Today in Digital Marketing - The Audio Ads That Listen To You

Episode Date: July 8, 2021

The surprising number of people who have opted in to iOS app tracking... A clever integration between e-commerce and credit cards... Why TikTok's entry into HR is actually brilliant... Facebook loses a senior executive — oh, and part of their policy documents... and Twitter's new brand awareness feature is pissing off a lot of consumers.Get each episode as a daily email newsletter (with images, videos, and links) — b.link/pod-newsletter ADVERTISING:- Ads: b.link/pod-ads- Classifieds: b.link/pod-classifieds- Brand Takeovers: b.link/pod-takeover JOIN THE COMMUNITY:- Slack: b.link/pod-slack- Discord: b.link/pod-discord- Podcast Perks: b.link/pod-perks ENJOYING THE SHOW?- Rate and review: b.link/pod-rate- Leave a voicemail: b.link/pod-voicemail FOLLOW TOD:- Twitter: b.link/pod-twitter- LinkedIn: b.link/pod-linkedin- TikTok: b.link/pod-tiktok Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin (b.link/pod-todsite) and produced by engageQ digital (b.link/pod-engageq). Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected, be Zen. Today, the surprising number of people Be protected. Be Zen. and part of their policy documents. And Twitter's new brand awareness feature is pissing off a lot of consumers. It's Thursday, July 8th, 2021. Happy Family Day, Ukraine. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. I started my career in radio in 1983.

I was 13. Good evening, I'm Phil Currier with the Dinner Report Sports. I'm Todd Maffin at the War Memorial Gymnasium. Good evening, I'm Monty Stewart. Back then, and honestly, even up until the 2000s, the way radio stations would track listenership was through diaries. Literally, paper diaries. A small segment of the population would be issued these journals, and they were asked to write down what radio station they were listening to.

Every hour of the day, every day, in 15-minute increments. Besides being quite the chore, it relied on people's memory. And it was critically important they remembered your station. Missing a couple of chunks would show up as reduced listening in the market, and that meant your ad rates would come down too. Good for advertisers, bad for the station. Then the industry moved on to electronic capture. Capture that didn't rely on memory, but instead of being issued a diary,

people were given a little gizmo to wear. It looked like a pager. And that gizmo's job was to always be listening for the sub-band signal every station broadcast, and logged what station the person was listening to. The people couldn't hear the signal, but these devices could. One of the big benefits with that was that it could capture when people were just exposed to a radio station, in addition to actively choosing to listen to it.

For instance, being at a gym or a sports bar. Now, this kind of listening technology is making its way into our world as marketers. A new tool by a company called AI Music can dynamically change the background audio of ads to match the music genres people are listening to at that time. The idea is to cut down on production time and make the ad match someone's particular music tastes. The guy who really likes hip-hop hears that kind of music in the ad, while the woman who's super into jazz will hear jazz. A test run with Dunkin' Donuts found engagement more than tripled when they tried this. The company calls these ads symphonic ads, and they are now available

in beta to agencies and trading desks that use AdsWiz's demand-side platform. It's been a couple of months now since Apple turned on that dreaded, hey, can this app track you prompt? So how many people have said sure, and how many people have said hell no? The attribution platform AppsFlyer has been tracking this and says currently the number of people who have permitted apps to track them is a staggering 48%. Quoting the company, out of the 25 million such instances we've included in the data set in the past week, 48% allowed tracking in the average app. Overall, the rate stands at 42% worldwide. It is important to remember that this rate is unrelated to attribution, which requires dual opt-in on both publisher and advertiser sides,

but rather only to pure consumer behavior with the prompt, unquote. They say only about 58% of the Apple user base has upgraded their devices to 14.5, which is where this prompt shows up. That's globally. It's about 68% in the U.S. and Germany. It's past 70% in Japan and South Korea. But remember, the timing of when the app pops up that prompt is up to the app's developer. And AppsFlyer says so far, only 37% of the apps they track have even bothered to pop that dialogue box up so far. Today's premium newsletter has a link to their full study, including comprehensive breakdowns for each country and vertical. So last couple of months, I've been using this budgeting site that connects to our bank

and credit card. This is not an ad, by the way, this is a story. It sounded like an ad, didn't it? And it downloads the transactions. And then I set up our budget categories like groceries, hobbies, charity, car payments, and the site will automatically categorize the purchases. So for instance, it knows now that when it sees country grocery or thrifty foods coming, it should apply that to the grocery budget. But one gap that it's got, one gap that everyone's got, is how to handle Amazon purchases. Amazon's the platform, not the category of product. So every month I look through the credit card statement and then log into Amazon and try to figure out what each purchase was so I can manually apply a category.

