The Real Cost of Amazon's Prime Days

[00:00:00] It is Tuesday, July 16th, today, outrageous greed. That's what the US government calls Amazon's prime days in light of its estimate that almost half of the company's warehouse workers will get injured in the next two days. Also Instagram's new ad product requires a lot of trust from you.

[00:00:21] LinkedIn supercharges its sponsored articles and Elon says X should sue a large group of advertisers. A group the company itself rejoined just weeks ago. I'm Tod Maffin, we're back from summer holidays. Thanks for your patience. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

[00:00:40] Amazon's big prime day sale has started but an American government committee says there are more costs than shipping. After a year of investigation, the US Senate today released a report that found Amazon's prime day event in 2019 injured one out of 10 warehouse workers and it says that only

[00:00:58] represents the injuries that Amazon is legally required to report. It estimates the actual injury rate for prime days at about 45% of warehouse workers. It says Amazon does not adequately staff for big sales events like prime day. A company spokesperson says the report quote draws sweeping and inaccurate conclusions

[00:01:20] based on unverified anecdotes and it misrepresents documents that are several years old and contain factual errors and faulty analysis. Unquote. Just in case you missed the government's feeling on this, the report was published by the Senate committee today under the headline documenting the outrageous level of corporate

[00:01:39] greed at Amazon. Two years ago an investigation by Business Insider found that Amazon warehouse workers were more likely to develop muscular skeletal injuries than workers at non-Amazon warehouses. Years ago I used to give keynote speeches at marketing conferences all over the world, probably did about 500 of them.

[00:02:02] One of my predictions was that cell phones would get so smart, this is the early 2000s, remember, that brands could target consumers with text messages as they walked by stores. Hey, you bought some makeup here two months ago? It's probably out by now. Want some more?

[00:02:20] I wasn't a great futurist. The iPhone didn't exist at the time, so nor did notifications and consumers were more infatuated with technology than worried about the privacy implications. So this kind of targeting never really came to fruition. This week Google finally proved me right. Sort of.

[00:02:39] People on social media have noticed an ad product called AdStop ads in Google Maps. Now I know that's a bit of a word salad, we're talking about advertisements that show up as you're driving and offer to add a stop at the advertiser's location.

[00:02:56] One fellow posted a screenshot of it on social media saying, quote, I put in directions down the shore and then when I passed this gas station this royal farms ad popped up with AdStop. I didn't type anything in about gas or food or anything, unquote.

[00:03:11] Indeed the screenshot he posted shows the name of the convenience store brand with a star rating this particular one was only 2.9 stars and the word quick detour below it and the number of minutes away it was. There is also the brand logo and the word sponsored.

[00:03:27] For its part Google says these actually aren't new. They call them promoted pins. The company spokesperson said they worked for gas stations, restaurants and stores among others and said the ads don't just pop up, they only expand if they're tapped on then disappear quickly after a short time.

[00:03:45] That seems to be different than what this user experienced. Some people reported seeing that behavior in the Google owned ways app but never in Google Maps before but maybe something to look into if this kind of targeting might be beneficial to your store.

[00:04:02] A new ad format coming to Instagram asks marketers to put even more faith in Meta's AI. The format is a custom offer that appears directly on Instagram ad call to action buttons.

[00:04:13] Normally a CTA might read shop now this new ad format adds an offer like 10% off to that sticker or button. But the catch is you won't be able to pick the offer. If you opt into this, Meta will decide what offer is most likely to convert.

[00:04:30] You can have up to 20 offers per ad but Meta will decide the actual discount you'll be offering. And that might work if you've got a ton of learning data or the media spend to buy that learning and Meta systems haven't always picked the right option.

[00:04:45] Sometimes they've put discounts on shop's ads that the advertiser never consented to and if someone bought at that discounted price, well that's the price you get. You'll be able to have multiple competitive promotions for Meta's AI to pick from

[00:04:58] like percentage or cash discounts and for now it's only available on single media ads in Instagram stories. Also it's only available to some ad accounts currently. If you haven't, you want to try it out if you're brave here's how to do it.

