Today in Digital Marketing - Social Media is Dead. Long Live the DM.

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected, be Zen. It is Tuesday, September 5th. Today, public platforms to private communities. Consumers are moving. So how do brands follow? Also, why is UA still alive? Microsoft has some nice ad platform upgrades. Publishers reassess their activity on Facebook. And on the ad-free premium podcast, which you can learn more about by tapping Go Premium in the show notes, Shane Cicero on the new AI-based audiences. How good are they? How are they different than lookalikes? And is the future of the meta platform just one big button that reads spend?

Starting point is 00:01:01 I'm Todd Maffin. That's Ahead. Today, digital marketing. I have a guilty habit. I love TV infomercials. You know the type? The over-the-top ones where people aren't capable of basic living. Making eggs makes a mess. They stick to the pan. They flop when you flip.

Starting point is 00:01:20 Are you tired of fussing with giant pasta pots, strainers, timers, stirring, and testing? That's right. Carrying your money and credit cards in a wallet can be dangerous. And if you carry it in your back pocket, it can cause bag problems. Yo, how heavy is this guy's credit cards? This one remains my all-time favorite. Everyone loves butter. But getting it out of the fridge, out of the wrap, and onto your food is a real hassle.

Starting point is 00:01:44 Lady, I don't know about you, but I just use a butter knife. You know, one of the first things you learn in marketing school is that to sell something, you need to position your product or service as the solution to a problem. As corny as these TV ads are, they're probably one of the best examples, the most pure version of you have a problem, we have a solution. And marketing science is here to remind us that sometimes the simplest positioning is better than all the clever you can muster. The Aerie newsletter today highlighted a research paper published in the Journal of Consumer Research called Judging Product Effectiveness from Perceived Spatial Proximity.

Starting point is 00:02:23 In short, your product should be photographed physically next to the problem it solves in videos and photos if you want consumers to think it's effective. Some examples of this, a bottle of laundry detergent next to a pile of clean clothes, an image suggesting a security breach next to some cybersecurity software, a pain relief massage next to a person with back pain. In their experiments, the researchers found that people believed a pain reliever was 21% more effective when the product was placed beside imagery suggesting a muscle injury. People were 26% more likely to choose a skincare product when it was shown beside someone with

Starting point is 00:03:03 smooth, acne-free skin. There were two areas where the effect was weaker. First, if the person viewing the images already knew about the product. And two, if the product was more of a long-term solution, like think vitamins instead of a stain remover. So why does this work? According to the newsletter, the physical distance between two objects helps us infer the strength of the link between them. When we see a product placed next to the problem or effect of the product,

Starting point is 00:03:33 we assume the relationship between the two is stronger. When the two elements, the product and its effect or the problem, are placed closer together, we assume the product is better at addressing that problem. The study focused on functional products like skincare and insect spray, so it's not clear how much of an effect this would have on hedonistic products. It also only looked at images of physical objects, so researchers don't know how text descriptions would be affected or B2B products. So, carpet cleaner marketers of the world, stop putting photos of your product on a white background. Start putting them on a clean carpet instead.

Starting point is 00:04:09 And whatever you do, fellow marketers, keep the corny infomercials alive. Honestly, they're all I live for now. This past July 1st was supposed to be the cutoff date for Google Analytics' old system, called Universal Analytics. The platform would still work, but no data would be collected after that date, and everyone would need to switch to the shiny new GA4. And the warning messages all over the old platform were terrifying. Any conversions and audiences you use with Google ad campaigns will stop working.

Starting point is 00:04:40 Or, to avoid serious disruption to your ads, book a free support session. But more than two months later, it seems like UA is still collecting data for some accounts. So what's happening here? Google hasn't changed its mind. Instead, it seems to be shutting accounts down in stages. Some are still up and collecting, some are up and not collecting, and some are just gone. But don't take the presence of UA data in your dashboard as a sign you can slack off. Google says UA will be completely gone by next July. So be sure you export your historical reports

Starting point is 00:05:14 sooner than later. Some updates now from Microsoft's ads platform. First, a few changes to audiences now available in their advertising editor software. They now support bulk associations for remarketing in-market audiences, dynamic remarketing lists, and a few others. One important thing to note here is that creating and managing your audiences will still be done via Microsoft Advertising Online. But now their ad editor can be used to make updates to associations in bulk. Also, in-market audiences are now available in all Microsoft advertising markets. They've also released new auto-generated assets for responsive search ads. Yes, they will start

Starting point is 00:05:58 making assets for you and will start serving them alongside the assets you've uploaded. This is something you would enable, though, in campaign settings if you want it. Microsoft says auto-generated assets are giving an 8% lift in CTR. Also, you can now add your brand's logo to your ad with new logo extensions. These can appear with other ad extensions and can be associated at the account, campaign, or ad group level. And you can now use customer data platform integrations from Hightouch and Zapier

Starting point is 00:06:28 to set up and manage customer match on Microsoft Advertising. An interesting think piece up on Business Insider was making the rounds on Mastodon over the weekend. Basically, the premise was that social media is dead and has been killed by group DMs on platforms like Snapchat and Instagram. Rather than posting to a public feed,

Starting point is 00:06:54 an increasing number of younger users post to a group chat, letting them control who sees it more effectively and prevents an algorithm from sorting and hiding their content from people the platforms think wouldn't be interested in it. This is something the platforms have acknowledged and tried to get ahead of. Instagram has a close friends group which you can post to, but it's not a DM thread and it's still subject to algorithmic sorting and hiding. One 22-year-old interviewed in the piece said, quote, there's this very weird, unspoken social standard of what's allowed on

Starting point is 00:07:25 Instagram. I know that for my age group, it's like you give up on it entirely and then you just post only to your close friends or alternate accounts. There's this sub layer of Instagram that's much more true to what the app once was, but it's just not viewable to the general public, unquote. Adding to that was Instagram's own attempt to morph itself into whatever the executives were chasing that month. Quoting from the piece, Instagram began prioritizing video, then live streaming, and then shopping. Each change muddled the purpose of Instagram even further.

