Today in Digital Marketing - The Ad Campaign You Can't Tell Your Mom About

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 big change to Google Maps that might affect local businesses. Be protected. Be Zen. campaign you cannot tell your mother about. It's Thursday, May 20th, 2021. Happy birthday, Mark Blevis. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing and a special note to parents. This episode contains some profanity and acknowledges the existence of websites where people go to look at naked people. You've probably heard how viral TikTok is, how easy it is to amass thousands of followers in a short amount of time. I can vote for this. I've had my Twitter account for more than 14 years.

Starting point is 00:01:11 It has 10,000 followers. But on TikTok, which I started basically in January, it's passed 34,000. And one very clever user decided to highlight this virality by creating a TikTok account for a completely random person and trying to get it to go viral without the person even realizing this was happening for them. This is Brianna from McDonald's and she still has no idea that this account is actually for her. We got her account from zero. So the person he picked, Brianna, who works at the drive-thru of a McDonald's close to him, and indeed, after 72 hours, the account was up to 180,000 followers. All of them, presumably, like me, curious to know how Brianna from McDonald's would react when she was handed control over a huge account. Well, that handover happened live today, and you'll hear about how it went later in today's episode.

Starting point is 00:02:10 There's a podcast out there called The Program. It's a fiction series set in a world where money, state, and God got fused together into a single entity. The producers of that show wanted to promote it, but they didn't want to use Facebook, ethical reasons, or Reddit, they were getting lots of organic traction there already, so, you know, why pay for it? Or Twitter, which had embarrassingly low engagement levels on the podcast tweets. So they turned to MindGeek. You might not recognize the brand, but MindGeek is actually the owner of Pornhub, RedTube, YouPorn, XTube, and a bunch of other adult sites.

Starting point is 00:02:45 So how did the ad campaign do? Kind of a mixed bag, really. The first campaign was a pop-up ad banner with the show's logo and a punny headline. The back end of these sites, sorry, uses their own ads manager called Traffic Junkie. And it's basically what you'd see on all the other platforms. A dashboard, campaign list, rules, charts, that sort of thing. They tested it in Canada only with a paltry $10 budget, got about 35,000 impressions for that and 231 clicks. So their click-through was 0.66%, which the ad support people told them was actually quite good for their network. They consider anything above 0.4% good. When the show's producers went into Google Analytics,

Starting point is 00:03:26 they discovered the bad news, extremely high bounce rates, like 94%. That said, they did notice their podcast download numbers go up, but there's not really any way to correlate that side of the equation. Anyway, the full blog post is weird, but worth a read. It's at programaudioseries.com slash mindgeek dash campaign, and it covers the results from a bunch of other creative that they tested,

Starting point is 00:03:52 including an image of Jesus Christ and a photo of the former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher with the headline, Meet the MILF that screwed the most people in history. As for me, wrote the producers in their post, having done porn, we might just do LinkedIn next. Just when you think you've got Google Local SEO figured out, comes word that the Maps experience your prospects see might change radically.

Starting point is 00:04:24 Google's I.O IO event continued yesterday. It came with a surprise. Google Maps will soon begin to change the search results people get based on the time of day. Google gave this example. Quote, if you live in New York and open up Maps at 8 a.m. on a weekday, we'll prominently feature nearby coffee shops instead of dinner spots. So you can start your day with Caffeine Fix.

Starting point is 00:04:48 And if you're on a weekend getaway, it'll be easier to spot local landmarks and tourist attractions right on the map, unquote. A reaction on Twitter has been mixed, one person saying, quote, My client has a shop and sells online. Are you saying that they will vanish off the map during the hours when the shop is not open to the public? That might kill the business off, unquote. And the best tweet reply? Cue the following SEO articles. 10 ways to make your business appear on Google Maps any time of day. 10 reasons your business just vanished from Google Maps. And 10 great alternatives to Google Maps.

Starting point is 00:05:30 All right, a bunch of Snapchat updates for you today. First, continuing the in-app e-commerce trend, they've partnered with the fashion site Poshmark to create an in-app store called Poshmark Mini. Users will be able to browse curated products, attend virtual shopping events, which they are calling Posh Parties, and, of course, buy products without ever leaving the app. This will be available in the US in the next few weeks. Second, they're launching a new app for people who make content on the platform.

