Today in Digital Marketing - Meta's Audacious New Plan: A Platform Without Ads

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Friday, September 1st. Today, a meta without ads? It could be here soon. Also, the podcast industry keeps growing despite content consolidation. TikTok's AR production suite leaves beta, and Elon Musk will use your brand's data to train his AI models, whether you like it or not. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. 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.

Starting point is 00:00:36 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. One of the largest ad platforms in the world is considering going ad-free, and that company is Meta. The New York Times reporting this morning that Meta is considering going ad-free in Europe

Starting point is 00:01:02 for people who pay a subscription fee. This, of course, is less about altruism and more about trying to stay on the right side of European privacy legislation. It would be optional, of course, and Meta would continue to offer free versions of Facebook and Instagram with ads. There's no information on how much the subscriptions would cost or when they would roll out. A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on the report, quoting the New York Times coverage. In July, the EU's highest court effectively barred Meta from combining data collected about users across its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp,

Starting point is 00:01:36 as well as from outside websites and apps, unless it received explicit consent from users. In January, the company was also fined 390 million euros by Irish regulators for forcing users to accept personalized ads as a condition of using Facebook, unquote. In the last couple of weeks, a new EU law forced social apps to offer non-personalized content feeds. Some platforms also stopped letting advertisers target people under 18 years old. Next year, another law will force the hands of Apple, requiring them to let Europeans download apps from app stores

Starting point is 00:02:09 other than from Apple's own. The complicated legal landscape there is why Meta still does not operate its new Threads app in Europe. Meta's CFO recently said that advertising in the region made up 10% of the company's overall ad business. The podcast advertising space is regaining its footing after a handful of large players like Spotify, Paramount, and NPR recently cut back on their audio investments. The cutbacks didn't happen because of shrinking ad investment. Far from it, in fact. No, the main reason was because many of these larger networks overbought content during the pandemic, making what seemed like a good decision at the time look bloated in today's economy. Digiday has a great piece about this up today. a senior audio executive from Horizon Media, saying, quote, During the podcast boom of the past few years, leading publishers were investing significantly

Starting point is 00:03:07 in several high-profile, star-driven studios and creators that did not materialize and generate the return they were expecting. This has led to publishers being more conservative and selective when considering content alignment and strategic partnerships, unquote. All that said, ad budgets are still flowing to podcasts. Almost six out of 10 agencies and advertisers currently have ads running in podcasts.

Starting point is 00:03:33 That's up from just over three in 10, three years ago. Almost a third say they're considering spending on podcast ads in the next six months. Digiday reports that's a nine-year high. In the US.S., Media Radar says podcast ad spending increased 5% year-over-year. That number was 10% year-over-year for comedy podcasts and 26% on crime podcasts. Marketers do seem to be a little more choosy in which providers they use. Betches Media says most of the spend is going to large networks like

Starting point is 00:04:03 Odyssey or iHeart, as opposed to small or independent producers. A recent YouGov study found that in the U.S., podcast listenership is up from 46% two years ago to 56% this year. More than a fifth of Americans listen to podcasts more than five hours a week. data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. TikTok's augmented reality software, Effect House, has now come out of beta. This tool lets brands create their own AR effects for the app. Other platforms have their own versions of this.

Starting point is 00:05:00 Snapchat calls theirs Lens Studio. Metas is called the Spark AR platform. Effect House is pretty easy to use and comes with a bunch of templates you can adapt. They also have a Discord you can get help from. There are about 400,000 people in there. TikTok says effects made by the tool have been behind 21 billion videos. Quoting social media today, Snapchat has long been the leader in this respect, with virtually every AR trend of the past decade stemming from Snap. But TikTok's popularity also sees it well placed to become the originator of similar hits, which is no doubt a key lure of its effect house offering. Unquote. It seems like the last couple of months, there were as many stories about keeping your information

Starting point is 00:05:46 away from generative AI scrapers as there were about the technology itself. Now, Meta is jumping in to offer a way to keep your information out of its model training. The company this week releasing a web form that will let you, quote, delete any personal information from third parties used for generative AI, unquote. That forum's URL is facebook.com slash help slash contact slash 1266025207620918. But don't worry, that link is at the top of today's show notes. It is a fairly basic forum, just wants to know your country, name, and email address. I filled it out two days ago and got an email a few hours later confirming that I had filled it out.

Starting point is 00:06:33 Then nothing since then, so I don't know if my data's been scrubbed or nothing happened or they lost it or what. It's also possible, and call me a conspiracy theory on this, I don't care, that the only countries Meta is actually acting on this forum data are European countries, given the legislation there. The optics of only offering privacy tools to one region aren't great. So maybe the forum is up for everyone, but they're not doing anything if you're not in Europe. I don't know. Anyway, again, link is in the show notes if you want to check it out. Meanwhile, X has updated its privacy policy to say it will use your brand's content to train its AI models. Not just brands, of course, but all accounts there. And we can only assume not just X's models, but also those of Elon Musk's AI company called, of course, XAI.

Starting point is 00:07:21 Here's TechCrunch talking about the fellow who discovered the policy update. Quote, this leads him to theorize that Musk likely intends to use X as a source of data for XAI, here's TechCrunch talking about the fellow who discovered the policy update, quote, this leads him to theorize that Musk likely intends to use X as a source of data for XAI. And perhaps Musk's recent tweet encouraging journalists to write on X was even an attempt to generate more interesting and useful data to feed into the AI models. In fact, Musk has previously stated that XAI would use public tweets to train its AI models, so this is not much of a leap. He accused other tech giants of leveraging Twitter to train their AI models, even threatening Microsoft with a potential lawsuit for alleged illegal use of Twitter data, unquote. There does not appear to be any kind of opt-out form.

Starting point is 00:08:08 And that will do it for the week. Today in Digital Marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Tsunamik First Nation on Vancouver Island. Our production coordinator is Sarah Guild. Music licensing by Source Audio. Ad coordination by Red Circle. And our theme composer, Mark Ble' Dad Joke of the Week. Why did the bicycle stand on its own? Because it was too tired.

Starting point is 00:08:30 Look, don't blame me, ChatGPT writes these. Thanks for listening, I'm Todd Mappin. See you on Monday. Our young hearts are racing And we will never grow old Bye.

Today in Digital Marketing - Meta's Audacious New Plan: A Platform Without Ads

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