Today in Digital Marketing - I, For One, Welcome Our New Clubhouse Overlords

Episode Date: March 30, 2021

Instagram expands IGTV ads, how much senior marketers plan to change their media spend this year, Facebook’s program for laid-off ad agency people is in more countries now, and the clever Earth Day campaign you wish you’d have thought of first!Get the entire show content, with links and images, as a DAILY email newsletter! Subscribe at TodayInDigital.com/newsletterPodcast Perks: Exclusive Deals for ListenersAdvertising: Perks (free!) • Ads • Classifieds • Brand TakeoversJoin the Community: Slack or DiscordEnjoying the show? Please rate and review us!Follow Tod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok (daily digital marketing tips)Get this as a daily email newsletterLeave a VoicemailToday in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital. Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Today, Instagram expands IGTV ads, how much senior marketers plan to change their media spend this year, Facebook's program for laid-off ad agency people is in more countries now, and the clever Earth Day campaign you wish you'd have thought of first. It's Tuesday, March 30th, 2021. Happy World Bipolar Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Twitter has cloned it. Facebook is working on a clone, and now another big platform has jumped on board the Clubhouse trend.

Spotify announced today it has acquired the company behind the live sports audio app Locker Room. Clubhouse, if you haven't been following, is an app that lets you set live audio meetings up. It's still invitation only and still only on iOS. But the format's been gaining a lot of interest. The head of R&D at Spotify told The Verge that Spotify would let anyone host conversations. For those creators currently under contract with the company, they won't need to promise they will only use the Spotify app, at least for now. Some analysts note this will be a pretty compelling funnel to Spotify's podcasting ecosystem. For instance, you could host a live

audio meeting, which would then automatically convert into a podcast app-ready MP3 file. Instagram is giving digital marketers in the UK and Australia another ad placement, IGTV. We've all been able to run organic content there, of course, but this is on the paid side. Instagram tested IGTV ads with US creators last May, and now they've let a small group in the UK and Australia turn on ads for their IGTV uploads. The ads will initially appear when people click to watch IGTV videos from previews in their feed. The video ads will be built for mobile and can be up to 15 seconds long.

But unlike regular Facebook platform ads, these are more like YouTube ads, where the video creator gets a share of the ads that run alongside their content. That share? Only 55% to the creator. To be fair, that's about the same that YouTube offers its partner program creators. Which is kind of weird when you think about it. I mean, they could have come in easily with a 75% share and probably gotten a lot more people to focus on IGTV,

which still has not proven to be the YouTube killer that Instagram was clearly hoping for. Google this morning announced some upgrades to Google Maps that marketers of restaurant brands will like. They're adding the ability to show delivery providers, pickup and delivery windows, fees, and order minimums. This will launch on mobile first, starting with Instacart and Albertson stores in the U.S. It will expand to other partners and restaurants later. More interestingly, they're also trying to improve curbside delivery by letting Google Maps tell the store which parking spot you're in. Also, when you place

an order for pickup on the store's app, you'll be able to add it to Maps. Google will then track your order, measure how far you are from the store, and send your phone a notification when it's calculated that it's time to leave. You can also share your ETA with the store. That ETA is updated live with traffic information so the store knows when to send your order out the door. A study of senior marketers has found most are optimistic about economic outlook in the U.S. and plan to increase their marketing spend over the next 12 months. In fact, that optimism was averaged at 66%. Max optimism is 100%. And while that might sound lukewarm to you,

that's actually near a historic high. And it's across all verticals. B2B products were even more optimistic. And good news for the platforms. Those polled said they plan to increase their overall marketing spend by 10% on average over the next 12 months. The premium newsletter today has some pretty charts, but suffice to say that is a sizable uptick. Even before the pandemic, that increase was averaging only around 6 or 7%.

The poll of 356 senior marketing executives was conducted last month by the CMO survey, Duke's Fuerka School of Business, Deloitte, and the American Marketing Association. Facebook has expanded its skills training program for ad agency professionals. It's called Rise. It's a collection of their blueprint training with industry connections and insights. It was being tested in Brazil, and they are now opening up access to agency professionals in Singapore, Italy, the U.S., and Canada. Quoting the company, In January 2021, U.S. ad agencies cut 4,800 jobs, reducing staffing to the lowest point since 2014.

Alongside these trends, internet media employment is at a record high. Digital roles in marketing are among the fastest growing in the industry, providing opportunities for agency professionals to develop new skills, hone old ones, or even pivot careers. Rise aims to help those in the industry better align with these trends, unquote.

The program runs using Facebook groups, of course. It's open to any advertising professional with at least one year of agency experience who was laid off in 2020. A clever campaign for Earth Day I thought I'd share. Pizza Hut in the UAE put up a website that could track whether people had internet access enabled on their phone or computer. If people turned off internet access, like all of it, cellular and Wi-Fi, and left it off for a full hour, Pizza Hut would send them a coupon for a free pizza. You can try it out yourself.

The website is at offlinehour.me. As soon as you disconnect the internet, a timer pops up. If you turn the internet back on in that hour, it stops and resets. They say they delivered 120 free pizzas to customers who successfully stayed offline that hour, it stops and resets. They say they delivered 120 free pizzas to customers who successfully stayed offline that hour. 120? That seems low to me, but what do I know? Which brings us to the lightning round. Google today said they have started to roll Flock out as a developer origin trial in Chrome. Flock is Google's solution to this whole first-party data thing. And they've launched a new website at PrivacySandbox.com

to update marketers and others on their forthcoming privacy tools. Instagram was having some issues today, so it wasn't just you. Google Search has added a fun little Easter egg. Google the phrase Suez Canal on desktop to check it out. You may have heard that Volkswagen is rebranding to Volkswagen to reflect their new focus on electric vehicles. It's not true. Turns out to have been an April Fool's joke they had been planning

that accidentally slipped out a couple of days early. And on my TikTok today, we cover the Twitter algorithm. You can find me there under the username Digital Marketing Secrets. Well, we've added a couple of new podcast perks to our perks page in the last few days. These are discounts that you can get by just being a listener. There are exclusive deals there for podcast producers, Facebook advertisers, people who work in agencies and more. You can find it at todayindigital.com slash perks, or tap the link in this episode's notes. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow.