Today in Digital Marketing - The Tears of Kate Bush 😢

Episode Date: June 24, 2022

Can't Inspect your Meta ads? Yeah, us either.The new "Campaign Strength" metricApple readies its AR gogglesWalmart and Instagram jump deeper into ARHBOMax's new (and irritating) ad formatNBC's new "emotional ad impact" measureTikTok rolls out a new Attribution ManagerKate Bush's "deal with God" isn't very profitable after allGo Premium! No ads, weekend editions, story links, audio chapters, better audio quality, earlier release time, and more.Get each episode as a daily email newsletter (with images, videos, and links).HELPFUL LINKS:ADS: Reach thousands of marketers with our ad options.CLASSIFIED ADS: Only $20 — more infoMORE CONTENT: Email newsletter, expert interviews, and blog posts.HANG OUT: Join our Slack communityEnjoying the Show? Tweet about us • Rate and review • Send a voicemailFOLLOW US:The Show: LinkedIn • TikTok • FB Page • FB GroupTod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok • TwitchDEALS:Jyll Saskin Gales — Inside Google Ads Andrew Foxwell — Foxwell Founders Membership • Scaling After iOS14 • All CoursesOthers — AppSumo lifetime marketing deals • Riverside.FM podcast recording siteCREDITS:Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada. Our associate producer is Steph Gunn. Ad coordination by RedCircle. Production coordination by Sarah Guild. Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.(If the links in the show notes do not work in your podcast app, visit https://todayindigital.com )Some links in these show notes may provide us with a commission.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Today, a big bug at Meta is gumming up reporting. Augmented reality gets its moment in the marketing sun. Meet the new ad format you're probably going to hate. NBC is trying to measure emotion. And the deal with God, it turns out, ain't so profitable after all. It's Friday, June 24th. I'm Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. A couple of things seem to have changed in Meta's ad platform this week.

In particular, a new metric visible in the ads manager called campaign strength. This appears to be a measure of how in line your campaigns are with Meta's machine learning based recommendations. Here's part of the help text under that field. Campaign strength is an evaluation of your campaign's performance potential. It's based on how many opportunities you have to potentially improve your campaign performance. It is shown on a scale of 0 to 100%. The lower the percentage, the more opportunities you have to potentially improve your performance. Your three campaigns with the lowest strength are highlighted on your account overview.

We also offer recommendations to help you understand what actions you can take to potentially improve your performance and increase your strength. You can see how applying each recommendation could increase your overall campaign strength, unquote. This is, of course, what all the platforms have been transitioning toward. AI picking and choosing so-called recommendations that it thinks would increase performance in your campaigns. I think I can speak for the entire digital media buying industry when I say that most of these recommendations range from being so generic as to not being useful to being actually harmful to performance. Also, while we're on the subject of frustration, there seems to be a pretty widespread bug in the meta ad platform, leaving many unable to use the inspect tool on their ad sets. All the other panels like edit history and charts seem to work fine, but clicking inspect actually will display a photo of Mark Zuckerberg with his middle finger in the... Oh, I'm sorry,

I read that wrong. Clicking inspect actually displays a completely blank page. So if that's happening to you, it doesn't seem to be from your end. Will Apple completely destroy Zuckerberg's iPhone moment? We recently reported that Meta is delaying the launch of its upcoming VR glasses, originally planned for 2024. Now, Apple's VR headset will likely be announced as soon as this January, according to an Apple analyst. The latest release date estimate was shared in a new report examining the VR industry. 9to5Mac.com has got good coverage of this today. The report also examined how meta will be affected by Apple's VR headset competition in the months ahead. It's expected

that while Apple's headset will be a game changer for the industry, its biggest competitor, Meta, will take a step back. The analyst anticipates Meta will cut back on its near-term investment in VR hardware to focus on its primary business model, advertising. Finally, the analyst predicts Apple's competitors will imitate its mixed reality headset design, driving the industry somewhat forward. If any of the analyst's game-changing predictions hold true, you may want to start considering your brand's position in the VR space. While the biggest tech company in the world prepares for VR, the biggest retailer in the world is investing more in AR. Walmart announced yesterday it will release two new augmented reality shopping tools for the company's app. The first feature, called View in Your Space, is an online app tool that lets shoppers view furniture and decor in their homes. Similar to other retailers using this technology, customers can view AR-enabled items in real life by clicking the View in Your Space banner, and the tool will walk

them through connecting their camera. They'll be able to toggle the item descriptions to see if the item will fit, take pictures, and so on. Walmart said the tool will be available for 300 items at launch and will be rolled out to all iOS users by early July, with plans to roll out on Android and the mobile web. The second feature is an in-store app tool, which is still in development. According to Walmart, shoppers and employees will be able to simply point their mobile device camera at store shelves via the Walmart app to filter their assortment based on that shopper's personal preferences. It seems everything is coming up augmented from AR shopping to AR social marketing. Instagram is testing new AR stickers and text within Stories, which lets brands add animated

or 3D digital objects to their content, similar to Snapchat's world lenses. Soon, creators and brands will be able to import their NFTs into their stories as 2D virtual objects. Meta announced this week that it will begin testing NFTs on stories using its AR platform called Spark. This includes an element called C in AR, which lets creators apply real context to NFT items to make them more tangible. HBO Max announced new ad options today, the first of which nobody who is a viewer is going to like,

but you with your marketing hat on just might. That first one is pause ads, which are static ads that appear on screen while content is paused. In contrast to other platforms, HBO says its offering aims to minimize disruption to storytelling. Instead of an ad taking over the full screen, the brand's ad will appear as an overlay on top of the content. Next up, sequential stories. Advertisers can use this format to create longer messages to consumers throughout an episode or movie. The way it works is that during a show or an episode, one brand will own all the ad spots, and the advertising will consist of a series of pre-roll and mid-roll ads that tell a story. Finally, HBO Max is getting an upgrade to its brand block ad suite.

