Today in Digital Marketing - Spam As a Service

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Tuesday, April 23rd. Today, now even Reddit comments are filling up with AI spam, and a whole new generation of bots are lined up to take your money. While your buyers are willing to wait up to five days longer for their purchase, what media buyers are saying about the proposed TikTok sale, and Europe says TikTok's latest promotion is as addictive as cigarettes. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in Digital Marketing. One of the search tricks people use online, if they're finding Google results lacking,

Starting point is 00:00:36 is to add the word Reddit to the end of their search. This usually finds more relevant content from that community, usually free from bots and scammy promotional text. Well, the AI tech bros have decided that the best way to capitalize on that is to infect Reddit threads with AI-generated marketing messages. 404 Media today has some great coverage of one such bot. Quote, a service called Reddit advertises itself as the AI that plugs your product on Reddit and which automatically mentions your product in conversations naturally. Examples on the site show two different Redditors being controlled by AI, posting plugs for a text-to-voice product called AnySpeech, and a bot writing a long comment about a debt consolidation program called Debt Freedom Now. A video demo shows a dashboard where a user adds the name of their company

Starting point is 00:01:28 and URL they want to direct users to. It then auto-suggests keywords that help the bot know what types of subreddits and tweets to look for and when to respond. Moments later, the dashboard shows Reply Guy is already in the responses of the comments section of different Reddit posts, unquote. It's interesting to see this entry in the content wars. Reddit has invested a ton of money into catching deceptive bots. Even regular users get caught up in the protections.

Starting point is 00:01:56 Many communities on the site won't let you post without having been a member for X number of days or have X amount of karma. And if your account gets banned site-wide, it's common belief that your IP address and hardware's unique address are also shadow banned, making it hard to do anything from your location or device. That and communities exist specifically to make fun of spammy accounts, like the subreddit called This Fucking Account. This AI bot called Reply Guy uses what it calls a pool

Starting point is 00:02:26 of high quality Reddit accounts, but you can also give it your brand's account to reply from, just in case you'd like to know what it feels like to have your brand account banned too. This whole black hat industry is called by some parasite SEO where people try to get their brand or content

Starting point is 00:02:42 on a domain that Google already trusts. None of this is bad, mind you. I mean, the only people answering questions on Quora now are people looking to promote themselves or their company. And if brands are going to gently promote in Reddit comment threads anyway, is a service that does this at scale really that bad? This is one of the new ethics debates I expect our industry will be having

Starting point is 00:03:05 in the years ahead. A spokesperson for Reddit told 404 Media they consider AI bots to be against their rules. A transparency report released by Reddit last week said that when they take content down, three-fourths of those removals are done automatically by an AI bot. A new report from logistics giant Radial reveals a growing consumer readiness to support sustainable shipping practices. Despite a general decline in sustainability importance among American consumers, a bigger portion is now willing to pay extra and endure longer waits for eco-friendly delivery options. According to the study, 51% of consumers are prepared to spend more for sustainable shopping. That is a big increase from 15% just in December of last year. Plus, 77% of those surveyed said they'd be willing to wait longer for their

Starting point is 00:04:05 purchases if the shipping methods were environmentally friendly. Out of these, 29% said they could wait an extra day, and 38% were okay with a delay of three to five days. But if you're going to try this, radio says put communications like regular updates high up on your list. Adweek today published some interviews they've had with senior media buyers about what they're telling their clients about the future of ads on TikTok. TikTok's presence in the US hangs in the balance as lawmakers recently passed a bill giving TikTok a year to divest from its Chinese ownership to avoid a ban. The uncertainty has sparked a flurry of shifts among ad buyers, but not all think it's a huge deal.

