Today in Digital Marketing - It’s 3:00 a.m. Do You Know Where Your Ads Are?

Episode Date: July 20, 2022

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Today, a new way to get more eyes on your reels. Google launches a new video ads creation tool. You won't believe how much advertisers spend on clickbait. Which social platforms are losing marketing clout? And climate change is burning down the cloud. It's Wednesday, July 20th. I'm Steph Gunn filling in for Todd Maffin. Here is what you missed today in digital

marketing. You can finally boost your reels on Instagram. The platform announced the update yesterday, which lets brands turn reels into ads directly through the app. Boosted reels will appear in feed, stories, the reels tab, and the explore page. But there are some rules. To be eligible for boosting, reels must be a maximum of 60 seconds in length, filmed in a 9x16 vertical aspect ratio and full screen format. Reels that are not eligible for boosting include content that contains copyrighted music, gifts, interactive stickers or filters, as well as reels shared to Facebook. Just like boosting a static post on Instagram, brands can now select boost post after finding the Reel they wish to promote in their profile grid.

While Instagram gives you a new way to turn videos into ads, Google is giving you a new way to create video ads for YouTube. Today, the company announced a new video ad creation flow in Google Ads, which lets you create videos by choosing a template from a catalog and customizing it with your brand logos, colors, images, text, and music. Your video can be used in any campaign that includes video, such as a Video Action Campaign or a Performance Max Campaign. The templates were designed for YouTube, so they feature optimal pacing, product placements, and calls to action.

A voiceover option has also been added to YouTube videos, which, like other video creation platforms, allows you to type in your script and set your preferred voice, and it will overlay the voiceover to your video. A new report has revealed that advertisers spend roughly a tenth of their budgets on clickbait sites. The media research company Ubiquity found that its clients spent $115 million on made-for-advertising inventory, which uses clickbait headlines to attract viewers, between January 2020 and May 2022. You've seen these before. They're awful-looking, terribly designed,

with only just enough content to make it qualify as a webpage. Turns out, clickbait accounted for roughly 10% of Ubiquiti's U.S. clients' budgets. Marketing Brew reports, according to the company's CPO, those funds could have been allocated to media companies with a diverse ownership profile, high-quality journalism, or high-quality news publications, rather than companies with no value to society. Agencies appear to be losing faith in the OG social media platforms. Data from Digiday suggests that Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube have plateaued in terms of how brand-appropriate agencies feel they are for their clients. The survey found that 80% of

agency professionals said Instagram is appropriate for their clients' brands, but that's down 10% from last year. Twitter is also down nearly 10%, with only 55% believing that the platform is appropriate for clients' brands. The report also found that Facebook and YouTube are down this year. Three-quarters said Facebook is appropriate for their clients' brands, compared to 80% last year. As for YouTube, 78% said it is appropriate for clients' brands, down 5% last year. No respondents indicated that any of these platforms were not appropriate for their clients' brands.

The report surveyed more than 50 agency professionals. Despite social platforms struggling with brand appropriateness for agencies, new research indicates that nearly half of small business owners and managers will increase their budgets for content marketing in the next 12 months, while only 6 out of 10 respondents that do content marketing indicated that their business has a documented plan. Among small business owners and managers, product reviews and customer testimonials are the most frequently published content types. According to respondents, the most effective content types are videos, blog posts,

customer testimonials, and product reviews. The report also found that 6 out of 10 respondents manage their content marketing in-house. Data has been provided by ServiceDirect's survey of over 700 small business owners or managers. 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. If your marketing platform seemed a little slow in the last day or so, the British heat wave might be behind it. Searing heat in the UK yesterday took down Google Cloud and Oracle servers. Both companies' data centers were

offline as cooling systems could not cope with the heat, disrupting a range of cloud services. Google stated it experienced a cooling-related failure in one of its UK-based data centers and that the issue is now resolved. Meanwhile, Oracle's message to its customers referred to unseasonal temperatures as the culprit. The company shut down some of its machines to prevent system failures, but according to its latest status update, all services have now been restored. Google Docs is getting an upgrade to help you with document control and collaboration. Yesterday, the company announced edit notifications that will alert you by email when someone edits a Google Doc. This is something that they've had for some time

for Google Sheets, their spreadsheet product, but this will now work on the word processing documents tool. The email details what changes were made, when the changes were made, and who made them. The alerts have to be enabled on a per file basis and can be set directly in a document. Google says the update will be rolled out over the next month. we have a small correction to yesterday's story about the shopify and youtube integration so we said that merchants needed to have 10 000 subscribers on youtube to qualify that number is actually 1000 so i just received a weather alert about a tornado watch and I had to laugh because when I clicked on it, here's what the weather channel has to say. Hazards. A few tornadoes. Including the possibility of strong tornadoes. So not one, but a few. So if I'm not at work tomorrow, you know, you might find me somewhere over the rainbow.

On a final note, if you haven't joined our Slack yet, this is your sign. We have over 900 members now. It's a great spot to share advice, get help, and get a look at what's coming up on each day's episode. We also love to know what you're working on, so there's a channel to promote yourself in. It's free to join.

All you have to do is tap the link in the show notes or go to todayindigital.com slash slack. Thanks for listening and Todd will be back with you tomorrow. Thank you.