Today in Digital Marketing - Immersive-Marketing Lessons from a Failed Video Game

Episode Date: February 18, 2021

What can a 20-year-old video game teach us about immersive marketing? Were Facebook’s ad reach numbers ever accurate?! The surprising finding about repurposing your video content. And will 2021 be the year of livestream commerce?Get the entire show content, with links and images, as a daily email newsletter! Subscribe at TodayInDigital.com/newsletterMORE:Join Our Free Slack CommunityGet this as a daily email newsletterEnjoying the show? Plese rate and review us!Reach Marketers: Ads • Classifieds • Brand TakeoversLeave a VoicemailFollow Tod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok (daily digital marketing tips)Today 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, what can a 20-year-old video game teach us about immersive marketing? Were Facebook's ad reach numbers ever accurate? The surprising finding about repurposing your brand's video content? And will 2021 be the year of live stream commerce? It's Thursday, February 18th, 2021. Welcome to Mars, Perseverance! Touchdown confirmed. Perseverance, safe flight on the surface, we're ready to begin seeking the sands of past life. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

About 20 years ago or so, there was this great video game called Majestic. Except you didn't play it. It played you. Here's how it worked. You went to the website to sign up. It asked for some contact info, your email address, your cell phone number, your fax number, and AOL instant messenger address. Remember, I said this was 20 years ago.

And then, the web server crashed. A few hours later, you got an email from customer support apologizing for the crash, saying there was a fire in the server farm, but they'll get it fixed that week. The next day, you got a text message from a guy saying, Listen, don't believe that fire story. It's a cover-up. I'll call you tomorrow with more details. About the same time, he faxed some codes and said they'd make more sense later. There never was a server crash, of course. It was just Act 1 in a deeply immersive game story about a shadow government conspiracy that used your actual real life as the narrative engine. It was free to try. The next four episodes required a $10 a month membership.

The game was paused after September 11th, given the subject matter, and then was completely shelved the next spring. I don't know if we, as marketers, would be able to get that deep into people's lives today. Between Cambridge Analytica and ransomware and spybots, I suspect that kind of storytelling might be a little too close to home for most consumers. But some brands are edging ever so closer to that line, and one of them is using the rather old-school channel of text messages to do it. The American cable network Showtime is promoting a phone number that if you send a text to it, you'll enter a group chat with the Gallaghers,

a fictional family in their show called Shameless. You can try it out yourself by texting pretty much anything to 708-578-7099. It'll send you a link to the platform they're using for it. But once you get in, it's kind of like that immersive video game. You're part of a group chat, complete with cattiness and extreme levels of profanity, per the show's characters. Other brands, too, are pushing more campaigns using text messaging as the pandemic has increased consumer use of smartphones.

The American restaurant chain Chipotle, for instance, ran a contest for free guacamole for a year. Users had to guess secret passwords in text messages they were sent. So, yeah, text messages. Who'd have guessed that everything old really does become new again? Let's stop for a moment and think about the behind-the-scenes effort that must have gone into implementing Facebook's far-reaching ban on Australian news. This was something that engineers and product managers

and executives and data analysts and public relations people spent a week or two, maybe more, in heads-down mode, putting this together. Yesterday, they pulled the trigger, removing all content from mainstream news organizations from the platform. But it wasn't just news sites. Hospitals, universities, government departments, the Bureau of Meteorology, the Department of Fire and Emergency Services, dozens more caught in the collateral damage,

all with their content removed. And Facebook blamed Australia for it, saying they only applied an intentionally broad definition of news because the draft legislation that Zuckerberg is so pissed about wasn't clear about what news is. But good news, not all publishers are gone. Australia's largest and longest running anti-vaxxer group is still there. Fake news sites that basically repost from InfoWars still up. And Rebel News, the far right website whose conspiracy theories Facebook considered to be so dangerous to

public safety, they banned its only Australian staff member from that platform. All of those still pumping out content. Meanwhile, something those engineers and product managers are apparently not working on, the broken ads platform. The New York Times reporting on yet another industry that can't run ads thanks to Facebook's overly aggressive AI, this time clothing specifically tailored for people with disabilities. Well, there's a lot of people who have very few options for clothing that looks good and professional. Jocelyn Maffin uses a wheelchair and speaks for Spinal Cord Injury BC. But also suits their disability needs.

For example, you know, for me, I need pants that are higher in the back because I sit all the time. And you can't find those at every given store. Oftentimes, they're only available from small businesses that tailor their clothes specifically to that audience. Full disclosure, Jocelyn is my wife. So that's where things stand. Facebook ads platform still broken. Facebook engineers apparently spending their time making more needles for Mark Zuckerberg's collection of voodoo dolls.

