Please Extinguish Your Ad Blockers at This Time and Return To Your Seat

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[00:00:58] Black Friday is here and an embarrassing Google bug has media buyers in a panic. Link previews are coming back to X, sort of. Consumers can now download your brand's Instagram reels and a video game company apologizes for its ad campaign which was totally an accident.

[00:01:17] Guys we didn't mean to put it there just in time for our completely coincidentally aligned Black Friday sale. I'm Todd Maffin, that's a head today in digital marketing. Well I don't have to tell you that personalized targeted ads are almost everywhere. They're baked into nearly every ad platform.

[00:01:34] In fact consumers have to manually opt out if they don't want their personal data used for ads if the platform even lets them. But there are a few places left where the ads are still gloriously broad. Take airplanes for instance.

[00:01:50] We all know we'll be subjected to five minutes of ads on the seat back screen in front of us, but at least it's not targeting us specifically, right? You see where I'm going here. According to a report this week in the Wall Street Journal,

[00:02:02] United Airlines is now working on seatback ads that are specific to the people watching. Quoting from the journal's report, quote it might make it possible for an advertiser such as an entertainment company to recommend one of its movies to a passenger who United knows occasionally vacations

[00:02:21] near the company's theme parks and recently redeemed miles for merchandise from that company according to a presentation, unquote. Turns out this expansion into personalized ads has been quietly happening throughout the travel industry. Last year Marriott opened up an ad platform letting brands buy targeted ads that show

[00:02:40] up on TV sets in the rooms. If the company knows you frequently book accessible rooms it could see an ad for a wheelchair cushion brand. In a news release at the time, Marriott somewhat hilariously said it believes pushing more ads

[00:02:54] in more places gives consumers quote a more fulfilling travel experience, unquote. The hotel conglomerate which owns and this is only a slight exaggeration every hotel brand on the planet now has 164 million members in its loyalty program.

[00:03:12] At United, apparently the work being done now by the ad team is to figure out how to pull off the personalized ad messages without crossing the creepy line. The company said customers would be allowed to opt out, at least to the extent that privacy legislation requires of it.

[00:03:33] Just hours into one of the biggest shopping seasons of the year, Google has disabled your ads and suspended your ad account. Or did they? Media buyers started reporting late Wednesday they were getting emails from Google's Merchant Center saying quote your ad campaigns aren't showing up on Google.

[00:03:51] Make sure you get them up and running in time for the festive season. Sign in to Merchant Center now to find out what's going on and how to fix it. And a big scary button that just said fix now.

[00:04:02] Media buyer Kirk Williams posted this on social media quote, we're suddenly getting clients freaking out that their GMC got suspended by this email. Not true, we send them back screenshots of GMC and their ads in the wild to assure them. Anyone else receive these?

[00:04:17] Seems to be some generic form email. What in the world would possess someone at Google ads to send an email like this hours before Thanksgiving holiday to brands so they all rightfully freak out thinking GMC dropped their products unquote. So what's going on here?

[00:04:34] Was it a phishing attempt? No, the emails did come from Google. Except they were a bug the computer says and a horribly timed one. This morning the Google ads liaison confirmed the report saying quote, we've identified a technical issue that incorrectly triggered this notification.

[00:04:51] This message is incorrect and can be ignored unquote. And you thought you were having a bad day. Speaking of complicated Google systems reports say that Google's November 2023 core update and its associated review update are still being rolled out weeks after they were launched.

[00:05:15] Quoting Barry Schwartz from the great seroundtable.com quote, normally these updates finish about two weeks after they start. But now the core update is 22 days since it started and the reviews update is now 16 days since it rolled out.

[00:05:31] I believe this is now the longest running core update since Google started to talk about core updates unquote. Google search engineer John Mueller, who's pretty active on mastodon was asked by an SEO person when the update would complete. Mueller politely punted on the question saying quote,

[00:05:48] the durations of updates is usually a mix of various internal factors, including the desire to do things incrementally for safety. I don't have an estimated end date to share for now unquote. SEO people generally prefer to know when rollouts are complete,

[00:06:04] as that is one signal they use to mark a period of results stability. Here's the score in case you're keeping count. Everyone on the planet one, Elon Musk zero. This week Musk announced that he is reversing his earlier edict that removed headlines for links posted on X.

[00:06:26] Web link previews shared on social media have looked the same forever. An image pulled from the meta, the page title and sometimes the meta description. Elon's version did away with everything except the image and a tiny domain name in the corner.