This option enabled one advertiser to run a spot in front of a movie, and then after the ad, the content would play uninterrupted. Now the suite includes previews, which mimic going to the movie theater. It's a front-loaded ad experience that delivers trailer-specific creative before the film streams uninterrupted. However, this ad format will only be available to studios and major entertainment partners. It's the season for new styles and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes.

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Be protected. Be Zen. A new attribution tool has just launched for TikTok advertising. Yesterday, the platform released its new Attribution Manager tool, which lets advertisers set custom attribution windows within their campaigns. The tool will provide more ways to measure ad response,

which could improve your performance or your ad strategy. For web and app campaigns, the tool lets marketers select a specific time period to measure success via two options. Click-through attribution, which can range from one day to 28 days, and view-through attribution, which can range from off to one day and up to seven days. You can find the new attribution manager under the assets link in TikTok's ads manager. How did that ad make you feel? That might just be the new and fully measurable metric you'll start seeing in campaign dashboards. NBCUniversal announced this week that it's adding emotion to its ad measurement framework. According to the company's VP of measurement, the company believes that, quote, emotion is a great way in which to

understand the linkage between pre-market creative performance and in-market measurement, unquote. But I'm sure you're wondering, how can emotion be measured? Well, it turns out the media giant is working with Dumbstruck, an emotion analytics company that uses facial coding and eye tracking AI to learn how an audience's emotional response to a specific ad affects its market performance.

The company also noted several other measurement partners working in this space, including SystemOne, Emoto.ai, and Kantar's LinkAdTest. Well, if you spent any time on TikTok in the last week, no doubt you have heard the 1985 song Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush. Interesting side note, she actually wanted to call it A Deal With God, but the record label thought that would be too controversial. Anyway, Kate Bush rarely licenses

her music, but when the producers of the Netflix series Stranger Things asked her if they could use that song in a show, she agreed. Apparently, she's a big fan. The show aired, and a generation of young people heard the song for the first time, loved it, and soon, as these things often do, it was going viral on TikTok. So you might think, wow, lucky Kate Bush. She must be getting serious royalties. Well, she's probably not. To explain why, I present another TikTok viral tune. It's called Funny Song. It's usually paired with videos of cats running into walls, kids stumbling around, that sort of thing. The musician is Thomas Hewitt Jones from the UK.

He makes his living composing production music for stock music libraries. This one, apparently he knocked off in about a half hour. It was part of a collection of goofy songs called Vintage Oddities Volume 4 that his production music bosses wanted. He did it in one take. Honestly, didn't think it would go anywhere. Then some YouTuber uploaded it, someone found it on TikTok, and it took off. It has more than a million plays on YouTube, more than a million on Spotify. But on TikTok, it's closing in on 7

billion plays. And so, like Kate Bush's sudden viral hit, you might think, well, good for Mr. Jones. He's probably swimming in royalties. But no, in an interview with Adweek, Jones says so far he's made about $730 for seven billion plays. He doesn't even get fame, since the song is credited on all these platforms as Cavendish Music, the production music publisher. It turns out, unlike the deals record labels have cut with streaming music providers like Spotify, TikTok's royalties are paid based on

how many videos use the song, not how many times the song has been streamed. So, while Kate Bush may be enjoying some new attention, she's not reaping buckets of cash from it all. It's certainly an outlier in royalty arrangements, and perhaps one the labels will try to change when the music contracts renew. A deal with God, indeed. So, man, are we confusing our neighbors.

My wife and I have a Canada flag outside, and it's a pride flag. It's like the pride flag, but also with the Canadian maple leaf in it. And then we are painting these fence panels that we're going to put up kind of around our hot tub as a privacy shield, since the hot tub is up on a deck that kind of overlooks the street. So we're painting those the pride rainbow colors as well. We present as a completely square, normal, male-female, married couple, which we are, but we also are flying the Pride flag. So it's very confusing to our neighbors,

which I actually kind of like. Today in Digital Marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Tsunamic First Nation on Vancouver Island. Our associate producer is Steph Gunn. Production coordinator is Sarah Guild.

Podcast music licensing by Source Audio. Ad coordination by Red Circle. And pity our poor theme composer Mark Levis, who is desperately trying to get back in shape. He is, after all, an internationally recognized

competitive Ironman. But he's having problems on that uphill portion, is, after all, an internationally recognized competitive Ironman. But he's having problems on that uphill portion, which, you know, personally, I've never had a problem with. And I told him, listen, if I only could, I'd make a deal with God, and I'd get him to swap our places. I'd be running up

that road, be running up that hill, with, by the way, no problems. I'm Todd Mathaffin. Have a restful weekend, friends. I'll see you on Monday. I told you better than yours. Well, I thought I told

you before. I told you better than yours.