Today in Digital Marketing - The GDPR is Dead. Long Live the GDPR.

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's time to level up your Instagram caption game. Walmart brings first-party data to, well, third parties. TikTok's long videos are getting longer. And when photo releases go wrong. It's Thursday, August 26th, 2021. Happy Women's Equality Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 455. The British government says it plans to break from the GDPR and other European data regulations.

Starting point is 00:00:56 This as the country overhauls its privacy laws after leaving the European Union. The culture secretary said they hope to have rules based on, quote, common sense, not box ticking, unquote. He was referring to the endless consent banners that we see all over the web these days, though, to be fair, those banners actually predate the GDPR. Legally speaking, the GDPR data protection rules, which came into effect about three years ago, are still part of UK law even after Brexit. The Brits also said they hope to forge a kind of transnational privacy alliance. Quoting The Guardian, any future data regulation will also be aimed at convincing other nations that the UK's data protection is adequate by their own standards to allow for free and

Starting point is 00:01:40 easy transfer of information across international borders. The government announced six target nations for such adequacy agreements, including the US, South Korea, and Australia. Instagram says it plans to change the way their search function works. Currently, when you search for a word, you get a list of accounts and hashtags with that word in it. You have to tap into one of those to see the media. Soon, searching will show you the media right away. You know, like TikTok does.

Starting point is 00:02:13 The head of Instagram didn't call it a feature copy, though he did call it inspiration and discovery. All snark aside, improving search has been a long time coming, and this will have some impact on our work as digital marketers. Namely, selection of hashtags and what words you use in your media captions. Those are going to become even more important. Don't forget, though, nothing at Facebook Corp is without an algorithm, so your search for waffles might look different than another person's. While yes, the text you enter in the search bar is the most important signal, Instagram is also adding two other factors into the mix. Accounts you follow, posts you've viewed,

Starting point is 00:02:57 and how you've interacted with accounts in the past. Instagram says they usually show accounts and hashtags you follow or visit higher than those you don't, and popularity signals. These include the number of clicks, likes, shares, and follows for a particular account, hashtag, or place. Plus, there are some negatives in there. Search tends not to bring up violence or semi-nudity. The company did not disclose a launch date for the TikTok-style search. Walmart has launched its new DemandSide platform that will offer third parties use of its first-party data.

Starting point is 00:03:32 Walmart DSP will be first available to a handful of suppliers by the end of October. Through its partner, the Trade Desk, it will offer ad space on all of Walmart's placements, like display, mobile, audio, streaming, and connected TV. The targeting data, of course, comes from the company's website and mobile app, and, more importantly, shopping data from its 4,700 stores. Quoting MarketingDive.com,

Starting point is 00:03:57 Walmart is positioning its ability to connect in-store and online sales as a leading differentiator to other DSPs, providing a closed loop measurement system. The Walmart DSP will serve as an important test as to whether the company can scale up an ad tech offering as the retail media space grows more competitive. In tapping into the Trade Desk's inventory, users can also manage multiple campaigns within one ecosystem. One goal is to expand the Walmart network's reach off-site, beyond its own properties, in the same manner as Google and Facebook. Time will tell whether advertisers gravitate to the platform,

Starting point is 00:04:35 but Walmart Connect has proved promising at a time when many brands are seeking alternatives to those digital heavyweights. And we return now to the case of the rewritten title tags, which someone on Twitter has called the titlepocalypse, so I guess we're there now. If you need a recap, Google has changed the way that it displays some page titles in their search results. For about 20% of those listings, they won't use the actual title tag coded into your page, but will grab the most visually impactful summary headline that it

Starting point is 00:05:10 finds, like an H1 tag or sometimes seemingly random text. The SEO industry believes this change was rushed since it's a little buggy and often creating confusing titles. For instance, one local business owner, a vehicle locksmith, reports Google changed one of her titles to show a location in a region she does not serve. Here is what's new today. First, some people are reporting that traffic to their website is down when Google tweaks and screws up a title. One person noted that after Google used their H1 tag instead of their title tag, even though their average position didn't change, they lost 60,000 visits in the past week.

