Today in Digital Marketing - Instagram Will Put Your Competitors' Ads On YOUR Brand's Profile

Starting point is 00:00:00 It's Tuesday, October 4th. I'm Todd Maffin. Today, Meta's Q4 gift to marketers is not what it's cracked up to be. The rules of influencer marketing just changed and nobody knows what they are now. You can now run your performance max campaigns on Microsoft's platform. Facebook shuts down one of its clone products and... God help us all. Looks like Elon Musk is going to buy the damn thing after all. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:29 We start with Meta's surprise announcement that they are adding a whole whack of new ad placements, a move they clearly hope will help slow their declining revenue problems. These placements will put ads in places on Facebook and Instagram that seemed, I don't know, sort of off limits before. We'll start with Instagram and Steph, roll the theme. Nobody asked for this. They are in profile ads. These will be right on the personal profile of all non-teen public accounts. They're testing this for now.

Starting point is 00:01:02 They say eligible accounts will be able to earn money from those ads displayed in their profile, at least those in the testing group and those in the U.S. Wondering about brand safety? Yeah, me too. Meta says you won't be able to control which advertisers appear on your profiles. So, theoretically, someone scrolling through your brand's images might see your competitors' images as well. And if you hate that, you're really going to hate this. With the new carousel multi-advertiser ads, when a user engages with your ad, up pops a carousel of related ads underneath yours. Again, Meta does not provide advertisers with the ability to block specific businesses, i.e. competitors. Instead, Meta says it will rely on machine learning to

Starting point is 00:01:52 prevent duplicate ads. This format also doesn't disclose which ads appeared alongside your ads. Meta also announced it is testing augmented reality ads in both feed and stories on Instagram, which will let brands use AR in their ads, just like on Snapchat. All right, over to Facebook changes now, where the company is continuing to push Reels monetizations with new ad formats. The first one, post loop ads on Facebook Reels. This is similar to how they work on Instagram Reels. These are skippable video ads that play after a user has finished watching a video, followed by the original Reel resuming and looping again. And then image carousel ads for Facebook Reels.

Starting point is 00:02:34 These are horizontally scrollable ads that can include up to 10 images from a single advertiser, and it will be shown at the bottom of Reels videos. Yes, at the bottom, while the Reel video is playing, this is a placement TikTok doesn't have, and probably for good reason. It looks a little cluttered, as you might imagine. Meta positioned the new ad lineup as giving creators more opportunities to earn more income for their short-form video content. The company said that for in-Reel Facebook ads in both carousel and post-loop formats, creators would get 55% of the revenue, while meta would get 45%. Instagram Reels does not support these new formats yet.

Starting point is 00:03:12 As for the split, for those profile ads, a spokesperson for the company says they are experimenting with revenue-sharing models, but there is no set breakdown at this time. Did Kim Kardashian just ruin influencer marketing for the rest of us? Yesterday, the American Securities and Exchange Commission announced it had fined Kim Kardashian about a million dollars for her post promoting cryptocurrency. This despite the fact that she did disclose that it was an ad using the hashtag hashtag ad like we all do. But no, the agency said Kardashian should have also mentioned that she was paid $250,000 for it. So the fine raises questions about whether federal regulators are more willing to go after social media influencers and what that means for brands. Professional influencers know not to skip disclosures

Starting point is 00:04:06 and should be penalized for doing so, according to a law professor at Northeast University who was interviewed by Digiday today. But when it comes to micro-influencers, this professor said it is the brand's responsibility to make sure they're educated and that disclosures are put in place. The Federal Trade Commission used to say that disclosing in any way, like putting hashtag

Starting point is 00:04:25 ad in the post, was all you needed. Now they're kind of changing the rules without saying specifically what those rules are. The find comes as the FTC is considering a review of regulations regarding endorsements and testimonials related to products and services. But to circle back real quick, isn't Kim Kardashian studying for a law degree? Earlier today, Microsoft announced its Performance Max import tool and other product updates as the queue for Holiday Rush unfolds. So first, the import solution that they use to import Google ad campaigns has been expanded on the Microsoft platform to now let you import Performance Max campaigns. This is, of course, a huge deal. It'll also let you duplicate and import smart shopping campaigns as well as local inventory campaigns. There are a couple of requirements to know when using the tool. First, you will need to create and import

Starting point is 00:05:20 your Merchant Center store within Microsoft prior to importing your Google Performance Max retail campaign as Smart Shopping or local inventory ads. And you have to ensure you have the JavaScript UET tag on your website and that it's working correctly. Other important things to know, this feature will only import Performance Max features that are in parity with Microsoft advertising Smart Shopping, and local inventory ads. Scheduling options are also available. Advertisers can now also extend their shopping feed to customers that have displayed intent

Starting point is 00:05:53 or interest in your product. This is part of the audience network. It lets you reach those customers on websites, email, newsletters, MSN, and so forth. Does anyone still use MSN? Audience targeting is automated, and Microsoft uses your shopping feed information and URLs to match users to products that they have already displayed an interest in. They've also added some feed filtration improvements, like more filters for ID and category.

