Today in Digital Marketing - The Billboards That Speak From the Grave

Starting point is 00:00:00 It's Monday, October 17th. I'm Todd Maffin. Today, 15 billion and counting and Meta's virtual worlds are ghost towns. Also, California tightens the screws on marketing data. Pinterest adds a conversions API. TikTok might soon become a podcast app too. And the digital billboards that speak to you from the afterlife. Here's what you missed today, Digital Marketing. Some damning numbers from the Wall Street Journal on what many marketers thought would be the next

Starting point is 00:00:28 big thing, the metaverse. As soon as the words slipped past Mark Zuckerberg's lips, analysts and marketers alike began digging in. The obligatory information sales guys showed up with their I made millions on the metaverse, here's how courses, companies started announcing hires of chief metaverse officers, and people who thought themselves prognosticators bought a VR headset and dove headfirst into Meta's new virtual worlds. It's been almost a year now since Meta's big announcement, and with $15 billion spent in development, how's it going? Not well, quoting the journal.

Starting point is 00:01:06 Meta initially set a goal of reaching 500,000 monthly active users for Horizon Worlds by the end of this year, but in recent weeks revised that figure to 280,000. The current tally is less than 200,000. Most visitors to Horizon generally don't return to the app after the first month, and the user base has steadily declined since the spring. Horizon is currently reaching less than the population of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, unquote. Ouch. Did you really have to do them like that? According to internal numbers reviewed by the journal, only 9% of worlds on the platform are ever visited by at least 50 people. Most are never visited. On the marketing side, it's hard to know what Meta's plans are here. Truth be told, Meta's probably not sure themselves what it'll all look like.

Starting point is 00:01:56 Certainly there won't be interruptive placements like interstitials, but you might be able to buy virtual billboards that people walk their avatar past, or maybe glide past since they're still having trouble with legs. A strange thing to be stuck on, by the way, considering virtual worlds like Second Life and VR Chats have had walking avatars since they launched years ago. For its part, Meta responded to the journal's reporting, saying their efforts were always intended to be a multi-year project and they still think it's the future of computing.

Starting point is 00:02:27 On the day of the big Metaverse announcement about a year ago, Meta's shares were at about $317. Today, they're trading at about $134. So while Zuckerberg's version of a virtual world struggles, one is doing quite well, thank you very much. And it's beginning to attract big attention from marketers and media buyers. That platform started out as a kind of game engine where people could build simple Minecraft-like games for kids. It's called Roblox, and some big brands are coming on board, even those not targeting kids at all. Take the world that's attracted more than 2 million users. There's a movie night, two mini-games,

Starting point is 00:03:11 winners of those games get branded clothing for their avatar to wear. That brand? Invisalign. Yes, the dental company. To give you a message of the message integration, one of the mini-games requires users to eat all of the snack options displayed, specifically popcorn, corn on the cob, and gum, all of which are off-limits to people with traditional braces. They also paired the effort with some influencer marketing, hiring a couple of popular creators to chat about their experiences with the product. Roblox says it gets more than 43 million daily active users, each of whom spend an average of 2.6 hours there. About two-thirds of its user base is under 16. Only 14% are over 25. Quoting Marketing Dive, for Invisalign, the age demographic

Starting point is 00:03:56 posed a bit of a challenge. Those users generally aren't the ones making purchasing decisions when it comes to orthodontics, but they do have influence over becoming users of Invisalign. Another big privacy deadline looms. Starting January 1st, the California Privacy Rights Act will take effect. Like most similar legislation, it applies to your brand's marketing efforts, even if you're not based in California. It applies to anyone marketing to California residents, which means if you're doing a broad buy of all of the U.S., you'll need to know and abide by this law. And if you're thinking to yourself, wait a minute, didn't this just happen a couple of Januaries ago? Yes, it did. Consider this an expansion pack to the main game or a DLC

Starting point is 00:04:41 if you're a gamer. The current law applies to customer data that is sold by one organization to another. This new add-on law goes beyond the sale of that data to regulate any data sharing, whether or not any money is exchanged. Under this new CPRA, any company that collects consumer data will have to disclose what they're collecting and whether it is sold or shared for the purpose of advertising. You also have to give consumers the're collecting and whether it is sold or shared for the purpose of advertising. You also have to give consumers the ability to opt out of that sharing. There are similar laws in Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah. So all that to say, if you haven't done a privacy audit and put those tools on your site, now is a good time to do so.

Starting point is 00:05:24 When Twitter announced it would finally let us edit tweets, we all went through a kind of stages of grief phase. First, oh my god, finally, tweet editing. Then, oh, only the paying subscribers get to test it? Okay. And then, here it comes, we're rolling it out. And finally, oh, you're only rolling it out to subscribers. Twitter, in case you didn't know, has an optional subscription plan called Twitter Blue, which adds a handful of extra features like better bookmarking, easier article reading, and so on. And they threw tweet editing in there as well, meaning that if you

Starting point is 00:05:56 wanted that, you had to pay up. Also, it wasn't the tweet editing we all dreamed of. You can only edit a tweet a handful of times, and you only have 30 minutes from the initial tweet to do it. Still, it's better than we had before. So how is this whole pay for editing thing going? Apparently not great. New numbers from SensorTower shows that the addition of editing hasn't had any significant effect on the company's incoming revenue based on overall app ranking data. Quoting socialmediatoday.com, one revenue increase came on October 9th, where Twitter went up several ranking spots in the US, which does point to a fairly significant shift

Starting point is 00:06:31 in users paying money in the app. But since then, it's largely regressed to the mean once again, which could suggest that the initial interest in tweet editing hasn't driven any major uptick in Twitter Blue adoption. Twitter seems fairly confident that it would, even raising the price of Twitter Blue back in July, seemingly in preparation for the arrival of tweet editing, which, given that it has been the most requested social platform update arguably ever, should have driven more interest in its subscription offering, unquote.

