Today in Digital Marketing - New TikTok Dimensions: 48 feet high and 14 feet wide

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected, be Zen. It is Wednesday, October 18th. Today, TikTok leaves the phone and wants to be on your street. YouTube adds perhaps the most important update to its product marketing toolkit ever. A new Snapchat integration brings influencer search to third-party platforms. And on the ad-free premium podcast, which you can learn more about by tapping go premium in the show notes, Google is killing off a whole bunch of attribution models. Which ones? Why are they doing it? And full details on the AI that replaces them. I'm Todd Maffin.

Starting point is 00:00:59 That's ahead today in Digital Market. YouTube is launching a new ad product, which could get your message right beside big events. They call them spotlight moments and here's how the company described them. Quote, it identifies popular YouTube videos related to a specific cultural moment. Take this Halloween example. An advertiser wants to drive awareness for its brand during the spooky season. Spotlight moments lets the advertiser seamlessly serve ads across Halloween related content on YouTube and curates them into a dynamically updated playlist that will live live on the sponsored hub. Brands will automatically appear alongside the most relevant and engaging content associated with the moment, unquote. It's a little confusing. We do have an image of what

Starting point is 00:01:41 this hub looks like in today's free email newsletter, which you can sign up to by tapping the link in the show notes. If you, like me, are a bit of a control freak around your brand messaging, you may want to put this on the watch but don't act list for now. Remember, it'll be YouTube's AI which decides what content goes into these playlists. It's also a higher end product, so it might be of more interest to large brands and agencies. YouTube also announced a big upgrade for marketers who sell physical products. Video creators will be able to add timestamps to specific products that they tag in their videos. This means that the creator can pop up a shopping button at the exact time they want to. A few other changes on their way.

Starting point is 00:02:22 Creators will be able to bulk tag affiliate products in their video libraries and YouTube Studio will soon show channel managers which affiliate products bring them program which will let marketers use TikTok content out in the real world. And it has a kind of awkward name. They call it TikTok out of phone. It sounds more like a higher end bespoke kind of product. There are three programs actually. Billboard, which lets advertisers play their TikTok campaigns on real world billboards, cinema, and then a catch-all called Other Screens that lets brands use TikTok videos in bars, airports, retail stores, and so on. It sort of sounds like a TikTok TV channel. What's interesting is that TikTok already does this with a partnership that they've had for a couple of years now with a company called Atmosphere. But as Social Media Today notes in its coverage of this, quote, this is more specifically aligned to each brand and campaign, which will require more direct assistance and guidance from the TikTok team. So it may not fit into the budgets of most smaller brands, but it could be another consideration for those looking

Starting point is 00:03:39 for new ways to reach a wider audience, unquote. TikTok says if you're interested in kicking the tires, reach out to your ad rep. Speaking of TikTok videos, you might know that TikTok's parent company has a video editor called CapCut. It is free. It is actually shockingly good for small projects. It really rivals what professional editors

Starting point is 00:04:04 like Final Cut Pro have. And now they are expanding it with CapCut for Business, a web-based video editor that is also on par with the big boys. Among the features, it can write an ad script for you once you give it a few prompts. This is the same tool that's in its creative center. There are a number of templates with some commercially licensed assets, an automatic product video maker. You give it a URL of your product page and it'll make a bunch of TikTok videos for them. And even some AI generated presenters, which are artificial characters that can act as a kind of narrator. I tried out the video maker component and fed it this story as its source material. And the results were terrible. When it heard the word TikTok,

Starting point is 00:04:48 it just slapped the TikTok logo up there. When it heard blog, it used some graphic about content marketing. And when it heard the phrase marketing team, which you'll hear in the next paragraph, it used what looked like a New Yorker cartoon of executives sitting around a boardroom table, looking at a whiteboard on which was written, our new marketing strategy, sue their pants off.

Starting point is 00:05:11 So yeah, still in beta, maybe, I guess. You can watch the video in our newsletter today. To be fair, of course, it's probably stronger with words related to products, not some boring business reporting. I personally think the big deal here is it's now web-based and you can share your drafts with members of your marketing team or your agency. You can post directly to TikTok, of course, or send your video right to its ads manager, but you can also send it to Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube right from the interface or just download the file. And they don't force you into vertical format, you can make it a square or landscape video. One consideration for risk-averse brands,

Starting point is 00:05:50 CapCut's owner is a Chinese business, which some people say has connections to the Chinese government, and it's not entirely clear what guardrails exist around your brand's content, where it goes, what it's used for, and so on. But if you wanna try it out or learn more about it, it's at capcut.com slash business.

