Today in Digital Marketing - You Can't Handle the Marketing Fountain of Youth

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Thursday, December 1st. Today, one of the fastest-growing social media apps shuts down over security issues. Disney's new tool might change before and after marketing pictures. Twitter's email-to-media buyers reeks of desperation. Will LinkedIn's new feature actually hurt B2B marketers? And another podcast host wants your media dollars. I'm Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. It can be tempting for brand managers to kick the tires on a new social media platform, maybe to see if there's a marketing opportunity, maybe just to reserve your company's username.

Starting point is 00:00:36 And with Twitter apparently imploding, a number of those new platforms have sprung up. Mastodon, Post.News, and last week we reported on the Hive mobile app. It's sort of a cross between Instagram and Twitter. There are reasons to be cautious, though. As we mentioned last week, Hive isn't exactly the most brand-safe platform out there. It currently only has three employees and no content moderators. Now, security researchers say it's got big holes in it. They found several issues that could let hackers access all of your account's data, including private posted messages, shared media, the ability to read deleted DMs, the ability to edit other people's Hive posts. And yes, this also includes being able to access

Starting point is 00:01:23 private email addresses and phone numbers entered during login. The researchers claimed that they first reported these issues to the company last week. Hive allegedly responded several days later, saying the issues were resolved. The researchers, though, found that was not the case, so they made their warning public. As a result, Hive announced yesterday that it was temporarily shutting down to address the problems. It's hard to look at Twitter these days and not think it's trying to destroy itself. Today, the company is apparently continuing its death wish and has qualified to be featured in another episode of Nobody Asked For This.

Starting point is 00:02:07 And they got there by implementing the one thing that social media users universally hate, the so-called recommended content. This is a plague on other platforms, notably Instagram, where instead of seeing the people you follow, it'll show you a handful of those folks. But your feed is mostly crap that the algorithm thinks you might like. More times than not, the algorithm just recommends viral posts that have nothing to do with your interests

Starting point is 00:02:33 or gets hung up on a topic it insists you must like. For more than a year, Instagram has claimed, I'll be interested in gardening and wouldn't I like to see 6,000 photos of plants? No, Instagram, I wouldn't. But users be damned, that's what you're going to get a lot more on Twitter now. The platform announcing it is expanding recommendations to all users, pushing more tweets from accounts users don't follow into their timelines. Last night, Kurt Wagner, a Bloomberg writer, reported, nine of the first 10 tweets in my

Starting point is 00:03:07 timeline just now were from people I don't follow. What is happening? Unquote. It's unclear how this might affect your brand's content, if you're still even posting on Twitter. On one hand, your tweets might start getting out to a wider group of people. On the other, your existing followers are being overwhelmed by many more tweets than they're used to seeing, which might drown your stuff out. To avoid the surge of recommended content, Twitter's support account recommends switching to the chronological latest timeline. Meanwhile, with big advertisers continuing to drop out of the platform, Twitter seems to be getting a little bit desperate. Many media buyers are reporting getting emails from the remaining sales staff at the platform this morning offering big spending incentives.

Starting point is 00:04:08 One offer reported by Platformer News is that brands that spend more than $500,000 will have their buy matched by Twitter in what it's calling a 100% value add. The email also, somewhat hilariously, comes with a chart showing a very steep rise in monthly active users. When you look closely, you realize the y-axis of the chart is at 240 million, and the top of the chart is 253 million, which visually looks like a huge jump in users, but is actually less than 1% growth. Meanwhile, one third-party developer of a Twitter tool reports they have started seeing excessive overcapacity messages from the Twitter API. These happen occasionally, he said, but this is, I think, the largest and longest I've seen since Elon Musk took over, unquote. Apparently, about a week ago, Twitter cut I've seen since Elon Musk took over, unquote. Apparently, about a week ago, Twitter cut a big part of the sample stream API without any warning to developers.

