Today in Digital Marketing - YouTube's New Best Practice: Shut Your Mouth

Episode Date: September 7, 2023

Google has new rules for AI-generative ads — rules that probably won’t apply to your marketing campaign. Some new podcast brand safety tools are released. And the new YouTube thumbnail advice is here: TLDR: Shut your mouth!.🌍 Follow us on our social media📰 Get our free daily newsletter⭐ Review the podcast✉️ Contact Us: Email or Send Voicemail·GO PREMIUM!Get these exclusive benefits when you upgrade:✅ Listen ad-free✅ Meta Ad platform updates with Andrew Foxwell✅ Google Ad platform updates with Jyll Saskin Gales✅ Earlier episodes each day✅ Story links in show notes✅ “Skip to story” audio chapters✅ Member-exclusive Slack channel✅ Member-only Monthly livestreams with Tod✅ Back catalog of 20+ marketing science interviews✅ Discounts on marketing tools✅...and a lot more!Check it out: todayindigital.com/premium·ADVERTISING📈 Advertising Options📰 $20 Classified Ads·GET MORE FROM US🎙️ Our other podcast "Behind the Ad"📰 Our “The Top Story” LinkedIn newsletter🤝 Our Slack community🆘 Need help with your social media? Check us out: engageQ digital·UPGRADE YOUR SKILLS• Inside Google Ads with Jyll Saskin Gales• Google Ads for Beginners with Jyll Saskin Gales• Foxwell Slack Group and CoursesSome links in these show notes may provide affiliate revenue to us.·Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Thursday, September 7th. Today, Google has new rules for ads that use generative AI. Some new podcast brand safety tools are released, and the new YouTube thumbnail advice is here. TLDR, shut your mouth. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. I don't think it matters which side of the political fence you're on to not be terrified about the looming combination of generative AI video and national elections. Our first big test will happen in America, where it's already gotten dicey. Florida's governor is running for the Republican presidential nomination. An ad for his campaign showed photos of Donald Trump hugging and kissing the forehead of public health director Anthony Fauci, a much maligned figure on the right. Except that never happened. The images

were generated by AI and that was not disclosed. It's happened with videos too and Google today said it would not ban the use of fake videos for political campaigns. Instead, it would require campaigns to disclose if they're using sound or images that have been altered or created synthetically. You can't really hide it either. The updated policy says the disclosure must be clear and conspicuous and be located somewhere that users are likely to notice it. But honestly, how much will that matter? As marketers, we know the power of imagery. A strong image or video is what usually gets the click, not the body copy. And with media literacy on the low side in much of the world, how many people will even understand the distinction

between real and generative, even if it is disclosed? Indeed, there does not seem to be much in the way of bans or disclosure requirements for non-political marketers. Google also clarified that AI use that does not impact the message of the content, things like resizing or recoloring or cropping, should be fine. Meta's competitor Threads has started to roll out the ability to search through posts.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced this, on the site of course, saying it will go to most English and Spanish-speaking countries starting with the US and the UK today. This appears to be only for the mobile app for the time being and not the web app. It's also a little hidden. When you search, you'll still get a list of users, but there'll be a new and small search for option at the top that will show you matching posts. Many people have said that text search is one of the most important pieces to competing with X. YouTube will soon show people watching on TV's ads that are longer, but there will be fewer of them. The company says people who watch on large screens

expect a more traditional television ad experience, longer and less skippable than the traditional YouTube ad placement. It was just earlier this year that YouTube brought 30 second unskippable ads to TVs. They'll also be testing a countdown timer showing how many seconds of an ad break is left. Right now, you might recall YouTube shows the number of ads left, like ad one of two.

But that doesn't tell the consumer how long they'll actually be waiting. This is just in testing for now, but I expect they'll roll that out widely. TV is an important viewing service for YouTube. The company says it reached 150 million people across connected TVs in the U.S. in April. And people are watching more than 700 million hours of YouTube content on TV screens each day. This past spring, they added multi-view for sports games and a couple of months ago, extended that feature to non-sports content as part of their YouTube TV package, which is not available outside the U.S. Pinterest today announced it's making its search feature more inclusive of different body shapes.

Quoting the company, Pinterest's inclusive product team partnered with experts to develop a body type technology that uses shape, sizes, and form to identify body types in images. With this enhanced understanding of visual content through computer vision technology, Pinterest has shaped its algorithms to increase representation of both body type and skin tone across search results and related pins.

For example, if a user searches for date night outfit inspiration, they will see results inclusive of various body types and skin tone ranges, unquote. Pinterest previously released technology that makes skin tones and hairstyles more representative of the population. Google's Chrome browser continues the march toward killing off third-party cookies by next year. Today, the company said its Relevance and Measurements API

for Privacy Sandbox are now universally available in Chrome. The sandbox is Google's attempt at a privacy-conscious alternative to cross-site tracking cookies. This means no need for browser flags or trial participation. 3% of Chrome users will still be held in a group unaffected by this, letting Google run A-B tests. It plans to roll this out to all users in the forthcoming months. Chrome also introduced new ad privacy settings, letting users control and customize privacy sandbox features like ad topic targeting.

