Has the Pandemic Really Accelerated Digital Marketing Trends?

Jessica Hawthorne-Castro of Adweek argues that not only has the pandemic accelerated remote work and our adoption of delivery and home-based services, it has also accelerated digital marketing trends by up to a decade.

Her belief is that although millennials and younger generations were already online and using mobile to high degree, the experience of being homebound for months pushed older generations online to a greater degree for entertainment, work and social interactions. "Favorite engagement points included online video, pay-per-click advertising, social, CTV/OTT, sponsored content, mobile and email," she says.

Though she provides no evidence for this hypothesis, this is not an unreasonable supposition. More people at home means more people online. However, Hawthorne-Castro does not acknowledge the impact of the Apple's recent privacy changes and the threat of regulation from government.  Apple's changes alone significantly impacted Snapchat's reported earnings and share price, taking other social media giants with it.  

But Facebook and Google and resting on their laurels, and are beginning to develop alternative approaches to reaching targeted audiences without relying on cookies and targeting individuals.

However, in my opinion, this could actually drive up barriers to entry into offering digital marketing solutions, removing new entrants, and thus creating a situation where there is less innovation, because there is less competition. So my counter question is, have trends been accelerated, or have privacy changes and the threat of regulation entrenched a duopoly that might result in a decline in innovation in digital marketing overall?  

Time will tell.

Digital Privacy and Who Pays for the Internet?

I missed this great piece on the tension between digital privacy and firms on Madison Avenue from Brian Chen of the New York Times when it was published late last month.

Chen summarizes the recent privacy changes implemented by FANG companies and the impact on the effectiveness of digital marketing for big and small businesses.

In April Apple implemented the ability to turn off tracking for particular apps on iOS devices. Google announced plans to block cookies to its Chrome web browser in June. And Facebook announced last month plans to target ads to users without knowing any user specific information.

These changes have come about through a willingness of governments to regulate big tech more, the most well-known example being Europe's GDPR legislation, and through shifting consumer preferences toward privacy.

However Chen rightly points out that this change impacts the effectiveness of digital marketing spend, providing the example of Georgia pastry shop Seven Sister Scones whose Facebook advertising became significantly less effective after Apple's iOS changes, resulting in a drop of monthly revenue from $40,000 to $16,000 in May.

Naturally the implications here are that if digital marketing becomes less effective, then naturally more spend is required to sustain the same conversions and revenue, and thus cost of acquisition increases.  For businesses with tight margins, this may mean switching to more traditional forms of marketing in preference to digital, or if that is untenable, price increases.  Indeed, Seven Sister Scones raised prices 25%.

In this respect, these privacy changes couldn't come at a worse time for the economy, as treasury bond yields begin to increase and inflation fears begin to take hold. 

Advertising revenue sustains a great deal of the internet, so the question becomes - if digital marketing becomes too expensive, who pays for advertising-supported digital products and services?

Lies, Damn Lies and Ads

 Lies, Damn Lies and Ads

Google bringing ethics to ads - by banning advertisements that deny climate change, Google is taking a big step towards bringing an expanded sense of right and wrong to advertising. However, it is also effectively proclaiming itself as an arbiter of "Truth". While most scientists agree on the realities of climate change, it is obviously still a contested issue politically.

This move raises additional questions about what other "Truths" Google shall seek to arbitrate.  Health claims of supplements and other health & wellness products is one possibility, the money-making potential of certain investments or investment platforms is another. While this certainly has the potential to have a positive impact in fighting misinformation and fake news, it feels like a slippery slope both from a social / public good perspective and from a business perspective for Google - does it create the precedent / expectation that Google polices all ads for truthiness?  If I make a purchase based on a Ad supported by Google and the claims turn out to be false, can I now sue Google?

As a digital marketer, we know the expectations are high for the ethical validity and truth in the content we put forth. Now the gauntlet has been thrown to the less ethical among us and challenged us to do better, to be better.

Now we wait and see. Will history judge Google as sage or folly?