Starting point is 00:07:00 It should be noted that Sensor Tower measures comparative app rankings, so we don't know the absolute numbers. Twitter declined to share those real numbers with social media today. Again, quoting them, In some ways, it feels like the hype around tweet editing has been overblown, due solely to Twitter's reluctance to add it in. There's no real major impact of adding an editing option. Every other social media platform has offered edit tools for years with no major issues or concerns. But Twitter's resistance to providing such has made it a bigger deal than it

Starting point is 00:07:30 probably is just because it wasn't there. And making minor typos and tweets is annoying. I suspect most people have already lost interest, as it's really not the revolutionary update that years of debate and campaigning had built it up to be, unquote. One sort of funny side note to this whole escapade, in text messages to Elon Musk that surfaced during his lawsuit with Twitter, investor Jason Calacanis told Musk Twitter Blue was, quote, an insane piece of shit, adding, quote, these dipshits spent a year on Twitter Blue to give people exactly nothing what they want, unquote. By the way, Calacanis has since signed up for Twitter Blue and has said very nice things about tweet editing.

Starting point is 00:08:21 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. Pinterest is rolling out a new API for conversions. They say early results showed improvements of 14% in the cost per action for optimized CPM campaigns when tags and the new API were used together and a 36% average increase in attributed conversion volume.

Starting point is 00:09:03 Pinterest says the new tool set was most frequently used for lower funnel actions like checkouts. And some of their early brand testers also used it to collect data on how effective it might be on higher funnel actions like add to cart and page visits. The new API will have direct hooks for Google Tag Manager and Shopify. If you are a developer or have them on your team,

Starting point is 00:09:22 Pinterest is doing a special live training this Thursday about all changes to its API. It's a big, ugly, long Zoom link, but we have created a short link for you if you want to attend. It's b.link slash Pinterest API. Also, they've added a new widget on the Trends homepage that lets marketers see what's been trending with their engaged users and followers over the past 90 days. You can also now filter that by demographic, place, time and topic. The company claims 400 million users. All right, and that will bring us to the lightning round.

Starting point is 00:09:57 TikTok appears to be getting into the podcast game. Pod News reports that RSS scrapers are hitting podcast feeds coming from IP addresses that lead back to TikTok. Those scrapers also identify themselves as GoHTTPClient, which is the default identifier used in the Go programming language, which TikTok developers use. Parler, the Twitter clone popular among right-wing political types, has sold itself to, wait for it, Kanye West. Apparently he's buying the whole thing. The deal expected to close this quarter. Wait for it. French word for speak, but let's let them have their fun. DoorDash has expanded its self-serve ad platform, mostly used by CPG brands. There's now third-party platform management and API integrations. Also, they're expanding their self-service sponsored listing offering to Canada and Australia. DoorDash claims 25 million monthly active users. TikTok has made some changes

Starting point is 00:11:01 to its live streaming policies, moving the age one's able to start alive from 16 to 18. This matches the age at which people can begin collecting tips, which can be cashed out into real money. And Google, God, this bell is just getting worse and worse. Never mind. Google Analytics has announced a nice little update. You can now set a daily, weekly or monthly schedule for all data import types that will retrieve data from any FTP server of your choosing. This is available now in your existing data import configuration page. You will still be able to manually import a file on demand if you prefer. And finally,

Starting point is 00:11:38 is this a brilliant idea for an activation or creepy AF? I cannot decide. Netflix has some billboards up in Times Square and Los Angeles promoting a film it's carrying. The film is called Mr. Harrigan's Phone. It's a Stephen King adaptation. Basically, a teenager befriends an elderly man. The two text each other. Old man dies. Teen leaves voicemail on old man's phone, knowing he's passed away, but using it as a kind of therapy. Suddenly, old man's ghost or spirit or something starts helping the kid from beyond the grave. That's the film. The billboards are completely different. One is just a text message bubble with the letters CCCST shown. But get close enough to the billboard and you'll get an airdrop request on your phone. Those requests show an image of that billboard

Starting point is 00:12:26 and tell the recipients to look at their text messages. The messages show as being sent from Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, the fictional location where Mr. Harrigan is laid to rest. The agency behind the campaign said they didn't really expect people to actually accept the airdrop file transfer request. They just wanted people to look at their phones. But just over 200 people actually did accept the file transfer request. And if you walked by, saw the request on your phone,

Starting point is 00:12:52 cancelled it, and then went to Google to find out what the hell that was all about, the agency had bought keywords on Google to redirect confused recipients to more information about the film, which is currently the second most popular English-language film on Netflix since its release. They also had an activation in Madison Square Park over the weekend called Bury Your Phone. There, actors dressed as employees for the fictional Mr. Harrigan's phone burial service accepted old phones in exchange for a phone death certificate and a free month of Netflix. Nothing to say here. Had a restful and fairly boring weekend, which actually I kind of liked.

Starting point is 00:13:38 Hope you had a good one too. I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - The Billboards That Speak From the Grave

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.