Today in Digital Marketing - Wait, They're Actually Listening?!

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Friday, December 15th. Today, changes to Meta's lead forms and collection ads, how will they shake up your Q5 plans? That myth about our phones listening to our conversations and serving us ads may actually not be a myth after all. And the policy reversal that is pissing off a lot of teenage boys. I'm Todd Maffin.

Starting point is 00:00:24 That's ahead today in digital marketing. 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. Every Friday at this time, you usually hear me plug our meta ads columnist

Starting point is 00:00:55 and tell you that it's over on the premium feed. We're trying something new that we'd like to get your feedback for, and that is moving it here to the free feed so that you don't need to pay to get it. That said, because it's pretty packed with detailed information about that specific ad platform, it does usually make the show a little longer than it usually runs. At the end of this segment,

Starting point is 00:01:15 I'm gonna ask you to participate in a one question quick survey to see if you prefer this option. But for now, we check in with our meta ads correspondent, Andrew Foxwell. Andrew's agency manages millions of dollars of meta ad spend for his clients. Andrew, hello. Hello. So lead forms, lead generation forms, I see have got an upgrade. Can you walk us through those?

Starting point is 00:01:37 Yeah, definitely. There's three new things that have come up within lead forms. I mean, I think this has been a priority of meta. They know that Google has a ton of lead generation business. And so this is something that Meta hasn't done a great job with, and they're upgrading this significantly. So number one, there's some new ad tools to generate leads. You can have ads that click to WhatsApp for lead generation. Also available on Instagram and Messenger. You have coupon offers for completing a Q&A where you can display the business information on there once they've,

Starting point is 00:02:13 you know, once they've submitted that. And there's multi advertiser ads for lead generation instant form, meaning you can have there's going to be more of these running for lead gen if you're in a specific area. So there's going to be more inventory, I think is a big part of it. And it makes it a lot easier. The second one is, there's more AI capabilities. So you're going to have the ability to pull in information from website forms, if they've started filling it out, potentially, Meta and the Cappy platform will be able to pull that in to make filling out the form a little bit easier. And then there's some more partner integrations too. So it's clear that they're making an effort into this and I think will be impactful in terms of the business and the bottom line in the next quarter, next six months

Starting point is 00:03:02 for Meta. But if you do lead generation, this is good news because it's going to hopefully make your life a lot easier and allow you to diversify back potentially into meta if you have diversified away from it. You mentioned multi-advertiser ads. Are these the ones that we've seen? I see them once in a while on Reels, I think, where it's sort of like four different advertisers occupying one space and you can kind of swipe through that. Is that what we're talking about here? Like it's like, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So this is like if you've ever seen on Google where you can put in your information, then they'll go out and look for

Starting point is 00:03:33 leads for you. This is sort of like a service named Thumbtack that famously did this and was like a unicorn that raised a bunch of money. You'd submit one thing and then a lot of people could get back to you. That's the same thing here. It's allowing you to fill it out and it's got, you know, you're able to send it to multiple places. So yes, it looks like that. I don't know exactly what it's going to look like in practice, but they're making more inventory available for this. I mean, just haven't seen as much lead gen stuff out there. And I think it's because the quality hasn't been great. So the more that we can utilize this, the better off it's going to be. This is especially a good thing for emerging markets as it ties into WhatsApp, honestly.

Starting point is 00:04:13 So overall, I think good for the ecosystem. Obviously, it remains to be seen if it'll be great. But I do like that the AI piece is going to be helpful to hopefully making that whole process a lot easier of less manual entry for folks. And those leads, of course, go now into I mean, they have since lead ads started. But when when lead ads first came on the scene, it was a fairly complicated process to get them into, you know, into your CRM through Zapier or some other middleware. They've they've simplified that. I think they have a new partnership. Like they're starting to do more direct connections,

Starting point is 00:04:46 you know, HubSpot for one. Definitely, which is great. And, you know, that'll just make it easier on everybody else because then you don't have to do as many manual imports. Yeah. So that's a good priority. I'm glad to see that change that's taking place. Some changes to Instagram feed collection ads.

