Today in Digital Marketing - Page 1 or Bust

Episode Date: January 10, 2025

Meta goes all in for Trump. What does it mean for marketers and brand safety? Also: A big flaw in the methodology of A/B testing has been found. TikTok is pleading for its life in the U.S. today. And details behind the strange Facebook Marketplace and eBay merger..📰 Get our free daily newsletter🌍 Follow us on social media or contact us📈 Advertising: Reach Thousands of Marketing Decision-Makers.GO PREMIUM!Get these exclusive benefits when you upgrade:✅ Listen ad-free✅ Back catalog of 20+ marketing science interviews✅ Get the show earlier than the free version✅ Member-only monthly livestreams with TodAnd a lot more! Check it out: todayindigital.com/premium✨ Premium tools: Update Credit Card • Cancel.MORE🆘 Need help with your social media? Check us out: engageQ digital🌟 Rate and Review Us🤝 Our Slack.UPGRADE YOUR SKILLSGoogle Ads for Beginners with Jyll Saskin GalesInside Google Ads: Advanced with Jyll Saskin GalesFoxwell Slack Group and Courses.Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada. Associate producer: Steph Gunn.Some links in these show notes may provide affiliate revenue to us.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Friday, January 10th. This week, Meta goes all in for Trump. What does it mean for marketers and brand safety? Also a big flaw in the methodology of A-B testing has been found. TikTok is pleading for its life in the U.S. today. And the details behind the strange Facebook marketplace and eBay merger. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead in our Friday wrap-up of the week in digital marketing.

All right, it was a busy week at Meta, for better or worse, so let's start there. First of all, as you may have heard, the company is dropping its fact-checkers and turning it over to Community Notes-style system. And just yesterday, some leaked new training material obtained by media shows that Meta will now welcome a range of derogatory remarks targeting races, nationalities, ethnic groups, sexual orientations, and gender identities. The document is a rundown of the new hate speech policy. Among the newly permissible content on Facebook and Instagram, the training materials include examples like, immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit. Gays are freaks.

And look at that tranny under a photo of a 17 year old girl. When asked about the policy changes, a Meta spokesperson referred to a blog post by the newly appointed global policy chief who defended the changes, saying the platform should allow controversial topics that are discussed freely elsewhere. Today, Meta removed LGBTQ options from Messenger. These were themes which featured the trans and non-binary pride flag colors and had been available for years. Also today, the company removed tampons from men's bathrooms. These were provided for non-binary and transgender employees who use the men's restroom and may have needed sanitary products. We also learned this week that in 2023, Meta reportedly rolled out guardrails for high-spending advertisers, giving them special treatment by bypassing automatic content moderation

and sending their content straight to human reviewers. The catch? You had to be spending $1,500 or more per day to get this VIP pass. Internal documents show a two-tiered system that benefited big spenders while leaving smaller advertisers stuck with its automated moderation. And Instagram, fueled by Reels, is set to overtake Facebook as the top U.S. social ad platform in 2025. Ad revenue is projected to rise 16% year-over-year to $37 billion. This comes from eMarketer, which estimates more than 25% of Instagram's ad revenue will come from reels and ad formats other than the feed and stories this year.

That estimate was published before the big changes at Meta were announced this week. To the world of advertising now in a new Journal of Marketing study, uncovering a big flaw in A-B testing on digital ad platforms, revealing that the data you rely on might be misleading. Here's what's happening. When you run an A-B test, you're trying to see which ad performs better. But what's really happening, according to the study's researchers,

is a phenomenon called divergent delivery. This occurs when platforms like Meta and Google use their targeting algorithms to show different ads to different user groups. The platform isn't splitting your audience 50-50, as you may have thought. Instead, it's choosing which users to see which ad. The winning ad might not actually be better, it just reached the audience most likely to engage with it. Ad performance could be influenced by the audience mix, not the creative. If you're making big

decisions based on these tests, it may be worth reading the paper. We have a link to it in Tuesday's email newsletter, which you can find on our site at todayindigital.com slash newsletter. Starting February 16th, Google will let advertisers use digital fingerprinting for targeted ads. That's a method of collecting data from devices and browsers to track users. Google called this a move toward less prescriptive ad targeting. It's a major U-turn for the company, which previously labeled fingerprinting as, quote, wrong, unquote. The UK's Information Commissioner's Office has already raised red flags warning businesses to tread carefully with fingerprinting or face consequences.

