Today in Digital Marketing - The Crash Heard Around the World

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, it was the crash heard around the world, Be protected. Be Zen. the new key to targeting. And Black Friday starts now. It's Monday, October 4th, 2021. Happy National Day of Chilean music. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. And here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing episode 476. I'm back. I have some updates about the future of this podcast, but we will chat about that at the end of the show. First, let us start with the elephant in the room. Facebook's entire platform was down today.

Starting point is 00:01:11 Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, even their team platform, Workspace, and apparently all their email services too, meaning even internal employees couldn't email each other. Late this afternoon, the New York Times reported that the access badges that Facebook employees use to gain access to their offices also weren't working. Is it possible that the reason this outage has lasted as long as it has is because Facebook's engineers can't physically get into the buildings to fix it all? As far as web analysts can tell, the company's DNS records got withdrawn this morning from the global routing tables. One of the funnier side effects of this, with the domains essentially no longer existing on the internet, the various Whois sites started listing the domains like Facebook.com as available for sale. So what happened? You do have to wonder if

Starting point is 00:02:02 there's any connection to the Wall Street Journal's reporting today of a whistleblower saying Facebook allows hate and misinformation for profit. In fact, the platform went down the very moment a Facebook rep went live on TV news to defend the platform. But it is unlikely to be a hack. Security expert Brian Krebs this afternoon published a review of what's known so far and said this was caused by someone at Facebook. At 11.39 Eastern this morning, this person updated the company's border gateway protocol records. This is how ISPs tell each other which path is the most efficient for routers to shuffle data around. Quoting Brian, in simpler terms, sometime this morning, Facebook took away the map telling the world's computers how to find its various online properties.

Starting point is 00:02:46 As a result, when one types facebook.com into a web browser, the browser has no idea where to find facebook.com and so returns an error page, unquote. Since Facebook manages those records internally, this was either an inside job by a disgruntled employee or, more likely, an accident of colossal proportions. How is this affecting digital marketers? Well, if you wanted to get any data from Facebook or through its API, you're not going to get anything. Of course, you can't post anything, do anything with ads, and so on. On the bright side, with the platform being offline, at least you know your ads aren't being served and charged to you.

Starting point is 00:03:27 More than anything, I think we should all consider this a wake-up call to diversify our media buying and not rely on a single platform. I think the best story here is how brands started jumping in to capitalize on this. After the crash, Twitter's official account tweeted, Hello, literally everyone. That was replied to by hundreds of brands, including McDonald's, which said, hi, what can I get you? Even Instagram's Twitter account replied, saying, hi and happy Monday, followed by an emoji of a face looking very queasy. Next time you're meeting with your agency and your rep asks if you want to do some speedbag,

Starting point is 00:04:09 not to worry, they're not offering you a drug. Speedbag is the name of a new kind of viral listening tool developed by the creative agency Mullenlo. In essence, it's an audience building tool that pulls data from tweets. They've built about 100 cohorts like sneakerheads, art appreciators, status chasers, outdoor adventurers, and say that their team can pitch messaging to influencers within each niche and have it go live within an hour. In fact, it happens so fast, the agency says clients should be prepared to review tweets and give approvals via text messaging apps. The cohorts are apparently built by tracking

Starting point is 00:04:45 keywords and jargon a specific subculture might use. Speedbag then shows trending messages ranked within that group by engagement rate, in theory giving brands a way to jump in on something before the others do. They say tweets inspired by the tool have an 88% higher average engagement per post and 53% higher average impressions per post compared to regular brand posts. They did not share pricing. We'll file this under who the hell asked for this. Google is testing a new feature that will show your web visitors links to your competitors while those visitors are on your website. The feature, still only being tested by a handful of people,

Starting point is 00:05:29 is a new button in the Chrome browser that will show up after someone visits a page from a Google result. Click that button, a side panel appears that shows other related searches that the visitor could have clicked. So in other words, it's showing more or less the previous search result. But given that it's in a side panel, this shows up on websites other than Google. Naturally, this is likely to show websites that compete with yours. I suppose in Google's mind, this is to remove the need to click a back button to return to the search results.

Starting point is 00:06:00 So you might think, well, good thing people are moving a little bit to alternative search engines like Brave and DuckDuckGo. Well, haha, joke's on you. Google says this tool is search engine agnostic and will work with whatever the user's default search engine is set to. Who's in the test? Developers for now. The feature has started to roll out to the Chrome OS dev channel. Every year happens earlier and earlier. Those Black Friday sales used to be on, well, Black Friday.

Starting point is 00:06:32 Then some jackass decided they'd call it Black Friday week. It started on the previous Monday. So then all of us had to follow suit. But will this soon be Black Friday month? Even though it's not actually in the same month as Black Friday, actually, it's already happening. Google today said it will start offering what it calls Black Friday worthy deals starting today. The discounts apply to the most popular on Black Friday, electronics and fashion. It's also going to do a holiday beauty hall event starting today until the 25th.

Starting point is 00:07:11 In case you don't follow this nonsense closely, Black Friday doesn't actually happen for another month and a half. It's on November 26th this year. It's not just Amazon. Target said today it's hosting something it calls Deal Days between October 10th and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. IPG's marketing intelligence company says it's found the key to marketing data past the cookiepocalypse. And the key is spelled K-I-I.

