Today in Digital Marketing - The Only Winning Move is Not to Play

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Tuesday, September 19th. Today, while your meta ads may have been sucking the last few days, Amazon has a warning for its sellers, the threat to your marketing platforms deep within AI bots, and next time your assistant says they've found the perfect cloud security system, make sure you know exactly what they mean by cloud. I'm Todd Maffin. That's Ahead, today in digital marketing. If you've noticed your meta ads have been slumping the last few days, this might be the reason why. DTC media buyer David Herman posted on social media this afternoon that the meta ad platform has been pretty broken since last Wednesday. He says his campaigns still have ads stuck in review. This despite him trying the duplicate and try again trick.

Starting point is 00:00:47 And any new ads he's put up since Wednesday have been performing terribly. Quoting from his post. We're still seeing $0 conversion value on the Pixel, leading to massive drops in ROAS. CPM and CPC for many brands have skyrocketed recently. $80 CPMs and $11 CPCs. Facebook reps claim this is normal. So here's what I'm doing in this scenario. One, pulling back on creative testing

Starting point is 00:01:14 at 10 to 20% of budget until it feels fixed. How will we know? It's an unspoken rule in media buyer land. You know when you know. Two, I'm adjusting bids up or down slightly for delivery. Seeing $3 to $5 increase in bids so far is delivering similar results as the desired goal of profitable, but this is not scalable. And three, riding the pain out. Sometimes it's worth it in the long run, as long as the numbers aren't too bad.

Starting point is 00:01:44 I've still got some brands killing it, but it's few and far between with all these bugs, unquote. So in case you've been seeing similar drops in performance or hikes in prices, this may be why. Some advertisers said on David's post that they're pulling back on MetaSpend by as much as 50% while they ride it out. Some updates to Microsoft's ad platform. The company today is starting the rollout of two new automated bid strategies for audience ads, Maximize Conversion and Target CPA. This is launching to a small test group for now and should be out to all accounts by the end of the month.

Starting point is 00:02:22 What are audience ads? These are Microsoft's display ads. They're served on third-party sites, as well as some of Microsoft's own properties, like MSN, Start, and Outlook. This is different than the keyword-based ads people see when they search on Bing. Audience ads, regardless of the platform,

Starting point is 00:02:39 are generally considered inexpensive and good for brand awareness, but not so good for clicks and conversions. They're more of a top-fun funnel placement. Microsoft also announced its audience ads are now available in 58 new markets. That brings it to 187 countries in total. Time is ticking. And if you sell products through Amazon's fulfillment program, the company is warning you have five weeks left to get your stock to them to make sure you're ready for Black Friday. The deadline is October 26th. The company says its fulfillment center employees will spend the time

Starting point is 00:03:17 after moving product around to its regional hubs to make sure things are close to expected consumer demand. Quoting Marketing Dive, most sellers will have higher inventory capacity limits in October and reduced capacity the following month, according to Amazon. The company didn't specify to what extent capacity would drop, but it said estimated limits in November will provide enough storage for six months of inventory. Unquote. If you need more capacity, you can increase your limit with Amazon's capacity management system. Also coming in October, higher fees for sellers using Amazon's fulfillment services. It's a kind of surge pricing.

Starting point is 00:03:57 The extra fees are for the peak season and run from October 15th until January 14th. One of Amazon's few competitors, Walmart, says it won't charge any peak storage fees for sellers, but there is a catch. You have to have your inventory in by October 1st. Elon Musk may have just inadvertently revealed that usage on X has plummeted. This is something independent analysts have noted for a while now. X has tried to counter it by inventing metrics like device user seconds, a metric that nobody else in the industry uses,

Starting point is 00:04:33 and saying that those, shall we call them DUSs, are at an all-time high. But then, at an event yesterday, he said this. You know, at any given day, there's on the order of 100 to 200 million posts to the system. This is a lot of material. Wait, 100 to 200 million tweets? That's actually not something to brag about, considering that Twitter used to regularly report 500 million posts per day.

Starting point is 00:05:01 They said it as far back as 2013 and continued reporting that number in the years that followed. In fact, even X's new management at one time said they were seeing 500 million tweets. Quoting from the company, Twitter aims to deliver you the best of what's happening in the world right now. This requires a recommendation algorithm to distill the roughly 500 million tweets posted daily down to a handful of top tweets, unquote. There are factors in this number we don't know. Factors X has so far been silent on. How many bots made up some of these posts? How many are retweets? For that matter, as socialmediatoday.com noted in its coverage of this, how much of this is due to the overall industry decline in posting on social media. But still, that's a big drop in activity. Also related, in the same meeting, Elon Musk told

Starting point is 00:05:51 the audience that he's considering charging people for access to the site, not just access to premium services, access to any of it. There's a reason why security experts say to be very cautious about what you put into an AI chatbot like GPT or BARD. Some people have put confidential source code into it. Others have given them access to large pools of company data in the hopes that these chatbots will learn more about the company and be able to provide more accurate responses. But a group of researchers has found that swimming around in that sea of data are API keys, and that could have a devastating effect on a company if those get out. API keys are short strings of data, like about 40 random characters, that let one service authenticate an account.

Starting point is 00:06:43 For instance, if you want to connect your email marketing platform up with your legacy CRM, you might use an API key. You generate a key from your CRM so that when your email system wants access, it provides the secret code and the two systems can talk. This also makes it easy to revoke access. You just change or delete the key. But keys are sometimes found in big pools of data. And if that pool is handed over to an AI engine, it's possible somebody else might be able to ask that engine for your API keys and be given instant access to the mission-critical platforms and systems you use. The researchers have published a study called Do Not Give Away My Secrets, uncovering the privacy issue of neural code completion tools. They built some software

Starting point is 00:07:28 that specifically looks for the way API keys and access tokens are formed, how many characters, what sequences tend to be in them, and so on. And they set their software off line by line, looking for strings that matched.

