Today in Digital Marketing - Meta's Mind-Boggling Display of Policy Gymnastics

Episode Date: September 21, 2023

Amazon scraps its fee for doing nothing. Microsoft’s new ad format is a little sus. The social platform that has reached perfect brand approval. And Facebook’s about-face on fake faces..🌍 Follow us on our social media📰 Get our free daily newsletter⭐ Review the podcast✉️ Contact Us: Email or Send Voicemail·GO PREMIUM!Get these exclusive benefits when you upgrade:✅ Listen ad-free✅ Meta Ad platform updates with Andrew Foxwell✅ Google Ad platform updates with Jyll Saskin Gales✅ Earlier episodes each day✅ Story links in show notes✅ “Skip to story” audio chapters✅ Member-exclusive Slack channel✅ Member-only Monthly livestreams with Tod✅ Back catalog of 20+ marketing science interviews✅ Discounts on marketing tools✅...and a lot more!Check it out: todayindigital.com/premium·ADVERTISING📈 Advertising Options📰 $20 Classified Ads·GET MORE FROM US🎙️ Our other podcast "Behind the Ad"📰 Our “The Top Story” LinkedIn newsletter🤝 Our Slack community🆘 Need help with your social media? Check us out: engageQ digital·UPGRADE YOUR SKILLS• Inside Google Ads with Jyll Saskin Gales• Google Ads for Beginners with Jyll Saskin Gales• Foxwell Slack Group and CoursesSome links in these show notes may provide affiliate revenue to us.·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 Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Thursday, September 21st. Today, Amazon scraps its fee for doing nothing. Microsoft's new ad format is a little sus. The social platform that's reached perfect brand approval. And Facebook's about face on fake faces. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in Digital Marketing. It's the season for new styles and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes.

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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. Well, that didn't take long. Amazon says it's changed its mind and will no longer bill merchants a 2% fee for not using its services. The fee was announced last month

and would have applied to thousands of third-party sellers who use Amazon's Prime Fulfillment Program but don't use the shipping component. Some analysts speculate Amazon got cold feet because of an expected antitrust lawsuit coming later this month. The case expected to focus on the company's alleged efforts to force sellers to use its logistics services. Amazon told the media today that the fee was, quote, intended to cover our costs, unquote, which is an interesting position since you'd think not doing something like shipping a product would be less expensive

than doing something. But what do I know? Fortune reported today that last year, for the first time, Amazon's fees ate up about half the cost of each sale. Almost 38% of U.S. online consumer spending goes to Amazon and its 2 million third-party merchants. Microsoft is launching a new ad category specifically designed for its chatbot, one that flies a little close to the not-disclosing advertising sun. It's called the conversational ad,

and will eventually have a number of products, the first of which was announced today. Compare and decide ads. Here's how Microsoft described them. Quote, one of the things we often see people ask chat is to summarize options and contrast pros and cons. For example, a user might be looking to buy a new car and considering several different manufacturers and models.

Compare and Decide ads pull all the relevant data of various car models into a succinct table so the user can easily evaluate different options based on the criteria they find most important. Unquote. The image they used as an example appeared to be almost identical to what a consumer might expect a chatbot to generate organically. It showed someone asking Bing Chat, I'm looking for an SUV with a strong safety record that is also fuel efficient. Can you help me? And Bing Chat did its usual searching for stuff. It generated a paragraph that was identical to organic results, then output a table showing fields like condition, color, trim level, dealer, and so on.

Interestingly, no data on safety records. That entire table is the ad unit. The only hint to a regular consumer that they're looking at an ad is the very tiny word ad in the top right in light gray text. Honestly, it took me about 20 seconds of looking to even see it. From a marketing point of view, of course, this would probably perform better than something with more clear disclosure. But it's still an interesting design choice by Microsoft, given the increased industry scrutiny on ad transparency. The compare and decide format will start to roll out in closed

beta at the start of next year. They also announced an API for ads inside a chatbot session, which will let mobile app developers and websites drop ads from Microsoft's marketing platform into chat responses. The example they used was from Snapchat's newish chatbot, where a person asks, do you have any dress recommendations for a birthday party I'm attending? And the bot responds with a photo carousel of options, that carousel much more clear in its disclosure, with the words sponsored results appearing at the top. The company also said it's working on adding more AI tools into its ad manager.

The usual now, headline recommendation, chatbot support, asset generation, and so on. Instagram is up. Facebook is down. Those are the top line results from a Digiday survey of 200 publishers released today who said they're posting more content to their Instagram account than they are to their Facebook brand page. That follows the yearly trend of increased Instagram activity. This year, 91% of publishers of news and entertainment sites said they'd posted to Instagram in the last month. 91%. That number was 86% last year and 84% the year prior. Also up, the number who post daily, that number on Facebook is trending downward. Why Instagram? According to Digiday, it's partly because brands are increasingly seeing Instagram as a place to make money, not just drive general brand awareness. 83% said Instagram is at least

somewhat valuable to driving revenues. Last year, that number was only 62%. More interestingly, not a single respondent in the Digiday survey said the platform is not appropriate for their brand. Last year, 8% said that. 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. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen.

