Today in Digital Marketing - Instagram Hates Content Marketers

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, Instagram's change means less reach for you. Which platform's CPMs have jumped 70%? Gen Z doesn't think much of your rainbow-painted logo. Agencies sit out the four-day workweek experiment. And Snapchat discovers the perfect ad frequency. It's Tuesday, June 7th. I'm Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Instagram this morning announced a change that may drag the reach of your brand's organic content

Starting point is 00:00:29 even lower than it already is. The change is in the way the app handles what it calls sensitive content. That's content which doesn't break community guidelines, like say nudity would, but comes close, like alcohol or posts where someone is holding a gun. Specifically, Instagram will now let people specify how much of this content they want to see. More of it, the usual amount, or less of it. Instagram doesn't actually promise any of this will actually work, coaching the setting with phrases like, you might see less sensitive content. That setting for seeing more sensitive stuff won't be available to kids. For the last year, there's been a way already to filter this stuff out, but it only applied

Starting point is 00:01:12 to Instagram's Explore page. Now, the company says a user's settings will be applied, or should I say might be applied, across search, reels, accounts you might follow, hashtag pages, and in-feed recommendations. So if your brand posts content that sometimes lives in this gray area, you might start to see reduced reach. Oddly though, Instagram says this only applies to content from accounts people are not following. If an account they do follow posts something sensitive, Instagram will apparently let it through. This wouldn't have been a problem back in the glory days of Instagram where your feed was just people you followed.

Starting point is 00:01:54 But today's Instagram app is a dog's breakfast of suggested accounts, reels forced on you, people the algorithm thinks you should follow, recommended content, ads, and shit they found under the lunchroom coffee machine. Anyway, if you want to try this out for yourself, go to Settings, Account, then Sensitive Content Control. CPMs, the cost to deliver 1,000 ad impressions, are largely a measure of how much competition is in the ad market. So we like to keep an eye on those numbers from time to time.

Starting point is 00:02:26 We asked the folks at Veros.io to tap into their database of 800 ad accounts and look at the changes between last month and a year prior. So these are, of course, broad averages, though technically they are median numbers, not averages, but anyway. Facebook ads were past $16 CPM. That's up about 11% over the previous year. Google is up a little more than 19% to just past $15. But the platform with the biggest CPM increase, TikTok, up more than 70% between May of 2021 and May of 2022. Even so, the current median CPM they measured was $10.41, still much less than the other platforms.

Starting point is 00:03:13 Veros provides a comparison service where you connect your ad accounts, and it will show you comparative data from other connected ad accounts. It is free for now. You can find it at veros.io. That's V-A-R-O-S dot I-O. Some more numbers in the digital marketing world. These coming from eMarketer and showing that search ad spending in Canada will account for 44.5% of digital ad spending this year. That's down from almost 50% five years ago.

Starting point is 00:03:44 If they're not buying search, what are they buying? Social media and video, of course, both of which went up in terms of share of media budget. Display formats make up about 54% of the digital market this year. Today's premium newsletter has the forecasts for the next three years. Quoting eMarketer, retail media networks will provide a boost to search marketing. The rise of retail media is tied closely to Canada's recent surge in e-commerce sales,

Starting point is 00:04:12 a whopping 75% growth rate in 2020 and a 25% increase in 2021, driven by pandemic buying. Retail search ad products are bottom of the funnel tactics, one click away from many purchases. Amazon ads leads in this regard, but Walmart Connect is also aggressively marketing search ad products in Canada. Near me searches on mobile are helping to push search marketing forward. Mobile will account for 76% total search spending in Canada

Starting point is 00:04:44 this year, as queries based on the user's location data have become a common form of search. So, did you do it too? Change your logo to incorporate the pride flag colors this month? Many brands are doing it, perhaps in an attempt to sway the younger generations, but new data suggests those cohorts don't really care one way or the other. Adweek today reported on a new study from the data platform Influential, quoting that piece, across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, blogs, and forums, just 14% of Gen Z looked favorably on rainbow flag campaigns, with support highest among baby boomers at 42%. And while corporate contributions to LGBTQ plus groups were more appreciated,

Starting point is 00:05:34 with millennials approving the most at 73%, that community and their allies are also looking at who is taking action on the issues they care most about, unquote. The U.S. in particular seems to be undergoing the biggest sea change here, with some states enforcing gender compliance in youth sporting, and others creating legislation preventing teachers from acknowledging that gay people exist on the planet. Lataria Coy, the head of ethical media at Influential, said, quote, Consum consumers feel as if brands are more focused on profiting off of rainbow capitalism and fail to truly foster change that will actually impact the community in a positive way. Do you have business insurance?