[00:06:40] The resulting links looked terrible, made things much more confusing and were the bane of social media content managers. But Musk never want to admit defeat says he's still not giving people the regular link

[00:06:51] previews back. No it'll still have the same image, but now the pages title will be overlaid. Certainly an improvement over the current version. Musk says he made the change for aesthetic reasons, but pretty much anyone with a marketing

[00:07:05] background knows the real reasons. Posts that take up less vertical space on the feed provide more room for ads. Social media platforms have always been careful about what content they let people share and how. That share button on mobile apps like Instagram and Facebook,

[00:07:27] don't go to your phone's actual share sheet. They first go to a curated list of places they'd rather you share that content to, usually still on their own platform. But TikTok turned that thinking on its head when it made it possible, easy even, for people

[00:07:42] to download any TikTok video they found and save it directly to their phone. That downloaded video got a TikTok watermark burned into it but the download made it easy to share the video anywhere else. And share people did on Instagram, on Snapchat. Hell 80% of reddit these days

[00:08:01] is just reposts from TikTok. These shared TikTok videos became so much of a problem for Instagram that the platform slashed reach and discovery for content where it found the TikTok watermark. Now Instagram says all users globally can now download public reels to their devices.

[00:08:18] Yes, they're going to slap a watermark on them too. Until now you could only save reels to the Instagram app. If your brand posts reels and you're a little squeamish about this,

[00:08:29] you can turn this ability off, go to settings, privacy, reels and remix, and then tap the option that says allow people to download your reels. If on the other hand your brand posts reels and you're

[00:08:41] excited by this, be aware that any of your videos that use commercial music will be muted when people download them. This is something that's been in wide testing in the US for some time. It's now rolling out globally. Let's be honest, retros can be boring. And

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[00:09:17] run effective, engaging, and actionable retrospectives. We use Miro at our agency to map out a client's messaging for our engagement team. That can be complicated. A lot of if-vents. But making it visual and sharing it directly with our client,

[00:09:31] 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. Whether you work on the marketing side or in product design engineering or UX, bring your team together on Miro. And

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[00:10:49] And finally, some gamers this week were in the middle of playing through the Ubisoft game Assassin's Creed Odyssey, which I think is the best Assassin's Creed game in the series. This is not a multiplayer game. This is one of those download the whole thing to your PC or

[00:11:10] console then play it kind of games. It cost $70 when it first came out. But that didn't stop Ubisoft from barfing out a full screen ad this week for their newest game when players went to

[00:11:23] access the game map. Usually you'd see a map of the world you're in with nearby locations, but instead gamers got a huge ad promoting a sale on Assassin's Creed Mirage, which and I know

[00:11:36] this isn't a gaming podcast but is anyone else having a hard time getting into the story? An Ubisoft spokesperson told The Verge that the bug was a quote technical error, which I guess is their way of saying, A B test, quoting The Verge quote,

[00:11:52] we can't imagine the game suddenly became sentient and started adding its own Black Friday pop-up ads to promote Ubisoft's latest versions of Assassin's Creed. Someone at Ubisoft had to code this into the game specifically for the sale this week unquote. Either way,

[00:12:11] one thing is clear, you might have beaten the boss fight, but in the end the accountants always win. GG. It's been kind of a weird medical month for us here at home. Our miniature Schnauzer died

[00:12:34] of pancreatitis, which I think is a miniature schnauzer thing. I had emergency eye surgery when I had a tear in my retina, and next week my wife is going for surgery. It's actually kind of

[00:12:46] cool surgery? I mean I don't know to the extent that any surgery can be cool. My wife is paraplegic, she uses a wheelchair full-time, and she has an intrathecal pump which is basically a device, a physical device with tubes that pump medication out of the device and directly

[00:13:03] into her spinal cord. It changed her life truly. The medication you have to change every three months or so, so she has a little topical freezing. They put a needle through their little port that accepts the medication, but every five years they have to change the battery.

[00:13:16] Remember this is surgically implanted in her and so the only way to change the battery is to replace the whole unit. So that is happening on Monday and Tuesday. Thank goodness for single-payer healthcare here in Canada. And since Steph is on mat leave, that means

[00:13:30] there'll be no episode on Monday or Tuesday. That will do it for the week. Today in digital marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Sunamic First Nation on Vancouver Island. Our production coordinator is Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark

[00:13:46] Blevis, music licensing by Source Audio, ad coordination by Red Circle. I think I'm going to go replay Assassin's Creed Odyssey. I think that's what I'm going to do this weekend. I'm Todd Mappin. Thanks for listening. See you on Wednesday.

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