This Amazon purchase of a pride pin, that was a gift. This Amazon purchase of a sprinkler timer, that was for house maintenance. Well, this week, one credit card company announced it will make that easier. American Express will soon offer digital receipts to its U.S. card members who shop on Amazon. This means that Amazon will pass

not only the purchase price along to Amex, but also details about the product, the merchant, the order number, and even delivery details. Which means, of course, the order number, and even delivery details. Which means, of course, people who use this kind of budgeting tool will find it much easier to categorize things. I suppose it'll make it easier to suss out whether there's been fraud on your account. Can I just say this?

Finally? It seems like it's a no-brainer. Why it's taken this long is beyond me. Anyway, it's being rolled out right now in the U.S. Facebook this week admitted it accidentally banned an Instagram post criticizing solitary confinement because, I swear to God I'm not making this up, they had lost the policy that allowed it. This is coming out after the poster in question

appealed the post removal to Facebook's newish arm's length oversight board. The board said Facebook, quote, found that a piece of internal guidance on the dangerous individuals and organizations policy was inadvertently not transferred to a new review system in 2008, unquote. And quoting The Verge, the policy allows discussion on the conditions of confinement for individuals designated as dangerous, but the internal guidance was never made public to Facebook or Instagram users, and Facebook only realized it had dropped out of the moderation guidelines altogether when the user appealed.

Had the board not selected this case for review, the guidance would have remained unknown to content moderators, and a significant amount of expression in the public interest would have been removed, unquote. For the record, Facebook declined to comment on whether it thought that assessment was accurate. Or maybe they did prepare a comment, but lost it. They did restore the post that started this whole thing, but said it wasn't technically feasible to apply that decision retroactively. The oversight board says Facebook is reviewing its procedures on transferring policies and also double-checking to see if they've lost any others.

Is the next big human resources tool TikTok? It will be if TikTok has its way. We learned yesterday the company was testing a job application tool that let people apply with video resumes. Already on board in the test, Chipotle, Target, Shopify, a couple of dozen others. You can see for yourself, even if you're not on TikTok, they've set up a website at TikTokResumes.com. What most companies are doing is to produce a TikTok video to introduce the brand to would-be applicants. Like this one, Chipotle, which appears to have hired an influencer who used to work for them.

Hi, I'm Zara, and I'm a former Chipotle employee. And today we're heading back to my old workplace to make some guac, talk to some of my friends, and get the inside scoop of what it's like working Chipotle. Let's go. I jumped right into making guacamole because it was my favorite thing to do when I worked at Chipotle, and my skills were a little rusty, but I had to. What's interesting about this model is that unlike most other job application sites, even ones that accept videos, is the application videos aren't private. Users are encouraged, in fact, to post them directly to their public feed as part of the process. Which is kind of brilliant when you think about it. The brand gets extra views and perhaps a perception that everyone wants to work there.

The jobs are varied. Some, like Target and Great Clips, are looking for entry-level people. A yoga brand is hiring a social media manager to develop their TikTok strategy. All Recipes is looking for an on-camera host. And the WWE is actually using it to find wrestlers. The pilot lasts until the end of the month. Two new things over at Facebook to report on for us in the digital marketing world. First, they're prompting some users to follow specific topics like travel destinations, sports, gaming, and so on.

This, of course, copied directly from Twitter's version of this. The benefits to us should be obvious. It'll get more people into those general interest targeting buckets. We first saw this leak out actually back in April, but this week Facebook confirmed the test, saying, quote, so if you're watching a travel video, we could show ads for hotels and flights, unquote. And second, they've started putting little labels that read small business under the posts of brands that qualify.

