Today in Digital Marketing - The Facebook Feature Nobody Asked For

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, Microsoft's ads platform will keep your ads off bad websites. More details on the looming elimination of Facebook's 28-day attribution windows. Twitter's new accessibility project will add one more task to your digital marketing to-do list. And why there is a full two-second gap of dead air in today's episode. It's Tuesday, September 29th, 2020. Happy World Heart Day, India. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. Yesterday, I reported on some new research that shows consumers are unwilling to trust brands

Starting point is 00:00:36 whose ads appear alongside fake or inflammatory content. Well, Microsoft has moved to help there. They've announced a partnership with digital ad verification firm Integral Ad Science. The role of IAS will be to provide brand safety technology for audience network ads. Those are the ads that appear on non-Microsoft websites and mobile apps. Specifically, quoting Microsoft, for all Microsoft audience ad campaigns, IAS will automatically scan all pages of all sites that the Microsoft audience network ads can appear on. They will rate the page based on risk associated with their standard content categories like alcohol, gambling, hate speech, and so on, and send a signal to our system preventing us from showing any ads on any pages that they deem as moderate or high risk. This is, of course, great news for us digital advertisers. Other platforms have gotten close to this, but not fully there.

Starting point is 00:01:41 Facebook, for instance, lets you upload a block list of websites that you don't want to be on. But I'm not aware of any AI that's doing that dynamically for you, or if they have something like that, they certainly haven't talked about it. And Microsoft says they are the first to integrate IAS's code at a platform-wide level. This will roll out in the US first, with other countries coming later. Microsoft did not specify what later meant. We're learning more now about Facebook's plan to eliminate the 28-day attribution window. It was hard to get real information about it because Facebook didn't announce it publicly. They just sent emails out to a handful of advertisers who then leaked that email on Twitter. Alex Afterman this morning tweeted,

Starting point is 00:02:25 I love how for weeks you couldn't avoid notifications that data over three years old in ads manager was going away. Pretty minimal impact. But this, huge impact for everyone, we get a week. And they're using peer-to-peer word of mouth to alert us. Everyone tell two friends, unquote. So two new things that we've learned in the last day. First, this will take

Starting point is 00:02:45 place October 12th. Some emails apparently said October 5th, but no, searchenginejournal.com is reporting it's the 12th. Remember, that's less than two weeks away. Second, apparently there's a workaround, albeit a temporary one. It turns out the ads API will continue to give you 28-day attribution data even after the 12th. So if you rely on a third-party tool for your data, you should be okay, at least until web browsers like Chrome and Safari ratchet up their privacy changes, which are coming in the next months, and then everything's going to hell, of course. Facebook says they're making this change because they believe the seven-day window

Starting point is 00:03:22 is a more realistic view of the impact of an ad campaign. But isn't that a decision that advertisers should be making for their own campaigns? Anyway, all snark aside, with all these poorly communicated changes, at least they are not messing with our accounts. Our Facebook accounts and Instagram accounts are now fully integrated into Creator Studio and the new Pages app, or the new Business Suite app, I guess they call it now. I think we can all be grateful that they haven't introduced some kind of new additional accounts app to screw things up even more. In other news, Facebook announced this morning that it is introducing an additional accounts app to screw things up even more. No, actually, for real.

Starting point is 00:04:04 You know, from now on, I'm just going to put comedy music behind all these Facebook updates. See, that's much better. So yeah, it's real. They're testing something called Accounts Center. It's not actually an app. It's not a website. It's what Facebook sometimes calls a surface. They mean it'll be a screen in the settings part

Starting point is 00:04:21 of the Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger apps. I'll tell you, I read their news release about this four times today. I read it slowly. I read it out loud. I read it to my wife. I still have no idea what the benefit of this thing is. So I'm just going to read you part of their announcement, and maybe you can figure it out. Quote, switching apps to post the same content is a pain. We want to make that easier while giving you better controls to manage your experience.

Starting point is 00:04:50 Whether you want to share a story to Instagram and Facebook at the same time or use your Facebook account to log into Instagram, setting up your account center will allow you to control connected experiences that work across our apps. In account center, you can easily turn any of these connected experiences off or on, including single sign-on, which lets you log in and recover your accounts more easily,

Starting point is 00:05:11 and cross-posting, which lets you share the same story or post on both Facebook and Instagram. Unquote. Okay, so unpacking. First, single sign-on? They have that. It's called Facebook. It's all on the Facebook login now. It has been for more than a year. And cross-posting to Facebook and Instagram? Also not new. You can do that everywhere. In Creator Studio, in the new Business Suite app, in third-party tools.

