Today in Digital Marketing - Was Chicken George Right All Along?

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Wednesday, August 30th. Today, drones in the skies, campaigns take flight. Instagram updates its ads API, the crazy number of teens who choose to not skip YouTube ads. And on the ad-free premium podcast, which you can learn more about by tapping Go Premium in the show notes, everything you wanted to know about Google's new approach to ad platform certification. I'm Todd Maffin. 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.

Starting point is 00:00:43 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. My favorite TV shows for years, decades actually, has been the American summer reality show, Big Brother.

Starting point is 00:01:04 Think Survivor, but indoors and less dysentery. And right in the very first season, there was a controversy. One of the contestants, a portly dad nicknamed Chicken George, was being mentally assaulted by viewers who had hired private planes to fly banners over the house on the CBS lot. At first, the banners were telling people inside the house to vote George out, that his family was on the outside mounting a nasty campaign against another contestant. That turned out to be true, actually.

Starting point is 00:01:35 The banners got so frequent that the contestants started to wonder if the whole thing had been dreamed up by CBS to spook them, throw them off their game. Oh, you don't want to know what that banner says. So the viewers hired a banner plane to address that conspiracy theory. What does it say? It says, wake the beep up. Anti-George banners are true fans, not CBS. Well, here it goes again, Admi.

Starting point is 00:02:05 Today, the show has a policy. Banner plane outside, everyone goes inside. I've often thought what it would be like now, in the age of drones, if people could just drop off full notes, or packages, or audio recordings of other contestants' diary room confessions. Well, the future may not have much messaging in the air for reality shows, but there's about to be a lot more for marketers. A company called Sustainable Skylines has received regulatory approval in the U.S.

Starting point is 00:02:36 to fly their ads attached to tiny drones above Miami beaches. This is the first time a drone ad banner towing operation has gotten FAA approval. Until now, of course, it's been planes flying them, and it's been popular. Brands like J. Crew and Dunkin' Donuts have flown ads behind real planes. But drones don't need an airport, don't need a runway, cost a lot less, and don't burn fuel. As for measuring effectiveness, the company was a little vague on that, but said it would use camera footage from the drones, presumably seeing how many people look up, and third-party mobile data to measure campaigns.

Starting point is 00:03:19 In time, they hope to develop a kind of pricing algorithm based on current events or the weather, more expensive on days when people are more likely to see the ads. The company wouldn't confirm specific pricing, but said it's on par with traditional planes and advertisers can buy the drone ads in two-hour blocks. A big change this week to the Instagram ads API. Until now, advertisers could not promote images or videos used in Instagram stories. In other words, use them as ads via the marketing API. This has now been fixed.

Starting point is 00:03:54 This means that third party tools like Sprout Social or Hootsuite will be able to turn those around once they build it out on their end. Quoting Meta, after consistently hearing about this pain point from our developer community, we have removed this unwanted friction for advertisers and now allow users to seamlessly promote their image and or video media used in Instagram stories as ads in the Instagram marketing API. Unquote. Also notable, it looks like Instagram is planning to expand the length of Reels.

Starting point is 00:04:27 Currently, the max time you can record is three minutes. A software engineer today found code in the app suggesting they'll expand that to 10 minutes soon. Quoting The Verge, expanding Reels from three minutes to 10 brings it closer to the length of many YouTube videos, though not that far away from short-term video rival TikTok, which already offers users more time to record videos. TikTok introduced longer video content of up to 10 minutes for free users

Starting point is 00:04:54 and a separate paid tier for up to 20 minutes so fans can watch more of their favorite creators. YouTube, though, has been making a push to entice creators to embrace shorter content. Unquote. Do you have business insurance?

Starting point is 00:05:14 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.

Starting point is 00:05:34 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:05:54 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 dot C-A. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. Some incredible numbers coming out this week from a new study about the online viewing habits of teens. Research from Precise TV and Giraffe Insights finds that six out of 10 teenagers would rather watch a YouTube ad than skip it. 60 percent.

Starting point is 00:06:30 Almost half say they can remember an ad they've seen recently. The study was of Gen Z, that's people born between 1997 and 2012, and also found that almost 80 percent of teens watch YouTube. Gen Z teens are twice as likely to recall an ad on YouTube than they are on TikTok. And one in five Gen Z teens said YouTube is part of their daily routine. An executive from Precise TV said in the report, quote, These findings are already convincing many of our advertising partners, agencies, media companies, and brands to double down on YouTube as their top video advertising channel, unquote. YouTube reported a 4.4% increase in ad revenue for Q2 of this year. Five years ago, when Meta created its own version of a Supreme Court,

Starting point is 00:07:20 which they called the Oversight Board, they promised that it would be arm's length and they would abide by its recommendations, that they would take the group's decision as binding. Indeed, on the front page of the Oversight Board's website, which Mehta wrote, it reads, these decisions are binding unless implementing them could violate the law, unquote. Or I guess not?

Starting point is 00:07:46 This week, Mehta refused to implement the board's recommendation to suspend the accounts of Cambodia's former prime minister, who's accused of using Mehta's platforms to incite violence. In one video he posted on Facebook, he told a crowd that his political opponents should either face him in court or, quote, I rally the Cambodian People's Party people for a demonstration and beat you up, unquote. Gizmodo reported today, quote, the decision marks a stark divergence from the oversight board, a meta-funded,

Starting point is 00:08:19 independent check on the company's most sensitive, politically fraught content moderation decisions. Recommendations aside, the Cambodia case proves that the buck for political content on Facebook and Instagram ultimately still stops with Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, unquote. Yesterday, Meta released a statement saying the reason they would take the unusual step of rejecting the ruling was because doing what the board said, quote, would not be consistent, unquote, with its policies. How much can consumers trust your product photos, especially now in the age of generative AI? How can they tell that you haven't just faked that shot? Well, Google says it has developed a technology that can invisibly watermark AI-generated images. A step toward one day letting people simply run a check or have a browser extension flag created images. The tool is

Starting point is 00:09:18 called SynthID. It's being tested right now. For the time being, it only supports Google's own text-to-image model, not any of the other more popular generative AI tools. Most importantly, the company says SynthID can even survive image modifications, like monkeying with the colors or adding filters or even compressing the image. The technology is paired with a recognition tool that can detect AI-generated images, but only images created by SynthID, and even then, it's not perfect. It can basically tell you whether it thinks there is a low or high likelihood that the watermark is present. A French startup called Imatag offers a watermarking tool that it says can't be removed by resizing, cropping, editing, or compressing an image.

Starting point is 00:10:06 OpenAI's text-to-image tool called DALL-E 2 places a tiny watermark on the bottom right-hand side of images that it generates. But a common standard between providers seems to be a long way off. I'm so excited. We're just days away from Starfield, which is the big Bethesda video game. It's like Skyrim and Fallout, two of my favorite games. They're huge.

Starting point is 00:10:33 They, you know, take 200 hours. They have great stories. Please, Bethesda, don't screw it up. But in the meantime, while I'm waiting for it, I got back into No Man's Sky, which actually has turned out to be really solid. And this is how I know that I've become obsessed with the video game is when I start downloading mobile apps for them, companion apps, recipe crafting apps, you know, like I'm trying to

Starting point is 00:10:54 build a glass roof on my settlement right now. But to find glass, well, I have to make it I have to get a refiner, get the parts to build the refiner, then fly to a planet where the right sand is that I could put that in the refiner. Anyway, it all sounds like busy work, but I kind of like it. Anyway, that's what I'm off to do right now. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Was Chicken George Right All Along?

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