Today in Digital Marketing - "Plz give us our money back. kthxbai."

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be protected. Be Zen. in and out of Google's search index. It's Tuesday, August 10th, 2021. Happy Independence Day, Ecuador. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. So shorts is the big thing now, also known as reels,

Starting point is 00:00:57 also known as spotlights, also known as TikToks. Yes, the short form video format is getting a lot of attention, and YouTube has decided to go all out in convincing young people to do the vertical video thing on their platform. In one of their largest brand marketing campaigns to date, YouTube today released a global advertising campaign aimed at Gen Z. The spot shows some clips of popular music videos, then the cursor clicks the create button and it shows a user's own creative take on the song. This in addition to the $100 million they've put into a creator fund, also an idea ripped off from TikTok. Last month, Google's CEO said the format is now available in more than 100 countries and gets more than 15 billion views every day.

Starting point is 00:01:43 But as Marketing Dive notes, Quote, Shorts faces stiff competition, and not just from TikTok, which recently became the first non-Facebook mobile app to surpass 3 billion global downloads and has established a stronger foothold in desirable marketing areas like commerce.

Starting point is 00:01:59 Snapchat and Facebook are similarly putting hefty resources behind their own copycats. Snap has dished out heavy paydays to get creators to adopt its short-form video offering called Spotlight. Spotlight's daily active users grew 49% in Q2, while average daily content submissions more than tripled over the period. Meanwhile, Facebook is tweaking Instagram to center more on video content as its TikTok riff, Reels, becomes the largest contributor

Starting point is 00:02:30 to engagement growth, unquote. I think it's fair to say we've reached that tipping point now. If you're not already at least testing out TikToks or Reels or whatever, you might be missing out. As with all the newly introduced formats,

Starting point is 00:02:44 the CPMs are quite low right now, though it's safe to say TikTok certainly is not the bargain it used to be. Ad spending by B2B firms should jump by nearly a quarter this year, according to a new forecast from eMarketer. In the US, the B2B digital ad space grew almost 33% last year, and it's expected

Starting point is 00:03:06 to grow just shy of 15% this year. In terms of raw numbers, that's about $11 billion in media spend. Yes, that is a slowdown, and one that seems like it's going to continue. eMarketer says it expects 17% growth next year and 15% in 2023. Remember, though, that's the growth rate, not the raw dollars spent. Those will keep going up. One strange trend I noticed was that display advertising was forecast to be much stronger than I think any of us would have expected. American B2B firms will spend about $5 billion on display advertising this year. That's up nearly a third from last year.

Starting point is 00:03:46 And by 2023, eMarketer expects B2B firms will spend more of their ad budget on display ads than they will on search ads. Of the sites most likely to benefit, LinkedIn, of course, is number one. Today's premium newsletter subscribers have a link to the full report with an in-depth breakdown by ad format and industry.

Starting point is 00:04:10 Of all the marketing tech that's been released in the last couple of years, I think the one that will eventually prove to be our strongest tool, or certainly in the top three or four, is augmented reality. Right now, AR is mostly about trying on makeup or sitting in a virtual driver's seat of a car. But let's not discount how powerful both those early implementations can be on sales. Now, a clever implementation in, of all industries, the cereal sector. Reese's Puffs has released limited edition cereal boxes that can be used to make music. Consumers point their phones at the specially coded boxes and the synthesizer pops up. Even more clever, there are actually three different types of synth boxes. A drum machine, a lead, and a bass. So presumably if you wanted to play with your friends you would need to buy three boxes. And in sort of a reverse

Starting point is 00:04:59 implementation, the General Mills brand will actually make a real synthesizer designed to look like one of the Reese's cereal boxes. They will send those to musicians and some fans to try to drum up some more attention. This does seem to be a tiny bit of a trend. This month, Oreo released packaging in some European countries that lets people create and share mixtapes. The packaging looks like a cassette Walkman from the 80s.

