[00:00:00] Introduction

[00:00:30] Evolution of Streaming Services and Advertising

[00:01:00] Impact of AI and Market Trends on Advertising

[00:04:00] Advertising Tactics and Platform Updates

[00:08:00] Security Concerns in Digital Marketing

[00:10:00] Conclusion and Preview of Next Episode

[00:25:30] Sign-off

[00:00:00] Hello, we're here to do geek speak. This month in the world of marketing, search, social and websites. I included AI cause that's always a topic of conversation. Let's do the round Robin. I'm Pip my name is Phelan. I work with Pip at Seymour Digital Media. I'm Seymour from Little Works India Media. And I'm Just Greg. There's no Just Greg. Why are we just Gregging? Are we just Gregging? He didn't win the survivor pool, people. That's what I just [00:00:30] heard.

[00:00:30] Anyway, we are talking about all great things. Great things, search social websites, and I'm going to let Seymour kick it off today because I see she left some good notes. It's going to be a good conversation. Cause we're getting, going to get right into it. All right. So I think the first interesting thing is that Netflix is opening up an ads platform part of their system so that you can you're going to view ads.

[00:00:53] So I guess they're doing the Prime thing. Prime did that a few months ago. And So did someone [00:01:00] weigh in heavily to add to that? Yeah, I totally really wanted to weigh in because Google did their monthly marketing thing. And one of the things was the ads on TV, more ads on TV. Which is interesting.

[00:01:16] So where are they buying? I wonder, I want to know where they're buying their data from. Disney. They're going to get some search from Disney. I saw that. I thought that was pretty interesting. But anyway, okay. So we [00:01:30] got any other feedback y'all want to jump in on this? Netflix has been turning itself slowly into TV for the last few years ever since interest rates went up.

[00:01:38] They had to, yeah. So yeah, you want to weigh in, which is different than just stating what's new. It's annoying because they disrupted and this is the whole problem with disruptors. They come in with their venture capital backed money and then they ruined the industry. And then they turned their industry into the same industry that it was ripped off of.

[00:01:58] They just become, [00:02:00] they become the mainstream and that's also, hold on. So we had fragmentation, which led to democratization slightly of. Did it? No, it got rid of Blockbuster and we all had late fees, so we're all thankful. No, Blockbuster wasn't the competition that they were going in to disrupt, I don't think.

[00:02:22] I think they were actually going in to disrupt the television and production companies. [00:02:30] Oh, interesting. They've done a fine job. In California, someone was saying that one of the divisions of the union was Telling people not to even bother applying because there aren't enough jobs for their members.

[00:02:44] So it's, it really is because they're not using, the, yeah. So anyways, I find it really just. Pointing quite frankly, because this is, first of all, this is not, I saw the interesting aspects of of disrupting the [00:03:00] industry pip like you. I was pretty excited about some of the aspects.

[00:03:03] However, how it plays out it's just always contingent on the economic systems that we have. So in the end, it always plays out in the similar ways. Like it's just repeating similar. The shitty parts of, and I just, I'm disappointed that this is the direction that they're going in.

[00:03:19] They couldn't find another solution. Maybe they will maybe out of it. Ads seem to take over things. There's a, ads, now make the world run more [00:03:30] so anyway, they can get into your life. Product placement's a big thing, right? That's the reason I think Influencers are in the know now and people, I don't even know what's going on with the influencer market actually.

[00:03:41] Way more interesting. That's not to me. That's way more interesting product placement. I'm all for, I love product placement. I think it's fun to figure out the product placement within movies and TV shows, but ads are something totally different. That was the thing that I didn't want to pay for television.

[00:03:56] So I could sit and watch ads every 10 minutes. That's [00:04:00] not what I'm interested in doing. And now I'm going to go back to getting cable, what do they call it? Now? You can't even record. What is it called? What do they call it? I don't know what they call it. You record the show and then you. You fast forward Oh, PVR, wasn't that a PVR?

[00:04:14] DV DVR. Yeah, DVR, whatever it's called. I think that's that's where I'm headed back, because I don't particularly enjoy. And now it's like a benefit when Prime tells me that after I'm going to see these ads, I can [00:04:30] watch the whole video without any ads. Have you noticed that on Prime?

[00:04:34] But if you watch television, you get an ad about every 15 minutes or so. Interesting. Yeah, they do time it out. I we had special streaming and it's not working right now, but I am on Netflix, but I'm wondering where they will place the ads. I find it interesting. They sell you radio or they sell you Google home now.

