Today in Digital Marketing - How Drug Dealers Use Your Brand's Web Site to Sell Heroin

Episode Date: September 28, 2023

The loophole letting drug dealers hijack nearly any brand’s web site they want, and turn it into a shopping page for illegal drugs. Plus: Microsoft keeps playing “Spot the ad disclosure”… and Reddit ad campaigns could improve, at the expense of the site’s goodwill..🌍 Follow us on our social media📰 Get our free daily newsletter⭐ Review the podcast✉️ Contact Us: Email or Send Voicemail·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✅ Earlier episodes each day✅ Story links in show notes✅ “Skip to story” audio chapters✅ Member-exclusive Slack channel✅ Member-only Monthly livestreams with Tod✅ Back catalog of 20+ marketing science interviews✅ Discounts on marketing tools✅...and a lot more!Check it out: todayindigital.com/premium·ADVERTISING📈 Advertising Options📰 $20 Classified Ads·GET MORE FROM US🎙️ Our other podcast "Behind the Ad"📰 Our “The Top Story” LinkedIn newsletter🤝 Our Slack community🆘 Need help with your social media? Check us out: engageQ digital·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 Thursday, September 28th. Today, the loophole letting drug dealers hijack nearly any brand website they want and turn it into a shopping page for illegal drugs. Plus, Microsoft keeps playing spot the ad disclosure and Reddit ad campaigns could improve at the expense of the site's goodwill. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. It's the season for new styles

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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. A recent change to Google's algorithm is what some people believe is behind a new wave of webpages advertising the sale of crystal meth and other illegal substances. To back up a little, when you do a search on a regular website, not Google, but just any old website, many sites will return that result as its own web page dynamically generated based on your search. It'll have your search

terms in the URL, and it'll put that search term as the page header, sometimes with the phrase results for ahead of it. This means you can make any website that works like this say pretty much anything you want. Just type in a search, copy the resulting URL, and presto. And when I say anything you want, I mean it. I tested it on our own site, searching for the phrase, high-quality weed available for sale, contact Todd directly, but not actually. And it generated a webpage with that as the title and those words in the URL. The search itself, of course, came up empty because I don't have any web pages about that.

And in fact, the site said so with a no results found note. But the headline advertising drugs was at the top. You can make many websites do this. Almost all WordPress sites generate search results pages like this, and that's 40% of the web right there. Among those sites where this trick works, the American Food and Drug Regulator, the United Nations, Interpol, and more. It turns out a recent change to the search algorithm in Google now lets those auto-generated pages get indexed into the search engine. Insider.com reported on this today.

Quote, Last year, Google rolled out an internal change that moved many of those user-generated result pages into the vast library of content that shows up when people use Google Search. Before the change, many website owners manually restricted Google from crawling the results of internal searches. Google's announcement of the change made it sound like the upgraded web crawler would do the same. It doesn't. Nor does it always appear to pay attention to other signals webmasters code in asking Google not to index their search results, unquote. And that's why hundreds of web pages advertising illegal drugs, along with

contact information for the seller, is now coming up in Google searches. Not just any websites, but websites that Google trusts and ranks near the top of search result pages. Government sites, educational, media organizations, mushrooms for sale on the CDC website, cocaine and fentanyl on the National Institutes of Health site, and Crack on a Cleveland Clinic site. Again, to be clear, these webpages are not static pages hosted by these websites. They're generated on the fly based on the words the user searched for and embedded in the URL. Indeed, when we searched for By Heroin,

the third result down was from the official website of the Canadian province of Ontario. It provided a website email address and telegram account of where, presumably, you could find someone to sell you it. For its part, Google told Insider.com that it was up to the website administrator to keep those pages from appearing in Google search using the usual methods, noindex, robots.txt and the likes. It also said its search index is 99% spam free.

That may be true, but 1% of Google's index is still a lot of pages. Insider did a Google search for the telegram handle of one illicit drug advertiser in Google and found more than 7,000 results across 24 websites, some sites being hit thousands of times. So what can you do about it? Well, first, check to see if Google has indexed this kind of dynamic content on your brand's website. Type the words like heroin and meth, followed by site colon and then your domain name. Second, whether you find some or not, it's probably best to try to send Google signals that you don't want these dynamically generated granularity, so you might need to install a plugin like Yoast to control the indexing on specific types of dynamically generated webpages. But if Insider's report is correct and Google's crawler is just ignoring those signals anyway, it might be harder to keep those off your website.

