Today in Digital Marketing - The Calm Before the Election Storm

Starting point is 00:00:00 It's Friday, November 1st. Today, brands take on election marketing. A Bezos-backed startup sets its sights on Amazon, while ChatGPT takes on Google with Search. I'm Steph Gunn sitting in for Todd Maffin. That's ahead, today in Digital Marketing. With the U.S. presidential election just days away, some agencies are recommending brands pause campaigns until after the election, while others are scaling back on major ad pushes and preparing post-election strategies depending on the outcome. Not all brands plan to go completely silent. According to Sprout Social, three out of four U.S. consumers now rely on social media as their main source for election news, with more Americans turning to social media for political updates. Brands risk missing valuable engagement if they go dark around elections. Marketers also have to be conscious

Starting point is 00:00:56 of ad costs on major platforms, as political ad spend has driven up costs on platforms like Meta and YouTube. Political ads on YouTube alone exceeded more than $2.5 million daily in October. To navigate this, the digital agency Kepler suggests brands reduce ad spend until after the election, when costs are expected to ease and the holiday shopping season picks up. Marketers are also preparing for different election outcomes. Social agency Monks advises that brands could capitalize on optimism if Harris wins, while a Trump win may require more cautious engagement. Perplexity, the search engine startup backed by Jeff Bezos, is gearing up to challenge his

Starting point is 00:01:40 former empire, Amazon, by entering the e-commerce space. The company is beta testing its latest feature, ProShop, which lets shoppers research and buy products from various merchants directly on Perplexity, according to an internal email obtained by media. Here's how it works. While browsing, users will notice a Buy with Pro option for eligible items. Shoppers will enter their billing and shipping information to complete their order. The Pro Shop also promises free shipping on all purchases. Open AI just took a swing at Google with the broad launch of ChatGPT Search yesterday. Like any search engine, it provides information and images from the web, including sports scores, news, stock quotes, and so on. It also includes links to relevant sources and lets users ask follow-up questions

Starting point is 00:02:30 to refine their search. ChatGPT will automatically search the web based on user queries, or users can manually choose to search by clicking the new web search icon. Responses have both inline and sidebar citations, sourced from news publishers and other data sources the platform has licensing deals with. OpenAI has also released a browser extension to make ChatGPT search the default search engine in Chrome. Plus, and team users will be the first to get it on mobile and web. A couple of weeks after that, enterprise and educational customers will get it, followed by free users. Even the cost of brand safety isn't safe from inflation. Adweek reported yesterday that Integral Ad Science, which sells brand safety and ad

Starting point is 00:03:17 verification tools to advertisers, is raising its prices, according to several sources. Some clients of Yahoo's demand-side platform received in-platform notifications about the price increase. The company typically charges on a per-CPM basis, meaning for every 1,000 impressions the company's tech reviews, clients pay cents on the dollar. Now, Integral AdScience is reportedly raising prices for various services by one to three cents. The new prices are expected to go into effect today. Meta reported its third quarter results this week. The good news, the company beat revenue expectations. The bad news, ad sales have slowed. Meta reported $40.5 billion in revenue,

Starting point is 00:04:03 marking a nearly 20% year-over-year increase that edged past Wall Street's expectations of $40.3 billion. Advertising accounted for 96% of Q3 revenue, though that's a slight decline from 97% in the previous quarter. Net income reached a record $15.7 billion, a 35% year-over-year increase. User engagement also showed positive signs, with Meta's platforms generating 3.3 billion average daily active users in September 2024, up 5% from the previous year. Looking ahead, the company forecasts revenue could climb up to $48 billion in the fourth quarter, in line with analyst expectations.

Starting point is 00:04:53 A couple of updates from Google Ads. First, the platform is rolling out a new conversion report that lets advertisers analyze conversions, whether they are lead or sales-oriented. To find it, you can navigate to Goals, then Conversions, then Summary, where you'll see two tabs, Sales and Leads. In other news, Google Ads chatbot is facing some challenges. As Google launches its conversational ad feature, advertisers are seeing the chat function more often, though sometimes it's a bit tongue-tied. Some users have reported the bot responding with nothing, no words, just a void of complete emptiness. Google confirmed that it is due to a bug and they're working on a fix. Either that or the robot overlords have had enough of our shit. Not much going on for me this weekend. We had a pretty busy week with Halloween being

Starting point is 00:05:41 yesterday. We actually took our one-year-old out trick-or-treating for the very first time, and I forgot how much fun it is to go trick-or-treating. She loved it. She mostly just wanted to go into everyone's house, which was adorable and also mildly concerning. Today in Digital Marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Snu-Namug First Nation on Vancouver Island. Our associate producer is me, Steph Gunn. Our production coordinator is Sarah Gilt. Ad coordination by Red Circle. And our esteemed VP of AI whispering and conversational design is Mark Blevis. Thanks for listening.

Starting point is 00:06:18 Todd is away on Monday as well, so I will talk to you Monday. I hope you have a great weekend. 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. 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.C-A.

Today in Digital Marketing - The Calm Before the Election Storm

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