Starting point is 00:05:54 It's called Story Studio and will help people create videos using more detailed tools. Judging from those tools, it's clear this is meant for their TikTok clone called Spotlight. It'll let you see what's trending, use sounds and music, add captions and stickers, and of course, remix popular content. This new app will only be on iOS at first at launch. And taking another page from TikTok, they will have a website for the Spotlight content coming soon so people can watch without needing the app. And finally, an interesting mashup within the Snap Map. Now, if you're not familiar with Snapchat's map, it is its own map inside the app, sort of like Google Maps, but it'll show you where your friends are. The coolest part, I think, actually, is this heat map that

Starting point is 00:06:34 shows you areas where a lot of snaps are being posted from. It's actually a really solid way to see what's happening at a concert or a protest or something. Anyway, this new map thing is called Layers, and it will allow brands to put things directly on the map. For example, the new Ticketmaster layer will let users sort through shows at nearby concert venues, then go directly to a new in-app shopping cart called Ticketmaster Mini to buy tickets. Sadly, you as the brand cannot just sign up and start doing this.

Starting point is 00:07:05 Snapchat is handpicking these new map integration partners. 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. Google today announced some new features for companies that are trying to promote mobile apps. First, and this is a little weird, but app campaigns can now run on desktop too. Until now, they've only been available on mobile

Starting point is 00:07:49 because, well, they're advertising mobile apps. But now, advertisers targeting Android users will be able to reach prospects on desktop too, the idea being if they like the app, they can send an install request from their desktop web browser to their phone. And, important to know, if you are one of these advertisers and your campaigns target Android phones, your campaigns will be automatically opted into desktop starting next month.

Starting point is 00:08:16 Also, event creation and modification will be possible within the Google Analytics interface. And to make things easier for advertisers to implement DeepLinks, Google has launched the DeepLink Validator, a tool that will validate DeepLinks for your entire Android app. The affiliate industry hasn't really changed much in the last, what, 10 years, 15? But soon there'll be a whole new category of products

Starting point is 00:08:44 available for you to collect commissions on, and those products are podcasts. Apple announced last month it'll let podcast producers create premium feeds, which they can charge subscriptions to. Now it's letting those producers offer an affiliate deal. It's part of their existing affiliate program called the Apple Services Performance Partner Program. That program already helps market other Apple services like TV and news. Quoting TechCrunch, when users convert by clicking through one of the links and subscribing

Starting point is 00:09:13 to a premium podcast, the partner will receive a one-time commission at 50% of the podcast subscription price after the subscriber accumulates their first month of paid service. So, for example, if a paid podcast was charging subscribers $5 per month, the commission would be $2.5. This commission would apply for every new subscriber that signed up through the affiliate channel, and there's no cap. Podcast creators can also use the affiliate links to promote their own paid programs, which would allow them to generate incremental revenue, unquote. The program will be available to anyone in the 170 countries and regions

Starting point is 00:09:51 where paid podcast subscriptions are available. If you've ever wanted that blue checkmark for your Twitter account, the company says it will open up applications again starting in a week or two. They paused it a couple of years back while they tweaked it all. Now all applications will be reviewed manually and will take up to a month to get your answer. To qualify for verifications, user must be in one of the six following categories, government, companies, brands, and organizations, news organizations and journalists, entertainment, sports and gaming, or activists, organizer, and other influential individuals.

Starting point is 00:10:27 Right now, only about 360,000 Twitter users have the coveted but mostly meaningless blue badge. All right, and back to that TikTok account that some guy got up to 180,000 followers all to hand the account over to some random person, in this case, a McDonald's worker named Brianna. Here is how it went today on the live stream when he walked into her McDonald's. 1.4 thousand in the live right now. Hey there, is Brianna here by any chance?

Starting point is 00:10:59 She's not here? No. She's not. I'm so sorry. She looks like really sick today, so she pulled off. So we made a TikTok account for her. I did the challenge, so I was trying to get a surgical bottle. She took the day off.

Starting point is 00:11:16 There were a thousand people on the live stream watching this. That's live television, friends. Even if it isn't television. Talk to you tomorrow. I'm falling in, falling in love

Today in Digital Marketing - The Ad Campaign You Can't Tell Your Mom About

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