This Month In The World Of Marketing

[00:00:00] Hello everyone! Today we are talking search social websites and AI. This is the time we come together to talk everything digital marketing, bring you up to speed with what we know in our specific professions.

[00:00:13] So I'm Pip, Seymour Digital Media, and this is with also with Seymour Digital Media. And can someone share this into the group? Because I, on this computer, I'm not able to do that. And I'm Rina from LittleWorks Indie [00:00:30] Media. And I'm Greg McKinnon with Original72 Creative. And today it's really interesting.

[00:00:38] We're going to dive into Google leaks, social stuff. Let's take it all away with Rina cause she's always over prepared. Okay. There's a bit, I'm just going to hit some highlights and you guys can chime in. If anything sounds interesting. One of the things that I wanted to bring up, which is really exciting is that YouTube has brought out thumbnail tester.

[00:00:59] So you can [00:01:00] upload your thumbnail into YouTube and it will tell you what it looks like in all the various configurations that you might want it for. So that's been great. It was supposed to roll out a couple of weeks ago. I haven't actually seen it on my account yet, but I will be signing in after this to find it.

[00:01:16] Wait. I'm interested. So Phelan, you're going to share it over because you know how to do that better than me. So if you could, and Rina, so YouTube thumbnails. Yes. What? Tell me more, what's going on? [00:01:30] It's a multivariate tester. So you put in your thumbnail and it tells you if it's going to work for all of the different device aspect ratios, yeah. And also different ones. Cause I know like Mr. Beast, he was the biggest YouTuber. He does multivariate testing with all his thumbnails. Cause that's the biggest component. So if you can have someone automating that rather than doing it manually. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of YouTubers are going to try that where it's going to, because I've noticed if you pay attention to your subscribe feed, when it first launches a video, usually it'll be [00:02:00] one and then they'll swap it out for a new one that they'll test within an hour to see, because the first hour is really the crucial time to try out different variants as it gets released.

[00:02:10] Crazy! Yeah. So that's great. So what you're saying is the funny face still shot before your video is not the best thing to use. Is that what you mean? It depends. It actually works really well in short form content. It's it ranks better, but I think if you're concerned about branding and [00:02:30] the long form content, I think works pretty well with them.

[00:02:33] As much as possible, I'd always advocate for people to have a specifically created. Image to represent whatever they're Oh, really? That's not so the short form videos get higher click rate when there isn't a branded thumbnail. Um, short form videos, or are you talking about shorts form videos?

[00:02:53] No, shorts get covers. Shorts. They took covers away from shorts. Sorry, I'm not talking about YouTube in particular. I'm [00:03:00] talking about video in general. So if you're putting it out on TikTok, Facebook and Instagram the research has. Suggesting that putting branded thumbnails on those is not really working because it's a live situation or it's meant to be live situation.

[00:03:17] So people want to follow people who are on Tik reels, that type of thing. But on YouTube, yep. You can't put It automatically does something on YouTube for your shorts and then when it comes to long form, I'm [00:03:30] still using thumbnails for for longer videos, regular videos on YouTube. Yeah, I am too.

[00:03:36] So this sounds interesting to pay attention to. All right, we'll come back to any other news on YouTube? Not on YouTube, but I have a lot more. If you want to get it, come on. There is a new piece of research out. I'll put the link in the comments regarding a disabling social media comments and how that affects your audience.

[00:03:58] It's pretty interesting. [00:04:00] Basically, I think we could probably all guess that people notice it and they don't like it. And the research is particular to influencers and individuals, celebrities, but I'm pretty sure. It would translate quite well to brands in addition. So the idea of being on social media is being social.

[00:04:19] So if you're just posting your stuff and disabling comments or not getting back to comments, it's probably not great for your brand. It is a pretty interesting piece [00:04:30] of research, so I highly recommend everybody read it. Can you share a link to that after the live in the feed? Yeah, that's exactly what I'm going to do. Yeah, so that seems pretty straightforward, yes? Yes we all love social stuff, and I think it's now a combination of search social websites. Using AI, that's really going to help brands along. And that's why we do this monthly and we just added in the AI stuff. And is there any other news associated with some [00:05:00] social stuff?

