Today in Digital Marketing - We Should Have Seen It Coming.

Starting point is 00:00:00 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:00:28 Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. 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. Today, Apple doubles down on the war against marketing data. Google forced to play nice by French regulators.

Starting point is 00:01:07 Pinterest's new commerce-enabled shopping lists. The clever but unlikely digital marketing partnership between a food condiment and a mobile app. And a big warning. Do not activate Facebook's new page experience if you have any plans to go back to the old page design. It's Monday, June 7th, 2021. Happy National Journalist Day, Argentina. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageU Digital. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:01:35 Honestly, we should have seen it coming. We believe in protecting your privacy and giving you transparency and control over your information. Today's big Apple event brought lots of great news for fanboys, not so great news for us digital marketers. The big one? Email campaigns. Here's a clip from their WWDC stream earlier today. If you're like me, you get a lot of marketing emails like this.

Starting point is 00:01:59 What you may not realize is that many of these emails use invisible pixels to collect information about your mail activity, like when you open a message and even your IP address. We think you should be able to choose whether to allow this or not. So now in the Mail app, we're introducing Mail Privacy Protection.

Starting point is 00:02:20 Here's what it does. It hides your IP address, so senders can't link it to your other online activity or determine your location. And it prevents senders from seeing if and when you've opened their email. So yeah, the mail app will block pixels. This, of course, means no open data for people who run email campaigns. To be fair, other apps block opens too. On the web, Gmail does this.

Starting point is 00:02:44 You can get browser extensions to do this. But Apple does have a lot of users, and many of those users do rely on the default mail app. This isn't happening yet. This is planned for their next operating systems, which probably won't be here until the mid or late fall. When it does happen, there is a way that you'll be able to claw that data back,

Starting point is 00:03:03 and that is with a click. Remember, even if Apple's email app blocks pixels from firing, it can't block links, and all email marketing programs replace your links with specially coded links that first register a click and then pass your recipients to the main link. Anyone who clicks a link, therefore, can be counted as an open, since they wouldn't have been able to see main link. Anyone who clicks a link, therefore, can be counted as an open, since, you know, they wouldn't have been able to see that link unless they opened it. Which, of course, means we'll all have to get better at enticing engagement.

Starting point is 00:03:33 Is this the return of clickbait tactics? And second bit of Apple news, they also announced that their next mobile operating system will let users have much greater insight into what your app is doing on their phone. So if you work for a brand that uses an app, you probably know your app can do a whole bunch of stuff like see someone's photos, get their location and so on. But Apple always pops up a little display for its users asking if it's cool that your app gets that data. Once users give you permission, they usually forget about it. And sure, they can go into settings and turn those off again,

Starting point is 00:04:10 but few do. Now, Apple will be adding a section where users will be able to look at a log of every time your app does indeed collect that data. This new section in settings gives you an overview of how apps treat your privacy. You can see how often apps use the permission you've granted to access your location, photos, camera,

Starting point is 00:04:33 microphone, contacts, and more during the last seven days. And to find out who your data may be shared with, you can see all the third-party domains the app is contacting. There's nothing here for us digital marketers to do really than be aware of it

Starting point is 00:04:48 and maybe limit our previously over-enthusiastic collection of data. Google today announced it will change the way its ad auction works in order to settle a dispute with the French government. Over the last two years, they've been trying to resolve things with the French Competition Authority. Now they two years, they've been trying to resolve things with the French Competition Authority. Now they say they've agreed on a set of commitments to make it easier for publishers to use data and Google tools with other ad technologies. Quoting the company,

Starting point is 00:05:17 Today, when buyers use Google Ad Manager to participate in Google's ad exchange, they receive equal access to data from our auctions to help them efficiently buy ad space from publishers. As there are a lot of ad exchanges to choose from, publishers sometimes use a technology called header bidding to run an auction among multiple ad exchanges. Because these header bidding auctions take place outside of our platform, it is usually not technically possible for Google to identify the participants and therefore we cannot share data with those buyers. With these commitments, we will work to operate a solution that ensures that all buyers that a publisher works with, including those who participate in header bidding,

Starting point is 00:05:59 can receive equal access to data related to outcomes from the ad manager auction. In particular, we will be providing information around the minimum bid to win from previous auctions, unquote. Google says publishers using ad manager have always been able to sell ads on different platforms and negotiate terms with other platforms. This, they say, should make it easier for publishers and advertisers to mix and match technology partners. They'll be testing this over the coming months before rolling it out fully. Pinterest today expanded its new shopping features to more countries,

Starting point is 00:06:38 specifically Australia, Canada, France, and Germany. The new features include those commerce-enabled pins where people can shop right from a pin. They're also launching a kind of shopping list, a place to bookmark product pins. The company says its internal data shows people are more than seven times more likely to purchase products that they've saved.