Last week, we reported on Microsoft's newest ad format, an AI-generated product comparison table, and how the ad disclosure was nearly impossible to see at first glance. Buried in the top right, in light gray text, the word ad. This tiny text likely isn't something the trade regulators around the world will like, most of which say ad disclosures must be prominent. But hey, at least it was a disclosure. Because now Microsoft is being accused of running ads with no disclosure at all on the ad units in search results that what they're showing has been paid for. SEO consultant Frank Santman found some examples of this in the wild on Bing's search

engine and posted a screenshot on Mastodon, there are three ads shown at the top and none of them had any indicator within the ad unit that they were ads. The only hint was small gray text at the top of the whole page saying ads related to and the search term. But the individual results were completely indistinguishable

from organic results. For better or worse, shrinking disclosures do reflect an industry trend. Bing itself months ago was found testing ad units where the word ad only appeared in tiny print at the end of the ad unit description. If you didn't read that long description, you wouldn't see the disclosure. I had to look at it for about 30 seconds before I could find it. It wasn't even three weeks ago when we reported on Twitter's shrinking disclosures, first changing it from the word sponsored under a link

to the tiny word ad snuck into the top right corner where nobody's eyes goes. Then some ads ran on X with literally no disclosure at all. It wasn't clear if it was a glitch, a test, a new policy. X didn't respond to media questions about it. But from a marketing perspective, is non-disclosure actually good for brands? We've known for decades that the less an ad looks like an ad, the more people are willing to trust it. Back in the 60s, David Ogilvie broke the marketing mold when he started running full-page magazine and newspaper ads loaded with text, the exact opposite of best practices at the time, and it worked. These days, the platforms may be different, but the advice is identical.

TikTok's tagline for its advertising department is, don't make an ad, make a TikTok. Indeed, the best performing TikTok ads look like organic posts. So then why should we worry about a search engine or social platform doing the same? Because on TikTok today, and in those magazine articles decades ago, there was still disclosure. Sure, they look organic, but they aren't. And they say so. Straight up removing ad disclosures entirely, besides picking a fight with every national trade regulator,

may work in the short term for sales, but you're trading quick wins for long-term brand damage. All we have as marketers is trust. If that's a currency we're willing to spend, then we get what we buy. Speaking of spending the currency of trust, Reddit has decided to cash some brand goodwill in for the sake of better ad targeting. The company this week telling its users it was simplifying some of their ad privacy options. and by simplify, Reddit means remove. Previously, users had been able to tell the site's advertising platform to not consider what communities they join, which posts they engage with,

and how they spend their time on the site when creating a user profile for marketing. In other words, spend all your time talking about gardening, and you could tell Reddit to not use that data for ad targeting. I'll snark aside. We have to acknowledge that as marketers, having the ability to target by interest is valuable. As the company continues its unpopular but inevitable move toward more business value, this move was an easy one to see coming. So advertisers will, in theory, get better performing campaigns. What we won't get is data. Reddit saying it would not send that activity information directly to advertisers.

Then again, Twitter once said it would never do a whole lot of things. Then some guy bought it outright and started doing a whole lot of those things. The move, as you can expect, isn't popular with Reddit users, who've had a number of things to get mad at site management about this year. Also, Reddit is not immune to legislation and did acknowledge that they would let residents of some countries keep that ability to prevent their activity from being used for ad targeting. They wouldn't say which countries specifically, though these will almost certainly be European nations. Reddit also says they're adding the ability to opt out of specific ad categories,

like alcohol, gambling, or weight loss. Though, peculiarly, Reddit says this ability won't be absolute. Some ads from restricted categories might seep in, as they work on their classification system. This is odd because ad categories are pretty binary. You're either in them or you're not. Every ad platform has you indicate what business category you're in. You're a news organization, or you sell children's clothing, or you sell guns. Some platforms require you to additionally specify if your campaign is about protected topics like

housing and employment. Reddit could simply exclude businesses in the gambling category or the alcohol category. For them to ignore that simple and clear classification and instead try to build a machine learning algorithm to detect ad topics seems like a peculiar first step to take. Still, the writing really had been on the wall for these kinds of changes to their ads offering

ever since they signaled their plans to go public soon. 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. A relatively new app built by Instagram's original co-founders is starting to look a lot

like a social platform. The app is called Artifact, and it started as a news app, similar to Apple News or Google News. I've used Artifact, and it's pretty solid. Like the others, it tries to show you stories it thinks you would be interested in based on your past engagement of other stories. But its algorithm, in my experience anyway, is much better and stronger than the others. Sort of like how TikTok really nailed its discovery algorithm. This app is doing the same for news articles. And it's been slowly building itself into a social platform. You can comment on stories. And a few weeks ago, it added the ability to submit a link like to a blog post you wrote. Now, it's letting users publish the full text of a blog post or company announcement or how-to guide directly to the feed. Quoting the company, Just like links, your posts will appear in the visual feed of content shared by the community.

