Today in Digital Marketing - Surrounded by Clones of Meghan Trainor

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Tuesday, October 10th. Today, Meta gives Reels ads a big update. Generative AI is coming for your brand logos next. Even YouTube wants to claim part of Twitter's territory. And the surprising Halloween hashtags you should be building into your social posts. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. No matter what you call them, TikToks, reels, shorts, idea pins, spotlights, the vertical video format is on track to dominate social media. Hell, even Spotify has got a TikTok-like feed now, and it's not even a social media app. Meta's reels, in particular, have seen huge numbers. And today, the format is getting a very big,

Starting point is 00:00:45 very important update for marketers. This morning, the company began rolling out brand safety tools for the format, expanding the controls it put in place for its Facebook and Instagram feeds back in March. This works the way a lot of brand safety tools work. The system tries to look at the content and categorize them into topics, looking specifically for controversial topics like guns or hot-button political content. It doesn't block that content, but rather lets advertisers then say they don't want their ads placed alongside content in those categories. Some categories, like illegal drugs, are already demonetized by Meta, so placing ads next to those aren't even an issue. There is a kind of global standard for these categories.

Starting point is 00:01:30 A body called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media has a set of suitability standards, which many platforms align themselves with. As well, the company is also adding some new features to Reel's ads, including multi-destination calls to action for Reel's carousel ads, a swipe left option to let viewers swipe to a landing page. Interesting that one since it's kind of a different way of using the app. So we'll have to see if users adopt that and if it confuses them. And also some optional media filters to adjust

Starting point is 00:01:57 images and boost video resolution. They're also adding collections ads for Facebook Reels, something which is already up and running on Instagram. These show thumbnails of three products pulled from your catalog at the bottom of your reel. It may take a few weeks for all of these to get out to all accounts. A small but important update to Google's local service ads appears to have been rolled out without any fanfare or as far as we can tell, any announcement. But if you use Google's local ads to generate leads, this might be a big deal. They are building the option to have their system send you a text message whenever you get a lead. This is great news for people who don't check their email often or worse, don't know which email is attached to their brand's Google account.

Starting point is 00:02:45 And you're not locked into the number you put into the account at first, you can redirect it to any number you like. And like many things in our marketing world, sadly, this is not showing up in everyone's account. It's not clear if this is a slow rollout or only a test, but definitely a welcome addition and likely to be in your account sometime soon. There's been a lot of hype around generative AI for things like text and images, and for good reason. Being able to type in Canadian podcast hosts surrounded by clones of Meghan Trainor is fun, or so I'm told. But one area in which we haven't seen a lot of generative AI, one which a lot of marketers do use a lot, is in vector graphics. These are graphic files made up of math and numbers, not pixels. This lets them be scaled up as much as you like without losing any resolution.

Starting point is 00:03:37 They're usually much smaller files as well. Vector graphics are the norm for logos, website design, and a bunch of other things. Now we're getting some heavy lifting in that department too. Adobe's Illustrator program, that's like Photoshop, but for vector art, will be getting generative AI abilities. Quoting TechCrunch, in its beta, Illustrator will now let you create entire scenes through a text prompt. What's nifty here is that those scenes can consist of multiple objects. So this isn't just a jumble of vectors that make up the overall graphic, but Illustrator will automatically generate these different objects and you can manipulate them individually to your heart's content, just like any other group or layer in Illustrator. More interestingly, I thought, especially for product marketers, is they'll soon be adding a new tool to Illustrator called Mockup. This lets you take any 3D scene and any vector file and apply it to that 3D scene.

Starting point is 00:04:34 Also coming, something they call Retype, which will convert static text in images to editable type, as well as find the fonts used in that image. 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. Get the Rakuten app or join at rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. It's hard to know for sure how X, formerly Twitter, is doing for ad revenue.

Starting point is 00:05:28 All independent studies show it's way down. Some days even platform owner Elon Musk says it's way down. Then other days his CEO says everything's fine. But its latest ad product, unveiled last week without any announcement, might show just how dire things are there. The ad format shows up in the feed, like other ads, but that's where the similarities stop. These ads, which appear to be coming from some unknown low-quality programmatic mill, have no profile name, no advertiser name, there's no ad disclosure at all,

Starting point is 00:05:59 and you can't click the profile image to learn more about the advertiser. You literally cannot tell who the advertiser is because anywhere you click on the ad, including the profile image, just bounces you over to the ad's landing page. The ads only have two elements, a photo and a clickbaity headline like, This seems unbelievable but happens in Dubai every day. They also spelled every day wrong, but whatever. Clicking that ad takes you to a Content Mill webpage full of ads of its own. It's really just spam.

Starting point is 00:06:31 The ads are new to X, but they're familiar to anyone who's ended up at the bottom of an entertainment site's webpage or glanced at the bottom banner of a free dating app. Ad networks like Taboola and Outbrain specialize in these low-quality formats. Industry analysts say it's entirely possible that X has just run out of regular advertisers willing to spend money on the platform. Usually, these kinds of spammy ads only show up when the inventory could not otherwise be sold.

Starting point is 00:06:58 Last week, X's CEO told an audience that 90% of the top 100 advertisers have returned to the platform. Big names, she said, like Visa. Media Matters later checked that claim out and discovered it was mostly hot air. Visa, for instance, had spent more than $75,000 in the 12 weeks before Elon Musk bought the platform. In the most recent 12 weeks, it's spent just 10 bucks. Well, even YouTube is now thinking about helping fill the void left by Twitter and is building a Twitter-like text update feed into its app. This builds on its existing text post system called Community Posts. Channels can create these posts for quick text updates and polls, and they show up in the mobile app within the home or subscribed feeds. But now they're thinking about breaking those out

Starting point is 00:07:49 into their own feed, which sure sounds a lot like Twitter. Quoting from YouTube, we've heard that YouTube users are looking for more ways to find community posts from creators. So we're experimenting with a posts only feed on the Home tab of mobile devices. If you're in the experiment, you may see a View All button on single community posts on Home, which you can tap to view more posts from channels you've engaged with in the past or posts we think you may like, unquote. And yeah, what's interesting, I thought, was that they're planning some kind of discovery in it. So you'll see text updates not just from your own subscriptions, but from others around the platform as well. Earlier this year, they removed the qualification thresholds for posting these updates. The new feed is currently in testing on Android and iOS.

Starting point is 00:08:37 And finally, for brands who lean heavily into Halloween, TikTok has released some new spooky AR effects and visual tools. Most of it is around makeup effects, you know, scary clown faces or bloody mouths. They're also running a contest for AR creators with a small cash prize for coming up with the best and most original spooky effect. Incidentally, the top hashtags for the season, other than the obvious Halloween and TikTok Halloween, are pumpkin season, spookyooky Treats, Halloween Decor, and Boo Basket. And all my people say, now everybody say, oh, you feeling me? Oh, yeah. Follow us on threads. We are at Today in Digital Marketing over over there or my personal account is at todd

Starting point is 00:09:25 mappen thanks for listening see you tomorrow i've been searching for it waiting for my moment looking at the sky for the color to change watching for my time for the stars to align but sick of people telling me that i should be patient something in the water i'm just working harder baby i just didn't know how to play. But I can see it coming. Shining like the morning when all of my people scream. Yeah. And all my people say. And everybody say.

Today in Digital Marketing - Surrounded by Clones of Meghan Trainor

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