Starting point is 00:05:03 What's happening there? Yeah, you know, I don't know if you've seen these thus far, but one of the things is, you know, we had forever dynamic product ads, which you could scroll through. And that's really, that ad unit hasn't changed a ton. And one that always worked well was a collections ad unit. And that had some catalog images,

Starting point is 00:05:22 it didn't have a ton and had a big kind of video or image at the top. So this is up to, you can customize up to, I think it's 10 images now from your collection that will be in a collections ad. So it's scrolling products on that particular IG feed ad that allow you to scroll through different products horizontally. So if they scroll past the three original thumbnails, they can look at, you know, more products at once. So it just is, it's a great ad unit because it allows you to show off more things. Again, making your product catalog even more important. But it's nice. It's going to be on Instagram stories. It'll be on the IG feed as well. So we talked about the feed, but it'll be on Instagram stories. It'll be on the IG feed as well. So we talked

Starting point is 00:06:07 about the feed, but it'll be on the stories and it'll be in the explore tab. So more places for people to click around and click into things and hopefully be interested in your products. And it certainly helps feed the algorithm that they're clicking into it and they're engaging, which gives signal to the algorithm. If I understand it, then this is sort of an automated carousel ad format in that it's pulling stuff directly out of your product catalog. Do I have that right? Yeah, you can customize it or do automatically pulled. So it depends on how you want to go about it. But the neat thing for me, particularly with this is, you know, the collections ad unit always was sort of a secret tool of a lot of e-commerce

Starting point is 00:06:45 retailers that did really well. And the fact that this has a really easily scrollable products below. I mean, I saw one yesterday and I was like, that looks great. Like it was just so nice. And that was already something I was looking at anyway. And it just brought it right there for me. So I think it's a good ad unit and I think it will continue to be helpful for people in the e-commerce space especially. Meta, of course, like all platforms these days, spending a ton of effort, time, and money on AI. Meta has rebranded it Advantage Plus on their end. What do you see Meta doing with AI in 2024? Put on your fortune teller hat.

Starting point is 00:07:26 Yeah, I mean, I think interesting one that I'll just point out is we've talked a lot about before in previous episodes about AI and the things that they're doing within Advantage Plus shopping campaigns, within the buying side of it, within ads. I think what's interesting we don't talk about or I haven't focused on as much is the amount that AI is being utilized in, let's just talk about the Instagram product. And yesterday, I uploaded a photo of my daughter and it automatically cut it out. And it asked me, where do you want the background to be? And I said, put her in Santa's workshop. And it created an image of her in Santa's workshop in like 10 seconds. And so that kind of stickiness, I think is absolutely incredible. And if you translate that into the ads world, which soon we'll be able to do no problem within their ads product, that has huge implications, because it's going to allow us

Starting point is 00:08:15 to do more creative testing at an iterative scale, you know, even more than we already are. So I think from I think from the organic standpoint, there's going to be more that we're going to be able to do to be creative with the things that are being created, which is good. I think from an ad buying standpoint, of course, the big movements in AI are just going to be continued automation. I talked to a company yesterday, they're spending 300 grand a month US on ads. And every single one of their dollars is going into Advantage Plus shopping campaigns. And they have two Advantage Plus shopping campaigns running and that's it. Really? So that kind of utilization of AI where they're having all the options turned on,

Starting point is 00:08:58 they have everything in their product catalog automated, and they're saying run with it as working incredibly well for them. So I think over time, what's in store for folks, what people are going to be utilizing is, you know, where are these pieces that in the platform itself can make it more engaging for users, in terms of imagery and video, that's going to make it easier for you to cut, you know, the second most downloaded app in the US and this year was CapCut. So Meta can build a lot of those tools and already is. So that's going to be, it's going to have a really hardcore editing suite that's going to allow you to integrate AI, whether it's changing imagery or backgrounds or colors or text

Starting point is 00:09:37 or whatever you want it to be. And then it's going to be in the ad buying standpoint, a simplification, you know, road that we continue to walk down, making it a lot easier for folks and letting AI basically do its work. So it's pretty crazy. What a sea change, hey, that we've experienced in the last, like, even the last four years, say. Like, I remember when setting up a meta ad campaign was 15 different campaigns and 10 ad sets and 10 ads inside those ad sets. And you were constantly tweaking and refining audiences. And now it's just basically like push start. And with one campaign that kind of, you know,

Starting point is 00:10:11 does everything, and it seems to be performing better. I mean, on the Google side, we're seeing performance max kind of similar. Yeah, definitely. It's really interesting. So yeah, I think, you know, the more things that we can do are thinking about landing pages, we can be testing, it's really thinking about the whole ecosystem. I do think that creative is still the number one thing that you can do even with the AI enhancements. But I think the actual buying is going to continue to make it simpler over time. But it's interesting, one thing I'll just note here at the end that I find fascinating is there's a member of ours in our community that wrote and said, look, we've had a huge amount of overlap in our campaigns. Meta tells us that 90% of our

