Today in Digital Marketing - [Insert Peacock Joke Here: _______________]

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, a big change to a mobile app may bring bad news to podcasters. It's round two for Walmart's live shopping TikTok show. WordPress's new upgrade could help your Google ranking. And the clever new ad format for streaming video. It's Wednesday, March 10th, 2021. Happy International Bagpipe Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:25 And a quick note before we start, we have a big all-hands-on-deck client deadline today here at the agency. So Sarah and I were up at 3.30 this morning to make sure that you got an episode today. So if major developments in the digital marketing space break today, please know that we will get to them tomorrow. Also, we are looking for a regular fill-in guest host. Details at the end of the episode. All right, let's get to it. If you market a podcast and rely on download counts as a metric to show your boss or potential advertisers, a big change coming to the industry may mess those counts up.

Starting point is 00:00:58 Apple's latest beta version of their market-dominant podcasts app will no longer download new episodes automatically. Instead, it will offer the users the ability to stream them on demand. And that's where those counts get messed up. Chances are it will be streaming it from its own caching server and not your hosting provider. This could mean that if 50,000 people listen to an episode on Apple Podcasts, it may only show at your end as one download, that download being from Apple's server to put it in its cache. This is actually how podcasts work today with Spotify and Google Podcasts, but Apple's mobile app is the podcast app most people use right now,

Starting point is 00:01:38 so this is potentially a big deal. Another change Apple is testing in its podcast app beta, replacing the word subscribe with the word follow. The idea being that people might confuse subscribe with being a paid transaction. Nevermind that YouTube creators are always saying to subscribe to their channels and nobody there is confused. Stitcher, Spotify, and Amazon either have already switched to the word follow or are planning to. Cadbury, which makes chocolate eggs for Easter and other times of the year, of course, usually has some kind of Easter egg hunt component to their annual marketing blitz. But with the pandemic still keeping much of the world in lockdown, how do you run an Easter egg hunt?

Starting point is 00:02:23 Well, you do it virtually, of course. And this year, they're doing a kind of mashup on Google Maps. Called the Cadbury Worldwide Hide, it lets users drop an image of a chocolate egg anywhere on Google Maps, then send a clue to a loved one to help them find it. If they do find it, you, the hider, have the option to reward them with a real chocolate egg that gets sent to them in the mail. I can't help but think that this is at least partially inspired by a strange online game that's been popular on the game streaming site Twitch. The game is called GeoGuessr, and it drops you in an unmarked location in Google Street View somewhere in the world.

Starting point is 00:03:02 You've got to try to figure out where you are just by using the movement features in Street View. It's actually more fun than it sounds. This marks the second year Cadbury has had to cancel its regular annual Easter egg hunt. Walmart is planning to do a second shoppable live stream on TikTok tomorrow night on its channel, this time focusing on beauty products. You may remember they did a similar one a few months ago, the holiday shop along spectacular.

Starting point is 00:03:31 And spectacular it was, they got seven times the number of views they'd expected and boosted their TikTok following by about 25%. That's 25% in two hours. So of course, the format is about the same. Don't fix what isn't broke, right? Influencers will be demoing products, sharing skincare tips, hair routines, makeup tutorials. While viewers watch, a product pin will appear on screen, showing the product being used at that moment, which will then put that item into a shopping cart.

Starting point is 00:04:01 Users can then purchase it right within TikTok's app immediately or after the event. With shoppers avoiding bricks and mortar stores, Walmart, like its competition, is beefing up its e-commerce abilities. Sales from U.S. online purchases grew 35% in Q4 compared to the previous Q4. Quoting marketingdive.com, TikTok is rapidly emerging as a popular influencer marketing platform with 45% of marketers saying they used the social video app in influencer campaigns last year,

Starting point is 00:04:37 up from a negligible amount in 2019, according to a global survey by influencer marketing firm, Upfluence. Still quoting here from Marketing Dive, TikTok's growing popularity is eating into Facebook's Instagram, whose utilization in influencer campaigns fell to 68% from 80% a year earlier. Meanwhile, Facebook utilization fell to 43% from 46%, and Twitter declined to 15% from 22%, unquote.

