Today in Digital Marketing - OMG THEY’RE ACTUALLY DOING IT
Episode Date: September 22, 2020Three small announcements you WANTED to hear from Facebook, and one big one you didn’t... TikTok and Oracle give a masterclass in how to screw up a simple p.r. Announcement… and Mailchimp turns to... artificial intelligence to power the next generation of its platform. Not subscribed yet? Get direct subscribe links at TodayInDigital.com HELP SPREAD THE WORD: • Tweet It: bit.ly/tweet-tidm to preview a tweet you can publish • Review Us: RateThisPodcast.com/today ABOUT THE PODCAST: • Produced by: engageQ.com • Advertising: TodayInDigital.com/ads • Our Slack community: TodayInDigital.com/slack • Transcripts: See each episode at TodayInDigital.com • Theme music: Mark Blevis (all other music licensed by Source Audio) TOD’S SOCIAL MEDIA: • Twitter: twitter.com/todmaffin • LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/todmaffin • Tod’s agency: engageQ.com • TikTok: /tiktok.com/@todmaffin • Twitch: twitch.tv/todmaffin Source links and full transcripts at TodayInDigital.com --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
Transcript
Discussion (0)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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,
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
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,
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
All night long.
Let's go to my hustlers in the city.
It's the season for new styles, and you love to shop for jackets and boots.
So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten.
And it's not just clothing and shoes.
You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more.
It's super easy.
And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first.
Join free at rakuten.ca.
Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal.
Get the Rakuten app or join at rakuten.ca.
R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A.