Starting point is 00:10:50 impressions are being shown to people that have already seen it before. What are my options? What are the things that I can do? And predominantly, they were running in a lot of Advantage Plus shopping containers. And predominantly, the feedback from the community was you need to go in and actually force placements. So show ads only on Instagram stories, show ads only on feed, because that's where you're going to get incremental wins. So meta is still not perfect at this, right? And you're still seeing manual forcing still having to take place, which I thought was interesting. Basically the anecdote to AI. So it's kind of it's kind of it's still rolling. But, you know, I think we still have to know that we're in control and

Starting point is 00:11:30 there's going to be levers we're still going to have to pull. Yeah. Andrew, thank you. See you next week. Thanks. Andrew Foxwell is our meta ads correspondent. You can learn more about Andrew's digital ads training at B dot link slash Foxwell or his Slack community of senior meta ad buyers at B dotlink slash founders. Both of those are affiliate links and you can find those at the bottom of our show notes. OK, so now it's your turn. We are about 11 and a half minutes in. Which option do you prefer?

Starting point is 00:11:57 These weekly ad platform deep dives in your feed at the expense of those episodes being about twice as long as a usual episode? That's option A. Or do you prefer that we keep these ad platform columns on a paid feed and stick to our usual show length of about nine minutes? That's option B. Here's how to vote. Swipe over to the show notes and tap your preference. Or you can vote on the web. If you prefer option A, that's with the weekly ad platform columns, go to b.link slash option A. If you prefer option B, that's without the columns, but also keeps the show shorter. Go to b.link slash option B. Thanks very much. Back to the show. I can't get through a month without someone, once they learn what I do for a living, pulling me aside, lowering their voice and saying,

Starting point is 00:12:48 Is it true? Does Facebook's app listen in on our conversations so they can deliver ads about what we're saying? And every time I have to explain that, no, they're not. For one thing, the amount of bandwidth you'd consume sending a 24-hour stream of good enough quality audio to their services would exceed anyone's cellular plan. Also, they've said they're not doing it. And for them to just straight up lie about it would get them into very hot water with every trade, stock, privacy, and consumer regulator on the planet. So no, Uncle Dave, Facebook is not listening to what you're saying. But apparently, another system is.

Starting point is 00:13:25 And this system is owned by the American media giant Cox Media Group. 404 Media reporting today that CMG is promoting a new ad platform powered by the conversations people are saying near smart speakers, smart TVs and other unnamed devices. 404 Media says they've seen promotional materials for the system on CMG's website, part of which reads, quote, what would it mean for your business if you could target potential clients who are actively discussing their need for your services

Starting point is 00:13:55 in their day-to-day conversations? No, it's not a black mirror episode, it's voice data, and CMG has the capabilities to use it to your business advantage, unquote. So how does it work? Well, advertisers buy a geographic radius of about 10 to 20 miles, then tells it what conversations it wants to listen to. Some examples provided by the company, the car lease ends in a month, we need a plan.

Starting point is 00:14:21 Or a minivan would be perfect for us. Or, hey, do you see that mold on the ceiling? Or, we need a plan. Or a minivan would be perfect for us. Or, hey, do you see that mold on the ceiling? Or, we need a better mortgage rate. Then people who've said that are placed in a targeting bucket, which can connect to all sorts of programmatic and other ad platforms, including, according to the site, YouTube and Google. The tracking pixel on the advertiser's website can monitor ROI. Again, quoting CMG's website, Obviously, the company understands how sensitive this is and has a section saying they believe it's perfectly legal to eavesdrop on someone's device because, quote, consumers usually give consent when accepting terms and conditions of software updates or app uploads, unquote. CMG did not respond to media requests for comment.

Starting point is 00:15:24 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 00:16:00 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. Brands on Instagram have a new engagement tool,

Starting point is 00:16:27 something the app calls Add Yours Templates. This lets users create their own interactive story prompts complete with GIFs, images, and text, which others can then add to and share. This is similar to the existing Add Yours sticker, where users respond to prompts set by others, but these new templates let users take the reins and build their own memeable content.

Starting point is 00:16:49 Followers can't alter the core elements of the template, but they can add their own creative flair. Instagram's been putting out a number of engagement-focused tools lately, like the template browser for Reels introduced in July. This new add yours templates rollout is happening worldwide today. Always striving to bring you the latest marketing trends you can exploit for fun and profit, and mostly profit, we present Pink Ribbons.

