Today in Digital Marketing - OMG THEY’RE ACTUALLY DOING IT

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, three small announcements you wanted to hear Be protected. Be Zen. the next generation of its platform. It's Tuesday, September 22nd, the first day of fall 2020. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. And here's your warning, parents. The language in today's episode is going to be rough.

Starting point is 00:01:00 Praise be, they are finally doing it. Instagram says they will be building an API for direct messages. Right now, there isn't one at all, meaning DMs that your customers send to your brand's Instagram account can't come into the third-party platform you use, like Agorapulse or Hootsuite. It's never really been clear why it took them this long to get around to it, but hey, better late than never, because right now, and all this time, the only way to see and reply to DMs was either on your phone or in the misery-inducing clusterfuck that Facebook calls Creator Studio. Details are a little sketchy. I wasn't able to find a timeline on this. Let's not celebrate too loud, fellow digital marketers. If Zuckerberg hears we want this, he's going to take it away. A couple of more bits of Facebook good news before we get to the Facebook bad news. First, it looks like they're putting more emphasis on hashtags in

Starting point is 00:01:53 Facebook posts. Some people are seeing a test where when you start typing a hashtag in a post, Facebook will give you some predictive options, just like how Google does when you start a search. And like Instagram, it will show you how many other posts on the platform use that hashtag, making it easier to pick the busy ones. Or I suppose to stay away from the busy ones. And even better, the long-dreaded 20% rule is apparently dead. When Facebook's ads platform first launched, it had a strict 20% limit of texts in any ad creative. So if a fifth or more of your image contained text, it just wouldn't run.

Starting point is 00:02:31 Then they relaxed that a little, saying, well, it's okay if you use more than 20%, but we're going to penalize you. So the more text you have, the less reach we'll give you. Here at my agency, we didn't really notice much reach reduction, even when we had a lot of text. Other marketers lately have reported the same thing. Well, this morning, Facebook has been emailing some of its biggest customers to let them know that rule is off. Quoting their email, we will no longer penalize ads with higher amounts of image text in auctions and delivery. Advertisers are still encouraged to reduce the amount of text with images, as we have found that images with less than 20% text generally perform better, unquote.

Starting point is 00:03:10 So a couple of things here. First, why the hell do we only find out about these things when Facebook's biggest advertisers leak it? Is there any reason we can't have a basic blog with an RSS feed to keep up with changes to your damn platform, Facebook? And second, they're right, of course, most of the time, images with a lot of text underperform. But some creative executions require it to get the message across. And for those ad campaigns, this is welcome news indeed. So that's the good news. Here's some bad news. Well, not bad as much as, hey, here's another example of Facebook throwing its weight around. The company today saying, hey, if you European regulators don't back down over your privacy concerns, let us do what we want.

Starting point is 00:03:53 We are going to pack up our toys and go home. Yes, Vice is reporting that Facebook is threatening to leave Europe entirely. I don't mean their offices would leave. I mean they would literally stop letting their website be available to anyone in Europe. Oh, and Instagram too, because fuck you, apparently. It's all because of a ruling by Ireland's Data Protection Commission that would require Facebook to stop transferring data about European customers to servers in the US. This over the very legitimate concerns of US government surveillance of the data.

Starting point is 00:04:26 Don't believe me? Go read the Patriot Act and tell me Ireland is being concerned over nothing. To this day, no government organization in Canada is permitted to store data about Canadians on any American server. That means no Dropbox, no Google Drive. So Facebook

Starting point is 00:04:42 has now filed a lawsuit saying the Irish Privacy Commissioner isn't being fair. They're singling out Facebook. Why does one person get to make this decision? Blah, blah, blah. For the record, Facebook actually disputes Vice's reporting and says they're not planning to leave entirely. And so it's back in the courts. Most industry analysts say Facebook's ultimatum is an empty threat, with one calling it absurd brinksmanship. Well, here's a case study in how not to make a joint announcement with a brand partner, say an acquisition partner, a company that's buying yours. What you should do, of course,

Starting point is 00:05:18 is align your messaging. Make sure you're both, you know, singing from the same songbook and all the other business cliches. Now, that is not what's happening in the boardrooms of TikTok and Oracle. And it's making this whole will they stay or will they go thing even more confusing. Here's what we know. TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, has reached a deal with Walmart and Oracle that will allow the Chinese social media app to continue operating in the U.S. As for the next sentence, you know, the one that usually talks about ownership stakes, that's where things go off the rails. ByteDance says it would retain 80 percent control of TikTok

Starting point is 00:05:56 and that what they're selling to Oracle and Walmart is the remaining 20 percent. In fact, they don't even call it an acquisition. They call Oracle a trusted technology partner, which is the same kind of language you would use if you wanted to announce that you picked Dropbox as your file sharing service, not a billion-dollar acquisition forced by the American president. But even so, ask Walmart, and they have a completely different idea of what's happening here,

Starting point is 00:06:21 saying Americans will have majority ownership and, quote, ByteDance will have no ownership in TikTok Global. Turns out what's actually happening is that U.S. citizens already own a big chunk of ByteDance. American investors control about 40% of the Chinese company. So combined with Oracle and Walmart's 20%, that brings U.S. investor control to more than half. Or at least that's what people think is responsible for the discrepancy. And so we turn to U.S. President Donald Trump for clarity.

Starting point is 00:06:52 I'm just kidding. He said he approved it on the weekend and then seemingly changed his mind yesterday, adding the phrase in principle to everything. The whole point of the sale was to secure the TikTok algorithm and code so they could be sure that there was no transfer of users' personal data to the Chinese government. But ByteDance today said, no, no, Oracle's not getting the algorithm.

Starting point is 00:07:12 In fact, the Chinese government just weeks ago passed a law banning export of that kind of code. Oracle will be able to do what ByteDance is calling occasional security checks on the U.S. source code. But quoting TechCrunch, it's unclear how Oracle's role as a code inspector and user data host will resolve concerns about Beijing's possible tinkering of TikTok's content black box. And then there's this. Remember how Trump said the deal

Starting point is 00:07:39 had to include a payoff to the U.S. Treasury? Yes, that's a government forcing not only a sale of a private company, but also requiring that they take a cut of the deal, just like we see all the time in banana republics. The Trump administration now quietly admitting that money will actually come from income tax and other taxes, like every other company in America.

Starting point is 00:08:02 But they said, we did get them to commit to a $5 billion education fund in the U.S. TikTok says it has no idea what the White House is talking about with that. And besides, they already invest lots of money in education anyway. So let's recap. TikTok has been sold. Unless it hasn't. And this is just a services contract. Really, nobody knows, including apparently the two companies. Thank you for attending today's class on getting your messaging aligned. MailChimp is adding some AI tools to their platform, including a creative assistant that will automate content creation.

Starting point is 00:08:41 Also dynamic recommendations, including personalized product recommendations. These will be inserted into each unique email and will be based on customer performance data as well as global industry trends. MailChimp calls the release, quote, nothing short of enterprise-level marketing automation. The platform already integrates with e-commerce solutions like Magento and Shopify

Starting point is 00:09:02 and website CMSs like WordPress. Not a lot to say here other than the usual. Please review us, join our Slack community, all that stuff. I'm Todd Maffin. More breaking news from the world of digital marketing tomorrow. I'll talk to do what it do, baby. Make the dollars work. Get it hooked, Rich. It's all good, baby, baby. We stay strong.

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Today in Digital Marketing - OMG THEY’RE ACTUALLY DOING IT

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