Today in Digital Marketing - In a Move Totally Not Driven by Panicked Desperation…

Episode Date: July 14, 2022

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Today, the biggest sign ever that TikTok looms large. Why is live streamed commerce so slow in the world's largest markets? How your brand can directly control Twitter's timelines. And Facebook now wants you to break one of its longest held community guidelines. It's Thursday, July 14th. I'm Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. There are a lot of

numbers in our business, lots of milestones, some important, most not. Among some of the biggest, the date when Instagram pulled past a billion users, the date when Snapchat turned down 3 billion from Zuckerberg. Now we have another one, a big one, and one that probably not many of us could have even imagined a couple of years ago. Kids and teens now spend more time watching videos on TikTok than on YouTube. I cannot overstate how big a deal this is and just how much time we're talking about here. As of now, people aged 4 through 18 average 82 minutes per day on TikTok and 75 per day on YouTube. Can we just stop for a moment and acknowledge how much time 82 minutes is when you consider that kids also need time for school and friends and some of them sleep?

And those numbers don't come from an estimate or a survey based on a couple hundred kids. The data comes from Custodio, which makes parental control software. This analysis is based on the real world data from the 400,000 families who have accounts with its service. TechCrunch hired the company to get these numbers. Obviously, these kids aren't sitting down for 82 minutes in one go. This is an average, and it's going to be over several sessions a day, but still, huge numbers. And even bigger when you drill down past the global view. Kids in the US specifically spent 99 minutes on TikTok and only 61 minutes on YouTube. It's even bigger in the UK,

where kids and teens there spent 102 minutes on TikTok and just 53 minutes on YouTube. Is it any wonder the other apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat are all desperately trying to play catch-up? YouTube's version of a TikTok video is called a short, quoting TechCrunch. But despite short's growing adoption per YouTube's data, Custodio's research seems to indicate younger people have simply been opting for the short-form content provided by TikTok. At the same time, TikTok has been slowly pushing its user base to consume longer videos. This year, for instance, TikTok expanded the maximum video length to 10 minutes, up from its earlier expansion to 3 minutes. And while most TikTok videos are not multiple minutes long, the optimal video length for a TikTok video has been growing.

In 2020, TikTok told creators that 11 to 17 seconds was the sweet spot to find traction. In November of last year, it amended that to 21 to 34 seconds. Over time, this could also help to drive up the average watch time on TikTok as well, unquote. Last week, we reported that TikTok apparently shelved plans to expand its live streamed shopping shows to more countries. TikTok, for the record, says they never had any intention to do live commerce in any other countries. And I don't think you need to be a Mensa level genius to acknowledge that's just nonsense. Of course, they want to expand the success being seen in some Asian countries. Why has live streamed shopping been so slow to pick up elsewhere?

Joining me to discuss this, Kamiko McCoy. She is a senior marketing reporter at Digiday.com. Hello, Kamiko. Hi, Todd. Thanks so much for having me. Happy to be here. Help me understand why live shopping is taking such a long time to get off the ground in Europe and the Americas. There have been strategists who have pointed to a cocktail of reasons as to why live shopping has been slow to take off here in

comparison to Asia. The Western world has a distrust as it is already in social media platforms, you know, Facebook with Cambridge Analytica and things like that. And it's been downhill ever since. That's a large part of the reason, you know, now you're being asked to not only use these and have your data collected, but now they're asking for your credit card and whatnot to facilitate this process, which again, puts us in this position of being distrustful. Also, the way that Western society uses social media, according to the people that I've talked to, is very different than how it's being used in other places. A lot of times we go to social media to be entertained, to be informed, not necessarily to shop. So as that's now being introduced as a feature, it's being slowly, slowly adopted, not to say that it's not being adopted at all.

