Today in Digital Marketing - Meta CPMs Are Skyrocketing. Is This The New Normal?

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. It is Thursday, April 11th. Today, CPM's up, morale down. Is Timu behind the recent downturn in meta ads? Also, LinkedIn's scam solution will cost you. YouTube's videos for kids are getting comments back. And why TikTok says videos in two languages will get you better results. I'm Todd Maffin. All that ahead, today in Digital Marketing. A new report from Bloomberg says advertisers running campaigns on meta platforms are hitting

Starting point is 00:00:56 a snag. It confirms what people have been saying on social media, that ad costs have soared, sales dipped, and there's been no word from Meta on what's going wrong. CPMs are up an average of two to three times what they were just a few months ago. CPCs up about the same. Cody Flocker from Jones Road Beauty, who we've had on the podcast, is quoted in the piece saying, quote, it's brutal out there. Quoting Bloomberg's piece, quote, Carly London, who runs an agency called Sometimes Curly and manages more than $100 million in meta-related advertising spend each year, said she saw a 20-40% drop in ROAS for a few of her accounts over the past two months without any explanation.

Starting point is 00:01:41 In practice, that means a marketer used to making $3 in revenue for every $1 spent on Facebook ads would suddenly be making closer to $2 in revenue. A meaningful difference when brands rely on predictable results to budget and manage product inventory. Even seasoned advertisers are struggling to find strategies at work, making some people wonder if there's an anomaly in Meta's usually reliable system. Perhaps the AI race is taking Meta's engineers' eyeballs off the ad platform. Despite these reports, Meta insists that its ad system is mostly functioning correctly, acknowledging only a few technical issues. The ad community, though, is still left scrambling for explanations and solutions, with some pointing fingers at Timu's recent advertising spree as a potential cause of the upheaval.

Starting point is 00:02:32 After all, digital ad platforms are supply and demand systems. If one player with a big wallet comes in, that affects everyone else. And as advertisers seek more stable grounds, platforms like TikTok and Google are becoming more attractive. Meta's first quarter earnings report is on the horizon, and the marketing community is watching closely, hoping for answers, or at least an improvement in the system that many have relied on for so long. Even so, as Corey noted in the Bloomberg piece, quote, this could be the new normal. Unquote. One of the many, many scams running around the internet has been recruiter scams. People set up fake accounts on LinkedIn, approach someone about hiring them, and then find various ways to get money out of them. It's gotten so bad that LinkedIn finally has a solution, a new verification badge for recruiters in the app. Once a recruiter has confirmed their legal identity and place of employment, they'll get a badge that tells members they're on the up and up. Although the badge itself is a little confusing. When you tap

Starting point is 00:03:35 on it, rather than saying something like this person's confirmed they're a legit recruiter, it says, quote, this recruiter has access to a LinkedIn recruiter corporate subscription, unquote. So yeah, you'll need to be paying for a subscription package to get this. To be fair, most legitimate recruiters on LinkedIn do use a package, and so it's probably not a giant hurdle. This is a different process than its identity confirmation system for regular users, which gives people a gray verification checkmark that showed up about a year ago and uses third-party ID providers to work.

Starting point is 00:04:07 LinkedIn says verified profiles on average get 60% more profile views, 50% more comments and reactions on their posts, and 30% more messages. This new recruiter verification system will start to roll out next week. If your brand uses YouTube videos to reach kids, there's a big change coming. One that almost certainly will affect your engagement and potentially your reach. And this time, in a good way. As you might know, YouTube three years ago disabled comments on videos intended for kids. This came after a number of media reports found inappropriate content in some of the comment sections and attracted the attention of lawmakers. Now parents will have more choices in whether and how their kids can engage with the video through a new read-only comments option.

Starting point is 00:04:56 Quoting Social Media Today, quote, The new addition applies to two of the three content settings available to parents who want to configure a more kid-friendly experience for their child, Explore More and Most of YouTube. Deformer allows kids to explore videos with content ratings for viewers 13 and up, while Most of YouTube offers older kids access to most of YouTube's content except for videos that are specifically age-restricted for adults only. By default, children will be able to read, but not write, comments under both of these content settings modes. Live chat will also be turned on. Meanwhile, parents who want to disable comments entirely can switch their child to the Explore setting, aimed at viewers aged 9 and up.

Starting point is 00:05:41 This option is generally the first step into the main YouTube experience, after using the dedicated YouTube Kids app as a younger child, unquote. This is, of course, great news for brands who use videos to market on YouTube. Now, comments will not be off by default on their videos. 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.

Starting point is 00:06:19 Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Snapchat this week announced they've brought some new third-party data tools on board. First, Snowflake's Marketing Data Cloud will improve targeting and conversions data, quoting from Snapchat's announcement here. Quote, the integration with Snapchat will enable Snowflake clients to quickly implement Snap's conversions API signal solution without needing to build a bespoke back-end integration, unquote. Also, they're partnering with AppsFlyers to help advertisers get a better view of their campaign performance via the mobile measurement partner

Starting point is 00:06:56 attribution for their iOS campaigns. And finally, the company teased an improved version of its event quality score metric. And finally, TikTok this week published a study shining a light on a significant trend, the increasing importance of bilingual ads. Partnering with NRG for this research, TikTok found that as the Hispanic population in the U.S. is set to soar, brands might be missing out by not crafting ads in multiple languages. Hispanics, currently the youngest and largest ethnic group in the U.S., will make up a third of the American population by 2060. TikTok says the demographic's deep engagement with digital and social platforms presents an opportunity for brands to connect more meaningfully. Specifically, the study highlighted bilingual ads that used voiceovers in both languages in the same video. Quoting from that TikTok study, quote,

Starting point is 00:07:55 an ad entirely in Spanish doesn't speak to the dual sense of identity these audiences feel. Layering English and Spanish creative elements to create balance ensures that brands can speak to bilingual users in a way that feels true to their identity, as well as appeal to a broader audience, unquote. TikTok even says English-speaking audiences showed a positive response to inclusive advertising. For instance, millennials viewing Spanish-included ads are more likely to perceive a brand as caring and trustworthy. So the Fallout TV show came out last night. My wife and I are huge fans of the Fallout video game series.

Starting point is 00:08:38 Man, did they ever nail it. Like, true to the video game, right down to the rivets in the walls of the vaults, which we know. We know what they look like. We were so excited to see it last night. It's a great series. It's on Amazon Prime. It's called Fallout. If you're new to the Fallout world, it's definitely worth at least the first episode.

Starting point is 00:09:00 All right, that's it for today. See you tomorrow. Holy shit. You're an actual vault dweller. I am. I thought all you dipshits were dead.

Today in Digital Marketing - Meta CPMs Are Skyrocketing. Is This The New Normal?

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