[00:05:00] I know you're all excited. Two more pieces that I'd love to hit if I get the time. So you get the time. Yeah. We all heard, I'm not sure if it was this month or last month, but Adobe had put out their terms of services that they're taking all of the imagery that we're making on Adobe and using it to inform, not, that's not the word, it's not inform, it is, um, where is it?

[00:05:21] Aggregate into their, like their US training data. There is a word that they use though. And I want it to be particular about it, but I'll find it in a [00:05:30] sec. So what and Meta is also doing the same thing. Um, this month they announced that and it is actually really hard to opt out of Facebook AI content.

[00:05:42] If you're, if you want to get out of it, you actually have to set up answer a form stating why you want to be. Not included in that to opt out, which is an extra step. So probably a lot of people won't even bother doing that. And then I'm not even sure if they approve it or how it works on their [00:06:00] end.

[00:06:00] But that's one thing. And they are being sued by the European yeah. Um, although Google and open a, I have already gone through being sued and organized with the European union. They're not doing it. They're just doing it very particular. And then let's see here where, oh yes. So the, so Facebook has faced 11 legal challenges in Europe.

[00:06:22] So we'll see how that organizes out. Interestingly enough, Facebook says that they want to do it differently than everyone else because they want to be [00:06:30] transparent, but they don't say Or they don't even say they want to be better than anyone else. They just say that they want to be more transparent, but they don't say more transparent than what or who.

[00:06:39] So that'll be interesting to see what that is. So I feel like Facebook is constantly throwing the transparency word around there's that's a big piece of its branding, which I find really intriguing because it's almost a. Of a concept less word, like everybody has a different idea of what it means.

[00:06:56] It doesn't have, it's not really grounded in any kind of definition or [00:07:00] meaning on their part. So that's interesting. That is interesting. Say before we jump off it Adobe has actually already changed the TOS. So the TOS change that was in section 4. 2 that you were, it's already been updated. So back down and they're not, oh, that's good.

[00:07:18] Oh, that's why I missed that. Okay. Just so everybody knows, because I wanted to bring this up as well, was that the whole the whole shady thing for the Adobe [00:07:30] change of terms. to have everybody accept. And so that it would give them the right to all of the works that are being produced on their platforms and they could go in.

[00:07:45] And they essentially owned rights to it as well, which was Is a massive no for that industry and really anybody who is trying to produce or do work [00:08:00] for any of their clients on, like, it's their work. Yeah, because who owns it then, right? Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

[00:08:09] Who's contract trumps? Yeah, they haven't integrated copyright law into this at all. I don't know what who is the copyright, the default copyright holder in the U S but in Canada, the producer is the copyright holder, unless they've signed an agreement with an agency or a client. But it didn't always used to be like that.

[00:08:26] When I first started out in in the arts, the [00:08:30] copyright was owned by the person who paid for it to a certain extent, and it depended on what your work was being used for. But it was we never had that issue before, but now then the copyright rules changed. I forgot when it was changed.

[00:08:44] It was in the nineties or something where it rev, reversed. The default was always the producer. So the photographer or the graphic designer in particular even if they're working for an agency, so unless there's a better agreement in place. Yeah. Cause I'm always looking at, I'm that's in [00:09:00] my my contractors.

[00:09:01] We always deal with that. If you're a freelancer or if you're an agency, you should have a piece about who owns the copyright to be produced so that you don't come up against problems. And usually what it is people can resell things at a later date or use them in there's one big designer, I forgot his name, but he did a retrospective exhibition of all of his work at the gallery.

[00:09:24] So he definitely owns all of his work, but if a company owned their work with him, then he wouldn't [00:09:30] be able to put that into his retrospective. So there's, it's pretty interesting. Yeah. Or is joined us. Hold on. Let me say what I always talked about. Disabled comments, bugger. She missed the YouTube tips.

