Today in Digital Marketing - You Can't Automate Telling Your Brand Story

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Friday, February 7th, 2020. Happy Rose Day, Australia. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, a strange bug at Google My Business, some nice changes coming to shopping campaigns on Bing, how will Instagram's new revenue share affect your marketing efforts, and Netflix has finally added the one thing that we have all wanted all along. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:28 Once you've been in marketing for any significant length of time, you realize that you, your colleagues, and everyone else in your marketing department actually really works on just one thing. No, not filling the funnel or getting leads, but in the end, we are responsible for the brand. That is to say, the promise that we make to our customers. And some marketers are now giving thought to how their brands may be affected by automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. A new study from Binder of 1000 marketing people in the US and the UK found that 77% of us are concerned about AI and

Starting point is 00:01:08 its impact on branding. So what's the connection? Well, think about mass personalization. AI can, in theory, let us highlight different parts of our brand story to different people. One shopper might be interested in your environmental work. One may only care about discounts of more than 33%. Another third might be secretly hoping to work for your company. A computer algorithm could be responsible for telling those different parts of your brand's story to different people, depending on their interests. And therein lies the problem. When an algorithm controls the rollout of your brand narrative, you as a marketer

Starting point is 00:01:47 lose control over the subtleties of that story, the order in which the story is told, the pacing, and so on. That's apparently why more than three quarters of the people in this study were concerned. 23% said outright that branding cannot be automated. One other interesting finding, and this is great news if you have a product that serves the digital marketing space, more than two-thirds of those studied say they plan to increase the number of vendors they work with in 2020. Something weird is happening over at Google My Business today. You may know that they recently introduced the ability for brands to create posts, sort of like how it's possible to add text content into a YouTube feed. Well, now comes word from hundreds of brand managers that say their posts are being rejected by Google en masse.

Starting point is 00:02:38 The search engine forums this morning are lit up with a ridiculous number of screenshots of people's rejection messages. For its part, Google hasn't said anything about it. But it is possible, based on what some people are saying in these forums, that this is a bug, not an actual rejection of your content. Some people even say that even though the post is showing as rejected in the Google My Business dashboard, it is actually making it out into the world just fine. There's more speculation out there that Instagram may soon be launching a revenue share program for creators who use its IGTV platform. That would get it competing a lot closer to YouTube or Facebook Watch, where video producers make 55% of their revenue from ad breaks

Starting point is 00:03:24 that are jammed into their content. Until now, the only way to get paid for putting IGTV content up came if you were a celebrity and you had a private deal with Instagram to cover some of your production costs. But this lack of monetization may have been part of the reason IGTV is a bit of a ghost town, with only cross-posted YouTube videos or promotions for content elsewhere. So what will this mean for you as a digital marketer? For now, nothing really, but if this does indeed come to fruition, you can expect more people to spend more time making content specifically for IGTV. That will bring more eyeballs to that section and, in turn, give you another channel to consider getting your brand's story out on.

Starting point is 00:04:11 Some nice upgrades coming for those of you who buy Microsoft advertising. They'll soon be rolling out a way to look at product groups across multiple campaigns, new options for bulk and automated bid changes, and more performance data for subsets of products. Quoting Search Engine Journal, product groups can now be viewed at the account and campaign level. Previously, you could only view them within a specific ad group. And a new filtering feature will allow users to quickly and easily drill down to specific product groups based on a number of different criteria. With this new list view, advertisers will now have the option to apply bulk bid changes to their product groups. Also, they'll be implementing scripts across shopping campaigns,

Starting point is 00:04:54 so if you buy ads at scale, this will make it easier to make changes. Expect those new features in a couple of weeks. And finally, and this has nothing to do with digital marketing, but I thought you would like to hear about it. You know how when you're scrubbing over show images in Netflix and every time you hover over a show for like a second, it starts auto playing a trailer. Well, now you can turn that off. This is something that we have been asking Netflix for for years. Well, they just added it now. And here is how you do it. Now, this only works on the web version of Netflix, not the app. When you first log in, you know, you get that list

Starting point is 00:05:31 of profiles, usually family members. There's a button there on that screen that says manage profiles. Click that and then find the new tick box that says autoplay previews while browsing on all devices. Uncheck that. Presto. For good measure, you can also tell Netflix now to not automatically start playing the next episode after the previous one ends. Well, that is it for today and this week. If you value a daily digital marketing news show, please take a moment this weekend to rate and review this podcast. It really does help in getting the word out there. There's a link

Starting point is 00:06:07 in this episode's description that makes that an easy one-click process. And if your brand could use some help with your social media content, engagement, or digital marketing,

Starting point is 00:06:15 check out our agency at engageq.com. Follow me on social, links to my channels and our agency are in this episode's description. Have a restful weekend, folks. I'm Todd Maffin. I will see you on Monday.

Today in Digital Marketing - You Can't Automate Telling Your Brand Story

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