Today in Digital Marketing - The Lawsuit That Might Cancel Cheeky Ad Campaigns

Starting point is 00:00:00 It's Monday, November 28th. Today, a new version of Google Ads Editor is out. A huge trademark case being decided could affect your advertising. Buy now, pay later looms large this holiday. LinkedIn finally lets you schedule posts. And Twitter's brand safety goes from bad to worse. I'm Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. We start with a new update to the Google Ads Editor,

Starting point is 00:00:26 up to version 2.2. This is the desktop version. Those features include quick access to the asset library. You'll be able to add, remove, and rename images, assign images to folders. Ads Editor now provides a dialogue to visually edit ad schedules for campaigns and certain assets.

Starting point is 00:00:43 Previously, you could only change these ad schedules by CSV import or by copying them from another campaign or asset. Also, logs containing API errors and details of the operations that triggered them are now available in a new easy to understand format. The editor will also now periodically check to see if any changes were made since the last sync and prompt you to make any changes or update it if necessary. In the shopping settings for shopping and Performance Max campaigns, you can now choose to make the country of sale optional or include support for an optional feed label.

Starting point is 00:01:17 And finally, video campaigns with shopping now supports all video campaign subtypes except for outstream and audio via the shopping setting and product groups. Other features include recommended budgets for video action campaigns, target frequency for video campaigns, and a bunch more. By the way, version 2.2, this version no longer supports Gmail display ads and campaigns. A dog toy is headed to the U.S. Supreme Court over an ad campaign that was designed as a brand parody. The case involves Jack Daniels whiskey and a squeaky dog toy named Bad Spaniels, get it, Jack Daniels, Bad Spaniels, by its creator VIP Products. Besides mimicking the shape and the label of the Jack Daniels old number seven bottle, Toy also reads, the old number two on your Tennessee carpet.

Starting point is 00:02:12 The case carries implications for both ad campaigns and trademark law. As Media Post reports, it will likely hinge largely on a 1989 suit called Rogers versus Grimaldi, in which the US Supreme Court determined that unauthorized trademarks can be used as long as they don't mislead consumers. VIP Products claims that while the Bad Spaniels toy resembles Jack Daniels' trade dress and bottle design,

Starting point is 00:02:39 it has significant differences, including the image of a dog and the label wording. The wording, for instance, replaces the whiskey maker's notations of 40% ABV with 40% poo by volume and 100% smelly. It is beginning to look a lot like a buy now, pay later Christmas. A new survey has found that one in five U.S. consumers plan to use buy now, pay later services this shopping season. Another 20% of consumers were on the fence. As Insider Intelligence notes, BNPL tends to be popular around the holidays, but tough economic challenges this year may make flexible payment methods like BNPL more appealing. Volume is expected to reach more than $75 billion this year. Among consumers, the most popular BNPL options are Afterpay, PayPal Credit, and Klarna.

Starting point is 00:03:40 LinkedIn is starting to roll out native post scheduling. The feature has been tested internally by the professional network for some months and is now ready for wider distribution. It has been confirmed that it will be available on Android and web for now. Sorry, iPhone marketers. Just like Facebook, the scheduling tool is built into the post composer box. Those that have the feature will see a new clock icon beside the post button in composer. Clicking that clock icon will let you set a future date and time for the post. Post scheduling, of course, is nothing really new.

Starting point is 00:04:10 It's been available on third party schedulers for years. Nonetheless, it is a welcome update for those who may not have the resources for those extra third party services. TikTok ad manager recently announced some new audience insights, which, like Facebook audience insights, lets you drill down into specific demographic details about your customers. The platform's insight filters are now listed on the left-hand side of the reporting section in Ads Manager, with a bunch of options to choose from, like video interactions, lets you filter your audience by people who have viewed and engaged with your videos. Creator interactions, which will let you filter by users that have followed creators in different

Starting point is 00:04:48 topic categories. And hashtag interactions, which will let you select a hashtag to narrow down your audience to those who have engaged with that tag. In the audience overview tab, you can filter by age, gender, location, device, top 10 interests, and oddly, bottom 10 interests. Next to the Overview tab is Audience Interests, which will let you see what types of content and ads your audience engages with. There's also an option to explore your audience's top 10 hashtags. Want people to read your content? They'll start with your headline, and that's as far as they'll get. If your headline doesn't convince readers to take action, it's meaningless. Stop wasting time writing headlines that don't get results.