Starting point is 00:06:15 Multiple filters can now be implemented to get a more granular selection of products. Multiple values can now be entered two ways, either in a new line or using a semicolon, and you can now exclude items from your catalog. Next, data exclusions for automated bidding are now in open beta. This will help inform Microsoft's algorithms in case there's a data outage on a client's website or other unintended conversion tracking changes. You can use the tool to inform Microsoft's advertising platform of the specific date, time, scope, and devices related to conversion tracking errors or outages so that the erroneous conversion data can then be excluded in optimizations. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack,

Starting point is 00:07:03 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. Brands and agencies are in alignment when it comes to how confident they are that social media drives marketing success. But there is a significant gap around how they spend their marketing budgets. The results of a new Digiday survey indicate that

Starting point is 00:07:36 there are large discrepancies between brands confidence in the marketing success of each social media platform and their share of marketing budgets allocated to those platforms. For example, more than half of the brand respondents said they're confident that Facebook drives marketing success, but less than a third said they would spend a large portion of their marketing budgets there. This pattern was repeated for each of the social media platforms Digiday asked about. Meanwhile, the survey found that confidence and marketing spend are more aligned among agencies. The majority of agency respondents said they were confident Facebook drives marketing success for their clients, and about 45% backed that confidence up with marketing spend by allocating a significant portion of their clients' budgets

Starting point is 00:08:18 to Facebook. Instagram saw the same pattern. The remaining social platforms, though, lagged behind their meta-owned counterparts. Only two out of five said they were confident in YouTube, compared with one out of five that reported the platform gets a large share of their marketing budgets. Less than a quarter of agency pros are confident TikTok drives success. Only 5% said their clients spend a significant portion of their marketing budget there. The data comes from Digiday's survey of more than 90 brand and agency professionals. This afternoon, Meta announced it will be shutting down its clone of the newsletter platform Substack.

Starting point is 00:09:02 It launched it about a year and a half ago, called it Bulletin, and even talked some big names like Malcolm Gladwell into switching. But like many copycat attempts, Seam's Metis version was too little, too late. Hollywood reporters said there were only about 120 writers on Bulletin. Last June, they also canned their attempt at getting into podcasts and folded their clone of Clubhouse, the live audio app, into Facebook Live. Which brings us to the lightning round. If reports are true, Elon Musk today decided to drop his lawsuit against Twitter and just buy the damned thing at the price he originally offered. He filed the suit, claiming Twitter had more bot accounts than they disclosed, though many

Starting point is 00:09:40 analysts believe he was just trying to negotiate the price down after the stock fell once, you know, he got involved. Twitter has rolled out tweet editing to its API users, which will give third-party platforms the ability to pull past tweets and edit content. Like the front-end version, it will let users edit tweets up to five times in the first 30 minutes of publication. This should mean that the functionality is coming soon to your third-party social media tool of choice, even if you don't subscribe to Twitter Blue. Twitter is also testing tweet status indicators, which might help provide context to tweets. They basically appear as an additional line over or under your tweet, like hot take or now playing or dear diary. Pinterest has released its annual list of trending Halloween costumes, at least those

Starting point is 00:10:25 costumes seen on its platform. The top three are Stranger Things themed costumes. They were up 22 times. Elvis and Priscilla costumes up by 19 times. And in third place, Patrick Bateman. Not gonna lie, I had to Google this. Turns out Patrick Bateman is the fictional villain from American Psycho, as portrayed by Christian Bale in the 2000 film. With less attention being paid to COVID issues, Stack Marketer reports that Google has removed some health and safety labels from business profiles, specifically appointment required and staff wear masks. And eMarketer has lowered its forecast for weekly podcast listeners in 2002. They are still predicting an increase of 6.8% year over year,

Starting point is 00:11:11 but that's less than half of last year's growth rate. It's still a pretty wide open field, though. Advertisers will spend about $13.70 per podcast listener, significantly less than the $52 for terrestrial radio listeners. Overwatch 2 just came out an hour ago. Goodbye. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Instagram Will Put Your Competitors' Ads On YOUR Brand's Profile

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