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In This Issue:

📍 The Google Reviews hack that keeps bad reviews alive forever

📱 TikTok hints at a deeper dive into messaging with new job listings

 📸 Instagram introduces sharing feed posts with ‘Close Friends' only

🌍 Instagram experiments with location tags in notes

🌐 Google Chrome under fire for its “dark-pattern” ad options

📺 A deluge of promotional emails: How Peacock is bucking the churn trend

📻 Despite podcast growth, AM/FM radio dominates in-car listening

📧 Google Ads now includes customer ID in emails, addressing a major user complaint

📈 Ad spending stabilizes post-pandemic, with 5% growth expected in the U.S.

💼 Over 50% of B2B marketers see increased budgets, but often less than requested

🔗 Google introduces ‘URL Contains' targeting in Performance Max campaigns

🎨 The AI startup that reportedly uses cheap human labor for 3D modeling

How Angry Consumers Can Keep Their Bad Review at the Top of Your Google Listing Forever

So you run a business. A customer had a bad experience. And they left a negative review. You reply to it, and that’s that.

A couple of days later, two good reviews come in, pushing the negative one down your Google Business Profile, and you rest easy knowing that while the bad one isn’t gone, at least it won’t be at the top forever.

Unless, that is, the disgruntled customer forces it there forever.

Yes, it’s possible, and Barry Schwartz from SERoundtable.com reported on the hack today.

Basically, any time someone updates the text — even barely — Google considers it an updated review, and jumps it to the top.

Barry quoted a post in his Forums that reads:

I should say that I was not able to replicate this. I found a four-star review I wrote two years ago of a local Dairy Queen, which just reads:

I updated that to add a period at the end, and did not see it bumped to the top, but then again my results might be different because I’m logged in, or who knows.

Barry, in his reporting of this this week, said:

Joy Hawkins from the Sterling Sky local SEO agency in Toronto says she approached Google about this when she first learned of it — two and a half years ago — and they told her the practice does not violate their guidelines. As such, there’s really no recourse for a business owner.

We reached out to Google this morning for comment, and did not hear back by deadline.

Read more at seroundtable.com

How Do You Keep People from Leaving Your Service? Assault Them With Emails!

It seems there are more television streaming services than ever before:

Netflix

Hulu

Max

Paramount (is that Max now? I’ve lost track)

Disney+

Peacock

To keep costs in line, many consumers are starting to cycle through them:

buy Netflix for a month, chain-smoke everything there, cancel

sign up to Disney+ for a month, chain-smoke everything there, cancel

and onto the next ones.

For the managers behind these platforms, it means a crazy-high churn rate. In fact, the past year’s average churn rate across streamers in the US was 47%.

But one streamer thinks it has a marketing solution out of this — a very basic, OG marketing solution: Email.

Peacock — that’s the NBC service — emails its customers between three and five emails each week, depending on how much they watch.

As of June, Peacock had 24 million paying subscribers.

The Results

But is it working?

Whoa, That’s a Lot of Segments

It is, of course, more complicated a setup than a Mailchimp account.

Peacock has more than 500 different segments, based on how much people watch, how long they’ve been paying, what device they watch on, and so on. Each segment gets different recommendations.

The marketing team there watches open rates, but doesn’t really care too much about clickthrough, since the conversion event they care about happens on TV screens or other devices separate from where people check their email.

Why They Don’t Care About CTR

So then how do they track this?

They measure the seven-day lift on viewership of individual shows that are mentioned in the emails, as well as any viewership increase overall among those who got emails. Peacock says it consistently sees double-digit lifts on both.

But while the emails may be personalized, they don’t want them to sound personalized. One executive told Marketing Brew:

Peacock is phasing out its free tier, and has raised the prices of its premium tiers.

Read more at marketingbrew.com

Social Apps Rush to Capitalize on the Trend of Private Social Sharing

Yesterday, we reported on a seismic shift happening with young people:

Fewer are posting to public social media feeds, and instead are posting to private Discord communities, a handful of selected Snapchat friends, or group DMs instead.

TikTok: The Standalone Messaging App?

Today, we learn that TikTok is moving quickly to bulk up its messaging functionality.

TikTok does have messaging already — it’s a kind of basic DM system.

But Axios this week found job listings suggesting the platform is working on a much deeper system called TikTok Social. In fact, it might even become a standalone app.

Instagram : Close Friends for Feed Posts

Instagram, too, is working on capitalizing on this, rolling out a new option to share feed posts with Close Friends only.

Only some users can see it, but it shows up as a new ‘Audience’ selector within the post creation workflow.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because they added this almost five years ago — but only for Stories, not feed posts.

Instagram has tried variations of private sharing before — suggesting people private their whole account, adding Close Friends to Reels and Notes, and the bizarre and seemingly against-policy recommendation to just create multiple accounts for yourself.

But this is the first time feed posts have felt a little more… dare I say it… Snapchatty.

Instagram’s head has repeatedly said that their users now share more content via DMs than they do in feed posts or Stories.

Read more at socialmediatoday.com

Instagram Location Tags in Notes

One more brief Instagram update while we’re here, some users are now able to add a location tag to their Notes searches.

Notes, if you’re not familiar, are short messages that appear on your profile and last for 24 hours. Instagram launched these last December.

Younger people especially seemed to respond, so Instagram added audio clips to Notes, then song highlights.

This is just in testing for now with a small group of users.

