Today in Digital Marketing - When Image Cropping Goes Horribly Wrong

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, one big advertiser is driving up the prices of ads on Facebook, and I promise you will not guess which company that is. Also Google adds some nice new tools to its online spreadsheet, Twitter apologizes for the way it's been cropping your images, and changes to Facebook groups means you may soon have a very powerful new placement at your disposal. It's Friday, October 2nd, 2020. Happy World Smile Day. I'm Todd Baffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing, brought to you by the Keep Optimizing podcast.

Starting point is 00:00:35 Yes, CPMs are up. They're up a lot, especially on Facebook. CPMs, of course, the price you as an advertiser pays for 1,000 impressions of your ad. Why do CPMs go up? Competition. After all, the ad platforms on social media channels are auctions. So when a whole lot of brands want to advertise on, say, Facebook, then Facebook's CPMs go up. And that's exactly what's happening right now. The U.S. is in the middle of a contentious federal election cycle, and the

Starting point is 00:01:06 campaigns of the two main candidates, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, are spending millions, nearly $7 million between them just last week alone. But it may not be those organizations pushing the rates up because those two campaigns are actually in number two and number three position for the top ad dollars spent last week on Facebook. Who was number one? Facebook. Yes, Facebook itself was the top spending advertiser on Facebook, more than 10 million dollars last week. And what, you ask, are they advertising? No, not themselves, but rather a series of register-to-vote ads. Some Google news now, not their search engine and not their ads. We're talking about their business platform, which is also known as G Suite.

Starting point is 00:01:59 A whole lot of digital marketers rely on G Suite for their business apps. It's very common in agencies, Google Docs and Google Drive and Slides. And maybe the one you spend most of your time in, Google Sheets, the online competitor to Microsoft Excel. If you're in Sheets a lot, you may be interested to learn about two new features coming in the next week or two. First, cleanup suggestions. These show up in a side panel and will suggest removing extra spaces, removing duplicate rows, adding number formatting, identifying anomalies, fixing inconsistent data, that kind of thing. This is actually really good for digital marketers in particular, given that we're often getting CSVs from different sources, email lists, and so on,

Starting point is 00:02:38 trying to combine them or upload them to a platform that has very stringent formatting requirements. And second, column stats. These also show up in a side panel and automatically generate visualizations that can provide insight into the data in a specific column. These insights can include count and distribution charts, frequency tables, and summary statistics. It can help you quickly catch potential outliers and move on to deeper analysis. How soon you get this depends on what release cycle your domain admin has your team on, but the rollout has already started, and everyone should have it by the end of October. Another update for you Google shops out there. Google Meet, that's their Zoom competitor, can now filter out background noise on its mobile apps.

Starting point is 00:03:23 They've been able to do that on the web version for a while now. One thing to note, this feature is off by default, so you'll want to turn it on if you'll be in a busy place. But if you're in a home office or a quieter area, I recommend you leave it off because noise filtering also filters out some of the clarity of your voice. You should have an update for your app in the next day or two, but they're only letting companies who are on the enterprise version of their platform have it. If you are on G Suite Basic, Business, Education, or Nonprofit, no soup for you. Two months and counting until one of the biggest days in a digital marketer's year, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And this year, with consumers avoiding bricks and mortar locations,

Starting point is 00:04:05 it's even more important that you're at the top of your marketing game. That's why the podcast Keep Optimizing has you covered with a special in-depth Black Friday episode featuring tactics and strategies from industry experts. Here's a clip. Your success will really be defined by the size of your subscribers list and by the engagement of your subscribers list. So you still have time to do that. Invest in your marketing budget now.

Starting point is 00:04:33 Don't wait last minute and start building relationships with your customers now. So if you're in e-commerce in any way, online or storefront, you owe it to yourself to check out the Keep Optimizing podcast. It's at keepoptimizing.com or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a social media content manager and you've tried to get the dimensions of a Twitter image just right, I bet you ended up quite frustrated. And that's because, despite what all the blog posts and sometimes Twitter's own documentation says, the crop dimension that they use for images changes from image to image.

