Today in Digital Marketing - The New and Improved Verizon Super-Target-O-Matic 2000

Episode Date: April 28, 2021

YouTube says video views of its TikTok clone are way up — so why are those results disingenuous? Also, Google's ad sales make a strong recovery, what form of videos are businesses using the least? Why, the most effective form, of course. TikTok wants your Lead Gen campaigns. And Verizon introduces its solution to a world without third-party data.Get the entire show content, with links and images, as a DAILY email newsletter! Subscribe at TodayInDigital.com/newsletterPodcast Perks: Exclusive Deals for ListenersAdvertising: Perks (free!) • Ads • Classifieds • Brand TakeoversJoin the Community: Slack or DiscordEnjoying the show? Please rate and review us!Follow Tod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok (daily digital marketing tips)Get this as a daily email newsletterLeave a VoicemailEnding song: "Ed Balls: The Song" by the Gregory Brothers.Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital. Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, YouTube says video views of its TikTok clone are way up. Be protected. Be Zen. wants your lead gen campaigns, and Verizon introduces its solution to a world without third-party data. It's Wednesday, April 28th, 2021. Happy Ed Balls Day, Britain. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

Just as we were nailing today's showdown, Facebook reported its Q1 numbers. Revenue was higher than most analysts expected. It made more than $26 billion in revenue over just the first three months of this year. That's nearly 50% higher than a year ago. That's a huge jump. What hasn't jumped is user growth in North America. That still remains flatlined and has been for more than a year. As Bloomberg tech reporter Kurt Wagner tweeted, consider this your quarterly reminder that while it often feels like Facebook is doomed or in dying or in trouble or whatever, business keeps booming. The only reply to Kurt's tweet was a man from Pakistan who asked Kurt,

quote, my account is disabled. Please back my account. It wasn't just Facebook with good numbers. Google also had a very strong recovery in the digital ad market. Ad sales jumped 32% compared to a year earlier. Remember, it was only a year ago when Google reported its first ever ad sales decline in its 26-year history, thanks to COVID. YouTube in particular was a strong placement, nearly 50% up to a total of $6 billion in revenue. By the way, last quarter, they were up 46%. For those of you producing micro content, they finally reported some numbers on Shorts, that's their take on TikTok, saying daily views were up 86% in Q1 this year compared to Q4 of last.

Probably not that surprising. Let's not forget that because they control distribution, they can pretty much make that number whatever they want. As for what they're observing, a Google vice president said, quote, over the last six months, people's shopping preferences have shifted constantly in response to changing conditions. It's not just online. It's not just online. It's not just offline. It's a mix. That trend has not changed. Searches for local and businesses are up 80% versus last year. Omnichannel is here to stay, unquote. Some people do wonder, though,

once the pandemic is behind us, if consumer behavior will revert to the way it was. People in offices and commuting in cars, both of which would probably mean less YouTube view time. Even Google's CFO signaled that, saying, quote, It is too early to say how durable this consumer behavior will be as economies recover and restrictions on mobility are lifted. Google's solution is Flock. Facebook's solution is, well, to badmouth Apple.

Now, one more big player has announced its take on a world without third-party data. Verizon has jumped in with the decidedly retro 90s named solution called Next Gen Solutions. Please tell me they're going to make a TV commercial for this and use William Shatner as the spokesperson. Anyway, NextGen Solutions will help brands serve semi-personalized ads without using any online identifiers. Here's how it works. According to StreetfightMag.com, quote, using artificial intelligence trained on first party data from Verizon media websites like Yahoo, NextGen Solutions infers audience characteristics based on context and real-time signals from devices.

Similar to Google's flock, Verizon's solution does not rely on cookies, mobile app IDs, or hashed email. What differentiates the product is that Verizon's NextGen Solutions requires no user-level profiles, and it works across multiple internet browsers. It relies on a first-party data-based identity graph to train machine learning modules for audience inference. The modules are enriched with content data and other real-time data signals like weather, location, and device types, unquote. So yes, this seems to be the way the industry is moving in response to the new focus on consumer privacy, to put people in buckets based on their inferred interests,

then letting advertisers target the people in those buckets as a group, since we won't get the data to target people one by one. Clearly, we are not far away from a world when we'll have as many services that want to sell us buckets of inferred users as we do now of email list providers or CRM tools. Hell, maybe we're in that world now. TikTok might not be the first place you think of when you want to run a lead gen campaign, but the upstart platform is trying to change that. Today, launching a new lead generation ad option, which will let you capture user data directly from your in-stream ads. They're very similar to the mobile-friendly lead gen ads that Facebook offers.

