Today in Digital Marketing - It's So Meta

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, Facebook has a new name. Be protected. Be Zen. It's Thursday, October 28th, 2021. Happy National Engineers Day, Venezuela. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 493. So I'm assuming you have heard by now that Facebook revealed its new name, and that name is Meta. As per Zuckerberg's recent obsession, it will focus on the virtual world and augmented reality. The company's rebranding comes as it faces a series of public relations crises. Quoting Zuckerberg, Our hope is that within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers.

Starting point is 00:01:19 We believe the metaverse will be the successor to the mobile internet. Unquote. Metaverse will be the successor to the mobile internet, unquote. The company says it will also change its ticker symbol on December 1st from FB to MVRS, because that's going to be easy to remember. Some other name change is coming. The VR headset Oculus Quest will become the MetaQuest, and the Facebook Portal video device will be branded to the MetaPortal in the next few months. People in our Slack communities were, well, a little underwhelmed. Michelle Hughes, a content manager at legendary social media, summed it up with,

Starting point is 00:01:54 Well, I don't hate it. Naturally, the usual suspects had their social media teams on standby to rush out pithy responses to tweet. My favorite was Wendy's, which changed their company name on Twitter to Meat. Someone else pointed out that the new meta logo, which looks like a low-hanging infinity symbol, also appears to be an almost exact duplicate of Spider-Man's eyes in costume. All that aside, what does this mean for the digital marketing industry? In the short term, not much. Facebook, the platform, will still be there along with Instagram and WhatsApp and so

Starting point is 00:02:31 on. The ad platform won't change for a while yet. Maybe in a couple of years when there's more adoption of VR in the market, we'll start to see some new placements there. Can you imagine virtual world added to the placements list? I'll give the final word to Tara Dublin on Twitter who said, A droopy infinity symbol seems to be the perfect representation for a company that exists to exhaust us emotionally and financially. How do you refresh a century-old brand and get young people through the door? That's what the car club AAA Club Alliance is working through, and they seem to be having some success. The company recently restructured its marketing strategy in an attempt to get people under 45 to see them as more than a brand that caters to their parents. You know, like Meta.

Starting point is 00:03:21 Alright, sorry. So what are the marketing strategies they're doing to reach millennials and Gen Zs? Reducing the volume of direct mail, placing strategic content within social media sponsorships, and they've increased the digital marketing budget. In 2019, digital marketing accounted for 19% of the overall marketing budget. Currently, it's 25%, and it's expected to reach 35% by 2022. It appears the strategies are working, since AAA has added 70,000 new members over the last

Starting point is 00:03:52 18 months, almost half of whom are under 45 years old. In addition to trying to appeal to a younger audience, AAA is trying to increase public awareness of its discounts, travel planning, and insurance services. To that end, they have a partnership with Props, a platform that matches social media creators with brands. Despite the partnership driving traffic to the site, 60% of those customers were abandoning the process along the way. Why? Apparently the landing page was confusing. So the solution? AAA created a landing page specifically for those users who found AAA through its props content, streamlining the process from landing page to discovering which plan suited them best. TV platforms like Roku and Netflix has accelerated, and it does not appear to be slowing down anytime soon. eMarketer estimates that by next year, there will be more than 213 million US-connected

Starting point is 00:04:51 TV viewers streaming over a billion hours of video content each week. Marketing firms could even benefit from enhanced data opportunities in order to compensate for the loss of third-party cookies and internet identifiers. All the puzzle pieces fit, so why aren't marketers capitalizing on his promise? A piece today in Marketing Dive offers this, quote, The number of devices that aren't measurable creates too much fragmentation and a complex buying environment. Thus, audiences are fragmented across devices, platforms, and services, making it difficult for advertisers to plan campaigns, unquote. Traditionally, marketers had a reach and frequency tool that was powered by Nielsen to look at the different places where the video was shared.

Starting point is 00:05:35 CTV, though, is an entirely new landscape and might require some adjusting, as fragmentation will remain because of major players like Amazon, YouTube, and Apple not likely to share data. 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.