Starting point is 00:06:15 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. Consumers across all generations would rather align themselves with brands that are making monetary contributions to organizations that will benefit the LGBTQ plus community and not just rainbow flag campaigns, unquote. This week, the world's biggest trial of a four-day work week started.

Starting point is 00:07:01 The idea came from a non-profit started by a fellow who cut his own New Zealand insurance firm's week to four days. The trial is happening in the UK and more than 70 companies there are participating in the six-month pilot program. Employees will get their full salary for only four days of working, as long as they commit to maintaining full productivity. You know which sector is notably not participating? The advertising and marketing industry. Adweek reports that not one of the large holding groups have announced they're part of the pilot. It's hard to not see this as a lightly sugar-coated way of retaining employees during a time when employees want to stay home, or worse, are just resigning en masse. Which makes the absence of the marketing and creative sector particularly notable.

Starting point is 00:07:48 Not only has our industry been hit hard by the Great Resignation, it's always been a workplace where overwork and burnout is the norm. A recent study from Qualtrics found that 92% of working American adults would prefer to work four 10-hour days per week instead of five 8-hour days. If you want your Snapchat ads to perform better, mix up the ad products. That's the key finding from a study released today. The study was paid for by Snapchat and used Kantar for the research. They analyzed 52 Snapchat ad campaigns and found that using different ad formats within your campaign drives significantly better results in both brand awareness and purchase

Starting point is 00:08:34 intent. They specifically called out camera ads. These are call-to-action buttons that appear when someone's using their camera. One use might be pointing your camera at a chair and up pops a button that lets you buy that particular chair. Snapchat explained, as target audiences become saturated with content ads, which includes commercials, snap ads, and story ads, at higher levels, the reallocation of budget toward camera ads helps with incremental reach as well as building differentiated frequency, unquote.

Starting point is 00:09:07 Also, the research paper says it found a sweet spot in frequency, again, quoting the paper. On average, across the studies included in this campaign, we found that a frequency of four times per week drove about three quarters of total possible intent lift, with the model predicting total saturation at eight times a week, unquote. That was one of the two studies they released. The second, done with Magna Media, found that ads using augmented reality are more informative than pre-roll ads, and AR campaigns also help consumers feel closer to the brand. Also, apparently it matters which way the camera is facing.

Starting point is 00:09:46 Again, from Snapchat, quote, world-facing AR lenses impact those in the middle of the journey and result in higher purchase intent and build relevance for the brand. Front-facing AR lenses help lift brand image for those closer to purchase with a 5% lift in brand uniqueness and a 4% lift in relevancy. Links to both studies can be found in today's premium newsletter, which you can find at todayindigital.com slash newsletter. Some cool technology is coming to H&M stores. Special digital mirrors, which can automatically identify the items that a customer has brought into the changing room, including the size and color.

Starting point is 00:10:28 Although it might be a tiny overstatement to call these mirrors, they're more like giant touchscreens that have a very reflective surface. The idea is you'll be able to see that product in other colors, show them what the item would look like when combined with fashion accessories, and in some of the test stores, even a way to buy that item before leaving the changing room booth. The first store in this test will be in, no surprise, Beverly Hills. By the way, if you are a premium member and you listened to the full-length Twitter interview over the weekend,

Starting point is 00:11:01 you'll know that I asked the Twitter fellow whether a branded hashtag, you know, the one where they put the little emoji at the end of it, whether you could actually use a poop emoji. He said he didn't know. He said he would get back to me. He got back to me. Apparently, the ruling from Twitter's board of emoji approval or whatever they have there is, yeah, it's yeah, they'll probably approve it. It depends on context. It depends on how you're using it and so on. But apparently there is no blanket ban on the poop emoji. For the next three days, I will be working on a secret podcast project, which I will

Starting point is 00:11:37 tell you more about when it's ready. And so for the rest of the week, our associate producer, the intrepid Steph Gunn, will be with you so that you don't miss even one story in the industry. As for the rest of today, I am about to do something I have wanted to do for 30 years now. Rent a power washer. I have not told my wife about this because she would consider it a waste of money which of course it absolutely is. Look I tell you it just looks so satisfying.

Starting point is 00:12:10 I've played power washing video games. I subscribed to power washing porn on Reddit. I am really really excited by this. So that's my afternoon. I will see you on Monday. Steph will be with you the rest of the week. Thanks for listening. Come on.

Today in Digital Marketing - Instagram Hates Content Marketers

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