Today in Digital Marketing - They Are Never, Ever, Ever Getting Back Together

Starting point is 00:00:00 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. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at Rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal.

Starting point is 00:00:28 Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. 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.

Starting point is 00:00:52 Get customized coverage today, starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. It is Wednesday, October 9th. Today, the U.S. government wants Google broken up. We have all the details, including how it might affect the ad market. Also, brands go big on Black Friday spending.

Starting point is 00:01:13 Threads will soon have loops. And these strange moderation decisions happening these days on X. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in Digital Marketing. Could Google's reign be over? The U.S. government now says it wants the tech giant broken up to curb its monopoly over internet search and advertising. Yesterday, the American Department of Justice and several state attorneys general submitted a sweeping proposal to rein in Google's dominance, which could result in the first major corporate breakup in four decades. The DOJ's proposed remedies present several options,

Starting point is 00:01:53 from behavioral restrictions to more drastic structural measures. The focus is on four key areas. First, search distribution, limiting Google's dominance by restricting default search deals, pre-installed software, and revenue sharing agreements. They're also exploring splitting off Chrome, Play, or Android from Google and limiting Google's control over new AI-powered search technologies. Second, data access and usage. Google might be required to share its search index, data, and AI models with competitors while ensuring transparency in search results, features and ad rankings.

Starting point is 00:02:30 Privacy concerns would limit Google's use of certain data, and the DOJ aims to reduce the costs for rivals to index and store data. Third, restricting Google's contracts that block rivals from accessing web content and let publisher sites opt out of having their data used for AI training or appearing in Google's AI products. And fourth, regarding advertising, the DOJ proposes scaling back Google's ad tools and exploring options for licensing its ad feeds separately from search. It also calls for increased transparency for advertisers by providing detailed auction and monetization data. Google responded in a blog post late last night, describing the proposal as radical and sweeping and warning that it could lead to, quote, negative unintended consequences for American innovation and America's consumers, unquote.

Starting point is 00:03:24 We have the full Department of Justice court filing in today's email newsletter, which you can sign up to for free by tapping the link at the top of the show notes or going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter. Wonder how your holiday budgets stack up against the competition? A new study from consultancy firm McKinsey & Company yesterday revealed that more than half of brands ramp up their e-commerce budgets for Amazon Prime Day. Brands identified as leading, that's growing 10% faster than their sector's average,

Starting point is 00:03:56 are also investing more than $100 million in e-commerce tech and recruiting tech talent to secure a greater share of sales during the holiday marketing season. As online sales are projected to account for a quarter of global sales by 2025, brands are stepping up their investments. Seven out of 10 brands plan to increase their e-commerce spending for both Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Two-thirds are focusing on the end of the year holiday season, and more than a quarter plan to increase spend by more than 20% during this critical time. The study found that more than 40% of leading brands generate at least 10% of their annual e-commerce revenue from holiday activities like Black Friday, while a quarter of laggards,

Starting point is 00:04:40 mostly defined as brands growing at an average rate, those brands opt out. For four years, ad tech firms have been preparing for Google's cookiepocalypse. Now, as the dust settles from Google's recent decision to cancel the phase-out of third-party cookies, these firms find their investments in a cookie-less future hanging in limbo. Adweek has an interesting think piece today about these companies that are still waiting for returns on their money, time, and labor. The chief product officer at the ad tech company TripleLift noted that while their first-party cookie-less solution is designed for both environments, adoption is slower than they thought it would be. The changing landscape has prompted businesses to rethink their strategies and investments, with many ad buyers reporting a significant decline in interest and communication about cookie-less solutions. One ad buyer lamented the fading sales pitches for cookie-less solutions, noting their inbox is now overwhelmed with AI offers instead.

Starting point is 00:05:47 As firms grapple with shifting timelines and uncertainty, resources, once dedicated to Google's privacy sandbox, have also been dramatically cut. The ad tech company Raptive indicated that investments in cookie-less technologies for privacy sandbox have plummeted from 20% to a mere 5%. While third-party cookies are still in play, many users access the web via mobile devices or browsers like Safari that have long abandoned third-party cookies. Reports indicate that about half the web is currently unaddressable to advertisers

Starting point is 00:06:19 due to this trend. Adweek notes that investing in solutions to tap into this cookie-less audience can pay off. For instance, Index Exchange said that using LiveRamp's identity solution, RampID, on cookie-less browsers results in an estimated 144% increase in CPM compared to supply without an ID present. Meta's Threads appears to be taking on its competition with X with a new in-development feature called Loops that lets users better organize their discussion on the platform by topics. With this feature, Threads users will be able to incorporate their individual threads

Starting point is 00:07:03 into a loop, connecting them to specific topical communities. While it's unclear whether these threads will also appear on users' main timelines, it seems that users will be able to join these loops to receive more relevant updates in their Threads feeds. This is similar to X's Communities, which lets users join different topic groups and have those posts highlighted in the app. According to recent updates to the back end of the Threads app, Loop communities are set to get several functional options, including the capacity to join, leave, add user-specific detail, and more. But Meta told TechCrunch this feature is still in the very early stages of development and not out in wide testing quite yet. YouTube is doubling down on short form video, the platform announcing several new shorts updates

Starting point is 00:07:55 for brands and creators yesterday. First, it's launched an updated version of its shorts templates, which lets users recreate or repurpose more elements of existing shorts. Previously, creators could only remix single elements like songs or effects, but now they can replicate or build on attributes from any existing video that they've watched, including audio segment timing and text. YouTube's also expanding the song snippippets feature for Shorts, letting users opt into receiving notifications when the full song is released. In response to concerns about Shorts overloading users' feeds, YouTube's implemented a new toggle option, which lets viewers decrease the frequency of Shorts clips being shown in-stream. While this could lead to fewer views for your brand's vertical content, YouTube anticipates minimal impact, suggesting that those who opt for fewer shorts aren't frequent viewers anyway. And finally, on the non-shorts front, YouTube Studio Mobile now supports landscape view on both iOS and Android.

Starting point is 00:09:02 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:09:38 You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at Rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal. Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. And finally, a new study has found that X, formerly Twitter, will remove nude images within hours, but only if the report is about copyright infringement.

Starting point is 00:10:14 The study from the University of Michigan uploaded 50 AI-generated nude images to X. The researchers reported half as copyright violations and half as non-consensual nudity. All images reported for copyright infringement were removed within 25 hours, with even temporary suspensions for the posting accounts. But images reported as non-consensual nudity remained on the site after three weeks, with no consequences for the posting accounts. Why the discrepancy? It could be because there's only one federal law for those claims. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act requires online platforms to promptly remove copyrighted material upon receiving valid takedown notices. This federal law incentivizes X to act quickly

Starting point is 00:11:03 on copyright reports. But in contrast, there's no clear legal incentive for X to act on images reported as non-consensual nudes alone, despite state laws and attempts to pass a federal law. The researchers argue that new legislation is needed to define victim-survivor rights and impose legal obligations on platforms to remove harmful content swiftly. They point to the European Union's GDPR as a good model that protects intimate privacy. X did not respond to media inquiries. But, you know, free speech. Am I right? So how old am I? I am prostate years old now. I've reached that age where my prostate numbers look weird.

Starting point is 00:11:53 I have new meds and I have a special log, a little log for 48 hours to record how much I drink and when I drink. And then, well, you know, the other part of that log. Not a fan of this whole aging thing. I mean, isn't it a rule that you don't get this stuff until you're past retirement and you've got time for medical appointments and stuff? Maybe I read that somewhere. I don't know. I'll see you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - They Are Never, Ever, Ever Getting Back Together

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