Today in Digital Marketing - It's Him, Hi. He's the Problem, It's Him

Starting point is 00:00:00 It's Wednesday, December 14th. Today, Twitter considers an ultimatum. Let us track you or delete our app. Also, a new brand safety tool for podcasts. Google launches a search status dashboard. The most popular vertical video app goes horizontal. And where marketers are spending these days. I'm Todd Maffin.

Starting point is 00:00:21 Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. One question shook the online ad business to its core last year. That question came in the form of a prompt on iPhones. Do you allow this app to track your activity across other companies, apps, and websites? When Apple released version 14.5 of its mobile operating system in April last year, that prompt started showing up on almost all apps. And, unsurprisingly, most people said, no, don't track me. It catapulted online ad businesses like Meta's into chaos.

Starting point is 00:00:56 Attribution went from confirmed to modeled. Data started coming in a lot slower, and the overall state of targeted advertising took a big hit. Meta said they expected to lose $10 billion because of the change. To be fair, almost all the platforms, Facebook, Twitter, Google, already let people opt out of personalized tracking. But you had to know where to find the toggle switch, and most people didn't even know it was possible. On Twitter's app, more than 65% of users opted out. That was a problem for Twitter then,

Starting point is 00:01:29 and even more of a problem now that Elon Musk's leadership has caused half of their major advertisers to back away. Last night, Platformer reported that Twitter has a bold new plan to slow the bleeding, force all Twitter users to agree to personalized ads and tracking, or lose access to the app entirely. And it's not just ad tracking. Insider sources speaking to Platformer said Twitter is also considering forcing users to share their location, requiring users to agree to let Twitter share their data with business partners, and using the phone numbers that people submitted for two-factor authentication for ad targeting purposes. You might recall

Starting point is 00:02:11 Twitter had to pay a $150 million fine for doing this exact thing only last year. Once users agree, they can never opt out. Quoting Platformer, Twitter is also considering allowing Twitter Blue subscribers to opt out of personalized ads if they pay the monthly fees, Horses said. If Twitter took that step, the feature would likely run afoul of Apple's rules, which prohibit apps from forcing users to make a choice between paying a fee and enabling ad tracking. Moreover, forcing Twitter users to share more personalized data could prompt a backlash, particularly during a moment when trust in the company and Musk's leadership is low, unquote.

Starting point is 00:02:55 As Taylor Swift's song goes, it must be exhausting always rooting for the antihero. Some advertisers still view podcasts as a kind of feral marketing platform where hosts are known to be controversial, sometimes cheerleaders for ivermectin. To help advertisers better assess podcast sponsorships, a new AI platform called Barometer announced yesterday that it has expanded its podcast brand safety tool to include analysis of news and online content about hosts. That's on top of their existing transcription level ratings. The new tool is called Host Intelligence, and it lets advertisers vet podcast hosts

Starting point is 00:03:36 based on sentiments about them outside of their shows. This layer is on top of their existing transcription level analysis. It analyzes 50,000 different content sources every day, tracking mentions of more than 2,000 podcast hosts, and then weighting those mentions based on how prominent they are in the content. That news can include stories from major media platforms, small publications, or even bot-generated articles pulled from social media. With the tool, advertisers will see a bar at the top of their screens, letting them know whether the system found that their hosts had been in the news in the past week or month, and if the coverage is rated positive or negative. Users can also click, of course, to view the articles. This updated version will be released in the coming weeks.

Starting point is 00:04:24 Something's going sideways at TikTok, and that something is the entire app. The company confirmed today it is testing a new horizontal full-screen mode with select users. Users who have access to the test feature will see a new full-screen button appear on videos in their feed. Tapping that button will make the video shift to a full-screen horizontal mode. The feature yet another example of TikTok shift to a full screen horizontal mode. The feature yet another example of TikTok continuing to infiltrate YouTube's territory. As The Verge pointed out today, up until now, what set TikTok and YouTube apart is TikTok's focus on portrait video, with brands and marketers having to create separate videos for each platform in order to use the

Starting point is 00:05:01 different platform strengths. Quoting The Verge, if this full screen mode means creators can now create a single video that's optimized for both YouTube and TikTok, we may well see more longer form videos on TikTok that you'd typically only find on YouTube, unquote. Of course, it could be handy in terms of recycling brand content. It is not clear yet if the platform

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Starting point is 00:06:20 Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. some details and the current status of the incident has a number of features you might already be using on other Google dashboards, like an RSS feed that you can subscribe to and a view of historical data. It's interesting to note that until now, Google had been posting these alerts on Twitter, but they've now moved away from that and have built this out. Key search engineers and even the main Google search liaison now have active accounts on Mastodon. With the new year just around the corner, how will marketing channels shake out through the end of 2022? New research published yesterday by Digiday ranked the top channels for brands and retailers this year. Leading up to the holiday season, the top marketing channels media buyers said they used include Facebook, Instagram, and influencers. Those topped the list with 9 out of 10 respondents indicating they used those

Starting point is 00:07:29 marketing channels. 85% used Google, three quarters used online display ads, two-thirds TikTok, followed by other social platforms and Amazon. Again, that's leading up to the holiday season, but everything seems to change when it comes to holiday marketing. While Facebook and Instagram have been the dominant channels so far in 2022, the study found that this holiday spend will go largely to TikTok and Instagram. Nearly half of respondents said Google and influencers will grow in importance to their marketing plans for the holiday, while two out of four said other social platforms will grow in importance, Facebook came in at the bottom of that list. A few updates from YouTube to share with you. First, YouTube Studio is rolling out

Starting point is 00:08:17 video processing time indicators that will help you track how long it will take for your video to process, with different indicators for SD, HD, and 4K. The platform is also adding more info panels for data stories to give you more insight into channel performance. Those insights include a weekly recap, highlighting the number of vlogs, lives, shorts, and posts published, how many viewers turned in, the percentage of new or returning traffic, key drivers to the channel,

Starting point is 00:08:45 and weekly revenue. Finally, YouTube also announced new ways it plans to combat its comment spam problems. Now the company says it will warn users when a comment is removed for violating guidelines. On top of that, users can be put in a timeout. If a user keeps posting multiple abusive comments, they may be banned for 24 hours or be temporarily unable to comment. And that will bring us to the lightning round. Twitter today announced it will shut down Review, its newsletter platform. The company bought it at the start of last year when paid newsletters were starting to pick up steam. Twitter will cancel all paid subscriptions at the end of their billing cycle.

Starting point is 00:09:23 And on January 12th, everything will be deleted. Reddit announced today it has expanded its Omnicom Media Group partnership in Canada. The two companies reached a similar agreement in the U.S. last year. And Facebook is killing off its job feature in the new year. Platform users began seeing notifications this week that jobs on Facebook will be toast as of February 22nd. Well, I'm off Overwatch again because I fell into gold again. So I picked up Fallout 76 again, really loving the new content. By the way, I'd love to play with you if you're on Xbox. Add me.

Starting point is 00:10:08 My gamertag is Radio9573. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - It's Him, Hi. He's the Problem, It's Him

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