Today in Digital Marketing - Rethinking Pink

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Tuesday, January 9th. Today, the gender illusion. Why marketers have gotten marketing to women all wrong. A boardroom battle at one of the most used marketing platforms. Google might be pulling your website offline in March. And the 16,000 fake ads swarming YouTube that might challenge your belief in generative AI. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. 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.

Starting point is 00:00:52 Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. So you're trying to figure out how to spice up that photo for your product ad? It's a product aimed at women, and you've got a few options from the design agency. Obviously, you should aim for the creative that's more feminine, right? Not so fast. New research finds that women make purchase decisions less by design-first features like colors and the way an object is shaped, and more by, wait for it, how good it is. Honestly, I'm a big fan of science, but it's a little bit sad that we needed a research paper for this. Anyway, quoting the RE newsletter, quote, Throughout 11 experiments, scientists found that when choosing items for women,

Starting point is 00:01:31 people were 2.8 times more likely to pick a prettier USB memory stick. There was no such difference when females were picking for themselves. Even when people are reminded that they are probably biased, they continue to make the same choices. We tend to hold certain societal beliefs about gender preferences. For example, women like beautiful items. Some previous research has suggested that women may be more associated with concepts of feelings while men are associated with rationality. Women are often portrayed as more concerned with physical appearances. This in turn becomes a stereotype even in non-beauty products, unquote. Indeed,

Starting point is 00:02:12 some retailers have tried to pinkify things they didn't need to. Probably the most awkward attempt was when Dell Computers made the Della website aimed at women, which looked like something out of the 50s. Dodge even made a separate car called the La Femme, which is basically the same car, but in pink and beige tones. Both of those flopped. Thank goodness for humanity. The paper was published in the Journal of Consumer Research. It's called Appearance for Females, Functionality for Males, the False Lay Belief about Gender Differences in Product Preference. You can find a link in today's newsletter. You can subscribe functionality for males, the false lay belief about gender differences in product preference. You can find a link in today's newsletter. You can subscribe by free by tapping the link in the

Starting point is 00:02:50 show notes. Some boardroom drama at Twilio, a marketing platform used by many marketers in the DTC space. The company's co-founder Jeff Lawson yesterday saying he is stepping down as CEO and board member and handing the reins of both of those to a longtime company executive. This apparently all because of backroom pressure from two activist investors who've been pushing for changes at the top. But will it be enough to placate the rabble-rousers? It might not be. Both want Twilio to sell itself or completely divest its data and applications business. The company recently laid off 5% of its workforce. Its shares closed up about 7% last night on the news. Heads up if your company's website was made using the lightweight Google Business Profiles tool.

Starting point is 00:03:43 The company yesterday announcing it is shutting those down and soon. Websites made with Google Business Profiles will stop working on March 1st. For a brief time, about two and a half months, that URL will redirect to your business profile listing. But for some reason, after that period on June 10th, they'll also delete the redirect. People will then get a 404 page not found error. Barry Schwartz at seroundtable.com noted in his coverage today that Google's own website recommendations say that three months is too short for redirects. The website builder was launched about five years ago. Google says they're shutting it down due to low engagement.

Starting point is 00:04:30 Amazon really wants part of your ad budget, especially if you've got a chunk set aside for streaming video. Adweek reporting this week that the company will launch ads at the end of January and the CPMs will be in the low to mid $30 range. That's not a bad deal, considering that Netflix and Disney Plus initially put their CPMs around the $50 and $60 mark. Netflix is said to have cut it back to a more reasonable $39 to $45 CPM because of, well, lower than expected interest at that higher price. Amazon's also taking an interesting risk with consumers by switching all its users over to the ad-supported streaming plan by default.

Starting point is 00:05:09 That will certainly increase the pool of available eyeballs for advertisers, but is a revenue risk for the company. If people don't want ads, they'll have to pay $3 a month. Quoting Insider Intelligence, that means the vast majority of the 289 million global Amazon Prime households, with 94.5 million in the U.S., will now become ad-supported viewers. By comparison, Netflix reported it had reached 15 million ad-supported subscribers as of November 2023, with total global subscribers across tiers reaching 247 million. For advertisers, it's a relatively easy decision. Advertise with Amazon and get cheaper access to streaming audiences than through competing platforms with a much larger audience out of the gate. Well, it was fun while it lasted. Last night, Threads launched its long-awaited search option that sorts content chronologically.

