Today in Digital Marketing - RIP CMOs

Episode Date: October 30, 2019

Muted colour palettes are all the rage TikTok’s ads platform is feeling growing pains And if your Facebook Return on Ad Spend is down… we may have the answer why. The Premium feed, with exclusive deep-dive interviews with social algorithm experts, is at http://patreon.com/todayindigital Today in Digital Marketing is brought to you by engageQ digital. Can we help you with YOUR brand’s digital marketing and social media? Let’s chat. http://www.engageQ.com or call 1-855-863-6233. • Connect with Tod: [e-mail] or use this contact form. • More about Tod: Twitter @todmaffin • LinkedIn • Instagram • Facebook • Web Site Sources: https://marketingland.com/forrester-predictions-for-cmo-role-are-dire-but-there-is-hope-for-current-cmos-270254 https://marketingland.com/tapclicks-acquires-client-reporting-platform-megalytic-270257 https://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2019/41962/the-2019-holiday-shopping-season-spend-timing-and-channel-trends https://www.seroundtable.com/nytimes-google-bert-28451.html https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/8-new-graphic-design-trends-for-2020-infographic/566095/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-ads-changes-how-placements-data-is-displayed-in-reports-editor/332901/#close https://digiday.com/marketing/tiktok-popularity-rises-buyers-say-ad-team-needs-grow-keep/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=digidaydis&utm_source=daily&DM2=774550&utm_content=191023 https://twitter.com/andrewfoxwell/status/1189198280141524992 https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/30/20939665/snapchat-augmented-reality-drawing-lens-ar-bar?utm_content=bufferd6c3e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=buffer --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Wednesday, October 30th, 2019. I'm Todd Maffin. Happy 38th day of fall. I know that one sucked, but it was either that or happy Russian Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions. So, yeah, happy fall. Today, muted colors are all the rage. TikTok's ads platform is feeling growing pains. And if your Facebook return on ad spend is down, we may have the answer why. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. The role of the CMO may be on its way out. This from a new Forrester study. It actually predicted a decline in chief marketing officers last year. And that seems to have come to fruition in a lot

of large firms, some being replaced by CIOs, some, like McDonald's, by a new Senior Vice President of Marketing Technology. Quoting Marketingland.com, the CMO has evolved from a position focused on long-term brand building activities to owning everything from branding and communications to MarTech investments, product innovation and operations. Marketing has also transitioned to a revenue center. Today's CMOs need to align these components to orchestrate customer experiences that drive long-term relationships between brands and their customers.

Good news ahead if you sell things online. New research from OpenX and the Harris Poll says people plan to spend more as a whole on gifts this year than they did last year. The average total seasonal shop is expected to be $862 this year. It was $819 last year. And millennials, of course, are leading that charge. 46% of them say they will spend more this year. Only 17% of all the people polled say they plan to spend less on gifts this holiday season. And if you manage an e-commerce store, listen up. Nearly 7 out of 10 millennials plan to make their purchase on their phones.

So make sure that, you know, you can buy on your site from a phone. As for boomers, they are 50-50 between online and bricks and mortar. Yesterday, I reported on Google's big algorithm change called BERT. And I mean big, the biggest change to how it ranked sites in five years. If you followed my advice and checked your Google Search Console to see the impact, and you have come away unhappy, you are not alone. The New York Times says it saw a, quote, huge, unquote, decline in search traffic from Google. But when search pro Barry Schwartz looked up their results in SEMrush, his tool of choice, their results looked up. This could be, like I reported yesterday, a problem with the way we use tools like SEMrush

and Moz, tools which most people track short tail keywords with. And Bert's update seems to favor long tail. So again, if you are feeling a drop in Google traffic but not seeing it in your SEO tools, maybe review what keywords you are tracking. So you are sitting in front of Canva again, and you're stuck again. How do you design this? Bold colors, muted colors? The folks at Infographic Tool Vintage have looked at what sorts of graphic designs are trending and have published their results in, of course, an infographic. Here's what they say are some of the design trends for the next 12 months. Muted color palettes. Abstract and dream illustrations.