Starting point is 00:04:52 This is something they would usually spend months communicating and preparing tools for in advance. A new AI tool might make it a lot easier to do before and after marketing photos. Disney has developed software that can change the age appearance of a person with one click. Disney Research Studios recently revealed FRAN, a new face aging network that can predict which parts of the face will change with age and can automatically generate or remove characteristics of the aging process. By layering these details, like wrinkles, for instance, over the original face, the resulting shot will retain more of the actor's true appearance. While photorealistic digital reaging is nothing new, the process until now has been quite tedious. A lot of work had been

Starting point is 00:05:43 done by artists manually, which could take weeks to complete. Sometimes studios have to reshoot entire sections of their films in order to re-age them, which of course can be costly. You might be thinking, no big deal, I have an app that does the same thing. But as Forbes points out, these video re-aging AI solutions often feature ghosting and other temporal artifacts, resulting in poor video quality and a lack of photorealism, while Disney's AI looks pretty convincing. However, Disney is gatekeeping its newfound fountain of youth. It has not said when or if it will ever release the technology publicly.

Starting point is 00:06:30 The podcast platform Acast is looking for a piece of your media budget this season. Yesterday, the company announced a new self-serve ad platform to help more brands and marketers enter the space. The tool lets brands set up campaigns at their own pace and budget, including those with budgets as low as $250. Advertisers can narrow their targeting by location, podcast category, and listener device. The tool has been running for two months with 100 test customers, and the company says it is already seeing early signs of success. Adweek reports that Acast is among the many companies creating a tool to lower the barriers of entry for advertisers, promoting even small spends on

Starting point is 00:07:05 the platform, and ultimately driving more revenue for the company. Acast did not disclose how much revenue it expects the platform to generate. Want people to read your content? They'll start with your headline, and that's as far as they'll get. If your headline doesn't convince readers to take action, it's meaningless. Stop wasting time writing headlines that don't get results. Headline Analyzer Studio is a free writing tool from CoSchedule made to help you write effective headlines that actually get seen and clicked. With data-backed headline scoring, suggestions, and SEO tips, you'll write better headlines that rank higher in search results and drive more engagement from your audience. Headline Analyzer Studio is also available as a free WordPress plugin and browser extension, so you can optimize your

Starting point is 00:07:56 headlines anywhere you write them. Get the leading edge over millions of existing headlines and maximize the traffic, engagement, and conversions you get from your content. Sign up for your free And that will bring us to the lightning round. Remember how Elon Musk claimed Apple had mostly stopped running ads on the platform and something, something free speech? Well, Ed, I know this will shock you. He might not have been telling the truth. New data from Pathmatics has found that Apple's advertising on the platform actually grew from October to November. In fact, the very day Elon said Apple had stopped running ads, it turns out Apple had spent about $84,000 on Twitter ads. The day before, it spent more than $100,000.

Starting point is 00:08:50 Reddit is adding images in comments for some subreddits. The platform announcing yesterday that subreddits that are safe for work can turn on the feature in their moderation tools. Images that are NSFW will be automatically removed. LinkedIn announced today that its new Focused Inbox is being rolled out to all users. The new inbox provides you with two separate InMail tabs, Focused and Other. Focused, of course, containing the most relevant stuff and Other containing, well, everything else. One potential problem here is that, according to the screenshots, InMails are now shuffled over to the other tab.

Starting point is 00:09:26 InMails are the only way marketers can do cold reach-outs to members. For some, today's Google Doodle will let you create your own mini arcade game. The Doodle honors video game pioneer Jerry Lawson, who led the team that created the first home video game system featuring interchangeable cartridges. It would have been his 82nd birthday today. A reminder about our new LinkedIn newsletter. It's free. It comes out every day. It covers the top story that we talk about in the podcast.

Starting point is 00:10:00 You can get it by going to todayindigital.com slash top story. There's a link to that in the show notes as well. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - You Can't Handle the Marketing Fountain of Youth

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