[00:04:52] And if you don't want radio or like ads, just. Buy YouTube stuff. It's just [00:05:00] instead of having free radio where the ads are paying for the radio station. Another thing about ads is that it has to be actually done well. And so what happens with North American television is that they adhere to a certain advertising cadence.

[00:05:14] So they're going to do so much. So of the show, they're not going to have anything exciting. And then they're going to have an ad, but if you watch American television in Europe, for example, they're on a different sequence of, yeah. What ends up happening is it'll just stop in the middle, like in the [00:05:30] middle of something that's happening that it's not at a natural arc in the story, stop in the middle of something that's happening.

[00:05:36] And then there's the ad and it just blows you over. So it's as an inside television is one of my things that I love to notice. I thought it was free when you pay for Prime. Now it's just they've segmented yeah, now you don't, it's not like BBC or I don't know. It's a lot. It's a lot.

[00:05:54] I understand. I'm thinking they're not going to have in video ads, but they're going to [00:06:00] have, yeah, it's, they're going to do exactly what Prime's done. They're not going to do anything different. I don't think. Because they're going to copy each other, one of them launches it, they try it out, they see if people will suck it up, and then the other platforms follow through.

[00:06:11] One thing to follow is, if you look at market share, so back in the day when Google ads started, Amazon had bought like a tiny piece of the market share for TV, and every year it bought a little bit more. And so that tells you that they, they have Prime, which [00:06:30] is, don't you have Prime if you get, get delivery?

[00:06:33] Is that what's, you get the Prime delivery and then you get the extra TV stuff? That's correct. But yes, that's correct. But now it comes with the app. Oh yeah, they're in there. So what there's a class action lawsuit in the States that's happening right now, because when we signed up for prime television was supposed to be an, a paid add on.

[00:06:53] Having them add the television in is not in accordance to whatever contract we signed. We [00:07:00] click yes to when we sign up for it for Amazon prime. And so there's a class action lawsuit about it. I think Netflix, I don't know what Netflix is I don't know how it'll Netflix or if they'll have to do the same thing, but I guess they figure the payouts going to be worth it in the end, which it probably is.

[00:07:16] In the end, and this is just a segment of advertising because, the search social and websites, they aren't going to go away, and I don't know if we'll have TV in, I guess we do now, have video on websites and stuff, but we don't need to pay [00:07:30] attention to the TV stuff, let's talk about fun stuff I was gonna say, as a seg , what I was gonna say as a segue to this, is that these ad placements are definitely gonna be a part of the Google Ads portfolio because they already are doing it for other TV platforms.

[00:07:44] Yes. And so I think that it's just gonna build further that it, they're just gonna integrate it in with the existing ads. Like Facebook and Google, and of course Google had their big I. O. this week where they had a big, a lot of announcements. A lot of them focused around Performance [00:08:00] Macs and AI.

[00:08:01] Those are like the two, if I was going to give like the Kohl's, like the quick and fast is that they're pushing for more performance max. It's going to have more AI in it. And supposedly they're going to have better reporting on performance max, which is definitely the shortcoming of using it as a tool is you don't really have enough insights to be like, do this, don't do that.

[00:08:20] Or, I'm showing up a lot of these placements. I don't want to show up there, that kind of thing inside. Is performance max what runs when I'm looking at Google [00:08:30] Analytics for my end? Is that the cross platform category? It can be. So it does. Yeah, it's one of many. This is why setting up UTM parameters and you're tracking URLs is going to be more valuable with performance max.

[00:08:43] The one thing, So cross to cross network is display, like this is a shorthand, but performance max incorporates display. And so that's why. On Linux, you get two separate categories, display and cross platform. And my [00:09:00] understanding when I look at the I, It says that's where where other platforms might be buying into Google ad space or where Google ads are buying into other platforms.

[00:09:10] That was my understanding of that is I've got Google ads. Google ads has two distinct platforms search and display is the display network, which is which can hold CBC, CSS, global, blah, blah, blah, every website in the world, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, [00:09:30] right? That's so that's that. So that's where the Facebook can fall in there.

[00:09:34] And like you can do different types of display type of ads. So that's where P max is falling. And did that make it make more sense? Can I ask in your next in your next course session. Yeah. I'd say just as a quick hand, what I, when you see cross network, it's a website that is part of the Google display network.

