Today in Digital Marketing - What Does a Broken-Up Google Ad Platform Look Like?

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Monday, January 30th. Today, a bug on Facebook's ad platform might be messing up your creative. A big brand safety update on Google Ads. Twitter doubles down on its controversial content relaxations. App developers are flocking to Mastodon. And TikTok's CEO has been called to the principal's office. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. All right, we start today with a couple of updates on the meta ad platform. First, the company will be removing instant articles for good. We covered this last year when they first announced it. Now we know the date range it'll happen mid-April. This format was a kind of proprietary version of AMP, which Google pioneered and last year killed.

Starting point is 00:00:45 It was from back in the day when web pages weren't really well optimized for mobile, so this format was scaled back content, but it lived on Google's and Meta's servers, not those of the content publisher. Meta had been paying news publishers to get them on board, but since that time, Meta's been trying to scale back news on the feed and put in more videos, especially short form videos. You still have access to insights and monetization for any instant articles you have up right now,

Starting point is 00:01:11 but once mid April comes around, kiss it all goodbye. Second, I'm seeing reports that Facebook has some kind of bug where they're cropping the images on newsfeed ads. Even if you specify the dimensions and provide multiple crop variations. People in the Foxwell Founders Slack group report that it seems to be pretty random. Sometimes square images get cropped to four by five.

Starting point is 00:01:33 Sometimes it's the other way around. So it may be worth double checking once your campaign is approved. So with media buying for a moment, Google is starting to roll out account level negative keywords globally. Until now, if you wanted to apply an exclusion to all your campaigns, you had to do it manually for each campaign. Now you can tell the platform you want those negative keywords to apply to most of your search and shopping inventory campaigns, including that part of PMAX, across your entire account. Google's ad liaison reminded marketers today that the intention here is to use these for brand safety reasons, not necessarily to fine-tune the results for conversions. Here's how it works. Once this makes it to your account, you'll be able to find it under Settings in the left nav bar, then Account Settings. You can

Starting point is 00:02:20 create your list by defining which search terms are considered negative for your brand. You can create your list by defining which search terms are considered negative for your brand. You can also specify whether you want to include these based on broad, exact, or phrase match. There is a limit to the number of negative keywords that can be excluded for each account, and that limit is 1,000. Well, if Twitter isn't already becoming the Wild West, the company now says it will take less severe actions when disciplining accounts that break its rules. These less strict actions include things like limiting tweet visibility or just asking users to delete a tweet and move on. This can't be the news advertisers still there wanted to hear. Since Elon Musk's purchase, many industry analysts say the platform has become less safe for brands and more welcoming to extreme views. In the past, of course, Twitter would hide offending tweets or suspend someone's account. Now it says it will only do that for the most egregious

Starting point is 00:03:15 violations. In the same statement, Twitter noted that it has been proactively reinstating previously suspended accounts. And starting this week, anyone can appeal an account suspension and be evaluated based on its updated standards. Twitter says it did not reinstate accounts that engaged in illegal activity, threats of harm or violence, large-scale spam and platform manipulation, or when there was no recent appeal

Starting point is 00:03:40 to have the account reinstated. Advertisers aren't the only ones fleeing Twitter. App developers are now following suit. Engadget reports that when Twitter recently updated its developer policies to, well, ban third-party developers from its platform, it abruptly closed a chapter in its history, a long relationship with independent developers. As a result, several developers of Twitter clients are now turning to Mastodon. One of those major developers is TapBot, the company behind TweetBot, which recently released

Starting point is 00:04:14 Ivory, a Mastodon client based on its longtime Twitter app. Other developers moving to the anti-Twitter include the developer behind the Twitter app Phoenix, which is currently testing a Mastodon client called Wooly, and the developer behind Spring is working on an app called Mona. Also notable, many people are noticing that engagement on Twitter has nosedived, while posts on Mastodon, which only has a reverse chronological feed, are getting tons of traction. One developer for Icon Factory mentioned that a recent post they did on Mastodon got 287 favorites and 163 reposts. Icon Factory's account on Mastodon has about 4,000 followers. On Twitter, it has four times as many.

Starting point is 00:04:57 So you'd think that post on Twitter would have gotten at least four times as much engagement. Nope. On Twitter, that exact same post got nine likes and three retweets. The developer said, quote, this has been said before by many people, but Twitter isn't worth your time anymore. People don't see what you're saying there, even if they actually follow you. The service is in big, big trouble, unquote. Even so, Engadget's report points out that not every former Twitter client developer is eager to start over on Mastodon.

