Today in Digital Marketing - “I Mean, Exclusivity Was An Option…”

Episode Date: February 8, 2021

Get the entire show content, with links and images, as a daily email newsletter! Subscribe at TodayInDigital.com/newsletterSurprising insights from 22 million social media posts... TikTok moves quickly on e-commerce functionality, why authority is the key to ranking higher in Google, and what happens when two brands accidentally use the same stock video in their Superbowl ads.Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing us!About the Podcast:Join Our Free Slack CommunityGet this as a daily email newsletterAdvertising and ClassifiedsLeave a VoicemailFollow Tod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok • TwitchToday 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, surprising insights from 22 million social media posts, TikTok moves quickly on e-commerce functionality, why authority is the key to ranking higher in Google, and what happens when two brands accidentally use the same stock video in their Super Bowl ads. Happy cultural holidays, Slovenia! I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. It's 1996. The marketing people at Pepsi are in a fierce battle for the hearts and minds of cola drinkers. One of the promotional ideas they have is a contest. A pretty simple one, by today's standards. Under each cap is a point value. Maybe one point, maybe two,

maybe five. Collect enough points, and you can redeem them for merch like T-shirts and sunglasses. Introducing the new Pepsi Stuff catalog. You're listening to the TV ad they ran for it. It showed a T-shirt cost 75 points, sunglasses 175. Now, the more Pepsi you drink, the more great stuff you're going to get. The final scene of this spot is this huge Harrier jet landing outside a school.

The top pops open, and it's a high schooler inside who looks at the camera and says, Sure beats the boss. And the caption reads, Fighter jet, 7 million points. It was a joke, of course. Mathematically, there was no way to even buy 7 million points worth of Pepsi products. But one teenager found a loophole. Buried in that contest's terms and conditions was a clause that said

you could buy Pepsi points for 10 cents each. He ran the numbers and realized he'd need $700,000 to buy the points he needed for the Harrier jet. He didn't have 700 grand, of course. What he did have was a phone. And within a couple of weeks, he'd convinced five big pocket investors to front that $700,000. After all, $700,000 to buy a $23 million jet, a 32 times ROI? Who wouldn't? So he raised the money and couriered a certified check for the amount to Pepsi.

And Pepsi told him to pound rocks. It was a joke, they said. Nobody would take that ad seriously. So this kid and his investors took Pepsi to court and sued them for breach of contract. Which brings us to today's quiz. And it's a simple one. Who won? Who won in that court case? The kid whose position was, dude, you said 7 million points and I've got them, cough up the jet. Or Pepsi, whose position was, dude, it was a joke, you're not getting a jet. The answer, later in today's episode.

TikTok has told some of its preferred advertisers about some new e-commerce The answer, later in today's episode. And second, a way for brands to showcase products like a live stream shopping show. Think of this like one of those old school TV shopping channels, except now people watch it on their phone and they can buy it right in the app. They've actually already been testing these in the Chinese version of the app and have made so much money off of their cut of this that revenue from this is actually now bigger than revenue from ads. Quoting socialmediatoday.com, TikTok has been testing in-video commerce links for some time, which was advanced last year with its new Shopify partnership. The new catalogs option would provide another presentation advancement on this front, likely via an added tab on selected profiles and video clips, linking through to an in-app showcase of sorts,

which could look similar to the last innovation, live stream shopping, which TikTok tested with Walmart back in December. Either way, it's clear 2021's major e-commerce moves will be direct in-app purchases. Will the value be strong enough for us digital marketers to be willing to hand a percentage of sales over to the platform, as opposed to just running our own cheaper, I don't know, Shopify store? Some other quick TikTok news. The company announced a partnership with Universal Music Group today, giving TikTok users access to a broader music library.

That's users, as in regular users. That doesn't mean you or me, sadly. Did you know this? Brands are still restricted to their commercial music library, which contains only 7,000 tracks. And to use one of those tracks, you actually have to connect with their partnerships team. It's true. TikTok says it's for, quote, any account that uses TikTok for marketing, advertising, sponsorships, endorsement, or publicity, including official brand accounts, their promotional partners, NGOs and government organizations.

Which probably means you. I know. It sucks. Bloomberg is reporting today that Twitter plans to offer a compromise to the long sought after edit button, an undo send button instead. But if Bloomberg sources are to be believed, this won't be free. It will be part of a premium monthly subscription. Think of it like Twitter Plus. Also being considered for that package, a way to tip authors and more ways to customize your profile. Last summer, Twitter did a survey which asked users if they'd also be willing to pay

to enable longer and better quality video uploads, to turn on automated responses, and to get improved analytics. Some people also believe that they may be moving their TweetDeck application into a subscription plan soon. A product manager already confirmed last month that they are working on a huge update for the app. Twitter is taking this seriously. They have a team devoted to building out the subscription offering. It does seem to be positioned at the average user, though, and doesn't appear, so far at least,

to be an enhanced package of services for marketers. They already charge a high price for historical analytics and access to the full stream of data, something they call the firehose. For its part, Twitter declined to comment on the report. One component of the Google search algorithm is something they call EAT. That's E-A-T. It stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

In essence, Google tries to figure out if you or your brand is an expert in a particular topic, and if it thinks you are, you get ranked higher. And this created a bit of a challenge when it first rolled out for content managers who scrambled to try to understand what kind of content would convince Google of this. In a recent Hangout, someone asked Google search engineer John Mueller, when we want to rank for a specific topic on Google, is it a good practice to also cover related topics? For example, if we sell laptops, when you want to rank for that,

is it useful to create posts like reviewing laptops, introducing the best new laptops, those kinds of things? Here's John's response. This is always useful because what you're essentially doing is on the one hand for search engines, you're kind of building out your reputation of knowledge on that specific topic area.