[00:09:57] So why do they have two categories in [00:10:00] Google analytics? Is it just. Is it separated in some way? I don't understand why, but that's display are separated. Yeah. No, hold on. There's a display and cross network that show up and those are category groupings that are done automatically by Google.

[00:10:14] So you'd have to go into the Google because they have, they'll let you know how they separate it. I can't. It's a Google Ads. Yeah, in the audience. No, Google Analytics. Into Google Analytics. Oh, okay. It's a grouping category that is set in the settings, and you have to go in [00:10:30] there, and it'll let you know how they've organized them.

[00:10:33] Oh, there's a second page. Okay. Cause I've never found that. I've only found the definition for what they're saying. Cross platform is okay. Anyways, we should probably move along because now we're getting right into the middle of it and we haven't finished everything. We're not even close. Close.

[00:10:48] We're close. Okay. Let's talk what we got Seymour, I think you got some things on Instagram. What's going on there. Greg, what's going on with websites? Not a whole lot for web related stuff since the [00:11:00] last release of WordPress. There's been some security releases for it. But one thing of note that came up a little bit ago was a very commonly used feature on many hosts called, it's called Lightspeed.

[00:11:16] And there's a specific caching plugin to use on Lightspeed servers, if you're hosting is a Lightspeed server that has an exploit in it where hackers had been [00:11:30] targeting. Unpatched plugins and able to gain administrative rights to your site and basically be able to do whatever they felt like.

[00:11:42] That was pretty major for, because Lightspeed is a very common application that many hosting servers are set up with. So if you're running a Lightspeed server. Definitely check if you're using the Lightspeed Cache plugin and make sure it's [00:12:00] updated. That that could have affected a lot of people, right?

[00:12:05] How would people figure out if they're on that, they'd call their web dev, and if they don't have a web dev, what, they're looking for a certain plugin they have? Their hosting would be Lightspeed Hosting. And they would need to be using the Lightspeed Cache plug in to optimize their site and have caching capabilities on their site.[00:12:30]

[00:12:30] If they're not using that plug in, then it's not an issue. You can still be on a Lightspeed server and be fine. It's because of this Lightspeed Cache plug in. To optimize on a lightspeed server, if you are using that is what has the exploit in it. So sounds like a bad day for some people. Nobody wants to give up administrator rights to their site.

[00:12:57] [00:13:00] Yeah, that could be just bad. But wow. Wow. Okay. On another note of fun hacking cause it sounds do we had here on the West coast, the London drugs, right? Which got hacked. I think I saw something on the news yesterday about that. And I know it doesn't seem like that's part of, this month in the world of marketing, but technically it kinda is.

[00:13:23] Because it's letting you, yeah, it reminds you that security is a big issue and you got to keep on top of it and you don't want to [00:13:30] have your systems hacked because you don't want to be a giant, whether you're a giant company or a little one, hacking and ransomware is more prevalent than it's ever been because of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies because it makes it easy for you to hold something hostage on a website, not even be nearby and get money.

[00:13:48] It's, yeah it's annoying that we're at best and libelous, like you, you could be liable for your data that's That's that's taken to the other thing. And so that's the other thing you want to [00:14:00] work with a company that has errors and emissions insurance, liability insurance.

[00:14:05] And I've just been talking to quite a few people and nobody asks their marketers that. It's super, yeah, it's super important to have that. It, and if you're a marketer, you need to get that. It doesn't cost that much for the year and it's so worth it because if you have any problems, then you're not caught.

[00:14:22] And you're not in trouble. Yeah, you have to if you're incorporated, you have to have that in your insurance, right? So [00:14:30] I think I have no idea. All I know is that I'm not incorporated, but I do have it. So yeah, that's good. And then Oh, and then we have some so we have some lighter news on an upbeat thing.

[00:14:42] What about x becoming x Oh, yeah. That was fun. I still can't get it. I can't, I guess it doesn't automatically forward, but you can now go to x. com and it is Twitter. They're not automatically forwarding. [00:15:00] Twitter. com 2x. com as of yet. Yeah. But that's pretty exciting. I want to know, how do they do that?

[00:15:07] Just from a technical perspective, how do they have both the platform, the tweets running on both URLs? That's so exciting to me. Yeah. Yeah. To be able to have the same site at multiple domains. I'm just thinking you're geeky, just so you know. But when you make a post on one, how does it get transferred to the other?

[00:15:28] Twitter. com. Yeah. Aren't they [00:15:30] running You're just at a different URL. But the URL, the way the DNS is always structured, you have to have one as the top level domain. One always has to be the dominant. Okay, I see. So it's not forwarded, but it's but they're connected. Okay. All right.

