Today in Digital Marketing - T Minus 3 Weeks: The Beginning of the End for Cookies

Episode Date: December 14, 2023

It’s happening. It’s really happening! The end of the third-party cookie starts in three weeks. Threads makes it to Europe. YouTube makes ads fewer but longer. And how your company’s data may have been shared with OpenAI without you realizing it..📰 Get our free daily newsletter📈 Advertising: Reach Thousands of Marketing Decision-Makers🌍 Follow us on social media or contact us.GO PREMIUM!Get these exclusive benefits when you upgrade:✅ Listen ad-free✅ Back catalog of 20+ marketing science interviews✅ Get the show earlier than the free version✅ Story links in show notes✅ “Skip to story” audio chapters✅ Member-exclusive Slack channel✅ Member-only monthly livestreams with Tod✅ Discounts on marketing tools✅...and a lot more!Check it out: todayindigital.com/premium·GET MORE FROM US🆘 Need help with your social media? Check us out: engageQ digital🎙️ Our other podcast "Behind the Ad"🤝 Our Slack community⭐ Review the podcast·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.·Today 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.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Thursday, December 14th. Today. Okay, it's happening. Everybody stay calm. What's the procedure, everyone? What's the procedure? Stay f***ing calm! The end of the third-party cookie starts in just three weeks. Threads makes it to Europe. YouTube makes ads fewer, but longer. And how your company's data may have been shared with open AI

without you realizing it. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. 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, Well, they said they would do it. Then they delayed it a bunch of times. Now it's really going to happen. Google this morning confirmed it will start blocking third-party cookies in its Chrome browser starting January 4th. Luckily for those marketers still not prepared for the cookie-less world, Google will only be blocking 1% of its users then.

Instead of cookies, Google's new system watches the sites people visit, then tries to put them in a number of interest buckets, like shoes or traveling or video games. Websites can then check what buckets a visitor is in, so people will still be subject to the sorting hatch, but it's a little less connected to individuals. What does this mean for digital marketers? Well, hopefully you've been aware that this has been coming and are transitioning away from third-party ad tracking as a general rule. Other initiatives like Apple's iOS 14.5 also reduced our ability to target with precision. This is part of the reason retail ad networks like Amazon, Walmart, and even Instacart have been growing at an impressive clip. They have first-party data, which you can use to target on their properties. Or even better,

have your own first-party data, email addresses, tied to purchases, tied to browsing history, all information you can capture on your website or perhaps your commerce platform. So if you see a little eyeball logo in your Chrome URL bar in the new year, you are part of that 1%, which will eventually, and probably faster than we expect, grow to 100%. A big day for Threads, Meta's Twitter competitor. The app is finally available in the European Union. When it launched, it didn't include the EU, probably needing more time to address that region's more detailed regulatory requirements, one of which is to let people browse threads without logging into a meta account. People who choose that will still need an account

if they want to post or engage on the platform. Yesterday, we reported threads had started connecting itself to ActivityPub, that is the large network that powers Mastodon, among other services. That integration is now out in the wild with a few accounts, notably the head of Instagram, whose posts on Threads you can now see and engage with from your Mastodon feed. Being in Europe, of course, is a huge deal to the growth of the app, with MetaNext turning its attention to a deeper activity pub connection and, fingers crossed, an API for us to use, it is definitely on the upswing. YouTube is reducing the number of ads which appear in a video, which could be bad for marketers. Generally, the less ad inventory is available, the higher the price to win it.

But there is one small saving grace here. The reductions only apply to videos watched on an actual TV set. The company this morning announcing it will decrease the number of TV ads but increase their length. Quoting that announcement, Viewers expect a different ad experience depending on the content they are watching. but increase their length. Quoting that announcement, quote, Viewers expect a different ad experience depending on the content they are watching. When it comes to long-form content on TV screens, 79% of viewers would prefer video ads that are grouped together

instead of distributed throughout a video. Based on this preference, we evaluated fewer, longer ad breaks to create a more seamless viewing experience on the big screen. In early testing, more than half of YouTube-connected TV streamers experienced 29% longer viewing sessions before their next ad break. One other change, it used to show how many ads were left. Now, viewers will see the time left until the break ends or they can skip to the content directly. Expect these changes to roll out fairly soon. Also, Google is launching Shorts ads globally on connected TVs. The viewer experience is about the same on mobile and viewers can use their TV remote to click away from ads just as