Starting point is 00:07:43 It was kind of like War Games, which, by the way, was my favorite movie. From the 80s, a young Matthew Broderick is trying to hack into a games company called ProtoVision. He sets his computer and phone up to start at an area code, 316, and a prefix, 250. Then, the computer adds the last four digits, 0001, and calls it. A human answers. The computer hangs up and calls the next one. Eventually, by just brute-forcing one number after another, his computer finds the secret phone number for his school district's student records.

Starting point is 00:08:26 His girlfriend watches as he goes in and changes his grade. Are those your grades? Yeah. I don't think that I deserved an F. Do you? You can't do that. Already done. That's essentially what the researchers did here. Gave them a sample and sent the code off looking for matches. Their

Starting point is 00:08:46 software identified 736 matching strings, 129 of them had keys or tokens in them. For ethical reasons, the researchers say they didn't check to see if keys to systems with private information in them worked, but they did test others and found at least two keys operational, both working on the Stripe payment platform. Stripe accounts actually have two keys, a test key and a live key. The researchers found the test key, so they weren't able to see or make any changes to actual personal data. Still, though, a lesson for us all. Be careful what you say to an AI machine. And consider what the Whopper computer in War Games told us all. The only winning move is not to play.

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Starting point is 00:10:21 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. TikTok today announced it will launch a new way for brands and creators to label AI-generated content, some by manual labeling, some automatically.

Starting point is 00:10:44 When the app detects AI generated content, it will soon pop up a prompt in the upload flow asking users to add the label. To users, this new label will show as a message below the username reading, creator labeled as AI generated. But usage of the tool isn't voluntary. TikTok said it won't require past videos to be manually labeled, nor will it apply any kind of penalty or a strike against accounts that choose to not add any kind of disclosure label. That seems to be at odds with its recently updated policy that gives it the right to take down realistic AI-generated images if the user hasn't disclosed the video is fake. The company says eventually it plans to figure out which videos have been auto-generated and will automatically apply this label to videos itself. They're still working on that AI detection software. Instagram is also working on similar

Starting point is 00:11:37 tech that will label content created or edited with AI, and the EU is pressuring platforms to label AI content as well. In a way, it's a little peculiar, given that much of TikTok's massive success is due to AI-based filters. The bold glamour filter was so accurate, it was the first to be considered AI-based rather than just a mesh applied over a face using augmented reality. At the time, TikTok refused to respond to media inquiries asking if the product was in fact AI-based. To its credit, TikTok says it will rename any of its own filters that uses AI so that it's more clear. Though to be realistic here,

Starting point is 00:12:19 I don't think any consumers know or care whether the tech that's giving them bigger lips is AR or AI. The new AI label functionality has started to roll out today and will take a few days to get to all accounts. A couple of interesting reports in the digital marketing space came out this week. First, research firm PQ Media says media spend on influencer marketing went up nearly 22% last year to $29 billion and is expected to go up 17% this year. Most of that, of course, coming from America. But as the stats often do, as the market matures, faster growth will start coming in from other countries. The researchers say the U.S. accounted for 76% of spend in their study, but that will drop to around 68% within four years.

Starting point is 00:13:10 The second fastest-growing market was India, followed by Japan. The fastest-growing account size was the micro-influencer. That's accounts between 10,000 and 100,000 followers. The study found that marketers using influencers are focusing less on metrics such as likes and are now more interested in click-throughs. Second, more signs that the digital ad space is on a comeback. Booster's Media Ad Sales Trend Report and Operative's Benchmarking Report

Starting point is 00:13:39 both show numbers on the rise for publishers, those are news and entertainment sites that host ads. Quoting Digiday's coverage of this, while quarter one was lackluster in more ways than one, the second quarter started revving up as several ad categories unfroze budgets and began transacting with digital publishers, ultimately ending the quarter up 3% year over year,

Starting point is 00:14:02 according to booster data, unquote. While that's certainly good news, it was noted that other metrics are still lagging, notably deal volume and deal cycle length. A booster executive was quoted in the report saying, quote, the deal cycle times dropped pretty significantly. So buyers seem to be coming in with smaller budgets and they were coming in very quickly,

Starting point is 00:14:23 right before the campaigns were supposed to go live. So they're making incremental buys, unquote. And finally, I guess you could call this marketing technology. It's not online. There's no pixel to install. Instead, it's technology used by a growing number of bricks and mortar stores. And that technology is fog, like literal fog that comes shooting out of a fog machine. It's called the density security fogger, and it's triggered by a store employee who sees a shoplifter. Once they push the button, the entire store fills up with fog very quickly, making it more or less impossible to see anything.

Starting point is 00:15:06 Specifically, where the exit is and how to get there. The company says it's an antidote to an increasing number of smash and grab robberies. We have a video of it in action in today's newsletter, which you can sign up to by tapping the link in the show notes. The fog is the same kind used in concerts or theaters. It takes about an hour to dissipate. The company says it has 3,500 installations in the U.S. so far, and a deal with a cell phone company is expected to add another 6,500. So next time you ask your team

Starting point is 00:15:38 to install a new cloud security system, better double check what they come back with. Follow us on Mastodon. We are todayindigital at mas.to and you can follow my personal account. I'm tod at hci.social. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. Bye.

Today in Digital Marketing - The Only Winning Move is Not to Play

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