Starting point is 00:05:12 They're not doing it to drive up sales of hard whiskey, although I'll bet there's some data correlation there somewhere. No, they do it to try to figure out what's in the image and then crop intelligently. If you've got faces near the bottom of a square image, they'd probably crop out the top. It's based on saliency,

Starting point is 00:05:27 which predicts where people might look first. But yesterday, the company announced they've sometimes been getting this wrong, and the crops may have been favoring people with specific skin tones. So they tested it. They fed their engine with photos of pairs of people from different races and gender,

Starting point is 00:05:44 white and black, white and Indian, white and Asian, male and female. While they say the results didn't show any direct bias, quoting the company, we recognize that the way we automatically crop photos means there is a potential for harm. We should have done a better job of anticipating this possibility when we were first designing and building this product, unquote. And so they say they'll rely less on AI making these decisions and will instead build tools that let users have more control over the crop,

Starting point is 00:06:11 which I think is a very welcome move away from the trend of machine learning. No word on exactly when these tools will roll out. Facebook continues to bolster its groups product. To be honest, I suspect not many digital marketers use groups for their clients or their brand. We're occasionally asked by our clients if we should set up a branded group. And while the better commenting features and the increased algorithmic juice is tempting, the one thing that has kept us away from it is that many third-party engagement and moderation platforms don't support groups. Sprout Social, for instance, can see Facebook page content and Facebook ads content,

Starting point is 00:06:50 but they've never supported content found in groups. Not really clear why, but there you go. Regardless, though, these new features will be on the website and not in the API, as far as I can tell, and they will include something called Admin Assist. This will basically be automated rules for moderating posts. So you'll be able to look for troublesome phrases or posts with links in them and automatically decline those. This will be on desktop only first and is still a few months away. They're going to put more focus on hashtags,

Starting point is 00:07:18 making them functional in the way that group topics are functional now. And in a feature totally not ripped off from TikTok, admins can also create hashtag challenges to increase engagement. Still with Facebook groups for a moment, from a digital marketing side, there is a new opportunity for advertising in these groups, which until now have been sort of kept away from the ad side of the business. Quoting socialmediatoday.com, last month, Facebook announced the addition of new brand partnership posts built into the group's experience, providing a new way for brands to reach highly engaged audiences based on group discussion. Facebook's taking that a step further

Starting point is 00:07:59 by adding group promotions into its brand collabs manager tool. Now, when brands go looking for potential partnership opportunities within the manager, relevant public groups will also be displayed, providing new connection opportunities for sponsored content, unquote. The screenshots on this are actually really quite interesting. You, as the potential advertiser, can tap a group listing in the collabs manager, and it'll give you stats on things like the demographics of the group, engagement levels, even what brand partners they've had before.

Starting point is 00:08:30 Facebook really does seem to be trying to turn groups into influencers, which I suppose they already are. Microsoft has opened nominations for its Advertising Partner Awards. This year's theme is Forward Together. Whatever the hell that means. They've also created a new award category this year, the Community Response Award.

Starting point is 00:08:54 They'll be giving that to either an advertiser or someone who works for one. Other statues up for grabs. Inclusive Culture and Marketing Award. Agency and Channel Partner of the Year. And Account Team of the Year. There is a catch, though. Only Microsoft's elite and select partners are eligible. That means at the least 30% of your search team has to be certified by Microsoft,

Starting point is 00:09:17 and you have to bring at least four unique active accounts to them each calendar year. Yes, there are minimum spends, too. Nominations have to be in by November 25th. There's a link with more info in the transcript of today's episode, which you'll find at todayindigital.com. And that will put paid to another week. Our production assistant is Sarah Guild.

Starting point is 00:09:38 Our theme is by Mark Levis, music licensing by Source Audio, advertising management by Red Circle and Podcorn. And this podcast is produced by our agency, EngageQ Digital. Find us at engageq.com. Full transcripts to every episode are on our website, todayindigital.com.

Starting point is 00:09:57 I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful and safe weekend, friends. I'll talk to you on Monday.

Today in Digital Marketing - When Image Cropping Goes Horribly Wrong

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