Today in Digital Marketing - Idiots Selling Garbage: TikTok's Latest Commerce Obsession

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Friday, January 12th. Today, Meta takes away more targeting, but is anyone using interests anyway? Why Chrome users are now worth less money to your brand? Microsoft's new Ad AI tries to do everything for you. And how hard is TikTok pushing its shop? So hard, you can get thousands of views for selling literal junk.

Starting point is 00:00:25 I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in Digital Marketing. 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 insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters.

Starting point is 00:00:47 Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Here we go again. Meta is removing more targeting interests. These are the topics you can choose when setting up an ad campaign. Things like football or incense or horror films. But as meta and the marketing industry as a whole leans even further into machine learning, these manual tweaks continue to be taken away. This time, though, we don't know which specific interests, other than what Meta calls topics that, quote, people may perceive as sensitive, unquote, and are probably related to health, race, and ethnicity.

Starting point is 00:01:27 Quoting Meta, Starting January 15th, 2024, we are removing or consolidating some detailed targeting options that relate to topics people may perceive as sensitive. Existing ad sets with impacted targeting options will continue to run until March 18th, but will require you to update your targeting selections.

Starting point is 00:01:44 After this date, we will stop delivering ads to the discontinued detailed targeting options While interest targeting was the norm for many advertisers for many years a while back, most have pivoted away from many narrowly defined audiences into a simpler collection of broad audiences. And while this might help avoid misuse, it doesn't completely eliminate the risk. Quoting social media today, for example, while you can't target people based on race, you can target people residing in certain regions, which some would suggest could lead to, effectively, the same result. Given this, there's no way for Meta to fully remove all forms of questionable audience targeting, while over time, Meta has also continued to improve its automated ad targeting tools to the point where giving advertisers more manual options is actually,

Starting point is 00:02:37 often, more restrictive, unquote. I personally miss the days when you could use Meta's ad platform recreationally. In case you were curious how many single British grandmothers liked Chuck Norris, you could get an answer. In my experience, that target group? Not particularly profitable. You've heard it before and now there's new data to remind you the first few seconds of your brand's video ad are the most critical. TikTok this week releasing data from a study it did with Media Science. They found that 50% of the impact of a TikTok ad happens in the first six seconds, that captures 90% cumulative impact on ad recall and 80% cumulative recall on brand awareness. Also, quoting Search Engine Land, quote,

Starting point is 00:03:34 Ads have a greater impact and are viewed longer when they are placed next to popular, relevant content, regardless of the platform. For instance, when placed alongside trending content, the same ad becomes more relevant to viewers, enhancing its effectiveness, increasing purchase intent by 9%. We are beginning to see the effects of Google's slow removal of tracking cookies from its Chrome browser. And an interesting piece today in Gizmodo says it may be damaging to the ad revenues that some websites rely on. Quote, according to Raptive, an ad tech firm, Google's new cookie-less users

Starting point is 00:04:17 are bringing in a whopping 30% less revenue. What's really surprising is that Raptive thinks that's good news. Quote, if you'd have asked me a week ago what I thought the numbers could be, I would have said cookie-less users would perform 50% worse, so I'm optimistic, unquote, said Paul Bannister, chief strategy officer at Raptive. Quote, the goal is to design a system to increase privacy and also help publishers keep making money, and a 30% drop in monetization, feels like a hill that can be climbed, unquote.

Starting point is 00:04:49 The problem is cookies are one of the primary ways that information is collected and shared on the web. Without cookies, it's hard for websites to tell the ad system much more than, there's a person here reading this really cool article. Advertisers aren't willing to pay as much for random internet users, so every time the page loads for a cookie-less Chrome user, it's bringing in less money than it might have before. Microsoft has launched a new site called the Retail Media

Starting point is 00:05:20 Creative Studio, and it contains an AI tool capable of generating ads in their entirety based just on a product sales page. You can then customize its output using text prompts like make the couch brighter or the perfume bottle should be bigger. Microsoft says its AI will try to stick to your style guide if you have one. Even more interestingly, the company says its AI is generating things based on its understanding of what works best in the ad market. Quoting Microsoft, once the banner ad campaign goes live, Microsoft Retail Media also leverages AI-powered algorithms to choose and display the

Starting point is 00:06:00 most effective banner creative based on key performance metrics, such as click-through rates and sales conversion rates. With AI-driven optimization, advertisers can improve banner campaign performance without spending time running A-B testing, unquote. By the way, if you're wondering where Microsoft's once-hyped PromoteIQ tool went, that actually is Microsoft Retail Media Now. The company just rebranded it. A bunch of nice new updates at YouTube for marketers who use their live broadcasting

Starting point is 00:06:34 service for things like product reveals or corporate events. Channel moderators can now see the history of a user's previous chats and past moderation activity during a live stream. That includes deleted chats, timeouts, hides, etc., as well as messages from the last 30 days. This is something the live streaming platform Twitch has had for some time now. Also, if you have a podcast, you can now ingest your existing audio RSS feed directly inside Creator Studio. This means you can take all your past episodes and make them available in YouTube and YouTube Music. Old episodes will not flood your subscribers

Starting point is 00:07:11 with notifications, but new episodes will send out alerts just like any new long form upload. The company reminded people in its update today that it has a pretty robust content discovery system. Quote, if someone is watching another video on a topic you cover in your podcast, there's a chance your video will be suggested alongside it or recommended right on their homepage, unquote. Finally, if you have a long form video that you want to turn into a vertical short, the company's released a new workflow to change the layout more

Starting point is 00:07:41 easily. You can crop, zoom, and stack your videos so they're more consumable on mobile. This feature is more aimed at live streaming gamers who rely on shorts to promote their channels. We are beginning to see what priorities Instagram is focusing on for the year ahead. And according to reporting today from the information, that focus will be threefold creation, creators and friend sharing.

