Today in Digital Marketing - The Consumer Buying Database You've Dreamed of Is Here

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Thursday, May 9th. Today, everything they've ever bought. Imagine using that to target people in your ads. Well, that time has come. Also, Threads plans to reveal your view counts. Pinterest adds a new certification. And the Apple ad that everyone seems to be mad about. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:32 Advertisers can now use Walmart's enormous trove of shopping data to more effectively reach people watching Disney Plus or Hulu, quoting The Verge. As part of the deal, Walmart advertisers will be able to match the retailer's shopping data with Disney's proprietary audience graph tools, helping them target audiences and measure data better. Data sets will be combined using clean room technology so that, theoretically, user data can't be shared with other external parties. At the same time, Disney will join Walmart's Partner Lab, whose members include TikTok, Roku, NBCUniversal, and other TV and social platforms.

Starting point is 00:01:02 Each company works with Walmart to test new ad formats and measurement, unquote. About 145 million people buy something at Walmart each week, either online or in-store, making it a formidable database of consumer brand preferences. So today's trivia question, which of the following is not a Walmart store format? Walmart Discount Store, Walmart Neighborhood Market, Walmart Mega Center, or Bud's Discount City? And I'm really sorry I forgot to give you the answer to the trivia question a couple of days ago. The question is, what was TikTok's Chinese sister app called

Starting point is 00:01:38 before it was renamed to Doyin? Most people in the newsletter guessed Video Star. The correct answer is A.me. TikTok has started automatically labeling AI-generated content from other platforms. Starting today, videos created with external tools like OpenAI's DALL-E 3 will feature an AI-generated tag. This is all part of TikTok's adoption of content credentials technology developed by a group co-founded by Microsoft and Adobe. TikTok already labels its own creations, but it only applies it as a tag on the media. It plans to extend this metadata system to its own AI effect soon. This metadata will travel with the content even when downloaded, letting other

Starting point is 00:02:25 platforms recognize and label the AI-generated material accordingly. The rollout did start today, but it might take a couple of weeks to get to all accounts. Threads will soon be exposing the view count of each of your brand's posts. This is something X has done for years, although X's owner Elon Musk keeps threatening to remove or hide those numbers from the public. Quoting The Verge, quote, as usual, it'll take some time before everyone gets this option. I'm not seeing it in my app or on the web just yet, but it'll be a welcome window into performance for influencers, businesses, and regular users. If nothing else, it's always nice to know

Starting point is 00:03:05 you're not just shouting into the void, unquote. To be fair, not everyone wants this. When view counts were added to Instagram sometime back, some creators there said it gave them a bit of anxiety knowing that everyone could see how well their posts performed or didn't. Threads now has more than 150 million monthly users. Blue Sky, another Twitter competitor, has been seeing falling usage over the last couple of months.

Starting point is 00:03:30 And Jack Dorsey, that was Twitter's co-founder, announced Sunday that he had left the Blue Sky board. In case you're thinking of making your Pinterest ad campaigns a little smarter, the company has added a new media Buyer Certification to its learning portal. Quoting the company, the Pinterest Media Buyer Certification exam measures and validates an individual's job-related knowledge and real-life Pinterest ad platform experience. It's designed to help marketers stand out across a competitive industry and get ahead in their career with a Pinterest standard of advertising excellence. Like most of these platform certificates, it does have an exam.

Starting point is 00:04:09 It includes 60 questions. Once you launch it, you'll be given an hour and a half to complete it and you won't be able to click in or out of the experience once you start. So it has to be completed in one sitting. You need to achieve a 70% score in order to pass. If you don't pass, you have to wait 14 days until you are able to retake the exam. Pinterest says it's meant for people with two to five years of media buying experience, including at least one or two years specifically using Pinterest's ad tools. Currently, Pinterest has about 518 million monthly active users. Revenues from podcast advertising slowed down last year, this after several back to back years of double digit growth. 2023 still saw growth, of course, but it only increased by

Starting point is 00:04:54 about 5% over the previous year. This according to new data released today by the IAB. The slowdown was attributed to last year's somewhat challenging ad climate that particularly affected mid-tier companies. An IAB executive said there's no cause for concern, though. This year is already showing revenue bouncing back. Breaking down popularity by genre, the number of comedy podcasts out there grew by 4% in the last year. Sports is the second most popular genre, though its share went down from 15% in 2022 to 13% last year. The IAB said more than a quarter of podcast revenues were in the other genre category. These are often small categories, but are so highly targeted that they are quite appealing to advertisers who need to

Starting point is 00:05:38 reach a niche audience affordably. LinkedIn has provided a new overview of the AI landscape and how the tech is being used in the workforce, quoting social media today. The report notes that the use of generative AI has nearly doubled in the last six months, with 75% of knowledge workers now using AI tools in their regular process. That's not overly surprising. But the real test is how helpful these tools can be and what people are actually using them for. A worker using ChatGPT once every now and then to come up with an idea isn't a major shift, but referring to an AI bot every day is significant,

Starting point is 00:06:18 and that context is somewhat missed by this question. And even so, 75% is a very high number, which underlines the importance of AI tools and their potential in the modern workforce. Yet at the same time, 53% of people who use AI at work also worry that using it on important work tasks could make them look replaceable, unquote.

Starting point is 00:06:41 A look at the demographics of AI usage shows the younger generation adopting it more willingly, Gen Z at 75% usage, but boomers at the bottom of the list are still quite high at 73%. And finally, it's the ad that everyone is talking about. Apple's latest ad for its thinner iPads is getting a lot of backlash in the places that social media people hang out in. Sometimes when I'm down and all alone All I ever need is you The ad shows a bunch of tools used to make creative things. A piano, some paint, sculpting clay, a guitar.

Starting point is 00:07:21 They all get crushed by this giant industrial machine. At the end, the machine lifts up, and what's left is a thin iPad. The most powerful iPad ever is also the thinnest. I guess the idea being, we compressed all your creative tools into something really thin. It is on par creatively with Apple's previous ads, but this time, not everyone loves it.

Starting point is 00:07:43 Some people are saying the ad is hostile to art. Quoting Marketing Dive, the video has been painted as the anti-1984, referencing an iconic Apple commercial that showed people freed from an Orwellian dystopia as a sledgehammer tossed by the protagonist smashes the screen of their oppressor. That ad is considered one of the best TV ads of all time. But critics of the new iPad Pro spot conversely see a dystopian vision brought to life as a variety of tangible art objects are violently crushed into a single piece of technology. Many creators and artists rely on Apple's products for works, adding a sense of betrayal to some of their sentiments, unquote.

Starting point is 00:08:24 One person wrote on social media, It is a heartbreaking, uncomfortable, egotistic advertisement. When I see this result, I'm ashamed to have been buying Apple products for 19 years. Apple needs a hit. And quick, the company's second quarter had the sharpest drop-off in quarterly iPhone sales in years, and its expensive VR headset has had a lukewarm response from the market. Tomorrow is the last day to take advantage of our 50% off sale on the Premium Podcast. You get no ads in it. You get skip-to-story audio chapters.

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Today in Digital Marketing - The Consumer Buying Database You've Dreamed of Is Here

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