Today in Digital Marketing - Which Video Format Performs Best — Square? Vertical? Wide? We have the answer.

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. It is Wednesday, November 13th, 2019. I'm Todd Maffin. Be protected. Be Zen. A nice new little feature from LinkedIn if your brand uses any kind of CRM. And a cool tool that will get you a transcript from online videos for free. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Okay, heads up if your brand has a YouTube channel. Starting today, everyone on YouTube is now required to tell YouTube whether your videos are made for children or not. This is part of a settlement with the American Trade Regulator.

Starting point is 00:01:10 If you are a brand manager with admin access on your YouTube channel, just go to your channel dashboard, and you should see a bar at the top prompting you to either set your whole channel as not for kids, your whole channel as for kids, or select it video by video. If you don't do this, YouTube says it could take away your monetization or your ability to be discovered. Something important to know here that the email that they sent out doesn't really make clear. When YouTube says, is this for kids, they literally mean, did you make this with children in mind as the main audience?

Starting point is 00:01:40 Do not read this as, is this safe for kids? There's a big difference in this case. Do not read this as, is this safe for kids? There's a big difference in this case. They want to know if children are your primary audience for the videos. So I'm assuming in most cases, as a brand, you will set your entire channel to know this is not for kids, unless you are actually in the children's clothing space or toys or whatever. Don't worry, you have not just told YouTube that your channel is NSFW. Again, the only case in which you'd actually say yes here is if you produce children's programming.

Starting point is 00:02:15 Starting next month, YouTube says that they will limit the data they collect on video made for kids. This means disabling personalized ads on this content, which, yes, affects revenue for creators making content for kids, as well as disabling certain features like comments and notifications. Honestly, I love the people at Agorapulse's blog. They are always doing some nearly scientific level research into social performance. And today they released their study on video aspect ratio. In other words, what dimension size of videos performs best? Regular wide landscape? Square like you see on Instagram videos, vertical like Snapchat.

Starting point is 00:02:51 First, let's look at the cost per click that they got for their ad campaigns. Four by five vertical ads performed the best. They got 94 cents. The others, wide and square, were both about twice as much. Also, the 4x5 vertical ad had higher reach, more three-second views, more through plays, and more consumers that viewed 100% of the video. To be clear, we are not talking about full vertical here, like you see on TikTok or Snapchat. We're talking about a slightly less high version, four by five. And this test was done on ads, not organic, and on Facebook pages only. So notably, none of this data came from Instagram. But there you go. Time to switch out your video ads. If your brand uses a sales-focused CRM system, LinkedIn has a nice new addition

Starting point is 00:03:41 called Data Validation. It syncs contact information between your CRM and LinkedIn, meaning that data can stay as current as your CRM is. Also, and this is a nice touch, Data Validation will mark contacts for you who don't appear in your CRM. And if a contact of yours on LinkedIn moves jobs, it can add a flag for you at the CRM side as well. Nice little touches. With everyone talking digital, social, and online, you might be wondering, how are television ads doing? Like regular over-the-air TV ads? Well, as you might expect, not great. eMarketer reported today that TV ad spending in the U.S. will drop about 3% this year, all part of an extended decline in the space. What's on the rise? Well, digital, social, of course, which now accounts for more than half of all ad spending,

Starting point is 00:04:30 but also on the rise, connected TVs. Now, that's a huge category. That's everything from smart TVs to Netflix, Amazon Prime, Roku, Apple TV, even Xbox and gaming consoles. Quoting eMarketer's piece, CTV, that's connected TVs, will reach nearly $7 billion this year. Again, they're talking about ad spend here. And $12.5 billion by 2022. By 2023, as a reminder, that's only four years from now, advertisers will devote almost 5% of their paid media budgets to connected TV placements. All right, lightning round. Facebook will now let advertisers use its ad breaks in videos to run campaigns with topics around politics,

Starting point is 00:05:14 adult health issues, and alcohol, topics which were on the naughty list until now. Zapier has added the ability to create video or GIF tweets now. Previously, all it could make were text-based tweets. In the Facebook Ads Manager, you can now select a mock-up that you created in Creative Hub. Facebook Ads trainer John Loomer has a great post-op that details 20 reasons why your ads may be failing. You will find it on his site at johnloomer.com. That's J-O-N-L-O-O-M-E-R.com. Look for the O N L O O M E R.com.

Starting point is 00:05:45 Look for the post called Facebook ads and the magic bullet. And I found a cool little tool for siphoning off the text of an online video. It's called down sub.com. It's free and it works. If the video has closed captioning, it will download the captions file, which with a little editing, you can turn into a transcript. That's down sub.com. If you have Alexa, you can add this to your flash briefing every day. Just search for Today in Digital Marketing on the Skillshare.

Starting point is 00:06:13 Skillshare? Skill Store. It's been one of those days. Follow me on social. All of my links are at the bottom of TodayInDigital.com. They're also in the description of this episode. I'm Todd Maffin. I'll see you tomorrow.

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Today in Digital Marketing - Which Video Format Performs Best — Square? Vertical? Wide? We have the answer.

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