Starting point is 00:07:59 Everyday people were still posting to the platform, but more and more of the content became professionalized. Bloggers brought their audience and editing skills and expensive cameras to the platform, but more and more of the content became professionalized. Bloggers brought their audience and editing skills and expensive cameras to the platform. Influencers started to snag brand deals. Fashion bloggers made the platform into a career. Today, the app has become an aspirational entertainment app. Nearly every photo on Instagram is now hand-selected from an album of dozens of nearly identical images. The only difference is the one you're seeing isn't too perfect, but just perfect enough for sharing, unquote. This is partly why apps like BeReal have jumped into the fray,

Starting point is 00:08:37 and platforms like Discord, which offer more of a person-to-person chat experience, have gotten more popular. All of this makes it hard for brands to reach younger audiences that aren't embracing traditional platforms. How do you show up in a Discord server and sell your energy drinks? Well, some brands have set up their own Discord server or group DM, but managing membership is a much more labor-intensive job than posting content twice a week. The piece is a long read, but it is definitely worth a read.

Starting point is 00:09:04 It's at businessinsider.com. Look a long read, but it is definitely worth a read. It's at businessinsider.com. Look for the piece called Social Media is Dead, Group Chats and Messaging Apps Killed It. 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 00:09:34 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected, be Zen. So if young people are keeping off social, what are the brands doing? One bellwether to how brands are changing their organic strategy is the publisher category. News websites, entertainment sites, the kind of websites that these days rely on social to get their content out. And even those sites are showing signs of slowing down on the main platforms. For the last three years, Digiday has surveyed about 200 of these sites to learn how they're posting on social. And the big finding? Some of these brands are slowing down on Facebook.

Starting point is 00:10:10 Quote, 91% of publisher pros said this year that their titles posted content to Facebook in the last month. This is admittedly a high percentage, but it's down from the 99% who said the same last year, and even the 95% who said they posted to Facebook in 2021. As for those that post daily, back in 2021, 85% of publishers said they posted every day. That percentage fell to just under three quarters last year, and then held fairly steady at 73% this year, unquote. It's not all bad news for Facebook. Nearly three quarters said they're still buying ads on Facebook. That number did drop this year, but only by a tiny bit. And more than a third say Facebook is extremely valuable to their branding. That number, the extremely valuable

Starting point is 00:10:57 answer, has been rising each year. It was only a quarter of those polled last year and less than a fifth the year before. Elon Musk's ex is facing an uphill battle maintaining or securing industry-recognized brand safety certification. Its accreditation by the Media Rating Council continues to be delayed. The company actually did a pre-assessment last December, but the CEO of the MRC confirms that while the two parties are talking, there's still no decision about whether they'll get accreditation. These are important because many large brands look to accreditation as a seal of approval, a sign that both their ad results are accurate and that their brand's goodwill won't be at risk if they run ads there. It's not hard to see why X is having trouble. Just this past weekend, X's owner Elon Musk bizarrely accused the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish group formed to fight extremism, of being anti-Semitic. He said the group's activities was the main reason the company's U.S. advertising revenue is still down 60 percent and that he would conduct a poll to see if he should kick the group

Starting point is 00:12:05 off the platform. But even without Elon, the company formerly known as Twitter has had hurdles. Back in 2017, the MRC said Twitter did a pre-audit but then never followed through. After a while, the MRC took its in-process status off. It also doesn't help that X's brand safety head left in June and it doesn't look like they've filled that role yet. It also doesn't help that X's brand safety head left in June, and it doesn't look like they've filled that role yet. It does have one important approval, the TAG accreditation. Though TAG's CEO confirmed to media this week that X is now being investigated by them after a formal report that the platform was in breach of its brand safety guidelines due to the questionable and incendiary content live on the app.

Starting point is 00:12:46 Quoting Digiday.com, In simpler terms, X's efforts to prevent a drain of ad dollars are akin to opening a restaurant without official health and safety inspections. Without these inspections, the Food Standards Agency could shut down the establishment due to the risk it poses to customers. Similarly, in the case of X, without both brand safety accreditation and robust internal expertise on the matter, advertisers are opting to steer clear with most of their ad dollars. I'm so excited. Starfield comes out tomorrow. It is Bethesda's new IP. It is Skyrim and Fallout, two of my favorite video games,

Starting point is 00:13:35 but in space. And I'm so jazzed. It's actually been out for a week. You know, the Clever Bastards, let me tell you, they made a version of the game which was available a week early, but you had to pay 30 bucks extra. i'm just too cheap i think so my wife and i have been playing no man's sky

Starting point is 00:13:51 which is not starfield but is also a space exploration game and has crafting and has kind of similar gameplay just killing time until starfield comes out which is tomorrow so no show for the rest of the week no No, no, I'm kidding. But I am excited. I'm Todd Mappin. Thanks for listening. I hope you had a great long weekend. See you tomorrow.

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Today in Digital Marketing - Social Media is Dead. Long Live the DM.

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