Today in Digital Marketing - Organic Content Marketing on… Spotify?!

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, is it the end of the line for influencer marketing? A clever organic content program being run on Spotify? More proof that Facebook reps have no idea what they're doing? And Twitter apparently deals a smack to YouTube's face. It's Wednesday, January 20th, 2021. Happy Mariachi Day, Mexico. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Here's what you missed today

Starting point is 00:00:25 in digital marketing. We all knew spending on social media advertising would be up at the end of 2020, the pandemic for one, but also that's just a metric that keeps increasing. What we didn't know was just how high that increase was going to be. Spending on social ads was up more than 92% in Q4 year over year, according to North American numbers from Socialbakers. Globally, it was still high at more than 50%. The top format? Video. In particular, live video, bolstered by new technology that connects live streams to shopping catalogs. Here's an example.

Starting point is 00:01:02 Ultra Beauty, a bricks-and-m and mortar chain that closed all 1,200 stores because of COVID, last month did a shopping live stream to demonstrate and sell products. They also had an augmented reality component to the show. And last month, Walmart did a one-hour live shopping show on TikTok. Products showcased were picked by selected TikTok influencers. Last year, Coresight Research said it expected revenue from live stream shopping sales to double worldwide. And while most tactics like live streams were up, there was one notable decline, the use of social media influencers, down almost 18% year over year. So you've got your brand on Facebook, on Instagram.

Starting point is 00:01:46 Hell, you're even duetting stuff on TikTok. But I'll bet you don't have a presence on Spotify. And I'll bet the reason for that is that you don't have a good answer for the question, okay, but what would we do there? Because there's not a lot to do for a brand on Spotify. I'm not talking audio ads or banners. I mean organic content marketing. But it does exist, and one Italian pasta brand did it with gusto recently. Quoting MarketingDive.com,

Starting point is 00:02:12 Barilla has launched a collection of eight Spotify playlists with running times equal to the cooking times of different pasta shapes. The playlists combine the four most popular genres in Italy, pop, hip-hop, indie, and classic hits, with pastas spaghetti, linguine, fusilli, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, and penne rigate, unquote. Playlists are probably the only organic content opportunity on Spotify. Other brands have tried their hand at it.

Starting point is 00:02:42 Earlier, KFC France made a playlist featuring hip-hop songs in which KFC was mentioned. More people reporting bugginess on the Facebook ads platform today. A bunch of people saying they're not seeing any total numbers at the bottom of the tables there. And if you think your Facebook rep is a product expert who can help you, consider this. A tweet this morning from DTC marketer Tristam Dyer who said, quote, just had a Facebook rep call me and say I have too many ad sets to allow Facebook to total the numbers at the bottom. This doesn't make any sense, of course, but wait, it gets better. Tristam also said the rep told him

Starting point is 00:03:21 that even if you did see numbers at the bottom, you shouldn't have because those campaigns have different audiences and thus different results. And yes, that's true, but that's the whole point of a bottom line, to add up all those different results. The truth is that with the removal of 28-day attribution windows, Facebook now no longer totals campaigns that have ad sets with different attribution windows. That's what's going on here. You should be able to see totals at the ad set level. Some people say they've been able to fix it by just pausing the campaign, then unpausing. But as usual, no communication from Facebook on this. There was no heads up that this would happen. Facebook reps seem to have differing opinions of what's going on. Most of those opinions wrong.

Starting point is 00:04:06 As of the time I'm recording this, Facebook's dedicated status page on the health of its ads platform reads, No known issues. There was a time back in the glory days when you could post a YouTube video to Facebook, and it would play right in the post. It was an embedded video. You didn't need to click the link to visit YouTube's site. It literally played in line right inside Facebook's news feed.

Starting point is 00:04:35 And then they took that away. And when you posted a YouTube video, it created a link post instead, as if you were posting a link to a blog page. And a small industry grew up around tools that would make the preview image more enticing, like embedding a fake play button on it, hoping that would pull more views. Then Facebook added an ads policy that prevented you from using a fake play button. Well, this might be a bug, but I noticed this morning some people reporting that Twitter also no longer creates either an embedded video or even a link post. It just pops the naked URL there now.

Starting point is 00:05:09 This would be one way to encourage people to upload the video natively to Twitter. It worked for Facebook. If we get any clarification on this from the company, I will let you know. Earlier this month, I reported that the head of global e-commerce giant Alibaba, a Chinese national named Jack Ma, had gone missing, and that the timing was concerning. He had been critical of the Chinese government's entrepreneurial policies. Well, an update, and it's good news, apparently.

Starting point is 00:05:35 Jack Ma has resurfaced in a video showing him touring a school, part of an annual event he does to recognize teachers. He did not mention why he went AWOL or where he was, nor did he say anything about the government. Shares of Alibaba jumped more than 10%. And finally, the consolidation of our digital marketing industry continues. Adthena, which makes AI tech for internet search advertising, has acquired the paid search business of market researcher Kantar. Quoting MarketingDive.com here,

Starting point is 00:06:07 quote, Kantar clients who use its dedicated search tools can now use Adthena's AI-powered search intelligence product suite. Adthena's more than 250 clients include marketers such as L'Oreal, Volvo, Progressive Insurance, and Qantas. The acquisition follows an integration partnership that Adthena and Kantar announced earlier this month.

Starting point is 00:06:30 If you found this podcast for one of those recommended for you listings, that happened because people rated and reviewed the show. If you're getting value from this daily news podcast, a podcast with no pre-rolls or mid-rolls, please consider paying it forward by reviewing us. You'll find a link in this episode's description that makes that a simple one-click process. All right, that's it.

Starting point is 00:06:50 Talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Organic Content Marketing on… Spotify?!

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