Today in Digital Marketing - When You Care Enough to Gen the Very Best

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Wednesday, September 18th. Today, YouTube's plan to combat the onslaught of AI-generated garbage is to let you create hundreds of your own. Plus, brands spent millions on Olympics ads. Was it worth it? And train first, ask questions later. LinkedIn is caught offside. I'm Todd Maffin.

Starting point is 00:00:24 That's ahead today in digital marketing. We start today with Google Ads and some new updates for marketers. They are expanding the conversational experience for search engines. This, if you're not familiar with it, is a feature that generates headlines, images, and other content for search campaigns. It is now available in more languages, including German, French, and Spanish. Google is also expanding AI-powered image editing to new campaign types beyond Performance Max. Now you can enhance image assets in search, demand gen, and app and display campaigns. Plus, asset generation is being expanded to six new languages. Marketers can

Starting point is 00:01:06 also provide up to five reference images along with a prompt for AI to generate brand-consistent visuals for Performance Max campaigns. Google is also launching a new impression reporting tool that gives advertisers more insight into the performance of search campaigns run through Performance Max, the company's AI-powered ad buying platform. The new tool shows the performance of text and shopping ads on search results pages. Performance Max will also feature campaign-level negative keywords, letting marketers exclude specific queries from search ads by the end of the year. Advertisers will also get recommendations to

Starting point is 00:01:45 improve underperforming ads, like adding more images or text. As always, take those recommendations with a bit of a grain of salt. These features are being rolled out for Performance Max campaigns in several languages, including German, French, and Spanish. The robot overlords at Google aren't stopping at your search ads. They're also taking over YouTube Shorts, and it could change how your brand creates content. Google announced today it plans to integrate DeepMind's AI video generation model, it's called Veo, by the way, into YouTube Shorts, letting marketers and users create AI video clips in the YouTube app and, God help us all, directly post them to Shorts.

Starting point is 00:02:33 Vio was unveiled earlier this year, competing with technologies like OpenAI's Sora. video clips in a range of cinematic styles, offering a pretty decent upgrade over YouTube's existing DreamScreen feature, which launched late last year and lets creators generate backgrounds in shorts from text prompts. So breaking it down, here's how it works. You'll be able to generate six-second standalone video clips for shorts. By selecting Create and entering a prompt, it will generate four images. You then choose one of these to turn into a short video. This new option can help brands add dynamic filler scenes like a New York City skyline. To enhance storytelling and create smoother video transitions, you can also edit and remix previously recorded footage.

Starting point is 00:03:26 The company plans to integrate VO into DreamScreen later this year. Creations on shorts will be watermarked using SynthID technology to label them as AI-generated. It's an ad buy that comes once every four years. The Paris Summer Olympics are now in the rearview mirror, but did the event deliver on advertising promises? Digiday reports today that the 2024 Olympics saw impressive viewership numbers, with NBCU reporting an average of 30.5 million daily viewers and a record-breaking $1.2 billion in ad revenue, that is a 60% increase in sales over previous games, surpassing the combined ad revenue of Tokyo and Rio. Warner Bros. Discovery had a major win, reaching 215 million people across Europe and delivering 7 billion streaming minutes across Max and Discovery+.

Starting point is 00:04:19 That's six times more than Tokyo in 2020. Channel 4, a British broadcaster and streamer that delivers Paralympic coverage in the UK, saw a boost in brand sponsorships, selling 16 packages compared to seven in the Tokyo games. The broadcaster declined to share pricing or sales figures, but a spokesperson for the company said sales were higher than Tokyo. Peacock, NBCU's premium streaming service, was a standout media highlight for the games. For the first time, advertisers could run ads programmatically on Olympic coverage. Viewers watched 23.5 billion minutes on the platform, up 40% from all previous

Starting point is 00:05:01 summer and winter Olympics combined. The company noted that digital revenues also hit new highs, tripling what was seen at Tokyo, but didn't provide specific numbers. Amazon's Buy with Prime program, which lets Prime members buy from third-party stores and check out using their Amazon account, is now adding a new payment option, PayPal. Amazon announced that starting today, Prime users can use PayPal to check out on sites integrated with the Buy with Prime API. Next year, Prime members will be able to link their Amazon account to PayPal, letting Prime benefits automatically apply when using PayPal for purchases.

Starting point is 00:05:50 Quoting TechCrunch, quote, merchants who offer Buy With Prime offload fulfillment to Amazon. In fact, the service requires that brands store inventory at Amazon warehouses. Rather than a replacement for payment intermediaries like ShopPay and Apple Pay, Buy With Prime is essentially a complete e-commerce experience inside a checkout button. Amazon claims that Buy With Prime is growing rapidly, with brands including Dollar Shave Club and iZod signing up to offer the service. Other sources push back against Amazon's rosy narrative, suggesting that while Buy With Prime is growing, it remains a niche business. Amazon revealed several other updates to Buy With Prime today,, it remains a niche business, unquote. Amazon revealed several other updates to Buy With Prime today, including real-time delivery estimates in TikTok ads for

Starting point is 00:06:31 Buy With Prime merchants and the option to buy items with or without Prime in one checkout on Shopify stores. If you've wanted to try out augmented reality for your brand, but don't have a computer coding pro, Snapchat announced a new AI tool yesterday that lets you create lenses, that's Snapchat's AR filters, based on text queries. The tool is called Easy Lens. It lets you generate custom lenses just by typing in a text description of what you want it to do. Snapchat is also rolling out Bodymorph, a generative AI tool that creates content from a text caption or a reference image like a 3D character or costumes or outfits. Lens Studio will also include an image generator specifically for creating lens icons. Looking ahead, Snap says it will add even more AI gen capabilities to Lens Studio, including a custom animation generator and a tool for reconstructing 3D objects from video downloads. And finally, was LinkedIn caught with its hand in the cookie jar?

Starting point is 00:07:43 Yes, it looks like it's now training its AI with your data. Today, several users noticed a new setting that lets LinkedIn use content to improve its generative AI. But here's the thing. The terms of service had not been updated yet to account for this training. When questioned, LinkedIn acknowledged the issue, promising to update its terms shortly. The new option, found under Data for Generative AI Improvement, is also turned on by default. You may want to consider turning that off. Our 50% off special of the Premium Podcast, celebrating five years of doing this thing,

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Today in Digital Marketing - When You Care Enough to Gen the Very Best

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