Today in Digital Marketing - The Marketing Campaign You Wish You’d Thought Of

Starting point is 00:00:01 Today, what happens when you remove the Facebook comments from your company's blog? Less toxicity and less time spent on site. Why a change to Chipotle's mobile app is tapping into the hearts of younger diners. The marketing campaign we all wish we'd have thought of. And it's the ridiculous Facebook ad denial of the day. It's Monday, October 26th, 2020. Happy Austrian National Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:31 Every so often, Mark Zuckerberg goes into a dark room in a basement, gets completely plastered on cheap gin, stumbles out, and announces the next big thing. And all of us digital marketers then shift everything to do that thing. Remember messaging bots? Or, hey, do a Facebook Live broadcast. We'll give you plenty of algorithm juice. They come, they go. It's not just Facebook, of course. This happens everywhere.

Starting point is 00:00:55 And for a while, last year, augmented reality was the thing. Many brands tried stuff there. Most failed. But one retailer says its AR is doing really well for sales. Thank you very much. Home Depot's AR happens on the product pages of its mobile app with a button that says, see this in your home with 3D augmented reality. People tap that and it pulls up the AR camera.

Starting point is 00:01:21 And how has it done? The company says people who use the AR feature are converting two to three times more often than those who don't use it. Now, not all products have an AR option, and Home Depot wouldn't say exactly what percentage of their catalog is AR-enabled, other than to say there are more AR-enabled products in its app than the total number of products in an average physical store, which sounds like a lot. The functionality is more than just see how it will look. Users can aim their smartphone camera at something like, say, a light fixture, and the app will try to determine what that product is. When blogs first appeared on the scene some 400 years ago,

Starting point is 00:02:06 one of the things they added to a digital marketer's responsibilities was managing the comments section. While you could, of course, just disable comments entirely, many managers felt that leaving them on provided more stickiness to the site, more engagement, and hopefully that would translate into higher conversions. Then Facebook came along with some code that would let you drop comments onto your posts using the Facebook ecosystem. So what effect do comments actually have these days on a website's goals? And are different comment providers associated with different levels of user toxicity? The Center for Media Engagement in the U.S. has published the results of a study they've done.

Starting point is 00:02:43 Now I should note this study was of 24 different news websites. So these are mostly the websites of local and regional newspapers, which, of course, do attract a lot of comments. And all those sites used the Facebook plugin. And that study found that comments became less toxic after removing the Facebook plugin. The engagement platform Coral was a partner in the study, so when they turned off Facebook, they actually switched to the Coral system. Only one newspaper's comment section got more toxic. That was in Detroit. The study also found that people spent less time

Starting point is 00:03:15 on news sites with no comments section at all compared to sites with Facebook comments. The study's author added, there was no evidence that people commented more frequently on the news organization's social media page when comments were turned off on the website. When the marketing history books write this decade, I suspect that one of the trends they'll have noted is that of food stories. I don't mean recipes or vertical story formats. I mean the story of the food

Starting point is 00:03:45 people are eating. We've seen unique UPC code stickers on bananas, so you can see where that batch came from. And here's an interesting new addition to the mobile app of a popular American restaurant chain. Chipotle today launched a food tracker that lets diners measure and share the environmental impact of their orders. Quoting Marketing Dive, it analyzes five key metrics around the sourcing of Chipotle's ingredients, including carbon waste, gallons of water, soil health, use of organic land, and antibiotics. Customers can post their findings to social media through a Twitter integration, unquote. They even hired Bill Nye to make some YouTube and TikTok videos

Starting point is 00:04:25 to promote it. This is certainly a trend if you're in the restaurant marketing business. Even Burger King's gotten into it. This summer, it ran a campaign talking about the livestock industry's impact on the environment. The analogy they used? Cow farts. Speaking of clever digital campaigns, meet Babe Wine. They make and sell wine, of course, and their latest marketing never couldn't have gone better. It was, essentially, a bottle of wine shipped to you in a box. Doesn't sound particularly clever, right? Well, that's because I haven't told you about the box yet.

Starting point is 00:05:00 The box was labeled Election Night Survival Kit, and alongside the wine, a stress ball to squeeze, tissues, and a pillow with the words Scream Here printed on the front. The bottle's usual label had been replaced by one that read Polls Closing Bottles Opening.

Starting point is 00:05:20 This isn't the company's first rodeo. Earlier this year, it partnered with the dating app Bumble to cover the moving costs of people who were stuck living with an ex during the coronavirus pandemic. Last year, the company became the first official wine sponsor in the history of the National Football League. Overall, sales in the canned wine category jumped 79% for the 12-month period ending in June. Which brings us to the lightning round. A couple of weeks ago, I reported on the apparent Google Maps bug that was displaying inaccurate and ridiculously long wait times at restaurants.

Starting point is 00:05:56 That appears to be fixed now. Second, the team chat system Slack is introducing a way for you to exchange DMs with people in other companies without having to add those people to your company's Slack setup. It's going to be called Slack Connect Direct Messages. They're testing it out now. If you'd like to try it out, there's a link in the transcript of today's episode. See the show notes. Also with Slack, they are adding that blue checkmark to identify companies which have verified their authenticity.

Starting point is 00:06:23 In the podcast world, iHeartMedia continues its buying spree. It has acquired VoxNest, which provides dynamic ad serving. VoxNest also owns Spreaker, which is the sixth largest podcast host, and also acquired BlogTalk Radio. Some code reverse engineering has found that Instagram is working on letting you follow an account from all the accounts that you have set up in their app rather than needing to log into each one to follow them. This is still just in the code and not yet public. And the ridiculous Facebook ad denial of the day comes

Starting point is 00:06:53 from Pamela Lund, who reported today Facebook disapproved a jewelry client's ads. The photos are all of hands and ears. They denied it because of, quote, excessive skin or nudity. Oh, video game update. Thank you to those of you who recommended Rogue Company. I tried it. It's not really my thing. If my team is relying on me to kill other players, then we're all going to lose because I'm just trashy at DPS. But I tried Wildlands.

Starting point is 00:07:23 I really like it. It's like a multiplayer cooperative Far Cry. Last night, my wife and I successfully took down a huge Uniden outpost. This Thursday, Watch Dogs Legions comes out. So, fair warning, there may or may not be a Friday episode. More than 200 digital marketers just like you are in our Slack community. Inside, you'll find exclusive deep dive episodes, jobs get posted in there, people use it to get advice, all sorts of stuff.

Starting point is 00:07:50 It's free to join. Just tap the link in this episode's notes or go to todayindigital.com slash Slack. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - The Marketing Campaign You Wish You’d Thought Of

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