Today in Digital Marketing - Want a Metaverse? Here's How Much It'll Cost.

Episode Date: August 5, 2022

Your boss wants a metaverse? Here's what it'll cost... Meta launches a livestreaming platform just a day after killing off a different one... Pinterest's financials are a little soggy... The B2B social platform gets a consumer-inspired feature... and Google's Keyword Planner gets a new feature.Go Premium! No ads, story links in show notes, deep-dive weekend editions, better quality, live event replays, audio chapters, earlier release time, exclusive marketing discounts, and more! Check out https://todayindigital.com/premiumfeedFor information on advertising, our social media, contact info, and everything else, please go to https://todayindigital.com/shownotes➡ Join our Slack at todayindigital.com/slackOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Today, your boss wants a metaverse? We've got some information to take to your next meeting. Meta launches a live streaming platform just one day after killing off a different one. Pinterest financials are a little soggy. The B2B platform gets a consumer-inspired feature. And Google's keyword planner gets a nice upgrade. It's Friday, August 5th. I'm Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

Meta isn't just chasing the TikTok dream. Now the tech giant is testing a new live streaming platform for influencers called Super, which bears some resemblance to the game streaming platform Twitch. Super describes itself as a live streaming and digital events platform that lets creators host events, engage with the audience and earn revenue. A Meta spokesperson confirmed it is a, quote, small standalone experiment being built by our new product experimentation team and currently testing with a small group of creators, unquote. It's kind of like watching a YouTube live broadcast, but with more light interactive features popping up, like polls, comments on the screen, visual templates like 2UP or a panel discussion. This is something Twitch does quite well.

Most people know of it as a place to watch people play video games live, but one of its most popular categories is called Just Chatting. Super operates on a tier system that charges viewers for certain features in streams. Viewers can also tip live streamers and creators keep 100% of tips and revenue. Business Insider reports the company has paid influencers between $200 and $3,000 to use the platform for just 30 minutes. Creators can also set up sponsored events. Paid collaborations with brands can be facilitated through Super by incorporating branding into an event, like branded backgrounds,

brand-led giveaways, mid-roll ad mentions, and so on. The news that Meta is testing the new live-streaming platform comes just 24 hours after it announced it was killing off Facebook Live Shopping on October 1st to focus on Reels. And, predictably, today Meta announced it is killing off yet another social commerce product. On August 31st, at the end of this month, Instagram will be discontinuing its Affiliate Commerce program. That program, which rolled out last July, let participating creators add product tags to their content and earn commissions when consumers tapped on the tags to view and purchase products.

This time, the company isn't abandoning its social commerce plans to push reels. Quoting Meta, We want to make Instagram the best place for creators to earn a living by partnering with brands. To do this, we are focusing on Instagram's creator marketplace, a singular destination where brands and creators can more easily build content partnerships and ending the current test of Instagram on-site affiliate, unquote. Meta's PR department probably won't want to admit this, but it's not like Mark Zuckerberg invented the metaverse.

It's been around in varying forms for years. From the old school but surprisingly detailed Second Life, to applications like Rec Room, or even inside game environments like the virtual concerts that Fortnite puts on. You could even say that really any shared space online where people are represented by an avatar qualifies. Is Minecraft multiplayer a metaverse? Sure it is. So what does a marketing manager do then when their well-meaning but mostly clueless VP or CMO hijacks a meeting and says, Do we need a metaverse? I feel like we need a metaverse. What some brands do is turn to an ever-growing list of programmers and developers who, for a fee, will build you a presence inside one of these existing spaces, or even build you your own branded virtual environment that you can host on your company's website. That latter is the model that our head uses. Ivan Puzyrev is the CIO and co-founder.

I spoke with him recently and asked him to quote me, what does a small branded metaverse cost? Average price is pretty transparent. You can ask the basic metaverse builders, and we prefer to keep the price around 30 US dollars, 7,000 US dollars, and up to 50,000 US dollars. That's the average price from scratch to the final version of the metaverse,

including works of the beta architect, including two custom-made avatars, and from five to ten custom-made three-dimensional objects, which will be presented inside and could be part of the storytelling or presenting your products, or could be part of the NFT campaign. You want to sell something, it's really up to you.

This is a basic set. So you need items, space, and avatar. And also you need to run it under your website. So this price also includes half a year or one year. It really depends on the conversation we have with the client. Subscription to put this uh kind of ecosystem under your uh under your website domain wait a minute it's 30 000 30 to 50 000 dollars to build it or 30 to 50 000 a year in subscription fees so 30 to 50 000 uh dollars to build it and to keep it under your website domain for half a year.

