Today in Digital Marketing - Meet the New Digital Kingmakers of Superbowl Marketing

Episode Date: February 5, 2021

Get the entire show content, with links and images, as a daily email newsletter! Subscribe at TodayInDigital.com/newsletterAmazon upgrades its affiliate tools. Why Google is rewriting text on your web pages. Snapchat’s clone of TikTok is killing it. And why your next campaign should probably include a sprinkling of Pinterest.Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing us!About the Podcast:Join Our Free Slack CommunityGet this as a daily email newsletterAdvertising and ClassifiedsLeave a VoicemailFollow Tod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok • TwitchToday in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital. Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Today, Amazon upgrades its affiliate tools, why Google is rewriting text on your webpages, Snapchat's clone of TikTok is killing it, and why your next campaign should probably include a sprinkling of Pinterest. It's Friday, February 5th, 2021. Happy Constitution Day, Mexico. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing, and we'll start with a quiz. As you probably know, the default search engine on Apple devices is Google.

When you do a search in Spotlight or you ask Siri something, Siri will go to Google for the answer. So, who pays who in that deal? Does Apple pay Google to license its search engine? Does Google pay Apple to be the default engine? Or is this a quid pro quo and no money changes hands? The surprising answer at the end of today's episode. When history is written about the last 12 months, expect one small chapter to be about the ad campaigns deployed during this weekend's Super Bowl.

Ad campaigns not on television, but online, on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and more. Take Budweiser as an example. For the first time in 37 years, the beer company will not run a television ad during the big game. Instead, they spent most of that ad budget on supporting COVID vaccine efforts. Most of it, but not all. they spent most of that ad budget on supporting COVID vaccine efforts. Most of it. But not all. The thing about America is we can do anything. Because some of that money was spent on this 90-second video uploaded to YouTube.

Into mountaintops. It has what you expect out of ads like this these days. Slow dolly shots, pastel hues, a warm but concerned tone of the narrator. Do we have a name for this kind of ad yet? As for how that upload did, the video ad platform Unruly says it was probably more

effective than any Super Bowl ad in the last five years. It increased purchase intent, drove up brand favorability numbers in seven out of ten people who watched it. Remember, there was not a single beer shot in the entire video, not even people drinking. The Budweiser logo only appeared briefly at the end. And it's not just them. Many brands have dramatically repossessioned their Super Bowl marketing spend in response to COVID, moving away from traditional media to social media. Triller, for example, that's a TikTok competitor, they had planned to buy a TV spot, but just this

week backed out and now plan to give a million dollars away on a live stream, which let's admit for a moment, it's kind of brilliant. What better way to drive people to your platform than free cash? Sprout Social's CMO Jamie Gilpin says, quote, while the big game is certainly an enticing moment in time to reach millions of TV viewers, it's mostly just that, a moment in time. Brands are increasingly seeing greater impact in ROI from the authentic connections social media can offer, unquote. And so what are those brands doing there on social media over Super Bowl weekend? Some are part of a two-hour virtual live tailgate party on TikTok headlined by Miley Cyrus.

Gillette and Old Spice are doing a hashtag challenge there. Ocean Spray has reunited with the guy who gave them their biggest viral boost ever. And television? Television sits in the corner, hoping to get some attention. Hoping its section in that history chapter doesn't turn out to be a footnote. I remember the first time I heard about affiliate marketing. It was then a new tool from Amazon, and all you needed to do was share one of their products with your friends, and if one of those friends bought it, you would get a cut. I know it seems obvious today, but at the start of digital e-commerce, this was a big thing.

And of course, everyone copied it. Since that launch, the only significant change Amazon's made to its affiliate marketing program, well, is to reduce the commissions. Until now. The company this week announcing something it calls Mobile GetLink. What a terrible brand name. Anyway, it essentially is a simpler workflow for getting an affiliate link to share on social media or DMs or wherever you like. In today's premium newsletter issue, more on that in a moment, there is a diagram showing the workflow,

but essentially it's just built into your phone's share panel. Before you get the link, you get a chance to pick which tracking code you want to have the purchases count on. Then it copies that link to your clipboard. And honestly, Amazon's making a bigger deal out of this than it probably is. Frankly, they should have had this functionality in their app years ago, but better late than never, I guess. Mobile GetLink is currently only available in the U.S. It will be mobile GetLinking to other countries soon. I don't know a single digital marketer who hasn't, at least once,

slaved feverishly over getting their meta description just right. The meta description is some text inside a web page meant to be, well, a description of that page, a summary, or maybe the opening sentence or two of a news story. The search engines don't consider it for ranking purposes, but it's still very important because that's the text displayed under the link in all the engines. For instance, the metadescription for our web page is a fast-paced eight-minute rundown of what you missed in the world of digital marketing and social media, whether you worked for a digital agency or worked for a brand. And then it gets cut off on Google because I was too lazy to write something that fit properly. But here's something I bet you didn't know. Google will sometimes change this text. They will literally rewrite it. It's all AI-driven, of course. There's no team of people doing this. But Google's motto these days is less do no evil and more we know best.

