Today in Digital Marketing - The Video Platform Culture Wars

Episode Date: May 4, 2021

Microsoft says it has a soul and wants to teach you how to have one too... which platforms are most digital marketers confident they can measure ROI?... Twitter plans to strip ads from sites you visit... and Facebook has no idea what irony means.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 VoicemailToday 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

Today, Microsoft says it has a soul and wants to teach you how to have one too. Which platforms are most digital marketers confident they can measure ROI? Twitter plans to strip ads from sites you visit. And Facebook has no idea what irony looks like. It's Tuesday, May 4th, 2021. Happy Teacher Appreciation Day! I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. It's always interesting to me to see how the individual cultures of the various social media platforms

influence how those platforms can roll out changes. Take TikTok. Part of TikTok's core has always been sharing and riffing off others' creations. In fact, there are functions in the app like Duet and Stitch which do precisely that. So there's never really been much uproar about people using each other's content.

YouTube, on the other hand, with its long-running history of copyright takedowns, has a notably different culture, one that protects the creative production of others at the expense of this kind of riffing trend. So, little surprise then that some YouTube creators are a little miffed that YouTube has automatically opted them in to have other people sample their content without any payment to them.

It is, of course, part of YouTube's response to TikTok, a format they call Shorts, and like TikTok duets or stitches, YouTube Shorts lets people take a chunk of one video to make their own. One person tweeted, quote, There's a new permission added to YouTube allowing other creators to sample your videos for Shorts. I naively assumed this would only apply to new videos, but it's opted in all my content. There doesn't seem to be a channel setting to opt out of this, so the only solution currently seems to be to manually untick this on every single video, unquote. One thing that might be keeping this from being a complete blowout

is that YouTube shorts are not currently monetizable. There are no ads with shorts and, you know, nobody's making coin on your video as a result. But I don't think there's anybody that believes it'll stay like that. YouTube created the format to be a competing ad product, after all, not out of the goodness of their heart. on your video as a result. But I don't think there's anybody that believes it'll stay like that. YouTube created the format to be a competing ad product after all, not out of the goodness of their heart. No matter how much their news release talks about inspiring people to share their culture and blah blah blah.

Anyway, it'll be interesting to watch as this develops. One of the strongest marketing messages in the last few years has been to connect your brand to purpose. What story are you telling and how does that story relate to a greater good? But of the many sciences in our digital marketing space, this tactic is most definitely an art. Microsoft today announced it wants to help with that art and has launched a marketing with purpose course. They say it will help you, quote, accelerate growth by building a more trusted and loved brand authentically. The course outlines marketing tactics and data-driven actions you should take across

the core building blocks of trust in your marketing, responsibility, values, and inclusion, which can lead to brand loyalty, unquote. The course is a little hard to find on their site, so I have created a short link. You can find it at b.link slash purpose course. Still with Microsoft for a moment, they've added a whole bunch more changes to their ads platform, so let's lightning round this shiznat. First, following in Google's footsteps, PhraseMatch will soon basically work like Modified Broadmatch. Both companies say it's intended to make things easier,

though clearly at the expense of specific controls, this will kick in mid-month. There's a new abbreviated ad format being tested in the US, one with only the headline and the URL. No description line. This is not a format you will choose. Instead, the blessed and holy algorithm will make that decision for you based on... Shit, I don't even know these days. What past engagement history?

Maybe the moon is in Virgo that day? Honestly, who knows? You can opt out by contacting Ads Support at Microsoft. As of today, customer match is available in all markets except for the European Union, the UK, and China. Also, oddly, businesses in the health and wellness category are not able to take advantage of this. If you've installed Microsoft's Pixel but aren't tracking conversions with it,

you will start to see a new metric being tracked in your account called smart goals. This is basically conversion modeling, and it's an educated guess on which session probably was, in fact, a conversion. There's a new workflow to set up conversion tracking. It's kind of like a wizard flow that polls you on a couple of questions about your ad goals.

The transition of DSA campaigns will happen this month. They'll convert those to search campaigns where the ad groups will be tagged as dynamic. After that rolls out, they will retire the DSA format. And finally, multi-image extensions and promotion extensions are now available globally. They had only been available in the U.S. until now. New numbers from Nielsen indicate most digital marketers plan to spend more on ads this year. And the channels that will benefit the most? Social media ads first, then search ads, then video, then email.

At the bottom of the list, spending on cinema ads. Not a single person polled said they plan to increase spending in that category. As well as a small sample size, only 260 marketing professionals across a number of verticals, but it does track with other numbers that we've seen from bigger studies. When asked which channel they believe they can most accurately measure ROI, the top two were search ads and email marketing. Today's premium newsletter has a link to the full study and two very pretty color charts. Twitter this morning announced it's acquired a company that strips ads from websites

to make the reading experience more enjoyable. They say they plan to offer the technology in their forthcoming premium subscription plan. In other words, if you pay for Twitter Plus or Twitter Pro or whatever they end up calling it, when you click links in tweets to read an article, that article will have all the ads stripped out. And you might be thinking, wow, I bet the website publishers will hate that. And you would be wrong. Because the company they're buying, called Scroll, is actually kind of revenue share.

Part of the money they got from subscriptions went to those publishers. In fact, the company says partners make 40% more money than they would have made from the ads. Pinterest continues to expand its ads business. Now, brands in Mexico can launch paid promotions. They say there are 23 million monthly active Mexican users. Last month, they opened up ads to the large Brazilian market. In fact, when you look at their user base outside the U.S., you see it grew 37% year over year in 2020.

Quoting socialmediatoday.com, in Mexico specifically, Pinterest still has a way to go to gain significant market traction, coming in at seventh on the top social media apps listing. But it is seeing increased engagement, particularly in regards to search activity. According to Pinterest, on-platform searches by Mexican users rose 93% year over year throughout 2020, unquote. Next in line for access to ads, Argentina, Colombia, and Chile.% year-over-year throughout 2020, unquote. Next in line for access to ads, Argentina, Colombia, and Chile. The stay-at-home pandemic economy has certainly helped the platform.

It says it's expecting a big revenue jump in 2021, but not to expect that growth rate to be so high in the future. And finally, tomorrow, we will learn whether former U.S. President Donald Trump will be permitted back on Facebook. The company's oversight board says it will announce its ruling in the morning. Perhaps not coincidentally, today Facebook launched a new emotional health resource center. You can't make this stuff up. Talk to you tomorrow. China.

China. China. China. China. China you tomorrow. China. China. China. China. China. China. China. China. China. China. Believe me, if the sky was falling down and the world was crumbling all around I would help you stand your ground

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