Starting point is 00:04:50 Darren Deltorio from WPromote says, quote, the platform is heavily embedded in the culture at this point. The move would be extremely unpopular and it's an election year. We're helping our clients create a social mix that integrates platforms like Snapchat and Reddit, unquote. Other buyers told Adweek the issue is more about advertisers not having a diversified enough program. Quoting Dan Gardner, co-founder of Code & Theory, quote, we're not concerned with the TikTok ban and advertisers that have a solid digital strategy that revolves around how to reach and engage consumers beyond a singular platform shouldn't Indeed, that does seem to be the overall theme of the piece,

Starting point is 00:05:46 keep running TikTok, but have plans set up to jump ship. Fred Shank, the VP of brand experience at the marketing arm, said, quote, we are advising clients to stick to the game plan while the audience activity is high. TikTok is still a place where we can reach them in a highly engaged mindset. This wouldn't necessarily be a replacement for TikTok, but be ready to expand that style of short form video content to Meta's apps and YouTube shorts, unquote. The whole piece is definitely worth a read if you are keen to learn how your media buying peers are thinking about the whole thing.

Starting point is 00:06:19 You'll find it at adweek.com. Look for the post called How Ad Buyers Are Advising Clients As Possible TikTok Ban or Sale Looms. Speaking of TikTok, the European Commission has launched formal proceedings against TikTok's lighter version, TikTok Lite, over concerns that its rewards program could lead to addiction among children. His feature, debuted in Spain and France, entices users to earn points by watching videos and liking posts, which can be exchanged for Amazon vouchers and TikTok coins. Commissioner Theory Breton compared

Starting point is 00:06:56 the app's addictive potential to that of light cigarettes, saying, quote, TikTok now has to submit a risk assessment of the app by Tuesday quote, we suspect TikTok Lite could be as toxic and addictive as cigarettes Lite. TikTok now has to submit a risk assessment of the app by Tuesday after getting an extension from missing their deadline last week. For its part, a TikTok spokesperson said there's a daily limit on video watching tasks and the rewards hub shouldn't even be accessible by kids under 18,

Starting point is 00:07:21 assuming, of course, they didn't lie about their birth year, which many, of course, do. This scrutiny is part of a broader investigation by the EU into TikTok's practices under the new DSA, targeting platforms with significant user bases to manage their content more closely. So yesterday was kind of a special place of hell. I own about, I don't know, 20 domains, something like that. Seven or eight of them are active. Most of them are for hobbies that my wife and I have. And then there's the main one, of course, today, digital.com, engageq.com, our agency, and a few others. And I had them hosted on one of those lifetime deals, which was great, actually.

Starting point is 00:08:04 It was fine. It had been hosted there. on one of those lifetime deals, which was great, actually. It was fine. Like, it had been hosted there. I paid $39 for unlimited hosting, unlimited traffic, like four years ago. Now, it was a slow server, as those of you who've been to our website can attest. But it worked, until it didn't. My own website, toddmaffin.com, which I think is still down, actually, started getting errors. The issue, I think, is that the PHP, the database of the underlying database architecture, this company was not updating it. So it was kind of stuck on an older version and they stopped applying to support requests.

Starting point is 00:08:37 Clearly, I had taken up as much as much time as they were willing to invest in my thirty nine bucks for four years. I still think it was a great deal. Anyway, I found another hosting provider and went through the whole process of, you know, switching things over. But my God, that is difficult. Hey, like, so I got the domain, I got the, they migrated it fine. Most of them, there's still a couple that are a little wonky. And then I forgot about the email that I've got to like repoint the email MX records to Google. Oh, it was just such a nightmare. And, you know, there's nothing more terrifying than knowing that like you've done something technical. You've done it wrong.

Starting point is 00:09:15 And now nobody in your agency is getting their emails. Like, why do I do these things to myself? Why don't I hire someone? Anyway, this all happened last night. Luckily, I got it up and running. We were only down for a couple of hours. And I mean, thank goodness I decided to do it at night. Because if I had decided to do it in the middle of the day,

Starting point is 00:09:35 that would have been even worse. But that is why my hair went a little bit more gray last night. All right. Thanks for listening. I'll see you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Spam As a Service

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.