Today in Digital Marketing - ㄒotally N𝐨𝐫𝐦al 𝗣𝗼𝗱cast Epɪꜱᴏᴅᴇ, 𝕹𝖔𝖙hing 𝓉𝑜 See ɦɛʀɛ

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected, be Zen. It is Tuesday, December 5th. Be protected. Be Zen. just got a killer import option? And why have some Instagram videos suddenly gone mute? I'm Todd Maffin. That's Ahead, today in digital marketing. I don't think you need to have a PhD to recognize that spam has gotten worse. Bad actors getting more clever. One trick, for instance, has been to substitute letters and numbers for shapes that look to the human eye nearly identical. A zero for a letter O, or using a Unicode symbol, like the mathematical bold capital C,

Starting point is 00:01:14 which looks like a capital C, but technically isn't. I'm not saying you've done this, but, you know, just in case you're doing this kind of stuff, you may soon be caught in Google's spam filters. The company this week announcing what it's called one of the largest defense upgrades in recent years. It says it's an AI that's been trained on that stuff and works out of the box on more than 100 languages.

Starting point is 00:01:37 It basically ignores the crazy letters and tries to read it like a human would. Ethical marketers haven't usually spammed these characters the way literally spammers do, but we have been guilty of dropping one or two of these symbols into words we know have a dangerous spam threshold. If your marketing campaign involves a contest, we've known for some time

Starting point is 00:01:58 that you'd better try to obfuscate words like contest or win or sweepstakes because those are pretty high on the spam hit list. Google says it's been testing this for the last year and is now active on consumer Gmail accounts. New research from Digiday has found that agencies may be feeling the chill on programmatic display ads, despite formerly at least a large amount of spending their clients were doing on the placement. In Q3 last year, 43% of agency pros said clients of theirs

Starting point is 00:02:33 spent a large or very large piece of their budgets on programmatic ads. But Q3 this year, that number fell to just 30%. Quoting Digiday.com, quote, Programmatic display ads' slight fall from favor could be related to the fact that agencies' confidence in online display ads as a marketing channel

Starting point is 00:02:53 has seen a dip since the beginning of the year. In Q1 of 2023, 89% of agency pros told Digiday they were at least slightly confident that online display drove marketing success for their clients. In Q3 of this year, that percentage fell from 89% to 80%. Unquote. In fact, more agencies are bailing out on display ads entirely. In the first quarter of this year, 13% of agencies said their clients don't spend anything on them. Six months later,

Starting point is 00:03:24 that number had nearly doubled. Digiday's full report is on their website. Look for the piece called Agency Clients Favor Programmatic Over Display Sold Ads. The data comes from surveys conducted of more than 350 agency pros from 2022 and 2023. Microsoft's ad platform has had some updates in the past little while. First, the company has partnered with Badoo Global, an AI company. You can pick up some of this enhancement by making sure your ad group settings have the option, the entire Microsoft advertising network selected.

Starting point is 00:04:00 Second, Microsoft store ads are now generally available in all global markets where product ads are available. This means that advertisers can select geographic targeting as worldwide or any specific country, as long as the app is available in that market. Third, you can now run video and connected TV ads in 32 markets in total. Microsoft is doing a webinar Thursday about their video and CTV offerings. We've created a short link for you if you want to sign up. It's b.link slash Microsoft webinar. And fourth, you can now manage predictive targeting in bulk across all your ad groups. Navigate to the ad group level and add the predictive targeting column to toggle the feature on and off across multiple ad groups at once. And finally, for

Starting point is 00:04:45 those using Google Import to advertise with Microsoft, that tool can now import discovery and demand gen ads from Google Ads. ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, is developing a platform to let brands create their own chatbots. This as the company tries to play catch up in the race towards AI. Chatbots have been up and down in the marketing world. Mark Zuckerberg famously had stole their virtues a few years back, nearly turning his company around to just focus on those, only to basically abandon the idea a few years later. Reports say the chatbot platform could come in beta form by the end of this month. It's also said to be working on its own text-to-image generator. ByteDance did

Starting point is 00:05:31 not comment on the media reports. The move comes as ChatGPT recently unveiled the ability to create your own customized chatbots for specific tasks. So far, neither ChatGPT nor Google's BARD are available in China. Microsoft Spot, the recently renamed Copilot, formerly known as BingChat, is available across Asia, including in Hong Kong. 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.

Starting point is 00:06:14 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. 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. 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 00:06:47 data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. While consumer tech attention might be laser-focused on AI and chatbots, most media buyers and marketers see retail media as the unicorn ahead. And new numbers from eMarketer suggest it's about to get even bigger. Retail media are ad campaigns within a retailer's advertising ecosystem. Walmart and Target are the leaders there, but also smaller apps like Instacart play in this space.

Starting point is 00:07:20 eMarketer has updated its U.S. retail media ad spend forecast to show higher growth than previously estimated, culminating in $110 billion in spend by 2027. Quoting eMarketer.com, growing by more than 20% each year, according to our forecast. By 2027, retail media will nearly tie with social media as the number two ad spend channel, second only to search. Retail media will be bigger than connected TV, digital audio, and traditional television advertising combined in 2027, unquote. But despite those numbers, an Epsilon study recently found more than two in five advertisers worldwide

Starting point is 00:08:09 don't plan to change their retail media ad spend through 2026. Why? A lack of measurement standards and ad formats across retail networks lead the reasons. We don't have a lot of information on this, but this week, several people have spotted Google search results pages Leave the reasons. We don't have a lot of information on this, but this week, several people have spotted Google search results pages with something new on them.

Starting point is 00:08:34 A small horizontal line. Normally, that's not enough to show up as a story in a marketing newscast like this, but it's here because of where that line is. Separating paid results from organic results. In Google's earlier days, it had such a line, as well as more prominent ad labels. But the industry trend, for better or worse, has been to try as much as possible to hide those mandatory disclosures. It was just a few weeks ago that people noticed Google was mixing paid and organic on the same page, making ads even

Starting point is 00:09:06 harder to distinguish from unpaid. But it does appear as if they're testing that line again. We have a photo of what it looks like in today's email newsletter. That said, Google's search results page has become a bit of a dog's breakfast over the past couple of years. That page now shows all sorts of stuff above and intermingled with the organic results you actually came for. Ads, the people also ask boxes, Twitter posts, Instagram embeds, a YouTube shelf, and more. A bug appears to be muting Instagram videos, but luckily only older ones. Quoting TheVerge.com, It seems that videos posted from June 2013, when Instagram first added video, to October 2014 are now missing their audio.

Starting point is 00:09:55 The audio isn't working regardless of platform, whether the clip is played on desktop, iOS, or Android, and because this seems to affect most, if not all, videos in that time frame, this appears to be an issue on Instagram's end, rather than some sort of takedown issue regarding copyrighted audio, unquote. This is probably not an issue for most brands, since videos that old likely aren't an active use anyway, but it also appears to be happening for embeds, so if your company has a webpage, even a new one, which happens to reference an old Instagram post in an embed, that audio might be muted as well. Meta says it's aware of the bug and is working on it. When we checked this afternoon, some of the reported videos did indeed have their sound back. All this week, I'm live streaming production of the podcast.

Starting point is 00:10:55 If you want to see how it's done, usually between about 11 in the morning and 1 o'clock, that's Pacific time, go to twitch.tv slash loweffortdad to watch. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - ㄒotally N𝐨𝐫𝐦al 𝗣𝗼𝗱cast Epɪꜱᴏᴅᴇ, 𝕹𝖔𝖙hing 𝓉𝑜 See ɦɛʀɛ

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