Starting point is 00:08:09 And that trifecta aimed specifically at teens. Quoting from the information with the new lineup, priority will be given to supporting the creators who are most likely to drive teen engagement on the app. Instagram's investment in helping creators make money on the platform will also be focused on efforts that have the most sway with teens. The fact that Instagram wants staff focused on the creators who keep teens glued to the app isn't exactly surprising, but it is notable given the external tumult

Starting point is 00:08:42 surrounding the app going into 2024, particularly around how Instagram handles youth safety issues, unquote. Meta is facing a lawsuit alleging it designed its products to addict teenagers. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is expected to testify in the U.S. Senate this month about its response to online child exploitation. If your brand was one of the many that left X, formerly Twitter, you may have not known where to set up shop instead. There's Blue Sky, which is actually a Twitter spinoff fronted by the former CEO Jack Dorsey.

Starting point is 00:09:18 It's gotten some traction, but not a ton of brand attention. There's Mastodon, which is a pretty solid social network. No ads, no algorithm, no suggested posts, but some people found the initial setup to be confusing. And there's Threads, Meta's upstart. This is where most defecting brands seem to have gone. And while there are no ads there now, of course there will be, along with the usual meta issues like accounts being automatically banned for no reason and with no appeal. But soon, that decision could be made a little easier. Mastodon operates using a network protocol called ActivityPub. Other websites that use that protocol can operate interchangeably with it.

Starting point is 00:10:00 And Threads is building that connection out. It already works with a handful of Threads accounts, but now TechCrunch is reporting today the two sites will be fully connected by the end of the year. What that means is if you set up your brand on Mastodon, people who use Meta's Threads app will be able to follow your brand's account, interact with you, reply, like, repost, and so on.

Starting point is 00:10:23 Quoting TechCrunch, quote, other questions remain unresolved at this time, like whether threads would surface third-party Mastodon client in its algorithmic feed, whether it would ultimately allow for algorithmic choice, whether Mastodon content would be made to appear visually differentiated from threads content in some way, and more. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg believed that Thread should be totally open, essentially that his view was that open

Starting point is 00:10:48 was the future of social networking. This might explain why Meta may be pursuing this, perhaps to thwart coming regulation or to take over Twitter's space in the zeitgeist as new owner Elon Musk turns it into an everyday app, potentially diluting its value as a fast-breaking news network and home to conversations. But it could also be that Zuckerberg is simply foretelling

Starting point is 00:11:11 where the direction of the web is going, unquote. We are active on both platforms. On Mastodon, we are at todayindigitalatmas.to. On Threads, we are at Today in Digital Marketing. 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 insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Finally, if you've noticed your For You page on TikTok has become an endless stream of TikTok shop posts and live streams selling all sorts of nonsense, you are not the only one. The app is obviously doubling down on its commerce play and, for American users at least, jamming the app with people selling things. And as Business Insider noted today, so far, it's a pretty good deal for sellers. Quote, TikTok has been subsidizing massive discounts and free shipping to Woo customers,

Starting point is 00:12:25 making it a great deal for sellers and buyers. Even sellers have noticed how shop content seems to get boosted. One creator told BI that a post with a shop link got almost a million views, while her normal posts got only 2,000 to 3,000 views. Shop posts are all over your TikTok feed now, for better or worse. And unlike the regular For You page, which has an uncanny ability to predict what content you'll love, the TikTok shop has a way of showing you stuff you don't love, unquote. One writer at New York Magazine, John Herman, tested it out from the seller's side to see if it would promote literal junk. Quote, he signed up as a seller and listed a single item,

Starting point is 00:13:02 a used mechanical pencil that he happened to have on his desk, for $1. Then he started a live stream to sell this used pencil, and the incredibly banal live stream got more than 1,200 viewers. He writes, quote, I had intended to broadcast to an audience of about three. In the end, my grueling stream for a worthless product reached more than 1,200 people and was liked by 157 of them. According to my account dashboard, this was an outlier experience, and my stream got more views than 99% of streams from accounts with similar, that is, basically no, followers. I strongly suspect that the reason the stream got an audience is that I was selling something.

Starting point is 00:13:46 I was using e-commerce features the company was trying really hard to promote and that rewards users for trying, unquote. He notes that many of those viewers seem to have gotten a notification in their inbox that he had gone live. They didn't even follow him. Herman was selling a piece of garbage, had almost no followers, and was doing a really boring live stream. This was a terrible experience for anyone who happened to scroll past it or get alerted. And yet, TikTok appeared to promote it heavily, unquote. So, progress? I guess. We'll get an expert for you to answer your question here on the podcast. All you have to do is leave your question at todayindigital.com slash voicemail or tap the link at the top of the show notes.

Starting point is 00:14:53 Nothing on the calendar this weekend. So that means probably video gaming, probably embarrassing myself in front of people. So if you want to be part of that humiliation audience, you can follow my live stream. Go to twitch.tv slash low effort dad. And that will do it for the week. Today in digital marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of this dynamic first nation on Vancouver Island. Our production coordinator is Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Blevis.

Starting point is 00:15:23 Music licensing by Source Audio. Ad coordination by Red Circle. And we still haven't forgotten about her. She's still on mat leave. Our associate producer, the intrepid Steph Gunn. I'm Todd Maffin. The Twitch stream again, twitch.tv slash low effort dad. Have a restful

Starting point is 00:15:40 weekend. I'll see you on Monday. It's the season for new styles, and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal. Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N.ca.

Today in Digital Marketing - Idiots Selling Garbage: TikTok's Latest Commerce Obsession

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