Today in Digital Marketing - Move Fast and Cancel AI

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Wednesday, July 31st. Today, back to the drawing board, Meta kills celebrity chatbots. The performance max change we all wanted is here. New data on where young people start their online purchasing journey. And NBC spent $7 billion on the Olympics. Has it paid off in ad revenue? We have the numbers.

Starting point is 00:00:24 I'm Todd Mathen. That's ahead today in digital marketing. Remember when Meta made all those celebrity chatbots last year, voiced by celebrities like Mr. Beast, Snoop Dogg, and Paris Hilton? It was the future, they said. AI would become more human, more indispensable, more transformative. Well, funny thing. Turns out, people didn't really like them. At least, they didn't like them enough. Snoop Dogg's bot only had about 15,000 followers

Starting point is 00:00:53 compared with more than 88 million on his real Instagram account. So now, Meta has cancelled the project and shut the bots off. None of the couple dozen they released garnered many followers, certainly nothing at the scale Meta had hoped for when they paid millions to license the voices. And the indirect ad revenue Meta had hoped for never materialized. The thought internally was that the chatbots would keep users in the apps longer. But there's a new plan afoot. Quoting the information, quote, On Monday, the company rolled out a new feature called AI Studio in the US, allowing any creator to customize AI avatars of themselves to answer common questions from fans, such as where they bought a dress or offering a link for a workout video, unquote. Actually, these custom AIs are basically a ripoff of ChatGPT's custom GPTs,

Starting point is 00:01:43 right down to the UI to set them up. You give them some basic instructions on how to answer questions, and users can ask your bot questions. We set one up to deliver marketing advice in Limerick form. You can try it out at todayindigital.com slash chatbot. One note, at deadline, it was still being reviewed by Meta, so this link might not work for another day or two, but it will, hopefully. Todayindig digital.com slash chatbot. Prepare to be underwhelmed. Google's Performance Max product has had a couple of big updates in the last few days, and to help get us up to speed, our Google Ads correspondent Jill Saskengales joins me. Jill, as you probably know, spent six years at Google Ads. Today, she runs the Inside Google Ads training program for practitioners and is host of the Inside Google

Starting point is 00:02:30 Ads podcast. Jill, hello. Hello, hello. So when PMAX, Performance Max, first came out, it was kind of a black box, right? You'd put your brand's assets into it and you'd put some money into it and it spat out results, maybe. But you couldn't really measure. Yeah, you couldn't like you couldn't get like a detail level of measurement. But with this update, it looks to me like they're returning some visibility to us in reporting. Am I reading that right? You are reading that right. And the first big change in that direction was actually a few months ago when Performance Max gave us asset group level reporting. So before you would only see for your campaign as a whole, you know, what are you spending conversions? A few months ago, they added in. Now you can see with each asset group, which is like an ad group, how are

Starting point is 00:03:14 they all performing? And now Google's taking that a step further. You can actually see how each asset is performing on a conversion basis. So which headlines or images or descriptions or videos are actually leading to those conversions. It's a major change. Do you get all metrics like we expect, you know, like the 20 columns of metrics for performance? Or are we just seeing conversions? According to Google's announcement,

Starting point is 00:03:40 for now, it's just seeing conversions. But frankly, of all the metrics we could see, that's probably the one we care about the most. I have to say I welcome this, of course, because, you know, I'm sort of a bit of an old school control freak. I like to see all the numbers. I don't like black boxes. But I'm surprised to see Google doing this since their whole thing has been just take your hand off the wheel. Don't worry about the numbers. We'll get you sales. Just just calm down there, Captain Enthusiasm. Why do you think the reversal here?

Starting point is 00:04:08 Well, in a Performance Max campaign, your assets that you give to the campaign are arguably the most important part. Because although there's audience signals and search themes, you don't really get to pick your targeting. Sure, you get to pick your budget and your bid strategy, but ultimately, like Performance Max is figuring out who to show your ads to and what you're going to pay per click and per view and whether you're going to show on shopping or search or display. So your assets, that's really all you can control.

