Today in Digital Marketing - How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Friday, January 17th. This week, the hammer finally comes down on TikTok. What that means for ad prices ahead. Also, why Google may be blocking third-party search tools. Meta is starting to look a little unsafe for marketers. Amazon cancels a popular consumer program. And Instagram goes back to 2019. Because why not?

Starting point is 00:00:25 And everything is crumbling into tiny pieces anyway. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead in our Friday wrap up of the week in digital marketing. We start, of course, with TikTok. The U.S. Supreme Court in an unusual unanimous ruling this morning says the sell or be banned legislation can stay. President Biden today said it's up to Trump to decide if that administration will enforce the law. Trump today would only say stay tuned. The ban starts this Sunday. Trump takes office a day later. TikTok spent the week prepping advertisers for a potential pause in advertising due to the ban, which it says will be

Starting point is 00:01:03 temporary. Advertisers will still apparently be able to access TikTok's ad buying system even if the ban happens, though U.S. targeting will be blocked. But ads can be purchased for other countries, and past campaign data should remain available. But if Oracle, which is TikTok's cloud service provider in the U.S., is forced to stop hosting data, media buyers are unsure whether they'll still be able to use the platform's ad system after all. Meanwhile, the battle for ad dollars is heating up with competitors vying for TikTok share. Digiday had a great piece this week on how other platforms are ramping up their efforts. Snapchat is highlighting its audience overlap with TikTok in both daily and monthly users.

Starting point is 00:01:46 YouTube is sweetening the deal to lure more ad spend, offering incentives like spend X amount, get X in credits. Pinterest is offering a percentage match for advertisers increasing their investment starting on or before January 22nd. And Meta is also offering a percentage match for incremental spend on Reels ads or additional budgets in January. Triller, the video app, is making another push to attract TikTok's brands and influencers. It plans to offer creators full-service teams

Starting point is 00:02:18 to move their content over and has launched a tool for backing up and uploading TikTok videos to their app. The company also wants to build relationships with advertising and talent agencies to connect with brands and creators. And after millions of TikTok refugees flocked this week to the Chinese app RedNote, rumors say the app might soon segregate U.S. and foreign users from its Chinese audience to curb outside influence.

Starting point is 00:02:45 An update is rumored to soon move foreign IPs to separate servers, potentially ruining the app for Chinese Americans. No official confirmation yet. All right, two meta now, and many marketers are looking to that company as plan B. But influencers? Not so much. Since the Supreme Court hearing this week on TikTok's potential shutdown, creators have been dragging Meta online, turning off its data sharing and even some deleting their Facebook accounts.

Starting point is 00:03:16 Google searches for how to delete Facebook and Instagram have spiked, especially after Meta scrapped its third-party fact-checking program. Even for those sticking with Meta, concerns loom. Can the algorithm deliver content to the right audience? Is monetization even viable for influencers? To where are anti-Meta users and creators heading? Many told Marketing Brew this week that YouTube is looking like the rebound platform of choice. Says Erica Maggs, a TikTok creator with more than 100,000 followers,

Starting point is 00:03:45 quote, don't make us go over there to Meta. The vibes are not the same, unquote. So in addition to removing any fact-checking, Meta also this week quietly dismantled the system that prevented misinformation from spreading in the U.S. According to an internal document obtained by platformer machine learning classifiers that once identified and limited the reach of viral hoaxes have now been switched off. Those classifiers which had identified those hoaxes were effective in reducing their reach by more than 90%.

Starting point is 00:04:17 The removal of this system means false claims like Pope Francis endorses Trump and Pizzagate hoaxes can now spread on Facebook, Instagram, and threads. Meta declined to comment on the changes. The U.S. Supreme Court also had another social media case on its docket. And this week, it shut down Meta's appeal in a $7 billion lawsuit claiming Facebook and Instagram inflated its ad reach metrics by up to 400%. Advertisers say Meta fraudulently counted multiple accounts belonging to the same users to pad its potential reach numbers, leaving budgets based on unreliable data. Now, Meta faces billions in damages.

