Today in Digital Marketing - Swipe Right for Meth

Episode Date: August 24, 2023

Hard drugs, stolen credit cards, and guns: All for sale through Instagram ads. So why does your boring and innocuous campaign about shoes get denied? Also: One company pays a big price for playing loose with emailed account notifications... how Europe's incoming laws might help you snoop on your competitors... and the distinct lack of grey in ad creative.Get More From Us🌍 Follow us on our social media📰 Subscribe to our free daily newsletter✨ 𝗚𝗢 𝗣𝗥𝗘𝗠𝗜𝗨𝗠! ✨Get these exclusive benefits when you upgrade:✅ Listen ad-free✅ Meta Ad platform updates with Andrew Foxwell✅ Google Ad platform updates with Jyll Saskin Gales✅ Earlier episodes each day✅ Story links in show notes✅ “Skip to story” audio chapters✅ Member-exclusive Slack channel✅ Back catalog of 20+ marketing science interviews✅ Discounts on marketing tools✅...and a lot more!Check it out: todayindigital.com/premiumHelpful Links🎙️ Subscribe free to our other podcast "Behind the Ad"🆘 Need help with your social media? Check us out: engageQ digital🤝 Join our Slack: todayindigital.com/slack📰 Get The Top Story each day on LinkedIn.✉️ Contact Us: Email or Send Voicemail⚾ Pitch Us a Story: Fill in this form📈 Reach Marketers: Book Ad🗞️ Classified Ads: Book Now🙂 Rate and ReviewAbout This PodcastToday in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada. Associate Producer: Steph Gunn. Ad Coordination: RedCircle. Production Coordinator: Sarah Guild. Theme Composer: Mark Blevis. Music rights: Source Audio.🎒Upgrade Your Skills• Inside Google Ads with Jyll Saskin Gales• Google Ads for Beginners with Jyll Saskin Gales• Foxwell Slack Group and CoursesSome links in these show notes may provide affiliate revenue to us.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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. It is Thursday, August 24th. Be protected. Be Zen. price for playing loose with emailed account notifications, how Europe's incoming laws might help you snoop on your competitors, and the distinct lack of gray in ad creative. I'm Todd Mathen. That's Ahead, today in digital marketing. Well, you don't have to run ads on Meta's platform for long before the automated policy enforcement bots think your ad violates some kind of policy. It's become a rite of passage, really. If you've never been on the receiving end of an ad takedown, are you really a media buyer?

My most viral TikTok was a skit I did about this, where an advertiser tries to run Facebook ads for his hat company. I'd like to submit this ad. Yeah, sure, let's have a look. Oh, sorry, I have to deny it. It's sexually suggestive. It's a hat. I sell hats. Sexually suggestive hats. I'm sorry. Can you check again? It's a hat I'm selling.

Oh, I'm sorry. You're right. I bet you can't run it. It's about cryptocurrency. Which is why a story yesterday from 404 Media is particularly frustrating. Quoting their reporting, For the last few months, Instagram has served me a constant stream of ads for hard drugs, stolen credit cards, hacked accounts, guns, counterfeit cash, wholesale quantities of weed, and cash app scams, as well as a Russian language job posting seeking paid-in-cash massage therapists. Nearly all of these advertisements

link directly to Telegram accounts where the drugs or illegal services can be directly purchased. With one tap, I was repeatedly taken from bouncing through Instagram stories on my friend's vacation to Telegram chat accounts

where I could buy automatic weapons, meth, and stolen credit cards, unquote. Indeed, we were able to see dozens of examples of questionable campaigns by searching Meta's ad library for t.me, the link shortener for Telegram, the instant messenger used by many people wanting to keep their identity private. Not all the ads are marketing illegal things,

but many are clearly way, way outside Meta's own ad standards. Captions like, join Telegram to make 50K a month and tap it in for the cash app money drop to get rich. The report says once you do go over to Telegram, the get rich method is usually recruiting you to deal drugs, hack bank accounts, or be the middleman in the sale

of stolen Netflix and Disney Plus logins. It is a huge gap in Meta's automated policy enforcement, something 404 Media in their coverage called a massive ad screening failure. To be fair, Meta's systems do check more than the ad copy. They also look at the landing page to make sure nothing nefarious is being sold behind the click. But Meta's systems don't appear to be able to analyze content within chat platforms. And really, how could they? Other than deploying fake people bots, I guess, to have conversations with the accounts behind the illegal ads to suss out what they're selling. But hey, if Ashley Madison can

