Today in Digital Marketing - Why is Apple "Closing" Businesses?

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Wednesday, January 24th. Today, TikTok moves squarely into YouTube's territory, Apple Maps is closing businesses, Google pulls back on the data it shows marketers, and the Authenticity app has decided its next move, celebrities. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in Digital Marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:23 Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. First it was three, then it was five, then ten. Now, TikTok is testing letting users upload 30-minute videos. This is, of course, all because of one thing.

Starting point is 00:00:59 To make the world a better place. Nah, it's advertising. The fact is, it's hard to monetize short videos. Your placement options are fewer for one. Users don't want their 30 second video interrupted by a mid-roll, but they're used to that

Starting point is 00:01:13 on a 30 minute video. Quoting social media today, quote, pre-roll and mid-roll ads can then be attributed back to the creator directly. That's been a key challenge for TikTok in facilitating effective monetization

Starting point is 00:01:26 and keeping creators aligned to its app. YouTube can offer better revenue potential because it shares the income from ads shown within each clip, but in shorter 30-second videos, that's not possible as you can't use pre- and mid-roll approaches and you can't directly attribute viewing of ads

Starting point is 00:01:44 shown in between shorter clips. 30-minute uploads could provide some solution on this front and could be another step toward expanded revenue sharing for TikTok creators, unquote. Where will it stop? Well, probably there, at least if TikTok's sister app in China is any bellwether. The Douyin app increased its upload limit to 30 minutes per video in 2022 and hasn't introduced anything beyond that since. There appears to be a big bug with the business listings in Apple Maps. 9to5Mac is reporting that some businesses are showing up as permanently closed when they are, in fact, still very open. One business, a Thai restaurant in Australia, got a call from a customer asking

Starting point is 00:02:30 why he'd shut his business down. He hadn't, of course, but it showed permanently closed on Apple Maps. Trying to get it fixed was harder than it should have been because the owner uses Android on his phone and Microsoft on his work devices. He had no connection to the Apple ecosystem. And he says when he called Apple, a rep told him that they couldn't help him because he wasn't an Apple customer. He estimated the mistake cost him about $8,000 in lost revenue. He tried to open an Apple business account, claim his business, then market his open. That seemed to work. But it also started showing the restaurant in the wrong location.

Starting point is 00:03:10 We've reached out to Apple for comment, and we'll update this story if we hear back. Amazon is rolling out a new generative AI tool for third-party sellers on the platform. It can rewrite all sorts of parts of a listing, including titles, bullet points, descriptions, and product attributes. Sellers can, of course, review these suggestions before they're added to the Amazon catalog. For the nerds out there, the tech comes from Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud platform and uses some open-source large language models on NVIDIA's GPUs. These chips specialize in handling tasks like text recognition now, summarization, translation, and content creation. Amazon says the new tech has cut down the time

Starting point is 00:03:50 required to generate these predictions by threefold compared to previous models. Google says it will remove some of the data it's been sharing with marketers in their Google business profile, specifically the driving directions report. This is a chart showing how many people asked for directions to your business from your business profile webpage. The fact that Google is removing data points from marketing reports isn't really new.

Starting point is 00:04:19 What's weird though, is the rationale it gave. According to the company, quote, Google is making updates to better protect people's privacy and give you more accurate results, unquote. So let's break this down a little. Better privacy. Google's reporting never gave any information about individuals. You couldn't learn where they were starting from or the time of day they requested this data. It was a simple month chart showing how many

Starting point is 00:04:45 requests there were. As for more accurate, Google didn't say that previous numbers were artificially inflated. So assuming they've been accurate numbers all along, it's not at all clear how getting less data is more accurate. All that said, though, I suspect most business owners and brand managers never even really looked at that screen, though let's not tell Google lest they pull the chart entirely. In case your social media manager is at a loss on what to post on Instagram, a new test underway might help them a little, though it's probably less helpful than post suggestions. These suggestions instead are for the notes section of the app. These are the tiny little status update texts that attached profile photos at the top of the messaging part of the app.

Starting point is 00:05:33 Quoting social media today, quote, based on the replies that I see every time I write about notes, many Instagram users are still confused as to why Instagram keeps updating this feature and why it even exists in the first place. Here's why. Notes is really popular with young users. Instagram is desperate to keep a hold on younger audiences, especially as more of them drift off to TikTok and Snapchat instead. Instagram does not want to go the way of Facebook and become the old person's social platform, so it's doubling down on anything that resonates with younger users, unquote. This isn't used much by brands, but could be a quick

Starting point is 00:06:12 place to drop a, I don't know, surprise discount code or ask people to DM or alert them to a newly updated post, especially if your audience is teens. Instagram says teens are about 10 times more likely to create a note in the app. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today,

Starting point is 00:06:50 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Be Real, the upstart app which positioned itself as the social media platform for authenticity, is now bringing brands and celebrities aboard. Starting February 6th, these entities can join with titles Real Brands or Real People, with the app saying they'll be encouraged to share candid moments from their daily lives with fans. Be Real gained popularity

Starting point is 00:07:17 in 2022. It was designed to offer a less curated experience. It notifies users at a random time each day to share a real-time photo within two minutes and often captures mundane activities. Initially focused on deepening connections among existing friends, B-Rail is often seen as a counter to the polished images typical of platforms like Instagram. It'll be interesting to see if this potential influx of brands and celebs will raise questions about B-Real's commitment to authenticity. The company said they think showcasing the ordinary aspects of well-known figures and brands aligns with its positioning. B-Real has reported a slight increase in daily active users, now at 23 million, up from 20 million in August.

Starting point is 00:08:01 The app has been experimenting with new features like groups, multiple daily posts, and a friends of friends feed. According to a Pew study, about 13% of US teens use BeReal. Meta has lost a court case against Israeli company Bright Data. Meta accused Bright Data violating its terms of service by scraping data from Facebook and Instagram, but the court ruled in favor company Bright Data. Meta accused Bright Data violating its terms of service by scraping data from Facebook

Starting point is 00:08:26 and Instagram, but the court ruled in favor of Bright Data, saying Meta failed to prove the data harvested was private and not publicly accessible. More interestingly, the case revealed that Meta had previously employed Bright Data's services to gather data for brand profiling on its platform. In the lawsuit, Meta alleged that Bright Data sold a large dataset of Instagram user information, but the court said that information was already publicly available. The court also dismissed Meta's claim that Bright Data used tools to bypass security measures like CAPTCHAs, but it differentiated between bypassing a CAPTCHA and accessing

Starting point is 00:09:02 password-protected data. Meta is fairly aggressive in suing entities it says scrapes data, a practice which could compromise user privacy, depending on the data that's scraped. And finally, Iceland is considering new legislation that would restrict the use of generative AI, specifically AI that can re-animate dead people. It comes after the country's public broadcaster used AI to bring back

Starting point is 00:09:31 a nationally treasured comedian for its New Year's Eve special. The comedian died a decade ago, but in the special, he appeared to be standing with his arms around two of the show's hosts, and it was moving video, not just an image. The lawmaker behind the bill says he plans to move it to the floor as quickly as possible.

Starting point is 00:09:58 If you are trying to reach marketing decision makers, consider an ad on this podcast or in our newsletter. Some ad slots are just 10 bucks. Tap the link at the top of the show notes or go to todayindigital.com slash ads. See you tomorrow. It's always goodbye

Today in Digital Marketing - Why is Apple "Closing" Businesses?

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