Users will see a CTA button on the bottom. When they tap it, they get pulled into an in-app form that pre-fills whatever info TikTok has. You can change your brand logo and header and add a small questionnaire. You'll then need to download the data from TikTok every so often. They don't have any direct CRM connections to import data, though you can hack something together using their API and webhooks. The company says the new format is now available to all businesses globally. 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 at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Another platform sharing their recent numbers, Pinterest. They report a 30% increase in monthly active users. That's year over year. Total numbers there are now 478 million monthly users. That said, that's a slight slowing of their earlier growth momentum.

But as socialmediatoday.com noted, quote, in some ways, that's to be expected. The sudden increase in focus on e-commerce saw Pinterest benefit from a significant surge as it replaced regular mall visits for shopping, providing connection to a broad range of artisan goods aligned to user interests. With physical stores reopening, it seems likely that Pinterest will lose at least some of that momentum, and 30% year-over-year growth is still significant. It's just a little down on what Pinterest had been seeing, which could impact market perception, unquote. So let's look at that

$478 million in context. That's still more usage than Twitter, LinkedIn, and Reddit get. Really, the only platform that beats it is the Facebook Instagram juggernaut, and maybe TikTok, though they don't share numbers as specifically. More important to the bean counters at Pinterest, though, ARPU, that's average revenue per user, grew by 34% in 2020 compared to 2019. There are lots of general benchmark studies out there on engagement and basic ad metrics, but we don't often get a decent-sized study on the business use of video. We have one now from Vidyard and Demandmetric.

They looked at 760,000 videos on the Vidyard platform in all of last year and also picked the brains of 300 or so video marketers. 60% of the videos on their platform were less than two minutes in length. This should not come as a surprise to you. In almost all instances, the advice is, just because you can go long, doesn't mean you should. That said, even though only 10% of videos were more than 20 minutes long, that's actually an increase of 66% from the previous year.

Viewership correlates, not surprisingly. 58% of viewers will watch a business's video to the end if it's less than a minute, but stretch that video to 20 minutes or longer and completions drop to only 24%. Though I have to say, 24% of people watching a business video that's more than 20 minutes long is actually a really good number, I think. And what videos are those marketers making? Two-thirds of them are product demos, tied for second place at just over 50% were how-tos, explainers, and webinars. Training videos and social video were also up there.

In last place, probably the one that should be in first place, personalized videos. This is a great space to be in. For the last couple of weeks or so, every single person who subscribes to our premium newsletter gets a personalized video from me thanking them and telling them about the premium perks and the secret channel we have in Slack and so on.

It's all done through Zapier, which checks for new activity in Stripe, then sends the info to Bonjoro, then creates a task for me in Todoist to remember to do the video. Personalized videos should not be at the bottom with 16%. We can do better. As for where those videos live, 73% go to social media, 70% go to a company's website, and 60% go to YouTube. And finally, a nice update for those of you using Adobe Spark. They've just launched Shared Templates. This lets multiple users personalize content from the same set of templates across the web, iOS, and Android.

Yes, it's Ed Ball's day today, the day Britons commemorate a Twitter slip-up by a now-retired Member of Parliament named Edward Ball. Ten years ago today, Mr. Ball went onto Twitter to search for an article about himself, but rather than typing his name into the search box, yes, he typed it into the Tweet Compose box, his tweet read, Ed Balls. That's all it said.

Rather than deleting it, he thought, eh, what the hell, and left it up. And because this is the internet we're talking about, thousands of people retweeted it. And in 2015, someone decided to set today as the annual reminder of that glorious tweet. So, happy Ed Balls Day. Talk to you tomorrow. We will Edballs, make Edballs together. At Edballs. At Edballs.