Today in Digital Marketing - Uncomfortable Questions

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Tuesday, June 11th. Today, the app that wanted the world to be more authentic has been acquired. Google says the next search update might restore some penalized sites. Why are marketers starting to be wary of ad verification platforms? And is it the triumphant return of the hashtag? I'm Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. Before we begin, a programming note. You may have noticed yesterday there was no podcast episode. I'm Todd Maffin. Rest assured, you will not miss a single bit of news. Anything that's important that breaks on Mondays will be covered in the following day's episode. And if something huge breaks that's really critical, we will publish a special Monday episode.

Starting point is 00:00:56 And then in the fall, when things pick up again, news-wise, we will return to five-day-a-week publishing. All right, on with today's episode. Be Real, the mobile app thought once to be a potential Instagram killer killer has been sold off to a mobile apps and games publisher. The app became popular for its take on authenticity. At launch, it only let you take one photo a day. There were no filters and both the front and back cameras took photos. Everyone was prompted to take their daily photo at the same time. So it became a kind of unglossed look at someone's life. A welcome counter to Instagram's traditionally poised and polished look.

Starting point is 00:01:32 The app's founders also said they wouldn't put ads in the stream, which led some people to wonder how it could support itself. In time, the app tried to be a little more mainstream in its features and add some things that brands could do, but in the end, they could only get it to 23 million daily active users. And perhaps that wasn't enough to keep chugging. It's not being shut down, though. The new owner, Voodoo, paid a half billion euros for it. The news release had the usual spin. They're excited. Next step in the journey, blah, blah, blah. The co-founder will stick around for a transition period and then leave the company. It is possible that Voodoo will sink some time into scaling it,

Starting point is 00:02:05 but if the history of similar acquisitions are anything to go by, the next six months will make or break the app. Google says websites smacked by last year's search algorithm update, which it called the Helpful Content Update, will be able to recover some of their lost ranking on the next core update. Posting on social media, Google search spokesperson Danny Sullivan said, quote, Yes, people who have had impacts with core ranking updates may see changes if our systems believe they've improved after the next broad one we have, unquote. He's talking, of course, about the next broad core update. So while that's good news, I suppose, there's still a lot we don't know.

Starting point is 00:02:48 We don't know when the next core update will happen. We don't know what it's going to be focused on. Most notably, we don't really know what Google's code will be looking for to determine if your site has improved enough to be pulled back up higher in the rankings, other than the usual just focus on your audience advice. How long does it take to recover? Google's help pages have some guidance on this. Quote, content that was impacted in search or discover might not recover, assuming improvements have been made, until the next broad core update is released. However, we're constantly making updates to our search algorithms, including smaller core updates. We don't announce all of these because they're generally not widely noticeable.

Starting point is 00:03:35 Still, when released, they can cause content to recover if improvements warrant. Do keep in mind that improvements made by site owners aren't a guarantee of recovery, nor do pages have any static or guaranteed position in our search results. If there's more deserving content, that will continue to rank well with our systems, unquote. SE Roundtable, in its coverage of this this morning, reported that it believes no sites at all have recovered from that September update, not even after this past March's core update. An interesting think piece today on Digiday reports that ad verification technologies are facing intense scrutiny from ad executives these days.

Starting point is 00:04:13 The executives Digiday spoke with say they're increasingly frustrated that as mature as the ad tech space has gotten, issues like fraud, ID spoofing, and shady sites still cause a significant amount of grief to marketers. Quoting their piece, quote, Marketers were left scratching their heads when Forbes was caught running a site for ad dollar arbitrage, wondering why their verification tech missed it. The same eyebrow-raising frustration hit when Colossus was mismatching cookie IDs. They couldn't help but ask, where were double verify and integral ad science during all this, unquote. For their part, those companies say they're not

Starting point is 00:04:52 designed to catch every issue, but that's not enough for some marketers who are rethinking whether to use verification tech at all. Instead, they're exploring other options, like buying entirely curated ad inventory or opting for authenticated reach only. Some in our industry advise clients to use analytics platforms like Adalytics and Foo Analytics instead of ad verification companies. While this approach might help you avoid wasting ad dollars on sketchy sites, it also raises concerns about brand safety and the potential for tone-deaf messages. It certainly is an interesting piece. It has a lot to say about whether our industry will tweak expectations around what ad verification tech can accomplish or move in a completely new direction. Their post is on Digiday.com. It's called Ad Verification is Under Fire.

Starting point is 00:05:45 We have a link to it in today's email newsletter, which you can sign up to for free by tapping the link at the top of the show notes. Marketers are spending more and spending faster, with global advertising expected to grow 7.8% and reach almost $1 trillion by the end of this year. This according to new numbers from GroupM's global mid-year forecast. And while next year's growth is expected to slow to under 7%, spending will hit a new milestone of $1.1 trillion. According to the analysis, the rapid expansion of retail media and the influence of China-based companies like Timu and TikTok are driving the growth.

Starting point is 00:06:29 The U.S. and China markets will represent 57% of global ad revenue, with the U.S. growing at a 5.8% rate and China at 14%. Other emerging markets like Brazil and India are also contributing to the growth. Digital, of course, makes up most of the ad spend, with media buyers sticking to the big players. The shift to newer channels like connected TV is expected to continue, and retail media should hit a 17.5% growth rate this year and fall back slightly to 13.5% next year. Meta's Threads app shook up the world of social media managers when it announced it wouldn't use hashtags. Rather than using words with the pound symbol in front of it, which had been a social media staple since forever, it introduced topic tags.

Starting point is 00:07:18 One or two words which, when tapped, would find other posts using that tag. But there's no hashtag, and you can only put one tag in your post. Now, it's possible Meta is backtracking on their attempt to kill the hashtag. One app researcher has found code in the app suggesting it will return to using the hashtag mark in front of linked topics, and it will return to calling them hashtags. Hashtags used to be an essential part of a social media post, but now, with machine learning and smarter content discovery algorithms,

Starting point is 00:07:49 most platforms say they're not really needed. When you upload a video to YouTube, the help text under the tags section reads, tags can be useful if content in your video is commonly misspelled. Otherwise, tags play a minimal role in helping viewers find your video. Quoting social media today, quote, maybe given the brevity of Threads posts and the real-time nature of engagement,

Starting point is 00:08:13 Threads actually does need more specific indicators to align the right conversations with interested users. That makes sense. At present, for example, Threads is using profile penalties to reduce the presence of political content in the app, likely because it can't always detect such in short Threads updates.

Starting point is 00:08:32 So if a profile posts a lot of political content, it gets a reach penalty by default for all its posts. So maybe the Threads algorithm actually does need more context to go on in order to properly filter and sort posts, unquote. This is, for the time being, just buried in the code and not released yet. But when we see this stuff in the back end, it almost always means it's on its way. All right, that's it for today. Thank you for listening. I'm Todd Maffin. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Uncomfortable Questions

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