Today in Digital Marketing - Will the Rise of the CCO Kill the Digital Agency?

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected, be Zen. Today, the big shift in corporate boardrooms that's threatening digital agencies, Google's aggressive plan to get more people trained on its platform, will in-person shopping ever come back, and signs that Clubhouse is starting to collapse. It's Monday, May 17th, 2021. Happy Constitution Day, Norway. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. As you may know, the U.S. has federal legislation called the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act. It prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities. Often the ADA concerns itself with

Starting point is 00:01:04 the number of accessible parking spots in a lot, or having hotel rooms that provide a visual signal for a fire alarm instead of just an audible alarm. Basically, the law kicks in in most public spaces. That includes the public space we know as the web. You can make your website ADA compliant

Starting point is 00:01:20 by paying attention to things like alt tags for images, not doing crazy things with your site's color and contrast, and putting captions on videos. But here's a question. Other than the obvious benefit to your website's visitors, does your brand get a benefit too? Happy Monday? Here's your quiz.

Starting point is 00:01:39 Do websites that are ADA compliant get a ranking boost in search? In other words, does Google use ADA signals for search ranking, putting accessible sites above less accessible ones? Discuss amongst yourselves. We'll have the answer later in today's episode. I think most of us saw this coming. The audio app clubhouse, now facing some big walleted competition, is struggling in the app store. The mobile analytics company Sensor Tower says downloads have all but collapsed after a surge in popularity this past February.

Starting point is 00:02:16 And yes, collapse is the right word here. Compared to February, downloads in April were down more than 90%. For the first three months of this year, Clubhouse was consistently in the top 10 lists for social apps. The last numbers we have from last week put it at 33%. Obviously, the company is banking on the release of their Android app, which just got out recently, but it may be too little too late. Pretty much everyone has or is working on a Clubhouse clone.

Starting point is 00:02:45 Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Discord, Spotify. The only one of that group that's really out and doing much is Twitter, which calls its version Spaces. And Spaces is excellent, but it does lack a simple discovery feature. Unlike on Clubhouse, there's not really any way to browse what spaces are currently happening. On the digital marketing side, some brands are experimenting with this new format, hosting panel discussions, mini-conferences, and so on. When Apple finally flipped the switch on ad tracking,

Starting point is 00:03:18 one of the many new tasks that got added to the plates of people who develop mobile apps was to figure out how they were going to claw that tracking back, or, more accurately, how they'll claw back the permission to track each user's activity since that was lost when those users upgraded to iOS 14.5. There is, of course, only one way to do this, and that's to use Apple's new App Tracking Transparency dialog box. That's the one that pops up and says,

Starting point is 00:03:44 hey, this app wants to track you. Are you cool with that? And developers do get a little bit of customization in that pop-up. The headline is hard-coded. You can't change that. It says, allow this app to track your activity across other companies' apps and websites. And the two options are allow or ask app not to track. But in between the headline and those buttons is a bit of text. And that is where app developers get to make their pitch. If you've been holding off triggering this box because you don't have that messaging right, a new site has popped up, which could help.

Starting point is 00:04:18 It's kind of a swipe file, actually, for this text. It's at attprompts.com, and you can see how other apps in your industry have asked for that permission. One mobile game says users should tap allow because it will, quote, improve the game experience and service. A fashion app says it'll provide the most relevant ads and personalized promotions. It's definitely worth a look if this is something you're wrestling with. Again, it's at attprompts.com. By the way, the percentage of people who have turned tracking back on is steady at about 5% in the U.S. and around 14% globally. If you run marketing for a brand that sells things online, a new study from Shopify may be of interest. They polled 10,000 consumers from 17 countries, weighted to match the demographic makeup of each country.

Starting point is 00:05:11 And their key findings. 84% of consumers have shopped online since the pandemic, compared to 65% who have shopped in-store. People in the UK, US, Spain, and Canada are more likely to feel uncomfortable shopping in person than that of other countries. Younger consumers were most likely to move their purchases online. More than two-thirds of those under 35 said that. That number was only 41% for people 55 and older. And more than half, 54%, of younger buyers said they discovered independent retailers through social media. You can download the full study yourself at b.link slash Shopify study.

Starting point is 00:05:56 Is the latest boardroom trend a threat to digital agencies? Marketing Dive today is reporting on the growing number of chief creative officers in the C-suite. Quoting their piece, CCOs have proliferated at brands in recent months, with companies from IKEA to Walmart to the NFL's Washington football team adding the role to their marketing rosters. A rising profile for CCOs comes as creative agencies contend with heavy pandemic workloads and the continued in-housing by marketers of key functions. Indeed, a recent study conducted by Anderson and BastionDB5

Starting point is 00:06:43 found that nearly a quarter of agency employees they polled said they were not confident in the current trajectory of that industry. Not only has the pandemic blurred the work-life line, the selection of a traditional agency of record isn't happening nearly as often as it used to. A greater number of CCOs on the client side ultimately sends a signal that budgets for marketing services providers could be reduced during a period when workloads are surging for full-service brand shops and digital boutiques alike. 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.

Starting point is 00:07:42 Google today announced a huge scholarship program for Canadians wanting to retrain in the digital space. Be protected. Be Zen. and they expect it will help about 5,000 people. The scholarships will pay for Google's own career certificates, and the choices include data analytics, project management, UX design, and IT support. According to Glassdoor, these four fields currently have more than 22,000 job openings across Canada. They've also put together a consortium of large companies that will recognize these certificates, including KPMG, Telus, and Loblaw. If you are an employer and you want to be in this group, you can apply at g.co slash grow slash employers. And if you'd like information on the certificates program itself,

Starting point is 00:08:37 that's at g.co slash certificates hyphen Canada. The courses will be conducted through the Coursera platform and are available in English. The company says there'll be some French content coming next year. This is just a reminder that Google's big changes to Phrase Match in its ads will start the global rollout in just two weeks' time. And when I say big changes, I mean, they're basically phasing out phrase match. The new version is a lot like broad match modifier. This change is already in

Starting point is 00:09:11 place for the following languages, English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, and Russian. Starting next month, the updated phrase match behavior will begin rolling out to all languages. It should be fully rolled out by the end of July. Google says you will not need to take any specific action for your phrase match or broad match modifier keywords in order to see these changes. Oh, and as for the quiz, is ADA compliance a ranking factor in Google?

Starting point is 00:09:44 The answer? No. Actually, it's not. Google search engineer John Mueller this weekend tweeted, quote, I'm sure it can be useful for your site, but we don't use it for search ranking, unquote. Well, if you found this podcast through one of those recommended for you listings, that happened because people rated and reviewed the show. If you are getting value from this daily news podcast, please consider paying it forward by doing the same.

Starting point is 00:10:11 You will find a link in this episode's description that makes that a simple one-click process. I'm Todd Baffin. Talk to you tomorrow. So it's a jazz that you stay clear.

Today in Digital Marketing - Will the Rise of the CCO Kill the Digital Agency?

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