Starting point is 00:06:16 The cookiepocalypse, of course, is well underway. Apple's doing its part. Google is phasing out cookies in Chrome in a couple of years, so everybody's scrambling to find the next solution. One company says it knows what the solution will be. Will it be Flock? Conversion API? Some new proprietary system? Yes, all those. Adweek has an interesting article up today called, The Washington Post welcomes cookie-less future but warns of third-party tollbooths. Quoting from that piece,

Starting point is 00:06:43 The Post has a different identifier strategy to most publishers. Its Zeus ad network works with more than 150 publishers, which it generates revenue from, and so it has a vested interest in finding identity solutions that benefit the larger media ecosystem rather than just itself. The Post needs to remain flexible and is open to working with several ID solutions, including UID2, which publishers like the New York Times have shunned for now,

Starting point is 00:07:08 and Google's Flock, Federated Learning of Cohorts, which The Guardian has objected against, depending on which best suits its business partners. We don't believe in a one-size-fits-all mindset at The Post. A post vice president said, from a data capability standpoint, we're looking at a modular suite of products and services that can align with the KPIs of our partners, while at the same time maintaining privacy consent, unquote. Anyway, if you live your days worrying about the impact of privacy on our business, the piece is definitely worth a read. Again, it's at Adweek, and it's called The Washington Post Welcomes Cookie-less Future, but warns of third-Party Toll Booths. Finally, a small correction.

Starting point is 00:07:52 Yesterday, we covered some new ad placements that Amazon has. As it turns out, most of those placements in their announcement are not actually available yet. They are in a closed beta test in the U.S., it turns out. Companies do this a lot in our space for some reason, make a big announcement about something only to mention in the fine print that, yeah, actually, this is probably a whole month's away still. In Amazon's case, it wasn't even in the fine print. Yesterday, I interviewed the head of international expansion for Amazon ads and asked him if he thought there was a trust gap between his company

Starting point is 00:08:22 and digital marketers. I don't think so. If I look at our business, really everything we do goes back to the customer experience. And if I think about that from an advertising lens, our advertising solutions wouldn't be effective if we did anything different. So our bar, I'll speak to advertising because obviously it's the business that I know best, but our bars that are ad experiences should be of such a high quality that customers should welcome them. And that, you know, might be on our websites or devices or boxes or anywhere. And I say that because I think advertiser and customer interest should be inherently aligned. And advertising only works if we make it a great experience for customers.

Starting point is 00:09:00 So they should be aligned, but they're often not, right? I mean, there's like, there's the customer trust path, and then there's a trust path with market. I mean, there are different audiences. I would say that, first and foremost, customer trust is not something that's negotiable. So, you know, we take the privacy of our customers, for example, very, very seriously. As we look beyond that to our advertising customers, we think that by helping customers discover new products, discover new brands within Amazon's sort of vast selection that they may just not have known about, often products they can't find in brick and mortar shelves, then advertising can and should be very useful for customers. And that's the high bar that we hold ourselves to. You'll hear the full interview with, yes, details on all their new ad placements,

Starting point is 00:09:48 some of which are actually quite interesting, on a special weekend edition coming to you this Saturday. But we try really hard to make this a good use of your time. Short, punchy, no rambling,

Starting point is 00:10:03 well, limited rambling anyway. And if you find this valuable, I'd really appreciate it if you'd take a minute to rate and review the podcast. We have made this easier for you than you think. There's a link in this episode notes that will take you right to the review page of your app. Thank you and talk to you tomorrow. If I brought you into the light, it couldn't tear us apart. So consider opening up and let some light in your heart. Cause that's the only way to heighten your arm.

Starting point is 00:10:26 It's like this or like that. I pass you the rhythm so you can give it right back. I'm potent right in the moment. You know I might snap. Devoted to crack and open the wheel to fight back against stagnancy. Yeah, the rhythm, the rhythm. I keep the rhythm, the rhythm. What?

Starting point is 00:10:36 The rhythm, the rhythm. I keep the rhythm, the rhythm. What? The rhythm, the rhythm. I keep the rhythm, the rhythm. What? The rhythm, the rhythm.

Today in Digital Marketing - It's So Meta

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