Today in Digital Marketing - How a Lawsuit About a Video Game May Affect Your UGC Strategy

Episode Date: September 30, 2020

Has your digital agency run afoul of a new Trump administration order? How a lawsuit over a video game might affect your social media strategy. Google will give you a full user experience audit — of your competitors… and how good will this new web analytics tool be when it promises it won’t track your web site visitors.Brought to you today by the Keep Optimising podcast: KeepOptimising.comNot subscribed yet? Get direct subscribe links at TodayInDigital.com HELP SPREAD THE WORD:• Tweet It: bit.ly/tweet-tidm to preview a tweet you can publish• Review Us: RateThisPodcast.com/todayABOUT THE PODCAST: • Our Slack community: TodayInDigital.com/slack• Produced by: engageQ.com• Advertising: RedCircle.com/brands and TodayInDigital.com/ads• Transcripts: See each episode at TodayInDigital.com• Email list: TodayInDigital.com/email• Theme music: Mark Blevis (all other music licensed by Source Audio)TOD’S SOCIAL MEDIA:• Twitter: twitter.com/todmaffin • LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/todmaffin • Tod’s agency: engageQ.com • TikTok: /tiktok.com/@todmaffin• Twitch: twitch.tv/todmaffin (video game livestreaming)Source links and full transcripts at TodayInDigital.comOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, has your digital agency run afoul of a new Trump administration order? Be protected. Be Zen. And how good will this new web analytics tool be when it promises it won't track your website visitors? It's Wednesday, September 30th, 2020. Happy National Translator Day, Mexico. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing,

brought to you by the Keep Optimizing podcast. It seems at some point in the life of every social media community manager, they will pick out some user-generated content from, say, Instagram, and post it to their brand's channel. And that user, even though it was posted publicly, will get mad. And so, that community manager from then on starts asking permission to use photos. It's kind of like a rite of passage for social media managers. Well, a new court case filed in the U.S. may have broader implications for the use of UGC, user-generated content.

It was filed by a tattoo artist against a video game company. That company, called Take-Two, makes a popular wrestling game. And one of the wrestlers you can play is a guy named Randy Orton. Of course, the video game company reached out to the wrestling league and licensed his likeness. What they didn't license, claims the artist, were the reproduction rights of the tattoo art. And it's a lot of art.

This guy has what I think tattoo people call a full sleeve. Basically, from the shoulder to the hand, it's all tattoo. Some skulls, a Bible verse, a dove, a rose. And in the wrestling match that is this court case the tattoo artist has delivered the first pile driver

a judge has ruled that Take-Two did in fact copy the work and the case should go to trial there a jury will decide if that rises to the level of copyright infringement and if so what sort of damages the company will pay that said they've actually won a similar case in the past where a judge said the tattoos that similar case in the past where a judge said the tattoos that were seen in the video game then weren't seen clearly enough. And anyway, they formed the whole likeness, which had been legally licensed. So back to digital marketing

and social media might be worth keeping an eye on this case. If it goes in favor of the tattoo artist, it may be entirely likely that you'll need to look even more closely at the people in the photos that you repost on your brand's channel. If they've got tattoos, either try to negotiate the rights to use it or, as I suspect would happen in the real world, just move on to a non-tattooed person. How far will that go? Will we need to seek the rights from jewelry producers for their necklaces? From knitters for their shawl patterns? Of course, probably what will happen here is an out-of-court settlement, but it's definitely something to keep track of. If your digital agency or your company does any kind of diversity training,

and you do work with the U.S. federal government, under a new executive order signed by President Donald Trump last week, that in itself can be grounds for the cancellation of your contract. Quoting TheDrum.com, the executive order calls out government vendors who teach critical race theory, white privilege, and unconscious bias. It says contracts may be canceled, terminated, or suspended, in whole or in part,

and the contractor declared ineligible for further government contracts, unquote. Here's what the executive order says verbatim, quote, Instructors and materials teaching that men and members of certain races, as well as our most venerable institutions are inherently sexist and racist, are appearing in workplace diversity trainings across the country. Therefore, it shall be the heard of the word inculcate either. Apparently, it means instill via training. The executive order was made effective immediately. As more attention is paid to privacy issues, the internet bandwidth provider CloudFlare has released a competitor to Google Analytics. They're positioning it as being built from the ground up

with the data privacy of your website visitors in mind. Quoting the company, our analytics don't cookie your visitors, collect their personal information, or track them across sites. So if your site needs a cookie banner, it won't be because of us, unquote. They say they don't use any client-side state. They don't even fingerprint individuals using their IP address or user agent string

or any other data, which I'm just going to say this out loud because I know you're thinking it too, which sounds like a terrible, terrible analytics platform for marketers, right? And we want that kind of data. We want to follow people around the web like lost puppies dragging our banner ads behind us.

But if your brand is going all in on messaging around privacy, then Cloudflare's new web analytics might be a good trade-off for you. There's a link in this episode's transcript, which you'll find at todayindigital.com. With Black Friday and Cyber Monday looming on the horizon, or at least looming on the task lists of digital marketers, you might be tempted to put all your effort into those days themselves. And that, says one expert, would be a mistake. It's really all in the planning.