[00:15:43] Then that's not as exciting as I thought. And then we have, so You did catch on the right thing that's weird is if you're not, because you always should be forced to either go to Twitter or X. One or the other has to be the top level one. So you can't have two top level ones unless you're running two instances of the same [00:16:00] website.

[00:16:00] Then you have to run two backup, like you'd have to be backing and cross referencing. So it seems like it would be a lot of work to do that, that they wouldn't want to do. But regardless, I think that's quite fun to have X. com. And then what are they going to just keep Twitter? Which country was it that they can't have X, X.

[00:16:17] com? I forgot. Japan. They can't. X is a got a copyright from a band. There's a very popular band there that is called X. And so they don't have, they don't have the copyright in Japan. Do [00:16:30] you think they'll keep Twitter. com in Japan then? Most, most likely, that's my suspicions.

[00:16:35] They would keep it because apparently Japanese corporations are quite litigious, especially around copyright. And so they're not afraid to see you in Japan if you do that. So I would suspect that probably they, they would keep it as Twitter. That's my guess. Exciting news. If he owns the domain, X.

[00:16:56] The copyright would be only on the game? It's [00:17:00] calling your b the way I heard it explained is that, the copyright, It's a rep, you're representing yourself, the business, as a copywritten name, so you're not allowed to represent yourself as that. Wouldn't be able to have any Even though you own it, and they're not legally trying to take X.

[00:17:17] com away from him. He just can't. Yeah. Cause so you don't own a domain you lease it. No one owns a domain. They're all owned by ICANN and then you buy a lease from them. That's, and so the lease is still for ICANN and ICANN doesn't [00:17:30] want to get sued. So they would say that it's null and void.

[00:17:33] And so if that's my understanding on it. I'm not like an international. That's interesting, isn't it? Cause this deals with international marketing and Yeah. So there's different regulations rules that we're not going to get into. Let's talk about other things that are related to this. How I was speaking of lawsuits, tick tock.

[00:17:51] I was thinking tick tock. It would match a better segue. Oh, what was your segue? Damn. Speaking of lawsuits open AI is [00:18:00] being sued by Scarlett Johansson because they decided to go ahead and. Use her likeness in a voice voice system eh, because after she had refused and then, and the only reason why she's allowed to do something after she's refused it, that is the worst business decision I've ever heard of.

[00:18:20] And posted. Oh, it's so much worse. Yeah. The only reason why the lawsuit can go ahead in the first place is because Sam Altman decided to [00:18:30] when he announced it, he posted a link to the demo and it only had one word, which was her, which is a reference to the 2013 Scarlett Johansson movie where it's her voice is an automated system.

[00:18:39] all he had to write was her and that's what he wrote. And now he's in trouble. Sam is always in trouble. Yeah. Oh oh, we got, how does everybody feel about screaming frog from Shea Lynn? And open AI integration into API. Yeah. I have a [00:19:00] lot of feelings about this Screaming Frog. I want to go play with more.

[00:19:05] I, yeah, I didn't know OpenAI was integrating with their API. Does that mean everything we put in Screaming Frog they get? Yeah. And they sell Google ads. Did you know that? Screaming Frog has Google ads as a service. I did not know that, but I guess it's out there number one service. They're a good service.

[00:19:26] They're an agency. They're like, at the end of the day, much like [00:19:30] Whitepar it does like a bunch of SaaS products that are still in a local SEO agency. That's a really good question. Shaylin. I don't know how I feel. They gave away Reddit gave away everybody's information, right? Google originated because Yellow Pages really gave away their information.

[00:19:46] So I think it'll make some big changes happen quicker. They sold it. They didn't just. Handed over. They got a print Reddit they got paid for giving away their data. So giving away people's data, [00:20:00] cause everybody was a volunteer who was in there and make it. Yeah, but I, that's what you get for just chatting and giving away your time, I don't know. It's hard. That's hard. It's such a good question. It's coming. It's going to take over and we got to figure it out as we go. Because what I saw from the Google Ads AI, like the marketing I have a client who's got a product and I can't get any pictures and it's going to make it so I can take that picture and just put it in any background, right?

[00:20:27] So I think with [00:20:30] AI changes and stuff like that, we're just going to have to learn to work with it. It's very life changing what's happening right now. We're just at the very beginning, right? So I think we all gotta, Keep learning and doing and paying attention to all of this. That's what do you think?

