Today in Digital Marketing - Meta's "Phantom Ads" are Back and They're Worse Than Ever

Starting point is 00:00:01 It is Friday, October 21st. I'm Todd Mathen. Today, Meta's Phantom ads are now promoting offers that do not exist anymore. And your brand might be caught up in it. Also, what science says is the perfect influencer video. Uber's new ad product is either genius or creepy. Snapchat feeling the pinch of smaller media budgets. And Twitter employees reel from news that Elon wants to cut three quarters of them. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:31 Good lord, it's happening again. The Facebook phantom ads are back, and now they are worse than ever. You might recall our coverage of this last month. Meta was plucking uploaded creative from the ad accounts of brands and then creating a very basic ad out of it automatically and running it as an ad on the platform. They were terrible ads. An image and the body copy reading shop and then the brand name and then the word today. The brands didn't pay for these ads, but they also didn't consent to them. And since it was, of course, an automated thing, sometimes these ads would be promoting seasonal products that the brand did not want to run, or they would run one brand's copy with a different brand's product photo.

Starting point is 00:01:14 The worst part of this was Meta's reaction to both our coverage and industry reaction. When we first asked about what was happening, Meta's media relations told us it was a bug. When we pointed out that Meta engineers on Twitter were saying, no, no, they're doing it on purpose, their media relations team stopped replying to our emails. When I mentioned to one of these Meta engineers on Twitter that, you know, running ads for brands without their permission, probably not a great idea, he blocked me. Meta never did explain what was happening formally, though apparently very high spenders were getting a little bit of information from their Meta reps. Eventually, they put a help page up on their site about it. Well, those phantom ads appear to be back and now they are even worse. One marketing consultant in Andrew Foxwell's Slack group reported this today,

Starting point is 00:02:01 quote, Meta is running an ad for a client's shop with an image from a promotion that is no longer live. The image says people will get a free product with purchase. They won't because that promo ran months ago, unquote. Speculation in the group was that Meta's automation might be looking at phantom ads that performed well earlier and then just rerunning them without any consideration for, well, anything. Not seasonal promotions, not inventory levels, not creative alignment. And brands were opted in automatically without any notification. There is a way to opt out if you want, and it is in Commerce Manager. Here's how to do it.

Starting point is 00:02:42 In the left-hand menu, click on Settings, then General. Look for the box marked Promote Products from Your Shop. Click the Edit button. Click Turn Off. Then click Turn Off again to confirm. And finally, add one more pin in your Zuckerberg voodoo doll. So while Meta continues putting ads up without brand's permission, a new report says they're also letting ads that should be prohibited into distribution.

Starting point is 00:03:11 Ahead of the U.S. midterm elections, the group called Global Witness and the Cybersecurity for Democracy, this is at NYU, investigated Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube's abilities to detect and remove election disinformation. All ad content tested by the researchers contained outright false election information, like false information about when and where to vote, false methods of voting, like you can vote twice,

Starting point is 00:03:38 as well as delegitimized methods of voting, like voting by mail. The researchers used identical ads on all three platforms and submitted 20 ads in both English and Spanish. So how did the social platforms handle them? To be fair, Facebook was not actually the worst. TikTok was. The platform, which I should note hilariously doesn't even allow political ads at all, approved 90% of the political ads that were uploaded, and they contained outright false and misleading election misinformation. Facebook was only partially effective in detecting and removing the problematic election ads

Starting point is 00:04:13 and approved what the researchers said were a, quote, significant number, unquote. YouTube both detected the ads and suspended the channel carrying them. After passing the approval process, the researchers withdrew the ad so users weren't actually exposed to the misinformation. In response, a Meta representative said the tests were, quote, based on a very small sample of ads, unquote, and are not representative given the number of political ads that Meta reviews daily. They also added that the company's ad review process has, quote, TikTok's response, on the other hand, doesn't account for much.

