Today in Digital Marketing - The Great Ad Headline Heist

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Wednesday, August 28th. Today, political campaigns are manipulating news headlines for votes, how you can do the same for your own ad campaigns for fun and profit. TikTok says if you haven't figured out your December holiday marketing plans by now, you may already be too late. Meta closes its AR studio suddenly. And did Google just release its internal ad tools to the public? I'm Todd Maffin. That's Ahead, today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:34 Well, you probably won't be surprised to hear that US presidential campaigns are spending millions of dollars on Google ads right now. but you might be surprised to learn that they're running ads to articles written by major news organizations like NPR, Time, and The Guardian. And they are changing the headlines of those articles without permission from the news organizations. How is this possible? Turns out it's allowed, even by Google's strict political advertising policies. Here to tell us more is our Google Ads correspondent, Jill Saskin-Gales. Hello, Jill.

Starting point is 00:01:10 Hello, Todd. So how, this is the Harris campaign that's doing this. How can they be running ads to a website that's not their own, first of all? Actually, anybody can do this. The final URL in your own ad does not need to be your domain. Since advertiser verification came into Google Ads, we're able to go in and see like who actually paid for an ad. And of course, this has much more use to a political campaign

Starting point is 00:01:36 trying to borrow the legitimacy of news organizations than say an e-commerce store trying to drive traffic, I don't know, to a different e-commerce store. But anyone can do this. It's always been allowed. And what came to light is that the Harris campaign is doing this. I'm sure the Trump campaign is doing this as well, where just like any ad, you put in the final URL of where you want people to go. In this case, sometimes it's Kamala's website. And in this case, sometimes it's news organizations. And then you write your headlines and descriptions for your ad as normal.

Starting point is 00:02:09 You know, it reminds me of the good old days when you could do that on organic posts. You could just basically take any news story and put it in. This is on Facebook. Paste it as an embed. Go in, change the headline. And Meta cracked down on that pretty quick. You had to prove that you owned that domain. And still to this day, on organic posts on Facebook, you've got to verify that you own that domain if you want to change the metadata in the embed. You'd think Google would be doing that

Starting point is 00:02:30 too. Yeah, because in this case, it's not like it's the metadata that you're seeing in your feed and article with a different headline. It's an ad. And when we write ads, we get to write headlines. Like if I'm advertising a shirt that's called Todd's fabulousulous Fitted Blue Shirt, I don't know, on my website. Maybe I don't want my headline to say that because people will know what that means. It might just say best price blue shirt on my headline, and then you click on it and land on a page with something else. That's what we're doing here. But news organizations were taken by surprise. Like just one example here, it's pointed to an article by The Independent, which is a newspaper in the UK. And the headline that the Harris campaign is advertising is

Starting point is 00:03:09 VP Harris protects democracy. Trump defends Jan 6 comments. So we don't know because we didn't see this at what actually article it led to, but it's unlikely that that's what the journalist who wrote that article called it. Or similarly, there's one from AP News. The headline that the ad manager wrote is VP Harris's economic vision, lower costs and higher wages. Now, if he clicks that ad and goes to that news article, it can say whatever. And honestly, I think it's pretty creative of the ad managers. You can see it from a branding point of view. You're absolutely right.

Starting point is 00:03:45 I think, you know, if you've got an e-commerce site and maybe it's a cheap e-commerce site and it renders titles on the page stupidly, right? And you want to be able to fix that. You can fix that. Does it not surprise you, though, that there's not, that Google hasn't carved out a policy just for political ads

Starting point is 00:04:00 to prevent this kind of stuff? Because let's face it, by any standard, this is misleading. Well, I will say that when the Harris campaign, for example, is paying for this, in addition to saying sponsored, like all ads do, it does say paid for by Harris for president. So it will say that on the search engine results page before someone clicks. Is it misleading? Maybe. But Google takes this stuff really seriously. And so the fact that they're allowing it and allowing any political campaign to do this means that not misleading

Starting point is 00:04:34 enough to cause concern. And so as users, you know, we can go into the Google Ads library, and with political ads, you can actually see how many times the ad was shown and how much was spent on it. So the Google Ads library, you can look up any ads that anybody's running and see their text image and video ads, but you can't see data about them. For political ads, though, you can. And that transparency is supposed to help preserve a sense of, I don't know, honesty, sticking more to the facts, because anyone can go look up and see this stuff just as we are right now. So for one AP headline, Harris for President spent $20,000 to $25,000 on that one ad in the month of August, and it was shown about 40,000 times, for example. And do we know how much money was spent? Overall?

Starting point is 00:05:20 On that ad? Can we get that granular in the ads library? Yeah. So for each specific ad, you can see how many times it was shown, when it was shown. Maybe it was only shown for a week or a month and how much was spent on it. And you can sort by the amount spent, by number of times seen. There really is a lot of transparent data given here about political ads that is not even given about other types of ads. You can also see if there are certain criteria that were used for the ads. So if they included any age criteria, gender criteria, so only show this to men or only show this to women, and then location criteria. So you can

Starting point is 00:05:55 see them getting quite geo-targeted with these different messages that they're trying to get out in different places in the electorate. It's really quite creative, to be honest. I feel that people forget about the incredible databases that are these ads libraries. Google, of course, has one, which we're talking about. Meta has one. TikTok has one. All the major platforms do. Can you walk us through Google's just briefly before we wrap up in terms of nonpolitical campaigns?

