Today in Digital Marketing - Meta G̶i̶v̶e̶t̶h̶ Taketh and Taketh Away

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Monday, May 6th. Today, why Meta no longer lets you pick which product to advertise, YouTube's new AI might be costing your brand viewers, Instagram's new sticker could flood your inbox, and the new feature on threads that might be a brand safety tool in disguise. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. And a small programming note before we get started, we have heard your comments about the ads in the podcast. I will have more to say about that at the end of today's show. That video your brand made, you know, the expensive one with the fancy intro or pricey influencer. What if I told you that YouTube will now be automatically skipping parts of your video?

Starting point is 00:00:45 It's true. And you can blame the AI tech bros for it. Actually, from a viewer's perspective, it's not a terrible idea. YouTube will offer to jump a user past the parts of a video that people hadn't previously watched much of. Sort of like a direct-to-the-good-stuff button. And it won't happen for everyone. It's currently only available to premium members. And that skip ahead button will only show up

Starting point is 00:01:07 if people themselves skip forward by 10 seconds. Also, for now, it's still just a test. Also a wider test than it had previously been. It's available on the Android YouTube app in the US on some English videos. This test joins the new Ask a Question feature, where users can engage with a chatbot on a video. They can do things like

Starting point is 00:01:29 summarize the video, or tell them more about the topic being discussed. A little trivia question for you here. What was the original concept of YouTube when it was founded? Was it a video sharing service? A social media platform? A video dating site? An email provider? or an adult content site?

Starting point is 00:01:47 The answer in tomorrow's episode. It is time to check in with our Meta Ads correspondent, Andrew Foxwell. Andrew has visibility to $300 million in Meta Ads spend through his Slack community called Foxwell Founders. Big debates, Andrew, happening on social over the last few days about interests targeting on Meta's platform, which I do want to chat about. But first, someone in the founders group of yours posted last week that Meta has removed the product set selection from Advantage Plus, meaning, I guess, that advertisers can no longer select which product their ad should pull from their catalogs. Am I reading that right? Yeah. And this is not a surprise. I mean, this is if they want to go fully automated. And so

Starting point is 00:02:35 before you could select a product set, if you wanted a product set, you know, you could create a product set with only one product in it and that you could try to limit it and try to game a system. And they probably saw that happening. I didn't see a ton of people doing that, but it did limit the products that you showed. And in this case, you're not allowed to do that anymore because they want to be able to showcase your products to people across everything that you have in the catalog. So in the terms of advantage plus, not a huge surprise here. We're going to continue to get control taken away from us. And especially as it relates to your catalog, I've been saying this on this podcast for

Starting point is 00:03:10 a long time. If you don't already, you know, have a enhanced catalog, that's something that I encourage you to do. Having, you know, more graphics on it, having star ratings on it, having testimonials on it, having UGC imagery, having testimonials on it, having UGC imagery in your catalog. All these types of things to experiment with are really important because the catalog itself is only getting more important as time goes on, honestly. So it's an important one. And yes, we'll continue to get the levers pulled away from us. What is the workaround here though, Andrew, let's imagine you've got a product catalog

Starting point is 00:03:45 that you've uploaded, or you're not uploaded, but you've connected, and it is, I don't know, 200 products strong, and 20 of those products are Mother's Day products. How do we, what's the workaround? How do we tell Meta, look, just pick the Mother's Day products, don't pick anything? You can't.

Starting point is 00:04:02 And there's really no way that you'd be able to know that if you're utilizing a product, if you're utilizing your catalog in an ASC. Now, you don't have to do this. Now, in the future, you may possibly have to do this, but you don't have to do that now. So you could just launch Mother's Day ads. But in terms of the catalog, if you had a catalog attached, which is a popular thing to do, a lot of people like to have multiple types of ad creative in one Advantage Plus shopping campaign. You're going to have an image, a carousel, a video, and maybe the carousel isn't just a manual carousel. Maybe it's a dynamic carousel. And in that case, you wouldn't be able to control it.

Starting point is 00:04:37 So, yeah, that's kind of the bummer there. But I think you'll still be able to utilize old ads. And that's a practice that I hope doesn't go away because that does make a real big difference, honestly, in terms of ad performance, having an ad with comments on it. You know, I joke about this with our Google ads correspondent, Jill's asking Gail's about their version of Advantage Plus, which is called Performance Max. I know there's lots of differences, but they are basically sort of similar type products. And I joke with her that one day we will just have two form fields. How much is your budget? Yes. And then and then press go. In fact, just one field and a big button. And this feels like that.