Starting point is 00:17:18 They are all the rage right now on TikTok, where creators are tying them around, well, everything. Houseplants, pickles, orders from fast food restaurants. No, I don't understand either. The trend is apparently so big. I say apparently because it hasn't shown up on my FYP. But apparently it's so big that the New York Times this morning devoted a full piece to the trend, which it says comes from the recent popularity of bows in fashion and pop culture. One creator, 22-year-old Nanny, posted an eight-second video of three ice cubes tied with pink bows, 11 million views, and counting.

Starting point is 00:17:56 Like many of these trends on TikTok, she says nobody really thinks bows are actually in. Rather, she says it's more of a, quote, large-scale inside joke, unquote. A joke maybe, but some people are posting shots of themselves getting pink bows as real tattoos. So there you go. If you market to a younger demographic, maybe in and around the fashion and beauty space, go find a stapler or something and put a bow on it. What a strange industry we're in. HubSpot announced a bunch of updates to its CRM platform. Here are the highlights. First, new deal pipeline rules that prevent users from skipping stages and limiting the deal creation to one deal stage. You can now include up to 10 additional attendees when booking time on

Starting point is 00:18:43 a scheduling page calendar. There's a new product history card in the middle panel of the contact or company record. So now you don't have to open a bunch of other tabs to see that data. There is a new call analytics page. So you can see all that without relying on custom reports or third party tools. And you can now tag Instagram profiles in photos and reels and mention LinkedIn personal profiles when scheduling social media posts in HubSpot. Twitch, the live streaming site popular among advertisers trying to reach gamers, this week announced changes to its policy on sexual content. The platform said, yeah, they're going to allow nudity now as long as it's, you know, tasteful, artistic.

Starting point is 00:19:31 You can now write things on boobs or butts. You can draw nude people. You can do strip teases on stream. And you no longer need to warn people with a special stream label that you'll be twerking, grinding, or pole dancing. Yes, this is a gaming livestream site, but it's also popular among streamers who wear revealing clothes, flirt a little with viewers, and sort of play games a little here and there.

Starting point is 00:19:57 But this morning, it all went to hell. Twitch posting on social media that it's changed its mind and nudity is back on Santa's naughty list, no matter how artistic it is. The issue, it seems, is all about AI-generated imagery and that the text-to-image tools are so convincing these days that anyone could generate what are essentially pornographic images, stream them, then claim it falls under the new artistic nudity policy. And with what might be the most awkward segue, I'll take this moment to tell you about my Twitch channel on which I stream gameplay. My account name is LowEffortDad. I promise no nudity. Meanwhile, over at Elon Musk's ex, lots of people sharing a screenshot of an ad running on that platform. It's for an app which lets you upload a photo

Starting point is 00:20:46 of any woman you know, and it will digitally remove their clothes. The ad reads, Undress any girl using AI. Earlier, X's CEO assured advertisers their platform was perfectly brand safe. And a strange bug happening with Google business profiles this week, specifically with the agency dashboard. The bug is that owners and managers cannot accept new invites. This is said to have started a couple of days ago, but Google is working on it, but has no ETA for it to be fixed.

Starting point is 00:21:39 So this episode just crossed the 20 minute mark. And of course, it's because we put the meta ad platform column in. So again, love to know your thoughts on this. If you like hearing these deep dive columns weekly, even if it does make the episodes run a little longer, that's option A. But if you'd rather keep the episodes at the regular length of about nine or 10 minutes, even if that means not hearing those columns, that's option B. Just swipe over to the show notes to tap your preference or you can vote on the web, b.link slash option A if you're voting for hearing the weekly columns, or b.link slash option B if you do not want to hear the weekly columns. So what do I stream on Twitch? Well, my wife and I actually play Fortnite together.

Starting point is 00:22:20 I'm in my 50s, she's in her 40s. We have no business being on Fortnite, but we won a game the other day, so that was like the best thing that happened in the house in a month. And usually I stream Fortnite's new LEGO Creative Mode and Rainbow Six Siege. If you care for multiplayer shooters or watching an entire team yell at a middle-aged guy. And that'll do it for the week. Today in Digital Marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Sunamic First Nation on Vancouver Island.

Starting point is 00:22:51 Our production coordinator is Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Blevis. Music licensing by Source Audio. Ad coordination by Red Circle. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend, friends. I'll see you next week.

Today in Digital Marketing - Wait, They're Actually Listening?!

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