Today in Digital Marketing - The Surprisingly Effective Strategy of Running Terrible Facebook Ads

Starting point is 00:00:01 It's Monday, September 26th. I'm Todd Mappin. Today, will smarter AI fix programmatic brand safety? TikTok loosens its live streaming requirements. Amazon plans to preempt Black Friday. Meta makes account switching easier. And why you might want to consider running absolutely terrible Facebook ads. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. We start with some possibly changing views on the issue of brand safety when it comes to programmatic advertising running close to news content. It's understandable why brands

Starting point is 00:00:36 are reluctant to run ads alongside topics like Queen Elizabeth's death or the Ukraine war, and that means reduced ad revenue for news publishers. But one publisher is hoping to change your mind. A senior VP at The Independent says brands are being too strict about advertising against news. Quoting this executive, Blair Tapper, There used to be this misnomer that programmatic was just all of these underground pipes that spit out ads like magic. I really believe that's not the case. Programmatic is still a human business. It's still a human cell. It's just a different way of buying inventory. And so, if you can humanize the programmatic relationship, I think a lot of objections to news go away, unquote. Still, even brands that don't shy away from advertising with publishers

Starting point is 00:01:22 still have rules on which stories to advertise on. Keyword block lists are one method of sorting through these barriers. But Tapper added, these lists are rudimentary when it comes to contextualizing the meanings of the words. A brand, for instance, could block the word shot and end up blocking a soccer article about someone taking a shot at the goal. To address this problem, Tapper's team has started working with IAS, Ipsos, and NewsGuard to try to contextualize the articles affected by keyword blocking. As a result, advertisers can still appear in articles about Queen Elizabeth's legacy and accomplishments, rather than avoiding all articles that may include her death. This has been an issue in the industry since forever,

Starting point is 00:02:05 but many analysts are hopeful that the advent of machine learning, tweaking placement rules, might usher in a new era of stronger advertising with less risk to your brand. All right, a couple of updates from TikTok to report. First, accounts can now live stream with up to five guests on the platform at one time. Some users have had access to this for the past few months or so, but this is a wider rollout. You'll be able to add up to five guest video boxes, or more to invite guests to a live broadcast. And live guests need to have 1,000 followers of their own. This can be a useful tool for brands to showcase their latest products or facilitate collabs with influencers or hold Q&A sessions. In other news, a preliminary agreement has been drafted between TikTok and the Biden administration. If the company tries to remain in the U.S. without major ownership changes, the New York Times reporting today that the two sides are closer to hammering out a deal in which TikTok would improve its data security and

Starting point is 00:03:13 governance without requiring its owner, ByteDance, to sell it. Closer, but not there yet. Watch this space. Veteran media buyer Andrew Foxwell has a new course out called the AAA Program, Assessment, Action and Ascension. There are a lot of people out there selling a lot of courses, but few I would trust. Andrew's is definitely in that camp. I've bought several myself and found them super helpful. This one is aimed at getting team members up to speed on some of the new realities in buying ads in a post iOS 14 world. It's a course that's really for bringing junior to mid-level buyers from social media, you know, report, talk about optimization, talk about attribution, and gives more than anything the tools to the buyer to start to make their own decisions on paid social, along with a lead on meta, of course, and meta properties, but then also talking

Starting point is 00:04:22 about TikTok, talking about Google and Performance Max, talking about email. It's super timely, too, because, you know, buying media on meta platforms used to be pretty easy, used to be fairly point and click before. But since Apple's changes and a number of other changes on the platform, it's become harder. It's not as simple as it used to be. I think that we all got spoiled in the early days or even, you know, for three or four years ago. And what we're doing now is a big focus on looking at the whole picture. So you can't really look at meta ads without looking at talking about creative. And, you know, there's there's two and a half hours of just creative content in this course.