Digital Marketing in Social Media

 

As human behavior continues to shift in a digital world, so does the way we interact with brands and each other. Included in this shift of behavior is the notion that our connectedness and reliance on each other has increased in social settings. We trust what our friends buy, we yearn to be a part of the cool crowd by buying what the influencers buy, and we follow the brands we know and love. It is no surprise, then, that Snapchat, in an effort to draw marketers to their platform, has introduced a new proprietary tool called 'Snapchat Trends'. 

Snapchat Trends primarily serves as a way to uncover trends, fads and other noteworthy happenings in the social space by allowing users - including Marketers - to find the most searched for elements on the platform. As users search for the latest pumpkin-themed creations, various keywords will bubble to the top that'll allow users to compare various stats related to the fall phenomenon. Understanding what's trending among the users of Snapchat would be especially viable information as companies today are doing everything in their power to understand Gen Z. By building this tool, Snapchat has positioned itself to be a valuable social platform for more companies and has formed a viable complement to other keyword search tools. It'll be interesting to see if other platforms follow suit but in the mean time, get ready for more pumpkin themed products in your feed! 

Source and more info: https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2021/08/snapchat-introduces-new-tool-trends.html

Google Ad Manager is Now Adopting First Price Auctions for Programmatic

Google Ad Manager - formerly known as DoubleClick - is now adopting first price auctions as means of simplifying programmatic buying and making it more transparent. 

What are first price auctions, you say? It's when the buyers pay the actual price they bid - so gone are the days where you could bid a ridiculously large amount and then end up paying half of that because the second competitor isn't as crazy as you (but still, thanks for driving up the average bid). While the old second price auction create date foundation of programatic buying (which also conveniently allowed publishers to fulfill their remaining inventory), this new method allows for Programmatic's increasing complexity to be addressed and make it easier for the publishers and advertisers to properly value their inventory. 

While Google wasn't the first one to adopt this, as a market leader, it is sure to create the biggest wave, so it'll be interesting to note how the ecosystem responds to this. 

“Since the change from second to first price will require both buyers and sellers to make changes in their programmatic strategies, we’ll give everyone time to prepare over the next few months before we start testing. During this time, publishers and app developers will need to rethink how they use price floors and technology partners will need to adjust how they bid for Google Ad Manager Inventory,” Google said.

Programmatic is expected to account for 86 percent of US digital display media buying by 2020, according to eMarketer, so this move is only for display and video inventory sold though Google Ad Manager. Search, YT, Adsense are still untouched - for now. 

Would you sell your iPhone usage data for $20 a month?

The latest scandal among the tech giants last week was that both Facebook and Google were found to have been paying selected users to allow the companies to track their usage on the iPhone. Apple has since shut both the backdoor research apps down, saying that they violated the special enterprise certificates that allowed both Facebook and Google to bypass the App Store, since their certificates were intended to internally distributed apps only.

Facebook was paying its users $20 a month, while Google allowed users to earn gift cards. A $20 price tag indicates that these companies are finding significant value in knowing exactly how users are interacting with their iPhone. This information could be used to serve more relevant ads to the users on their platforms; however, perhaps more valuable, both companies can use these insights to shape future product development knowing how its rivals’ customers are interacting with their products.

As more of our lives continued to be centered around our mobile phones this knowledge is becoming increasingly more valuable and its likely to see companies continue try to make a play to gain access to this usage data. Personally, I wouldn’t mind getting $20 a month which I could put towards my phone bill in exchange for how I used my phone, partly because I suspect Apple is doing this to some degree already anyway. How much would you need to turn over your mobile phone usage data?

Further Tech Crunch coverage:

• Overview of Facebook's 'Research' app
• Overview of Google's 'Screenwise' app
• Facebook's defensive of its 'Research' app

Google will take care of your campaigns

Recently, some Google clients received an email with intriguing words inside:

“We’ll focus on your campaigns, so you can focus on your business.”

Even though this headline is quite inspirational, some other details of this cooperation are not completely clear.