Lucy Bloomfield is from 10,000customers.com. I typically find that most people will look at Black Friday, Cyber Monday as the days that that strategy falls on. But the reality is the planning around the build-up to those and getting your customers primed to purchase is equally as important as the offers that you launch. And so when most people talk about planning, what they think about is what copy are we going to launch, what creatives, what offer, what channels.

And those things are all really important. But I think where most people fall short with this stuff is, okay, but how are we spending the previous 60 days using all of those questions to get the audience really, really ready to create a really awesome and successful campaign for Black Friday? Lucy is one of several experts who appeared on the Keep Optimizing podcast, which is a sponsor of today's episode. You can find their special Black Friday planning show at keepoptimizing.com or wherever you get your podcasts. The holiday season is looming, and that means the blog posts

from all your digital marketing platforms are out. Blog posts with tips on maximizing your seasonal promotions. First out of the gate this year, Pinterest. They've highlighted some of their latest advertising tools. First, some new placements. You'll be able to place ads in Pinterest lens matches or within the Shop tab inside Pinterest search or even shopping matches on pins. These are coming first to the U.S. and the U.K. with other countries coming later. Also added, two words that make digital marketers weak in the knees,

conversion insights. This covers both paid and organic Pinterest content, covers site visits and checkouts. It highlights the individual pins that were the top performers. It's a lot like Facebook's page insights. And finally, they're letting more countries into their personalized shopping recommendations, which has been available in the U.S. since last year. YouTube this week shut down a feature that was relied on by people with hearing impairment. It was called Community Contributions and let anyone add closed captions

and subtitles to published videos. The creators of the videos could then manually review and approve them, or if enough people contributed the same content, in other words, it all matched, then it would go up immediately. YouTube says they've closed it because it wasn't being used much. Well, duh. There aren't that many people with hearing impairment. Apparently, community captions were used on a fifth of 1% of watch time. Let's do the math here.

Three years ago, YouTube said about a billion hours of videos are watched every day on YouTube. Of course, it's certainly more than that by now, but let's use that number. That's 200,000 hours watched every day with those community captions. More than 5% of the world's population, that's about 466 million people, has disabling hearing loss. Incidentally, interesting little anecdote about news consumption. My wife actually alerted me to this story from a newscast that she watches every morning. It is a YouTube newscast called the Philip DeFranco Show. It's basically a guy in his living room doing a daily newscast.

He has 6. half million subscribers. By comparison, the largest cable news network in the U.S. by viewership, that's Fox News, this year announced it reached its highest viewership in the network's 23-year history, an average daily viewership of five and a half million viewers. Two months and counting until one of the biggest days in a digital marketer's year, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And this year, with consumers avoiding bricks and mortar locations, it's even more important that you're at the top of your marketing game. That's why the podcast

Keep Optimizing has you covered with a special in-depth Black Friday episode featuring tactics and strategies from industry experts. Here's a clip. Your success will really be defined by the size of your subscribers list and by the engagement of your subscribers list. So you still have time to do that. Invest in your marketing budget now. Don't wait last minute and start building relationships with your customers now. So if you're in e-commerce in any way, online or storefront, you owe it to yourself to check out the Keep Optimizing podcast. It's at keepoptimizing.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

A couple of interesting things from Google this week. They've added sort of like wizard tools to help businesses clean up their profiles prior to the holiday season. The Grow My Store tool is meant for e-commerce shops and will analyze your site's customer experience and suggest things you could be improving on, like adding product reviews or more visible pricing. It will also benchmark your site's UX to other stores in your category. It does take a couple of hours to get your report by email. Fun fact, Google doesn't ask for any kind of proof that you're putting the URL of your store in there. So I guess you could get reports on your competitors, too.

That's meant for online stores. If you're bricks and mortar, they have a different tool for that. They've also added something they call the local opportunity finder. But really, it's just a walkthrough of your Google My Business profile areas that could use some touching up. Also, they have a new set of marketing lesson videos for the holiday season, including how to list products on Google for free, creating an effective social media plan and SEO best practices. And those free shopping ads that they rolled out in the U.S. earlier in the year are now going to be free around the world. Some countries as early as two weeks from now. Bloomberg has relaunched its short-form video platform under a new name. It will now be known as QuickTake.

They are one of a number of publishers moving aggressively into the OTT space that's over the top. Essentially, platforms like Disney Plus and Hulu and CBS All Access all becoming very hot places for digital ad spends. Their QuickTake service relaunches on November 9th. They say they're trying to break away from just financial news and reach, quote, a broader, younger audience from every business sector, unquote. QuickTake has more than 100 video producers and editors. And why the new name, you ask?

Well, Bloomberg felt the service's old name might have been causing some confusion in the marketplace. It was called TikTok. And finally, Disney has sold Truex, the ad tech company that provides consumer location data for mobile ad targeting. Disney ended up with Truex when they bought 21st Century a couple of years ago. Disney ended up with Truex when they bought 21st Century a couple of years ago. Disney ended up with Truex when they bought 21st Century Fox a couple of years ago. Quoting Marketing Brew, Truex's special sauce is actually video ad tech from interactive streaming ads to addressable TV, which lets advertisers show different ads to different households.

The new buyer, Gimbal, wants that kind of tech so it can develop a service that helps mobile marketers better target audiences on connected TV platforms. And that's it for today. Don't forget to check out the Keep Optimizing podcast there at keepoptimizing.com. Remember, that's optimizing with an S, not a Zed. I mean a Z for you Americans. See you tomorrow.