It's just being slowly adopted because that's not what we are accustomed to. It's interesting because I think that's the model that a lot of these companies, whether it's YouTube or Snapchat or TikTok or Instagram, they're all trying their hands somewhat desperately at trying to nail this formula. And it has to be a balance, I guess. It has to be somewhat entertaining, but it also has to have sort of anchors in that commerce space. Have you seen in your reporting any examples of really successful versions of that formula at play? Not necessarily on the social media sites themselves. And I can't name them off the top of my head, but there are a couple outside of social media that are living just on the internet that have been pretty successful. Now, if social media platforms can find a way

to tap into that and strike the balance that you're mentioning here, there may be a little bit more success there. Yeah, I think Walmart has Walmart has done a couple maybe Target as well. I think I think you're right. That's that may be the approach. It's kind of ironic in a way, isn't it? That, you know, the social platforms you'd think would have all this heft behind it. But actually, it's the it's the larger standalone retail brands that are finding success there. You folks have a new podcast coming out as well. So for the last two years, if not more than two years, we've all been in pandemic lockdown, we have finally started returning to the office. But the fact of the matter is that the office is no longer in the same standing of that we left it.

It's not just the dead plants that are there now. But now what off purpose does the office serve? So we followed a specific agency here in Atlanta, and I will let you guys listen to the podcast to figure out which agency it is, essentially made, you know, plans to come back to the office, suffer through a positive COVID case, how they handled that, what it means for health and wellness of their employees, and things like that. So, you know, in a couple episodes, we zoom into the specific agency to see how they're handling, and then zoom out to see what this means for the greater working world. We just dropped the trailer. It's called The Return. And by the end of the month, we'll have episode one out.

Kamika McCoy is a senior marketing reporter at Digiday.com. She spoke to me from Atlanta, Georgia. Last year, Google introduced a beta version of its ads creative studio. Today, they announced that platform is now available globally, and they've added a few more features. Now you can create multiple or even hundreds of versions of a single display or video ad. They can be customized for different audiences, locations, languages, or contexts. You tell the software what element of the ad creative, like a product image or superimposed text or sound. You want to set a swappable and provide different versions of that element based on a set of rules you create.

The rules include the audiences you want to reach or context you want to match. For example, you might make a rule to change the text overlay on your video creative based on whether your audience is in the market for cold weather gear or warm weather travel. Google says the software will apply the rules to all videos and render the different versions in a matter of minutes. Then you can create and share a preview

that shows every video along with the rules that apply to that video with anyone who needs to review it. These features are available today for video creatives and will be launching soon for display. A couple of other nice enhancements. You can now export images from the Ads Creative Studio asset library to the Google Ads asset library of any linked account. And you can also connect an Ads Creative Studio account to Campaign Manager 360. 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. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen.

Twitter has announced a new kind of timeline feed, one that looks like it could become an ad placement in the near future. It is essentially a custom timeline that third parties, like brands, can create and distribute to fans. It shows up looking a lot like a Twitter list, but appears to be more tightly curated. The example they showed was a custom timeline for the TV show The Bachelorette. It was apparently created in partnership with ABC. It's running for the next 10 weeks in the US and Canada, though only to a small group of people. Apparently, if you have already tweeted about the show, you will be among those potentially to get into the beta. What we don't know is the level of curation here, whether those groups sponsoring a custom timeline can or even must pick and choose every single tweet in it,

or if there's some kind of looser algorithmic control. Still, it might be a pretty solid way of helping your customers and fans stay on top of your brand. One economic indicator people watch these days is how Amazon's Prime Day did. The annual two-day shopping event ended yesterday. The company said Prime members, who are the only people allowed to shop these specially discounted products, bought more than 300 million items.

