Today in Digital Marketing - Meet Meta's New 'Dumbed Down' Ads

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, Meta will soon launch scaled-down ads, robots are generating even more content, the surprising LinkedIn post type that can triple your reach, everything you wanted to know about Twitter ads, and the gap between in-store audio and real-time inventory levels. It's Monday, June 6th. I'm Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Before we get to our lead story, a quick update. Today, Apple held its annual event where they show off what they're planning for the next versions of their software.

Starting point is 00:00:31 There'll be a way to customize your lock screen. They announced Matter support for home devices. There's a way to track your meds on your watch. But for we digital marketers, one announcement stood out. Apple is joining the Buy Now, Pay Later party. This will be available for customers who use Apple Pay to complete a purchase. It'll split it into four equal payments without interest or late fees. And apparently it won't require any work on the merchant side or from developers.

Starting point is 00:00:58 Upcoming payments are made through the Apple Wallet app on iOS, and they have an integration with Calendar, so payments due will show up there. There's also going to be some order tracking, which will let sellers send receipts and package shipping information to the Wallet app. Apple says it's already integrated with Shopify. More details are emerging now about Meta's plans for a kind of dumbed-down ad product, one that doesn't use any personal tracking or targeting. This in response to an ever-restrictive privacy landscape like Apple's recent moves to limit user tracking. This is something we first reported on a few weeks back when rumors were spreading on Twitter. Now, Business Insider has some more of the confidential details. Quoting their piece, Facebook is in the early stages of developing

Starting point is 00:01:43 a product that wouldn't rely on any anonymized personal info from users, two ad buyers from different ad agencies told Insider. Basic ads, as Facebook engineers have been calling it, is aimed at brand advertisers that are trying to build awareness and shape perception of products. One of the buyers said it would be measured by basic metrics like engagement and video views, unquote. Those two metrics are to be used because they're really the only things of value that can be tracked entirely on Meta's side of the platform. And yes, that would mean no landing page views or even knowing whether an ad converted. And because advanced targeting options apparently won't be available, those campaigns may not be quite as effective. Here's Social Media Today's take on it. Quote, basic ads would also be a cheaper Facebook ad option, though the price would be variable based on advertiser interest. The focus would be on

Starting point is 00:02:35 building general brand awareness through broad audience exposure. So if you're not looking to target any specific audience or group, you could run a basic ad targeted to Facebook users more generally. If you're confident in your creative, it might also be a viable opportunity. Though overall, these less targeted campaigns would also, you would assume, be far less effective in generating direct results. But then again, if the price is right and you're able to run broad-reaching campaigns, that could still be a good way to boost exposure without using any invasive user data elements, unquote. Meta reported in its latest Q4 results that Apple's changes cost the company around $10 billion in lost ad revenue last year. Some estimates put that number even higher.

Starting point is 00:03:18 So if there's no advanced targeting, what can you do? Think about the media buying landscape pre-digital, like newspaper or radio ads. There you target broad swaths of demographics rather than lists of cohorts. Business Insider reports the team developing basic ads has fallen behind its planned test launch in January. When it does start testing later this year, it is expected it will test first in Europe to align with that region's more stringent privacy laws. One day, you will set up an ad on Google by just uploading your logo and letting Google's AI handle everything else from targeting to creative. Okay, that's a bit of a stretch, but only a bit.

Starting point is 00:04:01 Google's Performance Max campaigns are headed in that direction. Hell, they're already halfway there. And now, more moves toward machine learning replacing people. Some advertisers over the weekend reported seeing a new option in the Google Ads interface called Automatically Created Assets. The option is essentially an on or off toggle. It reads, you can allow Google to help you generate headlines, descriptions, and other assets using your content from your landing page, domain, and ads. Google will provide you with automated tools to customize your assets

Starting point is 00:04:34 based on relevance for your keywords. There's an on switch. That on switch says, use my content from my landing page, domains, and ads in combination with assets I provide. Customize assets based on relevance for my keywords. There's also an off switch that says only use assets I provide directly for my ads. The Google Help document on this feature says, quote, For responsive search ads within campaigns where you enable automatically created assets,

Starting point is 00:05:03 you instruct Google to generate assets from eligible sources based on relevance and predicted performance. These assets can take the form of entire sentences, phrases, or paraphrasing while retaining the original meaning. The generated assets are added to the pool of eligible assets for your responsive search ads. When your ad is eligible to serve for a query, the system will look at the pool of eligible assets for your responsive search ads. When your ad is eligible to serve for a query, the system will look at the pool of eligible assets, both advertiser-provided and automatically created, and select the assets that are predicted to perform best.