Starting point is 00:05:21 Yeah, definitely is. Definitely is. And I think, you know, the debate that you kind of mentioned previously, I mean, it goes along the same lines, right? Certain people have said, well, look, it's interest and lookalike targeting. I don't know why people are using it. It's so stupid. Just leave it alone. It's a waste of your time. And the argument essentially that underlies a lot of that is that the performance is bad. Now, if you look at it from the performance angle, that's one thing.

Starting point is 00:05:41 But if you look at it from the what will the future hold, which is that interest targeting and lookalike targeting will go away. I don't think that they can ever fully remove those pieces because they're actually, especially in the lookalike targeting world, there's so many entrenched vendors that service that market by utilizing proprietary lookalike audiences through the API and others. So I don't think, I think that's going to be, will be around for a long time as an option in targeting, even if broad is something people really like to do. But, yeah, it's in terms of the performance, like the hot topic is go broad or go home, essentially. And I've never I don't know why people still make definitive or declarative statements about stuff like, I don't know why you're doing that. I've never seen it work. And it's like, if you've done Facebook ads for any period of time, you know, that literally

Starting point is 00:06:29 I I'm like Jon Snow, like, you know, nothing, Jon Snow, like literally, I know, you know, like, I know, I know nothing. Like I learned things every day and it now saying these broad statements, like you can't, you know, and it's really, in effect, it's really a hard way to go through the world of saying, oh, it's only this or only that. It never is. I mean, I've seen accounts. I just was talking to an account guy who runs a decent account in Europe and in a large country in Europe, and he has switched to single interest ad set targeting, and it's doing great and has saved his account because he has creative that's lined up for single interest. Now, I'm not saying this is the most scalable thing in the world, but it's helping them find qualified people and drive them

Starting point is 00:07:17 in. So, you know, I think that's, you have to always take like everything into consideration where your ads are running, what vertical you're in and and knowing that it's never totally black and white. It was interesting to see that last week really kind of emerge on DTC Twitter. You know, DTC Twitter, it tends to be a fairly friendly communal everyone, you know, all the water floats all boats, whatever that saying is. But man, people were picking sides left, right and center on this. You know, interest targeting is dead. Lookalike targeting is dead. Move on.

Starting point is 00:07:51 Yeah, it's always entertaining. And I think to some degree, I think that there's very little that separates the work that we're doing right at this point in terms of being an advertiser. And I mean, some would say there's a lot that separates you. But I think that in terms of the if you're a person that knows what you're doing, and you've been doing it a long time, in terms of the tactics, there's there's you're utilizing similar tactics, you're kind of generally utilizing the same creative types, etc. And I think that there's a lot of people that are always trying to look for that one little piece of an edge, right, a little part of the I think about all of us standing on the same brick wall. And

Starting point is 00:08:24 it's like, well, if I move my foot a little bit different, like maybe I'll be noticed in the photo later. Like it's kind of that kind of thinking that's going to, that isn't long-term thinking, but makes attention, it brings attention to you. And that's, and it's right, you know, we are marketers. That in itself is a marketing tactic, right? And so I think there's something always in the debate and ultimately it does produce a healthy result, in my opinion, because it gives people a breadth of ideas and, you know, kind of like what they can go for. But I do think it's always funny when people just say like, oh, I've never I haven't used a video in two years. I got only static ads or something like this. Like I've never I only go broad and it's like, okay, like, yeah, I, that might work.

Starting point is 00:09:05 And like, that's great. If that works for you, that's awesome. But like, I, I've never seen an account only on one thing. Like it's, it's a, it's always a combination of stuff. And there's always some little nuanced story that you get once you actually get into the weeds on it. I mean, I think the, the, the main advice for all of the platforms is give the platforms options. Yeah, definitely. I think that's totally true and a good thing to think about. Andrew, thank you. Thank you. Andrew Foxwell is our meta ads correspondent. You can

Starting point is 00:09:36 learn more about Andrew's digital ads training at b.link slash Foxwell or his Slack community of senior meta ad buyers at b.link slash founders. Both of those are affiliate links. You can find those links at the bottom of our show notes and you can watch the full unedited interview. There's a link to it in today's newsletter, which you can sign up to for free by tapping the link in the show notes or going to today in digital.com slash newsletter. All right. To be fair, Meta had more than the shredder out last week. They announced some new tools for brands. First, their Instagram creator marketplace will try to better

Starting point is 00:10:13 match brands with influencers. That's not really clear on how this will be better than the previous version, although the searching ability on the previous version was pretty brain dead. Apparently now Meta's system will take into account things like how similar your brand's audience is to the influencers, how well the topics match, and so on. The search function itself is also a bit better, more attributes to toggle mainly. They are also starting to work on tech that can predict which organic brand content will perform best when used in paid campaigns as an influencer campaign. Meta's image expansion is also getting into more places. This is the tool that reformats your uploaded media assets into different dimensions.