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Starting point is 00:06:06 and maximize the traffic, engagement, and conversions you get from your content. Sign up for your free Headline Analyzer Studio account at coschedule.com slash today. That's coschedule.com slash today. And now, God help us all, a short roundup of the Twitter news that broke over the weekend. Steph, cue the music. First, the on-again, off-again verification scheme is back on again. Sort of. You might recall Twitter let anybody buy a blue checkmark for eight bucks,

Starting point is 00:06:39 and then brand impersonations flourished, because of course they did. So Twitter introduced a new second badge called Official. Then Elon Musk killed it the very same day. Then it came back again, but only for some accounts. Now they say they're going to add two more different types of verification.

Starting point is 00:06:58 The existing blue badge for people who want to buy one, but also then a yellow badge for companies and a grey badge for government accounts. So how safe is it for your brand to have a presence on Twitter? Probably not much. A European Union report on social media companies found that Twitter is removing fewer tweets with hate speech and taking longer to review them. It says Twitter only reviewed half of the reports it received about illegal hate speech within 24 hours compared to 82% in the previous year. The proportion of posts removed has also fallen.

Starting point is 00:07:33 Also, Twitter this morning said it will reduce the number of people who can write community notes. That's their crowdsourced fact-checking system, which had been used to combat dangerous misinformation about vaccines and other topics. They say they'll be weeding out people who post, quote, low quality fact checks. Then there's this. Yesterday, thousands of previously dormant Chinese Twitter accounts suddenly became active, posting nonstop spam, porn and ads for sex workers. It appeared they were spun up to try to flood the service and keep Chinese citizens from finding information about the COVID lockdown protests in the country. Elon Musk, for his part, might be feeling more of the pressure of advertisers fleeing his platform than he lets on. The Financial Times reporting this weekend that he has, quote, personally called chief executives

Starting point is 00:08:21 of some brands that have curbed advertising in order to berate them, according to one senior industry figure, leading others to instead reduce their spend to the bare minimum required so as to avoid further confrontation with the billionaire entrepreneur, unquote. Kurt Wagner from Bloomberg reports this morning that Apple has suspended advertising. He says, quote, Apple was one of Twitter's largest advertisers, if not the largest. And despite his attestations for free speech, Business Insider this morning reporting that some Twitter users who criticized or even just poked a little fun at Elon Musk say their accounts are now suspended or the platform told them to delete the tweets.

Starting point is 00:09:08 One account owner says their account was outright banned. Their crime? Tweeting that Elon Musk was unlikable. And that will bring us to the Golden Globe nominated lightning round. Yahoo now has a 25% stake in the advertising company Taboola, which specializes in content recommendation widgets on popular news sites like USA Today, Insider, and The Weather Channel. As part of this deal, Taboola will become Yahoo's native ad partner through a 30-year commercial agreement. Shopify announced record-breaking Black Friday sales with an increase of almost 20% from last year, reaching more than $3.3 billion in sales. At its peak, merchants saw $3.5 million in sales

Starting point is 00:09:50 per minute at 12.01pm. The top selling countries were the US, the UK and Canada. And here's an example of what happens when you don't own the domain name for your brand. Thousands of people recently signed up for Hive.com, which is a management firm, apparently mistaking the site for the new Twitter alternative Hive Social. The management firm Hive.com says it has seen a 330% increase in its daily web traffic. So apologies if you hear like nasally whiny congestion in my voice today. My wife and I still have COVID. You know, we're fully vaccinated and boosted, so

Starting point is 00:10:36 it's mild, but man, it's lasting a long time. Is that normal? And different symptoms. Saturday was fatigue. This morning seems to be I can't taste coffee. Well, I can taste coffee, but it tastes like liquid tinfoil. Hopefully we are on the road to recovery. I think we are anyway. So I'll leave it there. I'm going back to bed. See you tomorrow. Now it's Monday morning and my head's screaming

Starting point is 00:10:57 Got two hours sleep and I'm caffeining But a text from you is all I'm needing So baby tell me where and when We'll get our crazy on again I'm out.

Today in Digital Marketing - The Lawsuit That Might Cancel Cheeky Ad Campaigns

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