It is worth to mention that function will be added automatically in 7 days, if a user won’t opt out within this period. This strategy resembles free subscription trap, which quite often we forget to cancel on time. However, Google seem to play if fair, saying that user can turn this option off at any point of time. This news make specialised agencies and consultants think that they are watching how a powerful new competitor appears. I would say that their suspicions are quite logical. Managing customers’ accounts with limited responsibility, since at this point service provider do not guarantee excellent results, might be a great learning opportunity for Google workers. Additional interesting fact is that this added feature won’t increase a budget and even refund might be issued in case of negative results, which also might lead to an idea that profit generation is not the main aim at this point.

Even though Google is a leading player in many fields of digital marketing, they still see some areas to grow and have all resources to enter those areas successfully.

Personalize Bots to Perform Mundane Tasks? Implications for Off-site Optimization.

Bots are trending in the artificial intelligence industry. I don't mean the infamous Russian 'bots' which are mainly people-run, created to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. No. I mean online bots that receive, process and respond to information; they perform the mundane tasks that we'd normally complete. According to Kurt Wagner from CNBC, bots range from online chatbots that simulate conversation, to bots that schedule appointments and bots that provide customer service support (e.g. respond to inquiries). The bot industry is growing by the day and large companies such as Google (with Google Now), Microsoft, Slack, Kik and now Facebook are increasingly creating bots that perform simple tasks.

Google's Fresh Bots (which constantly return to updated sites) and Deep Crawlers (which scout sites monthly) index updates for Google, that is, perform a relatively simple task which would otherwise require an enormous undertaking for humans to complete. Just think about having to register updates as they happen, every day, hour and even minute for thousands of sites. If it were not for bots, this would be nearly impossible. What if we were to create a customizable bot service that performs one task for your regular, on a budget, entrepreneur? The bot can learn to send you reminders or schedule reminders, or to use your credit card to buy toilet paper every month. In effect, to complete one mundane task that you do often and would save so much time if it were outsourced to an online robot.

I've tried to search for a service like this, but I've come up with zero results and prototypes at best. I'd be intrigued to see where this opportunity goes and if something like this comes out in the near future.

In any case, these bots could completely change the possibilities for off-site optimization. Just think about it, a bot that messages companies requests for backlinks? Bots that check your site and make sure you're using internal links, deep links for other sites, or to make sure that "click here" doesn't appear but instead the name of the page, etc. A bot to complete the relatively easy tasks which a busy entrepreneur may not have time to complete or a novice start-up not familiar with optimization would know about. Bots that help startups to start up, by taking care of the little things that can make a big difference in the long run.

Looking for a new job? See how Google, Snapchat, and LinkedIn can help you!

If you are looking for jobs, the internet has newer ways to help you! While Google rolled out a search engine for jobs this week, Snapchat launched ‘Snaplications’ in the US! LinkedIn, on the other hand, rolled out a new tool that makes it easier to know who is searching for your profile.

It is interesting to see how brands are continuously leveraging technology to reach their target audience and simplify processes via digital platforms!

Google’s new job search is powered by AI and lets users find the perfect job listings for a search query. What’s more? It pulls data from some of the world’s biggest job boards, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Monster, Indeed and Glassdoor to give users a dense set of search results and help simplify the tedious job search process.

With the launch of ‘Snaplication’, snapchat is all set to revolutionize the recruiting game! A world’s first, snaplication allows applicants to initiate the job process via snaps! Given the evolution of technology and the change in audience behavior, snapchat is empowering brands to engage directly with its potential talent, especially, millennials.

As the world’s largest youth employer, McDonald’s for instance is already using Snaplication to hire more than 200,000 workers this summer! Since ~48 percent of Snapchat users are between the ages of 18 and 24, it makes a lot of sense for a brand like McDonald's to leverage snap for recruitment.