Let's start from this. Can I ask why I'm paying a subscription then if it's hosted on my website? It's represented under your website, but it's hosted and operated by our head ecosystem. That's why that's important. So if you're not paying for a subscription, you still have access to your world, but it's just located under the spaces.ourhead.io. So it's still available for the audience. But it's branded and the domain name is Our Head. Our full conversation is much longer. We cover what the bottom line benefits to a brand could be to have a metaverse, what the risks are of this technology just being a fad, and some specific examples of

work they've done and how that appears to consumers. That's all part of a special weekend edition of our podcast coming tomorrow exclusively to the Premium Podcast. You can sign up now by tapping the link in the show notes or going to todayindigital.com slash premium feed. Well, the second quarter declines continue. This week, Pinterest reported its slowest revenue growth in two years. Its second quarter revenue grew 10% year over year, but growth in the U.S. was slower at 7%. Monthly active users dropped by 5% from the prior year. Mobile app usage worldwide, however, increased by 8%. Pinterest said user growth was hindered as a result of Google's search algorithm change in

November, making it harder for consumers to find products on its website. In Q3 of this year, the platform expects revenue to grow mid-single digits on a year-over-year percentage basis, which takes into account slightly greater foreign exchange headwinds than this quarter. 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. LinkedIn is getting a new Instagram-like feature, Link Stickers.

The platform recently announced it is rolling out the new tool which lets you add a clickable link to your posts. Now brands can add a link to their content to generate external traffic to their site, including product listings, newsletters, promotions, signups, and more. Just like on Instagram and Facebook stories, social marketers can place the link sticker anywhere on the image of a LinkedIn post. Meta, however, only lets you add a link sticker to a story, which eventually disappears, whereas LinkedIn lets you add it to sticker to a story, which eventually disappears, whereas LinkedIn lets you add it to video and image posts. Users will be able to access the new tool only through their post creation tools, that is to say on mobile,

as it is not yet available on the website. There are no branding or color options, but you can customize the text displayed based on the link. LinkedIn says link stickers will be rolled out gradually. No need to get out your reading glasses. YouTube is testing a new mobile app feature with its premium subscribers that lets them zoom in on any video. The platform added the new tool to its experimental features page yesterday.

9to5Google reports that videos can be zoomed with a pinch-to-zoom gesture and works in both portrait and landscape modes. This can be useful for consumers to zoom into your brand's products, but it is also mildly alarming that they can also zoom into your face. If you are a premium member... Boy, that sounded terrible. I'm sure you have a very lovely face, by the way. If you are a premium member of YouTube, you can access the new feature until September 1st. It is only available in the Android app. Max Connect, a digital agency that specializes in automobile advertising, recently launched a platform called Kudos to help marketers optimize their media spend during the economic slowdown. Kudos places hyper-targeted ads across

a variety of digital platforms. Conversion data is then collected and tracked anonymously from those consumers. The tool is designed to track the customer journey in a shorter time frame, as well as tracking the actions consumers took like website activity, phone calls, form submissions, searches for detailed pages of vehicles, and so on. Kudos' algorithm also forecasts campaign performance, which lets its clients adjust and improve campaigns before any additional marketing spend is spent. Back to Instagram for a moment, because even Instagram photos

are now about to get TikTokified. Last week, if you'll recall, Instagram halted its redesign after user backlash. But today, Instagram's head, Adam Massuri, confirmed the app will begin testing 9x16 photos in a week or two. Currently, Instagram displays vertical images that have been cropped according to 4x5, supporting slimmer, taller 9x16 photos to match the Reels format will allow for a more full-screen experience, of course. Quoting Massari, quote, you can have tall videos, but you cannot have tall photos on Instagram, so we thought maybe we should make sure we treat both equally, unquote. In other words,

your brand may need to change its posting strategy when it comes to static posts now. Finally, a nice little upgrade to Google's keyword planner tool. Some new keyword groups are coming and got help us all more automation. Today, the company confirmed it is rolling out a feature in the keyword planner section that lets you organize keywords into ad groups. Quoting Google, you could always manually choose to add keywords to ad groups, manually picking which ones to add where. This feature adds the ability to use an automated machine learning system where we suggest which ad groups

are the best ones for the keywords instead of you manually doing the placement. This should hopefully save advertisers time and effort if they have thousands of keywords and ad groups to sift through, the ability to manually add keywords still exists. So apparently it's going to be another hot one this weekend. That's what my mother says.

She seems to be our family's weather person now. She spends a lot of time on Facebook, I guess. Anyway. Hey, if you've got a marketing position you're trying to fill, maybe you're looking for the next great gig, consider a classified ad right here. It's just 20 bucks. You can book it online. Link in the show notes. Today in digital marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Tsunamik First Nation on Vancouver Island. Our associate producer is Steph Gunn. Production coordination by Sarah Guild. Podcast music licensing

by Source Audio. Ad coordination by Red Circle. And our theme composer, Mark Blevis, spent a whole week reconstructing a bunch of analytics that got lost. They just disappeared. He was mad. He sent off

this raging email to the database provider. They read, The message is perfectly simple. The meaning is clear. Don't ever stray too far and don't disappear. No, don't disappear. I'm Todd Maffin.

Have a restful weekend, friends. I'll see you on Monday. Wait a second. I got something to say. First two. Probably never take away. I'm probably proud to do what I do. I'll see you on Monday.