Today in Digital Marketing - Who Sells Short Shorts

Starting point is 00:00:00 It's Thursday, November 14th. Today, shorts get a boost with Google's latest ad tools, YouTube comments get hyperlinked, fueling Google search, ads could be coming to threads sooner than you think, and LinkedIn opens the door to volunteering. I'm Steph Gunn sitting in for Todd Mappin. That's ahead, today in Digital Marketing. As short-form video continues to thrive on YouTube, Google is coming after even more of your ad budget. Yesterday, Google announced new ad formats for shorts, including sticker ads and animated image ads.

Starting point is 00:00:37 The new short sticker ads will display an image from a product feed that, when tapped, opens a carousel of products for viewers to explore. Animated image ads, meanwhile, pull multiple product images from your feeds and animate them into one ad unit. These options let brands tap into Shorts without creating their own video content, by pulling images directly from Google Merchant Center feeds. Google is also expanding format buying controls, letting brands run campaigns exclusively in the Shorts feed or only use horizontal creative. These controls are already available for video reach campaigns, with a pilot for Shorts only buying in demand gen underway for select advertisers.

Starting point is 00:01:16 On the influencer marketing side of things, Google is testing a new creator partnerships tab to centralize your influencer and affiliate marketing efforts. It's also launching a new video linking API to manage multiple requests at once, and will soon let creators tag partners in their brand videos. On top of that, Google is expanding its audience building tools for Shorts, soon adding view durations and working on third-party sales lift measurement for Shorts ads. As Google pushes Shorts, it's also working hard to reclaim its search dominance with a new YouTube feature, hyperlinked comments. Google's search made Alphabet $49.5 billion last quarter alone, but reports showed that for the first time in more

Starting point is 00:02:01 than a decade, Google's market share is about to fall below 50%, thanks to competitors like ChatGPT and TikTok becoming the go-to search engines for Gen Z. To protect its search lead, TubeFilter reports that Google is now using YouTube's hyperlinked comments to drive more traffic to its search engine. Quoting TubeFilter, If the feature becomes a permanent thing on YouTube, it's easy to see how this could benefit Alphabet. Even if some people find hyperlinked comments spammy, it's likely that with hundreds of millions of comments across YouTube's smorgasbord of video content,

Starting point is 00:02:36 thousands or even millions of users will click on them every day and generate potentially valuable traffic for Google Search. Not only will these users be pumping Google search numbers, but they'll also be presumably be targeted traffic, since at least in ideal cases, they were already watching YouTube content about a particular topic, and now are being served more information about that topic. End quote.

Starting point is 00:03:04 While other short-form posting platforms face waning advertiser trust, threads might start luring advertisers to the platform in just a couple of months. According to a report from The Information yesterday, Meta plans to launch ads on threads and will let a small number of advertisers run campaigns starting as early as January. Instagram head Adam Mosseri also confirmed earlier this year that the company is definitely planning to bring ads to threads. While Meta reported nearly $40 billion in ad revenue last quarter, the company's CFO says threads isn't expected to become a meaningful revenue driver in 2025. It's still not clear how ads will appear on threads, but sponsored posts may be the route, according to a recent discovery by a reverse engineer.

Starting point is 00:03:51 Meta has not commented on its future plans. LinkedIn is launching a new feature to connect users with volunteer opportunities. The new Open to Volunteer option lets members add an informational tab to their profile indicating the causes they're interested in supporting, while also helping charitable organizations find volunteers. Here's how it works. Users can opt in by selecting Volunteer from the Open to drop-down menu under their profile picture. They can then specify supported causes, skills, and preferences, including location, and whether they prefer in-person or virtual volunteering. Once active, LinkedIn will display relevant volunteer opportunities in the feed and offer alerts

Starting point is 00:04:34 for matching roles. TikTok is looking to make content on the app more shoppable with a new feature called affiliate comment links. According to reports, some TikTok creators can now add affiliate links from select brands to their videos, which then appear at the top of the comment stream. When clicked, these links direct viewers straight to the product pages. This move is part of TikTok's expanded affiliate program designed to encourage creators to add direct shopping links during the upload process. Currently, only links from selected partners like Amazon, Expedia, Timu, and Target can be included. So I was making dinner last night and I went to go get some onions from our pantry and I noticed that they all had a very tiny bite out of them. All of them. So I'm thinking

Starting point is 00:05:26 that it's probably time we put a toddler lock on the pantry. Don't forget about answering our one question survey. Doing so could win you a $100 Amazon gift card. All you have to do is answer one question for us. That question is, if you could change anything about our podcast, what would it be? You can head to todayindigital.com slash question to answer it, and you could win a $100 Amazon gift card. Tomorrow, we will be bringing you a full sample episode of the Founders Forum podcast, which is a fantastic show for senior marketers and direct-to-consumer media buyers discussing what's working in the e-commerce and digital ad space. Tomorrow's episode will be all about digital marketing strategies for Black Friday. And Todd is back

Starting point is 00:06:10 on Monday from his vacation with a special deep dive marketing science episode discussing the role of Schadenfreude in social media comments. Thanks for listening. I'm Steph Gunn. We'll talk to you soon.

Today in Digital Marketing - Who Sells Short Shorts

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