Today in Digital Marketing - The Walls Have Monetizable Ears

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, a new study claims Amazon smart speakers act as advertisers' ears inside consumers' homes. Snapchat's new device could help your brand with affordable drone content. Platforms continue to up their AR tools game for brands. Microsoft offers a cashback incentive on ads. And Google releases its first developer preview of Privacy Sandbox on Android. It's Friday, April 29th. I'm Steph Gunn filling in for Todd Maffin. Here is what you missed today in digital marketing. Turns out you don't need to be a fly on a wall to listen to your customers' wants. You just need to

Starting point is 00:00:37 be an Amazon advertising partner. A new study claims that the e-commerce giant's smart speakers are listening and collecting data. The researchers of the report titled, Your Echoes Are Heard, tracking, profiling, and ad targeting in the Amazon smart speaker ecosystem, say that Amazon's methods in doing so are allegedly inconsistent with its privacy policies and call for greater transparency into data collection, sharing, and use of smart speakers. Quoting the researchers, Our results show that Amazon and third parties, including advertising and tracking services, collect data from your interactions with Alexa through Echo smart speakers and share it with as many as 41 advertising partners. Amazon processes voice data to infer user interest and uses it to serve targeted ads

Starting point is 00:01:27 on-platform Echo devices as well as off-platform on the web, unquote. The report also found that smart speaker interaction leads to as much as 30 times higher ad bids from advertisers. According to The Verge, the e-commerce giant confirmed that it does use voice data from its smart speaker interactions to inform relevant ads that appear on Amazon or other sites where it places ads, comparing it to what you'd experience if you made a purchase on Amazon.com. The company also confirmed there are targeted ads on its Echo devices. An Amazon spokesperson says that the company does not share its customers' personal information with third parties without consent. Amazon also noted that it allows users to opt out of ad targeting. However, a framework was created by the researchers to measure online advertising data collection

Starting point is 00:02:15 and concluded that there was strong evidence that smart speaker interactions are used for the purpose of targeting ads, and that this ad targeting implies significant data sharing across multiple parties. Amazon responded to the study by saying, many of the conclusions in this research are based on inaccurate inferences or speculation by the authors, and do not accurately reflect how Alexa works, and that it is not in the business of selling its customers personal information or sharing Alexa requests with advertising networks. Amazon may be listening, but Snapchat is watching you from a bird's eye view.

Starting point is 00:02:58 Snap Inc. is getting into retail and has announced a mini drone called Pixie. The drone could be an easy and fun way for your brand to include aerial drone photography in your content without having to purchase a high-end drone or pay for pilot training, which is required in some countries like Canada. What's neat about Pixie is that there is no controller or SD card. You just turn it on and then select the flying mode. The drone can float, orbit around you, or follow you as you walk or run.

Starting point is 00:03:26 When you want to stop recording, you place your hand below the drone and it will land in your palm. Videos will automatically be transferred to your phone and by default will be stored in Snapchat memories. What's next? VR headsets? In the e-commerce space, there is no end to the number of plugins, platforms, and pop-ups you can install on your store's website to try to juice sales. One of the biggest focuses of this category is around increasing the conversion rate between the moment someone adds a product to a cart and that person actually pays for it. In fact, I'd venture to say an entire industry now exists in the very specific, but very important space known as cart abandonment.

Starting point is 00:04:12 Some studies show that 80% of online shopping carts are abandoned. In this space, we see everything from urgently worded text messages to time-limited discount offers by email. Sometimes these tools encourage people to come back to the site to read the product reviews or browse more product pages. But a new paper published last month in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science says tactics like that might actually be causing people to abandon their carts. Todd recently spoke with the study's co-author, Dr. Angeline

Starting point is 00:04:46 Scheinbaum, and she told him more information is not always better. One is that marketers should understand or at least think about that there's a differential relationship of retailer provided versus consumer provided information search with the cart use and cart abandonment. So what e-tailers could do is to encourage customers to place more items in their cart. Online retailers should make consumer reviews more visible. However, the results are also showing that exposure to too much information could make what we call information overload. And then that could spark something called choice deferral.