Starting point is 00:05:40 Hell, every time you publish an Instagram post, you can do this. In fact, when you think about it, this fancy new account center will be a terrible place to turn on cross-posting because the toggle switch on whether to cross-post will be on a different screen entirely. Very few of us want all our posts to cross-post by default. Some aren't right brand-wise for that channel. Some just straight up won't even fit the dimensions. So what, we're supposed to first go to settings and then account center and then turn off cross-posting and then go to post and then go back to settings and account center and turn it back off again? Every time? The only thing I can tell that is new here is buried at the bottom

Starting point is 00:06:19 of their announcement where it says, you can sync your name and profile photos across our apps. That way, if you change your name or your profile photo on Facebook, it will update on Instagram as well. Okay. I guess. Thanks. Turns out this may not be for our benefit at all. In TechCrunch's reporting of this story this morning, they said, quote, this new feature brings to light the extensive data collection operation Facebook has built by way of its various apps. Facebook clearly states that it uses your information from across its suite of apps to personalize your experience, including which ads are shown. In other words, even if you maintain different identities publicly, Facebook is aggregating your data behind the scenes. This allows it to maintain its market dominance in social and potentially stifle new competition, unquote.

Starting point is 00:07:13 Well, either way, I for one am delighted to see Facebook engineers spending their time on important releases like this and not on silly side projects like making the ads platform stable. Twitter says it's putting a greater focus on making its platform more accessible to people with disabilities, like sight impairment. In a statement this morning, they said when they were testing

Starting point is 00:07:43 voice tweets earlier this summer, that made them realize that they had more work to do in the space. There aren't any new technologies or platform changes in their announcement. Essentially, they're creating an internal team focusing on accessibility, a focus, frankly, I'd assume they already had given the size of the platform, but hey, better late than never, I guess. It's actually two groups, the accessibility team and something they're calling the Accessibility Center for Excellence, a title which sounds like somebody

Starting point is 00:08:10 won a pick the name of our new team contest. This second group has a broader focus like workplace accessibility and communication strategy. The only thing that really affects our work here in the digital marketing space is they say they'll be adding automated captions to audio and video by early 2021. That may sound like a great idea to you. But remember, right now, your brand's videos don't have any captions automatically. And when they launch that, it's entirely possible they'll go from having no captions to having inaccurate captions. After all, these automated systems don't always get things right, so you may have to go in and manually edit your video caption files when this launches,

Starting point is 00:08:50 even if only to clean things up. I have promised to take you along for the journey into podcast monetization. As you probably know from yesterday's episode, this past weekend I moved this show's feed to a new platform. I am pleased and somewhat shocked to say that the switchover seems to have taken perfectly. I even uploaded a short audio file to the old platform saying, basically, if you're hearing this in your feed, then something went wrong, you did not get redirected. And that audio file has been downloaded exactly zero times, which is great.

Starting point is 00:09:23 So this morning I filled out the new platform's ad setup, which had me specify two different CPM rates, one for the host read ads, and one for pre-recorded ads. I thought that was interesting in itself. I wasn't aware podcast producers were charging different rates. I lowballed it at $15 CPM for both just to see what happens. You can also have different CPMs for pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll. Presumably mid-roll would be more expensive since it has more attention. What's nice about Red Circle, that's the new platform, is that they'll keep adjusting the ad price as you gain listeners.

Starting point is 00:09:55 So your CPM stays the same, but since your audience increases, so does the rate you get. You can also override CPMs and offer flat spot rates like $1,000 an ad. Then they had me pick a consistent promo code that advertisers could use for tracking, and it checked to make sure nobody else used the same one on their platform. So I chose today. Next set up screen, my mailing address in case the brands want to ship product samples. Then I had to put in some audience demographic information, links to my social channels, and that was it.

Starting point is 00:10:21 Apparently, this podcast is now in the marketplace. You may have heard in the middle of this episode, there was a bit of a pause, a longer silent transition than I would normally do. That's because Red Circle will automatically drop ads in as long as I've given it an insertion point. So just to give that some breathing room, I've added a second or two. Anyway, who knows what will happen? I promise, I promise, I promise I am not going to pack this podcast with ads. I'm just more curious about the whole thing. Kind of like

Starting point is 00:10:50 how, when I'm feeling curious, I turn to Best Fiends. Best Fiends is a fun mobile... No, I'm just kidding. Ugh, it was a bad day in Overwatch last night. Eleven games played, only one victory. So I've switched to a new game called Stranded Deep, where you crash on an island and you've got to stay alive as long as you can,

Starting point is 00:11:09 staying out of the sun, staying hydrated. My wife loves these games. She plays one called The Long Dark, where it's basically the same concept, except you're stranded in the Canadian North. Anyway, I'll be streaming the game this afternoon on my Twitch channel, if you want to watch and chat with me. You can find me at twitch.tv slash Todd Maffin. And there's also a link in today's episode. Come say hi. Come say hi in the chat room. Anyway, that's it for today. Talk to you tomorrow. I said I love you till the end of time

Starting point is 00:11:42 Forever and a second of my entire life how could i ever think

Today in Digital Marketing - The Facebook Feature Nobody Asked For

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