Not really sure what they mean by dream, but whatever. Heavy but simple fonts. And minimalist landing pages. Snapchat has launched a new augmented reality 3D paint feature. You can 3D paint on your face or switch the camera around to do it in your environment. Hmm, 3D paint filters, where did I see that recently? Oh yeah, all over TikTok. No matter, it's rolling out on Snapchat today under Create in the augmented reality bar,

but only for iOS devices. Android folks, you will be waiting a couple of months. All right, cool filters aside, it's not all sunshine and lollipops at TikTok. Digiday today reports that digital marketers who have tried to get ads up and running on the hugely popular platform are running into issues. Quoting Digiday, TikTok's ad business now resembles early Snap ads with low CPMs, a buggy self-serve platform for those who have access to it, few metrics, and unproven sustainability.

Buyers have other complaints like wait times of up to 24 hours for campaigns to appear on the platform, and a junior ads team in need of help too. TikTok declined to share user numbers, but in February, Digiday obtained a deck that said TikTok had more than 27 million users opening the app eight times a day. The company also offers video ads,

brand takeovers, brand lenses, top view video, and its signature hashtag challenge. I will admit I watch a lot of TikTok now, and not just for research for our agency and for this podcast. Their algorithm has nailed me pretty accurately, and now it does a good job on showing me things that it thinks I'd like. And for the most part, they're right. Also, for the most part, they are all videos of Frenchies howling. I am a 49-year-old man. By the way, if TikTok is a space your brand is investigating, you owe it to yourself to listen to the deep dive interview I did with TikTok consultant Michael Sanchez on their ad platform and how the TikTok algorithm works. You will find

that on the premium feed, which you'll find a link to in the description of this episode or at todayindigital.com. Speaking of the premium feed, this month's episode in November will be how we at my agency perform algorithmic repair on new social channels that we take on for clients. If you manage a brand's social channels and have a gap in content, this will help, I promise. That's dropping Friday. You can get all the premium episodes at todayindigital.com or look for the link in the show description.

Facebook ads consultant Andrew Foxwell says he's noticed significant drops in return on ad spending in the last couple of months. He does have a theory, though, quoting here from his tweet storm on the topic last night, quote, a lot of space was reserved in the reach and frequency buys from big brands, locking in CPMs for October since it's Q4. So there's just less space. I've seen accounts that were spending with good distribution drop off, which I think is part of the issue.

My roadmap is to play it safer, save money, and keep spending on tofu, that's top of funnel, to bring new people in so we have more pools come Black Friday and Christmas. And finally, this afternoon, right at deadline, Twitter announced that it will simply refuse to run political ads, not just in the U.S., everywhere, and not just during the American election, forever. That's, of course, in sharp contrast to Facebook, which allows political ads once the buyer's identity and geographic location have been confirmed. Facebook also won't fact check any of them unless they are especially egregious. But Twitter says it won't really affect their revenues. They only made $3 million off ads in the recent American midterm elections.

Okay, lightning round. TapClicks, the connectionware for major ad platforms, has bought Megalytics, a dashboard and reportings tool. If you had trouble logging into Google Ads yesterday, you are not alone. Google said they had an outage for about an hour. There was no impact on your ads or reporting. Also, Facebook's entire platform seems to have been down for a handful of people today for

about an hour, so that's fixed now too. Google automated feeds will be available in all shopping ads countries in November. So make sure you've got your schema markup in tip-top shape. Interesting little UI housekeeping change at Google Ads. They will now be changing how they report placements.

Instead of the current method where they show data for automatically targeted placements, soon it will only include placements that you have chosen to target. If you want to see all the locations that your ad was served, you will need to dig a little deeper now in the columns. And also, is it just me or is Buffer failing on a lot of posts these days? We have at least one or two a day now across the brands that we work with

where it'll just get stuck. Weird. Well, that is what you missed today in digital marketing brought to you by engageq.com. If you have Alexa, you can add this to your flash briefing every day. Just search for today in digital Marketing on the Skill Store. Follow me on social.

All my links are at the bottom of todayindigital.com. I'm Todd Maffin. See you tomorrow.