Starting point is 00:05:48 Do you have business insurance? looks like a cassette Walkman from the 80s. financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. A couple of changes to Google's ads platform to report on today. First, they released version 1.7 of the Google Ads Editor. Inside, new support for YouTube audio campaigns, hotel campaigns, and lead form extensions. You should also now be able to specify which campaigns you want to download offline rather than having it pull the whole account. And for search campaigns, you can now add target cost per action bidding to maximize conversions strategy,

Starting point is 00:06:19 as well as target return on ad spend bidding to maximize conversion value strategy. That's what's been added. well as target return on ad spend bidding to maximize conversion value strategy. That's what's been added. As far as what's been taken away, showcase ad groups. Those are no longer supported in ads editor. And over on display and video 360, improvements to its automated bidding, specifically a new interface where you can set custom bidding multipliers without writing any code. They're also adding support for pay forfor-viewable impressions to outcome-based buying. And finally, a new report to give you more insights into how

Starting point is 00:06:51 automated bidding places bids to hit your goals. Well, if you've noticed some unusual fluctuations with organic traffic coming from Google to your brand's website. You are not alone. Some SEO professionals are reporting that something strange seems to be happening with Google Search Index. For the last few weeks, SEO journalist Barry Schwartz says he's heard complaints from SEO professionals, mostly in private forums, about Google having weird indexing issues. Quoting Barry's blog post this morning,

Starting point is 00:07:29 the issues are not persistent in that a new page is indexed, then drops out of the index, then indexed again, then drops out, then back in again. It's like Google can't make up its mind if the page should be in its index or maybe some data centers show the page indexed and some do not. Sometimes the issue can be spotted using the URL inspection tool in Google Search Console. Sometimes it can be found in the other reports, or via the API, or just simply Googling. This is impacting all levels of sites, from super big sites to smaller sites, all with authority based on what I'm seeing, unquote.

Starting point is 00:08:02 No definitive word from Google on what's going on. If anything, Google search advocate John Mueller said he's passing the reports onto their team to look into it. If nothing else, maybe you should pop into Google Analytics today and check to see if you too are being affected by this. So some jackass is trolling your brand's Twitter account. How do you handle it? If you're like most brands, you just block, said jackass is trolling your brand's Twitter account. How do you handle it? If you're like most brands, you just block, said jackass.

Starting point is 00:08:29 But blocking is a kind of giant metal hammer to bring down. And as often as not, it backfires. Since that user will now see a message on your profile that you've blocked them. And they, of course, will tweet that. Twitter appears to be working on a kinder, gentler brand safety approach. The unfollow. I don't mean the user unfollows your account. I mean, you unfollow them from your account. Or I guess defollow might be more grammatically accurate. This way, they're no longer getting your tweets in their feed, but they also won't see that you've been blocked

Starting point is 00:09:01 message. Can still backfire, though, of course. I mean, if they realize they're no longer following your account and they didn't unfollow you themselves. It's actually been possible to do this forever in a kind of two-step way. First, you block them, which removes their following status. Then you unblock them immediately after. They will stay unfollowed, but not blocked. This seems to be a similar approach, and they're testing it now. And finally, and I know this podcast has nothing to do with cryptocurrency, but if you've been sitting on the fence wondering if you should get into it,

Starting point is 00:09:41 a cautionary tale. Today, the cross-chain protocol Polynetwork revealed it has been hacked. The Polynetwork is a platform for swapping tokens across multiple blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum. How much money was lost? $611 million. It is said to be the largest such hack in history.

Starting point is 00:09:59 You can't get your money back from insurance, because that doesn't exist. Can't get your money back from the government, because't exist. Can't get your money back from the government because it's all unregulated. Like they say, play stupid games, win stupid prizes. By the way, this was trending on Twitter today, not as much for the hack, but for the Poly Network's response to it, which was to post a short letter on Twitter titled, and I'm not making this up, Dear Hacker. The letter basically asks the

Starting point is 00:10:27 hacker to kindly return all the money. So my first big home automation purchase is coming today. It's a lawn sprinkler that I can control through Apple's Home app and schedule, do things like if it starts raining, turn off the sprinkler. I, for one, look forward to hours ahead of screwing up the automation programming, calling the device a very bad name, and telling my wife I need better hobbies. Talk to you tomorrow. Outro Music

Today in Digital Marketing - "Plz give us our money back. kthxbai."

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