Today in Digital Marketing - How the “Vicarious Haptic Effect” Can Boost Your ROI

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, don't take another product photo without listening to this episode. Snapchat kills its coolest influencer marketing tool. How LinkedIn bios can secretly track consumers. Walmart is watching the payment space. And if you hate conversion modeling now, you are not going to like what Meta just announced. It's Friday, August 19th. I'm Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Snapchat's flying selfie drone, Pixie, has gained its angel wings. Yesterday, the Wall

Starting point is 00:00:32 Street Journal reported that Snap is discontinuing its latest hardware product less than four months after launching it. Sources say Snap's CEO recently told staff during a Q&A that further development of Pixie was being halted as part of a reprioritization of company resources. Back in April, Snapchat introduced Pixie as a pocket-sized free-flying drone that hovers over people while taking photos and videos that are then automatically uploaded to Snapchat. It had the potential to be a great product for brands to get drone footage and product photos without having to spend big bucks on production. But it never really took off. Sorry. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company will continue to sell the current version of the drone. However, right now, the drone appears to be out of stock on the Pixie website. Snap did not respond to a request to comment on the report.

Starting point is 00:01:27 There are many advantages e-commerce brings to consumers. They can shop from home. It's easier to compare products from different stores. But there's always been one big disadvantage. They can't touch anything. Sometimes holding a product in your hand is as much a part of the buying process as holding your credit card there. But if we can't give them a good feeling by letting them touch the product, can we at least get halfway there? That's what Andrea Luongroth set out to discover. She's an associate professor of marketing at the Tippie School of Business at the University of Iowa. She and her colleagues have published a fascinating research study in the Journal of Marketing Research called The Vicarious Haptptic effect in digital marketing and virtual reality.

Starting point is 00:02:06 I spoke with her recently and asked her if we marketers can extract the same warm emotional feeling that someone has holding a product by just showing them a photo of someone holding it. Yes, you absolutely can. What we see is that people evaluate products more favorably when they see a hand reaching out and touching it. They report greater willingness to pay of that product. What we see is that this is because it fosters a sense of what we call psychological ownership. So it makes people feel as if the product being touched is their own. The product feels like it's mine. And this is really what drives product valuation.

Starting point is 00:02:48 Well, and what marketing benefit? I mean, what needle, I guess, is what I'm asking. What needle is sort of moved by seeing a hand? Are consumers more willing to buy a product? Do they get a warm feeling about the brand? Do they consider the product to be more valuable? Like, what is the marketing benefit that gets changed by that? One is that they just evaluate the product more favorably.

Starting point is 00:03:08 They like the product more. Two is that they actually report being willing to pay more for the product. So they report being willing to pay about 32% more for products after having seen them touched as compared to not touched. We also test this with social media content. So we look at whether or not consumers will actually engage more frequently with products that are shown being touched as compared to not touched. And so we look at Instagram posts of brands, and we see that indeed, consumer engagement goes up for those brands, for those

Starting point is 00:03:47 posts that actually have and show touch. Our full conversation goes into a ridiculous amount of detail on this topic covering things like must the image show touch? Or can it just show a hand? How a photo performs versus a video versus an animated GIF? What instances you'd want to avoid showing a hand in your product photos, how her results differed when it was a female hand, but a male consumer viewing it, and by race, did a black hand viewed by a Caucasian person

Starting point is 00:04:14 change their perception of the product? And I tried to extract from her the secret formula, the perfect composition, left hand, right hand, how much of the hand should be in the photo. Our full conversation with the answers to all those questions and a lot more is coming tomorrow, exclusively to the premium podcast feed, which you can subscribe to by tapping the link in the show notes

Starting point is 00:04:34 or by going to todayindigital.com. It's usually $10 a month. It's on sale right now and only till the end of the weekend for $4.99, a price that will not change. The premium podcast, no ads, better audio quality, earlier release time, detailed show notes with story links, audio chapters to jump directly to each story, and exclusively negotiated discounts on marketing tools. An update now on yesterday's story about Instagram apparently blocking users from

Starting point is 00:05:02 repurposing Reels content by stripping away the audio. If you need to refresh, some users reported that video clips saved from the Reels edit screen were stripped of sound, forcing them to publish the Reel in order to save them properly with audio, presumably saving them so they can publish them later on TikTok or Shorts or whatever. Meta says today it wasn't intentionally trying to stop creators from creating content in its app than exporting their videos to other platforms. Quoting Meta, due to a bug, the Reels download feature is not working as intended for iOS users, and in some cases audio is missing in downloads. We are working to fix the issue as soon as possible. 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

Starting point is 00:05:55 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. Some new research coming out over the last day or two suggests that the LinkedIn bio platforms may be opening a privacy loophole for social media giants to gain access to consumer data that they are not otherwise disclosing. A new study found that Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok have the ability to track interactions when users open in-app browsers, such as searches, clicks, screenshots, form inputs, like passwords, addresses, credit card numbers. According to the research, Meta has access to,

Starting point is 00:06:38 quote, monitor everything happening on external websites without the consent from the user nor the website provider, unquote. The study explains that some social media apps inject JavaScript code into third-party websites that load within their in-app browsers. When that code loads, these companies can collect data about what the user does on that web page. It also injects what's called a PCM script, which, according to Meta, helps aggregate events, like online purchases, before those events are used for targeted advertising and measurement, and, according to Meta, quote, helps Meta respect the user's ATT opt-out choice, unquote. A follow-up study published yesterday says that TikTok's in-app browser is capable of tracking all keyboard inputs, including every tap on any button, link, image or other component rendered, unquote. Remember, they're talking about monitoring other websites, not their own app.

Starting point is 00:07:36 Forbes reported that TikTok confirmed that those features exist in the code, but the company said it is not using them. An industry update now on the all-important e-commerce payment side. Walmart is looking to expand its payment offerings now that PayPal's former CFO is on the team. The retail giant's new CFO, John Rainley, recently joined the company after nearly seven years at PayPal and provided some insight into future payment opportunities during this week's earnings call. Executives say one of their top priorities will be investing in payment systems in other countries, and they will be starting in India. And finally, just in case you thought we'd send you off into the weekend on a good note, here's something popping up today in some meta ad

Starting point is 00:08:25 managers a dialogue box reading quote as part of our ongoing efforts to support advertisers through industry and regulatory changes we are making changes to how conversions are reported such as expanding our use of conversion modeling unquote The message ends with this bizarre conclusion, quote, you may see more complete reporting, unquote. Okay, bros, can you just not? Well, this is it, your last chance to lock in the premium podcast for just $4.99 a month. It's super easy to buy. It takes Apple Pay, Google Pay.

Starting point is 00:09:04 You can cancel anytime, no annual subscriptions. And if you grab that right now, it will not change. But that offer disappears after this weekend, goes back to the usual price of $10 a month. So lock in the $4.99 now by tapping the link in the show notes or going to todayindigital.com slash premium feed. And that'll do it for the week. Today in Digital Marketing is produced by EngageQ

Starting point is 00:09:28 Digital on the traditional territories of the Tsunamic First Nation on Vancouver Island. Our associate producer is Steph Gunn, production coordinator Sarah Guild, music licensing by Source Audio, and our theme composer Mark Blevis has found himself in a bit of a rut lately.

Starting point is 00:09:43 Every day feels like the same day. He takes the morning train, he works from 9 to 5, and then he takes another home again. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend, friends. I'll see you on Monday. Following the footsteps of heroes like you I got nothing to take And I don't wanna say I just Love the guy you betrayed

Today in Digital Marketing - How the “Vicarious Haptic Effect” Can Boost Your ROI

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