Today in Digital Marketing - There Exists a Not-Inconsequential Chance This Headline Will Make You Skip Today's Podcast Offering

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Thursday, June 13th. Today, dumb it down. New research says the simpler you make your headlines, the more people will click on them. Also, Instagram's latest ad format is just as irritating as it sounds. A huge player exits the ad business entirely. And podcast listeners might just be the nicest people ever. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. Meta has Advantage Plus. Google has Performance Max. Now Pinterest is joining the party with an ad product it calls Performance Plus. All of these are the so-called smarter campaigns, which remove a lot of the fine control from advertisers and use machine learning to steer a campaign's audience and placement. Pinterest expects ad revenue to grow more than 17% this year.

Starting point is 00:00:53 Still, that'll bring it to about $2.6 billion. Compare that to Google's parent company, which made $80 billion just in Q1 of this year. Pinterest says its new format generated about a 10% improvement in cost per acquisition for conversion and catalog sales campaigns, and consideration campaigns got a little bit more than 10% improvement in cost per click. And unlike many AI-based ad products at launch, you still get a decent amount of control over targets. You can specify age, country, product interest. Performance Plus will manage the placement, in other words, where the ad will appear.

Starting point is 00:01:30 Quoting Adweek, quote, To compensate for signal loss, platforms, including Meta, TikTok, and Google, and most recently Yahoo, have leaned into automation and machine learning to recommend and manage ad placements for advertisers. In return, these platforms promise better campaign performance. While convenient, buyers are skeptical of some of the shiny AI tools for not offering details about where ads

Starting point is 00:01:55 are ultimately placed. Nearly one year after the launch of Meta's Advantage Plus, some marketers have been underwhelmed, finding the results inconsistent, unquote. So what's next? Pinterest says they are working on a couple of other formats, including a new collage ad designed to make things more shoppable. Next time you're slaving over your ad headline, consider this. Simple is better. New research from Harvard University finds that people are more likely to click headlines that use simple language and common words. The study was published in the Science Advances Journal and looked at 24,000 headlines.

Starting point is 00:02:36 To be clear, this wasn't a study about ad headlines specifically. It was a study of news headlines. But there are certainly some lessons that can apply to our world. Some examples, a headline saying that Meghan and Harry were spilling royalty to Oprah got more clicks when that was changed to just talking to Oprah. The headline, defiant gestures are increasingly what conservatives have instead of policy, got better results when it was changed to, I get the indignation, but where are the ideas, Republicans? The improvements in CTR in the study were small, but depending on the scale of your business,

Starting point is 00:03:16 it could actually be huge. Quoting Search Engine Journal, quote, To show how important this is, look at the Washington Post's audience data from March 2021 to December 2022. They averaged around 70 million unique digital visitors per month. If each visitor reads three articles, a 0.1% increase in click-through rates from 2.0% to 2.1% means 200,000 more readers engaging with stories due to the simpler language, unquote. Consumers are more likely to pay attention to podcast ads than any other media channel.

Starting point is 00:04:00 No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. There's no ad here. This according to a new study from Sounds Profitable, a podcast industry newsletter and research arm. 28% of listeners say they listen to all the ads on podcasts, the highest percentage among all media channels tested. 46% of listeners say they always or often skip ads on podcasts. But when asked about the last specific episode they consumed, that percentage dropped substantially. Quoting Tom Webster, partner at Sounds Profitable, quote, the encouraging thing about this study is that the consumer tolerance for ads in podcasts isn't zero. They expect to hear ads. While skipping ads happens in any ad-supported medium,

Starting point is 00:04:42 podcasting has the ability to mitigate much of that behavior like few other platforms if we just respect the listeners' expectations, unquote. This study was underwritten by a bunch of podcast companies, including Wondery, SiriusXM, and NPR. We have a direct link to the study in today's email newsletter, which you can sign up to for free by tapping the link at the top of the show notes. Well, first, it was unskippable ads that prevented you from scrolling down the feed until you watched them. Now, Instagram is testing another intrusive ad format, which might piss off both consumers and marketers alike.

