Today in Digital Marketing - Instagram's Latest Copycat: (checks notes) MySpace?!?

Starting point is 00:00:00 It's Wednesday, October 19th. I'm Todd Maffin. Today, is it smarter machine learning or a dumbing down? TikTok's new ad product is all about automation. Plus, is that music on Pinterest pins? Why the worst is yet to come for marketing budgets? PayPal adds a new cashback integration. And yeah, it had to happen sometime. Instagram has officially jumped the shark.

Starting point is 00:00:24 Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Another day, another automated campaign, but this time ad automation is coming to TikTok. The social media app announced smart performance campaigns today, which, like on Facebook and other ad platforms, relies on machine learning for full ad targeting and optimization. TikTok's new option promises a completely hands-off process, and it only takes a few things for advertisers to set up a campaign, including your marketing objective, a budget, the country you want, and your creative. Putting all your trust in machine learning, though,

Starting point is 00:00:58 isn't always a winning strategy for marketers. Taking that into consideration, TikTok says that smart performance campaigns are best suited for advertisers that are new to TikTok or marketers who don't have hands-on campaign management resources. That said, TikTok also claims that in early testing, this outperformed manually set up campaigns. Of course, it's impossible to know what the results will be without experimenting with it. Too bad you can't do that quite yet. Smart performance campaigns will be globally available for Android app promotion campaigns at the end of the month, with more to come later this year. Could better music help Pinterest keep up with TikTok and Instagram? The company announced

Starting point is 00:01:43 a music licensing deal with Warner Music Group today and several other labels. Now, some accounts have the option to add licensed music from popular artists to IdeaPins. That's that platform's take on stories. Previously, the company only offered a royalty-free music library. With the updated catalog, painters can add music to their content using a new user experience that lets them search by artist, keyword, and song title. Yes, I said some accounts, probably not yours. As with other platforms, the music terms prohibit the use of licensed tracks for commercial purposes. So we filthy digital marketers can't use them for sponsored posts.

Starting point is 00:02:21 Furthermore, like TikTok and Instagram, Pinterest has added the ability to export projects for use outside of its own platform. But keep in mind that if you export content with licensed music, the licensing may not be the same on another platform. Here's a less than pleasant thought. If you think ad slowdown has been bad up until now, you ain't seen nothing yet. That's according to an interesting piece up on Digiday today that looks at how marketers are rationing ad dollars. A new study from the World Federation of Advertisers found that about one third of the world's largest advertisers plan to cut ad spending next year, while three out of four believe 2023 budgets will be heavily scrutinized. Meanwhile, another quarterly study shows that cost reduction and cash control are the top two priorities for more than half of CFOs.

Starting point is 00:03:12 And as most of us are aware, advertising generally on the chopping block when it comes to cost cutting. As for the eternal optimist out there, here's a more gloomy perspective from the chief economist at the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Quote, the economic situation may account for 10 to 20 percent of the current advertising slowdown. That won't change before the end of the year. There are still big cyclical drivers of advertising to come. The real winter of discontent will start in the first quarter of 2023. Unquote. The piece suggests that everything so far has been a prelude to what's to come once the economic downturn catches up to marketers. Again, quoting the piece,

Starting point is 00:03:50 The contradiction in ad dollars up to this point has been less to do with the widespread inflation and more to do with structural factors. There was always going to be an ad slowdown, just not an economically induced one. Instead, the slowdown hit one side of the market more than the other, the part underwritten by small to medium-sized advertisers, i.e. platforms. Growth had to take a backseat to profit in those marketing departments. They're grappling with rising Facebook ad prices, waning ad measurement, inflated shipping costs, newly sober public markets, and smaller-than-predicted customer appetite for D2C spending. In the meantime, the big advertisers continued to spend. It does, however, show that the state of the ad economy has become a tale of two narratives.

Starting point is 00:04:35 Ad dollars are being spent, but they're also being cut. Next year, those fault lines won't be so clear. If anything, it will be the same ad slowdown story told in many different ways. 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. PayPal is expanding its rewards offering by integrating cashback. The company recently announced PayPal Rewards, a program that lets consumers earn points and save money through cashback discounts and more at participating retailers. But with this new tool, customers can pool cashback rewards from the company's products like the PayPal app and Honey,

Starting point is 00:05:33 which is a browser extension that automatically offers coupon codes at checkout. And in the future, PayPal's Cashback MasterCard and Debit Card app users will see a new rewards section in the interface where they can track earnings. Finally, Honey Gold, the extension's own reward program, will become PayPal rewards points for all users regardless of whether or not they have a PayPal account. It is time to play Who is Instagram Copying Today? If you guessed TikTok or Be Real, no, that's not today. If you guessed MySpace, you're right. Instagram is ripping a page out of Tom from MySpace book and working on a feature that will let you add a song to your profile.

Starting point is 00:06:19 According to an app researcher, the song would appear in your profile at the bottom of your bio underneath links. It's not clear if the song will play automatically as it did on MySpace, but screenshots indicate visitors will be able to play the song from the profile. Looks like the feature is being tested internally. There's no official update on live testing from Instagram. In the meantime, you just have to figure out what your brand's theme song is. Well, what a night uh as soon as my wife and i turned off the lights last night around midnight our smoke detector went off it's a new house so it started screaming loudly every smoke detector got triggered including ones in our tenant suite woke them up too it went away went to bed again

Starting point is 00:07:00 it showed up again three times in a row i think I finally unplugged the one from here in the studio. Just unplugged it out of the wall. Seemed to fix the issue. But I was up until 3 in the morning. And, you know, I have my biggest anxiety. The thing that causes me the most amount of stress that I worry about is the house catching on fire. So it's quite a night. How was your night?

Starting point is 00:07:24 I'm Todd Maffin. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Instagram's Latest Copycat: (checks notes) MySpace?!?

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