[00:20:44] What do you guys think?

[00:20:46] Don't all talk at once. Now. Yeah, I'm not. I'm not that familiar with screaming frog. So that's not really a space for me. But from what I've read there's a lot of data that's been scraped. I'm not sure how I feel about that. And of [00:21:00] course, that's how Open AI works. That's the whole thing.

[00:21:03] I still have the same feelings that I have about it in general, where it's like all the people that are actually writing great content and doing great things on the internet, their work is now devalued in my mind. And it's going to be a lot harder to create or, and to find original work with a plethora of Iterations of the same thing.

[00:21:24] We already had problems with that where people were scraping other people's work and creating iterations. And [00:21:30] it's just I don't know. I don't think that's, I don't know. That's not the kind of internet that I actually want to see. To be honest, from what I'm seeing out there, and maybe this will change, but cause I'm using, I've been playing with the system that does AI with Google search and.

[00:21:48] The factual the insights it gives are interesting and quite accurate. If it followed from material that was sourced correctly, because it's [00:22:00] just pulling a line from here that it thinks makes sense, but it's reference, referencing it wrong. So I think that there, the language models still have a long way to go and I think we could maybe gain some insights, but I think that the human is very needed in every element to make it work properly because machines run themselves into walls.

[00:22:22] I've done it. Humans, they'll try to move. If they hit a wall once they will move aside. This reminds me, I just [00:22:30] watched a tick talk yesterday about the, because there's an app. I don't know if it's like an, Open AI specific app or not, but people have the, have it on their phones and you can just talk to your phone and AI will answer you and you can have a conversation.

[00:22:47] They took two phones and activated it. And so the two AIs were just talking back and forth to each other from phone to phone and having a conversation, but that would go on. [00:23:00] Forever. That conversation would never stop if those two AIs just kept on talking back and forth to each other. It's true. It is true.

[00:23:10] But isn't, it isn't, it is interesting how many of us are using ChatGPT and being like, it's like asking a friend a question that, That seems to know a lot more than you, I don't know, I'm shoving things at it learning. So it's such an interesting topic. I think that if I want to put that I use AI on my website.

[00:23:28] So I think that's the [00:23:30] direction I'm going in with it. Not that it might be the best direction. And I would say, I hope you're going to be more specific than just that.

[00:23:40] I would say that yeah. Sorry. I was just gonna say that with Screaming Frog and Open ai, I think that it's not necessarily a bad thing 'cause it doesn't really scan the on-page content other than to find a word count. It's mostly around s SDO related things like your page shuttles, meta descriptions.

[00:23:54] And that's where Open AI does reasonably well. And it's not too bad where it's doing regressive [00:24:00] searches Oh. For data. So I don't, I think that. It'll be fine to point out like a, maybe like a plan of Hey, you've got X number of things like this. I would start here. And so it's more. Yeah, that's exactly right.

[00:24:14] So it looks like the Screaming Frog integration is mostly about organizing titles and meta tags and things like that. I just took a brief, very brief cursory look while I can listen and read at the same time. And so I think in that case, that might actually speed things up a whole lot. [00:24:30] But are they giving the same answer to everybody else?

[00:24:32] I don't know because every SEO person is slightly different of what they're going to want. And even if you use the AI, you have to be very specific. As I said, you have to work with it. Can it help you? You're still going to have to adjust it because it's not, you want a sales copywriter in with your meta descriptions, titles, URLs, and you also want an SEO writer, right?

[00:24:56] And then you might want somebody with some skills from Google Ads that [00:25:00] understands things about title case and sentence case and, yeah. So I think that to get the perfect thing, you'll, it'll, you'll have to wiggle with it. And speaking of wiggle, we're going to wiggle out of here. Yeah, that was a terrible segue.

[00:25:12] But I do want to dance the afternoon away singing songs while I work, because I think today's going to be A great day, and I hope it's a great day for you all. Y'all know what we're doing next week? Do we know? Okay. Next week we have a special guest. So I'm very excited to bring a friend of mine in named [00:25:30] Darby and we're going to be talking about sales.

[00:25:32] So if you want to learn anything about sales, you should join. This guy is so good at what he does. He works with Jason Swank and who had a mastermind that we were in a while ago, but he's a person I'd like to call a friend. So I hope you all can join because it's going to be really fun. And I think we're out of here.

[00:25:50] Bye guys. Bye. Everyone