Today in Digital Marketing - Oh Lawd, They Comin'

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Friday, January 3rd. This week, free advertising on Amazon, but it comes with a big catch. Meta floods its platforms with fake profiles. The huge hit taken by retailers on product returns. And out with the mob wife, in with the sports fluencers. What 2025 has in store for the creator economy. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead in our Friday wrap-up of the week

Starting point is 00:00:26 in digital marketing, although this week it's really just the last two days. 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,

Starting point is 00:00:45 data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. We start as usual with changes to the advertising space. Ban or not, TikTok still wants your ad dollars. The platform is guaranteeing ad refunds now to ease concerns as it faces a potential U.S. ban. As some advertisers pull back, the app is trying to reassure major ad firms that they can get out of ad agreements if the ban goes through. In an email to ad agencies, TikTok said it would refund down payments on ad commitments if it fails to stop the ban, which is set for January 19th. As the legal battle drags on, attitudes among advertisers are divided. Some are pausing

Starting point is 00:01:33 new campaigns. Others are sticking with TikTok for now and are prepared to shift funds to YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, or other streaming platforms if needed. Free advertising on Amazon, you say? Sure, but only if you quit Timu. Timu, the bargain site, has become a go-to for popular China-based Amazon merchants looking to expand. Until recently, Amazon wasn't really stopping them. Now, Amazon is offering incentives like free advertising and lower commissions if merchants agree

Starting point is 00:02:04 to stop selling on Timu. Amazon has also started removing buy now buttons from product listings when it finds identical items listed on Timu for less. A spokesperson for Amazon said it hasn't asked sellers to sell exclusively on its e-commerce site and it supports selling across different platforms, but apparently not at Timu. Over at Google Ads, they are testing search ads without ad copy. Yeah, just photos and no descriptions. This has left some marketers frustrated, questioning how they can trust metrics when ads are so inconsistent.

Starting point is 00:02:37 Starting January 20th, new Performance Max campaigns created in the Google Ads web interface will require brand guidelines. Business name and logo assets will have to be linked at the campaign level, not at the asset group level. There's also a new brand control override for PMAX campaigns to allow shopping ads on searches with excluded brands. The option found under brand exclusions lets you bypass exclusions for shopping ads, making sure that your ads will still appear for searches mentioning those brands. And Google Ads has launched a new brand report that shows deduplicated reach and frequency metrics across your campaigns.

Starting point is 00:03:15 You can also sort it by demographics like age and gender. All right, to the social media changes in the past, well, couple of days. Who could have seen this coming? Meta's push to flood Facebook and Instagram with AI profiles is already backfiring. Users uncovered fake bot accounts that have been around since 2023, like Jane Austen, a cynical novelist, and Liv, describing itself as a proud black queer mama. Despite more than a dozen AI characters, none of them gained much traction, each barely scraping a few thousand followers and

Starting point is 00:03:53 little engagement, that is, until recently. After news broke this week of Meta's plans to roll out millions of AI profiles, these bot accounts are suddenly in the spotlight and the reactions are not good. Comments like, what the F does an AI know about dating? And this isn't only virtual blackface, it's just weird. Several of the AI profiles were taken down today. Users were not able to block or report the ads since typical blocking features were missing. A couple of other small items, Blue Sky has added a new trending topics feature that lets brands and users see what's popular on the app. You'll find it under the search icon.

Starting point is 00:04:31 It shows a list of trending and recommended subjects. X has raised its premium plus subscription by 30%. That increases it from $16 US to $22. Are you looking to market to moms? Seems like Facebook is still the go-to platform. A study found that US moms spend more than twice as much time on Facebook and Messenger as they do on TikTok. What does 2025 have in store for influencer marketing? According to some experts quoted in our newsletter, influencer brand extensions. This is influencers expanding into brands and podcasts

Starting point is 00:05:05 and newsletters and subscription content and expect more long form audio and video content with a focus on episodic series. Meta has tapped Joel Kaplan, a former Republican White House staffer, to replace Nick Clegg as global policy head. The move comes ahead of Donald Trump's inauguration, suggesting a major shift in Meta's direction under its new Trump-friendly leadership. And TikTok is rolling out some more generative AI features like the AI group shot tool. This will let users add themselves to image templates.

Starting point is 00:05:39 The platform says more AI tools are, of course, in the works, including easy meme creation from personal images and AI-driven suggestions for video captions and edits. AI tools are, of course, in the works, including easy meme creation from personal images and AI-driven suggestions for video captions and edits. I guess since we're here with TikTok, we should take a look at the two big court cases we're following. One, of course, is TikTok, and Donald Trump wants the Supreme Court now to let him negotiate a deal to save TikTok from a U.S. ban. In a court brief

Starting point is 00:06:05 this week, Trump said only he has the political mandate and expertise to resolve the issue once he's in office. No word yet on what said deal would look like. And the other big court case that we are watching after its antitrust win, the American Department of Justice proposed sweeping changes to Google, including selling Chrome and ending exclusive search deals with companies like Apple. Well, now Apple has come back with what it thinks is a simpler fix. Just end default search deals for three years and let us keep Android and Chrome, if you don't mind.

Starting point is 00:06:41 No word yet on the final ruling. All right, a look at what changed in the DTC and e-commerce world for the past few days. In 2024, social media referral traffic to publishers kept declining, with Facebook taking a major hit and platforms like Instagram, Reddit and Threads sending minimal traffic. The standout? Well, Google, of course. As retailers pushed holiday discounts, shoppers showed up. Total spending for the holiday season from November 1st to December 24th rose nearly 4%. Online sales outpaced in-store, growing nearly 7%, but in-store sales still were up by 3%.

Starting point is 00:07:21 Retailers took a $103 billion hit from fraudulent returns last year, 15% of the projected $685 billion in returns. Nearly half of retailers faced returns of stolen merchandise, and 60% dealt with what's being called wardrobing, Items bought online, worn, and then returned. And TikTok shop has added 10 new collectible categories, including comics, manga, and art books, plus more sports memorabilia and autographed items. Merchants have to verify item condition and authenticity to prevent the sale of fake goods.

Starting point is 00:08:08 And finally, one other interesting tidbit that didn't seem to fit anywhere else. Marketers are worried that AI will kill jobs, not just their own. A new study has found that half of marketers believe AI will cut marketing roles, but two out of three say they're not worried about tech taking their job. We listen and we don't judge. Those were the top digital marketing stories over the past, well, I guess two days, really. All the sources are in our email newsletter, which comes out every weekday at five o'clock Eastern and is free to sign up to.

Starting point is 00:08:39 You can sign up to it at todayindigital.com slash newsletter. Tuesday on our weekly deep dive episode, our Google Ads correspondent Jill Saskengales joins me and we talk about what's ahead in 2025 for the ads platform. Follow us on social media. We are almost everywhere. Blue Sky, Threads, Mastodon, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok, Snapchat, and Pinterest.

Starting point is 00:09:03 Just go to todayindigital.com slash social or tap the link in the show notes. I'm Todd Maffin. Follow me on BlueSky at T-O-D-M-A-F-F-I-N.com. Thanks for listening. Have a restful weekend. I'll see you on Tuesday.

Today in Digital Marketing - Oh Lawd, They Comin'

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