Today in Digital Marketing - 🚨 Late Arrivals! 🚨

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected, be Zen. Today, how did the world's first real test of omni-channel marketing go? Be protected. Be Zen. And why is everyone mad at Twitter today? It's Wednesday, August 11th, 2021. Happy Nutritionist Day, Mexico. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. And here's what you missed today in digital marketing. One of my favorite shows in Vegas is the Blue Man Group. It's sort of a rock concert, comedy show, drumming spectacle.

Starting point is 00:01:07 And in every show, usually about 15 minutes in. All of a sudden, in the middle of the set, the music stops abruptly, the house lights go up, red alert lights on the side start spinning, all the screens on stage then change to the words, late arrivals. You're late, you're late. And you see a camera, a live camera inside the audience as people who showed up late to the show are shown to their seats

Starting point is 00:01:30 in this glorious moment of shared schadenfreude. Literally, a mobile cameraman walks down the aisle with them. I've seen the show like a half dozen times. They do this little shaming moment each time. I often wish we had one of those for our little digital marketing world. A way to shame companies that really should have been on top of stuff they weren't, but then showed up late with a magnificent grand entrance. If I had that button, I would absolutely be pressing it for Facebook today,

Starting point is 00:02:03 because they've finally shown up to the privacy party, publishing a news release titled, Privacy Enhancing Technologies and Building for the Future. It is, for all intents and purposes, a concession that they've given up trying to talk up personalization over privacy, and will finally focus on building solutions for the new era that we are all in. Welcome to the party, late arrivals. Most of the announcement was the usual Facebook PR speak about listening to and working with advertisers, users, and industry groups, blah, blah, blah. But two items did stand out.

Starting point is 00:02:37 Quoting from their news release, Last year we began testing our private lift measurement solution with select partners, which uses a privacy-enhancing technology called Secure Multiparty Computation. Thank you. or Facebook. This solution will be available broadly to advertisers next year. In the meantime, we have open-sourced our framework for private computation solutions so that anyone in the industry can develop measurement products based on this technology. We're also exploring applications for on-device learning, if you want to dive a little deeper. The Verge actually asked directly how many Facebook and Instagram users have opted into personalized ads since the iOS 14.5 prompts started popping up. The executive somewhat bluntly spat out a no comment.

Starting point is 00:03:50 But, like I say, welcome to the new reality, Facebook. Better late than never. Hors d'oeuvres are on the left. The Olympics in Tokyo this summer were really the first summer games to be broadcast in an era of true omni-channel advertising. We have terrestrial broadcasts, of course, but now there's a lot more in the mix. YouTube, over-the-top services, digital audio, podcasts. So how did it go? Not well.

Starting point is 00:04:20 Quoting Marketing Dive, NBC Universal's coverage of the Tokyo Olympics was considered by many viewers to be too fragmented, leading to the broadcast's lowest ratings since NBCUniversal acquired the U.S. media rights to the Summer Games in 1988. Viewers cited obstacles in navigating the broadcast across different channels, particularly NBC's over-the-top product Peacock, and found it difficult to tune into live events, according to the journal. TV viewership was down 42%, compared to the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Viewer confusion about NBCU's wide-spanning broadcast comes despite the company's efforts to streamline its omni-channel ecosystem, potentially altering how NBCU offers ads for major broadcasts in the future. Unquote. Turns out it was so bad that the Wall Street Journal is reporting some advertisers are hoping they'll get some make-good discounts

Starting point is 00:05:15 on their future ad campaigns with NBC, some of which, like the Winter Olympics and the Super Bowl, they've already locked in ad slots. It must be especially frustrating for the company since they've heavily invested in OnePlatform, their omni-channel media buying platform, which was supposed to provide a one-stop shop for brands to place ad campaigns. The U.S. Postal Service says it plans to add a special seasonal surcharge in Q4 of this year that would apply to both commercial customers and to retail customers. The extra fees would vary depending on the size of the package, but would be generally from 25 cents to five bucks. This would kick in as early as October 3rd this year and end on Boxing Day.

Starting point is 00:06:03 This is a step up from last year's extra fees, which they only applied to their big commercial customers like Amazon. They say last year they delivered a record 1.1 billion packages that was up 25% from the previous year. To be fair, FedEx and UPS both have added holiday surcharges on shipments for years now. The American postal regulator has yet to approve the proposal.

