Today in Digital Marketing - When Your Brand Must Pick a Side

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, what do you post on your social channels when world events demand that your brand picks a side? Also, the shockingly convincing augmented reality feature coming this year? Google has a present for you data nerds, and WhatsApp is not doing what everyone says it's doing. It's Friday, January 8th, 2021. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. I failed to mention something yesterday when I talked about brands putting their social content on pause during the events in America. What I forgot were the brands that did the opposite. Traditionally, the communication strategy when these sorts of things happen is to lay low, stay quiet, and above all, don't choose sides.

Starting point is 00:00:46 Well, some brands chose sides. And not small brands that were already left-leaning. We're talking major global brands. Coca-Cola tweeted, What happened in Washington, D.C. is an offense to the ideals of American democracy. Axe body spray. We'd rather be lonely than with that mob. Chevron. We call for the peaceful transition of the U.S. government.

Starting point is 00:01:09 And Ben and Jerry's ice cream, yesterday was not a protest, it was a riot to uphold white supremacy. Resign, impeach, 25th Amendment, not one more day. It's an interesting turn, I think, since most corporate communications and marketing folks don't want to alienate a large portion of their community. But that's what's happening here. All these brands are choosing a side and have made the corporate decision to speak out. Results be damned. Strange new world.

Starting point is 00:01:44 Facebook continues to bemoan the forthcoming changes Apple is making, changes that will mean users will be asked if they want to permit Facebook's apps to track them. Most people, of course, will probably say no to that, which Facebook says, and analysts agree, will negatively affect the effectiveness of Facebook ads. Facebook so far has taken out full-page newspaper ads, and it seems every time you go near the ads manager, you get this giant reminder box about how pissed off they are about the whole thing. Well, now they are providing some more helpful information in the form of some

Starting point is 00:02:14 webinars for digital marketers about it all. On Monday, it's called our stance on Apple's iOS 14 policy requirements and guidance to help you. Then they get a little more granular. On Tuesday, it's guidance for web advertising. And on Thursday, it's guidance for app advertising. It is free to register. If you'd like to sign up, you'll find a link in the transcript of today's episode. If there's one thing we digital marketers love, it's acronyms. Did our CTR and CPC drive stronger ROAS? Well, get ready for a new acronym, one you may be hearing a lot of this year. LIDAR. L-I-D-A-R. It stands for Light Detection and Ranging, and it's just starting to be used in augmented reality. AR is hugely popular in Snapchat and TikTok filters. These are the ones that will put a

Starting point is 00:03:03 cartoon head on your face and track your movement, or will put a little baby Yoda on your coffee table. LiDAR takes that to a new level, and TikTok is one of the first out of the gate with it, adding a filter that is powered by this tech. It's pretty impressive to see. In the example they tweeted, it shows a guy standing with his arms out

Starting point is 00:03:20 in what gamers would call a T-pose. Glitter falls from the sky and lands, some on the floor, but also some on his head and on his shoulders and arms, which in itself is pretty convincing. But then when he moves away and puts his arms down, the glitter falls to the floor. This does take some horsepower in the device to pull off. The new iPhone 12 Pro has it, but of course it'll end up everywhere. For its part, Snapchat says it's working on lenses that will use LiDAR. So augmented reality. If you haven't

Starting point is 00:03:51 played around with it yet, go download Snapchat or TikTok and play around with it because I guarantee it will soon form a part of your marketing strategy. Heads up data nerds google ads has made some changes that will probably make you happy they are introducing data exclusions for search shopping and display campaigns why would you want to exclude data you said well all to help prevent conversion tracking issues seroundtable.com gave this example quote let's say that your website conversion tracking breaks and under-reports conversions for three days. With data exclusions, you can now exclude that date range from being used by smart bidding, unquote. You can also get somewhat granular here, applying it to clicks only if you want, or applying it to all campaign types. I think Flavor Flav said it the best. Don't believe the hype. And especially

Starting point is 00:04:49 don't believe all the panicked blog posts and tweets you've been seeing talking about how WhatsApp has changed its terms of use and now they're going to start sharing your data with its parent company, Facebook. It's not that they're not doing it. Of course they are. It's that they've been doing it for years and even said so. The privacy policy from 2016, 2016 read, quote, as part of the Facebook family of companies, WhatsApp shares information with this family of companies. They may use the information we share with them to help operate, provide, improve, understand, customize, support, and market our services and their offerings. Unquote. So people, there's nothing new here.

Starting point is 00:05:29 They've been doing it all along. Also, remember, if you're using WhatsApp for messaging and privacy is important to you, they still have not removed end-to-end encryption or anything. So still, neither WhatsApp nor Facebook can see the contents of your message. Yes, they know some metadata, and they're probably sharing that around, but this is not new. Don't freak out. We've all been on those Zoom meetings where someone's just droning on and on about nothing. You wish you could just drop out politely.

Starting point is 00:06:03 Or even better, have your internet cut out exactly when you want it to so you've got a good excuse. No, no, I didn't want to leave, but I, you know, my internet goes up and down all the time. I present for your weekend experimenting, buffering a new application that will simulate a bad connection on a video call. It works on Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Skype, Google Video, I mean, pretty much all of them, right? And it looks really convincing. Your webcam will start to stutter, your sound gets glitched out, you lag, your picture freezes up. It's all simulated, of course, it doesn't actually slow your computer down. One interesting side note, it's actually just a

Starting point is 00:06:40 Snapchat filter. Snapchat has a desktop app that you can create a sort of virtual camera from your existing webcam. You put this filter on and then tell Zoom or whatever that your actual camera is this virtual one and presto. So if you want to try it out, go download SnapCam from Snapchat's website and look for the filter called Too Many Meetings. My thanks to Emily from the US who said, I love this podcast. It is a super helpful succinct daily social media and marketing news podcast it helps keep me up to date with the market while also keeping me entertained thank you so much Emily and if you'd like a shout out to all you need to do is rate and review this podcast there's a one tap link in this episode's notes that will take

Starting point is 00:07:21 you right to your apps review site, that's it for this week. Our production assistant is Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Blevis. Music licensing by Source Audio. 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. I'm Todd Maffin.

Starting point is 00:07:45 Have a restful and safe weekend, friends, and I'll talk to you on Monday.

Today in Digital Marketing - When Your Brand Must Pick a Side

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