Today in Digital Marketing - The Sad, Triumphant Return of Vaporware

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Wednesday, May 22nd. Today, the marketing announcements are plenty, so why can't any of us actually use these cool new things? TikTok to lay off a big chunk of their support team, Meta adds video to catalog ads, and the science behind offering a dollar discount or a volume discount, which performs better depends on what you sell.

Starting point is 00:00:26 I'm Todd Maffin. That's Ahead, today in digital marketing. Yesterday, it was Google's big day. Today, it was TikTok's turn to try to capture the hearts and minds of marketers. At its TikTok World event, the company announced some new tools. No surprise, much of it focused on AI. First, something they called TikTok One, which will be a kind of dashboard of sorts for all their creative tools. No surprise, much of it focused on AI. First, something they called TikTok One, which will be a kind of dashboard of sorts for all their creative tools, their measurement tools, their agency partners. They're throwing Creator Marketplace in there as well. So it sounds like some sort of consolidation of their various services. Then there's TikTok Symphony. This sounds like roughly the same thing, but for all their AI tools. Beyond that, there wasn't a lot of detail, which is sadly common these days.

Starting point is 00:01:10 In a push to show off how innovative they are, all these platforms announce stuff way in advance, some of which never actually comes into fruition. Yesterday's Google Marketing Live was a great example of that. Some of the things they announced were actually announced last year, too. Back in the Comdex days, we used to call this vaporware. It's software, sure, but it's not really out yet, so it's more just kind of vapors. Indeed, neither of these two TikTok things, TikTok One and Symphony, are widely available yet. If you go to TikTok's website, there's just a form to sign up for a waitlist. TikTok also announced some new automation tools

Starting point is 00:01:48 for campaigns that will take over once you put in your budget, campaign, objective, and some creative. TikTok's AI will then choose the creative to show, the audience to show it to, and the timing of impressions. Presumably, this is something you'll be able to choose to turn on and not something that'll happen automatically.

Starting point is 00:02:05 They also showed off a new interactive add-on for their top view placement, which will now let you add pop-out elements and countdown stickers. There's also something called Duet with Branded Mission, which lets advertisers participate in duets alongside creators. And finally, on the measurement side, the company launched Unified Lift, which will combine conversion and brand data to give a wider view of campaign results. So while TikTok will be busy getting those things off the ground, whether soon or, you know, maybe next year, don't expect a lot of support from the company's support teams. The information this week is reporting that a large percentage of the 1,000 employees in TikTok's operations, content, and marketing departments will be laid off tomorrow. Most significantly, TikTok will close down

Starting point is 00:02:57 its global user operations team. This is the group that handles user support and user communications. TikTok has laid off people before, but those layoffs have tended to be a few dozen at a time. that handles user support and user communications. TikTok has laid off people before, but those layoffs have tended to be a few dozen at a time. This would be a rare instance of a large-scale layoff. This all happening, of course,

Starting point is 00:03:15 just a few weeks after the US passed legislation requiring TikTok's US operations to be sold to an American company by mid-January or risk being banished from the country. There's a new automated video ad option coming to Meta's platform. Catalog product ads will be able to show video assets. You might be familiar with their catalog product ads. Those are pulled from your connected catalog and are shown dynamically to people Meta thinks are most likely to buy. Until now, you've only been able to use images for these, but now you can add video into these product listings.

Starting point is 00:03:50 Quoting social media today, quote, the option will also enable advertisers to expand their video ads across reels, feeds, and stories with Meta's automated display process ensuring optimal display to interested users. It could be a good way to more easily extend your promotions in a more engaging format by tapping into the popularity of video in Meta's apps. Indeed, Meta says that consuming video content now makes up 50% of the time spent across Facebook and Instagram, which could make this a valuable expansion of the existing catalog ad offering, unquote. Meta says if you do decide to upload some videos, make sure you keep them short and punchy, a hook within the first two seconds, a call to action within the first six.

