Today in Digital Marketing - "Hey! Lesbian!"

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, is the next B2B platform going to be TikTok? Be protected. Be Zen. It's Wednesday, May 12th, 2021. Happy International Nurses Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. The average job tenure for chief marketing officers at large organizations fell last year to the shortest it's been in more than a decade. The study from Spencer Stewart looked at CMOs at 100 of the most advertised U.S. brands last year. The average tenure? About three and a half years. Just 40 months.

Starting point is 00:01:08 That's the lowest it's been since 2009. I know, I know, averages and medians are different, so if you care about the median, that was 25 and a half months. Today's premium newsletter has the full data set

Starting point is 00:01:19 going back to 2004. On the diversity landscape, good news and bad news. First, 47% of CMOs in the study were women last year. That's up from 43% in 2019 and just 36% the year prior. But when looking at ethnic diversity,

Starting point is 00:01:36 only 13% of CMOs were people of color. That's actually down one point from 2019. So this was pure genius. The Signal app, which competes with Facebook's WhatsApp, tried to run ads on Facebook and Instagram, ads that Facebook quickly denied. But the campaigns weren't denied because of the brand. Instead, it was about the ad and the ad targeting. Signal created a bunch of very niche audiences using Facebook's tools and then directly called out those attributes in the ads. For

Starting point is 00:02:13 instance, one read, quote, you got this ad because you're a teacher, but more importantly, you're a Leo and single. This ad used your location to see you're in Moscow. You like to support sketch comedy, and this ad thinks you do drag, unquote. The ads are, of course, a huge violation of Facebook's ads policy about not calling out targeting attributes in the ad text. You can't, for instance, target women who are romantically interested in women and say, hey, lesbian. Obviously, this wasn't about getting the ads out there. It was a stunt to highlight the amount of data that Facebook collects on its users. For its part, a Facebook spokesperson said,

Starting point is 00:02:52 this is a stunt by Signal who never even actually tried to run these ads and we didn't shut down their ad account for trying to do so, unquote. And then it devolved into a highly entertaining pissing match on Twitter. Signal replied with a screenshot of an ad account showing it had been banned. Then the Facebook spokesperson jumped into the fray with his own personal Twitter account, I might add, saying, no, no, that's that's a screenshot from March when you had payment issues. Signal, by the way, is funded by Brian Acton, the fellow who sold WhatsApp to Facebook for $22 billion.

Starting point is 00:03:32 TikTok continues to try to move into the B2B space. Axios is reporting that they're testing a new employee recruitment tool that would let brands hire people right on the platform and promote their workplace culture to potential candidates. Apparently, early versions of this are sort of like a landing page where potential employees tap a call to action button and then are taken to a web page, still in the app, where they can apply. And if that seems like a peculiar alignment, the Washington Post says it shouldn't. Quoting them, TikTok is fast emerging as a force in the job search ecosystem. At a time when unemployment remains high, a new generation looks for their first jobs and pandemic isolation leads to hours of mindless scrolling. Unquote. A recent survey from Sky Nova recently found that TikTok is the one social media platform that brands want to get into the most. TikTok says videos using the hashtag career advice are seen more than 80 million times a day.

Starting point is 00:04:36 Still with TikTok for a moment, they, like all the platforms, are racing to put e-commerce hooks directly into the app. And now, a report from Bloomberg says they may actually be making more headway than they're letting on. Apparently, they are testing having product thumbnails right on the profiles of some European businesses. For its part, TikTok gave the standard

Starting point is 00:04:56 we are always exploring new ways to serve our users, blah, blah, blah. One thing is clear. TikTok is moving very carefully to get this right. They've been working on e-commerce integration for more than a year now. The early tests were tags on videos you could tap to be taken to a product listing inside the app. Since that test, they've tried live streamed shopping events and partnered with Shopify for an ad product that pulls products out of a catalog and runs them as an interstitial.

Starting point is 00:05:27 And to be fair, it's not like they're keeping all this under wraps. Earlier this year, they previewed new ad products like Promo Tiles, which will let you add customizable sales alerts on top of your videos, and a deeper integrated version called Showcase Tiles. Last TikTok story for the day. Not directly a digital marketing story, but I thought I'd mention it as well. If you're on TikTok, you'll know this voice. It's the text-to-speech voice that the app uses in North America. The person behind the voice is a Canadian voice actor named Beth Standing.

Starting point is 00:05:59 Back in 2018, she was hired by the Chinese Institute of Acoustics, a government-backed research body, and she recorded about 10,000 sentences to be used in translations. Then, somehow, ByteDance got the data, and now she's suing, saying her voice is being used to say foul and offensive things,

Starting point is 00:06:18 causing her reputation, quote, irreparable harm. 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,

Starting point is 00:06:40 and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today, starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. YouTube is filling a gap in its analytics platform,

Starting point is 00:06:52 community posts. These are like short blog posts you can add to your channel, mostly meant for subscribers to see. They can contain polls and images. But until now, there hasn't really been any way to find out how well they performed.

Starting point is 00:07:04 Now, you'll be able to see impression and engagement rates. This is only on desktop for now. They're working on bringing it to the YouTube Studio mobile app soon. Also, they're letting you add multiple images now, up to five in a single post. This was apparently one of the top requests from the community. For now, that's only available on Android. Desktop and iOS coming later in the year. And finally, iOS users will be able to schedule community posts that was already available on desktop and Android.

Starting point is 00:07:32 All YouTube accounts with 1,000 subscribers or more can publish community posts. YouTube also says it's joining the creator fund party. In case this is new to you, many social platforms have started these funds, basically pools of money that get divided up between creators in the program, usually allocated based on view count. Some platforms, like Pinterest, are using it to encourage people of color to participate on the platform. Others, like TikTok, use it as a kind of stopgap until there's more reliable monetization options. Anyway, YouTube's fund will be $100 million and will go to people who make YouTube shorts.

Starting point is 00:08:10 That's their TikTok clone. Like TikTok, they're using this as a stopgap since shorts are monetized right now. As a result, many creators haven't put a lot of time or effort into making them. But unlike TikTok's fund, you won't need to be accepted into any kind of creator fund program. If you've got enough engagement and views on a short, YouTube says it'll reach out to people, money in hand. They say they expect that money will stretch to thousands of creators each month. That fund should start in a month or two. And finally, Google Ads has added another vertical to its naughty list.

Starting point is 00:08:47 Now, cell and gene therapies will no longer be allowed to advertise on the Google Ad Network. This includes stem cell therapy, platelet-rich plasma, and other types of regenerative medicine. Did you know you can get this podcast as a daily email newsletter too, complete with images, related videos, links to dive deeper, and even newsletter exclusive content. There's a free tier as well. You get an issue every Friday. The newsletter comes out about an hour before the podcast drops.

Starting point is 00:09:19 Just go to todayindigital.com slash newsletter to sign up or tap the link in this episode's notes. All right, that's it for today. Talk to you tomorrow. Outro Music

Today in Digital Marketing - "Hey! Lesbian!"

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