Starting point is 00:06:13 Snapchat today announced a handful of tools aimed at making it easier for brands to find and work with creators. First, they have a new API for searching for creators. This will let you search by name, filter by follower count or age. This is an API, so it's meant for third-party tools. Apparently, Captivate, Creator IQ, and PearPop are among the handful working on building this into their platforms. Second, advertisers can now place branded content within creator stories. These are essentially mid-rolls. And finally, in the coming weeks, verified creators

Starting point is 00:06:45 will be able to tag a brand when posting their own spotlight, snapped map, and public story. Brands can then approve the partnership within Ads Manager, letting marketers see the analytics and use the media as an ad. The company says their app reaches more than 90% of 13 to 24-year-olds across more than 20 countries. 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 00:07:20 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. Speaking of influencer marketing, Threads, that's Meta's challenger to what's left of Twitter, has added a disclosure function. When you compose a post, there's a new three-dot icon in the top right that reveals a mark as paid partnership option. Tapping it just adds hashtag paid partnership at the end of the post, which is a little confusing given that hashtags aren't tappable or searchable yet.

Starting point is 00:07:55 They are coming, though, and if this paid partnership hashtag is also tappable, this might make it a really easy way to search through paid influencer content. In theory, you could search for your product category and then the hashtag to get a kind of swipe file. We'll see how strong the forthcoming search will be. Still no timeline on when they'll add threads as a placement option for ad campaigns, though some code recently found in the app did hint that it is being worked on. Threads did see a pretty significant jump in activity and new accounts ever since concerns were raised over X's ability to control the spread of misinformation and graphic content regarding the developments in Israel and Gaza. Last week, Threads also added the ability to edit a post. There is a catch, though.

Starting point is 00:08:38 You only get five minutes after first posting to change it. After that, if you want to change something, you'll have to do it the old school way of deleting then reposting. A little icon indicates that a post has been edited, but there's no edit history yet. And unlike over on X, this functionality is free. All right, that will bring us to a very busy lightning round.

Starting point is 00:09:03 LinkedIn is cutting more than 650 jobs, mainly in its engineering team. This comes as ad revenue growth slows. The company is increasing hires in India, its second largest user market. Last May, LinkedIn cut more than 700 jobs and announced its exit from the Chinese market. The TV ad company Ampersand suffered a ransomware attack. The company sells viewership data to advertisers on about 85 million households. They would not disclose if a ransom was paid. YouTube is introducing visual cues for its like and subscribe buttons.

Starting point is 00:09:36 When creators say these words now, the corresponding buttons will animate, which I'm sure creators won't abuse and won't get old quickly, right? TikTok will start automatically adding captions to all videos starting next month. You can still edit or delete these captions after posting, but just be aware that their captioning may be incorrect and potentially embarrassing if you don't give it a quick read-through. Google business profiles now include disabled-owned and indigenous-owned attributes. Businesses can use these labels to identify themselves in these categories, and they show up in maps and other places. And X will now charge people money to do almost everything on the

Starting point is 00:10:18 platform. Reply, post, retweet, bookmark, and more. This is in testing right now in New Zealand and the Philippines. The cost is $1 a year. There is a loophole, though. If you want to post and not pay Elon $1 a year, you can sign up for verification. Oh, yeah, which costs $8 a month. back from the U.S. from Las Vegas last night after meeting our new client and onboarding them, which also gave us a chance to increase our own resources, which means we have one additional client slot left. And we'd love to work with you. If you are looking for a partner that can answer questions that you get on social media,

Starting point is 00:11:05 escalate issues, encourage people, moderate your channels and so forth, that is all we do and we are the best in North America at it. Our median first reply time is usually within seconds. It's almost never over two and a half minutes. It is speedy and accurate. If that's something we should be talking about, you can reach me directly. There is a link in the show notes. I'm Todd Mappin.

Starting point is 00:11:26 Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. So part of your job is to manage your brand's social media accounts. That can get busy, especially if you're running a paid campaign. You've got comments to moderate, reviews to reply to, issues to escalate to management, and that engagement comes in around the clock. That's why you might need a social media engagement firm,

Starting point is 00:12:04 a partner who's handling all that for you, either just evenings and weekends or offloading it entirely. Thank you. common questions and an escalation path, then leave it to us. Our team can answer product questions, encourage purchases, thank your customers, hide or delete the bad stuff, reply to reviews and more. And best of all, your customers won't know it's not you. We don't outsource this. Every single person is an in-house employee here in North America. If you're interested, check us out at engageq.com. That's engageq.com. Look for the link in this episode's notes in the About This Podcast section.

Today in Digital Marketing - New TikTok Dimensions: 48 feet high and 14 feet wide

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