Starting point is 00:05:26 Quote, much will likely depend on if Mastodon is able to maintain its current growth and continue to attract new users. And as much as many former Twitter users see it as a replacement, Mastodon is structured very differently and not everyone finds it as user friendly as Twitter. Unquote. If you'd like to follow us on Mastodon, I'm Todd at hci.social, and our podcast account is todayindigital at mas.to, or just tap follow us on social media in the show notes. 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 00:06:08 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. Last week, we reported that Google was being sued over its alleged monopoly on digital ads. The Wall Street Journal has some analysis on this today and reports that if the U.S. government wins its antitrust case against Google and the tech giant is forced to spin off its technology for brokering ad deals across the Web, these separated businesses would be valued at tens of billions of dollars. Selling the assets, though, could be challenging,

Starting point is 00:06:47 because the big tech companies that could afford such a deal might then just face antitrust hurdles of their own. Some observers believe a spinoff would be more likely, and that the resulting enterprise could become an acquirer in an ad tech business crowded with small firms. According to some media executives, splitting up the Google ad machine would give publishers and advertisers more choices and flexibility to operate outside the Google ecosystem without risking damage to their businesses. As the Journal report notes,

Starting point is 00:07:17 given how long antitrust legal battles can drag out, any spinoff or sale could be years away, unless the company attempts to reach a settlement with the government. There's also the possibility Google could prevail in the case and hold on to its entire ad business. Google declined to comment. Instagram is expanding access to its Inbox Notes feature to brands and creators in Europe and Japan.

Starting point is 00:07:44 Notes, which we've previously reported on, are short text posts that are displayed at the top of your inbox for 24 hours that your followers can see and respond to. Instagram's head said that the feature has been well received, particularly among younger users. As Social Media Today points out, the option is another effort from Instagram to capitalize on the fact that more people are now interacting in messages than they are posting to their main feeds. The feature is now available worldwide. We often hear that one of the most important things you can do to protect your accounts from hackers is to use multi-factor authentication. Meta has even mandated two-factor authentication for high-profile users.

Starting point is 00:08:26 But one hacker discovered a way to bypass Meta's 2FA. A bug in Meta's Accounts Center, which lets users link all of their accounts to manage their logins for Facebook and Instagram, could have let cyber criminals switch off an account's two-factor protections just by knowing their email address or phone number. Important to note here, this bug was discovered last year, reported to Meta in mid-September.

Starting point is 00:08:50 Meta fixed this bug a month later. It's not clear whether any malicious hackers exploited the bug before it was fixed. In case you're curious of how the bug worked, TechCrunch has a great piece up on it today. It turns out a security researcher realized that there was no limit of the number of attempts you could use when you entered your two-factor code to log into your meta accounts. Quoting the TechCrunch piece, with a victim's phone number or email address, an attacker would go to the centralized account center and to the phone number of the victim, link that number to their own Facebook account, then brute force the two-factor SMS code. This was the key step because there was no upper limit force the two-factor SMS code. This was the key step, because there was no upper limit to the number of attempts someone could make. Once the

Starting point is 00:09:30 attacker got the code right, the victim's phone number became linked to the attacker's Facebook account. A successful attack would still result in Meta sending a message to the victim saying their two-factor was disabled as their phone number got linked to someone else's account. At this point, theoretically, an attacker could try to take over the victim's Facebook account just by phishing for the password given that the target

Starting point is 00:09:51 didn't have two-factor enabled anymore, unquote. Once again, Mehta says this bug has since been fixed. And finally, we learned today that TikTok's CEO will testify before American legislators on March 23rd in his first ever appearance before a congressional committee. According to a statement released by the committee earlier today, the CEO will be asked about TikTok's consumer privacy and data security practices, the platform's impact on kids and their relationship with the Chinese Communist Party. Still lots of people arriving here from TikTok. Welcome. If you're new to the podcast, we do this every single weekday.

Starting point is 00:10:33 And it's usually about this long, you know, 10 minutes or so. We have a Slack community. We have a free LinkedIn newsletter. We have an email newsletter. All that stuff is in the show notes. And also, if you are looking for a job in marketing or maybe you've got a marketing position that you're trying to find a good person for, you can get a classified ad right here. I will read it out on the show. It's only 20 bucks. You can book it

Starting point is 00:10:53 online. The link for that is also in the show notes. I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. 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

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Today in Digital Marketing - What Does a Broken-Up Google Ad Platform Look Like?

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