they would with any other short. If you are interested in trying shorts ads out, you can get to them through the video reach campaigns, video view campaigns, and shorts specific campaigns like YouTube select shorts, first position on shorts, and trending music on shorts. Insider Intelligence has put out its digital ad predictions for 2024. First, they're expecting some stability in digital ad spend, less in the way of big swings. U.S. digital ad spend grew 13.5% during the years of the pandemic, according to their estimates. From now until the end of their forecast period in 2027, that will drop below 10% for the first time in more than a decade. Second, with Google's full phase-out of cookies set for next year, Insider Intelligence expects a push for mergers and acquisitions among ID providers,

and they think Apple will finally roll out a demand-side platform next year. Third, they expect ad rates for streaming ads will get better. Next year, Amazon Prime releases its ad-supported tier, and it's expected to overtake Roku in the rankings of ad spend. Fourth, they expect to see even more major ad platforms become more chummy with their tech. This year, we saw Google's ad platform play nice with X, and Snapchat cutting deals with Amazon.

Quoting Insider Intelligence, One of the main drivers is retail media, which is taking up an increasing share of ad budgets, causing smaller walled gardens to try and prop up their ad business by partnering with their bigger counterparts, unquote. Instagram this week launched a background editing tool to users in the US. This will let you change the image background of a photo you upload to stories. Let's say you upload a photo of your product on grass. You could erase that grass and tell it to put your product on a bed of flowers or a red carpet.

If you're in the US and you have this activated, once you upload a photo through the Stories workflow, you will see an icon at the top with a person and a box with a plus sign over it. Snapchat also this week released a similar tool which lets users create and send AI-generated images, though that is part of their paid subscription. Earlier this week, we reported on the Pew Center's recent study of where American teens spend their time online. One platform we didn't mention, just because it was quite low in the rankings, is BeReal. BeReal is sort of like Instagram, but tries to be more authentic and get away from the packaged and polished images on Meta's app. According to that report, 13% of American

teens aged 13 to 17 say they use BeReal. This week, the company added live photos. The app will now capture a second or two before you actually take the photo, so you end up with a tiny video which is viewable by long-pressing the image. They're also leaning into the trend toward group sharing, adding group chats to the app. Users can only have two of these groups active at any one time, again forcing people to be choosy about where and how they spend their time. And they're finally letting people tag friends in posts and repost images that they're tagged in. Be Real says it has 25 million daily active users. Quoting social media today, quote, 25 million daily app users is a solid engaged base. It's a 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. 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. Adobe is in trouble with American regulators over its policies around canceling its software subscriptions. Apparently, it's been in talks with the Federal Trade Commission for about a year and

a half on this, but only recently disclosed it, saying there could be a settlement soon which could cost the money, quote, significant monetary costs or penalties. Quoting Fortune, quote, users of Adobe programs, including Photoshop and Premiere, have long complained about the expense of canceling a subscription, which can cost more than $700 annually for individuals. Subscribers must cancel within two weeks of buying a subscription to receive a full refund. Otherwise, they incur a prorated penalty. Some other digital services like Spotify and Netflix don't charge a cancellation fee, unquote. The FTC has been trying to make digital subscriptions a little more consumer friendly.

They proposed a rule earlier this year that it must be as easy to cancel as it is to sign up. Adobe is also trying to mend fences with British regulators over its proposed $20 billion acquisition of the design tool Figma. And finally, Dropbox is finding itself in hot water this week after it was discovered it was sharing its customers' data with a third-party provider. That provider is OpenAI, and the sharing happened if users used any of Dropbox's AI tools. Dropbox doesn't make any of their own tools, so they're basically renting the tech from OpenAI. So, of course, to use your company's documents with AI, they would need to send the data over

there. The problem is that it wasn't particularly clear that was happening and the consent toggle was switched on by default. So if your company uses Dropbox and any of your people on the account did anything with its new AI tools, it's likely that your data is now with OpenAI. Dropbox says it believes data sent there

isn't used for training, though of course that's second-hand information. If you want to turn it all off, go to your account icon in the top right, click Settings, choose the tab called Third-Part, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, You can sign up by tapping the link in the show notes or going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter. I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. If my heart was a house, we can make it home.