[00:09:41] Yeah. And go back and see those. Those are good ones. And then the license, the 4. 2 license to your content solely for the purpose of operating or improving the service and software you grant is not again, lots of interesting stuff. That's very legal speak ish. But this is something really to pay attention to, [00:10:00] right?

[00:10:00] About like images, video. And yeah, you can't, I actually just ran into someone who's taking images off the internet, thinking that because it was on a public space for her to view it, that she could just use those photos in her marketing. I had, I was really quite. a little bit, there was still somebody in there in that, in the sphere that thought that was okay.

[00:10:23] Cause when I asked, where did you get the photo and did you purchase a license for it? Or is it fine to use? [00:10:30] That was the answer I got. I found it online and it's that's not really specific. So out there, people are still doing that. You do get a licensing fee. What they call, it's not really a fine if they can't call it a fine.

[00:10:42] It's called a retroactive license fee and it's quite a lot. It's more than hiring. It's annoyingly high. It's way higher than what it would have cost you to bought the image and buy the image in the first place. But it's much, it's just a little bit less than what it would cost to have a lawyer look at it.

[00:10:58] for you and write you a letter [00:11:00] that was done on purpose. Exactly. Totally. So people have to pay these things and it comes up from time to time. Just to be clear as well, the whole point of AI is it's an obfuscation machine for licensing and copyright. The whole purpose is that you put it in a bunch of images, it goes into the AI thing, and then you ask it to spit out an image.

[00:11:22] Yeah, it doesn't it's supposed to obfuscate who actually created that image. That's why anytime they ask them Hey, how did where did [00:11:30] you get all these images to feed this machine? And they stammer and they don't answer the question Yeah, what they want to do is just say we just generated it Out a whole cloth out of taking all this and so it's a new thing that doesn't have any copyright associated with it Because they've already had one legal case go through Where they had a completely auto generated comic and it was deemed that no one had the copyright to it by the courts.

[00:11:51] Yeah. Yeah. So that makes it even more interesting. Did you know for just an aside with the AI stuff, there was a photography competition [00:12:00] and it was backwards as to what one, it was an AI competition and the photo that one was a guy that put in a real human photo and so that human photo one.

[00:12:10] That tells you a bit about perspective. It's going to be very interesting for the psychology of things. Things and the digital marketing. Ooh, Phelan, you're doing a PIP. What is going on? I saw that. Oh, Greg's like wrong section of it for me. I was like, Oh, that was great. That's exactly what I was hoping for.

[00:12:29] Greg got a little [00:12:30] snicker out of that. Didn't he? It's what's PIP doing now? It's not me, buddy. So on the computer. On a similar topic, there is integrated ad science, which is a company is working on a brand new safety tool designed to keep deep fake content away from ad content so that proximity is important for branding.

[00:12:55] When you think about putting your ads online, do we always know what [00:13:00] our ads are going next to? I'm sure you've seen those ads at the bottom of kind of shady magazines where you read a good article. Autumn has got terrible they look like blog articles. Yeah. They're just awful. So this is going to help with spam.

[00:13:12] Yeah. So this is going to help brands stay away from that, which is really great. And open AI has already started their own version of that too. So that's good. I'm encouraged about that. And Because the most there's this one line that I got out of this that says most analysis say [00:13:30] that issues of deep fake ad adjacency is likely to worsen in the coming years as generative AI becomes more widely available, which I agree with.

[00:13:38] Lots of deep fake stuff. And actually, interestingly enough there's a bunch of ads that are just circulating on Tik Tok that were made by deep. They're deep fakes and they're AI generated and they are actual politicians making really outlandish yes, they're making these awful interesting and people are believing it because that looks [00:14:00] like the person that they see on the news all the time.

[00:14:02] So yeah, this is, it's going to be so messy. Election time is going to be so messy is well, it's going to be interesting with interference. Go on. On that note, I was just going to say, I'm not sure if anybody else heard this news, but I had recently seen that it was found that a specific account, I believe it was that was doing like pro Trump propaganda.

