Today in Digital Marketing - Is the Era of Personalized Marketing Already Over?

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Friday, December 6th, 2019. Happy Independence Day, Finland. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, have most marketers given up on personalization? The four primary content marketing trends you should know about going into 2020? Google tries its hand at machine learning based ads recommendations? And the reason you lost YouTube subscribers today? Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. The people of Pantone have announced their color of the year for 2020. It is a color that, quote, installs calm, confidence, and connection.

Starting point is 00:00:36 And what is that color exactly? I will tell you at the end of this episode. You've heard it all the time, I'm sure, whenever you go to a marketing conference or read a blog post. Personalization, they say. Make your message customized to each prospect and you will be more successful. But will you? Gartner says marketers are losing the faith. In their report called 2020, Marketers, They're Just Not that into you. The research firm predicts four out of five marketers will abandon personalization efforts within the next five years. Why? A lack of ROI and the challenge of managing all that customer data.

Starting point is 00:01:16 Apparently, the folks at the Association of National Advertisers didn't get the memo, though. They chose personalization as their marketing word of the year. Of course, the only opinion that actually matters is that of consumers. So what do they think about getting personalized marketing messages? Accenture found last year that 41% said it was creepy. That getting a text from a store while walking past that store was icky. Yeah, even I would get creeped out by that. But also 35% said they were squicked out by just being retargeted on social media ads after having looked at a product online. All that said, though, the very same report also found that 91% of consumers report they are more likely to buy

Starting point is 00:01:59 from brands that send them relevant offers. No need to worry if the YouTube account of your brand or your client saw a drop in subscribers. It's all part of regular maintenance at YouTube, where they go through everyone's subscriber base periodically, remove those they think are fake accounts, accounts that the user has closed since subscribing, and accounts that YouTube shut down for violating policy. It's a little weird to me that they do this in big periodic sweeps instead of just removing the person from your numbers as soon as that person is gone. But whatever. If you want to check the impact on your YouTube account, here's what you do.

Starting point is 00:02:35 Go to YouTube's analytics page and restrict your search for December 3rd to December 4th. You can also click the See More there under the graph and select Subscription Source and then Closed Accounts if you want to see all the numbers. YouTube reminds everyone that this shouldn't have any impact on your watch time since those accounts were closed anyway. But as Social Media Today noted, it does matter if you're around 1,000 subscribers,

Starting point is 00:03:02 since that's the magic number where you get monetization, or 10,000, where you get access to YouTube stories, YouTube says, on average, most channels should lose less than 15 subscribers in this sweep. Listen up if you manage content for your brand or client. Storyblocks has published its 2020 content trends report. They analyzed more than 105 million searches during 2019 to get these recommendations, and they are, number one, retro vibes. So not so much about the neon colors, but apparently more about nostalgia and specific decades generally. Number two, real and raw. Quoting Storyblocks here, authenticity made a big comeback in 2019, and this is now translating into the trend of adopt more hands-on content through shoppable formats and choose-your-own-adventure videos.

Starting point is 00:04:12 And finally, the fourth trend is something they call bending the rules of reality and perception. They say this is a hard one to pin down, but a creator's ability to blend mediums to challenge the viewer perception of reality will depend on it. Honestly, not 100% sure what any of that means. Branded podcast producers Pacific Content have released a study showing that in the last year, podcasts have become shorter in length. They looked at the metadata for about 19 million episodes. That's for more than 600,000 podcasts and found that the overall median episode length this year was about 36 and a half minutes.

Starting point is 00:04:53 That's about two minutes shorter than last year. And honestly, thank God. I've been listening to and making podcasts since pretty much the day the technology was created. And there are far too many of what I call ramble casts, where they just turn on the mic and spend two hours trying to get to one single point. I'm looking at you crime writers on nobody cares about your cat. The Pacific content study found that the longest podcasts by topic are film history, wrestling, and the longest topic, video game podcasts.

Starting point is 00:05:31 I can attest to this. My brethren really do not know how to shut the hell up sometimes. As for the shortest, kids stories, daily news podcasts, it's your boy, astronomy, I guess there are only so many planets you can talk about. And the shortest, language learning. At Pacific Content, they say they aim for a podcast length of about 25 to 30 minutes, partly because of average commute times in the U.S. Google Ads has become the latest platform to adopt simplified recommendations for your campaign performance. They call it explanations, saying, quote, it gives you clear insights into large changes in your Google Ads account performance. With explanations, you can view the most likely reason for impression,