Starting point is 00:05:20 This time, they're testing pop-up ads that show up on Stories. Now, to be clear, we're not talking about Stories ads, where the ad takes up the story screen and you pay for that. You get a call-to-action button and some text. No, rather, these are call-to-action buttons that get overlaid on top of an organic post. In one version, a single headline and call-to-action button appear near the bottom of the story. In another, it's at the top and sort of pushes the story down a bit. We have examples in today's email newsletter. It's definitely going to confuse consumers who might wonder what the connection is between someone's story about running in the house with an overlaid ad for incontinence products.

Starting point is 00:05:59 For marketers, we might not particularly like the idea of a competitor's call to action getting slapped on top of our organic posts. Like many things in our business, we learned about this through screenshots of this in the wild. There hasn't been any official announcement of this as a new ad product. And so far, the ads seen have been in-house ads for meta products like its VR games. The software technology giant Oracle is shutting down its advertising business, citing a significant decline in revenue. During its earnings call this week, the CEO reported that the company's ad business generated only $300 million in revenue

Starting point is 00:06:42 for the 2024 fiscal year, a drastic drop from the $2 billion recorded in 2022. Oracle's foray into the ad industry was marked by big investments, with the company spending more than $4 billion on acquiring ad companies over the past decade. Notable acquisitions include BlueKai, Datalogix, and Moat. But Oracle's ad and marketing business suffered a big blow when Meta stopped sharing data with third parties, including Oracle, in 2018, following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Then the GDPR in Europe forced Oracle to stop offering third-party data targeting services there. This led to the shutdown of the Add This Publisher Audience tool in Europe in 2019 and its complete termination two years ago.

Starting point is 00:07:25 The company says it will now focus on cloud, subscription services, and artificial intelligence. Disney has introduced two new ad products across its streaming portfolio, shoppable ads and something it calls advert games. Powered by the ad tech firm Brightline, these include Quiz Show and Beat the Block, both of which launching on Hulu and ESPN. These are interactive games that hope to increase brand recall. One example of how a brand used it,

Starting point is 00:07:56 Topgolf created a game where viewers used their remote controls to shoot golf balls into on-screen targets. The shoppable ad product is available across Disney's portfolio, comes in three formats called Sync, L-Bar, and Impulse. These use QR codes to let viewers shop specific products on their phones during a show.

Starting point is 00:08:13 Quoting Adweek, quote, though the games are customizable, Brightline uses some basic templates to avoid having to develop each experience from scratch. It has different formats based on factors like advertiser categories and trending events, such as March Madness or the holidays. Once Disney delivers the ad assets,

Starting point is 00:08:32 Brightline takes between three and five days to develop the game. This enables the product to scale, which is critical for spurring adoption, unquote. These shoppable ads are also available programmatically. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit?

Starting point is 00:08:54 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. And finally, LinkedIn this week announced some new job search tools powered by, you guessed it, the magic of AI. They include a tool that can write cover letters for applicants,

Starting point is 00:09:21 which, I don't know, as an employer, I kind of like to see how people write on their own. They also have automated coaches that can recommend specific on-platform courses they can take. Update on the puppy. We thought she was doing really good. We had three or four days straight without an accident in the house, but that's because we're using something called the tethering system, which basically means she's attached to my wife through a leash or myself all the time. All the time. And the idea is that she's never out of sight, so she can't hide somewhere. She can't go somewhere and poop or pee somewhere away from you, hidden.

Starting point is 00:10:08 So that's working, but then she gets away from us, and the first thing she does is, so I don't know. I don't know how much of it she's taking and absorbing into her head. Everyone we talk to says, relax, it'll get better. Chill, it takes longer than it seems. So anyway, catch number one still in my books but i do love the puppy see you tomorrow

Today in Digital Marketing - There Exists a Not-Inconsequential Chance This Headline Will Make You Skip Today's Podcast Offering

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