 

Lastly, I noticed that LinkedIn rolled out a new feature that lets people see who searched for their profile!
The Search Appearances feature is visible on a user's personal profile page (see image), for both mobile and desktop versions. It lets the user find out how many times they've been discovered. With the roll out of this feature, LinkedIn wants to give its users a sense of how frequently they're appearing in queries and how they can strengthen their profile. It also helps people see the companies and job titles of the people who found them in search to help signal what types of opportunities you may be a fit for!





Links:

http://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/2017/06/13/mcdonalds-accepting-snapchat-snaplications-to-lure-millennial-employees.html
https://futurism.com/google-now-employs-ai-to-help-you-land-a-new-job/
https://www.cnet.com/news/linkedin-wants-you-to-know-whos-job-searching-for-you/

Big tech competing for the Virtual Reality market

Not only Google, Facebook and Samsung are in the race to gain the market of VR devices, but many of the big entertainment companies such as Walt Disney are already producing the content that VR Devices’ users will demand.

Google’s Cardboard inexpensive device is definetively targeting the massive consumption, maybe in contraposition to what it was a big failure so far, the extremely expensive Google Glasses.

Walt Disney, has teamed up with Google and Verizon to hand out thousands of free Cardboard viewers featuring characters such as R2-D2. The initiative follows a partnership with the New York Times last month, in which viewers were sent to the newspaper’s subscribers.

Samsung and Facebook, on the other hand, just teamed up to launch a $99 VR gear headset. While Cardboard is designed for simplicity, Gear VR offers more sophisticated hardware and tighter integration with Samsung’s smartphones.

On the content side, Star Wars became the first highest-profile entertainment brand yet to join the Cardboard platform, this week.

In 2015 alone, more than $600m has been invested in 119 deals with most of that going into content companies such as Jaunt, NextVR and 8i.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/df7f388c-9974-11e5-95c7-d47aa298f769.html#axzz3tHT0NShw

Capture the Micro-moments and win customers

Micro-moments is a recent novelty term invented by Google, which refers to the instant that triggers consumers to either search online or make expressions on social media. According to Google, the mobile devices "fracture the consumer journey into hundreds of real-time, intent-driven micro-moments"---  the want-to-know moments, want-to-go moment, want-to-do moments, and want-to-buy moments etc. As consumers can easily turn to their mobile devices for solutions and expressions, capturing those micro-moments become strategic for brands to motivate customers for purchase and build up customer relationship. 

In last class, we mentioned web-influenced sale, which refers to the situation where consumers use their phones to check for online price when they shopping in retail store. If Amazon offers a lower price for the same product in retail store, then the e-commerce giant may easily win the purchase from the consumer from the retailer. 

Another interesting example shown on the micro-moment google website is when a man got messed up with his cooking, he searched online for food delivery. Then if a nearby restaurant had adopted some location marketing strategy and made its appearance on top of the search page, it would be very likely to capture the moment the man wanted to get food delivered to his apartment. 

The importance of those micro-moments lies in the fact that when a person conduct the search or post things on social media, he or she has already become very engaged. He or she wants a solution or being noticed immediately. If at those tiny real-time moments, a brand could connect with those consumers by providing relevant information and products that meet the demand, it is very valuable. 

Google actually provides a very guideline on how to capture and utilize micro-moments on its website. The first step is to identify the moments you want to win from consumers. The second step is to think from the consumer perspective in terms of how we could offer easier, faster and most helpful solutions. The third step is to use context to deliver the right experience like location and time. The fourth step is to optimize across different platforms for the fact that people are using multiple screens. They may do an instant search on mobile phones and then purchase on a desktop. The final step is about measuring and identifying the most effective moments and think about issues like ROI etc. 