Despite these changes, most users won't see much of a difference as the update primarily concerns developers. Now that these APIs are available, developers and ad providers can prepare for the upcoming end of third-party cookies in their offerings. Next up in the plan, in Q1 of next year, Google will shut off third-party cookie support entirely for 1% of Chrome users to start. SiriusXM has released a new verification tool for podcast advertisers to ensure brand safety. It's pixel-based, developed with Barometer as the measurement partner and ArtsAI on the pixel side. In one example cited by the company, an auto retailer initially turned off all news programming, but this tool was able to find a suitable Formula One racing news show that otherwise would have been excluded by the broad category. Reporting will also be available live during a campaign,

so marketers can tweak things in real time, and post-campaign analysis will include brand suitability info. It won't work for every platform, though. The new tool offers third-party metrics validation only through SXM Media and its AdsWiz division. The SiriusXM Podcast Networks includes Stitcher Studios, Team Coco, NBCUniversal, and the Oprah Winfrey Network. It's the season for new styles, and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy.

And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at rakuten.ca. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at Rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal. Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N.C-A. Digiday has some reporting today on the state of social media monetization for large content websites. And Snapchat doesn't come out looking great. Quoting their piece, in August, Snap removed the carousel of stories that specifically highlights accounts

that users follow from their Discover page and merged those stories with the main feed on the Discover page, which includes popular content from all public accounts surfaced via its algorithm. According to a Snap spokesperson, the move was made in an attempt to simplify the user's consumption of content on the Discover page. Publishers, though, feel this change impacted their ability to reach followers on the platform.

One of the publisher execs said, quote, This time last year, 1 million or 2 million people would read the same story. Today, maybe 60,000 people read that story. And when our revenue is based on the ad impressions in that story, you can do the math of how far it's unfortunately sunk, unquote. In fact, that executive said revenue fell for their site about 75% year over year on Snapchat. Snapchat said the change led to an increase in both viewers and time spent on the platform, but they used data from Q2 to prove their point, and this carousel change happened

after Q2. Also, Q2 saw their ad revenue decline by 4% year over year. Last Q1 was also in decline. The LGBTQ publication Pink News said revenue earned from its revenue share deal with Snapchat isn't small. It's not been as good as previous quarters. Last year, 80% of Pink News revenue came from social media ads, most of which came from Snapchat. Today, that Snapchat part of the pie is less than 50%. And that will bring us to the lightning round. Instacart has released a new app for Shopify merchants. This lets Shopify's CPG stores access Instacart ads and sales data.

U.S. influencer marketing spend is set to outpace social ad spend in 2023. Growth is especially notable on TikTok, but it's surpassing other major platforms too. T2, a Twitter alternative, has launched its For You feed. Unlike some platforms, it's not the default. The new feed prioritizes content from followed users and relevant topics. Connected TV viewing hours increased by 21% in May of this year. Now, 73% of U.S. households stream content. And Patreon is rolling out a chat feature that lets creators connect with fans in group messages.

Links to the full details of these lightning round stories are in today's free newsletter, which you can sign up to by going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter or tapping the link in the show notes. And finally, creators and marketers who use YouTube a lot always look to one creator in particular for guidance on the real best practices, Mr. Beast. I probably don't have to explain to you

who that is now, YouTube's biggest individual star, and he makes so much money, he has a full team dedicated to thumbnail testing. When you saw everyone using closed up shocked facial expressions with an open mouth on their thumbnails, blame Mr. Beast. When people started putting thick white outlines around any person in the frame, that's because Mr. Beast did. But now, we have some new guidance. A policy change, if you will,

on that shocked facial expression. Mr. Beast's team have tested and tested and yesterday reported that combining that shocked expression with a closed mouth results in more click-throughs and thus more video views. To be clear, you could still show teeth. In fact, you probably want to show teeth based on the thumbnails on his channel right now. You just don't actually want to open your mouth fully. Today's newsletter has a couple of screenshots from his YouTube analytics showing specifically what this looks like. In fact, look back at some of his more recent videos

and you'll see many of them have switched over to this new look. YouTube released the thumbnail AB test tool this past June to a couple hundred creators, said it would launch more widely next year. In the meantime, expect to see that overly enthusiastic dental first look coming to a thumbnail near you okay so if you don't care about video games i won't be offended if you stop listening i'm gonna be talking about starfield for a while it is a great game it is one of those games though i mean typical of bethesda skyrim fallout for that matter, all the other kind of large scale open world quest driven games is, you know, I'm just trying to get to do something. I just I just have to like whatever it is, you know, I have to bring a box to a guy and he's across the city. And but there's this kid that wants me to put up posters and then there's's this woman who wants a job. And I have to bring coffee to this other person.

And every person I walk by, I mean, to the game's credit, right? I mean, you know, they've been working on this for 10 years. But I'm just trying to do my one basic quest. And there's so much stuff in the way. And I want to do all this stuff too, right? And every YouTube video I watch that are like, here's how to play the game is like, don't do this iQuest. Just focus on the main issue. But I can't. This

happens to me with every one of these games and it's happening again. But good problem to have. Our newsletter, again, it's free today in digital.com slash newsletter or you can tap the link in the show notes to sign up. See you tomorrow.