Today in Digital Marketing - It Must Be Exhausting Always Rooting for the Anti-Hero

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Wednesday, February 15th. Today, Amazon's fees now take more than half of retailers' sales. Forget modeled data, meet synthetic data. Music in your brand's YouTube video might be pricier than you think. Why marketers are paying for phone lines that don't even work. Are you seeing a lot of Elon's tweets lately? There's a reason. Even his biggest fans might not back him up on this one.

Starting point is 00:00:26 I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce company, continues to hike its fees and now pockets more than half of retailers' sales. A new report by e-commerce researcher Marketplace Pulse found that sellers are paying more because the e-commerce giant has increased fulfillment fees and made spending on advertising unavoidable. The report shows that commission fees have steadily increased since 2016, but sellers were not negatively impacted because of the boom in online sales during the pandemic. But when the lockdowns were lifted, sales plummeted. As a result, Amazon suffered its slowest sales growth since its inception. According to the report, Amazon gets a 15% transaction fee from sellers along with fulfillment

Starting point is 00:01:13 fees of between 25 and 35%, and then on average, advertising and promotion fees of around 15%. A spokesperson for the company told Gizmodo that the fee sellers are charged is based on the cost and investment Amazon puts first. Quote, many selling partners have built and run their businesses without advertising. Sellers are not required to use our logistics or advertising services, unquote. While sellers can choose whether to participate in packing, delivery and advertising, they can't control the amount Amazon charges or the fees included. And those fees vary depending on the category, product price, size, weight, and the seller's business model. Despite struggling to make money, the report also showed that merchants are reluctant to increase their prices. Businesses are also shipping their own packages instead of using the company's warehouse and are starting to spend less on advertising. The spokesperson added that on average,

Starting point is 00:02:05 Amazon's fulfillment center is still 30% cheaper than the standard shipping services offered by third-party competitors and 70% less than alternative two-day shipping options. As collecting consumer data is starting to feel more like a mission out of Grand Theft Auto, digital marketers are looking for solutions that are effective while protecting their consumers' privacy. Adweek has an interesting think piece up today about how synthetic data may be the answer to our cookiepocalypse prayers.

Starting point is 00:02:38 What is synthetic data? The article's author, Mike Froggatt, explains that synthetic data is information that's created by generative AI that can optimize scarce data, mitigate bias, or preserve data privacy. He suggests that while marketers may be tempted to dismiss synthetic data as fake data, it can be valuable because it can be used to generate data sets that would otherwise be impractical because of collection limits or regulatory restrictions. Quoting his piece, first and foremost, synthetic data is a potentially viable solution to the common privacy challenges of sharing data across partners, including for the purpose of targeted digital advertising campaigns. While the technology to anonymize datasets via synthetic data is still relatively immature, synthetic data, in theory, could protect personally identifiable information of a company's customers

Starting point is 00:03:32 like social insurance numbers, phone numbers, email addresses, sensitive data like race and gender. Today, the process behind the anonymization and sharing of real first-party data can be time-intensive and expensive. Synthetic data, on the other hand, can be created based on the original real data set to form a synthetic one that no longer contains any of the original sensitive data information, unquote. YouTube recently launched its new commercial music licensing feature,

Starting point is 00:04:04 Creator Music, to US users in its partner program, and it has shocked many by its prices. The program lets influencers either pay up front to use copyrighted music in a video or split future ad revenue with the song's rights holders. Business Insider reporting today that creators testing the new song licensing feature have noted prices as high as $1,000 per track for use in a single video. Some licenses have a set price, while others have custom pricing based on a channel size. Other licenses are free. Those prices vary wildly based on a creator's subscriber count. One creator noticed this variance when comparing his main channel to a smaller gaming channel he operates at has only about 7,000 subscribers. The song he was looking to purchase, for instance, cost $0 for his gaming channel and $149.99 on his main channel, according to screenshots viewed by Insider. Another YouTuber said that the costs of revenue sharing rather than upfront licensing

Starting point is 00:05:09 can still be steep, particularly if a creator is required to split half of their 55% ad revenue. Other creators balked at the idea that a creator music license only grants an influencer access to use a song in a single video and can't be used with YouTube shorts or live streams or even in reposts of the video on other social platforms. Thus, one suggested competing licensing tools like Epidemic Sound, which provides royalty-free music for use across different social media platforms for a monthly subscription as a more cost-effective alternative. A British startup has come up with a way to verify small businesses on WhatsApp. If you use a single WhatsApp number for your business and your home life,

