Today in Digital Marketing - The Facebook Ad Denial Bots are Here to Stay

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, don't expect those Facebook ad denial bots to go away. You're not going to believe Pepsi's next-level ad personalization. Google cancels a popular ad format, Spotify launches a new ads platform, and Snapchat's recent audience numbers are mind-boggling. It's Thursday, February 25th, 2021. Happy Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:32 Twitter this afternoon announced that you will soon be able to charge your followers money for access to your tweets. They're calling the feature Super Follows. For $5 a month, your followers would be able to get access to special tweets and an email newsletter. This does, of course, follow the market on monetized content. You can subscribe to individual YouTube channels for extra perks. Patreon has been hugely successful. God, even some jackass podcasters these days are creating pay-only premium news. Actually, you know what? Let's take that out of the script. We can assume Twitter will take a cut. They didn't say how much, but based on other platforms, you can expect it to probably be a 70-30 split in favor of the creator. Perhaps more interesting, though, to our work in the digital marketing space is their second announcement, something they're calling

Starting point is 00:01:13 Communities. There wasn't a lot of detail on this, but it sure sounded like Facebook's groups. And again, they teased that TweetDeck may soon become a paid subscription app, or at least have some additional functionality gated by a monthly fee. No timeline for the launch of any of these additions was announced. You don't have to run ads on Facebook long before one of their enforcement bots thinks that your ad about shoes is sexually suggestive and locks you out of your account. Sure, you can appeal it. Maybe it'll work. Maybe it won't. Which is why last year, when the company announced it would

Starting point is 00:01:50 form an oversight board to give people an arm's length appeal channel, most of us were happy about it. At the time, Facebook said the board's rulings would be binding and immediately actionable. And while it does appear they've accepted the board's actual rulings on specific cases, Facebook is not so thrilled with the content moderation recommendations that the board made alongside those decisions. Facebook this morning announced that of the 17 recommendations, it would implement 11 of them. Five of them they're going to, quote, assess feasibility,

Starting point is 00:02:23 which I assume is code for stall long enough so people forget about it. And one they're're going to, quote, assess feasibility, which I assume is code for stall long enough so people forget about it. And one, they're just going to straight up ignore. Actually, to be accurate, of those 11 recommendations they liked, they didn't actually say they would act on them, only that they were, quote, committed to action. And you're not going to like this. Most of the recommendations they're assessing have to do with automation. You know, like those ad campaign enforcement bots. Specifically, as it relates to our work, as digital marketers, Facebook said it was assessing the feasibility of letting us appeal decisions the bots have made when the bots think your ad is about sex,

Starting point is 00:03:00 informing us when automation is used to take enforcement action, and disclosing how many automated removal decisions the bots have made and the proportion of those decisions subsequently reversed following human review. So, in summary, the bots are here to stay. But hey, at least they're not changing ads manager again. In related news, Facebook today announced it will be changing ads manager again. In related news, Facebook today announced it will be changing ads manager again. Quoting the company, we are simplifying ads manager to make it easier for small and medium sized businesses to get started and use personalized marketing plans to increase the value of their advertising investment, unquote. It wasn't clear exactly what they

Starting point is 00:03:43 meant by simplifying, other than to talk about a new scaled down dashboard that will help advertisers make optimizations quicker. So we don't know if it's going to be a separate dumbed down ads manager, kind of like Google's old ads express product, or whether everyone will have to use this new simplified version. They also announced that they have extended the waiver of fees that they charge businesses who use checkout on shops. Now it's extended to June. And there are some new page options for restaurants, like having a separate tab just for menus. That announcement about the simplified ads manager and other changes came as part of a somewhat defensive blog post that went

Starting point is 00:04:23 up this morning titled, let's talk Talk About Why Personalized Ads Matter. They didn't outright mention Apple in the post, but we all know they're still mad about Apple's forthcoming plan to let users easily opt out of ad tracking in apps. And I know I piss on Facebook a lot, but they're not wrong here. From a digital marketing point of view, the ability for us to use data points to tweak an ad to a specific kind of audience is important.

