Today in Digital Marketing - 🎶 Things That Make You Go Hmmmm 🎶

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Tuesday, January 7th, 2020. Happy National Flag Day, Italy. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, Twitter is set to shut its analytics site down. Facebook bans deepfake videos, but of course there's a catch. What should we call single-set ad campaigns? And Amazon's algorithm is just getting creepy now. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:28 What if I told you that the majority of people making videos of themselves dancing on TikTok are in their 50s? It's absolutely true. Sort of. This surprising number actually comes from the Chinese version of TikTok called Douyin. The front end is pretty much identical to TikTok.

Starting point is 00:00:47 We can't assume, of course, the back end is sending every video you shoot to glorious leader. But Douyin has 400 million daily active users. This time last year, they were at 250 million, so pretty solid jump. It's not just the age of dancers that are different, though. On the Chinese version, people tend to post more learning-related material. One user alone who makes videos about chemistry had a reach of 130 million people last year. The parent company of both apps, ByteDance, is expected to go public on the Hong Kong exchange later this year. Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy told its people to not install the app on their smartphones, fearing the

Starting point is 00:01:25 app's connection to the Chinese government. Facebook will start banning deepfake videos now. Those are those fake videos of people that look surprisingly real. A good deepfake can make it look like anyone is saying pretty much anything you want them to say. And that is the problem, of course, especially as the U.S. gets closer to an election. But because it's Facebook, there's a catch. The new rules will not apply to parody or satire, which, honestly, is a pretty low bar to hit. You could claim pretty much any fake video

Starting point is 00:01:59 as parody if you wanted. Also, who's going to make that decision? Will there be a satire review and approval board at Facebook? Of course not. Oh, one more thing. If you make a fake video that just changes the order of words spoken, something like moving a critical not after the words I will, which naturally changes the entire meaning of that sentence. Yeah, Facebook's cool with that too. No problem. No ban. So I guess, good job, Facebook. I'm really not impressed by you. Here's something that sounds really bad, but, you know, honestly, probably isn't. Twitter is shutting down its audience insights page at the end of the month. That's the one you may have visited at analytics.twitter.com. To be honest,

Starting point is 00:02:45 I don't know that that many people actually went there. You might recall it shows some very high level numbers from the last 28 days. You can't change that date window. And all it shows you anyway is your top tweet, your top follower by follower count, how many mentions you got, that sort of thing. Most of us here, I'm assuming, are using a more fully featured analytics and reporting third-party tool anyway, tapping into Twitter's API. It'll give you a lot more flexibility in how you see those numbers. That said, I am not thrilled with Twitter pushing more people to its API to get access to their data. Because really, for regular marketers like you and me, that doesn't mean we're going to the API directly. That means we're going to those third-party platforms who have to pay to get access to Twitter's API, and who in turn make us

Starting point is 00:03:30 pay for that access after the firehose price is marked up. It is frustrating as hell to me that Twitter's business model includes selling their tweet data, our tweet data that is, and not cheaply. Compare that to Facebook and Instagram, who give nearly all of it away for free. It's coming soon, friends. The end of Facebook ad set optimization. Yes, campaign-based optimization will become the law of the land soon. Most direct response marketers I follow seem to think that CBOs have actually been getting pretty good lately. Though, of course, it's frustrating that daddy Facebook wants to make all the optimization decisions. This, of course, means you can't hack your way around it. You could

Starting point is 00:04:13 set up campaigns with just one ad set in them. Then I guess you're optimizing for both campaign and ad set at the same time. I actually expect there'll be a ton of these single ad set campaigns on Facebook, just as there are now, especially among smaller budget advertisers. So, the question, what do we call these single ad set CBOs? Andrew Foxwell has a fun little Twitter thread going on today, quoting Andrew, A colleague called them SAS CBOs this morning. We need a name as an industry. Another leading contender, standalone CBOs or standees, unquote. My vote here is singles, as in single serve instant coffee packages. But it looks like standees is getting the most votes so far. So this is creepy or maybe a coincidence.

Starting point is 00:05:06 One of my friends is an author of fiction books. She's a pretty well-known author, so I'm going to keep her name off the record here. But today, she got an email from Amazon about them promoting one of her books as a Kindle daily deal. As you may know, Amazon systems are largely automated by algorithms. It's not surprising that it might reach out to authors telling them that they're going to get a nice little boost in their feeds. What's unsettling, she said, is that they wanted to promote only book number eight in her 11 book series, and they only wanted to promote it in Australia. What is book number eight's major subplot about? Witches fighting forest fires.

Starting point is 00:05:46 Coincidence? As we said in the early 90s, things that make you go hmm. Alright, it is the return of the lightning round. SEO pros smell a Google algorithm update happening today. Let's not forget, updates to Google's index happen a couple of times a day, but this one might be big. I will report on it later in the week if it turns out to

Starting point is 00:06:09 be a thing. Mevo, the company that makes a fantastic social streaming camera. We have one here at EngageQ for our client work. They've come out with an updated camera. This one comes complete with a bigger battery pack that lasts about four and a half hours. Another day, another Google search console bug. Looks like the crawl stats report has crawled to a stop as of December 30th. Not a big deal. It's not likely that Google has actually stopped crawling your site. It's probably just a reporting issue. And as of now, YouTube video plays will be considered in the calculations

Starting point is 00:06:40 for the Billboard 200 album charts. Billboard says it will also take into account video plays from Apple, Spotify, Tidal, and Vivo. And finally, it is CES time, where companies get more than a little drunk on their own bullshit and come out with products that they think everyone needs, but in reality nobody really wants. Remember 3D TVs a couple of years ago? My personal favorite from this year's CES so far, the Opti Precision Skin Care System, which is, I'm not making this up, a handheld inkjet printer for your face. Yes, apparently it will scan your face, figure out where your skin tone is uneven, and squirt very tiny droplets of serum on the areas of your face that it thinks needs improving.

Starting point is 00:07:31 It goes on the market later this year. My wife is in Vancouver for business for a couple of days. You know what that means. I am now free to yell loudly at my Overwatch team because Reinhardt, I swear to God, if you charge to the other side of the map with 5 HP, I am not healing your suicidal ass. If you value a daily digital marketing news show, please take a moment to review this podcast. It only takes a second and it really does help. Quick instructions at ratethispodcast.com slash today. Thank you. and our agency are in this episode's description. I'm Todd Maffin. See you tomorrow. Bring me another!

Starting point is 00:08:29 Still not healing you!

Today in Digital Marketing - 🎶 Things That Make You Go Hmmmm 🎶

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