Today in Digital Marketing - OMG Hun 😍, You Are going 🤞🏻 to LOOOVE 💚❤️ this Episode!!!!! 🎙️

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Friday, September 15th. Today, were the MLM huns right all along? Does emoji spam actually increase conversions? Science has the answer. Plus, the metaverse bait and switch, Walmart tries video ads out, and the Facebook bug randomly removing brand pages from the platform. I'm Todd Maffin. That's Ahead, today in digital marketing. 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 at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. You ever see one of those pitch messages from someone in a pyramid scheme? They're usually over-the-top effusive. Language like, Oh my god, girl, this is the absolute most best thing I've done. You should do it too.

Starting point is 00:01:02 You could make $100 a day from your phone. These messages are notable, ridiculed, actually, not only for the language, but also for the overuse of emoji, sometimes dozens in a single short message. And you, proper digital marketer, may have thought, does that actually work? Should we be adding lots of emoji to our social media post? Well, science now has the answer. A research paper published this month in the Social Media and Society Journal tested it. They created three versions of a Facebook post, one with no emojis, one with seven, and one with 20. They made sure the emoji didn't actually add any context to the message. They were just there for decoration. And they found that the 7 emoji version brought the trustworthiness of the content way, way down.

Starting point is 00:01:58 And that there was no difference between the 7 version and the 20 version. In short, lots of emojis equals bad. Quoting from the paper, quote, participants judge a message with many emojis as less credible than a message with no or a few emojis. We also find a significant effect on the number of emojis on participants' knowledge. Using many emojis in a post decreases the recipient's knowledge of the information presented, unquote.

Starting point is 00:02:25 And why does this happen? In short, because consumers of the content feel manipulated. Quote, the experiment shows that emojis are perceived as a persuasive attempt, which decreases message credibility. Emojis can have negative effects on perceptions of both the source and the message itself. Therefore, organizations should think carefully about whether and how to use emojis. We have a link to the paper in today's newsletter, which is free to sign up to at todayindigital.com or tap the link in the show notes. Some new ad tools coming to the meta platform as we all get ready for the holiday buying season.

Starting point is 00:03:12 First, there's a new way to change your spend budget automatically based on the time of day. This will let you run more of your spend during hours you think will be more advantageous. Maybe if you're a snack food marketer, you run more over lunch hours. Or if you'd like to bump your spending up over the weekends, you can do that as well. The UI will give you an option to increase your daily budget by a dollar amount or by a percentage. After that promotional period ends, your budget will automatically revert back to the daily budget that you initially set. I'll be honest, this surprises me. Everything coming out of Meta in the last year or two has been to trust the AI, that it knows whether the weekend will be better for you, or to let it show your ad to specific people during the times of day it knows they're more likely to convert. So it's a little weird,

Starting point is 00:03:56 welcome, but weird, that Meta is giving media buyers back some of the fine-tuning control we had in the old days. Second, Meta is also bringing the promotional ad format to more advertisers. These are tied to discount codes and similar offers, which are shown to the consumer through the whole purchase journey. They will be available now to brands in the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia in the next quarter.

Starting point is 00:04:18 Meta is also expanding reminder ads. These are Instagram ads for events, which will push people notifications before your event a day before 15 minutes before and at the time of the event. Specifically, the expansion is around letting you upload creative in ads manager, they are also adding stories as a placement for this format. And finally, Meta is also testing shops ads which integrate direct purchase into an ad format. For now that test involves adding integrations with Adobe Commerce, Magento, Open Source, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Meta already has integrations for BigCommerce, Feedonomics, ProductsUp, GoDataFeed, and ChannelAdvisor.

Starting point is 00:05:00 A couple of years ago, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg bet the farm on the Metaverse. Hell, he changed the company's name to match the new direction. Marketers tried to follow, but it wasn't easy. The Metaverse was really only in one of two places. In video games or inside virtual reality goggles like the one Meta built called Horizon Worlds. Needless to say, not much happened. A couple of big brands with money to burn set up shop there, only to basically abandon them a few months later. Now, Meta's making a move it hopes

Starting point is 00:05:32 to capture the imagination of the mainstream consumer, and of course marketers. They're letting a bit of their VR world out of the goggles and onto phones and the web. But it's not what you think. Most marketers, when they think of a metaverse, think of a world like the OG metaverse Second Life. This is a world where you can walk around, build stores, staff them, provide support, talk to other people, trade things. It's like a more colorful version of our existing world, only everything moves at 10 frames a second. That's not what Meta's rolling out here. Instead, this is more like competing with Roblox, the multiplayer gaming platform aimed at 12-year-olds that some people liken to a virtual world, but really isn't. In fact, read far enough into Meta's news release on this today, and you discover that the only thing you'll actually be able to do on phones or the web is play one game called Super Rumble. To be fair, Super Rumble looks like a lot of fun.