Starting point is 00:04:33 And I think advertisers, myself included, have been really skeptical of these performance ratings, best, good, low. Like, does that mean best click-through rate? Does it mean best converting? And Google's answer has always been, it means best according to the goals of your campaign, which is not helpful. People are like, what does that really mean? So similarly to how in your search themes report, you know, you don't get a fully detailed on every search term, but you can see the conversions driven by each category of search themes. Now you can see asset by asset, asset by asset,

Starting point is 00:05:07 how they are leading to different conversions. And what this will hopefully do is get advertisers to perhaps pay more attention to creating effective assets that are more like the ones that are driving more conversions. Jill, you train people, you coach ad buyers on the Google platform.

Starting point is 00:05:24 Would you recommend then, now that we have visibility into how different assets are converting that we pay attention to that report and that we turn on and off assets as they are performing? Or should we still kind of maintain the hands off that Google's been recommending? I think advertisers should always be hands-on where their assets are concerned, whether that's a responsive search ad or a video in a YouTube campaign or these kind of building block assets you get to put into Performance Max. So now that we do have this conversion level reporting, I'm not going to say you should check it every day, but probably on a monthly basis, you should look at the last 30 days and see which assets were driving more conversions and make decisions accordingly. Now, just because a certain asset maybe didn't lead to as many direct conversions, that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad, right? But putting these things in context of each other and looking at how they change over

Starting point is 00:06:19 time can help you understand the kind of text, image, and video that are most likely to drive the results you're looking for. Gotcha. I, and video that are most likely to drive the results you're looking for. Gotcha. I also saw that they are bringing in sort of a new suite of image editing tools, some AI-based, some more enhanced. What are you seeing there? Yeah, this is one of the big things Google told us was coming at Google Marketing Live, and now it's here, AI-powered image editing. So this is where using the beauty of AI, you can just click and drag on an image to remove an object or add an object

Starting point is 00:06:51 or expand the background, you know, with context aware fill. So this is something that will be especially helpful for e-commerce advertisers. And it's something I actually thought it was already in, but I guess not. They're moving it into different types of campaigns as well, I think. Yeah, for now, it's launching in Performance Max.

Starting point is 00:07:10 As we're seeing, that's usually where new features are coming in because it is a top priority for Google. And Google has shared that demand-gen campaigns will come after that. It's interesting because in a way, this is sort of like they're recreating a couple of years ago. A lot of these platforms would license a plug-in tool from, say, Canva to do this kind of stuff. You know, where a little mini version of Canva would pop up into your ads manager and you could do that. And that still exists. In fact, I think Google made reference to another partner they're bringing on that might be similar. But it seems to me like they're trying to get away from those deals and now, you know, bringing their AI in so that it's kind of all in the same family. Well, they're doing both. I mean, within Google Ads, you can

Starting point is 00:07:50 generate images using AI, but then also within Canva, you can use Google's image generation technology, right, to create an image there, which you could then use in Google Ads. So they do seem to be pursuing both avenues. They have multiple creative partners, including Canva, and they also have these more basic capabilities in platform. And I think that's what I like so much about this announcement, you know, if you run a large company or you work for a large company, you're going to have designers and people who can do this kind of stuff for you. But if you have maybe, you know, 10 or so, 20 different e-commerce products and you just want to change a few things

Starting point is 00:08:27 about your images or test a few things, now you can do that directly in the Google Ads interface for Performance Max. And it is quite rare for Google to bring stuff like this directly into the Google Ads interface. So I'm excited to play around with it.

Starting point is 00:08:42 Yeah, always changing. Thanks, Jill. Thank you. Jill Saskengales is our Google Ads correspondent. She's here every second Wednesday. You can learn more about her Google Ads training program at our affiliate link, todayindigital.com slash GA. And you can watch our full unedited interview.

