Your Ad Was Denied. Reason: [A HAT]

Today In Digital Marketing is a daily podcast showcasing the latest in marketing trends and updates. This week, Tod touches on:

• Coming Soon: As Close to a Twitter “Edit” Button As We’ll Get
• Meet the Unbranded Longform Podcast Ads
• The New Wordpress Will Speed Up Your Site
• Google’s New “Evasive Ads” Policy
• Facebook’s Bad News for Political AdvertisersBelow is the transcription from this weeks topics

Coming Soon: As Close to a Twitter “Edit” Button As We’ll Get

When Twitter first started, the idea was to replicate text messaging — short, 160-character maximums, and once you send it, it’s gone. You can’t take a text message back.

That was the vision co-founder Jack Dorsey had, and it’s a vision he’s still obsessed with.

This is the reason, by the way, we don’t have an edit button on Twitter. It’s not for any policy reason or technical limitation — Dorsey himself says he doesn’t want one — because text messages don’t have one. (Um… okay?)

But, it seems soon we’ll be getting as close to an Edit button as Jack Dorsey will permit.

A programmer has found references to an Undo button in Twitter’s code.

The way Undo generally works online is that it’s not really Undo’ing anything — instead, it’s holding it for a certain amount of time before sending. Within that time window, you can edit it.

Looks like that’s what Twitter will be doing — so far, their test code only gives users five seconds to change something before it goes out. So, just enough time maybe to spot a typo.

This also means its potential inclusion in any publishing API would be pointless.

Nearly all third-party tools that use the publishing APIs of social channels do so to let their users schedule content. If it’s going out when you’re not actually looking at it, that five-second window won’t help.

Still... progress?

I guess?

Meet the Unbranded Longform Podcast Ads

The podcast ad format has, for the most part, fallen in line with its radio cousins — 30- or 60-second ads in the middle of a show, sometimes at the start or end.

There are also those ads that fall on the other side of the spectrum — full branded podcast series.

Companies like Gimlet Creative and Pacific Content produce complete series for a car brand, or a consumer goods company, and try to make it compelling enough to drive an audience.

Now, TED (the annual invitation-only tech conference) thinks its figured out a third option to sit somewhere in the middle.

Last month, it launched what it calls its “Audio Collective” — or, as we normal people would say, a “podcast network.”

As part of that network, they’re offering a kind of unbranded longform podcast ad. They’re three minutes long.

Quoting MarketingDive:

Rather than having a hurried and forceful sales message squeezed into quick sound bites, the storytelling ads are designed to engage listeners in a narrative that blends with the surrounding audio content.
Brands including Accenture.. Google, Lexus… and Dove have worked with TED… TED's team consults its internal marketers to find compelling stories that draw in listeners and embed a story about the sponsor at the end of the segment.

This new ad format might be compelling to an advertiser, but it’s bordering that once-sacrosanct line between advertising and editorial.

For example, the host of TED’s WorkLife podcast interrupted his show to interview one of their sponsor’s customer service workers. That worker told a heartwarming story about how a customer had lost a favourite shirt and the rep sent him two more shirts… then, the host reads out an offer for savings at the brand’s web site.

Again, from MarketingDive:

TED created a native ad featuring… the host of the "Far Flung" podcast that searches for the "world's most surprising and imaginative ideas."
In the segment, he profiles a Nigerian-American woman who started an emergency blood-delivery service called Life Bank. After learning that hemorrhaging was a leading cause of death for women in the city of Lagos — where heavy traffic limits emergency care — she started a company that relies on motorcycle drivers equipped with Google Maps to plot the quickest route.
"It didn't really mention Google," said [TED’s marketing rep], "It was just about how she was utilizing technology to impact the community and solve a problem."

Look, I know host-read ads exist. I occasionally do them on this newsletter’s free daily companion podcast.

But in almost all cases, the industry so far has done them as brief 30- or 60-second spots, clearly a marketing script, and usually with the same ad music behind it.

But these new ads TED is trying are more like short infomercials masquerading as editorial content.

That may be a great thing for us wearing our digital marketer hats, and a bad thing when we’re wearing our podcast consumer hats.

Also, they’re not cheap — the costs vary from $150,000 to $650,000.

The New Wordpress Will Speed Up Your Site

As you may know, Google plans to consider the speed of your brand’s web site in its search ranking.

It already does this, to some extent, but they’ve formalized it as a metric called Core Web Vitals — which is actually three measurements:

1. How soon content appears on your page
2. How soon someone can interact with the page
3. How much your page layout jumps around

It’s less a “score,” and more about whether you pass or not.

If you pass, you get a small ranking boost.

If you’ve been pushing off the task of speeding your site up, Wordpress has some good news for you.

Their 10.1 update of Gutenberg — that’s those new content blocks in the editor — uses some trickery to speed up the loading of those blocks.

So basically, as long as you’re keeping your Wordpress site updated, you should benefit at least partially from this.

Core Web Vitals, as a ranking factor, goes into effect in May.

Google’s New “Evasive Ads” Policy

Attention scammers!

Google has a new content policy for its Google Ads platform — it’s called "Evasive Ad Content."

This means they now explicitly prohibit:

• manipulations of trademark terms in ad text
• the use of invisible UNICODE characters in ads
• manipulations of images or videos to hide policy-violating content

This is something they’ve always thought poorly of, of course, but now they’re cementing it in their official policies, in case people actually need to be told this stuff. (And, apparently people do.)

It goes into effect on May 4th.

Like most other Google Ads policies, you’ll get a warning first — at least 7 days prior to any suspension of your account.

This, in stark contrast to Facebook’s ad policies, which will ban your entire Ad Account for, you know, any reason. Here are some examples:

• It’s Friday
• You used a vowel
• Or that image had a hat in it

Shame on you.

Facebook’s Bad News for Political Advertisers

While we’re on Facebook here — a brief update for those people who market in the social-issue or political space. 

We reported earlier that Facebook has lifted its previous ban on that ad content.

Today, though, the company announced:

The control that allows people to see fewer social issue, electoral and political ads is now available in more than 90 countries… People have told us they want the option to see fewer political ads on Facebook and Instagram, so now more people around the world can make that choice.

This is, by the way, in addition to a small deranking of related organic content.

People will have to opt-out of this kind of advertising, so who knows how many actually will. But even if it’s just a few — for the rest of us, that means a tiny bit less competition in the ads market. And that’s generally a good thing.

Reporting Bug

And, this afternoon, Facebook reported that some advertisers are experiencing issues either with reporting or optimising their campaigns based on View Through metrics. They’re aware of it and are working on it.

What is “Business Media” — Who Knows?

One thing they’re apparently not working on: This new “Business Media” folder we’re all starting to see now.

So now we have a “Business Media” folder and an “Ad Account Media” folder.

The former, I guess, stores assets across your entire Business Manager.

I say “I guess” because you can’t actually pull those assets up in Ads Manager.

On the bright side, I think we’ve found the company’s new positioning statement: “Facebook: Who The Hell Knows.”

Honestly, it works on so many levels.

• “Who knows,” like what do brands know about you?
• Or “Who knows” like they’re adding crap to business manager they never explain.

Think Zuckerberg would like it?

Who knows?

Credit to Tod Maffin and the Today In Digital Marketing podcast, Produced by engageQ.com.