Because fingerprinting is such a widespread practice, though, enforcement is tricky. Google says it plans to invest in technologies that will make that data collection safer, but hasn't said exactly how those tools will protect user privacy, especially since the whole point of fingerprinting is sort of the polar opposite of privacy. A big W for marketers, a big L for consumers. Still for advertisers, this shift opens the door to better cross-device measurement, particularly for connected TV, where conversions often happen on other devices. Comcast wants a piece of your ad budget.

The company is targeting small and medium businesses with Universal Ads, a new platform that will launch in this quarter, partnering with other major players like NBCUniversal, Roku, and Fox. It is expected to bring more ad dollars to streaming services amid social media's continued dominance. But have we hit peak ad network? New networks flooded the market in 2024. Financial services, even real estate ad networks. Experts this week told Digiday in a great piece they had up on their site that they predict even more ad network launches in 2025, along with consolidation. Amazon ads announced that brands using its data clean room, Amazon Marketing Cloud, can

now analyze five years of consumer shopping data. That's up from just 13 months. And a bug in Google ads rollout of an upcoming feature is letting some advertisers pause, enable or remove conversion assets at the asset group level for Performance Max campaigns. Google's ad liaison confirmed the issue and said it is being addressed. To other social media other than meta, Reddit has announced some new features for businesses, including Reddit Pro Trends, which lets companies monitor real-time conversations on the platform about their brand, products, industry, and so on.

There's a new Trends tab that tracks keywords and phrases, providing a visualization of conversation volume, relevant communities, and related discussions for about 100,000 smart keywords. Reddit is also introducing a new type of ad for the Ask Me Anything sessions they do, letting businesses promote their own AMA Q&A sessions directly from the ad dashboard and track RSVP numbers for those interactive events. Oddly as well, Reddit may be seeing a decline in Google rankings, with noticeable drops in search visibility since Tuesday. Tools like SEMrush are showing the shift, with user-generated content sites

like Reddit experiencing volatility. Google recently just signed a deal to use Reddit content. Did the deal go south or is this just a glitch? Blue Skies reportedly eyeing a $700 million valuation with Bain Capital Ventures leading the funding round. The boost follows a surge in users spurred by Musk's Trump campaign, which pushed some ex-users to seek alternatives. Over to YouTube now. The company there is testing another tool that lets

creators turn long-form content into shorts. Details, though, are limited. If you are part of the experiment, you'll see an option to create a video highlight in the video editor tool in YouTube Studio Desktop. And it announced this week it is expanding three-minute shorts to all users. And now, any clip under three minutes will automatically appear in the shorts shelf on your subscription feed and your brand's channel page. Plus, they'll be listed in the shorts section

of YouTube Studio and qualify to be recommended in the YouTube feed. And finally, Fortune reported this week that X is considering making new users pay money to sign up, as the company is expected to suffer major financial losses for last year. Fortune's initial reporting said new users would pay $8 to sign up for X and get one month free of X Premium. That's a $7 a month subscription that includes a verified checkmark badge. But at our deadline today, Fortune said it had reason to doubt one of the sources for its story and has placed the story into review.

Elon Musk has denied the report. To the world of search now. Page one of Google isn't just prime real estate. It's also the key, apparently, to driving AI brand mentions. A new study found a correlation between Google rankings and brand mentions in ChatGPT's answers, indicating that brands ranking on page one of Google are more likely to get mentioned in LLMs.

As brands push for discoverability in LLMs, optimizing for generative engines has become the next big marketing challenge. And while it differs from traditional SEO, according to the researchers, the formula remains the same. Rank high, stay relevant. Google rankings seemed to matter, but backlinks and content variety did not. Brands on page one of Google showed a strong correlation with mentions in LLMs, while Bing rankings mattered slightly less. And backlinks, as I mentioned, had a weak or neutral impact, and multimodal content also didn't deliver the boost researchers had expected. Has Google dropped a January 2025 local ranking update? There are reports of major ranking changes with Google Maps and local search results. Many noticed drastic

shifts over last weekend. It was not immediately clear whether that was an algorithm update or a bug. If you've ever seen a blank screenshot in the Google Search Console's URL inspection tool, don't panic. Gary Ilias of Google says as long as the desired content is in the HTML tab, you're good. Rendering can fail sometimes, but if it happens consistently, that could be a problem. AI's search engine startup Perplexity is challenging Google's traditional auction-based ad system with a new CPM model. Marketers sponsor questions, not just keywords, with AI-driven answers. And Microsoft this week used Bing to trick users into thinking they were on Google. If you searched Google on Bing without signing into a Microsoft account,

you got a page that looked suspiciously like Google, complete with a search bar, a Google-like doodle, and familiar text, being later disabled, the new look. 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. All right, a quick look at what changed in the DTC and e-commerce world this past week. U.S. holiday retail sales hit $282 billion, up 4%, while global sales soared to $1.2 trillion. That is a 3% rise. Mobile and social commerce powered a holiday sales surge that outpaced predictions.