Read more at socialmediatoday.com

Google’s Chrome Browser is Tricking People to Opt Into Personalized Advertising: Reports

Google is under fire this week for what appears to be a sneaky attempt at dark patterning consumer approval of ad targeting.

As you might know, Google has been rolling out what it calls “Enhanced Ad Privacy.”

But a more accurate product name could be “Enhanced Ad Permissions,” since unless consumers opt out, it will let websites target them with personalized ads based on their browser histories.

For the last few weeks, people have reported seeing a pop-up box asking them to confirm that they want to stay opted-in. But the wording on that pop-up box does not at all make it clear that confirming means personalized ads.

The message shows up in Chrome with the headline “Enhanced ad privacy” and reads:

There are two buttons to clear that pop-up — and, you might expect to see Accept and Reject. Or Opt-In and Opt-out.

Instead, the Opt-In button reads: “Got It” — which, everywhere else on the web is used to confirm you’ve read something, not to confirm a big change to your account.

The other button — the one presumably meant for people who don’t want to have personalized ads — is just as vague: it reads “Settings.”

This is all part of Google’s move to its replacement for third-party cookies — a replacement it calls Topics.

Basically, Topics watches the sites people go to and puts them into general topic buckets

Example: This guy likes sports, she likes mechanics, he likes flowers, and so on.

Websites, it should be noted, can ask Chrome what topics someone likes when they arrive on their site.

Matthew Green, a cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins University in the US, said on social media:

I don’t want my browser keeping track of my browsing history to help serve me ads, and I definitely don’t want my browser sharing any function of my browsing history with every random website I visit.

— Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green)
Sep 5, 2023

Of course, from a marketing point of view, the fewer people who opt-out the better our results.

Google may, in fact, be aware of the dark-pattern concerns. Another test spotted had the headline: “Turn on an ad privacy feature”, with buttons “No thanks” or “Turn it on.”

This is likely a test for the European market, given its more stringent regulations.

But, again, turning this on does not give the user privacy. It reveals information about their browsing habits.

Read more at theregister.com

Two Changes to YouTube Advertising Options

YouTube today announced two changes to its advertising options.

Removing Ad Format Controls

Starting in November, they’ll be removing individual ad controls for pre-roll, post-roll, skippable, and non-skippable ads on newly uploaded videos.

Once it rolls out, when creators turn ads On, viewers may see any of these ad formats.

This is, of course, an AI thing with the platform intending to match the consumer to their preferred format. Channel managers probably won’t like it, since it removes some level of control over which ad formats are shown.

This change will only apply to new uploads. All previously uploaded videos will retain their existing ad format selections unless a video’s monetization settings is edited in the future. Creators will still be able to turn mid-rolls On or Off.

Mid-Rolls

Speaking of mid-rolls, they’re also letting channel owners push mid-rolls at set intervals during a live stream.

Before an ad appears in Live Control Room, you’ll will see a 60-second countdown with the option to skip the ad. They say they’ll soon add a new Delay ads button to delay mid-rolls and live display ads from appearing for 10 minutes. If an ad is skipped or delayed, the Insert ads button can be used to manually insert a mid-roll at any time.

In Brief

A new study says despite the rise in podcasts, terrestrial radio still dominates in-car listening. Research from Westwood One shows that 60% of all in-car tuning is to AM/FM radio. read more

Google Ads has updated its emails to now include customer IDs. This change addresses a long-standing user request, making it easier for advertisers to manage their campaigns. read more

Ad spending in the U.S. is stabilizing after the pandemic. A 5% growth rate is expected, which mirrors trends from before the pandemic. read more

A new survey reveals that more than half of B2B marketers have seen an increase in their budgets this year. But many feel the funding is still insufficient for their needs. read more

Google has introduced a new ‘URL Contains' targeting feature for its Performance Max campaigns. This feature gives advertisers more control over where their ads appear. read more

Links to the full details of these lightning round stories are in today's free newsletter, which you can sign up to by going to TodayInDigital.com/newsletter or tapping the link in the show notes.

And finally…

Has this happened to you yet? You hire a copywriter and the copy they come up with is… I don’t know… effusive? Overdone?

You run it through a generative AI detector and, yep, they ChatGPT’d that.

It’s happening more and more — brands and agencies hiring artists and writers and researchers, and those people just farming it out to AI.

But one company is being accused of doing the opposite: Promising AI, but delivering human creations.

404Media today reported on a design company called Kaedim which turns 2D illustrations into 3D models. While the company says it uses humans for “quality control”, 404media today reports one of their sources told them at one point humans made the whole 3D design by hand, with no help from AI.

A recent job listing for the company said it needed people who “are able to produce low quality 3D assets from 2D images 15 minutes after they are requested.”

15 minutes — that’s plausible delay time for AI, isn’t it? Like “The engine is generating your models now; please wait.”

It kind of reminds me of how the video game The Sims starts up. To keep you entertained, it cycles through a series of fake but data-heavy sounding status updates like “Reticulating Splines” and “Desalinizing Snorkels”.

(In one particularly sad example of How Do You Do Fellow Kids, if you had the Teen expansion pack on, it would say “Like, Reticulating Splines, Dude.”)

404 Media found LinkedIn profiles for Kaedim workers in Argentina, England, Indonesia, Ethiopia, India, Greece, the Czech Republic, Colombia, and Spain. These people listed their title as “Quality Assurance” or “Quality Control.”

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