Posts will be distributed to your followers and shown to anyone on Artifact who has read on similar topics to help you be discovered by people most likely to enjoy your post. All posts also now have a unique URL that can be shared with anyone, unquote. If you have the app and you want to try it out, go to the links tab, tap the plus icon, and from there you can add your own images, title, and text. This is another contender shot at filling the void created by the drop in Twitter usage. Substack added a similar social feature some months ago. So should marketers try it out? There's no reason not to if you have the time. And in fact, it might prove valuable.

Often when these types of new social features and apps are released, there are early adopters there to see your content and few other marketing teams they're posting. That said, there don't seem to be any brand safety controls, which would prevent your blog or company message from being positioned beside a news story about a tragedy or something similar. Also, this is mobile only. There is no way to post your content via desktop and no API to use any third-party tools.

Two brief stories for you. As you know, two is below the threshold that we need to run the lightning round music. So first of all, a welcome change to ChatGPT, actually bringing back a change that they'd put on hold for a bit. You can now once again use results from the live web. So no more of that, my knowledge stopped in September of 2021 nonsense. OpenAI paused that ability when they discovered people were using the feature to bypass news paywalls. Since then, they've taught the engine to respect robots.txt exclusions and given enough time for publishers and websites to put that in place if they so choose. And second, Google Ads has added a nice feature. You can now set up temporary users

to be able to see your account and you can automatically expire their access after a set period of time. X, formerly Twitter, may be considering a paid tier, which would eliminate ads from subscribers' feeds. It's not a crazy idea. Meta is said to be considering the same thing for users in Europe. This is something that X's majority owner Elon Musk has mused about in the past, but now some software engineers are seeing text in the X code

base indicating that this is actively being worked on. Currently, there is only one tier of membership and it promises fewer ads in a couple of places in the app, but not most of it. X's ad revenues amount to about $12 US per user per month. So any ad-free version would need to charge at least that to break even. It would also make the platform, I would think, less attractive to advertisers, given that their campaigns would be guaranteed to reach fewer eyeballs than the current setup.

Currently, about half of 1% of X's user base subscribe to its premium plan. Since the start of his tenure at the company, Musk has tended to make sudden announcements, only to ignore or backpedal later. It was only last week when he said they might soon charge, quote, a small monthly payment for the use of the X system, unquote. He also said a cheaper version of the current premium plan is coming out soon, though it's not clear what would be stripped out. Meanwhile, yesterday, X's CEO Linda Yecorino disputed media reports that their election integrity team had been slashed from 25 people to just four people. She told a conference that the group is a, quote, robust and growing team, unquote. Except her boss, Elon Musk, earlier that same day, not only confirmed that the team

had been cut, he said the whole unit got disbanded. Replying to a post about the cuts, Elon Musk said, quote, Oh, you mean the election integrity team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they're gone. Unquote. More than 50 countries have national elections next year. Oh, and at the same conference, Iaccarino was asked about concerns that the amount of hate speech, particularly anti-Semitic speech, had been increasing on the platform. Her response? Probably not what brand safety managers and advertisers wanted to hear. You know, something like, we denounce hate speech.

Rather, Iaccarino told the audience, Everyone deserves to have that opportunity to speak their opinion. Then, according to people in the room, she looked at her watch and said she had to catch a flight. Tomorrow, Friday, we have an all-staff off-site retreat, so there will be no episode on Friday. Monday is a stat holiday here in Canada. Well, actually, the stat is Saturday, but you know how it works. Get the Monday off. So, no episode tomorrow, no episode Monday.

Next episode will be Tuesday. Today in Digital Marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Tsunamik First Nation on Vancouver Island. Our production coordinator is Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Blevis. Thank you. occasionally by email. That's how to do it. Tap the link in the show notes. I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. Have a restful weekend. I'll see you on Tuesday. I'm the one Hit me hard

I'm the one Can you feel me? I'm the one Hit me hard Folks gonna set you free Yeah Folks don't set you free