Starting point is 00:05:00 The case covers ads purchased since August 15th of 2014. So if you bought ads since then, again, 11 years ago, you may be eligible for some compensation. With Meta raking in $116 billion in ad revenue in the first nine months alone, stakes are high. Meta is also preparing for another round of layoffs, this time focusing on, quote, low performers, unquote. This according to an internal memo from Mark Zuckerberg that was obtained by media. He said they'll now act faster on performance-based cuts

Starting point is 00:05:31 instead of managing people out over a year. The exact number of job cuts is unclear, but managers at Meta have been told that around 5% of employees will be let go

Starting point is 00:05:42 starting February 10th. The plan is to backfill those roles in 2025. And if you can't beat them, delete them. Meta is blocking links to PixelFed, that is a decentralized Instagram rival labeling the links as spam and deleting them immediately off of Facebook. PixelFed is an open-source image sharing program, and it has seen a surge in signups amid Meta's controversial rule changes. All right, to other social media changes in the past five days.

Starting point is 00:06:19 Instagram is reviving one of its more chaotic features. A new tab in the Reels feed will show videos liked or commented on by a user's friends. This feature is a nod to the old activity feed, which was removed in 2019. Removed because people find it creepy that their friends can just look up a list of videos which they liked. So that's coming back for some reason. The newsletter platform Substack is also eyeing TikTok's audience. Live video was made available to all publishers on Substack this week, providing a potential alternative for brands and creators to monetize their content. That's kind of a weird flex for X.

Starting point is 00:06:58 This week, the company shared that users spent 24 minutes in the app per user in 2024. Maybe they didn't look up their history, because that's down from 30 minutes in March and 38 minutes pre-Musk. Blue Sky is getting a photo-sharing app called Flashes, created by a third-party developer and powered by Blue Sky's AT protocol. It won't be an Instagram clone, but Flashes will support photo posts up to four images and videos up to one minute. Posts will also sync with Blue Sky,

Starting point is 00:07:30 including comments and DMs. LinkedIn's new job match tool will show you how your skills stack up against job ads and offer tips to boost your chances of landing an interview. It'll even help you write a cover letter. Pinterest has a new report out, identifying what it says are the colors most likely to resonate with consumers this year. an interview. It'll even help you write a cover letter. Pinterest has a new report out identifying what it says are the colors most likely to resonate with consumers this year. It's a little hard to

Starting point is 00:07:49 describe these in a podcast, so you may want to go to our email newsletter for that. We had this in yesterday's issue. Those colors are though cherry red, butter yellow, aura indigo, dill green, and alpine oat, which is a, I guess a fancy way of saying beige. And Twitch clocked 1.58 billion hours of watch time in December. It may sound like a lot, but that is its lowest amount of watch time in four years. Yet new streamers are still joining, live channels are on the rise. The mystery remains. Twitch's financial struggles and policy drama have ruffled a few feathers this year,

Starting point is 00:08:25 but AI emote's backlash alone doesn't seem big enough to explain a viewership drop this steep. All right, to online advertising now, and Google's U-turn on fingerprinting, which is effective next month, opens up new opportunities for ad targeting. Now, while advertisers welcome to the update, experts told AdExchanger this week the marketers should proceed with caution. The UK's Information Commissioner's Office has called Google's move irresponsible, warning that businesses do not have free reign to use fingerprinting. Timu is testing an Amazon-style ad program, letting merchants pay to boost visibility through higher search rankings and display ads. With a cost-per-click model, the pilot targets U.S. sellers,

Starting point is 00:09:15 though some international merchants are also involved. The pilot is still in its early stages. Broader rollout plans remain uncertain. Pinterest is doubling down on shoppable ads. It's CRO telling AdExchanger this week they want to make it easier to buy through its platform, with plenty of innovations, they say, in visual search and discovery. There were not many specifics there, though. Netflix's ad pivot is paying off big time. After a shaky start, the platform's ad-supported tier has gained massive traction,

Starting point is 00:09:46 a marketer predicting a 43% revenue boost, reaching just over $2 billion this year. While still not a top 10 player in digital ads, Netflix is on track to become one of the top sub-OTT ad platforms by the end of the decade. To search news now, and reports today say that Google is blocking tools that scrape search results, causing global outages for popular SEO tools like SEMrush. Many SEO services are struggling to access the data they usually gather from Google's search results pages. Also, a warning that scammers are hijacking Google Ads accounts from media buyers. When ad executives log into their ad accounts after a Google search which they've clicked on, obviously a bad one, fraudsters serve fake sponsored links, hack the accounts, and