Starting point is 00:06:01 a problem many small business owners face is that to access WhatsApp business, you need a second number to create a unique ID, which of course can be a hassle. The company Your Business Number has come up with an interesting solution to address this pain point. Your Business Number offers a phone number. That's it. Just the number. You can't text anyone. You can't call anyone. You can't use apps. It's just the unique ID. It costs $5.99 a month. But it will break the connection to WhatsApp if the business lapses in payment or breaks WhatsApp's terms and conditions, which can slow down both spammers and legit business owners who forgot to pay. Still, it's something many small business owners might feel they need, a way to manage their companies from their phone without revealing their personal

Starting point is 00:06:40 phone number. Do you have business insurance? 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. How good do you think you are

Starting point is 00:07:10 at detecting deep fakes? Listen to my voice carefully. Is this my voice or is this an AI reading a script I programmed it to read after training it on five hours of my voice? No, it's actually just me

Starting point is 00:07:21 talking like a robot. But for a second, you thought, and just as we're seeing everyone from beloved brand mascots and spokespeople turning up in problematic deepfake videos, we now have deepfake audio, and it's not always pleasant. Gizmodo reports that ordinary people are now being targeted with online harassment and doxing attacks using their own voice. These attacks specifically targeted people with YouTube channels, podcasts, or other streams.

Starting point is 00:07:49 A number of these also targeted voice actors, some of whom have been critical of AI-generated content. Two voice actors reported that they were targeted by videos on Twitter containing fake audio of their own voice that shared their home addresses while using racist slurs. Now, some of these accounts have since been banned and deleted from Twitter. The Gizmodo report noted that a few remained online

Starting point is 00:08:12 for quite some time. Some of the posts explicitly stated they were generated with Eleven Labs technology. The AI company's Voice Lab software lets users clone voices and then generate new audio based on a text prompt. Following reports of those deep fakes, Eleven Labs announced the program would only be available to paying subscribers and that it would introduce more identity verification

Starting point is 00:08:35 for new accounts. And that will bring us to the lightning round. Reddit is looking to go public in the second half of this year. The company reportedly keeping its initial public offering paperwork up to date in preparation for its debut when market conditions improve. Pinterest has extended the video length of idea pins to five minutes. Up until now, the content format, which is something between a TikTok and an Instagram story had a 60-second limit. Microsoft has confirmed it's finally killing off its social enterprise network, Yammer. But don't worry, this isn't the end of Yammer. Microsoft says the platform will be rebranded into its Viva Engage offering.

Starting point is 00:09:17 And Tweetbots, former developers, have now added an edit button to Ivory, their app for Mastodon. Other updates to Ivory's iOS app include the ability to report users in posts and support for the server's language translation services. And finally, Taylor Swift's hit song Antihero begins with the line, I have this thing where I get older, but never wiser. Honestly, it's starting to feel like she wrote the song about Twitter owner Elon Musk. I know you've heard what's been happening there and the advertising followed from it, but this time, this time even Elon's biggest fans

Starting point is 00:09:53 are likely finding it exhausting, always rooting for the antihero. This week, he directed Twitter engineers to design a special system to boost tweets. Not your tweets, though. Just his. Platformer reports that after his Super Bowl tweet did worse than Joe Biden's, you know, the president of the United States,

Starting point is 00:10:15 he ordered major changes to the algorithm. Biden's tweet generated 29 million impressions, while Musk's tweet generated only 9 million impressions. So he rage quit, deleted the tweet. Within a day, Twitter users opened the app to find that his posts dominated their timelines. Platform confirmed this wasn't an accident. After Musk threatened to fire his remaining engineers, they devised a system this week to ensure Musk and only Musk benefits from the previously unheard of promotion of his tweets to the entire user base. His tweets now have an algorithmic multiplier of 1,000 times. Honestly, Taylor Swift may end up being our

Starting point is 00:10:59 generation's best cultural translator for Elon. As she wrote in that song, I'll stare directly at the sun, but never in the mirror. All right, enough Elon bashing for one day. I'm Todd Mappin. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. It's the office worker of the future who may have to face not only a change of work style, but a change of workplace. That's because the office of the future, already called a workstation, is so self-contained that it can exist almost anywhere, provided there's a telephone and electrical supply. So, the necessary visual display unit,

Starting point is 00:11:43 the electronic keyboard, computer and printer, can be set up in your own house. And far more of us could be working from home by 1981. I'm a royal like a lioness. Yeah, we about to get down now.

Today in Digital Marketing - It Must Be Exhausting Always Rooting for the Anti-Hero

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