Starting point is 00:06:11 Until now, when you searched for something, you got post results, but it was sorted by some unknown algorithm, probably tied to engagement and follower count and the usual meta-nonsense. But then, just as quickly, poof, it was gone. Turns out the leaked feature was only an internal prototype, and somebody there accidentally hit the publish live button. What's interesting here is that back in November, meta executive Adam Massari said they're not planning an option to search for the latest results, saying it would create a, quote,

Starting point is 00:06:44 safety loophole. Quote, having a comprehensive list of every post with a specific word in chronological order inevitably means spammers and other bad actors pummel the view with content by simply adding the relevant keywords or tags. And before you ask why we don't take down that bad content, understand there's a lot more content that people don't want to see than we can or should take down, unquote. Many people believe one of the remaining upsides Twitter has over threads is its lack of real-time post search. So, despite the concerns, maybe they are indeed working on it. An interesting new partnership between Google and Instacart, the latter testing ad campaigns that run inside Google Shopping and bring in its own first party data from its retail network.

Starting point is 00:07:34 That network includes a catalog of 14.5 billion products. So far, it's mostly food brands in the testing pool. Oscar Mayer, Philadelphia, Lunchables, that sort of thing. One example offered by the company shows a high-intent consumer searching for mac and cheese on Google Shopping. They get returned a row of sponsored display ads from Kraft, linking out to Instacart and promoting same-day delivery. Quoting from MarketingDive.com, quote, Instacart sits in an interesting place in the retail media ecosystem, providing delivery and pickup orders that are sourced from other grocers, many of whom operate their own rival networks. Securing a stronger connection to

Starting point is 00:08:17 Google, still the most used search engine by a wide margin, could provide Instacart with an advantage as online platforms and retailers push to link e-commerce closer to advertising to get in on a lucrative media opportunity, unquote. Are you wary of using AI in your content production process? Pamela Wilson, author of the Master Content Books, looks at it this way. You're the head chef. AI is your sous chef. Busy professional chefs have sous chefs on their team who prepare ingredients ahead of time. The chef takes their work, combines and seasons it, and serves it up with flair. Professional chefs don't expect their sous chef's work to be

Starting point is 00:09:01 ready to plate, and we shouldn't expect AI-generated content to be ready to publish. AI output is a starting point for content marketing. A pre-prepped ingredient, not the whole meal. Don't be wary about using AI to jumpstart your content production process. It's not going anywhere, so learn how to use it to get real results with your 2024 content. Learn more when you read Pamela's newly updated Master Content Books at mastercontentbooks.com. That's mastercontentbooks.com. 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

Starting point is 00:09:46 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. And finally, Taylor Swift is popping up on YouTube ads promoting, well, you gotta hear it to believe it. Hi guys, it's Taylor Swift. Remember those stimulus checks? Well, there she's turned to hawking scammy sounding schemes. She hasn't, of course. But that is a real YouTube ad. And 404 Media says the recent fakery is everywhere. Quote, shoddy AI clones of celebrities including Joe Rogan, Taylor Swift, Steve Harvey, Ice Cube, Andrew Tate, Oprah and The Rock are hawking Medicare and Medicaid scams to millions of people on YouTube with seemingly little intervention from Google. Ads connected to this scam have been viewed more

Starting point is 00:10:50 than 195 million times on YouTube. YouTube has taken down few, if any, of the ads, unquote. The thing is, they're not even really good AI creations either. Almost all the videos b-roll, the faked celebrity only appears for the first couple of seconds. And the people behind the ads didn't even really sync up the mouth to the words that well. But just the voice match alone is pretty impressive. Here's fake Steve Harvey. I've been telling you guys for months to claim this free $6,400. Fake Rock. We want any of our viewers who are earning minimum wage to go and do this. Even fake Joe Rogan. I've just uncovered a mind-blowing secret the government has been

Starting point is 00:11:32 hiding since January. As for why YouTube hasn't pulled them, that's a great question. It's not like they're hard to find. One college student was able to get a huge list of them, 16,000 ads, by just looking them up using Google's own Ads Transparency Center, quoting 404 Media. Quote, it's relatively easy to identify hundreds of videos for the same scan in a matter of minutes. And Google has seemingly not taken the time to do this. At the same time, Google continues to collect ad revenue from these companies.

Starting point is 00:12:15 I've been having a great time live streaming the production of the show. If you want to see how the sausage is made around one o'clock Pacific time every weekday or so, depending on, you know, how good I am at script writing. And the address for the live stream is twitch.tv slash low effort. Dad click follow. You'll get a notification when I'm alive.

Starting point is 00:12:32 See you tomorrow. I survived from the pain. I'm a rock till I rain. With a wave full of warriors. And they all feel the same. Better heed my advisory. I would run. I would hide from me.

Starting point is 00:12:44 I'm a beast, but a freedom. You'm a beast for the freedom You ain't built for the rivalry

Today in Digital Marketing - Rethinking Pink

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