Today in Digital Marketing - Meet "Focused View" — An Ad Placement for the Budget-Conscious

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Thursday, October 13th. I'm Todd Maffin. Today, TikTok wants to give you six seconds for free. A study finds most marketing agencies secretly outsource their work now. Amazon's Prime Day prequel was a worrying precursor. Twitter's new call to action has a catch. And here comes the age of the automated creative. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. How would you like to only pay for the ads that people are actually engaging with on TikTok?

Starting point is 00:00:35 Well, TikTok launched a new campaign type today called Focused View, which is designed to target viewers who are paying attention to your ads. According to the company, quote, brands only pay when users have voluntarily watched an ad for at least six seconds or when they interacted with the ad within the first six seconds, unquote, whichever occurs first. While TikTok will lose some upfront money with the new pay if you engage tool, performance tools tend to increase brands' willingness to spend on platforms. But even with it being more cost-effective, many marketers still see TikTok as lagging behind Meta in driving direct sales. Marketers told Adweek this week that, in order for TikTok to be a true sales driver, better targeting and attribution capabilities are necessary. One marketer pointed out that focused view also faces the challenge of many brands needing more than six seconds to

Starting point is 00:01:25 explain their value proposition to consumers. They suggested that brands with products that can sell in less than six seconds, like a food or a simple kitchen tool, would benefit the most from this format. That said, another marketer indicated Focused View can help improve marketing budget efficiency. If someone drops off in the first six seconds, you won't have to pay for that ad. TikTok's creator marketplace, their matchmaking tool for influencers and brands, got several updates today as well, including better creator matching search results with granular keyword searches, a new recommendation feature called TTCM Match that automatically generates a list of creators based on a brand's brief. Open application campaigns let brands post details of upcoming campaigns to let creators apply in advance. And invite links, which let brands or any agencies work with a creator, even if that creator is not enrolled in TikTok's creator marketplace. Brands will also have access to new

Starting point is 00:02:25 post-campaign reporting metrics, including audience interest distribution, audience overlap, and Spark Ads campaign dates. A new report says that most marketing agencies now outsource their work. 75% of marketing agencies in the study are outsourcing help from either freelancers or content marketplaces, with the majority of those working with freelancers exclusively. The study also found that a fifth of agencies said that content creation makes up more than three quarters of their revenue. Does company size matter? Limited staff doesn't seem to be the issue. Among those agencies, two-thirds have

Starting point is 00:03:05 more than 10 employees. When it comes to frequency of content creation, not many agencies are producing more than 15 pieces of content per client per month. Six out of 10 in the study say they're producing between one and nine pieces per client per month. Four out of 10 produce one to four pieces. According to the study, in-house marketers produce more content per client than agencies do, with almost half producing 5 to 14 pieces. The survey found the biggest blockers to agencies creating quality content are industry and audience knowledge, managing client expectations, and not having enough resources. Finally, half of all in-house teams outsource work,

Starting point is 00:03:46 suggesting that the hybrid content creation model is becoming more common. The data comes from Verblio's survey of more than 400 marketers. 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.

Starting point is 00:04:08 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. Prime Day 2? What are we calling the thing that just happened? Prime Day 1? Prime Day the prequel? Be protected. Be Zen. that Amazon was pushing, which could of course be a precursor for holiday shopping trends. As of yesterday, the average order size was down more than 20% from the Prime Day sale in July. Likewise, the two-day Prime Early Access sale, which started Tuesday,

Starting point is 00:04:56 generated softer sales in the summer event, this all coming from the research firm Clover. So what's to blame for consumers' lack of enthusiasm this time around? Amazon says everyone is feeling the pinch of inflation. Brands and businesses on Twitter can now add a new call-to-action button to their profile. The platform recently announced Link Spotlight, which is now available for professional accounts, which lets brands display an interactive button on their account by entering a URL and pairing it with a call-to-action prompt.

Starting point is 00:05:29 The CTA options include Listen Now, Watch Now, Book an Appointment, and so on. After choosing your message, you'll be able to activate your new link spotlight. But there is a catch. Twitter is limiting the URLs that can be used. There are currently only 34 domains that qualify. There are some popular options available in their selection, like YouTube, Ticketmaster, a few podcasting platforms, food delivery services, and so on.

Starting point is 00:05:54 But at least for now, you can't pick any link, like, for instance, a link to your website. And that will bring us to the lightning round. Auto-generated ad content is happening. Microsoft recently released a sneak peek of its upcoming designer platform, which will use AI to generate marketing content for your campaigns based on text prompts. Platform only in limited beta, but eventually will be available to paying Microsoft 365 subscribers. Twitter has started testing audio chats within communities.

Starting point is 00:06:30 With the test, some admins will be able to create dedicated audio spaces within their groups. All users can see and join a space started in communities, but only members of that community can reply to the space. Instagram is reportedly developing a new achievements feature for Reels. The feature would display certain badge levels on your Reels performance, like trendsetter and creative streak. It appears that only you can see your achievements, suggesting that these are a new incentive to get you to post more TikTok, excuse me, Reels. And Slack confirmed it is experiencing issues today with threads, channels, notifications,

Starting point is 00:06:58 and more. The issues started this morning and apparently are still ongoing as I record this. Slack is aware of the issues and says it's working on a fix. Had a bit of a panic yesterday. I opened up iPhoto on the Mac and all of our vacation photos were gone. I couldn't find them anywhere. The folders were there, just nothing in them. As it turns out, so the iPhone's operating system has a new like shared albums feature. So I put all of our vacation photos a few months ago up there. But the Mac version has not actually updated their operating system to catch up with the iPhones yet. So the Mac version of iPhoto has no idea what a shared album is. It just when you open it up, it just looks like it's empty.

Starting point is 00:07:40 So, boy, let me tell you, I downloaded every photo from iPhoto, put them on a hard drive, and then backed up that hard drive. I'm not having that feeling again. Ugh! It was bad. Anyway, I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. Leave all the heartaches Leave all the bad breaks

Starting point is 00:08:07 Cause one day you won't forget this Let's keep running through the night Blurry lines and sparkling lights Forever Forever

Today in Digital Marketing - Meet "Focused View" — An Ad Placement for the Budget-Conscious

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