Starting point is 00:06:31 It's a multiplayer shooter, similar to Apex Legends or Call of Duty. But there's no lobby, there are no stores, there's no walking around. In fact, Meta still hasn't figured out legs for its virtual world. So players in the game are just a bunch of torsos disembodied from the waist up. Quoting Gizmodo's coverage of this today, when Mark Zuckerberg announced he was changing the company's name to Meta, the vision he laid out wasn't to make a bunch of poorly reviewed video games. It was to create a metaverse, an enveloping parallel virtual world where you can do everything you enjoy in physical space and so much more. But Meta isn't a game developer, or maybe it is now. It's a social media company building out a specific

Starting point is 00:07:11 vision of the future, unquote. So this is going to a test group on Android this week, iOS coming next week. They also say they'll add more later spaces that might be more traditionally thought of as virtual worlds, comedy shows, concerts, and so on. So what to make of it all? Well, it's clear that Meta's fascination with VR is more about entertainment than commerce, and that's probably a smart move, considering that the platforms can't even get live shopping to work in North America.

Starting point is 00:07:39 What's peculiar to me, though, is its positioning, so far, of the Metaverse as a toy for gamers and teens. Gamers have hardware. Both Xbox and PlayStation recently released their next-gen consoles, and both have huge marketing budgets behind them. Perhaps behind the scenes, Met is thinking about how brands might participate in a metaverse. But for now, unless your marketing manager is really good at headshots, it's probably not the droid you're looking for. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit?

Starting point is 00:08:18 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 at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Meta this morning disputed a report saying they were getting ready to bring ads to WhatsApp. The Financial Times reported that Meta was considering adding ad placements in between the lists of conversations on the WhatsApp home screen. But Meta says they weren't testing it, they're not working on it, and they don't have any plans to do so. It's not like WhatsApp doesn't make money, though. More than 200 million monthly active users interact with

Starting point is 00:08:59 WhatsApp Business, which adds some commerce and customer support layers into the app. You can also run ads that bring people to your WhatsApp profile. Last year, Meta reported it made $1.5 billion on those ads and that the format grew 80% compared to the previous year. While we're on the topic of WhatsApp briefly, there's a bug there on the platform today. Apparently, accounts with lots of message templates are affected. Meta says they're working on it, but recommend deleting any outdated templates or those you don't use regularly

Starting point is 00:09:30 if you're seeing some weird stuff happening in your account. Walmart is rolling out a sponsored video ad format, their first video ad placement. Sponsored videos appear in the search results and are available now to all brands that are in the Walmart brand portal. Campaigns can be managed either through their own ads manager or third-party tools. Quoting Marketing Dive, the news demonstrates how mature retail media networks are moving past purely performance-based advertising into areas of marketing that are oriented around brand building. Walmart Connect is aiming to appeal to marketers who have shifted

Starting point is 00:10:10 their holiday strategies more toward digital channels and are angling to inspire in-the-moment purchases on e-commerce platforms, unquote. Walmart says 93% of the 100 most searched keywords on its services are non-branded words or phrases, suggesting that consumers might be open to new brands. The company's ad sales were up 36% last quarter compared to the same quarter last year. So while Walmart ad sales are up, Adobe's are down. Third quarter digital ad revenue is down almost 20% from the previous quarter and from the same quarter the previous year. Quoting Martech.org's coverage of this today, Digital advertising will come back, but this is a reminder that it isn't everything. Businesses appear to be moving more dollars to the areas of digital marketing

Starting point is 00:11:05 where they have more direct control, such as customer experience. Retail media networks, which can deliver to targeted audiences, will likely continue to see more ad spend than more general outlets, unquote. Some LinkedIn ad metrics have been given accreditation by the Media Ratings Council. This is an independent body which verifies the accuracy of the numbers platforms report to advertisers. Specifically, LinkedIn now has the nod of approval for gross impressions, net impressions, gross clicks and net clicks. This accreditation covers sponsored content ads, text and dynamic ad formats. You will also start to see a new MRC accredited metrics column view in Campaign Manager. Really briefly seeing some reports on social media today that Facebook is randomly unpublishing brand pages, then sending the page admins a notice that their page goes against community standards.

Starting point is 00:12:06 Then, according to reports, the page shows back up after about 30 minutes. This does appear to be a bug. No word from Meta on this. But if this is happening to your brand page, maybe just give it an hour or two to see if it sorts itself out. And finally, Google deleted just three words from one of their help pages recently. It was noticed by the sharp-eyed Barry Schwartz from seroundtable.com. In their page titled, Google searches helpful content system and your website, it used to say that Google's ranking system prioritized, quote, helpful content written by people for people, unquote.

Starting point is 00:12:47 But now, the phrase written by people is gone, suggesting that Google will equally prioritize content written by AI as it will that penned by a human. Welcome to the future. And that will do it for the week. Today in Digital Marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Stunamic First Nation on Vancouver Island. Our production coordinator is Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Blevis.

Starting point is 00:13:23 Music licensing by Source Audio. Ad coordination by Red Circle. I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. Have a restful weekend, friends. See you next week. These memories will never fade I get reminded every day

Starting point is 00:13:41 Acts of kindness at the corner store Buried feet on a September shore day. Acts of kindness at the corner store. Buried feet on a September shore. Bluesy bands on a Friday night. Out of key, but that's alright. I tried my best to do

Starting point is 00:13:57 it like you did. You taught me how when I was a kid

Today in Digital Marketing - OMG Hun 😍, You Are going 🤞🏻 to LOOOVE 💚❤️ this Episode!!!!! 🎙️

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