write bots that convince thousands of men that they're talking to a real person, can't Meta? If nothing else, it does seem like Meta's basic image recognition isn't even working right. Karan Lalla, a former engineer on Facebook's integrity team, told 404 Media, quote, There's things like weed photos, something that should be just getting caught. If I were an engineer on the integrity team, I would want to know why our systems aren't catching them, unquote. Worse, it seems Instagram's discovery algorithm is even involved.

Quoting the 404 piece again, Since clicking on one of these ads, I've been bombarded with hundreds of Instagram ads for illegal services and drugs. Nearly all these advertisements link to Telegram accounts. At one point, I was asked by Instagram if I, quote, want more or less of your ads to be like this, unquote, beneath an advertisement that featured blank credit cards and stacks of cash, unquote. It's hard to know how long this has been going on since Meta's ad library only shows ads that are actively in distribution. We asked Meta for comment this morning. They opened our email, but we did not hear back by deadline.

You've probably seen these emails before. They're from a company you've done business with, but they're nothing you want to see. So you go look for the unsubscribe link at the bottom. But there is none. Instead, there's a note saying you can't unsubscribe from these kinds of emails because they're not marketing, they're important updates about the status of your account. It is true that in many jurisdictions, anti-spam legislation has a carve-out for legal notices, privacy policy updates, critical information, and so on. Things you can't unsubscribe from unless you delete your account from the service entirely. But it is a bit of a gray area. For instance, can you tag a tiny promotional call to action at the bottom of a legitimate privacy update? Can you suggest an upsell in small print?

Well, the American credit reporting agency Experian, as the kids say, f***ed around and found out. Experian has been fined $650,000 for violating spam laws. And the American Justice Department and trade regulator also slapped a permanent injunction on the company forbidding them from f***ing around anymore. From The Verge, quote, If you've been unlucky enough to receive experience spam, you may already know the format. A new car has been noticed on your account.

Please confirm it. You need dark web monitoring to protect you. Or that old classic, boost your FICO score. When you log into your account, you're treated to a page that wants you to upgrade your account or sign up for a loan, unquote. Indeed, email shown in court documents actually have the audacity to start with, this is not a marketing email. There is no unsubscribe link, only a note that customers can update some alerts and communications preferences, but will still, quote,

receive notifications like this one on account status. A new study finds that of the marketers currently using X or Instagram, 80% said they will try Meta's new Threads app, even though they realize this will fragment their social outreach. The numbers come from Capterra's 2023 Social Media Landscape Survey. We have a link to that report in our newsletter, which you can subscribe to for free by tapping the link in the show notes. 66% say they think Threads will weaken the marketing potential of Instagram and Facebook.

And more than two-thirds of marketers say their brand has indeed created an account on at least one upstart Twitter competitor like Mastodon or Blue Sky. Quoting a marketing analyst at Capterra, Experimenting with new social media platforms should be encouraged, but avoid overcommitting. Marketers need to assess whether they're equipped to manage another platform, if the app delivers on safety and security, and if the platform offers must-have capabilities or features, unquote. Their study found 52% of marketers polled said they were likely to use Threads because they believe it has better user safety and security. 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. Web traffic coming from X, formerly Twitter, has declined sharply in the past year. The parent company of WordPress says traffic from X to a sample of large and small news websites fell by an average of 24% from the first half of last year to the first half of this year. A source of the New York Times told Digiday they'd seen a sharp drop since X started throttling links to the news site, artificially adding a four to five second delay before the site loaded.

It's not clear why X implemented those delays on the Times and a handful of other news sites and competitors. But I don't think you need a PhD in psychology to understand how Elon Musk thinks. Several months ago, Twitter inaccurately labeled several national public broadcasters like America's NPR and Canada's CBC as state-owned media. Both those large networks stopped posting on Twitter and have not returned, despite the labels being removed. As for regular websites like the kind brands and marketers manage, those too are seeing drops in traffic as X's user base and engagement continues to fall. An executive at a large lifestyle site told Digiday this week they saw traffic from X drop by 72% year over year.