Starting point is 00:04:49 For some brands, like apparel, it's critical. For others, like, let's say, Pepsi, less so. Or is it? Pepsi, turns out, is diving headfirst into personalization in a very unique way. Starting today, they are customizing the voiceover tracks on more than 70 pieces of creative to be more receptive to the individual person listening. So if you're young, you'll hear a young guy. If you're older, you'll hear an older

Starting point is 00:05:16 guy. And yes, I said guy because this campaign is only targeted to men in their 30s and 40s. Quoting Marketing Dive, the brand tapped Google's Director Mix technology to pair dozens of different voiceover recordings to its video asset, which is consistent throughout the campaign, depicting a can of Pepsi Zero Sugar getting cracked open and poured. And while this is easy from a technical point of view to do this on digital platforms, they're also doing it on channels where ad campaigns have been traditionally harder to adjust mid-campaign, like television and radio. Those channels will still use different voiceovers, but rather than switching for each consumer, which, you know, is all but impossible for TV and radio, they're choosing what they

Starting point is 00:05:59 think is the right voice for each time of day and genre of programming. TikTok may still get all the headlines, but some new numbers out today continue to show that Snapchat's reach among young people is ridiculously strong. Snapchat says it now reaches 70% of all 13 to 24-year-olds in the world's most lucrative digital ad markets. The numbers came as part of a presentation to investors. Some other takeaways, users open the app an average of 30 times a day. Those who've used AR filters to try on products are 2.4 times more likely to convert. And the company expects 50% annual growth in revenue every year for the next few years.

Starting point is 00:06:45 Since you asked, my TikTok experiment has been going really well. I started last week with 240 followers. I'm just under 1,000 now. Every day I'm posting a digital marketing tip. There is a link in the episode's notes to my channel, which you can also see on the web, by the way. You don't need the app. Anyway, back to Snapchat.

Starting point is 00:07:00 They say they will add both the Snap Map and the Spotlight video platform as placements for our ad campaigns, and they are beefing up their self-service ads manager. So while Snapchat is adding additions for advertising, Google is taking one away. The company today emailing some advertisers to say it will discontinue showcase shopping ads as of April 1st. Previous showcase shopping ad layouts, like the merchant carousel, are now part of product shopping ad groups. These ad groups can now dynamically feature your products in these new layouts, so essentially their work on dynamic integration made this standalone product obsolete. Showcase shopping ads were launched only two years ago.

Starting point is 00:07:50 Spotify has launched a new audio advertising marketplace, which will let you run campaigns across its entire platform, music streaming and podcasts. Targeting is demographic for now, though they plan to add interest targeting later in the year. And good news for all of us, they say they'll be adding a self-serve option for podcast advertising to its existing ad studio. Marketing Dive reports, quote, Spotify has placed a heavy bet on podcasts in recent years, spending millions to acquire high-profile shows, publishers, and production studios in the burgeoning audio space. With the launch of the Spotify audience network,

Starting point is 00:08:25 the company is hoping to better translate podcasts popularity into a revenue generating machine as the format goes through some of the growing pains other digital channels have experienced, unquote. Their ad insertion tech is now available on almost all exclusive and original Spotify podcasts in the US right now, with other countries coming online over the next year. That said, not all analysts are convinced. One reported that it, quote, did not show any material benefit from recent podcast investments.

Starting point is 00:08:54 If we were to see a material positive inflection in app downloads or premium subs, we would alter our view. But our fear is that if podcasting doesn't provide a way for Spotify to shift away from music label dependence, Wall Street may reassess the underlying value of the business. All right, in the premium newsletter today, our coverage of a detailed study comparing CPM,

Starting point is 00:09:20 click-through, and CPC rates between Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. You can read this right now by becoming a premium newsletter member. Tap the link in this episode's notes or go to todayindigital.com slash newsletter. You'll get an issue every day and get access to deep discounts on digital marketing tools in our new premium perks program. That's it for today. Talk to you tomorrow. 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.

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Today in Digital Marketing - The Facebook Ad Denial Bots are Here to Stay

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