It's not clear what qualifies as a small business in Facebook's mind. And this is really only in a very early test with a small group of U.S. businesses. 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. Twitter has started showing people fleets from profiles they don't follow. Fleets are Twitter's version of stories. This is, of course, a huge pain in the ass for users.

Why clog that real estate up with stories from accounts I don't care about? The answer to that question? Marketing, baby. This is potentially a new and valuable placement for brands to drop into. To its credit, I don't think Instagram does this. Yes, there are ads between stories, but I don't think I've seen those little story circles at the top come from anyone other than accounts I follow. Of course, Instagram being Instagram, I'm sure they'll copy this idea too. And these, should we call them bonus fleets, show up a little differently.

They have a small gray lightning bolt icon on the circles. How are users reacting? One fellow on Twitter said, this new thing where stories and fleets from people you don't follow are chilling at the top of the timeline where you can accidentally click on them is garbage juice. Lots in the lightning round today.

And we start with the fact that I think the word lightning should have an E in it because I keep spelling it that way. Somebody please make that happen. Fiji Simo, the team leader for Facebook's mobile app, is leaving the company. She's set to become the CEO of Instacart. This means the leaders of all of Facebook's major product organizations are now men. The e-commerce platform BigCommerce announced today it will integrate

Amazon's multi-channel fulfillment into its platform. It says the move will help retails offer quicker delivery times and lower fulfillment costs. A great free tool for podcast producers has launched. It's at loudness.info. You upload the MP3 of a recent episode and it will tell you your LUFS level. You should be at negative 16, by the way. Don't be a monster. Facebook has now confirmed it is using modeled data

on the seven-day click portion of the seven-day click one-day view attribution window. Depending on who you ask, the quality of this modeled data ranges from not bad to what the hell is this fantasy nonsense. It looks like Instagram is rolling out the ability for Reels to be shared. So far, it seems you can only share within the app,

so on the feed or on your profile. Yes, it's bad out there in media buying land. Everyone's numbers are down. It's not just you. DTC buyer David Herman said, this is the worst I've ever seen Facebook ads. UTMs are now showing 70% more sales in Google Analytics than what Facebook is reporting. And finally, bad at your job. Many of us that have lived in digital marketing for 10 plus years are baffled. It's insanely, insanely tough right now. And finally, we have Facebook Creative Hub. Actually,

use the music for this one. Use the music. Thank you. We have Facebook Creative Hub, Facebook Creator Studio, Facebook Business Suite, all three of which do mostly the same thing. Now a fourth! Please welcome to the ring, Facebook Creative Guidance Navigator. Actually, to be fair, this one's a little different. They're cards or infographics that I guess you're supposed to drop into a client report or a pitch deck. It's a little light on details. I actually tried to drill down to Instagram carousels, you know, probably the strongest format they have there right now. You couldn't find a single card for me. But anyway, it's there if you really want it. On yesterday's show, I gave my best valiant effort in pronouncing the names of two European fashion brands.

Needless to say, I butchered them. Luckily, listener Eva New sent in a voicemail with the correct pronunciations. The first one is Spanish, and it's Balenciaga. I don't speak Spanish, but I know that's how it's supposed to be pronounced. So Balenciaga. The second one is Italian and it's Bottega Veneta. So Balenciaga and Bottega Veneta. But don't worry, you're still cool. Ciao.

By the way, if you want to be on the show, you can use our voicemail too. Just go to todayindigital.com slash voicemail or tap the link in today's episode notes. You can record it right from your phone. Let's start it off this way. Tell me how Facebook buying has been for you in the last two weeks. So I've got this squad of about six people that I met in Overwatch last year. They're super fun. We have a private Discord together. It's hard to find teammates that don't blame you when you suck. Like last night, we lost

a match because I accidentally threw a healing orb into the enemy team instead of a damage orb. Everyone lost about 25 SR because of that. Anyway, apparently now we're going to try out in a league. I haven't had a chance to go to our Discord all day, but I've been seeing the notifications pop up.

I assume, of course, this will be bad for my mental health. So if I sound a little surly tomorrow, you'll know why. Talk to you then. Be the first in line. 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.

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