But they weren't really concerned because traffic from X now only accounts for 2% of the company's organic traffic this year. That's half of what it was last year. Statistica forecasts that X will end the year with 4% fewer monthly active users than it had at the end of last year. Also still dropping? Advertisers. A media radar analysis found that of the 3,100 brands left advertising on X in May. Remember, that's the month the company gained a new CEO from the ad business. 34% chose not to return in June.

As new European legislation takes effect tomorrow, the rest of the world is gaining some ad platform enhancements. The new Digital Services Act is forcing the hand of many large social platforms, requiring them to be more transparent, particularly in paid promotions and influencer disclosures. And that could be a benefit to you if you're interested in checking out what your competitors are up to. Here's a quick rundown of the announcements in that space this week. Meta now lets you track branded content campaigns in its ads library, so you'll be able to see how other brands are using influencer marketing across Facebook and Instagram. You can find it on the front page of the ads library

under the button reading Go To Branded Content. You'll be able to enter the platform, the date range, and the brand or competitor name. This addition to the ads library is available globally. The same can't be said for Google's update this week, which they are restricting to only Europe. In fact, not much can be said about Google's plans at all because they were awfully vague about how they'd be updating their tools for the incoming DSA. Google's VP of Trust and Safety would only say in a blog post that they'd be expanding

their ads transparency center, but didn't say how. There was some talk about expanding its annual transparency reports and maybe updating its appeals processes. And Snapchat yesterday said it would let users opt out of content personalization in the Discover and Spotlight tabs, add some new ad campaign insights, and increase transparency around audience targeting. But those updates, again, only for users and advertisers in the EU and UK. They'll also start providing more detail around why content was removed and how to appeal. And they say they're building their own ads library, which again, for the time being, will only include European ad campaigns. If you've noticed a change in your LinkedIn feed lately,

it could be because of some algorithm changes discovered by researcher Richard Vanderblom. Changes you might want to work into your content strategy if you're in the B2B space. According to his findings, LinkedIn has been putting more focus on hashtag engagement lately. They're also showing users more content from the people and pages they engage with most. Posts are also getting more reach over a longer period of time, a change from when posts would get the most traction

on the first day of posting. He says posts actually get more reach on the second and third day now after posting. LinkedIn did say recently it updated its feed algorithm to pull in more engagement signals. They did mention the hashtag specifically. Or, as the company said, quote, embeddings represent high-dimensional categorical data

in a lower-dimensional continuous space, capturing essential relationships and patterns within the data while reducing computational complexity, unquote. All right, then. What did we say again about letting the engineers write the blog posts? So, takeaways? You should probably be adding hashtags to your LinkedIn posts from now on, and even have your brand jump in on discussions that are happening between others,

since that too appears to be affected. LinkedIn says sharing of original content on their platform increased by 41% year over year in 2022. Spotify is adding some new tools for people who market podcasts. Podcasters will soon be able to feature one episode more prominently on their show page, guiding first-time listeners to their best starter content. They're also adding something called host recommendations, where you can choose up to two pieces of content from other creators on Spotify, like a different podcast or music album or playlist or audiobook, and pin them to the top of the More Like This tab. For podcasters using Spotify Open Access through partners like Patreon or Supporting Cast, you'll be able to activate a promotional banner on your show page.

Starting this October, you'll also be able to select your podcast's preview clip that appears on the home feed and podcast and shows sub feed. And you will soon be able to see the total number of impressions for your show and the individual episodes over a 30-day period, including trending data and a breakdown of where on Spotify the impressions came from. And finally, people over 60 make up 16% of the population and have 25% of the world's spending power, but a new study has found they're barely in ads. The data platform CreativeX looked at 126,000 ads from different industries like food and healthcare and alcohol,

and found that only 4% of people in ads are over 60 years old. Of those people, fewer than 1% were shown as business leaders or even professionals. Most were shown in family settings. It's not just ads. The American AARP Association found that one third of the U.S. population is over 50, but they're only in 15% of media images. Nothing to say here except thanks for listening. I'm Todd Maffin. See you tomorrow. my name gonna rain show me what you're working with every verse clean won't curse the bitch it's the season for new styles and you love to shop for jackets and boots so when you do always

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