Starting point is 00:04:56 According to a company spokesperson, quote, TikTok is a place for authentic and entertaining content, which is why we prohibit and remove election misinformation and paid political advertising from our platform, unquote. Sure you do. According to the researchers, the only ad that TikTok rejected claimed that voters needed to receive a COVID-19 vaccination to vote. Meanwhile, Facebook accepted that ad. Sponsored videos. They've become an important marketing tool as video sharing platforms and the popularity of influencers have grown. But to date, not much research has been done around how the

Starting point is 00:05:33 design of sponsored videos affect viewer engagement. That research gap is part of the reason Lee Chen looked into it. She's a professor of marketing at Suffolk University in Boston. She and her colleagues recently published a paper in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science called What Drives Digital Engagement with Sponsored Videos? An Investigation of Video Influencers' Authenticity Management Strategies. I spoke with her earlier today and asked her if it's better to have an influencer mention your brand at the beginning of their video or at the end? So based on our findings, it's better to talk about brand information at later stage in your video. So while you can clearly disclose sponsorship, but talk about the brand in the later part of your video is better for your engagement. And what about influencers' subjective endorsements, like sharing

Starting point is 00:06:23 personal experiences or opinions about the sponsored product? Yeah, so that's another interesting finding. There are, generally speaking, two types of information you can provide, right? One is subjective information, meaning that you talk about your own opinion, your own experience, your own thoughts about the brand. That's subjective. The other is objective. So you focus on the facts. You talk about the facts about the product. And in our study, we find that subjective endorsement, meaning that you talk about your own experience, your own thoughts about the brand will negatively impact digital engagement.

Starting point is 00:07:04 Oh, interesting. That surprises me. Yeah, that also surprises us a little bit. We believe it may be because that subjective endorsement is hard to verify. So it's your own experience. For example, I'm endorsing a snack and I'm telling you it's really delicious. You really should try it. That's my subjective opinion, right? But it's hard to verify. As viewers, they just don't know. They don't know whether it tastes good or not. It's just your own opinion, your own thoughts. But objective

Starting point is 00:07:37 information is verifiable. For example, this snack is made of organic ingredients, then I can easily verify the information. But subjective endorsement is not. So if it cannot be verified, then viewers may become a little bit suspicious and they may feel, right, they may doubt. And that's why we think explains why the negative influence would appear. Our full conversation covers all of her findings, including how disclosure affects engagement, if there's a difference between influencer disclosure or platform disclosure, like that sponsored post tag, whether this effect is stronger on longer form influencer videos, like on YouTube, or on shorter ones, like on TikTok, how engagement is affected when the influencer deliberately uses low production values, and a lot more.

Starting point is 00:08:30 That conversation is coming tomorrow exclusively to the premium feed. You can sign up now and listen to the full episode, plus more than 20 other interviews with marketing scientists that you will not hear on any other podcast. Plus, when you sign up, this daily feed becomes ad-free. You get it earlier in the day and a bunch more enhancements. You can learn more about the premium feed at todayindigital.com slash premium feed

Starting point is 00:08:52 or tap the link in the show notes. Buckle up, Uber ads are coming. The ride-sharing company recently announced ad options that will let marketers target riders based on their location at every point during their use of the app. According to the company, the new ad-targeting product will let brands place ads based on riders' recent travel history and their precise geographical location. For example, if a user books an Uber to a specific retailer, cinema, or airport, your brand can buy ads around that location. Brands can also sponsor an entire trip.

Starting point is 00:09:32 These are called journey ads and will be sold on a per-trip basis instead of the usual digital advertising pricing based on consumer impressions. it'll let brands show different ads to users at three points along their journey, while waiting for a car, while riding in a car, and upon reaching their destination. The rider can also do transactions like clicking the ad to buy a product without leaving the Uber app. Separate pilot programs in the U.S. and India will also include ads on in-car tablets. These ads will be available in select markets at launch. This, of course, is already raising privacy concerns. An Uber spokesperson said the company never shares users' individual data with advertisers. She added that the data it does share is aggregated information or data related to performance. Users can also opt out of targeting

Starting point is 00:10:21 ads on the Uber app at any time. Uber's advertising policy forbids targeting users by factors like race, religion, and sexual orientation. It also prohibits targeting users by certain kinds of destinations like government buildings, hospitals, and reproductive health centers. 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

Starting point is 00:10:55 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's parent company called Snap reported mixed earnings yesterday, with users increasing but ad revenues, like everyone else, slowing. First, the good news.

Starting point is 00:11:17 The platform added 16 million more daily active users for the quarter, taking it to over 360 million. The app has seen particular growth in India, which, as Social Media Today points out, is positive for its long-term potential, but doesn't significantly boost its revenue at the moment, like adding US users would. Moreover, the company also reported that overall viewing time in the app continues to increase, driven primarily by Discover and Spotlight. On Spotlight specifically, Snap indicated that total time spent watching content on its TikTok clone