Starting point is 00:05:09 No wonder Zuckerberg is panicking. One of the hundreds of ranking factors in Google search is whether or not your brand's website is secure. And it's a pretty simple on or off switch. If you run HTTPS, you get a ranking boost. If you only run HTTP, you don't get that boost. Transitioning your site to HTTPS has either been a trivial matter of flipping a switch or a complicated process involving server settings and code, depending on how friendly your hosting provider is, or perhaps more accurately, how much you pay your hosting provider. Well, there's good news ahead. The latest version of WordPress called 5.7 Esperanza will let you convert your site from HTTP to HTTPS with a single click.

Starting point is 00:05:59 Once it's done, WordPress will rewrite any URLs in your site's content database that reference the HTTP pages. You'll also find an HTTPS status check in the site health section of the WordPress dashboard. Other changes in 5.7, font size controls are now available right in the list and code blocks. So no need anymore to jump to a different setting screen for those changes. Reusable blocks are a little bit more stable. They're easier to use. They also save now automatically. And you can quickly change the size of the icons in the social icons block.

Starting point is 00:06:37 The tools we use for digital marketing haven't really changed much. We have banner ads, pre-roll and post-roll ads on videos, sponsored posts, that sort of thing. But has one company invented an entirely new digital ad product? The company is Peacock, that's NBC's streaming service, and the ad placement they're selling? Pause. Like literally the screen that shows up when you pause content. Normally, of course, when you press pause, you're just shown a freeze frame of where you stopped. But at Peacock, that's prime real estate.

Starting point is 00:07:10 Someone on Twitter showed an ad for Capital One on the Peacock service that said, taking a break, we've got your back when you get back. Not the best copywriting in the world, but the new format is certainly interesting. Some people on Twitter are saying

Starting point is 00:07:25 Hulu may have actually done this earlier, but most agree that the actual invention of this ad placement came from the single most innovative sector of our industry, the porn sites. Yes, I know there's a peacock joke there, but come on.

Starting point is 00:07:41 Gotta keep a portion of the show classy. Hey, remember when BuzzFeed bought the Huffington Post in November? And remember how they said HuffPost would operate as a, quote, separate distinct news organization? And remember how they said they'd keep their websites and editorial staff? Yeah, funny story. They abruptly closed HuffPost Canada yesterday. All of it. All employees fired.

Starting point is 00:08:10 No warning. The employees were summoned to a hastily assembled Zoom meeting, the password to which was springishere. The company said, of course, it had nothing to do with the fact that those employees filed for union certification just a couple of weeks ago. Nothing at all, I tell you. Also gone, 47 employees in the U.S.

Starting point is 00:08:30 They were told that some people would get canned and others wouldn't, and go back to your desks and we'll email you around 1 p.m. with our decision on you. And by what can only be sheer coincidence, most of those workers were unionized as well. Over at parent company BuzzFeed, much of their new staff unionized more than two years ago. They still don't have a signed contract with management. BuzzFeed's CEO, who we won't name here, owing to our policy against naming serial killers and other sociopaths,

Starting point is 00:09:03 said the company wants to, quote, preserve the most powerful journalism and lean more deeply into politics and breaking news, unquote. They'll do that without the help of, you know, journalists specializing in politics and breaking news. All right, so, as you may have noticed, I took Monday and Tuesday off from the podcast. My wife and I said goodbye to a much-loved family pet Monday morning, our cat Pepper. Pepper was with me before I even met my wife, more than 10 years ago, and was with me in my early recovery days, so it has been a bit of a difficult time.

Starting point is 00:09:45 My thanks to those of you in our Slack community and on Twitter who sent their thoughts. It really did mean a lot. My wife and I will also be taking a few days off in a couple of weeks, and I would love to find a regular fill-in host for those days and other days. So if you've got a good mic

Starting point is 00:10:03 and some journalism and or podcast experience, please tell us about yourself at todayindigital.com slash host. That's todayindigital.com slash host. There's also a direct link in this episode's notes if you just swipe over and find it. All right. That's it for today. Talk to you tomorrow. We'll see you next time. 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

Starting point is 00:11:19 rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A.

Today in Digital Marketing - [Insert Peacock Joke Here: _______________]

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.