Starting point is 00:10:39 use the funds to run more phishing ads and fraudulent campaigns, funneling the money back to themselves. Three major account operators reported breaches last month. New reports of the same malicious ad surfaced this week. Google said it is investigating the issue. We may soon have a cousin to Performance Max. Search Max might be coming to Google Ads soon, as a Search Max option has started appearing in the Match Type report for some advertisers. There's not much info on Search Max yet, but Google Ads and SEO specialist Adrian Decker has more details in our email newsletter today,

Starting point is 00:11:15 which is free to sign up to. Just go to todayindigital.com slash newsletter or tap the link at the top of the show notes. Google has told the European Union that it will not add fact checks to Search or YouTube. This ahead of the EU's plans to expand disinformation laws. This surprising pushback follows Google's previous voluntary commitments, which are now being formalized into law

Starting point is 00:11:38 under the Digital Services Act. All this while Google's search dominance may be finally slipping. For the first time since 2015, Google's global share of the search market fell below 90% for the first three months of 2024. In the US, Google's share also took a hit, falling from 90.3% in November to 87.3% in December. Google has maintained its search monopoly with a consistent 90 percent to 92 percent market share for almost a decade. Can click through rate manipulation hack Google

Starting point is 00:12:12 rankings? Briefly, yes, but it's a short lived illusion. The Canadian local SEO agency Sterling Skies experiment showed brigaded clicks push a restaurant's ranking higher, but over time, its ranking slowly dipped back to where it started. It was actually an interesting experiment. They were all on a live webinar together, and they said, everyone go click this one restaurant, and then they measured it, and indeed, the rankings went up a bit. But if Google detects fake clicks,

Starting point is 00:12:42 they could drop your ranking instead of boosting it. It is risky, unsustainable, and probably not worth it. And finally, eMarketer predicts generative search will become the new norm in 2025, reshaping ad spend and search strategies. Tech giants and retailers like Amazon and Walmart are already adopting AI-powered search, with 40% of U.S. customers interested in using AI-driven search engines for online shopping. Alright, speaking of online shopping, a few notes from the Commerce File this week. Amazon is shutting down its Prime Try Before You Buy program at the end of this month. The service let Prime members try up to six items before paying.

Starting point is 00:13:24 A spokesperson says it's retiring because of limited item availability, but Amazon's push to reduce returns probably had something to do with it. And Google wants retailers to build their own branded robot overlord with Google Agent Space. Brands can now create custom AI agents for personalized product recommendations, answer questions in real time, and automate tasks like inventory management, customer service, and loss prevention. And a few other tidbits just to close out that didn't fit anywhere else. Google is making its AI features free in workspace apps like Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and Meet. Well, kind of free.

Starting point is 00:14:07 First, if you wanted to use those features before, you had to spend $20 a month to be part of its Gemini business plan. But of course, there is a catch, and that catch is that all workspace plans are getting a price hike of about $2 more per month per user, whether you use the AI or not. And WPP's recent mandate requiring its 114,000 employees to return to the office four days per week has sparked new debate over workplace flexibility in the ad industry. Between the extremes, WorkLife reports that many agencies have embraced hybrid models and plan to stick with them, at least for now. By the way, a recent survey found that four

Starting point is 00:14:45 out of 10 workers would rather leave their partner than return to the office. So those were the top digital marketing stories over the last five days. All the sources are in our email newsletter, which comes out every weekday at five o'clock Eastern and is completely free. Sign up at todayindigital.com slash newsletter or top the link at the top of the show notes. So with Meta, Amazon and other platforms shutting down their diversity and inclusion programs, what does that mean for the average marketer who still has such a program? Tuesday on our weekly deep dive episode, I speak to a marketing scientist who has tested what posting about your DEI programs does to your brand's social media engagement.

Starting point is 00:15:32 And the results may surprise you. Follow us on social media. We are on Blue Sky, Mastodon, YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok, Snapchat, and Pinterest. Go to todayindigital.com slash social or tap the link at the top of the show notes. I'm Todd Maffin. Follow me on Blue Sky at toddmaffin.com. Thank you for listening. Have a restful weekend. The next newsletter is out Monday, and I will be back in your podcast feed on Tuesday.

Today in Digital Marketing - How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

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