Cool. And a big time photography blog links to me as like a trusted resource. My page rank would shoot up. You got it.

It's all about those endorsements. Google recognized that a website's value went beyond just the words on its pages. It was about its connections across the web, its reputation in a sense. And that's how link building was born. Which I'm guessing some clever SEOs saw as a way to, let's say, influence the system a little bit. Bingo.

And that's where link farms come in. Picture thousands of websites created with the sole purpose of linking to each other, creating this illusion of popularity. Imagine a fan club where everyone promises to vote for each other just to rig the system. Sneaky, right? But of course, Google, they were onto them. They always seem to be one step ahead. So what did they do? Unleash a wave of algorithm updates to combat these tactics. Oh, absolutely. Google's algorithm updates are legendary. In 2010 alone, over 500 adjustments were made. One of the most well-known is the Panda update.

Now, the Panda update, that wasn't just about cute animals, right? What was the target there? No cute animals, unfortunately. Panda went after duplicate content. Websites were copying content from each other, even from themselves sometimes, just to fill their pages with keywords. Panda penalized those sites, pushing them down in the rankings. So it forced websites to become more original, right? Offer something unique.

Precisely. Quality over quantity. But the updates didn't stop there. Google continued rolling out these major updates. Penguin, Hummingbird, each one targeting different tactics, always pushing for a better internet experience for everyone. Now, Hummingbird, that one always stuck with me. It wasn't just about catching the cheaters, was it?

It was about understanding what we're actually looking for when we search, right? You got it. Hummingbird was a game changer. It was like Google suddenly learned to, you know, read between the lines. Like it could understand the context of our searches, not just match words on a page. So like instead of just searching for pizza, it's more like best pizza place near me open now. One's vague. The other's got a real intent behind it. Exactly. Hummingbird was Google saying, hey, we're not just a dictionary anymore. We're trying to understand what you actually want, which brings us to this really interesting

aspect of SEO, the ethics of it all. We're talking white hat versus black hat. What do you make of those terms? It does sound kind of like a spy trailer, doesn't it? The good guys, the bad guys all fighting it out in the search results. Yeah. So what exactly is ethical SEO or white hat SEO? Think of white hat SEO as like building a house with a strong foundation. It's about creating high quality content that people actually want to read, you know, building those genuine connections with other websites, making sure your website is technically sound, user friendly. It's playing the long game, building trust and authority over time. So less about outsmarting Google and more about actually being valuable to users.

Exactly. With White Hat SEO, you and Google, you're both working toward the same goal, connecting searchers with the best, most relevant content. OK, that makes sense. Now, what about the villains? What kind of shady stuff falls under Black Hat SEO? Black Hat SEO, that's all about shortcuts, manipulation. Imagine building that house, but on stilts, hoping no one notices that shaky foundation. Yeah, not good. We sought examples in what you sent over keyword stuffing, of course,

but also hiding text within the website's code or even cloaking, which is basically disguising a website's content from search engines. Imagine clicking a link promising amazing travel tips and you land on this jumbled mess of keywords related to travel. Talk about bait and switch. Exactly. That's Black Hat SEO trying to game the system.

And, you know, Google has gotten really good at spotting these tricks. And there are consequences for getting caught using these tactics. Oh, absolutely. Google takes its search results very seriously. Websites using Black Hat SEO, they risk penalties, like a huge drop in their rankings or even being completely wiped out from the search results. Remember that example from the research about BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany? Yeah, those were big names getting penalized for using some questionable SEO tactics. It just shows even huge companies aren't above the rules. Google's really serious about protecting the integrity of its search results. So it's not just about trying to get a quick win. It's about the long-term health and reputation of your website

too. Exactly. And that's why ethical SEO is so important. It's about building a website that deserves to rank well, not trying to cheat your way to the top. Makes sense. So if I'm understanding this right, SEO isn't a one-size-fits-all thing. It's about finding that balance, right? Optimizing for search engines while also creating something valuable for us, the actual humans using the Internet. You got it. And here's another layer to consider. Mobile search. Everyone and their grandma is browsing the Internet on their phones these days. Oh, sure. Can't ignore that. What's changed with mobile search?

It's been huge. Your research actually shows that by 2016, mobile search had overtaken desktop search. Over 51 percent of searches were happening on mobile devices. That's a big shift. It forced Google to prioritize websites optimized for mobile viewing. They even rolled out mobile-first indexing. Mobile-first indexing. What is that? It's actually pretty simple.

Imagine Google's ranking system, but it's putting on a new pair of glasses. Glasses made for mobile. Okay. So with mobile-first indexing, Google is mainly looking at the mobile version of your website. That's how they're deciding where to rank it. So if your site looks amazing on a desktop, all sleek and modern, but then you go to the mobile version and it's clunky, confusing. Well, Google notices.

Yeah, that's like trying to squeeze into those jeans from high school. Yeah. Not a good look. Exactly. Google knows that a bad mobile experience that sends people running websites that are easy to use on a phone. Those are the ones Google is going to favor. Makes sense. Keep those thumbs scrolling right now. Thinking beyond just our phones. What happens when you want to like go global. What about the

rest of the world beyond Google. It's a great question. SEO changes around the world, just like languages and cultures do. What works in one country might totally flop in another. Google might be king in, say, North America and Europe, but in China, it's all about Baidu. So if I'm a business, right? Yeah. And I want to reach people in China, my Google optimized site isn't going to cut it. Not really. No, you'd need a new game plan.

You got to understand the local search engines, translating content, building those relationships with local websites. Even getting a country specific domain name could make a big difference. So it's like traveling to a new country. You got to learn the customs, right? Don't want to show up speaking the wrong language, using the wrong phrases. Exactly. International SEO is all about understanding your audience and their digital environment. Wow, we've covered a lot of ground today. The evolution of SEO, the back and forth between SEOs and search engines, the whole ethics thing, the mobile revolution, and even the global picture. It's a lot to take in. So for our listeners who are like, whoa, where do I even start? What's the one thing to remember? For me, it always comes back to people. SEO is about understanding your audience, creating content they actually want, and making sure your website is valuable and easy to use. Forget about tricking the system or chasing those quick wins. Just focus on building something genuine, something trustworthy.

That's what matters in the end. Love that. And speaking of understanding our audience, one listener sent in a question that I think really gets to the heart of it all. They were intrigued by the idea of usefulness as a ranking factor for Google. And honestly, I'm right there with them. What does usefulness even mean online? It's the million dollar question. It's tricky because usefulness isn't a static thing. It changes as our needs change, as the internet itself evolves. So it's not about like checking boxes off a list. It's more about always adapting, always adding value. Yeah, exactly. And that's what makes it so interesting. It keeps us on our toes, right? Always striving to create content that connects, that makes a difference. I love that. So to all our listeners out there, we leave you with this. How can you make your little corner

of the internet a more useful place? What can you create stories, tools, resources that will genuinely benefit others? Until next time, happy optimizing.