Starting point is 00:05:51 Second, Google has now started a webmaster help forum discussion where you can post screenshots of your web page's bad title tags in search results. So far, examples posted range from a healthcare website where Google is slapping the word vaccination as titles on pages that have nothing to do with vaccination, and many results where the capital letters have been stripped out, leaving the whole title uncapitalized. And third, the SEO tracking tool Systrix has now released a title change tracking tool. Red words are the original tag, green words are the ones where Google added. One example they highlighted was Google apparently trying to make a page's title gender neutral. The original read beginner gym workout for males,

Starting point is 00:06:33 and Google changed it to beginner gym workout for strength. You can see how if your market really is specifically men, this would be cause for concern. Their tool costs about 100 euros per month. 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, As you may know, TikTok recently increased the length of videos you could post on its app. Originally, the maximum was 15 seconds, then it went to 60 seconds. Now it's three minutes. But soon, if a test spotted in the wild gets launched, that limitation might extend to five minutes or beyond.

Starting point is 00:07:37 Some people are reporting seeing a notification telling them they've got access to the five-minute beta. What can TikTok do with a five-minute video that they can't really do with a three-minute video? Why insert a mid-roll ad, of course. Quoting socialmediatoday.com, it would also put TikTok on more direct footing with video rivals in YouTube and Facebook. TikTok is known as the home for short-form video, an element it currently dominates, but by enabling longer-form uploads,

Starting point is 00:07:59 that would make it a more inclusive offering, which could eventually reduce the impetus for its creative talent to migrate to other apps, with TikTok able to offer comparative revenue, creative, and reach potential, unquote. Last week, a screen recording leaked showing someone's 10-minute long video on TikTok. By the way, the Chinese version of TikTok, which is called Douyin, has allowed 15-minute long videos for more than two years now. Financial analysts say Google is paying a staggering $15 billion to stay as the default

Starting point is 00:08:38 search engine on Apple devices. Last year, they paid an estimated $10 billion. And why? Bing. Google apparently deciding to overbid to make sure Microsoft doesn't swoop in and take that spot. Analysts say that $15 billion amounts to around 9% of Apple's gross profits. And at least one investor note forecast this could go up to as high as $20 billion next year, quoting Search Engine Journal. While the increase in payment is notable on its own, it's also good for digital marketers to know that there will likely be no major disruptions to Google's search volume over the coming years. That would almost certainly be the case if Google lost its position as the default search

Starting point is 00:09:21 provider for Safari. You're a responsible marketer. You wouldn't dream of doing a photo shoot without getting all the sign-offs. But what happens if you do a photo shoot with a child in it? The parents sign the release form, you pay them $200, and then the child, years later, grows up and sues you. That's exactly what's happening now around one of the most iconic images of the 90s. Nirvana's Nevermind album showed a naked infant swimming in a pool,

Starting point is 00:09:53 chasing a dollar bill on a fishing line. That infant is now a fully grown man in California, and he has filed a lawsuit against the band, saying he was the victim of child pornography. The man is named Spencer Eldon, and he accuses Nirvana of continuing to benefit from his quote, commercial sexual exploitation, unquote, 30 years after the album's release. He's seeking $150,000 from each of the 15 defendants, which include the band members and late band leader Kurt Cobain's widow.

Starting point is 00:10:23 Certainly one factor the defense will bring up, Eldon's own use of the imagery. He has twice now recreated the post for photo shoots. And finally, earlier we reported that the content subscription platform OnlyFans was dropping sexually explicit content. Yesterday, they put out a press release that can be summarized as JK, JK, JK!

Starting point is 00:10:48 Yes, after saying they will suspend all explicit porn, now they say they're suspending that suspension. Porn is back on. Special thanks to M. Cooper and Ken for becoming subscribers of the Premium Newsletter in the last 24 hours. We put it out every single weekday. All the stories we hear on the podcast every day, but annotated with images, videos, links to dive deeper and exclusive content.

Starting point is 00:11:20 Just go to todayindigital.com slash newsletter to sign up or tap the link in this episode's notes. You can try the daily subscription for free for seven days or get a basic issue every Friday absolutely free. Again, that's todayindigital.com slash newsletter or tap the link in this episode's notes. My wife comes back from her travels tonight, which means I have a whole lot of cleaning up to do, which means I'm leaving you a goodbye. Talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - The GDPR is Dead. Long Live the GDPR.

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