Today in Digital Marketing - SPOILER: It’s Yellow and Grey, folks.

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected, be Zen. Today, the whole world is going TikTok, including a most unlikely platform. More placements are on the way. Microsoft adds an important tool to its platform, and it's free. And what are the copywriters at Pantone smoking, and how do I get some? It's Monday, December 14th, 2020. Happy birthday, Nostradamus. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. More signs that the world will all be vertical soon.

Starting point is 00:00:53 A popular TikTok clone has been sold. Dubsmash is the clone. It's been a pretty popular app in its own right. And the buyer, Reddit. I know, listen, I'm a Reddit user too. The last thing any of us old people want is more vertical video stuff, but hey, it's the kid's world now. We're all just living in it. Dubsmash says it serves a billion monthly video views. 30% of its users log in daily. Of that user base, 70% are female, but a quarter are African-American teens.

Starting point is 00:01:22 For now, the app will continue operating as normal. The brand will stay and all that. Reddit plans to integrate its tech into their web app. Why are they doing this? Same reason any social platform buys anything these days, to provide us digital marketers with more placements. Right now, Reddit has only a few ad product options. A short-form video placement would, I'm guessing, do pretty well.

Starting point is 00:01:44 One interesting side note, this is actually Reddit's first major acquisition. They hit $100 million in ad revenue last year and say that they can hit a billion in revenue within the next few years. And speaking of new vertical video placement options... LinkedIn is getting ready to add Stories ads to its platform. This after rolling out their organic Stories product this past September. They're testing the ad version right now with a limited number of advertisers in a closed beta. Limited maybe, but apparently 600 brands have tried it out so far.

Starting point is 00:02:19 But, quoting socialmediatoday.com, It is worth noting that LinkedIn hasn't provided any data on Stories usage, outside of saying that the response to Stories has been incredibly positive and that Stories have sparked hundreds of thousands of new conversations on the platform. Which doesn't really mean much. I mean, sure, LinkedIn Stories exist, but advertisers want to know how many people are using them, what the engagement rates are, how people are responding. It seems odd that in an announcement of a new ad product,

Starting point is 00:02:50 LinkedIn has provided no indicator of performance as a measure of what the addition could mean for your campaigns, unquote. LinkedIn says it should be launching the Stories placement more broadly in the new year. Facebook is turning up the heat on TikTok. You'll recall they added TikTok-style videos to Instagram in a form they call Reels. And as Facebook tends to do, every couple of weeks, they add a bit more functionality and creep ever closer to the full feature set that the app they're copying has. But this new development isn't as much about functionality as it is about discoverability. Because Facebook is now testing a quick way to cross post your Reels video from Instagram to the Facebook newsfeed. Note that I said

Starting point is 00:03:37 the newsfeed, not your newsfeed or the newsfeed of the user. Because in the test scene so far, all the toggle switch will do is permit Facebook to show your reels in a kind of highlights carousel on the Facebook news feed. So it's not really a cross post. It's certainly not a cross post to a personal profile. The timing is certainly interesting, with American regulators saying Facebook is a monopoly and should be broken up. Apparently at Facebook, meh, no matter.

Starting point is 00:04:04 Business as normal, full steam ahead. What do you want? What? You have food upstairs. 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.

Starting point is 00:04:26 Without 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. Also chugging along reliably, the Microsoft Ads platform. Despite being a distant competitor to Google,

Starting point is 00:04:46 the folks at Bing really are full steam ahead on adding functionality there. Earlier in the year, they launched Clarity, a free visual analytics tool including website heat mapping. Well, now that tool is becoming part of Bing Webmaster Tools. It's a pretty comprehensive utility and one that many, many providers charge for. It does click and scroll heat maps and can even replay entire user sessions. To find it, just log into your Bing Webmaster Tools account. You'll see a new option to sign up for Clarity.

Starting point is 00:05:14 You will, of course, need to drop their code onto your site's pages, either manually or go through, ironically, Google's tag manager or whatever. You got to hand it to whoever started the mini website data lotto. I can't tell whether it's a real contest or just a parody of digital marketing data practices. But basically, it's a form asking you for your name and email and phone number. They say once they get a few thousand people in their database, they're going to sell everyone's personal information to whatever buyer will pay the most for it. And then one of those people who gave up their personal info will win all of the revenue made from that sale of their data and everyone else's data. You can't say they're not disclosing what's going to happen. Their site includes this

Starting point is 00:06:02 in the who do you sell my data to section, quote, the highest bidder or multiple since it's non-exclusive. We're going to juice this baby for all it's worth. Odds are we'll be selling to advertisers who want to target you with ads, but we will accept any buyer's offer as long as it's high enough, unquote. At the time I write this, nearly 163,000 people have coughed up their personal data, which the site estimates is having a value of about $2,500. It's at datalotto.biz if you want to check it out. And finally, the moment the digital marketing world has been waiting for all year. The one event that most of us use to plan out all our campaigns.

Starting point is 00:06:48 The single most significant data point that we'll all need for our 2021 work. The color of the year is out. Pantone has released its call for the color of the year and in a shocking development. They are recommending not one, but two colors. I know, crazy, right? So first, a spoiler. The colors are yellow and gray. My favorite part of these annual announcements are the over-the-top descriptions that they give their color picks.

Starting point is 00:07:20 Honestly, most of the time it sounds like the copywriter has just hit the peak of an LSD trip. And this year is no exception. Their color descriptions are so egregiously effusive, unyieldingly unrestrained, and irrepressibly effervescent that I hired a voice actor to read them to you. Ultimate Gray is emblematic of solid and dependable elements which are everlasting and provide a firm foundation. The colors of pebbles on the beach and natural elements whose weathered appearance highlights an ability to stand the test of time. Ultimate Gray quietly assures encouraging feelings of composure, steadiness, and resilience. So there you go, folks. Yellow and gray. By the way, yes, Google was down earlier this morning, only for about 45 minutes or so, but it did take pretty much everything down. The ads platform, YouTube, search, Google Workplace. So if you experienced that, it wasn't just you.

Starting point is 00:08:26 Also, I'm seeing some people on Twitter today reporting that Facebook CPMs were higher this past weekend than Black Friday weekend. Anyway, maybe go check your ads dashboard. That's it for today. Talk to you tomorrow. I always want to be

Today in Digital Marketing - SPOILER: It’s Yellow and Grey, folks.

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