Starting point is 00:11:49 has increased by 55% year-over-year. Now for the bad news, quoting the company. Total time spent watching content in the U.S. decreased 5% year-over-year as the diminished depth of engagement with friend stories was not fully offset by the growth in viewership Considering Snap's revenue statistics, this is especially relevant. Snap's revenue for the quarter increased by 6% year over year, but its income is heavily dependent on the U.S. market. It was also the slowest pace of growth since the company went public. Snap pointed its finger at advertisers who continue to cut marketing budgets because

Starting point is 00:12:31 of macroeconomic headwinds. It also blamed increased competition and everybody's favorite kicking horse, Apple, with its previous privacy changings making it difficult for apps to target advertising and measure results. Well, it looks like Elon Musk's final boss level in the Twitter deal could be Joe Biden. Bloomberg reports that U.S. government officials are considering conducting a national security review of Musk's Twitter deal, which could lead to President Biden blocking the deal. Sources say Musk's plans to purchase Twitter for $44 billion with the help of foreign investors have concerned Biden administration officials. Now those officials are considering which tools they could use to review the ventures,

Starting point is 00:13:20 including the use of the Committee on Foreign Investment, which reviews foreign takeovers of American businesses. A review of the Twitter acquisition by this committee could result in a recommendation to President Biden to nix it, which, by the way, is exactly what Elon Musk appears to want. Maybe or maybe not. Nobody's really quite sure what he wants anymore. The Twitter user comments on the Bloomberg article tweeting, quote, it would be hysterical if the government stopped Elon from overpaying for Twitter, which Elon Musk replied to with the 100 emoji and a rolling on the floor laughing emoji. In other news, Twitter is confronting reports that Elon Musk is planning to gut the company's workforce if the deal goes through.

Starting point is 00:14:03 The Washington Post reporting yesterday that his plan for Twitter involves slashing its staff by 75% in a matter of months. Twitter this morning told staff that there have not been any plans for company-wide layoffs since it signed a deal to be acquired by the billionaire. The memo warned workers to expect, quote, tons of public rumors and speculation, unquote, as the closing of the deal nears and that the company does not have, quote, any confirmation of the buyer's plans following close and recommends not following rumors or leaked documents, but rather waiting for facts. Which brings us to the lightning round and an all new bell. I got a new bell. This was the old bell, if you'll remember.

Starting point is 00:14:45 It was just terrible. Now and an all new bell. I got a new bell. This was the old bell, if you'll remember. It was just terrible. Now here is the new bell. So good. All right, let's do it. LinkedIn has wiped out 50% of accounts that claim to be Apple employees. 50%. This is part of a new effort to kick bots off the platform. The professional network has seen an uptick in fraudulent activity with fake accounts

Starting point is 00:15:06 claiming affiliation with organizations they were not affiliated with, along with altered photos and profile descriptions lifted from legitimate profiles. Consumers plan to shop more in stores this holiday season, with nearly two-thirds planning to shop IRL. This is followed by 55% who plan to shop with an online-only retailer, while half expect to order online from a brick-and-mortar store. Instagram launched some new safety tools yesterday

Starting point is 00:15:32 to enhance filters on DMs, block other accounts from someone you blocked, and it will even start reminding you to be nicer in comments and DMs. Its Hidden Words DM filter tool now expands to story replies and claims to even catch intentional spelling mistakes. And finally, you probably heard about DALL-E, the AI that can

Starting point is 00:15:52 generate artwork from a text prompt. There is a public-facing version of it now that is free to use, though it only generates Halloween images. Still, fun to play with. You might end up making something that you can use on your brand site or an email list or whatever. It's at artbot.ai if you want to check it out. Well, it finally happened. The rain started, usually here in British Columbia on the west coast of Canada. September 1st, like almost like clockwork. September 1st comes along, boom, summer over. It's like someone turns off a switch. But boy, it lasted a long time here. Summer lasted until, well, this morning.

Starting point is 00:16:33 And the rain has started pouring. Today in Digital Marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Tsunamic First Nation on Vancouver Island. Our associate producer is Steph Gunn. Production coordination by Sarah Guild. Podcast music licensing by Source Audio. Ad coordination by Red Circle. And you know, not many people know this,

Starting point is 00:16:57 but our theme composer, Mark Blevis, is one of the world's most sought-after media buying experts. To be fair, he did warn me about Meta Thank you. The one you said I could live without. We're in an awful mess, and I don't mean maybe. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend, friends. I'll see you on Monday. It will shine again when the rain is gone. Hold on for a brighter day. Sunshine's coming your way.

Starting point is 00:17:53 Hold on for a brighter day. Sunshine's coming your way.

Today in Digital Marketing - Meta's "Phantom Ads" are Back and They're Worse Than Ever

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.