Starting point is 00:05:35 Unquote. They even provided an example of how their AI might write some headlines. In one example, they provided it with the URL of a smartphone and some of their own headlines, like Our Most Innovative Smartphone Yet, Safe and Secure, and Contact-Free Delivery Available Today. And then Google came up with these additional machine learning generated headlines, Impressive from Every Angle, Trade-In Offers Available, Several Colors to Choose From, and Reimagined Camera to Capture Life's Moments. For now, this appears to choose from, and reimagined camera to capture life's moments. For now, this appears to be a test, though I don't think you need to be Karnak the Magnificent

Starting point is 00:06:12 to predict whether or not it will roll out more widely. A new study from Social Insider and Cloud Campaign has found some interesting tidbits regarding LinkedIn effectiveness. They say they analyzed more than 140,000 LinkedIn posts from more than 1,000 LinkedIn company pages. The findings are what you would expect. Of course, video generates the best engagement for small and medium-sized businesses. You should post more often and so on. But interestingly, they also discovered that posting native format documents, and by that

Starting point is 00:06:46 I mean uploading PDF files, tripled the click-through rate. Apparently some content managers use this as a carousel post with each PDF in its own swipable tile. Also, they say the average LinkedIn page reach rate is just shy of 3.5%, which is better than I thought it would have been, actually. That reach is actually over 6% for pages with fewer than 5,000 followers. A link to the complete report is in today's premium newsletter, which you can find today in digital.com slash newsletter. If you've ever been on Twitter and seen those big impact ad placements, like a big banner over the Explore page and wondered, how do I book that? How much does that cost?

Starting point is 00:07:32 Well, we have the answers for you. Recently, I spoke with Andrew Hutton. He is a client account manager at Twitter. And we walked through nearly every single ad product they have available, from promoted tweets to sponsored hashtags. One of those I asked him about was that big banner, a placement they call the timeline takeover. It's the first tweet that users will see. I believe it's for the first two times that they jump on the platform. And then after that, 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

Starting point is 00:08:05 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. It will revert to just a regular promoted tweet. So, you know, if I go in at eight in the morning, I'll see it my first thing. Maybe I don't go on again until noon. That'll be again. I'll see it again. And then from there, it will be returned to the normal scope.

Starting point is 00:08:37 For first view, for pricing on that, for Canadian, it's around $46K. And that gets you the full 24 hours with that top placement. And then how would that scale up to the US? Is that the same in US dollars, more expensive? I'm assuming more expensive. If you want to take over in the US, it will definitely be more expensive. I'm not sure 100% of what that pricing will look like, since I have access to Canadian pricing. But it definitely, the higher the scale of the audience, the higher the cost, essentially.

Starting point is 00:09:07 Is this something that we have to book in advance? Yes, we always recommend booking in advance as in advance as possible. A lot of dates are very popular with advertisers. So you really want to make sure you are booking it before someone else essentially takes it from you. So this is not something we'll see on the self-service side. This is a call a Twitter human being and book it that way.

Starting point is 00:09:28 Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You mentioned trend takeover and trend takeover plus. What are those? How do they price all that, Jess? Yeah. So there's a trend takeover and a trend takeover plus. The trend takeover is when you are looking at the Explore page on Twitter.

Starting point is 00:09:43 So where all those top trends are, you will see in generally the third placement, that promoted trend. You can actually go in and see there's probably one live today. Looks like Kraft Dinner has theirs live today for KD Flavor Debate. So it will show up in that placement for the full day. It will always stay there. And when users click it. And it's very big.