Reference: 

https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/micromoments/intro.html#overview

Google launches app streaming service

Today I read a post about another one of Google's initiatives, which is based around app streaming. The streaming service has not been particularly popular on other platforms - for example, Playstation 4 users were reluctant to use the service for streaming PS3 games. However, on mobile platform the dynamics might prove to be very different.
With this move Google is basically decreasing the distance between customer and his needs, assuming the app publisher provides his approval. This effort shows how desperate Google is to tap into the mobile users market - because they spend a majority of their time in apps instead of web browsers. If successful, this could mean another huge chunk of revenues going to Google - because I strongly believe that once the service takes off Google will do one of three things:
a) either start charging publishers a fee from their sales
b) create a subscription-based service for consumers
c) make money through advertising in streamed apps

Whether this effort is going to be successful remains to be seen, but I am quite pessimistic about it.

http://adage.com/article/digital/google-lets-people-view-app-content-downloading/301443/  

Keeping Google search relevant on mobile

One of the Google’s Moonshot projects, app-streaming, was announced to go live last week. It consists in showing up apps content in the mobile-search results, regardless of whether the content is indexed. Users will be able to click a "stream" button to get the full app experience without installing anything.

Although it is yet working for nine apps Google partnered with, the functionality could have an enormous impact as Google brings more services on board. It gives apps a way to engage with users they otherwise would not have had the chance to, so it's a win almost regardless if they get an install as a result.

http://www.businessinsider.com/google-app-streaming-2015-11

Mobile Advertising: Trends & Challenges

With mobile marketing becoming the clear trend nowadays, companies are leveraging the app-install ads implemented by Facebook, Google and Twitter. The three Internet behemoths are also developing ever more sophisticated products like video ads and deep linking ads that target customers who haven’t visited a certain app in awhile. Twitter has also launched Twitter Moments to allow advertisers build deeper promotions through providing immersive experiences. Pinterest launched its Promoted Pins, which introduced shopping and Cinematic Pins to better showcase the product and to lead customers directly to the product landing page.

Google has also initiated the universal app campaign, which are generated on the fly by the system to fit the most relevant ad inventory and placements available. The system rotates the ads and adjusts bids automatically to get the most downloads for the app. For example, according to Google, if one line of text is performing better than another, the system will show the better text more often.

Nevertheless, ad spend by mobile developers is also skyrocketing. According to industry experts, the combination of new entrants to the space, and increasing budgets have driven overall spending up nearly four times what it was one year ago. A large portion of the expense is allocated to mobile Web designs and building responsive websites so that these brands are getting a version of the Web that is built to the expectation of mobile devices so as to boost the ad engagement.  The cost of an ad has also been driven up by private marketplaces, which are alternatives to open bidding and priced the ad five to six times higher in terms of cost per thousand impressions. Google ads are markedly less expensive than that of Facebook, as publishers pay $1 to $3 for a thousand impressions, compared with $9 to $12 CPMs on Facebook. On Facebook, the cost per install is sometimes more than $15, which is a reflection of oversaturated app-install advertising on Facebook.

In addition, viewability on mobile is also an issue. The most prevalent trend is placing the ads high up on the page, where readers are likely to see them on first glance. Others are touting the fixed bottom navigation areas that have become more popular owing to the new scrolling paradigms. According to industry experts, despite high impression generated by high-top advertisements, readers would be diverted away from the website after seeing the ad, making it undesirable for the publisher. Another problem is that if a mobile user doesn’t load at a lightning-fast speed, users will not end up viewing it, as the average mobile user starts scrolling on a website 13 seconds after content begins loading, compared with 24 seconds for that of desktop readers.

Publishers and mobile developers also summarize key factors that make an ad stand out. Brands have discovered that the better the targeting, the more valuable would the ad impression be. Moreover, ads that are more artistically creative and deploy new format have kept performing well in terms of impression and generated revenue. Advertisers also realize that banner-based ads don’t translate to mobile, and that native and personalized content are much more effective.

Related Links:

• http://digiday.com/platforms/mobile-ad-market-dependent-app-installs-growth/
• https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6247380?hl=en
• http://digiday.com/platforms/inside-pinterests-plans-win-advertisers-maybe-beat-twitter/
• http://digiday.com/brands/heres-twitters-first-promoted-moment-looks-like/
• http://digiday.com/publishers/publishers-latest-thinking-mobile-ad-placement/
• http://integralads.com/data-metrics/viewability/