Starting point is 00:06:30 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 00:06:54 So you have your Shopify store set up. Klaviyo's in there. You've got a regular brand website. You don't have your own mobile app like the big players do. This week, the web hosting platform Wix launched a solution, a done-for-you mobile app like the big players do. This week, the web hosting platform Wix launched a solution, a done-for-you mobile app. Let's hope the app quality is better than the product name. They're calling it Branded App by Wix. Maybe hold off on the award submissions. Quoting TechCrunch, business owners can customize their app's icon, layout, and content, including product pages, booking services, forums and groups, chat functions, blogs, push notifications, and more.

Starting point is 00:07:30 Wix will automatically update users' apps to remain compatible with the latest versions of iOS and Android, unquote. But here's where it gets, I don't know, questionable. Almost all of a mobile app's development is up front in the design, programming, and submitting it to the app stores. Once it's there, other than maybe the occasional security update, there's really not much work that needs to happen. But Wix is pricing this by the month. And it's not cheap. It's $200 per month.

Starting point is 00:08:01 Plus, $99 a year to be in Apple's app store. Plus, $25 to be in Apple's app store, plus 25 bucks to be in Google's. That's $2,500 a year, which might work out financially for some stores, but I'm guessing not for a whole bunch more. Probably not coincidentally, Wix will announce its Q2 earnings tomorrow. Instagram's brand safety feature called Limit has now finished rolling out and is now available globally. This will prevent people who aren't your followers from sending your account any DMs. And if you're thinking, well, someone will just follow our account then troll us, you can also say, also block people who've only been following us for a week. Instagram intends this to be used as a temporary solution to your account being on the end of unwanted attention,

Starting point is 00:08:46 and you can have it active for up to four weeks, after which it'll remind you that it's returning to normal. Of course, if you want no DMs at all, you can set the app to not receive message requests. If you were to read every single word of Instagram's terms of service and privacy policy, how long do you think it would take you? Did you guess 20 minutes? Nope. 40? Nope.

Starting point is 00:09:13 According to a fun little study from Reboot Online Marketing, it would take you more than an hour. But here's the worst part. Of all the services they looked at, Instagram was actually the smallest amount of time. It would take you more than an hour and a half to read both documents from PayPal, closely behind at 89.1 minutes, Shopify. As for which platforms received the most online searches for their legal agreements, the top three were WhatsApp, Discord, and Instagram. Somewhat surprisingly, Amazon was at the bottom of the top 10 list.

Starting point is 00:09:49 Well, Twitter made a tiny change to its website today and the internet completely lost its shit about it. Did you even notice, by the way, as of today, Twitter.com is rocking a new font, which, by my untrained eyes, is completely indistinguishable from the old font. But what do I know? Because the comments under the announcement tweet ranged everything from this is crap, it looks blurry, to it physically hurts to look at, that's an actual quote, to I feel I need to use my safe word now. For its part, Twitter says the new font, which it calls Chirp,

Starting point is 00:10:26 is more accessible and less cluttered. Some elements have become more high contrast. Some, like follow buttons, are now black. They say this is just the start and more visual updates are on the way. And finally, in case you thought the buzz around TikTok was falling off, latest numbers from app analytics platform SensorTower show that the app was once again the most downloaded non-game app in July. Quoting social media today, now you know why Facebook sought to stoke fears about Chinese tracking through the app with U.S. senators in 2019, an angle that it's no doubt still working behind the scenes because right now doesn't look like much else is going to slow down its growth and expansion around the world, unquote. Well, don't cry too hard for Zuckerberg. Second, third, fourth, and fifth place are all owned by Facebook. Then, Snapchat, Zoom, Telegram, CapCut, that's the free video editing app owned by TikTok's parent company,

Starting point is 00:11:24 and Google Meet. So how did my first attempt at home automation go yesterday? Thanks for asking. Horrible, actually. I'm beginning to think that the gap between what marketing shows and how products actually perform, that gap is biggest with home automation platforms. Like, I watched the YouTube videos of these guys and yes yes yes they get free samples shipped to them so you know there's an incentive to be generous let's say in their review of it but it looks like it'll work

Starting point is 00:11:57 so this lawn sprinkler that i got which is supposed to connect with your house you can't control it unless you're like literally standing right in front of it. The Bluetooth is that weak. Somebody is going to make killer money by coming to your house, like setting up a service where they will just show up your house and just make it all. I'm not talking about like the geek squad or anything like that. Just like one really good nerd who will come to your house and make all of this home automation work the way it should. Maybe that's the silver lining here. I may have just found another side hustle. Talk to you tomorrow. It's the season for new styles, and you love to shop for jackets and boots.

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Starting point is 00:13:18 R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A.

Today in Digital Marketing - 🚨 Late Arrivals! 🚨

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