Starting point is 00:05:31 Again, kind of putting it off. Planned procrastination was an earlier word that we had used for that. So what customers can do and what companies can do is really think about those customer reviews and where they're going to be on that site and if they're needed at all, because if it produces information overload, in some cases, it could actually be a detriment to closing that sale. Their full conversation lasted more than half hour covering things like what the primary causes of cart abandonment are, how to handle the display of sold out products, whether to offer incentives to prevent a cart from being abandoned,

Starting point is 00:06:11 and how soon after someone leaves your site should you send them a retargeting email. That episode is coming exclusively to the premium feed tomorrow. You can sign up for 50% off your first month at todayindigital.com slash premium or tap the link in today's show notes. 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. From flying cameras to AR lenses, Snap Inc. announced it will roll out new features to make it easier for brands

Starting point is 00:07:03 to create augmented reality shopping experiences. The new shopping features include AR image processing technology. Using the shopping lens, consumers can try on outfits without changing clothes. A 3D asset manager. Brands can now request, manage, and optimize 3D models for any product in their catalog. The platform will also be introducing a builder for turning those models into ads or filters. To make these features easy to find, the app will feature a new tab in its Lenses hub called Dress Up that will collect try-on filters from brands, retailers,

Starting point is 00:07:37 and creators all in one place. A software developer kit will also be provided for retailers to build AR try-on features on their websites or mobile apps. Snapchat isn't the only platform enhancing its augmented reality suite. Meta is also giving brands more creative tools in its Spark AR Studio. Their update includes new audio options, allowing for more advanced audio integrations and including enhancements to audio processing, allowing creators to seamlessly blend multiple audio sources to create fun, layered audio effects. The company says this is exclusive to Instagram. They have also added new depth controls with a camera depth texture,

Starting point is 00:08:24 which lets creators detect the relative distance of surfaces and objects from the camera and extract this data as a texture. Finally, the Spark tool will have a new occlusion feature that will allow creators to better blend virtual objects into the real-world setting. The results from Amazon's first quarter are in, and e-commerce sales dropped 3% to $51 billion as consumers returned to shopping in real life. However, its e-commerce services posted gains, marketplace seller fees revenue rose 7% to $25 billion, subscription services grew 11% to over $8.5 billion, and advertising revenue increased almost a quarter to $8 billion. During the period, Bezos' empire missed Wall Street's earnings expectations due to a significant

Starting point is 00:09:14 slowdown in top-line growth and higher costs. The company reported overall revenue of $116 billion, up 7%, but it was the company's slowest year-over-year growth rate in two decades. Amazon reported a net loss of $3.8 billion in the first quarter. To help developers test its upcoming ad tracking system, Google has rolled out the first developer preview of Privacy Sandbox on Android. The preview program provides an early look at the Topics API and SDK runtime. Developers will also have access to device system images for Pixel 4 and up, sample code that demonstrates the implementation of runtime-enabled SDKs, and usage of Topics API available on GitHub, as well as Privacy Sandbox API references.

Starting point is 00:10:07 Google cautions that it is not intended for daily or consumer use and is only available via manual download. So my husband showed me something kind of cool on Google Maps. Did you know that you can go to your Google Street View and then you can look back to 2009? So for example, if you look up your home or your business address, you can see how it's changed over the past decade. You know, maybe this is just news to me or cool to me, but we bought our first home last year. So it's kind of cool getting to see what it looked like 10 years ago before we owned it. Although I could tell my husband immediately regretted showing me because the people 10 years ago

Starting point is 00:10:47 had a much nicer garden than we do now. So a lot of yard work is going to be in our future. Today in Digital Marketing is produced by Engage Q Digital on the traditional territories of the SnuNama First Nation on Vancouver Island. Our associate producer is me, Steph Gunn, podcast music licensing by Source Audio, ad coordination by Red Circle, and our bilingual theme composer Mark Levis was at the

Starting point is 00:11:13 Ottawa Film Festival last night. But not everything went as planned. He meant to give the actress a compliment. He said it with devotion. He sounded so sincere, but the words he spoke in Spanish brought the female lead to tears. Thanks for listening. Todd will be back with you on Monday.

Today in Digital Marketing - The Walls Have Monetizable Ears

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