[00:05:12] Set up a conversion ad campaign in ads manager and give it website as the conversion location. You can then enter the website URL and Meta will find your offers on that page or you can manually type in the offers if you prefer.

[00:05:26] There will be a step for you to review and confirm this. LinkedIn is adding sponsored newsletters to its quiver of ad products. In January the company launched sponsored articles allowing brands to promote and gate their content. Sponsored newsletters work similarly.

[00:05:45] Companies can boost their newsletters to attract more signups. LinkedIn clarified that only company authored newsletter articles posted on a company page can be sponsored. Member authored newsletter articles can't be sponsored yet but they say this will be coming in the future.

[00:06:02] Sponsored newsletters can be part of brand awareness and engagement campaigns that can be created via the content library in campaign manager. LinkedIn claims a 47% increase in newsletter engagement over the past year. Well it should be noted that LinkedIn often publicizes relative metrics

[00:06:20] and often doesn't provide the actual numbers behind that engagement lift so we don't really know the scale of that increase. There are now more than 184,000 newsletters on the platform. This is being rolled out gradually so the option may not be available to all brands quite yet.

[00:06:39] Well Elon's back this time saying he plans to take action against the Global Alliance for Responsible Media commonly known as GARM, accusing the advertising coalition of coordinating an effort to restrict free speech on the platform. This body was established by the World Federation of Advertisers and

[00:06:57] it exists to make sure that ads aren't placed next to harmful content. But Musk says GARM members collude to censor certain speech by imposing restrictions on what they deem unsafe platforms targeting conservative speech in particular. Since Musk bought Twitter ad revenue has plummeted to half its previous amount.

[00:07:18] You might make an argument for some advertisers being put off by Musk literally telling them Don't advertise. You don't want them to advertise? No. Go f*** yourself. Go f*** yourself. Or his habit of posting incendiary and factually inaccurate content.

[00:07:33] What's strange about all this is that X itself is a member of GARM. In fact, just two weeks ago they tweeted this. Quote, we're excited to announce that X has reinstated our relationship with GARM. As of today, X is included as a member of GARM.

[00:07:51] Yes, reinstated because the platform pulled out of the group when Musk bought it originally. Some industry watches believe this is more of a temper tantrum than any sort of real threat, but Musk has taken up similar suits, most of which he's lost or dropped.

[00:08:03] Quoting social media today, quote, Musk had hoped that user subscriptions via X Premium would make up the shortfall here, but thus far adoption of subscriptions has been limited, leaving X in a precarious financial position. Musk has secured an additional $6 billion in funding for XAI,

[00:08:20] a side project that's intertwined with the app, but it's unclear whether that will benefit X itself and where that then leaves the app, which could be in a significant financial hole by year's end. With this in mind, Musk's motivation for this new legal action are fairly clear,

[00:08:37] though again I'm not sure that'll change any advertisers mind either way and ultimately lead to a better outcome for X. A quote.

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[00:10:46] And that will bring us to the lightning round. Bloomberg reports that Google's parent company has backed away from plans to acquire the marketing platform HubSpot. Apparently, the two-party city may get to do diligence in talks.

[00:10:59] At the end of May, MSNBC reported the deal would have been an all-stock purchase. Google yesterday dropped chats from Google Local, Google Business Profile, Google Search, and Google Maps. New chats can no longer be started. The company warned marketers back in May,

[00:11:15] this would happen. And Affinity, the design suite that competes with Adobe's biggest tools, now offers a six-month free trial. After that, if you decide to buy it, you pay only once. It's on sale right now for about $75 US for all three apps, photos, illustration,

[00:11:31] and publishing. And that includes all operating systems as well. So yes, thanks for your patience while we were off for about a week and a half there for our summer break. My wife and I went down to the cabin in Victoria, had a nice time there.

[00:11:44] It is hot here, hot by Canadian standards, which is 26-27 degrees. That's in Celsius, I have no idea what that is, in Fahrenheit, but hot, hot for Canadians anyway. All right, thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

[00:11:56] YouTube Serve has announced a new program to provide subscribers with custom email addresses to replace the awkward eight- and nine-digit numerical user IDs. So instead of being 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, you can now be John Doe. CompuServe says they will phase in the new system during the first quarter of 1996,

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