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Today's News:

Email Campaigns • Marketers Caught in Crossfire?

Threads • Publishing API Now In Testing

Microsoft Ads • Performance Max (Not That One.)

PR • Your Agency Doesn’t Think About Your Leads

Instagram • Some Nice Messaging Updates

Google Ads Editor • New Version Out

Email Campaigns • Marketers Caught in Crossfire?

Your email marketing program is about to get more complicated — actually, it may already be.

A great piece this morning in MarTech.org discusses the big changes that marketers are having to make to their email marketing setups, thanks to new rules from Google and Yahoo governing how emails are sent.

In short, the new focus on authentication, limiting spam rates, and providing an unsubscribe method.

MarTech says the changes will “lead to an arms race pitting email providers against spammers. Conscientious emailers, caught in the crossfire, will be collateral damage.”

While MarTech acknowledged the new measures should improve deliverability and open metrics…

The whole piece goes into detail on why costs are likely to increase, to what extent legitimate marketers will be collateral damage, and a great recap on how we got to this point.

If you’re responsible for email marketing, the piece is definitely worth a read. You’ll find it at martech.org — look for the piece called “New email sender rules: Legitimate mailers will be collateral damage.”

Threads • Publishing API Now In Testing

Meta has upped the ante in its attempt to take over the void left by Twitter.

Late last week, the company began testing a publishing API for Threads. APIs, of course, are the back-doors into a social platform that let third-party tools do things.

Right now, a handful of such large tools have access to those, including Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Sprinklr.

This could be a significant shift in marketers jumping onto Threads. Until now, many brands went there to stake their username out, maybe posted one or two things, but because there had been no API, all that work needed to be done in-app or on Threads’ web site. Many brands prefer to use those third-party tools instead, to make it simpler to publish the same content to multiple sites at once, and to consolidate reporting.

Also, in our testing of this, it didn’t appear as if the topic tagging was implemented for now — at least not on Sprout Social’s end, which is the tool we use for clients of our agency.

It should be noted this is a Publishing API only — meaning while you’ll be able to use it to send posts out, it doesn’t include any engagement functionality. Seeing comments, replying to them, hiding comments, liking them, and all that are presumably coming in another API down the road.

For this reason, I expect most brands and agencies may still keep a low profile.

As I mentioned, this is a sort of live test with a small number of Meta partners. The company says the full release should be out by the end of June.

Microsoft Ads • Performance Max (Not That One.)

Performance Max campaigns will be available globally starting tomorrow.

And if you’re thinking, wait, I thought Google’s PMax campaigns were already available globally, you’re right they are. Because we’re actually talking about Microsoft’s AI-heavy campaign type, which it also calls Performance Max.

You can import your Performance Max campaigns from Google Ads, or set up your own new Microsoft campaign.

One important note: If you’ve imported a Performance Max campaign from Google Ads that originally came over as a smart shopping campaign or dynamic search ads (DSA) campaign, Microsoft will upgrade it to a Performance Max campaign in phased approaches over the next few weeks.

If you are currently using a third-party platform that does not yet support Performance Max, they will continue to be imported as smart shopping or DSA.

PR • Your Agency Doesn’t Think About Your Leads

A new study from CoverageBook finds that only a third of public relations professionals align their activity with commercial goals.

It’s definitely a sobering result, and something to keep in mind when you’re talking to a p.r. agency. Are they asking questions about measurement that are tied to your actual business goals? Or will they consider it a success if they get you a million reach, even if that results in no new leads.

What’s to blame? Inertia, for one — the idea that this is the way it’s always been. Plus: Budget cuts. A third of agencies said they cut back last year.

The survey polled more than 350 senior PR and marketing professionals.

Instagram • Some Nice Messaging Updates

Instagram announced a suite of updates today aimed at improving the direct messaging experience on its platform.

Users will now have the ability to edit direct messages they have already sent, with a 15-minute window to fix any typos or errors.

A new pinning feature now allows users to prioritize specific chats by pinning them to the top of their inbox. This ensures important conversations remain readily accessible.

Third, users will now have the ability to disable read receipts entirely or on a chat-by-chat basis.

Fourth, users can now save their most-used stickers for easier access during future conversations. This is in-app only, of course. The update also expands reply options to include stickers, GIFs, videos, photos, and voice messages.

Finally, the update introduces a variety of new chat themes, letting users customize the visual aesthetic of their conversations. This includes a theme inspired by the popular animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender.

These updates are expected to be rolled out to all users in the coming weeks.

Google Ads Editor • New Version Out

Google’s Ads Editor, the standalone app, is getting a new update today.

Version 2.6 now adds:

Performance Max Migration: Users can now migrate Display campaigns to the Performance Max campaign type within the Editor. This migration can be accompanied by experiments to assess the performance of Performance Max campaigns against other campaign types.

Enhanced Recommendations: The “Add Responsive Display Ad” recommendation now includes suggested fields, pre-populating text and images within newly created ads.

Reserve CPM Bidding: Editor now supports Reserve CPM, a bidding strategy similar to Target CPM. It allows for one-time upgrades from Target CPM for most compatible campaigns.

Multi-Asset Video Ads: Video campaigns can now leverage multi-asset ads, enabling the addition of up to five videos, headlines, descriptions, and calls to action within a single ad.

And some other updates like Granular Pause Filtering, and improved

Third-Party Measurement Settings.

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