Today in Digital Marketing - Meta Taketh and Taketh Away

Episode Date: May 27, 2022

Connections targeting is finally going for good... Is Facebook pulling the plug on news?... Google's uphill battle for the post-cookie world... Snapchat's new tool enhances collab... and even groceries are going video.Go Premium! No ads, weekend editions, story links, audio chapters, better audio quality, earlier release time, and more.Closing Eminem remix music from tiktok.com/@thereiruinedit/Get each episode as a daily email newsletter (with images, videos, and links).HELPFUL LINKS:ADS: Reach thousands of marketers with our ad options.CLASSIFIED ADS: Only $20 — more infoMORE CONTENT: Email newsletter, expert interviews, and blog posts.HANG OUT: Join our Slack communityEnjoying the Show? Tweet about us • Rate and review • Send a voicemailFOLLOW US:The Show: LinkedIn • TikTok • FB Page • FB GroupTod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok • TwitchDEALS:Jyll Saskin Gales — Inside Google Ads Andrew Foxwell — Foxwell Founders Membership • Scaling After iOS14 • All CoursesOthers — AppSumo lifetime marketing deals • Riverside.FM podcast recording siteCREDITS:Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada. Our associate producer is Steph Gunn. Ad coordination by RedCircle. Production coordination by Sarah Guild. Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.(If the links in the show notes do not work in your podcast app, visit https://todayindigital.com )Some links in these show notes may provide us with a commission.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Today, connections targeting is finally going for good. Is Facebook pulling the plug on news? Google's uphill battle for the post-cookie world? Snapchat's new tool enhances the collab? And even groceries are going video. It's Friday, May 27th. I'm Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. Meta this week announced some changes with its marketing API version 14, and you are not

going to like them. With the changes, Meta will be taking away several options from the API that will affect both marketers and the third-party platforms marketers rely on. First, connections targeting will be removed from all Meta advertising platforms. This lets advertisers segment their audience based on how people are connected to your business on Facebook. So if they like your page, if they're a friend of someone who likes their page, that kind of thing. You used to be able to segment audiences

based on whether they were connected to your page or, for that matter, your app or an event. And thus, Meta is taking away the option to reach friends of people who interact with your page or your event. And that happens on June 15th. Quoting the company, in advance of this date,

we recommend developers convert their existing audiences that leverage connections targeting to the equivalent engagement custom audience or lookalike audience. These alternatives also allow developers to target ads to users who are connected to their page, app, or event. Unquote. To be fair, this is something they've actually been pushing

on the front-end UI of Ads Manager for, I don't know, at least a month now. The Facebook Analytics mobile app customer audience user by segment feature will also be deprecated and will be removed by July 3rd. related to the way third-party platforms access Facebook data, including changes to the questions developers need to answer as part of its data protection assessment, and a new access verification process to identify tech providers using its platform. Finally, Business Manager will be getting some new tools, and Meta will be adding new permissible use cases for accessing both user-like and post data via the Graph API.

From API changes to algorithm changes, some news websites speculate that Meta might be pulling the plug on news. Performance Marketing World posted a great think piece yesterday asking the news industry's $1 billion question, is Meta about to unfriend publishers? In the wake of stricter licensing legislation around the world, it was recently reported that Facebook is reconsidering how news content is promoted on the platform. Some publishers believe the tech giant is preparing to distance itself from deals with large networks to save money. Facebook has invested hundreds of

millions of dollars in the journalism industry through its Facebook News partnerships in recent years, and last year committed to invest at least a billion dollars in news by 2024. But one U.S. news source claims that Meta has not reached out about contract renewals, while another source suggested that the company might be signaling that the good times are over for news on Facebook. According to a recent report, Meta is also now pushing news organizations to create short-form video content. Those moves line up with a recent Facebook post in which Mark Zuckerberg stated that the company's main response to TikTok

will be to use AI to generate content in users' news feeds. He stated that the change would be to move the news feeds for those services from being almost exclusively curated by your social graph or follow graph to now having more of your feed recommended by AI, even if the content wasn't posted by a friend or someone you follow. Is it possible this is the beginning of a major change in content discovery algorithms? Trials of Google's privacy sandbox have now reached the

experimental stage, but it appears there's still a long way to go before the looming cookie apocalypse. Now, half of the developers who took part in testing Chrome's new privacy software are eligible to test those new products they talked about earlier, like Topics, Fledge, and the Attribution Reporting API. But Adweek reports today that several industry sources have raised concerns that sandbox tools may have unintended negative consequences for publishers as more developers test the product. First of all, Google needs to work on debugging Topics. Last week, the tech giant revealed a bug in the Topics API that prevented it from being tested. Google's product lead for Privacy Sandbox said the root of the issue was from Chrome's backend,

and the issue was resolved within 24 hours. But according to an AdTech source, even if Topics worked as intended, it may not be useful. The source claimed that Topics only assigns one topic per domain name. For example, the Wall Street Journal might be tagged as Business, which would be too narrow of a category. But Google's product lead disagreed, indicating that each domain receives several topics, each with a different weight of relevance. If one thing is clear about the brave new world we're all about to be in, it's that there is still a long, long way to go in finding privacy-aware solutions

that are still effective for marketers. 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. Snapchat recently unveiled a new Shared Stories feature, which could help your brand facilitate influencer collaborations and get more reach. Basically, it's an iteration of the app's Custom Stories feature, which allows Snapchatters to create a story and add friends to view and contribute to it. Now, with shared stories, users who've been added to a group, users like, for instance, influencers that your brand has hired, can add their friends or colleagues to contribute with their own content. The story will also be viewable by their connections, providing expanded exposure and a new type of collaboration within your content. If you want to try this out, go to your profile, tap the new story option,

and then select shared stories. Snaps sent to a shared story will be deleted after 24 hours. And finally, even groceries are pivoting to video. Yesterday, Instacart announced two new ad formats that will be rolling out on their platform. First, it is testing shoppable video ads. These will be available on their ads manager platform later this year. It will embed a sponsored video into the feed, along with a carousel of products for purchase. Dove, PepsiCo, and San Pellegrino are among the early partners. The second new format, shoppable display ads, appears similar but with a static image instead of a video.

As part of the format, brand imagery is paired with direct add-to-cart functionality. Brands are then able to pin a bundle of items that could inspire a consumer to make complimentary purchases. More than 40 brands have tested the display ads and Instacart plans to make them available to all brand partners in Ads Manager this summer. Following up briefly on the story yesterday about TikTok integration coming to third party platforms, we mentioned a couple of them in our piece. Turns out there were eight platforms to get this API. And as it turns out, this rollout is not as complete as the platform's glossy feature pages imply.

The comments don't come in real time. They're on a somewhat convoluted polling frequency. Many of these platforms don't have any of this integration present in their mobile app. We reached out to all eight to ask for details on their integration. We'll have that next week. Don't expect a lot of detail. So far, the replies we're getting back are a little on the evasive side. But don't forget the premium version of this podcast is just like this one,

but with no ads, access to deep dive weekend episodes, replays of our live events, better audio quality, story links, audio chapters and more. Get $30 off the annual plan by going to todayindigital.com slash premium feed or tap the link in the show notes. Today in Digital Marketing I'll see Maffin. Have a restful weekend. I'll see you next week.