Today in Digital Marketing - Why Is Bob Ross (Who Is Dead) Pitching a Soft Drink?

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, Twitter teases commerce-enabled tweets, Google's peculiar decision around sitemaps, meet Taco Bell's new AI marketing technology, how American drugstores are using COVID to grow their marketing databases, and why Amazon quietly changed its mobile apps icon yesterday. It's Tuesday, March 2, 2021. We found some inauthentic listening, and you will be refunded one cent! I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. When you first see the Bob Ross video, it looks completely normal. How about we add some happy little droplets? Until you realize that instead of a mountain landscape, he's painting a giant

Starting point is 00:00:42 bottle of mountain dew. Sometimes in life you get a little thirsty. Then he grabs the bottle out of the painting. And when a refreshing opportunity comes along, you can just... Opens it, takes a drink, and delivers the closing line. Ah, shoot, that's good. It's not the real Bob Ross, of course, but were it not for the giant product placement,

Starting point is 00:01:00 I guarantee you would not be able to tell the difference. Because this is a deepfake. Mountain Dew created it with the help of a body double wearing prosthetics and a wig, a painter certified by the Bob Ross estate, and face-mapping CGI technology. It's promoting a kind of Bob Ross-inspired paint-along tutorial session on YouTube this weekend, after which it'll use TikTok influencers to give away branded paint kits.

Starting point is 00:01:25 Not everyone on YouTube thinks it's a good idea. The top comments on that YouTube video read, Dear God, let the man rest in peace, and I hate everything about this. For better or worse, deepfakes are becoming a larger part of the digital marketing scene. Last year, a beer brand put Peyton Manning's face into scenes from Caddyshack, and ESPN repurposed one of its sports shows from the 90s to promote State Farm.

Starting point is 00:01:57 Pinterest has it, Facebook has it, Instagram has it, TikTok has it, and now Twitter says it's getting it too. Sadly, we're not talking about an edit button here, but I am talking about the next best thing, direct e-commerce integration in the form of a new card. Cards are what Twitter calls those content blocks that show up in the Twitter timeline.

Starting point is 00:02:15 Most of the time, they're links. Now, those cards can have a large shop button that goes to a purchase page. It can even pull a price off your website's feed. If this sounds familiar, it's because Twitter tried this six years ago with something they called product and place collections. This let some accounts promote products on a separate tab of their profile,

Starting point is 00:02:35 but it did have a way to make the purchase right on the site. So why did they shut it down? Their revenue chief told investors last week that they'd been struggling with the foundations of it all, so they've rebuilt it from scratch and are starting testing now. So this is weird. Google, which for years has talked about how important having an XML sitemap is for your website's discoverability, has apparently dropped support for sitemaps on its own website service. The service is called Google Sites. It comes bundled with their workspace plans

Starting point is 00:03:10 and was originally positioned as a lightweight intranet builder. I don't think many people use it. It's sluggish. It's way behind in UX design. But it's Google's, so that's why it's weird that it has apparently stopped producing sitemap files. If you do use Google Sites for your brand's website, well, I don't know what to tell you. It's not like WordPress where you can install plugins like Yoast and just have something else generate the sitemap for you.

Starting point is 00:03:36 We've reached out to Google for some clarity on this, and we'll report back if we learn more. If you've got the Amazon app on your smartphone, you may have noticed a few weeks ago that the company changed the app's icon from a shopping cart on a white background to their smile arrow on a beige background with no words. It was a pretty dramatic difference, so it stood out. But I'll bet even the sharp-eyed among you did not notice the icon change they quietly rolled out yesterday. In addition to that smile arrow, they had a blue tag at the top that I guess was supposed to represent a bit of ripped packing tape. But some people on Twitter thought the combination of the jagged edge at the top and the smile somehow looked like the mustached face of Adolf Hitler. One person on Twitter said, Amazon's new logo be looking like they're the third most downloaded in the Reich section. As for the company's part, they issued a press release full of phrases like sparking anticipation, excitement, and joy, and didn't mention the whole, you know, Hitler thing. This was the first time they'd updated their app icon in more than five years.

Starting point is 00:04:46 Logo design. It ain't easy, folks. More marketing tech firms are being sold to major brands. The holding company of KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut has bought the performance marketing firm Kavuntum to bolster their shift toward a more data-driven marketing strategy. Specifically, the tech uses AI and something called econometric modeling to chart the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. This has been one of the quiet trends in the last year of the digital marketing space. In the past, we might have expected this kind of underlying

Starting point is 00:05:21 proprietary tech to be acquired by other bigger tech firms. Sort of like how Sprout Social bought the analytics tool Simply Measured about three years ago. But these days, it's the end user buying the tech outright, not another provider. This transaction, Walmart's recent acquisitions, Amazon's all snapping up marketing AI tech firms. Well, not all of them. Some of them are trying to sell them. McDonald's is said to be considering selling part of an AI company it bought for more than 300 million bucks just two years ago

Starting point is 00:05:53 after lackluster performance from the tool. And a handful of smaller items to round out the show today. The popular SEO app SEMrush is going public. It will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SEMR. It made $144 million last year, but actually ended the year $7 million in the red. Also, Twitter's answer to the audio meeting app Clubhouse has launched on Android. You can now create and join what they call spaces. It should be coming to iOS soon, along with the ability to create private spaces. And finally, the Wall Street Journal this morning has an interesting piece

Starting point is 00:06:33 about some American drugstore chains that have found a creative, if moderately unethical, way to increase their marketing databases through COVID tests. The site reports CVS, Walmart, and Walgreens are, quote, collecting data from millions of customers as they sign up for shots, enrolling them in patient systems, and having recipients register customer profiles. CVS executives say they plan to stay in touch with the vaccine recipients beyond receiving their second shot and use information gleaned in the process to better market to them, unquote. Remember, you can get this podcast as a daily email newsletter to complete with images, related videos, links to dive deeper and even newsletter exclusive content.

Starting point is 00:07:19 And there's a free tier as well. You'll get an issue every Friday. The newsletter comes out about an hour before the podcast drops. Just go to todayindigital.com slash newsletter to sign up or tap the link in this episode's notes. Talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Why Is Bob Ross (Who Is Dead) Pitching a Soft Drink?

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