Starting point is 00:10:51 Tall for Reels, square for Instagram's feed, that sort of thing. Soon you'll be able to access it during the Reels ad creation workflow. Meta's also rolling out multi-destination product ads for Reels. These show users relevant product matches from your catalog in a carousel format. And finally, a new feature for its reminder ads, brands will now be able to

Starting point is 00:11:10 include external links in their promotions in case you want to get people over to your own website. These changes started rolling out last week and should be to all accounts shortly. Instagram is also giving marketers an interesting way to engage with your fans and customers. A hidden story that people can only see by sending your brand a DM. If you have access to this, you'll find it under the stickers icon when creating a story. It's called the reveal sticker. Your hidden story actually shows up in people's feeds, but it's blurred out. The sticker will say message to reveal along with whatever text you add is called action. That sticker will

Starting point is 00:11:50 prompt people to send your account a DM. Once they do that, the blur filter goes away. And while that might sound appealing, your social media community manager might not necessarily want to slog through thousands of messages that just say hi or even less. They're also adding a new sticker to let users share a song and prompts users to share one that they are vibing to as well. This is sort of a riff off of the add yours sticker that lets people add their own content from a prompt or question. Another update, something they're calling cutouts, creates custom stickers from any part of a photo or video in a user's camera roll. This mirrors Apple's image cutout tool, but is integrated directly into Instagram. Finally, another update, something they're calling Frames, which transforms a selected photo into a virtual Polaroid. This is meant for throwback memories and comes with an automatic

Starting point is 00:12:42 date and timestamp on each photo. Users can access this by either clicking a shake to reveal button or by literally shaking their phone. It was 20 years ago when the Polaroid company had to issue a news release begging its customers to stop actually shaking the film as it was developing. Despite OutKast's popular song of the time, apparently shaking it like a Polaroid picture can distort the image. When Mastodon started getting attention as a potential home for Twitter refugees, one thing the platform didn't have were quote replies. You know this format, it's like a retweet, but you can put your own thoughts to write alongside it.

Starting point is 00:13:26 At the time, Mastodon's founder said he wasn't a fan of the format, that it was often used more to attack or mock people than engage in any real discourse. Eventually, though, he relented, and quote replies exist in Mastodon's code, though not all apps or web frontends support it. Perhaps as a nod to the potential for misuse, Threads now lets you control who can quote your posts. You can choose from letting anyone do it, or only profiles you follow, or only profiles you mention. As far as I can tell, this only works on a post-by-post basis. You can't seem to set this account wide. Threads has been on a bit of a safety blitz lately,

Starting point is 00:14:04 adding the ability to mute specific phrases or hide a reply on one of your posts from all users. X, meanwhile, is going in the opposite direction. The company announced last week they've changed how the block function works there. Now, if a user who's blocked you replies to one of your posts, you will be able to see their reply. Back in August, X's owner Elon Musk posted that he plans to remove the ability to block at all, except for DMs. Apparently, though, to be in Google and Apple's app stores, social media apps must have some kind of block functionality. So this announcement last week seems to be the compromise.

Starting point is 00:14:50 All right, an apology to those of you on the free feed. My understanding is that the ads have been a little bit more assaultive than they had been in the past. I don't hear them because I'm in Canada and I'm getting geo-fed different ads. But we have heard you. Thank you for your feedback. We're working with the ad platform to try to elevate the ads a bit better. Here's what we're going to do in the meantime. First of all, we're going to be moving the mid-roll position to the end of the show for a little while, for a couple of weeks. We do have some bespoke campaigns. We're working directly with some advertisers. Those will return, of course, in the mid-roll position, but they'll be, I think,

Starting point is 00:15:19 more targeted to the kinds of stuff that you do day to day. So I think it'll be more relevant. Second, if you want no ads at all, we have a sale on our premium podcast for this week only. Those of you who've been with the show for a while know that we rarely put this on sale. So you can get it for 50% off now. Here is the unlisted secret link to get that deal. Todayindigital.com slash half off. That's H-A-L-F-O-F-F.

Starting point is 00:15:46 There's no requirement to sign up annually. There's no requirement to maintain it for a certain number of months. You can go month to month if you like. That removes all the ads from the show. It also gives you access to my course on building an agency. It gives you access to more than 20

Starting point is 00:15:57 deep dive marketing science interviews, discounts in our newsletter, a whole bunch of other features. So again, todayindig digital.com slash half off, if you'd like to take advantage of that. I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Meta G̶i̶v̶e̶t̶h̶ Taketh and Taketh Away

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Today in Digital Marketing - Meta G̶i̶v̶e̶t̶h̶ Taketh and Taketh Away