Starting point is 00:08:01 It stands for Kineso Intelligent Identity. It's a marketing identity tool that IPG says can connect people's identities across both the open web and even inside walled gardens, like the ecospheres of Apple and Google. The company says it can improve relevant campaign reach by 20% because they're able to match targets better. Their CRO said, quote, while brands are spending billions of dollars on technology to ensure addressability ahead of the demise of the third-party cookie, no approach has been able to connect identity across all doors of the marketing ecosystem. Rather than merging all channels into one integrated firehose, Key unlocks the borders between media paid and direct mail in a channel agnostic way, unquote. The company says Key can take in a brand's first-party CRM data and map it to their own Key identifiers,

Starting point is 00:08:51 reducing the costs associated with third-party onboarders and eliminating activation minimums. Key is currently available in the US, with planned expansion to the UK, Australia, Germany, and Canada and more in 2022. A big update to YouTube's ad placement options just in time for Black Friday and all of the preceding Black Friday nonsense. As of today, the company is expanding video action campaigns to connected TVs, sometimes called CTV. That's the industry term for everything from watching a YouTube video on a smart TV to its Xbox app and so on. You might think that's not a lot of

Starting point is 00:09:33 people, but you'd be wrong. The company says about a quarter of people logged into YouTube are watching on regular TV sets. So here's how it'll work. When a viewer sees a video action campaign on their TV, they are invited through a URL at the bottom of their screen to continue shopping on the brand website visits, signups, purchases, and other types of conversions. Video action campaigns on TV screens are now available globally through Google Ads. If you run marketing for a brand that gets leads online but closes deals offline, Google has a new tool that can help out. And it's based on the increasingly important first-party data. It's called the OCI Helper tool. OCI standing for Offline Conversion Import. It lets you bring in data about sales you've done outside of a digital ad platform, like at a till or a register. This, of course,

Starting point is 00:10:40 is first-party data since it's customers of yours buying directly from you. To get started, you'll go to ocihelper.withgoogle.com and then answer a few questions to confirm your account's compatibility, tracking solutions, lead to sales journey, and the team that will help you with implementation. Once you've assigned team members for each role in the process, OCI Helper will guide them in the process. There is some speculation that Google had a massive search ranking algorithm update over the weekend. SE Roundtable.com says the SEO tools that it uses to track volatility in the algorithm don't usually show the level of activity it saw this past weekend, unless it's from a confirmed core up. Moz.com reports their stats as weather. They were at 101 degrees. Advanced web ranking was at the top of its chart. AccuRanker was the highest that SE Roundtable has ever seen. SEMrush spiked to 9.2 and so on. So far, much of the discussion in SEO spaces claims that traffic to US websites are off by around 30%.

Starting point is 00:11:46 No word from Google on what might be causing the changes. And finally, a listener has a classified ad for you. WTWH Media is hiring a digital marketing specialist. The ideal candidate must have two plus years of experience in social media account management. The candidate must have advanced knowledge and understanding of the digital marketing landscape, tools, emerging trends, and best practices. For additional information, visit our site, WTWHmedia.com. And if you'd like to reach thousands of digital marketers, our classifieds are only 20 bucks.

Starting point is 00:12:25 Check the link in the episode notes. And our thanks to Tyler from Duo Plus Marketing in Hamilton, New Zealand, who reviewed the show, saying, Such valuable and up-to-date news for our industry. It's fair to say that you have become a staple part of my morning routine for the last two years. Either when I commute to the office or work from my desk at home, I've even managed to get some of my co-workers to tune in, unquote. We do try hard to make this a good use of your time. Short, punchy, no rambling. Well, not a lot of rambling.

Starting point is 00:12:51 And if you find this valuable, we'd really appreciate it if you'd take a minute to rate and review the podcast. We've made it easier for you than you think. There is a link in this episode notes that will take you right to the review page of your app. Yes, I'm back after a week's holiday. We did indeed go camping. It went better than our first attempt 10 years

Starting point is 00:13:12 ago. Not sure sleeping in the back of the SUV will continue, but I'm certain we'll do more camping. I mean, what's not to love about campfires in a rainforest? There are some pictures on my Twitter account. If you're curious, link in the episode notes. Also, you may remember we were hiring an associate producer. We have now found that person, and she starts two weeks from today.

Starting point is 00:13:29 In case you're wondering, it was LinkedIn that ended up introducing us to Steph. We spent $450 on a LinkedIn job post. Even though it was only seen 273 times for that budget, we ended up with 27 applicants. So basically a 10% conversion rate. Steph will be helping us add even more coverage of the digital marketing space for you. We have plans for more regular weekend editions with marketing experts. We're also planning a premium podcast feed that will be ad-free and contain at least

Starting point is 00:13:57 30% more stories each day and some other surprises as well. All right, talk to you tomorrow. I'm running overtime Locked into overdrive Spinning in circles now I'm racing to the other side No need to turn it down Let's step it up And we won't stop moving No, we won't stop now

Starting point is 00:14:16 Don't stop moving Don't stop now Don't stop moving Don't stop now Don't stop moving Don't stop now

Today in Digital Marketing - The Crash Heard Around the World

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