Today in Digital Marketing - More. More Never Changes.

Starting point is 00:00:01 It's happened again. This time, Adobe scrambles to reassure marketers that it's not going to steal their work in the service of AI training. But can its track record be trusted? That, plus updates to Meta's conversions API, LinkedIn pulls one of its most effective ad targeting tools, and much more ahead in this very busy Friday, June 7th. I'm Todd Maffin. Here's what's happening today in digital marketing. Yesterday, the creative marketing community was up in arms after Adobe locked some of its users out of the company's software until that user agreed to terms that appeared to hand over all rights for AI training. Some said they couldn't even get support or cancel their subscription or uninstall their apps until they agreed to the terms. Duncan Jones, a film director,

Starting point is 00:00:52 posted this on social media, quote, Hey, Photoshop, what the hell was that new agreement you forced us to sign this morning that locked our app until we agree to it? We are working on a bloody movie here. And no, you don't suddenly have the right to any of the work we're doing on it because we pay you to use Photoshop.

Starting point is 00:01:09 What the fuck? Unquote. At first, Adobe came out with a statement which was basically, yo, what's the problem? We've had these terms in there forever. Which, of course, didn't do them any favors. Quoting Adobe's statement, quote, this policy has been in place for many years. Adobe accesses user content for a number of reasons, including the ability to deliver some of our most innovative cloud-based features, unquote. Late yesterday, wiser heads in Adobe's PR department apparently prevailed, and they published a blog post offering more details. Essentially, they said their updated terms were meant to offer some examples of how the existing policy would play out

Starting point is 00:01:45 and that some of their need to review the data you upload to their cloud was about monitoring for child abuse imagery. Most importantly, Adobe says regardless of how it may have sounded, it doesn't use customer content to train its AI, which it calls Firefly. Quote, Firefly generative AI models are trained on a data set of licensed content, such as Adobe stock and public domain content where copyright has expired. Customers own their content and Adobe does not assume any ownership of customer work, unquote. The company said it would be tweaking those terms of use acceptance screens customers see when opening applications to make them a little less scary. This certainly isn't the first time Adobe has sold out some of its goodwill.

Starting point is 00:02:27 It was only a couple of years ago when the company turned colors in its customers' documents to black if they hadn't purchased an additional Pantone color license. This might be a good time to remind you that there are plenty of outstanding Adobe substitutes out there which don't charge you a monthly fee to use. The Affinity Suite is an excellent replacement. I bought Pixelmator Pro for 25 bucks about six years ago. It does pretty much everything Photoshop does, including reading and writing Photoshop files. Both products are low cost and pay once lifetime models. LinkedIn has geo-restricted one of the most effective ad targeting tools it has

Starting point is 00:03:08 it will no longer let marketers target european users based on which linkedin groups they're in this after a complaint filed with privacy regulators on the continent quoting tech crunch quote patrick corrigan linkedin's vp for and Digital Safety, said that while it disagreed that its platform could be used indirectly by advertisers to target users on special categories of data, it has chosen to remove this feature anyway. Quote, we made this change to prevent any misconception that ads to European members could be indirectly targeted based on special categories of data or related profiling categories. The change is effective now for all new advertising campaigns. It's a move evidently designed to nip the investigation in the bud early. After all, its parent company, Microsoft, is facing a raft of regulatory hurdles in Europe over various alleged misdemeanors. Unquote. Instagram is clarifying its stance on single-word call-to-actions and longer reels after concerns

Starting point is 00:04:10 flew among marketers about having their content shadow banned. Last week, the platform advised against using single-word calls-to-action, saying those could be seen by their systems as engagement bait and lead to reduced post-reach Now though, Instagram says that open-ended questions and calls to action are still fine and won't be penalized. It says the goal is to prevent users from hacking the system by trying to pile on clicks. It also clarified that third-party automation tools like ManyChat, which use single word responses

Starting point is 00:04:41 to drive engagement, were not the intended target of that advice. One recent piece of advice it didn't walk back though was to avoid posting reels longer than 90 seconds. It confirmed that reels over that length still are not eligible for recommendations, but if someone already follows your brand's account, your content could still very well get to them.