Starting point is 00:04:36 It also reminds marketers to not forget about the safe zones for videos and make sure you leave room in your video for the UI to get overlaid. These updated catalog product ads should now be available to all advertisers. Incidentally, in case you were trying to access Meta's ads manager this morning and got nothing but a white screen, it wasn't just you. The platform did have some issues today, most of which seem to have been resolved. Science has discovered that there is a right way and a wrong way to create product offers, and it all comes down to the type of product you sell. Research showcased today by the RE Newsletter found that if you sell products that are more fun than functional, think of things

Starting point is 00:05:20 like candy or cologne, your sale should be using a price promotion, like $20 off or 30% off. But if you sell more practical products, like a garbage can, you'll get better results with a quantity promotion, like buy five and get 50% off. Quote in the RE Newsletter, quote, as a snack for their pleasure, as opposed to an energy source for a hiking exercise. More than half were more likely to buy a city guide magazine with a 50% off coupon when it was framed as pleasurable. And more than half, 53%, were more likely to buy headphones when they were to be used for pleasure,

Starting point is 00:06:18 like movies or music, versus functional purposes, like to study a foreign language, unquote. As for why this happens, the researchers say people reported a need to justify their purchase decision. Pleasurable purchases come from our desire for fun, which might be a little harder to rationalize. So promotions based on price might justify the purchase as a, well, just this one time

Starting point is 00:06:42 kind of indulgence. There were some caveats to be aware of. First, researchers found that this effect isn't as strong if people are buying the pleasurable product as a gift or if they keep that purchase private for whatever reason. Also, the paper conducted their experiments as hypotheticals. There were lots of experiments and they all had solid methodology behind them,

Starting point is 00:07:02 but the study did not measure any actual real-world sales data. The paper is called The Effects of Promotions on Hedonic vs. Utilitarian Purchases. It was published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. We have a link to it in today's free email newsletter, which you can sign up to by tapping the link at the top of the show notes or going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter. Sprout Social has released another report of the best times to post on social media. These numbers are a good general guide to when engagement is higher on the various platforms. But of course, your brand's best time to post might be something completely different.

Starting point is 00:07:44 It's important for you to measure your own audience's activity, but these overall numbers sometimes do provide a bit of a guide. Also, this is all based on engagement with posts from Sprout Social's platform, but they say the average has come from 34,000 of its customers. So while that's a pretty reliable sample size, of course, it skews more toward medium to large scale brands, since that is the majority of Sprout's customer base. Okay, on with the numbers. First with Facebook. Facebook's high activity times are weekdays between 9 a.m. and midday. This is roughly the same as last year. There's also a bump at about five o'clock, presumably people opening up the app after work. As for the worst days, Sundays. It's about the same on Instagram. Weekdays between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. are good there,

Starting point is 00:08:26 but there is less engagement on Fridays and weekends. LinkedIn's company pages get more engagement on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, specifically between 10 a.m. and noon. Pinterest's most active time is Tuesdays to Fridays at one in the morning. You might be asking, why so early? Apparently, so did Sprout, which went back to its data science team to double check. Turns out they believe early morning or late at night, depending on your perspective, is when users seem to be most struck with inspiration. And finally, unlike the other platforms, TikTok seems to get better engagement in the afternoon, with a noticeable uplift between 2pm and 6pm on weekdays. There's also a small bump between 9am and 11am on Wednesdays and Thursdays. We have the full report in today's email newsletter. Some nice updates coming for YouTube channel administrators.

Starting point is 00:09:25 First, the platform will soon tell you the specific times of policy violations in your uploaded videos. This is definitely helpful, as it was sometimes a little opaque as to what the enforcement bot got upset about. Quoting YouTube, quote, When a creator uploads a video using our self-certification process on web uploads, and that video receives a yellow icon, they'll have the option to appeal and have one of our experts review the video. When that review is complete, the issues our expert found that led to a yellow icon,

Starting point is 00:09:57 either for limited or no ads, will appear for the creator in studio, alongside timestamps of where in the video they appeared, unquote. If you get one of these and there's no timestamp, YouTube says that's because basically the whole video is against policy in some way. This is important not only to stay on the right side of YouTube, but also because these kinds of policy violations prevent monetization. So if it goes unaddressed, you won't make any money from that video's views.

Starting point is 00:10:24 Unfortunately, the workflow that we'd all like still isn't possible. That is to upload a replacement video at the same public URL and have YouTube check that new version. Instead, you'll have to delete the offending video and upload the replacement as a new video. This, of course, means any links or embeds that are out there for that first video will break. Also, the system isn't available for uploads from the mobile app yet. And YouTube is testing AI-generated instrumental soundtracks for shorts. You'll be able to enter a text prompt like pulsating rhythmic and select a genre. It'll then make you a 30-second, non-looping instrumental music bed

Starting point is 00:11:05 to go underneath your short, which will be unique for each generation and free of any copyright issues. This will be part of its other AI music tool called DreamTrack, which can generate short song clips in the style of participating artists like John Legend, T-Pain, and Sia.

Starting point is 00:11:24 That's it for today. I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - The Sad, Triumphant Return of Vaporware

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