YouTube today announced a whole bunch of things coming to its service. And if you like endless content generated by AI, you will love these. There's something they're calling Dream Screen that will generate photos and videos that you can run behind your main content in shorts. So if you want a bunch of twerking pineapples behind your content for some reason, soon you'll be able to. Don't know what video to make it all? Let a bot tell you. Coming to YouTube Studio, a topic generator, which will even spit out a content outline for you to follow in case you're incapable of basic creativity. The ideas it comes up will be informed both by what you've posted in the past and by what's trending out there on that day. So that should be some high quality stuff.

All snark aside, there are a couple of nice additions on the way. A text to music tool where it'll suggest music you can use as background and a way to dub the audio of videos into other languages. YouTube also said it's working on a new app called YouTube Create, which sounds a lot like a clone of the popular CapCut video editing software owned by TikTok's parent company. CapCut is free, works on desktop and mobile, and is a remarkable editor. Honestly, rivals software like Final Cut Pro. Quoting The Verge, the new app could encourage more people to make shorts, YouTube's take on TikTok style videos. It's generally easier to make a TikTok video than it is to make a full fledged YouTube video, which is a key reason why TikTok has exploded in popularity, unquote.

Like CapCut, YouTube Create will provide editing and trimming, automatic captioning, voiceover filters, effects, transition and royalty free music. Should be out soon on Android in the US, the UK, Germany, France, Indonesia, India, Korea, and Singapore. They say they'll make an iOS app next year. But I will give the last word on this to Gizmodo, who nailed this story with its headline, quote, YouTube announces new tools to flood its platform with AI-generated slop. All right, a quick dive over to the lightning round. The Twitter competitor Mastodon is getting a big upgrade today. The software will make it easier to search for content on the platform.

Until now, you've only been able to search for hashtags, not words or phrases. Users will have to turn on the ability for their account to be searchable in that way. If trends continue, Instagram will soon outpace Facebook as the largest social media platform by ad revenue. Mork Media forecasts almost 20% revenue growth this year compared to last. Even last year's flat ad market saw Instagram revenues climb almost 6%. And Pinterest this week said it's seen a 170% increase in video uploads so far this year compared to last. The company recently added mobile deep linking to let brands send users directly to a shopping page within their app. And finally, back in the day, I had two Facebook accounts,

one with my name and one with the name Congolia Breckenridge, a George Carlin joke if you don't get the reference. I used Congolia's account the way people use Finsta's today to have a secondary view

of the platform, each with its own friends and feed. But Facebook caught me and shut Congolia's account down, citing its policy that users must be authentic and use their real name. A policy it said as recently as today is still in effect. Which is why it's a little weird

that they also announced today that you can now create multiple fake personas using made-up names and not violate its still-in-effect policy against... I'm sorry, I have it here somewhere. Oh yes, fake personas using made-up names. No, I can't wrap my head around the dissonance either. In what can only be described as a mind-boggling display of policy gymnastics, Meta today announced it will now let Facebook users create and use multiple personal profiles,

as many as five, including your real one. Unlike an actual gray account, this would be tied to your main account, so you wouldn't need to maintain separate email addresses and passwords and the likes. This is something they started testing a year ago, we reported on it at the time, and it's different than the change that lets you more easily swap between different accounts, This is something they started testing a year ago. We reported on it at the time. And it's different than the change that lets you more easily swap between different accounts, like if you have a personal Instagram account and a brand Instagram account. Quoting the company,

Whether you're new to Facebook or a long-time user, you may want to keep your personal and professional relationships separate. Or you may want to keep one profile tied to a community you're part of and another profile just for friends. Creating multiple personal profiles lets you easily organize who you share with and what content you see for various parts of your life. Think one profile for the foodie scene you love and another to keep up with your friends and family. Unquote. There are a couple of limitations for your porn accounts. I'm sorry, I mean your secondary accounts. You can't use Messenger or Marketplace as your fake use. Yet Metis somehow managed to shoehorn this into its long-standing policy called Account Integrity and Authentic Identity, which says that you have to use your real name. But now they say they interpret it

this way. You have to use your real name on your main they say they interpret it this way. You have to use your real name on your main account, but you can use any names you like for your Finstas, as long as you don't pretend to be another real person. So no creating an army of fake Elon Musks, something that is actually possible right now on the Elon Musk owned X. From a marketing point of view, this shouldn't have any real effect on campaigns or metrics, since these fake accounts are all pooled under one central account. We can only assume they won't duplicate reach counts. I can't imagine they'd be bold enough to start reporting user counts based on profiles, not actual people.

Right? They wouldn't do that, right? They wouldn't do that, right? This starts rolling out globally today and will take a couple of months to get to everyone. On the show tomorrow, why are Google results showing up in TikTok search? And why is Amazon limiting the use of one of its oldest services? Follow us on TikTok. We are at Today in Digital. Or follow me for shitposting and cat videos. I'm at Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. Summertime It's when I think of you When the days grow long

I get the summertime blues