Snap, Crackle, Pop.

[00:00:00] It is Friday, July 19th. Today, it was the blue screen seen around the world, how did today's massive global computer outage affect marketers? Google kills off yet another product and that might mean more work for your web admin.

[00:00:16] The company's Microsoft will keep your ads away from, and Google's AI will be all over the Olympics. What could possibly go wrong? I'm Tod Maffin. That's a head today in digital marketing. Well, let's start with what it wasn't, a cyber attack.

[00:00:34] Many people feared that when computers around the world started crashing earlier today. No, it was a configuration error made by a security company. That company is used by some of the largest firms in the world to manage, update and secure their Windows computers.

[00:00:50] Earlier today, the company pushed out an update which crashed at the kernel level. That is the most sensitive part of a computer's operating system. Experts say today's outage was the largest of its kind in history. The fallout was enormous.

[00:01:05] Airlines cancelling hundreds of flights, banks scrambling to get people's old age payments into accounts on time, broadcasters taking off the air, borders nearly closed due to long lines. Marketers and brand managers of course were affected as well with many reports of credit card payments not going through.

[00:01:23] Shipping companies like UPS and FedEx warned of service delays on the ground. Doesn't sound like things had ground to a halt, but it's definitely clogging things up. FedEx says the outage triggered its contingency plans for such an event.

[00:01:37] There is a fix, and that fix is to boot your machine into safe mode, find a specific file and delete it. But the problem is that because this file is at that deep kernel level, it has to

[00:01:50] be done by a human being physically in front of each affected computer. That could be thousands of computers for big companies. Virtual support tools which so many IT departments use won't work. That's a big problem for companies with computers in remote locations or on

[00:02:07] server farms where those computers might not even have a monitor or keyboard attached to them. In some cases, Microsoft says you may need to reboot the computer 15 times in a row, but the fix to take. We asked both Shopify and Stripe how their platforms were affected.

[00:02:25] Both opened our email, but did not reply. Another shutdown is on the horizon, but this one will be very deliberate and caused by a company known for killing off its own products. Google says it will completely shut down its URL shortener next year. That tool was launched in 2009.

[00:02:47] It turned any URL into a shorter one using the domain Google.gl. In 2018, they actually stopped letting anyone create new ones which caused a bit of a panic at the time because people thought wait are all of our links that

[00:03:00] we made with your service just gonna stop working now? No, Google assured users at the time, your links will be fine. They'll keep working. Not anymore. Google now says next year, all those links will stop working and generate 404 file not found errors. You do have lots of time.

[00:03:18] D-Day will be August 25th of next year, and they do plan to start letting users who click those links know it's coming. Starting in about a month, those short links will start displaying an interstitial page notifying users that the link will stop working next August.

[00:03:33] That message will be shown to only a small percentage of users at first, but that percentage will grow until shutdown day. Google warns that the interstitial page might cause disruptions in the current flow of your Google short links. For example, if your website uses 302 redirects,

[00:03:51] the interstitial page could prevent the redirect flow from completing correctly. If you've embedded social metadata in your destination page, Google says that the interstitial page will likely cause those to no longer show up where the initial link is displayed.

[00:04:06] If you find this happening, you can suppress this interstitial page by adding s i equals one to existing short and Google links. But if you're going to go to your site to edit those links, you might as well take that time to replace them.

[00:04:20] As the register noted today, quote, the challenge facing engineers is tracking down all the places where an affected link might be used. Link rot, where links that might have once worked but now return of 404 has become an increasing problem as the worldwide web is matured.

[00:04:37] Decisions such as Google's will only serve to make the problem worse. Microsoft's ads platform is launching brand lists for performance max campaigns, saying the new feature will give you more control over your brand image. Brand lists are a kind of exclusion list.

[00:04:56] You can add up to 20 different brands and tell the platform to keep your ads from appearing alongside any of them. Microsoft has a big list of brands you can choose from, or you can request specific brands to be added to that master list.

[00:05:10] Though it sounds like that goes through a human editorial board that could take up to six weeks to make a decision on adding it to their list. One use case would be to keep ads away from your competitors in the market

[00:05:21] or from brands that don't align with your values. Microsoft says the feature will also cover misspellings automatically. And finally, on this short summer episode, Google has been named the official AI sponsor for Team USA at the Olympics. And by named, I mean they bought the title.

[00:05:42] And according to The Verge, they're going to make sure you know it all the time. Quoting from The Verge, quote, as part of the deal to promote Gemini and Google's other AI tools, announcers and commentators will squeeze Google Search AI overviews

[00:05:59] into broadcast segments by trying to answer Olympic and Paralympic questions. Between this and the AI generated Al Michael's recaps, hopefully it all works better than the time it told us to add glue to our pizza

[00:06:13] or said that we should expose all of the film in a camera to fix a jam, unquote, get out the popcorn folks. I have a feeling we'll be talking about this again. Well, if you are trying to reach some marketing decision makers,

[00:06:29] consider an ad on this podcast or our newsletter, some ad slots are just $10. Tap the link at the top of the show notes or go to todayindigital.com slash ads. That will do it for the week. Today in digital marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital

[00:06:43] on the traditional territories of this new name first nation on Vancouver Island. Our production coordinator is Sarah Gild. Our theme is by Mark Blevis, ad coordination by Red Circle. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend friends. I'll see you on Tuesday. When you use a debit card,

[00:07:00] the money is instantly electronically whisked out of your bank account into the stores. It's being billed as the latest high tech convenience. The Royal Bank is the first of the major chartered banks to try it out on consumers at selected stores in London, Ontario.

[00:07:14] Apparently some customers think it's neat a novelty, but there's a cost of being technologically with it 25 cents for every transaction. Economist Jim Savry doesn't think at that price debit cards will be a big hit. It does seem as though the consumer is paying twice in a sense.

[00:07:29] The consumer is using a debit card to in effect do the bank's work for the bank and then is charged for the privilege of doing so. The London experiment is part of a ten year plan to convince consumers that debit cards are good for them.

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