And for users as well, it provides a little bit more context on why they should trust you. If they see that you have all of this knowledge on this general topic area, and you show that, and you present that regularly, then it makes it a lot easier for them to trust you on something very specific that you're also providing. For search engines as well, it's something

where if we can recognize that this website is really good for this broader topic area, then if someone is searching for that broader topic area, we can try to show that website as well. We don't have to purely focus on individual pages, but we'll say, oh, it looks like you're looking for a new laptop. Like this website has a lot of information on various facets around laptops. This is actually more helpful than it may seem on the surface. For years, the standard advice was to post lots of blog articles,

like two to three a week if you can. An entire industry formed around outsourcing production of massive amounts of low-quality blog posts. But with EAT in play, most SEO experts today say don't worry about the blog as much. Focus on three or four articles that you spend a lot of time on, answering lots of people's questions,

keeping it updated. In other words, be the single best source on the internet for the topic you want to rank for, and the traffic will come. Well, this was embarrassing. With lots of eyes focused on the Super Bowl, and we marketers focused on the ads in the Super Bowl, some of those eyes spotted something interesting.

Two Super Bowl ads using the exact eyes spotted something interesting. Two Super Bowl ads using the exact same stock video footage. Yikes. The two brands were Indeed and Guaranteed Rate. The clip was really brief, like only half a second or so. It was of a mom carrying a toddler on her back, running into a living room. So if you spotted that, yes, it happened. The videos are in today's premium newsletter. The president of the stock video company said exclusivity was an option. The brands just chose the cheaper self-service version and, well, you get what you pay for. By the way, viewership for the game was down 15% from last year, but viewership of the ads on YouTube up 70%. Some fascinating numbers from Social Insider,

which took 22 million brand posts across all the major platforms and did a massive number crunch on them to see how 2020 fared compared to 2019. Among the highlights, quoting from their report, the trending platform of the moment, Instagram, seems to be the place where brands are getting a small increase in engagement. Overall, the average engagement rate for brands on Instagram increased just a bit to 1.16%. On Facebook, everything is about ads.

The engagement stayed flat compared with 2019, and brands reached a median engagement of 0.26%. Twitter is almost dead for all industries in terms of engagement. Engagement was 1 20th of 1%. All 35 industry studies published images as the primary type of social media content. On the Instagram feed, the posting frequency declined by about 6% in 2020 and the average Facebook posts per day increased by about 6%. The premium newsletter has a link to a video wrap-up on all the numbers

and a bunch of charts if you are a visual person. Two small items to wrap up. Google's Chrome browser will now automatically hide the content of any web pop-up notifications when you're sharing your screen on a meeting, including notifications from Google Chat, email notifications, and third-party websites. You will still get a pop-up showing where the notification is from, but its content will be hidden. And Instagram today rolled out an update to text on stories. Now you can animate them.

Oh, and as for the quiz. Who won in the court case between the kid who collected enough points to redeem them for the jet offered in Pepsi's TV ad and Pepsi, who said the ad was meant to be humorous, not literal? The answer? You're not going to like this Pepsi one. The judge agreed with the company, saying no reasonable person could have believed that they intended to sell a $23 million fighter jet for $700,000. Actually, when you read the ruling, the judge comes out as a bit of an insufferable prick, saying, quote, The notion of traveling to school in a Harrier jet is an exaggerated adolescent fantasy. The callow

youth featured in the commercial is a highly improbable pilot, one who could barely be trusted with the keys to his parents' car, much less the prize aircraft of the United States Marine Corps. This is my favorite part of his ruling, though. Also, no school would provide

landing space for a student's fighter jet. Well, Pepsi actually continued running the ad with two small changes. That fighter jet was now listed at 700 million points, and there was a tiny line under it that read, Just kidding. On today's issue of our premium newsletter, imagine a better Bitly. As you may know, the free plan of LinkShortener Bitly only gives you 30 days of analytics. You need to pay them monthly if you want more.

In today's newsletter, I point subscribers to a better LinkShortener with full analytics, including the ability to customize the destination based on time of day or day of the week or geography, and even add your own custom domain name, all for $59. Thanks for watching. can get this podcast as a daily email newsletter complete with images, related videos, links to dive deeper, and newsletter exclusive content. Just go to todayindigital.com slash newsletter to sign up or click the link in this episode's notes. That guild I joined in Elder Scrolls Online is having a meeting tonight. A meeting that sounds like it might be filled with some drama, actually. The notice actually says, feelings will get hurt. I 100% am not going to miss this. And now here it is, your moment of marketing zen. John here says that he prefers the leading cola to Pepsi. I want you to taste both colas, John. This one. Well, what do you know, Pepsi?