What they wouldn't say is how much revenue that was. The analysts at Numerator found that consumers mostly stuck to the essentials and smaller purchases. Only 5% of items sold for more than $100, more than half the purchased items were less than $20. Obviously, inflation playing a role here. It reached 9.1% last month in the U.S. But, quoting Marketing Dive, as in previous years, Prime Day lifted other U.S. retailers as well. U.S. online spending during those two days nearly reached $12 billion, an 8.5% increase over last year. Stores played a role, with conversion for retailers offering curbside pickup up 20% compared to an average day in June. There is some industry chatter that Amazon might schedule a second Prime Day later this year, something it has never done before. The company declined to comment on the report.

Instagram is the latest platform to expand its experiments with paid subscriptions for creators. The idea being that a creator, or for that matter, a brand, could charge a monthly fee that would grant its fans access to subscriber-only content. This is something Twitter has launched as well. Instagram actually has had this for a while, but only for the Stories post type. Now they say all post types can be paygated. It is, of course, an attempt to lure back influential creators who've moved their work to the much more discovery-friendly TikTok. Accounts with access to this will get a special subscribers tab where paying members can filter the content that's exclusive to them. Subscriptions can range from $0.99 a month to a surprisingly high $99.99.

In addition to exclusive content, creators will be able to go live to only their paying members and will let them do a group DM chat with up to 30 subscribers at the same time. So far, this monetization is only available in the US. If you live near Seattle and heard a bunch of champagne quirks popping last night, there's a good reason for it. Netflix awarded one of the digital advertising business's potentially most lucrative contract to Microsoft. That contract being the official ad partner for the streaming giant. Netflix,

in case you haven't heard, is planning a lower cost plan that will include ads. Someone's got to manage the media buying and delivery and reporting. Netflix didn't have the internal capacity, so they're outsourcing it. More than the direct Netflix connection, though, it sounds like Netflix will become a placement in Microsoft's ad manager, part of their premium connected TV inventory. So this is cool. The Canadian grocery store chain Sobeys has a clever initiative that rides TikTok trends. It's actually through Sobeys delivery service called Voila. And they're about to launch something called Trending to Table. They'll partner with food influencers and creators on TikTok, making their recipes immediately shoppable with one tap.

If you were on TikTok about a year ago, you will probably remember that baked feta pasta dish that was everywhere on the platform. Apparently, the recipe was so popular, it actually led to shortages of cheese in grocery stores. Now, tapping on the call to action button that will appear over top of these special cooking videos will take viewers to a cart on the Voila platform preloaded with the recipe ingredients. And finally, Meta would like to remind you that it is a violation of the Facebook rules to have more than one personal account or to use a fake name on that account. Quoting the company, Facebook is a community where people use their authentic identities. It's against the

Facebook community standards to maintain more than one personal account. Sorry, I'm being handed something. Breaking news, Facebook says you can now create multiple accounts and use completely fictional names on them if you want. In a move totally not driven by panicked desperation, Meta is now testing letting users create up to five fictional profiles. Sorry, I thought I could get through this without laughing. This is real, by the way. Meta is testing

letting users create up to five fictional profiles linked to one personal account. Quoting CNET, Facebook users could create profiles dedicated to their hobbies, such as cooking, design, or travel. They could also have a separate profile where they correspond only with certain family members or friends. Unquote. The company would not say how many users are part of the test. Bloomberg reports you'll only be able to like or comment on another post with one of the profiles,

not all of them. And Meta says it will not change how they calculate daily or monthly active users. Totally not desperation, guys. Big numbers, big milestones. We crossed one yesterday. We have more than a thousand subscribers to our email newsletter now. If you're not familiar with it, by the way, it's at todayindigital.com slash newsletter. Basically, every day we put out a complete recap of everything that you heard in the podcast. It's essentially the script of the podcast. So if you prefer to consume your digital marketing news via reading as opposed to listening,

this might be a good thing for you. It goes out for free every Friday, or there is a paid version which will give you every single weekday's news. Again, that's todayindigital.com slash newsletter. Thank you so much to those thousand of you who have signed up. We really appreciate it. Okay, I'm off to create 700 new fake identities on Facebook. I will talk to you tomorrow. 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.

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