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[00:00:00] Do you want someone who understands you like no other? Someone who can be your true wish and want to experience the most beautiful adventure of your life with you? The shopping platform Shopify revolutionizes millions of companies worldwide.

[00:00:15] With Shopify, you only focus on your online shop, without programming or design knowledge. Thanks to the efficient education and intuitive social media and online marketplace integration, you can sell and sell through Instagram, eBay and Co. It was never easy to reach new target groups.

[00:00:34] Shopify offers on a single secure platform all tools to build up your online business. Without any tests, and present your business to the world. shopify.de.try Simply enter shopify.de.try and start. Made for Germany, powered by Shopify. It is Tuesday, December 5th.

[00:00:58] Today, that little trick you're using in email campaigns might soon get your brand sent to Gmail Jail. Programmatic display is falling out of favor with agencies. Microsoft's ad platform just got a killer import option. And why have some Instagram videos suddenly gone mute?

[00:01:18] I'm Tod Maffin. That's ahead today in Digital Marketing. I don't think you need to have a PhD to recognize that spam has gotten worse. Bad actors getting more clever.

[00:01:29] One trick, for instance, has been to substitute letters and numbers for shapes that look to the human eye nearly identical. A zero for a letter O or using a Unicode symbol like the mathematical bold capital C, which looks like a capital C, but technically isn't.

[00:01:49] I'm not saying you've done this, but, you know, just in case you're doing this kind of stuff, you may soon be caught in Google's spam filters. The company this week announcing what it's called one of the largest defense upgrades in recent years.

[00:02:02] It says it's an AI that's been trained on that stuff and works out of the box on more than a hundred languages. It basically ignores the crazy letters and tries to read it like a human would.

[00:02:14] Ethical marketers haven't usually spammed these characters the way literally spammers do, but we have been guilty of dropping one or two of these symbols into words. We know have a dangerous spam threshold.

[00:02:25] If your marketing campaigns involves a contest, we've known for some time that you'd better try to obfuscate words like contest or win or sweepstakes because those are pretty high on the spam hit list.

[00:02:39] Google says it's been testing this for the last year and is now active on consumer Gmail accounts.

[00:02:45] New research from Digidae has found that agencies may be feeling the chill on programmatic display ads, despite formerly at least a large amount of spending their clients were doing on the placement.

[00:02:59] In Q3 last year, 43% of agency pros said clients of theirs spent a large or very large piece of their budgets on programmatic ads. But Q3 this year, that number fell to just 30%.

[00:03:13] Quoting Digidae.com, quote programmatic display ads slight fall from favor could be related to the fact that agencies confidence in online display ads as a marketing channel has seen a dip since the beginning of the year.

[00:03:27] In Q1 of 2023, 89% of agency pros told Digidae they were at least slightly confident that online display drove marketing success for their clients. In Q3 of this year, that percentage fell from 89% to 80%, unquote. In fact, more agencies are bailing out on display ads entirely.

[00:03:48] In the first quarter of this year, 13% of agencies said their clients don't spend anything on them. Six months later, that number had nearly doubled. Digidae's full report is on their website. Look for the piece called agency clients favor programmatic over display sold ads.

[00:04:04] The data comes from surveys conducted more than 350 agency pros from 2022 and 2023. Microsoft's ad platform has had some updates in the past little while. First, the company's partnered with Badu Global, an AI company.

[00:04:22] You can pick up some of this enhancement by making sure your ad group settings have the option the entire Microsoft advertising network selected. Second, Microsoft Store ads are now generally available in all global markets where product ads are available.

[00:04:37] This means that advertisers can select geographic targeting as worldwide or any specific country as long as the app is available in that market. Third, you can now run video and connected TV ads in 32 markets in total. Microsoft is doing a webinar Thursday about their video and CTV offerings.

[00:04:55] We've created a short link for you if you want to sign up. It's b.link slash Microsoft webinar. And fourth, you can now manage predictive targeting in bulk across all your ad groups.

[00:05:07] Navigate to the ad group level and add the predictive targeting column to toggle the feature on and off across multiple ad groups at once. And finally, for those using Google import to advertise with Microsoft, that tool can now import discovery and demand gen ads from Google ads.

[00:05:25] Bite dance, the Chinese owner of TikTok is developing a platform to let brands create their own chatbots. This as the company tries to play catch up in the race towards AI. Chatbots have been up and down in the marketing world.

[00:05:42] Mark Zuckerberg famously had stole their virtues a few years back, nearly turning his company around to just focus on those only to basically abandon the idea a few years later. The report say the chatbot platform could come in beta form by the end of this month.

[00:05:56] It's also said to be working on its own text to image generator. Bite dance did not comment on the media reports. The move comes as chat GPT recently unveiled the ability to create your own customized chatbots for specific tasks.