Starting point is 00:06:59 Items on a shopping list will also have price change notifications. That shopping list feature will first be up and running in the U.S. and US and UK. Later in the year, it'll come to Australia, Canada, France, and Germany. They're also doing a kind of drops thing that they're calling the goods by Pinterest. It will be a two-week event promoting limited edition products that are exclusively sold through Pinterest. That'll be in the US, UK and Canada. A study paid for by Pinterest recently found that people who visit Pinterest weekly outspent non-pinners by two times every month and have an 85% larger basket size. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack,

Starting point is 00:07:44 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. In 2014, Mark Zuckerberg bought the VR headset maker Oculus for $2 billion. At the time, many analysts expected within five years, the technology would be embedded into everything, from meeting with friends, to playing games, to shopping for products. Well, it's been eight years since that purchase, and not much has changed. There have been some new headsets,

Starting point is 00:08:25 new games, but the exciting new world of virtual reality commerce hasn't yet come to fruition. Meanwhile, of course, Snapchat chose augmented reality over virtual reality and has been quietly killing it. And why wouldn't it? Try on lipstick virtually or a new outfit, and if it looks good on you, why wouldn't you buy it right from the app? But Facebook has not given up on VR. This week, the company published a 28-page report on how AR and VR is evolving, where they think it's heading. They have some lofty goals. They're apparently relying on a September study by Bain that found 75% of business owners

Starting point is 00:08:59 anticipate using AR and VR within the next two years. Uh, okay? Seems awfully high to me. Sure, we'll be getting some new AR wearables in that time period, and sure, usage will increase, but three out of four businesses? Anyway, noted here, in case that's a space you're interested in. Every so often I like to call out a clever digital marketing campaign. Today, a smart one from Heinz, Burger King, and the mobile navigation app Waze.

Starting point is 00:09:37 Here's the promotion. This summer, if you end up stuck in a traffic jam, and you end up only being able to move at the speed of 0.045 kilometers per hour, you will get a coupon for a free burger. And why, you ask? 0.045? Apparently, that is the speed that Heinz's ketchup pours at. So basically, if you're moving as slow as ketchup, you could get a coupon for a burger via your Waze app. And sorry, Americans, this one's for Canada only.

Starting point is 00:10:10 I mean, after all, we have ketchup-flavored chips up here, which I still do not understand why Americans don't have that. It's like the best potato chip of all time. The campaign also includes some user-generated content from people stuck in traffic. There are some micro-influencer partnerships, social ads, and even traffic-activated digital billboards that will react to the speed of traffic near that billboard. A study recently found that 80% of Canadians plan to travel this year, but most won't leave the country, meaning summer traffic could be terrible. Last year, Heinz Canada put out what was possibly the single most difficult jigsaw puzzle invented. The whole thing was red.

Starting point is 00:10:52 And that's all. Just one big red puzzle. Which brings us to the lightning round. Those of you who use Google Meet as your online meeting tool might be interested in this. They said today you'll be able to replace your background with a moving video. For the time being, though, you'll only be able to pick from three videos that Google has made. A classroom, a party, a forest. It will be on the web to start moving to mobile later.

Starting point is 00:11:19 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg today said the company's creator tools, like paid online events, fans, subscriptions, and badges, will remain free to use up until 2023. This is an extension of that fee suspension they first put in place last year during COVID. He also couldn't resist taking a shot at Apple, saying when Facebook starts charging, it'll be less than Apple's traditional 30% cut. Over the weekend, I heard from four separate people warning not to upgrade to Facebook's new page experience. This is a redesign that Facebook's been inviting brands to switch over to. Problem is, and they're not very clear about this, if you do switch and then later decide to switch back, you will lose every post on your page dating back to when you first switch over.

Starting point is 00:12:13 Also, a source within Facebook has told me there will be a permanent, mandatory switch to the new pages experience for everyone later this year. And now that Twitter's rolled out its paid upgrade subscription called Twitter Blue, they are apparently close to launching super follows. This is where your followers can pay a monthly membership to receive exclusive tweets that only your paying followers can see. Judging from some code found in the app, it will only be open to accounts with more than 10,000 followers and have posted at least 25 tweets in the previous 30 days. You know what that means? Tweets about our dog are now $5 a month. Cash only, no refunds, not valid in Quebec. Don't forget you can get this podcast as a daily email newsletter too, complete with images, related videos, links to dive deeper,

Starting point is 00:12:56 and even newsletter exclusive content. And there's a free tier as well. You'll get an issue every Friday. The newsletter comes out about an hour before the podcast drops. Just go to todayindigital.com slash newsletter to sign an hour before the podcast drops. Just go to todayindigital.com slash newsletter to sign up or tap the link in this episode's notes. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow. and we'll know which way to go. The sun comes down and we'll feel the shine. I am so lucky I can call you mine.

Starting point is 00:13:32 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. 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

Starting point is 00:13:59 sent to you by check or PayPal. Get the Rakuten app or join at rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N.C-A.

Today in Digital Marketing - We Should Have Seen It Coming.

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