And thank you, robot overlords, AI boosted the shopping experience with product recommendations, targeted offers, and personalized customer order support, influencing 20% of online holiday orders. And Meta is exploring a new partnership with eBay that would see eBay listings displayed on Facebook Marketplace, a move reportedly to align with EU antitrust regulations on Marketplace listings.

The U.S. Supreme Court today heard arguments from TikTok as to why the sell or be banned legislation in the U.S. should not go through. Legal analysts mostly said that the court appeared to be leaning toward upholding the law, which would mean TikTok would either be required to sell its American operations or be kicked out of app stores in the U.S. Despite the uncertainty of whether TikTok will even still be an app in the U.S. in 10 days, agencies are still going all in on ad spend. TikTok ad spend in the U.S. is set to surge nearly 60% year over year in the first two months of 2025. With the TikTok ban looming, competitor platform Triller is seizing the moment by offering users the option to download their TikTok content directly into the Triller app. Now, at SaveMyTikToks.com, users can link their TikTok account to Triller and transfer their TikTok clips.

Creators, though, are torn on a TikTok alternative. While 1 in 10 adults in the U.S. consider being a TikTok creator for their job, many are turning to YouTube and Instagram. Creators favor Instagram for audience growth, while YouTube is the golden ticket for monetization. TikTok's head of ad sales in North America will be leaving the company that was announced this week. His name is Samir Singh.

He joined ByteDance in 2019 and played a pivotal role in driving TikTok's North American ad business. He will remain with the company until the end of February. TikTok's U.S. agency lead, Jack Bamberger, reportedly left the company a week ago. It is not clear if TikTok plans to replace him. And finally, TikTok's sister app, Lemon 8, has been sponsoring posts on TikTok to push users to migrate to the app as a potential US ban looms. The ban law, though, does apply to other apps

owned by TikTok's Chinese parent, ByteDance, apps including Lemon 8. Reports say ByteDance could be betting that regulators and app stores become so focused on TikTok they may overlook its other apps. ByteDance could be betting that regulators and app stores become so focused on TikTok, they may overlook its other apps. ByteDance also released an app called Malolo, featuring short dramas, TV, and movies on Google's App Store. That quietly launched in November.

And a few other interesting tidbits that didn't fit anywhere else. Getty Images and Shutterstock have agreed to merge, creating a $3.7 billion visual content powerhouse. The deal highlights the growing demand for images from content creators and platforms. Getty's CEO will lead the combined company. A high-severity WordPress vulnerability has been discovered, which lets attackers inject arbitrary shortcodes into sites using the Popular Posts plugin without needing a user account. WordPress Popular Posts is installed on more than 100,000 websites. All versions up to and including version 7.1.0 are vulnerable. And finally, Microsoft is rolling back its Bing image creator upgrade after users complained about the DALI 3 model's poor performance since the December update.

The company confirmed it is reverting to an older version of the model for now, but it could take weeks to fix. And those were the top digital marketing stories over the last five days. All the sources are in our email newsletter, which comes out every weekday at 5 p.m. Eastern and is completely free. Sign up at todayindigital.com slash newsletter.

So what to make of all this meta news? Over the next couple of weeks, we will have extended coverage for you. Will advertisers abandon the platform like they did with X? Is meta's stranglehold over the marketing community too strong? And what safety tools exist there to keep your brand's content away from the newly permissible slurs? Tuesday, our meta ads correspondent Andrew Foxwell will be here to walk us through all of that. Then, a week later on the 21st, a new study provides some guidance on what to do about your company's diversity initiatives in this new American-led culture war. They have some interesting data on how brand engagement is affected by posting on social media about D&I.

Can posting about it boost brand loyalty and improve consumer perceptions? Or does it risk coming across as performative? That's a week from Tuesday. I'm Todd Maffin. Follow me on BlueSky at ToddMaffin.com. Follow us on BlueSky at TodayInDigital.com. Thanks for listening. Have a restful weekend. The next newsletter is out Monday. I will be back in your podcast feed on Tuesday.