Starting point is 00:10:07 Like what I'm looking at now, like it's quite impactful. It is a big graphic banner that is animating. So what you are looking at there is the trend takeover plus. So that placement allows you to put in that graphic where, like you said, it's super impactful. It really stands out. And then the way the plus works compared to just the regular trend takeover is you will have that placement for, again, I believe it's the first three times that a user goes to that page. And then after that, it will then move down to the placement around the second spot under the trends where it won't have the image anymore, but it will still have your hashtag and your description. Yes, correct. I just reloaded it twice to see and that's exactly what happened. So after the third reload, that went away. I'm looking now at a news banner in that position,

Starting point is 00:10:54 and it's gone to the second to the second position. Perfect. And then what happens as well is when a user clicks into that trend, it will do a search essentially of that hashtag, and you will have a tweet associated with it that will be the first one that a user sees when they're looking at those search results. If someone responds to this, you know, like they see your ad and they tweet, and it's a negative tweet, they say this brand is terrible, you know, they kill whales or something. What level of control do you as an advertiser have on, how do I say this the right way, sanitizing, I guess, the search results?

Starting point is 00:11:33 Yeah, you don't, because this at the end of the day is still a search result. So any tweets using a hashtag will show up. The way we recommend it is not just having one tweet that you are putting out on the day of using that hashtag, use multiple. That helps put more of your content in the feed and in the results. And do it with engagement content that will get people engaging in a positive way. So again, so that content is showing up. And the higher the engagement, the more likely it is to be seen by users. We'll see you next time. premium feed. Well, despite all the attention on e-commerce, many sales are still made, of course, in brick and mortar stores. Groceries, for instance. Sure, you can buy them online, but most of us don't. There is a crossover between that real world space and our digital media

Starting point is 00:12:58 buying space, and that's in targeted audio aimed at in-store customers while they shop. One such provider, Vibenomics, just raised about $12 million in funding. They say they'll use it to expand their network of grocery stores, pharmacies, and convenience stores. Last week, I spoke with their president, Paul Brenner, and he said that while the technology is getting closer to being able to deliver specific ads based on real-time inventory levels, it's not quite there just yet. You know, we're automated to the point where we can say, here's 100 stores and 88 of them have that product. We're only playing the ads in those 88 stores at that time,

Starting point is 00:13:37 and we can turn them off and on by the second. And is that connection in real time? As long as we ask, you know, the system and the people in advance, like, is this product being carried in this store? That's usually sufficient. So, you know, if I know like two or three days before the campaign starts that I'm good, that usually over the four weeks I'm still good. It's really just a matter of is the product sold there or not. So, you know, like not all jars of pickles are sold in every, you know, all thousand stores. Oh, I see. So it's not a real

Starting point is 00:14:11 time connection to the actual stock levels. Like if they sell out of pickles at 430 in the afternoon, you can't turn the pickle ad off at 430. That's correct. Right. It's only if it's listed as a distribution item. Our full interview is available online now for everybody to listen to. You don't need to be a premium subscriber for that. It's at todayindigital.com slash in-store ads. And finally, TikTok has added some new insights to its Creative Center platform. There are now song analytics that let you see the popularity of a particular sound over time,

Starting point is 00:14:48 as well as demographic information on which users are using it. You'll also see what interests people who use a particular sound have. That popularity chart is also now available for trending hashtags. It's also broken down by region. And there's a kind of popularity scoreboard now for creators that shows the top influencers by region. You can find it all at ads.tiktok.com slash business slash creative center. So, yes, I did finally manage to repair my Fallout 4 character.

Starting point is 00:15:21 I've been investing in, well, I got enough charisma to get local leader. And now trying to bulk up my strength, not because I care about melee or carry weight, but that's where all the armoring and the blacksmith stuff is. And honestly, at what point is a video game actually a job? I think I logged like 10 hours in it over the weekend.

Starting point is 00:15:40 I am a 52 year old man, and I logged 10 hours or more. Remember, you can get this podcast as a daily email newsletter, too, complete with images, related videos, and links to dive deeper. It comes out every day before the podcast does. And if you don't want the daily version, you can sign up for every Friday's issue absolutely free. Go to todayindigital.com slash newsletter to sign up or tap the link in the show notes. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Meet Meta's New 'Dumbed Down' Ads

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