Starting point is 00:05:03 In other words, 90 second or longer reels are a shadow ban from people who don't follow your account, your content could still very well get to them. In other words, 90-second or longer reels are a shadow ban from people who don't follow your account, but not for those who do. Meta has announced some updates to its messaging tools at an event yesterday. First, and this is a big one, they're expanding the Conversions API to now support messaging events, quoting the company. Quote, conversions API previously supported web app and offline events, and it is now expanding to support messaging events across Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Starting point is 00:05:40 For business messaging, this also enables our new purchase optimization, which offers advertisers the ability to drive more sales and reduce costs by reaching customers most likely to purchase, unquote. Second, they are testing a new AI support tool on WhatsApp, which can respond to fairly simple questions asked in the app. The chat will indicate that it was written by AI. These aren't out in the real world much yet, so we don't have any way of knowing how good these are in practice. So far, most attempts we've seen at auto-replying AI bots have been pretty anemic at best. In some cases, it's spouted replies that brand managers have winced at. Third, they're letting brands in more countries buy a blue checkmark. The new countries are Brazil, India, Indonesia, and

Starting point is 00:06:20 Colombia. If you already have a green verified badge from WhatsApp, that will be changing to blue to match it everywhere else. The company recently added higher priced tiers to its verified program, including one that costs $1,000 US a month if you want both your Facebook and Instagram accounts to have the checkmark. A few other updates too, a new paid message option to let you send personalized marketing messages to customers' WhatsApp inboxes and a new message template library in the WhatsApp business platform. After watching Walmart, CVS and other big retailers rent out its customer purchase data for ad targeting, Costco says it now wants in too. And with nearly 75 million members, it could quickly become one of the big players, especially when you remember that unlike Walmart or CVS, in order to make any purchase at Costco, customers need to have a

Starting point is 00:07:18 member-specific card which logs what they buy. Quoting Marketing Brew, quote, generally advertising is a comparatively high margin business for retailers since it costs relatively little to run ads on websites and since shoppers will visit retailers' e-commerce sites whether there are ads or not. Costco already has a nascent ads business bringing in some advertising revenue through its Costco Connection magazine and rudimentary on-site contextual ads.

Starting point is 00:07:47 Ad tech company Criteo manages a portion of its website monetization, like sponsored search and product ads, but the company hasn't until now made more aggressive moves into the ad space, which a Costco executive suggested could be due to its general aversion to advertising and marketing on major platforms like TV, which has created a lack of expertise in the paid media space, unquote. And that will bring us to the lightning round. Shopify has acquired Threads.com. No, not Meta's app, but the UK-based Slack competitor that everyone googled by accident when Meta announced their app. Threads admitted Meta's move on the name helped push them towards selling. It is not clear what Shopify plans to do with it. scrape the personal data from Facebook users to train its AI and share it with third parties. Meta says users have a couple of weeks to manually opt out and did not reply to media questions about how people can have their data removed if they didn't hear about the opt-out option in time.

Starting point is 00:08:57 Communities have been rolled out on Meta's Messenger app. This lets users join groups based on shared interests, the move seen as a response to the growing popularity of community-focused platforms. And Google says it will turn off the old user interface for Google Ads on August 30th. It says the new version is better, and we marketers have had plenty of time to get used to it. 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

Starting point is 00:09:32 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. And finally, LinkedIn has blown past X as the most valuable social media platform for public relations professionals. This according to the latest state of the PR report by Muckrack. This marks a substantial decline in X's usability since Elon Musk took over in 2022.

Starting point is 00:10:03 The report, based on a survey of about 1,100 PR professionals, found that 61% of respondents view LinkedIn as the most useful platform, surpassing X, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok combined. It's a big fall. X had previously been the second most used platform for pitching reporters, but now only 10% of PR professionals use it for outreach, ranking even below phone calls and text messages. And that will do it for the week.

Starting point is 00:10:37 Today in Digital Marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Snunamic First Nation on Vancouver Island. Our production coordinator is Sarah Gild. Our theme is by Mark Blevis at coordination by Red Circle. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend. I'll see you on Monday.

Today in Digital Marketing - More. More Never Changes.

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