Starting point is 00:05:02 You know, there's talking about landing pages. I mean, I think we talk about landing pages for 45 minutes. Like it gives you everything that I know on how to make sure that your team is trained properly. I've been a member of Foxville Founders, which is your Slack community. I've paid for it with my own money more than a year and a half now. Incredible resource inside our senior media buyers, very receptive to answering questions about attribution and reporting and auditing and so on. Today, you launched a resource, a database of quick answers. Can you talk a bit about that? One of the things that's a challenge for everybody is time. What we have tried to do is we have, a podcast that goes out for members. That's every two to three weeks,

Starting point is 00:05:43 recapping the best stuff from the membership. We have a weekly email recap. And then now we also have this founder's database. And what this does is it takes all of the absolute best content that we've had in the membership from the last year. And now it's updated every month, too. Andrew's new course is called the AAA program. Again, meant for agency or brand media buyers who need to catch up on all the changes on the various platforms from auditing to pixels to creative. You can learn more about that course at b.link slash media buying. And his

Starting point is 00:06:16 super helpful Slack community is at b.link slash founders. Those are affiliate links. Again, the course b.link slash media buying and his Slack community, b.link slash founders. Amazon wants to get a jump on Black Friday. Earlier today, the company announced a second Prime Day called the Prime Early Access Sale, which is pretty much just another 2022 Prime Day, but this one in October. The two-day shopping event will take place on October 11th and 12th and is, of course, exclusive to Prime members. The e-commerce giant says the event will give members early access to holiday sales with hundreds of thousands of deals. New deals will drop throughout the event across all top categories like electronics, fashion, home, and pets. Amazon will also release its first ever top 100 list

Starting point is 00:07:10 of this year's most popular and giftable items during the event. 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. Viewers tuning into Amazon's first exclusive Thursday night football game last week may have noticed something missing. Beer commercials.

Starting point is 00:07:51 I know, football with no beer ads? Turns out the reason was that beer ads run counter to Amazon's advertising policies. Policies they apparently carry over from their website ad platform. They prohibit ads that promote wine, beer, spirits in the U.S. and other countries like Canada, India, and Saudi Arabia. The guidelines indicate that ad content must not encourage, glamorize, or depict excessive consumption of alcohol, which is, of course, exactly what beer commercials are meant to do. 13 million viewers tuned into its Thursday Night Football broadcast, which was more than their estimate of 12.5 million. Business Insider noted that the lack of alcohol commercials is a notable example of how an NFL live stream differs under Amazon's empire, foregoing the historically cushy relationship between sports and booze. Some good news for social media managers who juggle multiple social accounts on Metis platform.

Starting point is 00:08:50 The company today announcing it is testing a new update that makes it easier for brands and social media managers to switch between accounts and get notified for multiple profiles on Facebook and Instagram. Here's how it works. Using this new profile switching interface they're coming out with, you'll be able to switch between Facebook and Instagram accounts, but only if they are added to the same account center. And notifications will also be displayed for each profile. Side note, I'm hoping they don't screw this up because they've

Starting point is 00:09:19 already screwed up notifications with pages. I don't know if you have access to multiple pages in the new page experience or whatever they call that thing. But my personal Facebook is unusable now because all I do is I get every notification from every brand page that our agency has a client of. And I can't find my own notifications in that. And there doesn't appear to be any way to turn that off. Anyway, also, Meta is introducing a new account registration and login flow. New users can create a Facebook or Instagram account and then use that account to sign up for additional ones. Which, side note, also seems to be against their policy

Starting point is 00:09:56 about having multiple accounts, but whatever. And people who have both an account on both platforms can now use login information for one app to access the other. Again, as long as their accounts are in the same account center. Are you confused? Yeah, me too. The company added that users will be notified when a new account is created using their existing account. And when an account is added to their account center.

Starting point is 00:10:18 Finally, users can manage which profiles appear in the profile switching experience. And which accounts can log into each other. But there is some genuinely good news coming out of Meta that is not confusing. And in fact, something that we have been waiting for, well, for a long, long time now, you can finally create Instagram stories up to 60 seconds long without them getting chopped up into multiple clips.

Starting point is 00:10:45 The company confirming it will roll out the ability for all users to upload long, uninterrupted stories. Now you'll be able to watch and create stories continuously for up to 60 seconds instead of being automatically chopped into 15 second clips. Quoting TechCrunch, the new change is a welcome addition to the app, likely for both users and viewers. Users will be able to now post uninterrupted stories that won't be broken up, and on the other hand, viewers will no longer have to continually tap to get through a long video that they might not actually want to see.