Starting point is 00:06:15 click, and cost changes with the click of a button. This makes it easy for you to spend more time focusing on optimization and less time investigating performance issues, unquote. Sure, I guess. Honestly, I cannot think of a single instance where I've found these kinds of automated recommendations helpful or have them turn up anything that wasn't already quite obvious. And that's mostly because as good as machine learning is, it will never understand the nuance of your particular brand's voice or the specific reason behind the targeting that you're using. Instead, it'll suggest things like, hey, maybe you should widen out your targeting to include more ages. Yes, that probably would

Starting point is 00:06:56 result in an increase in reach, but none of those people are our market, so thanks for nothing. Google's implementation of this is in beta, and they say it will be able to tell you things like how changes to your bids may have affected where and how often your ad showed, and how spreading your budget across multiple ad groups may have affected performance. Over the last couple of days, I've been documenting the process of getting one ad, just one, on this very podcast. I'm using an ads marketplace called Podcorn. Listen to yesterday's episode if you want to catch up. This advertiser, a service called ShareKit.io, agreed to my proposal of 250 bucks US,

Starting point is 00:07:36 so that's like 6 million Canadian, for a mid-roll ad. And today I wrote the script. And I got to tell you, I did not enjoy the process. I started my career in radio almost 30 years ago, way before entering the digital agency space. And not once, not once, have I written copy so agonizingly slowly. Not even when I wrote my book, and I hated writing my book. Who was it who said I need three weeks to write 300 words, but I can be called upon at a moment's notice to write 30,000 words? Anyway, script is with the client now.

Starting point is 00:08:12 If he likes it, the ad could show up here sometime next week. Which brings us to the lightning round. Instagram is changing up the way your IGTV reposts appear in stories. Now it'll autoplay the video just like reposting other stories. And it's a regular post, not a sticker anymore. Hootsuite has been having some problems today with their dashboard.

Starting point is 00:08:34 That's affecting a whole whack of things. Boost, inbox, and message publishing. Twitter, too, has been buggy today. Their ads API is glitching out with 503 errors. They're working on it. Google is testing the ability for people to look up the delivery status of shipments right on the Google search results page without having to go to the carrier's website. And Facebook is now suggesting moderators for your Facebook group. If you have members who look like they contribute a lot,

Starting point is 00:08:59 get a lot of engagement on their posts, Facebook might pop up a little note suggesting you make And finally, this. Apparently something has gone wrong with Amazon's product database. Like, horribly wrong. People are sharing photos on social media of packages they've received that are not what they've ordered. And we're not just talking about the wrong size or the wrong color here. At least a dozen people who bought a Nintendo Switch on Black Friday did not get a Nintendo Switch. Instead, they have been getting everything from air fresheners to photopolymer resin instead. This doesn't seem to be a skew mismatch because it really is random stuff that they're getting sent. Tambourines, electric toothbrushes, condoms, dog food, facial hair trimmers.

Starting point is 00:09:49 Amazon says it's looking into it. And you thought you had a bad week. Oh, and as for the Pantone color of the year, quoting from their news release, this color is elegant in its simplicity, suggestive of the sky at dusk. It's a restful color that gives people peace and brings them tranquility. It's a color that helps us concentrate and gives us clarity, centering our thoughts. It's a color that we need in our lives today. I'm not making this up, by the way. It goes on. We are living in a time that requires trust and faith.

Starting point is 00:10:31 It is a kind of constancy. Is that even a word? Constancy and confidence that is expressed by this color, a solid and dependable hue we can always rely on. Imbued with a deep resonance, this color provides an anchoring foundation. Boundless, evocative of the vast and infinite evening sky, this color encourages us to look beyond the increase our perspective and open the flow of communication oh my god uh that color by the way, is blue.

Starting point is 00:11:28 Blue! Well, classic blue, or as they know it, Pantone 194052. All right, to be fair, like, it's not quite just blue. It's like a muted blue. I mean, like, think blue with, like, a little bit of gray. But that's it. It's muted blue i mean like think blue with like a little bit of gray but that's it it's muted blue wow what are they smoking at pantone well if you are looking for some weekend listening the premium feed has a whole bunch of stuff a full description of how we do facebook

Starting point is 00:12:00 page algorithmic repair a deep dive into into the TikTok algorithm, plus my exclusive interviews with Mitch Joel on the future of digital agencies and Scott Stratton on why the so-called social funnel will fail. Click the link in this episode's description or visit todayindigital.com and look for the button that says premium episodes. I made the mistake of reinstalling Overwatch last night, played one game, lost that game, and uninstalled it again. So I think I'm gonna try Halo this weekend. Not really a looter shooter kind of guy, but after 1100 hours on Overwatch, 670 of which

Starting point is 00:12:37 on Mercy, I think I'm done with the omnics for a while. I'm Todd Maffin. Check out our agency at engageq.com. Link in the description. Have a restful weekend, and I will see you on Monday.

Today in Digital Marketing - Is the Era of Personalized Marketing Already Over?

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