Today in Digital Marketing - Spotify Desperately Wants to Own the Entire Podcast Ecosystem

Starting point is 00:00:00 It's the season for new styles, and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at Rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal.

Starting point is 00:00:28 Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. 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 at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, Spotify doubles down on podcasting, and that's probably not great news for the industry.

Starting point is 00:01:07 Google brings stories to Data Studio. TikTok, for a change, steals from Facebook, while YouTube puts more pressure on the popular app. The big Amazon war is over. You can now pull business calls into your CRM and on the premium podcast with no ads, more stories and extended weekend episodes. Tap the link in the show notes for more. It's back. The Y2K bug. Only this time your website might break.

Starting point is 00:01:34 It's Thursday, February 17th. I'm Todd Maffin. Here is what you missed today in digital marketing. Spotify has announced two major podcast tech acquisitions, Podsites and Chartable. Both Podsites and Chartable allow podcasters and networks to include tags in their shows. These tags can then be used to track who listened, if they heard an advertisement, and if they acted upon hearing it. The company plans to use Podsites technology for more than podcasting, including ads within music, video ads, and display ads. Chartable's acquisition seems more targeted at podcasters themselves than advertisers,

Starting point is 00:02:11 particularly because of its SmartLynx technology. SmartLynx are shareable, trackable URLs that automatically route listeners to a podcast while collecting both clicks and download data. The Verge reports that with these acquisitions, Spotify will also be better prepared to compete with what some people think is actually its biggest competitor, YouTube. It's apparent that video has become one of Spotify's top product priorities as it tries to sync audio and video together by adding video podcasts to the platform and by acquiring the rights to YouTube podcaster content like that of Joe Rogan. With the goal of having 50 million creators on the platform, Spotify needs a way to make money

Starting point is 00:02:51 for them. I cannot stress enough how big a move this is. Podsites and Chartable are not small companies and are relied on by countless podcasts and podcast networks. Will this mean you'll only get access to their tech if you move to Spotify's closed platform? I know where I've got my money. If you've been trying out web stories for your brand, Google has introduced a new Data Studio template so that you can track to see how well your stories are performing. Web stories are visual, tappable mobile stories that can be found through Google Search and Discover,

Starting point is 00:03:29 similar to Instagrams. They actually live on your website. The new Web Stories Insights dashboard template in Data Studio provides an overview of the performance of your stories based on data from Google Analytics. Obviously, to use the template, you first have to set up tracking in Google Analytics. Regardless of what editor you used to create your web stories, you will need to enter your UA

Starting point is 00:03:48 tracking ID. Once you've done this, you can view performance metrics by navigating to behavior, events, and overview. Here is the data you'll be able to view now. Key metrics like story starts, page views, time spent, and completion rate. Audience metrics like age, gender, and device. Top stories, that'll be your top 10 stories during the selected time period and completion rate, audience metrics like age, gender and device, top stories that'll be your top 10 stories during the selected time period, traffic channels, which is an overview of where users are finding and reading your web stories and story level performance, which will be key metrics and a breakdown of page views for each specific story. In order to help clean up its user content, TikTok has poached hundreds of content moderators from big tech contractors in Europe. The Financial Times reported today that the companies which the platform is poaching from have also managed content moderation for rivals like Facebook.

Starting point is 00:04:39 About 190 of the content moderators hired since January 2021 previously held contracting jobs with Accenture, Kovalen, and CPL. It's also worth noting that the platform is bringing content moderation in-house rather than outsourcing it, like Meta and other companies do. TikTok says the move demonstrates its commitment to safety and its recognition that if the platform features safe and appropriate content, it is also more attractive to advertisers. Speaking of TikTok, YouTube has taken another step towards its focus on TikTok-like videos, which it calls Shorts.

Starting point is 00:05:18 The platform has now added a dedicated Shorts shelf in the channel listings on desktop. So now, when a channel has uploaded Shorts, it will appear in a separate section, giving the content more focus and potentially driving more viewers. The update will be rolled out to all creators very soon. Along with a new display for Shorts videos, YouTube has launched additional metadata for English educational videos, updates to channel editing on mobile, custom thumbnails for videos on demand, and an updated display of user-specified gender listings in Analytics.

Starting point is 00:05:54 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 at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. All right, three small items to tell you about. First, Google has quietly launched an API for retrieving call history information from your Google business profiles programmatically. It will be called, and I know this is a mouthful, the My Business Business Calls API. Under the new API, you can

Starting point is 00:06:38 query Google for your call history data, which you can currently find under the calls section of your Google business profile manager. As with all APIs, of course, a developer on your side will need to which you can currently find under the calls section of your Google Business Profile Manager. As with all APIs, of course, a developer on your side will need to program it to connect to your backend systems. Second, if your brand has suffered from the same horrible Snapchat username since you signed up in 2011, then this update is for you. Starting on February 23rd, the platform will finally let accounts change their usernames. And third, Amazon and Visa officially ended their feud today over the card company's fees charged to UK credit consumers, an issue that actually threatened to spill over to the US.

Starting point is 00:07:25 According to a Visa spokesperson, their credit card will now be accepted at all Amazon sites and stores. And finally, as you know, we focus on digital marketing for this podcast. So why am I about to tell you about an outdoor billboard campaign? Because glued to said billboard are 300 real pagers under 20 years old. Ask your parents what a pager is. All displaying the message, this is going to hurt. This billboard is now up in London. It's an ad for the BBC to promote its upcoming TV show, also called This Is Going to Hurt,

Starting point is 00:07:57 which is based on a memoir by a former doctor. The BBC's in-house agency, BBC Creative, designed the billboard with the intention of bringing the chaos people in the medical profession deal with to life. And it brings chaos. The ad features working models of pagers that display messages, including hospital codes like Labour Ward, to lines revealing events in the show. Also, LED flashing lights and sound effects are used to disrupt those that pass by, the idea being that it is recreating the feeling of

Starting point is 00:08:29 doctor's pagers constantly buzzing and calling them back to work. Would you hear something on today's show you wanted to comment on? Just tweet your thoughts with the hashtag TIDM and I'll read it out on the show. Remember, you can get this podcast as a daily email newsletter, too, complete with images, related videos, links to dive deeper and even newsletter exclusive content. And there's a free tier as well.

Starting point is 00:08:57 Those people will get an issue every Friday. The newsletter comes out about an hour before the podcast drops. Just go to todayindigital.com slash newsletter to sign up, or tap the link in this episode's notes. Overwatch remains uninstalled on my Xbox. This is the longest stretch I think I've had from it. And it's going to stay. It's really turned out to not be good for my mental health.

Starting point is 00:09:19 So thanks to everyone who gave me suggestions. I heard lots. I think I'm going to try my hand at Apex Legends, which is a battle royale. And I hate battle royales. Only because the way that game mode works is you're going to lose. Like, there are, what, 100 players? And the way the game ends is when one of them wins.

Starting point is 00:09:39 So you have like a 100 to 1 chance. Whereas at least in Overwatch, I mean, you're on a team. You have a 50% chance of winning. or 10 in my case obviously so i'm gonna try apex legends i'll try to be a support character because i'm bad at shooting maybe i should just realize i'm just bad at video games entirely all right talk to you tomorrow You know I'm living You know I'm living

Today in Digital Marketing - Spotify Desperately Wants to Own the Entire Podcast Ecosystem

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