Starting point is 00:11:18 But the change could also be a turnoff for people who liked the simplicity of short, bite-sized stories. In addition, the ability to post longer, uninterrupted stories somewhat blurs the lines between stories and reels, as you now have two options when it comes to posting a 60-second video. A mostly bare billboard advertising a field is gaining recognition for its creative. The British grocery retailer Sainsbury has unveiled its new marketing campaign,

Starting point is 00:11:52 Billboards You Can Harvest From. With the aim of promoting autumn specials in the grocer's own Taste the Difference line of products, it has planted billboards right in the middle of some of the UK farms that produce its ingredients. The see-through billboards feature 2D branding and perfectly frame the farmland landscape where its products are harvested. If you are a member of our premium newsletter, you can see a photo of what one of them looks like. It actually looks really cool. And finally, next time you need to shake up your ad account a little,

Starting point is 00:12:28 consider running deliberately terrible ads on Facebook. Like really, really bad. Creative that isn't cropped right. Typos in the copy. No, it's not to artificially boost engagement. It's the way at least one media buying agency is throwing their clients' competitors off their scent. As you might know, Meta has an ads library that gives anyone a look

Starting point is 00:12:51 at the ads any brand is running at any given moment. Well, clever digital marketers realized early on that this is actually a goldmine of data, especially if you're trying to learn what's working for others in your category. That's where the fake ads come in. Zach Stuck, founder of the growth marketing agency Homestead, shared his scheme on Twitter recently. Quote, we've run fake ads at $1 a day in big spending accounts to throw off the competition, unquote. And honestly, brilliant, right? Because the ads library shows the creative and a tiny bit about targeting. What it doesn't show is budget. So you have no idea how much money a brand is committing to any particular piece of creative. All you'd see for Zach's clients is a whole bunch of ads. Some are performing. Others aren't. Still others might be bleeding budget.

Starting point is 00:13:44 But you won't know which. Absolutely brilliant. By the way, last week, we reported on a wave of ad account bans coming from Meta. I am seeing some reports out there actually through Andrew Foxwell's Slack group. The word is leaking out through Meta engineers that they are aware it's a bug and are fixing it. I am starting to see people whose ad accounts had been banned, getting them back. Not all, of course, but certainly,

Starting point is 00:14:11 and anecdotally, to be fair, an uptick. Andrew's Slack group, again, is b.link slash founders. I have been using a new email app on my phone this month. It is the only one that has been able to block those irritating sequence pitch emails. Do you know what I'm talking about? Like, hey, we're a great SEO firm. You should hire us. And the next day, just checking in to see if you read my email. Then the next day, just moving this to the top of your inbox. I hate those more than regular spam.

Starting point is 00:14:42 Anyway, the email app is called Edison. Once you get one, you block them. And this is the part I like. You can block their entire domain in a tap. I know Gmail and others can block as well. But the problem is that those blocks will drop them into your spam folder. And I check my spam folder every day just in case there are any false positives. This app sends blocked emails right to the deleted items folder, which I love. I know it sounds petty, but I love it. Full disclosure, they comped me a year's access to their premium product to check out those features too. It'll automatically update

Starting point is 00:15:14 your contact with data it finds and signatures. You can add spammers to your call blocking too. But I'll tell you, there is nothing more satisfying than tapping that block all from this domain button. The app again is called Edison. Well, if this podcast is on your daily must listen list, you might get benefit from upgrading your listening experience by signing up for the premium podcast. You will get this show, but with no ads, you'll get immediate access to more than 20 deep dive, full length episodes covering the latest in marketing science. Plus you'll start getting new ones every other weekend. There are links to stories in the show notes. It comes out earlier than the free episode. There are even audio chapters that let you jump between stories. Tap the link in the show notes or go to todayindigital.com

Starting point is 00:15:57 slash premium feed. I'm Todd Mathen. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - The Surprisingly Effective Strategy of Running Terrible Facebook Ads

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