[00:06:10] So far, neither chat GPT nor Google's Bard are available in China. Microsoft's bot, the recently renamed co-pilot, formerly known as Bing Chat, is available across Asia, including in Hong Kong. Let's be honest, Retros can be boring.

[00:06:31] And if you're the organizer, you know it's more than just running a meeting. You have to synthesize and categorize themes, get the team involved, decide next steps, and make it all a fun safe space where teammates want to participate.

[00:06:44] Miro is the visual collaboration platform that helps you run effective, engaging and actionable retrospectives. We use Miro at our agency to map out a client's messaging for our engagement team.

[00:06:55] That can be complicated, a lot of if bends, but making it visual and sharing it directly with our client, sped things way up. Plus, our side can share spitballing ideas with private mode. The client doesn't get to see our thoughts until we've decided on the approach.

[00:07:12] Whether you work on the marketing side or in product design, engineering or UX, bring your team together on Miro. And your first three Miro boards are free when you sign up today at Miro.com. That's three free boards at Miro.com.

[00:07:47] You can now go to your online shop, without programming or design knowledge. Thanks to the efficient education and intuitive social media and online marketplace integration, you can now go to ebay, ebay and co-sell and sell on Instagram. It was never easy to reach new groups of people.

[00:08:05] Shopify offers a single secure platform for all tools to build up your online business. Just go to shopify.de. Just go to shopify.de. Just go to shopify.de. Just go to shopify. While consumer tech attention might be laser focused on AI and chatbots,

[00:08:30] most media buyers and marketers see retail media as the unicorn ahead. And new numbers from eMarketer suggest it's about to get even bigger. Retail media are ad campaigns within a retailer's advertising ecosystem.

[00:08:43] Walmart and Target are the leaders there, but also smaller apps like Instacart play in this space. eMarketer has updated its US retail media ad spend forecast to show higher growth than previously estimated, culminating in $110 billion in spend by 2027. Quoting eMarketer.com

[00:09:04] Retail media is going to be the fastest growing ad channel across media through 2027, growing by more than 20% each year according to our forecast. By 2027, retail media will nearly tie with social media as the number two ad spend channel second only to search.

[00:09:22] Retail media will be bigger than connected TV, digital audio and traditional television advertising combined in 2027. But despite those numbers, an Epsilon study recently found more than two in five advertisers worldwide don't plan to change their retail media ad spend through 2026.

[00:09:42] Why? A lack of measurement standards and ad formats across retail networks lead the reasons. We don't have a lot of information on this, but this week several people have spotted Google search results pages with something new on them. A small horizontal line.

[00:10:03] Normally that's not enough to show up as a story in a marketing newscast like this, but it's here because of where that line is. Separating paid results from organic results. In Google's earlier days it had such a line as well as more prominent ad labels,

[00:10:20] but the industry trend for better or worse has been to try as much as possible to hide those mandatory disclosures. It was just a few weeks ago that people noticed Google was mixing paid and organic on the same page, making ads even harder to distinguish from unpaid.

[00:10:37] But it does appear as if they're testing that line again. We have a photo of what it looks like in today's email newsletter. That said, Google's search results page has become a bit of a dog's breakfast over the past couple of years.

[00:10:49] That page now shows all sorts of stuff above and intermingled with the organic results you actually came for. Ads, the people also ask boxes, Twitter posts, Instagram embeds, a YouTube shelf and more. A bug appears to be muting Instagram videos but luckily only older ones. Quoting theverge.com,

[00:11:14] quote, it seems that videos posted from June 2013 when Instagram first added video to October 2014 are now missing their audio. The audio isn't working regardless of platform, whether the clip is played on desktop, iOS or Android,

[00:11:30] and because this seems to affect most if not all videos in that time frame, this appears to be an issue on Instagram's end rather than some sort of takedown issue regarding copyrighted audio, unquote.

[00:11:42] This is probably not an issue for most brands since videos that old likely aren't in active use anyway, but it also appears to be happening for embeds so if your company has a web page, even a new one,

[00:11:53] which happens to reference an old Instagram post in an embed, that audio might be muted as well. Mitta says it's aware of the bug and is working on it. When we checked this afternoon, some of the reported videos did indeed have their sound back.

[00:12:10] All this week I'm live streaming production of the podcast. If you want to see how it's done, usually between about 11 in the morning and 1 o'clock, go to twitch.tv.com. See you tomorrow.

[00:13:07] Whether personal POS system or a comprehensive e-commerce platform. Social media and websites like Facebook, Instagram and eBay are also supported. Thanks to the constantly growing selection of innovative functions and the reliable technical support, it's very easy to build your business with Shopify.

[00:13:25] Whether product presentation or order and payment development. Shopify offers everything you need for your business. That way you can concentrate on your business. Try out Shopify free of charge and bring your business forward. shopify.de-tri