Starting point is 00:06:21 If someone wanted to look up their competitor, then what data can we see? Can we see how much money they're spending? Can we see what the demographics are? You can't see what they're spending or what the demographics are, but you can see all of their ads, even ones that aren't actively running right now. So Google was latest to the party with this ads library thing. Metas has been around for years, but Google's is, I want to say only about two years old or so. It's called the Ads Transparency Center. And when you go there, my advice is to look at companies not by the company name, but by the domain being advertised. It's much easier to ensure you're finding the right advertiser out of the millions of verified advertisers. And then when you click on that advertiser, you can view all their text, image, or video ads.

Starting point is 00:07:04 You can sort by date range, and then you can see if there's different variations and what the ads look like. So through that, through the language you're seeing or the image you're seeing, you can kind of infer what's going on behind the scenes in terms of keywords or targeting or budget. But that isn't made explicitly clear. It only is for political ads. All right. Thank you so much, Jill. Thank you. Jill Sasskin-Gales is our Google Ads correspondent. She's here every second Wednesday. You can learn more about her Google Ads training program at our affiliate link at todayindigital.com

Starting point is 00:07:35 slash GA. And you can watch our full unedited interview. There is a link to it in today's newsletter, which you can sign up to for free by tapping the link at the top of the show notes. Turning to some other Google news now, the company is getting ready for the holiday shopping season with some new updates for businesses using Merchant Center. First, there are some new product trend insights inside Merchant Center. These will highlight major shopping search and purchase trends in the app. This could help you plan your ad campaigns around what's popular at any given time. So for example, a denim retailer can see

Starting point is 00:08:13 if a specific type of shorts is trending and adjust their inventory accordingly. Google is also bringing more AI elements into its Merchant Center analytics. The new summaries give insight into the products that are gaining the most traction at any given time. And conversational queries will let you ask for custom data sets like the performance

Starting point is 00:08:33 of your best-selling dresses. The company is also improving its product availability notes on listing and launching new customer acquisition goals in performance max and search campaigns. TikTok just dropped a new guide to help businesses plan their holiday marketing. The 18-page document is packed with data and tips on how to reach users. It is specific to the European market, though. But TikTok says its users around the world start thinking about holiday shopping earlier than you might think they do. Last year, users began searching for Christmas-related content in August.

Starting point is 00:09:12 The guide breaks down when people are most active and what they're searching for. It also reveals what gifts are trending this season. TikTok says its users are looking for experiences like travel and concerts, as well as tech gadgets and sustainable products. TikTok's guide covers the Q5 season. That's the period after Christmas when shoppers hunt for bargains. This is usually when many brands offer discounts and promotions. And with only 118 days until Christmas, many brands are already finalizing their holiday marketing plans. We have a link to the full PDF guide in today's email newsletter, which you can sign up to for free by tapping the

Starting point is 00:09:50 link at the top of the show notes or going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter. Instagram just updated its app with new features to help you get a little more creative with your brand's organic posts. First, it added several new fonts that can be used in reels and stories. The app also made it easier to add text to posts and mix and match font styles. You can now also add stickers to photos and carousel posts, which was recently updated to include 20 frames. Until now, those were limited to stories. The updates also include more music features, which could attract users who might be leaving TikTok. Indeed, the new features may be a response to TikTok's popularity. And with TikTok's future in the U.S. uncertain, Instagram is racing to position itself as an alternative platform for creators. Meta is closing its Spark AR Studio platform, which allowed brands to create augmented

Starting point is 00:10:50 reality effects for Facebook and Instagram. The platform will shut down on January 14th next year. The move will impact hundreds of thousands of creators who've used Spark AR to develop effects. And worse, any AR campaigns that were built using Spark will be disabled after the shutdown date. So why is Meta doing this? It says it's shifting resources to new experiences like its AR glasses, but the decision seems counterintuitive

Starting point is 00:11:18 as competing platforms like Snapchat have seen success with their own AR creation platforms. As for what's next, Meta may be developing new AR creation tools that use generative AI, but the company hasn't revealed any details of a potential replacement platform, leaving many creators uncertain about their future. More information might be announced at Meta's Connect conference next month. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack,

Starting point is 00:11:53 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 at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Google faced a lot of criticism in February. Its AI chatbot Gemini couldn't create images of white people in historical context.

Starting point is 00:12:19 To stop the backlash, Google opted for the nuclear option and just disabled the ability to render humans at all. Now, Google is turning that feature back on, but only for users who pay for Gemini Advanced. Google has struggled with its AI products. The company's chatbot, BARD, got a major fact wrong in its public outing. Critics called Google's AI racist and sexist. The company says, like all AI, its technology will still make errors.

Starting point is 00:12:47 And at least for the time being, it still won't respond to requests for photorealistic images of public figures, minors, or violent imagery. And finally today, many media buyers and marketers noticed a new option in Google Ads, but they might have been scared to click it. Down the main menu column appeared a button reading Internal Tools. The brave ones who did click it found that opened up a submenu with the option Audience Builder in it.

Starting point is 00:13:18 Now, Audience Builder isn't new, but the whole Internal Tools thing was. At deadline, Google had not addressed the issue, but it is believed to just be a glitch. All right. I have to practice for an Elder Scrolls trial with my guild. Yeah, I'm that guy now, apparently. So I got to go. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

Starting point is 00:13:40 Are you an ad agency with clients in the retail sector or a retail store or brand that wants to improve your understanding of your customers? Well, you're in luck. This summer, Unnery has started offering retail shopper dashboards for clients in the United States and Canada. Great for brands, retailers, and marketing agencies to be able to visualize customer visits to their own stores and to selected competitor stores as well. Thank you.

Today in Digital Marketing - The Great Ad Headline Heist

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