At least we can be grateful that Facebook's ads platform still reports accurate data. In related news, TechCrunch reports today that Facebook's ads platform failed to report accurate data and senior executives knew about it and did nothing. Quoting TechCrunch, Turns out in 2017, COO Sheryl Sandberg had already known for years there were problems with a free ad planning tool the company offers to marketers to display estimates of how many people campaigns running on its platform may reach, per newly unsealed court documents. The filing also reveals that a Facebook product manager for the potential reach tool warned the company was making revenue it, quote, never should have, unquote, off of wrong data. The unsealed documents pertain to a U.S. class action lawsuit filed in 2018,

which alleges that Facebook deceived advertisers by knowingly including fake and duplicate accounts in a potential reach metric. Facebook denies the claim but has acknowledged accuracy issues with the potential reach metric as far back as 2016 and also changed how it worked in 2019. Redacted documents from the lawsuit included the awkward detail that a Facebook employee had asked, quote, how long can we get away with the reach overestimation, unquote. Newly unsealed documents from the suit now reveal that in fall 2017, Sandberg acknowledged

in an internal email she had known about problems with potential reach for years. They also show Facebook repeatedly rejected internal proposals to fix the issue of fake and duplicate accounts, inflating the estimates its platform showed to advertisers of the number of people who could see their ads, citing impact on revenue as a reason

not to act. Unquote. I'm sorry, remind me again, why are we all still using Facebook for our ad campaigns? The live streaming platform Twitch wants a slice of your ad budget and it's planning to expand beyond its current gaming focus to get it. Part of its efforts recently have included live concerts, fitness classes, cooking lessons, and so on.

And one example of this renewed focus went live just today. Lexus used the platform to unveil its new car model, a model designed by Twitch users. They partnered with a streamer and ran a vote on what features to put in the car. Other recent examples, the NFL simulcast its Thursday night football broadcast there last fall. Capital One says the results it got after being the sponsor of a gaming tournament were so strong, they're planning to expand their presence on the platform. And lighting retailer Lamps Plus last year sponsored a food streamer as she demonstrated lights in her kitchen during downtimes in cooking. According to the Entertainment Software Association, 60% of Americans play video games every day, the average gamer is 34 years old, and 45% of them are women.

In related news, live stream commerce platform TalkShop Live said this week it has raised $3 million in seed funding to help manage the growing demand from brands. YouTube's answer to TikTok, which it's calling Shorts, will be coming to the US next month. They've been testing it in India since last fall and it seems to be a hit. The company reporting that Shorts there got more than 3.5 billion daily views.

Like TikTok, it has a video editor that lets you add music, edit clips, speed up or slow down content, set timers, that sort of thing. And you switch videos by swiping up. As for implementation, it looks like YouTube plans to just bundle it into their main mobile app, so gratefully there won't be a separate app involved. From a digital marketing point of view, the type of content that seems to perform better are more casual, more fun, less polished executions. We used to believe that videos cut from other campaigns and repurposed into this newer format would underperform, but Snapchat has some interesting data today countering that.

More on that in a moment. From an analytics point of view, YouTube will count shorts views just like a view of any other video on your brand's channel. We don't have an exact rollout date yet, but you will hear about it first right here. And speaking of TikTok, late today the platform announced a multi-year partnership with the mixed martial arts group UFC to live stream matches. It will have weekly live streams.

It will feature behind-the-scenes footage, engagement with UFC athletes, and other exclusive content for TikTok. So what of those short video ads that show up on TikTok and Snapchat and maybe soon in the future, YouTube Shorts? Just how effective can they possibly be? If new numbers out today from Snapchat are anything to go by, maybe more effective than you

think. They surveyed 7,700 users and found that full screen vertical ads there drove more than two times awareness gain than other platforms they asked about. They said six second ads were more persuasive than 15 second ads. And younger people reported they felt 15 second ads weren't as innovative and sometimes didn't add anything new. Quoting the company, we found that of the ads tested, the ads that marketed a new product saw longer lengths provided greater efficacy on Snapchat. Therefore, new product launches should be a time to consider extended play commercials in your media mix, unquote. Also of note, Snapchat says there wasn't much of a campaign performance difference

between custom ads created just for Snapchat and ads which were repurposed from clips of longer videos originally meant for another platform. Heads up if you run Google Ads, responsive text ads are now the default ad type in search campaigns. If you're not familiar with the format, the name might be a little confusing. This doesn't mean responsive as in looks good on mobile. This is something that other platforms call dynamic.

You give Google a bunch of headlines and body copies and its AI will mix and match them until it finds what it thinks is the right combination for each person. This does require a little bit of extra thinking on the part of the ad buyer, though, because if you're going to use this format, you've got to make sure that each element can stand on its own. For instance, you wouldn't want to put the start of a sentence in a headline and pay off the end of the sentence in the body copy, at least not if you want to use this format.

If you're still rocking the old-school expanded text ads, those are still there, and you can still run them just fine. And finally, I have started to take my TikTok a little bit more seriously. I am now posting daily digital marketing secrets, mostly web tools that we use here at the agency that are super helpful. You'll find me there at at Todd Maffin. That's T-O-D-M-A-F-F-I-N. There's a link in this episode's notes too. And remember, you can get this podcast as a daily email newsletter,

complete with images, related videos, charts, links to dive deeper, and newsletter-exclusive content. And yes, there is a free tier as well. You'll get an abbreviated issue every Friday. The newsletter comes out about an hour before the podcast drops. Just go to todayindigital.com slash newsletter to sign up or tap the link in this episode's notes. All right, that's it. Talk to you tomorrow. The very soul Blows up a million times And then just takes you home Rain fashion can't even bear to wait

And you can't even stop