Starting point is 00:08:57 There is a link to it in today's newsletter, which you can sign up to for free by tapping the link in the show notes or going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter. In the last six months, 55% of Gen Z have bought things online while browsing social media. This from a new Walmart-funded study of 2,200 Americans. Compare that cohort to the broader demographics where only 38% of shoppers overall

Starting point is 00:09:26 bought while surfing. One interesting finding was that Walmart asked Gen Z shoppers where they begin their shopping journey. 44% started with an online search, 40% started on a store's website or app, and 38% started on social media. Nearly half said they would buy more clothes if they could access virtual try-on tools. Walmart is pushing hard to capture the hearts and minds of younger consumers. Quoting Retail Dive, In May, the company introduced Walmart Realm, an immersive shopping platform where shoppers can browse virtual environments and buy the items within them.

Starting point is 00:10:01 The company also introduced a Walmart Discovered Roblox experience last fall that let players access virtual departments across the beauty, sports, and pet categories on the gaming platform. The retailer this summer also revived one of its largest private labels, No Boundaries, aimed at Gen Z. We have a link to the full Walmart study in today's email newsletter. Buying the broadcast rights to the Olympics is an expensive proposition. Just ask the American broadcaster NBC. It paid the Games more than $7.5 billion to renew its broadcast rights through 2032.

Starting point is 00:10:47 NBC, of course, is betting that the Olympics would bring in billions in ad dollars. And that bet appears to be paying off in spades. The company said so far it's earning the highest Olympic and Paralympic ad revenue in history, and it's onboarded more advertisers than the Rio and Tokyo Olympics combined. Also, nearly a half billion dollars came in from first-time advertisers, a group that makes up 70% of the total group. When you break it down to digital-only ad revenue, NBC says that category is earning twice as much as it did for the Tokyo Games just four years ago. Nearly 10 million U.S. households watched the opening ceremony, either live or later the same day.

Starting point is 00:11:28 The key appears to be NBC's streaming platform, Peacock. Rather than having to bump solid performers off their main television schedule, the broadcaster is keeping television for special moments. Peacock is expected to stream 5,000 out of the 7,000 hours of Olympic coverage. Most importantly, for advertisers, almost all the metrics are up. In some cases, way up. Quoting Adweek, Overall, advertisers are seeing more attention on their ads, 18% more,

Starting point is 00:11:59 greater message recall, up 33% more, and an increased likelihood to search, up 67% on linear TV than competitive broadcast and cable TV. Paris Olympics viewers are 24% more likely to be in the market for a car than the total population. Paris auto advertisers are already seeing 52% greater incremental brand search compared with competitive TV. Meanwhile, Paris Olympics viewers are 79%

Starting point is 00:12:26 more likely to visit casual dining restaurants than the total population, with Olympic restaurant advertisers earning 50% higher intent to visit a restaurant after seeing an ad compared with competitive TV. And finally, Microsoft had a great financial quarter, and a lot of it was due to advertising. In its latest disclosures, the company reported its search and advertising revenue was up 19%. In total, revenue for the company was $64 billion. That is up 15% compared to the previous quarter. If you get a lot of value out of this podcast, don't forget that the premium version is just like this one, but no ads, better sound quality, audio chapters. You can just tap and skip to whatever story you want.

Starting point is 00:13:13 It comes with access to more than 20 deep dive interviews with marketing scientists, my course on building a small agency and a whole bunch more. Tap go premium in the show notes to sign up. That will do it for today. I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. And if you always wrote your appointments down in a book, now there's the Personal Digital Assistant, or PDA, like Apple's Newton. It has a pager to receive data.

Starting point is 00:13:36 It gets messages from the office and more. Four times a day, I get daily updates on world news, sports news, entertainment, business news. It recognizes your handwriting it even sends faxes

Today in Digital Marketing - Move Fast and Cancel AI

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