And so they tweak things if they think you'll get more traction. Even things you slaved over getting just right. How often is Google rewriting that meta description text? More than you think. According to a recent study by Ahrefs, they compared the meta descriptions of 20,000 listings on Google with the actual meta descriptions that were hard-coded into the page and found that a whopping 62% of those pages had their meta descriptions rewritten by Google. I'm sorry, what? They also found 25% of those pages didn't have any meta description at all, and further, that Google is more likely to rewrite it if the page targets long-tail keywords,

though that's not by a huge margin. 40% of pages had meta descriptions that were too long, which begs the question, should we even bother writing our own descriptions at all if Google's just going to come along and drop their own in? Quoting this blog piece, yes, relevant and compelling meta descriptions entice clicks, so they to rank in Google, or are likely to be shared on social media, where the meta description will be used for the social snippet description, unquote. Okay, Google, knock it off. One social platform that doesn't get a lot of attention these days is Snapchat, which is weird because they're still out there and actually they're doing amazing.

A 22% growth in global daily active users this past quarter year over year. In terms of users, that's 16 million more people. As with most of the other platforms, that growth coming mostly from outside of North America. Don't think Snapchat's not relevant in the Americas. The company reported that 90% of Generation Z in the U.S. watched original shows or publisher content in Q4. Not 90% of its user base. 90% of all Gen Zs in the U.S. Also revealed in the quarterlies,

users over 35 years old engaged with content 30 percent more than the same quarter in 2019 200 million users use the app's augmented reality tools daily more than 200 beauty brands alone use this its most recent viral effect which turns your face into a cartoon had a billion impressions in the first three days after it launched. Its TikTok clone, which it calls Spotlight, had more than 100 million monthly actives last month. And most impressive of all, revenue was up a whopping 62% year over year. Also doing well, Pinterest.

Their latest update showed 17 million more users in Q4. Also doing well, Pinterest. Their latest update showed 17 million more users in Q4. That brings them up to 459 million monthly actives. But with them too, almost all that growth came from outside of the U.S., where their growth seemed to stall out a bit in the last quarter. As for which demographic is bringing in the money, users under 25 had the highest revenue growth. That revenue, a little over $700 million in Q4. That is a 76% increase in revenue compared to Q4 of 2019.

Nearly all of that growth credited to Pinterest's continued investment in direct e-commerce tools on its platform. And we head to the lightning round for some small items to wrap up the week. Twitter earlier today had what they call a system irregularity, otherwise known to you and me as a bug, that is apparently fixed now. Am I the only one who remembers the fail whale? In the showdown between Google's news division and Australian lawmakers, somebody has blinked first, and that somebody is Google, the company announcing today that it will pay some news publishers for the rights to

use their content. And last summer, Google announced that they would be making some enhancements to their ads platform, in particular, the addition of portfolio bid strategies. These are objective driven buckets, essentially, that can contain multiple campaigns. That feature has now rolled out and is available to all manager accounts. And back to today's quiz. Who pays who for Apple using Google as the default search engine on their devices? Or does no money change hands?

The answer? Google pays Apple $12 billion a year. But if speculation is correct, it may not be for long. Apple has been quietly working on its own search engine. They've been on a search engine hiring spree, and in 2018 poached one particular engineer from Google, the head of Google's search. Tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. Pacific, noon Eastern, a special weekend edition will drop in your podcast feed.

I'll be chatting with John Loomer about how Facebook ad campaigns will be affected by the forthcoming changes to iOS 14. We cover domain verification, the new cap on pixel events, and a whole lot more. Those of you on the premium newsletter will get a complete transcript of the episode at the same time that it goes out on the podcast feed. Remember, our new companion email newsletter, with the text of every story covered here, plus images, videos, contextual links, deeper dive links, and exclusive content,

is available now at todayindigital.com slash newsletter. You can see a free preview there of what it looks like. And if you want it, it's $5 a month for daily issues or $30 for a year of daily issues. That special annual price will be $50, by the way, after the end of this weekend. So now is the time to jump in. That's todayindigital.com slash newsletter. Or swipe over to this episode's notes in your podcast app and tap the link at the top there. That's it for the week.

Our production assistant is Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Blevis, music licensing by Source Audio, and this podcast is produced by our agency, EngageQ Digital. Find us at engageq.com. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend, friends. I'll talk to you on Monday. And now here it is, your moment of marketing zen. I can see the starlight I can feel the moonlight I can hear the voice It's the season for new styles

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