Today in Digital Marketing - The Mid-Roll Ad Format Everyone is Watching Closely
Episode Date: February 15, 2022Google automates even more of your ad campaigns... Is your brand name feminine enough? Will viewers reject Snapchat's new mid-roll ads? Instagram's new feature will be welcomed by social media... managers... The QR code that crashed a crypto site.Go Premium! No ads, more stories, audio chapters, and extended weekend episodes — https://todayindigital.com/premiumADVERTISING as low as $20: https://todayindigital.com/ads JOIN OUR SLACK! https://todayindigital.com/slackFOLLOW US: https://todayindigital.com/socialmedia (TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit) ENJOYING THE SHOW?- Please tweet about us! https://b.link/pod-tweet- Rate and review us: https://todayindigital.com/rateus- Leave a voicemail: https://b.link/pod-voicemail FOLLOW TOD:- TikTok: https://b.link/pod-tiktok- Twitter: https://b.link/pod-twitter- LinkedIn: https://b.link/pod-linkedin Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin (https://b.link/pod-todsite) and produced by engageQ digital (https://b.link/pod-engageq). Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Does your brand need a podcast? Let us help: https://engageQ.com/podcastsOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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Today, Google automates even more of your ad campaigns. Is your brand name feminine enough?
Will viewers reject Snapchat's new mid-roll ads?
Instagram's new feature will be welcomed by social media managers.
Microsoft ads now usable by 29 more countries.
And on the Premium Podcast, with no ads, more stories, and extended weekend episodes.
Tap the link in the show notes for more.
American legislators have a new target, social media algorithms.
It's Monday, February 14th. I'm Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.
Google has announced that the way automated extensions work will change next month.
Just to back up a little, extensions are those things you put under your ad,
like a phone number or a site link. An automated extension, if you're opted in, let's Google puts things in there that it thinks would work well or provide better results.
So those three changes are first automated extensions will be shown with manually created extensions beginning in mid-March.
Previously, dynamic site links, dynamic call outs and dynamic structured snippets were not eligible for showing with a manually created site link.
Number two, a new report for automatically created extensions.
You'll be able to view individual reporting for these automated extensions on the extensions page of Google Ads.
And the ability to add site links, callouts, and structured snippets to ad groups, campaigns, and accounts. Beginning mid-March again, when those elements from higher levels in your account are predicted
to improve your performance, they will be eligible to serve alongside extensions of
the same type from lower levels.
It is a tiny bit confusing, and our premium newsletter has got some very pretty, very
colorful graphs to help explain it all.
New research suggests that brands with linguistically feminine names have an advantage.
On average, the top-ranking companies on Interbrand's global top brands list over the past 20 years have more feminine names than the lower-ranked companies.
And how do you tell which names are linguistically feminine?
The study determined it this way. If it has two or more syllables and stresses on the second or later syllable,
or if it ends in a vowel. According to the report, people perceive linguistically feminine brand
names as warmer and therefore choose them more frequently, an effect termed the feminine brand
name advantage. The study found that brands with feminine names seemed warmer to participants, and this
increased their purchase intentions.
People apparently preferred to watch videos on a YouTube channel that had a feminine name,
and participants would rather take home a hand sanitizer with a feminine brand name
instead of taking a cash incentive or a hand sanitizer with a masculine name.
Additionally, the research identified limitations to this advantage.
When a particular product is marketed specifically to men, like men's sneakers,
both masculine and feminine brand names are popular.
And it turns out people generally prefer feminine names for hedonic products like chocolate,
whereas they prefer masculine names for strictly functional items like bathroom scales.
The study is published in the Journal of Marketing.
It is titled, Is Nestle a Lady? The Feminine Brand Name Advantage.
Snapchat is testing a new placement for ads.
They are experimenting with mid-roll ads that appear in the stories of creators.
For now, that group is only a small group of U.S. influencers.
This is something that will be up to those people.
Creators will be able to turn on ads within their stories and receive a share of any revenue generated by those ads.
Revenue share is calculated according to metrics like posting frequency and engagement.
Who is in that small group?
For now, it's only going to be offered to Snap stars.
Those are creators or public figures with large
following who have been verified on
Snapchat. They have a little gold star
as an indicator.
This is a pretty risky move for Snapchat.
Platforms that have used image stories,
like Instagram, have long jammed ads
between those panels. This, though,
would insert mid-rolls into the middle
of a video story, much like mid-rolls into the middle of a video story,
much like mid-rolls on YouTube. Probably good for marketers.
We'll have to wait to see what the viewers think of it. from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit. No business or profession is risk-free.
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Be protected. Be Zen. Instagram has finally launched a long-awaited feature that could help clean up your brand's
inbox. The platform has added Stories Likes, which is a way for users to engage with your content
by liking any of your brand's stories in their feed. It'll show up between the send message and
the paper airplane icon. It'll be a little heart icon, and when you tap it, that will send a like
to the creator. Unlike previous iterations of this,
it will not create a new DM thread. Likes on stories will be private and do not have counts.
Instead, they will appear as hearts next to people's handles. And if this all sounds familiar,
yes, it's just like TikTok. The new feature is being rolled out to all users beginning today. Microsoft Advertising Today announced that it is now available in 29
new countries across Europe and Africa. With the expansion, the company will be able to offer
advertising in nearly twice as many markets. With these markets, advertisers gain access to new
audiences and can reach consumers in 19 additional languages. This will expand on
the platform's footprint to reach 41 million consumers, making 400 million searches on
Microsoft and partner sites per month. Well, it turns out to win the unofficial title of the best
Super Bowl ad, you just have to stop trying so hard.
Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange app, spent $14 million on an ad that was essentially a QR code that just bounced around the screen for 60 seconds.
The ad was so successful that after its debut, the company's website suffered an outage.
The ad paid homage to the old DVD screensaver logo, which bounced around the screen
and stood out from the competition by incorporating a gaming element because viewers had to capture
the floating code on their phone before the timer ran out. When the QR code was scanned,
the consumer was redirected to the company's promotional website, which offered a limited
time promotion of $15 worth of free Bitcoin to new customers, plus the chance to enter a $3 million giveaway.
As a result, interest in the offer crashed the company's website after people checked it out.
The ad also drove in-app installs, making the app climb to number two in the App Store charts
just hours after the ad aired. And finally today, you may be missing some conversion data in Google Ads.
It's not just you.
The company confirmed that it experienced a delay in reporting a portion of conversions using data-driven attribution.
The delay occurred on February 9th between 7.54 p.m. and 12.34 p.m. the following day.
Those are in Pacific Times.
The issue has been resolved, and it is working on recovering the conversions that were affected. Google has also confirmed that auto bidding was not affected.
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But we try really hard to make this a good use of your time, video game rambling
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