[00:14:28] Was basically [00:14:30] a Russian bot and proved that it was like, it was taken down, but it just goes to show that, people from anywhere can create these big accounts and bots and. Propagate whatever message they want to message to, to interfere with or sway people's votes or anything else for that agenda.

[00:14:54] We're going to learn so much probably after the election the American election, [00:15:00] right? Just to see what's happened because it sounds like deep fake. So what is the outcome? I know Phelan is going to jump in, but it's don't believe what you read. Don't believe what don't believe what you hear always take that experimental view of, let me get more data, right?

[00:15:14] Yeah. Steven's got a question here after Reena. Yeah. You have to really understand what critical thinking actually means. And that is a methodology that has certain steps. So if you can only find an article in three places and you've never heard of [00:15:30] those those before, then chances are, it's not real.

[00:15:34] That's usually fine. What? Okay. Stephen's wondering now, you mentioned that there's a question on who created the work as a freelancer. Yeah. Versus agency. So this is for Reena. Yeah. What happens when you consider the client any ideas on who would own the work? Yep. And how could that be argued? It really depends on how agencies organize their contracts [00:16:00] with their freelancers and with their clients.

[00:16:03] So generally speaking, it is custom to, for the agency to want the rights of ownership over the freelancer. And if they're paying well enough that's the ideas that you usually, that's a leverage point for freelancers to take. Charge a good amount. If you're working with the client, usually in the contract with the client, there's a section that tells the client how they can use it.

[00:16:28] Because, of course, if you're using any [00:16:30] stock photography, which I know is not what exactly what we're talking about right now, there's only a certain number of uses you can use that stock photography license for. So similarly there's usually some parameters around what the client can use. So how many prints can they make?

[00:16:45] Like they can't just make 50 years of brochures with this one brochure. They're usually limited by print run or they're limited by how they use it. So it could be that, you would give a logo with the intention that they could, [00:17:00] And you provide them with the files that they could use it anywhere.

[00:17:03] But if you're doing something that's more specific their use the wording is usually around, you're allowed to use this, the business is allowed to use it for its own marketing purposes. It's not allowed to use it for anything else. So they can't resell it to another business. They can't use it in an art show.

[00:17:20] They can't create a calendar or a a table book. Where would people find this information? I [00:17:30] don't know. I've, I had my lawyer write my piece up, but I'm sure that there are templates online that you could get some wording from, and then have your legal representative, because of course, we're in Canada, and each province, and each government, Country is going to be slightly different on how they can do things and how they should say things So you want to make sure that you've got that covered?

[00:17:51] That's what I would say check a template. Welcome to social media turning into politics and rules It's very interesting behind the scenes of [00:18:00] all the things we need to know, right? Speaking of websites and images or images and then moving to website. Oh failing. Yep We, before we jump off that, you, we missed one piece that was in that, that I think is going to be super important for everyone, which is the FTC is suing Adobe over dark patterns, which is a big thing for, so basically a dark pattern is like you design the website so it leads you away from actually [00:18:30] canceling your subscription.

[00:18:30] That's specifically what they went after them for. Thank you, Amazon. Did Amazon get sued? And also, it was for hiding their cancellation fees and things like that. If you did want to cancel early. They bury that stuff so far that nobody Ever knows about that's another reason that they're suing.

[00:18:55] Yeah. It's all crazy It's all part of like dark basically you're getting sued over dark [00:19:00] patterns It's like when how that kind of comes to that's why when legal experts were talking about this they mentioned the dark patterns as being the more That this is going to be used as a means to go after other companies, like Amazon, who's notoriously has a 14 step you have to go through 14 pages to cancel your Amazon account.

[00:19:17] They're like, Oh my God. Yeah. Like they will make you like, and they'll, they make the button to like, cancel, like to not cancel so big. And then the other one to actually move forward with the cancel, it's like really small. It's like [00:19:30] part of the text. And so like they, like all these, so really What's it what's important about it to my mind is not necessarily Adobe but it's that the government can go after companies for doing this and that opens up the Pandora's box that hey You can't actually all these bad behaviors that they've been doing that they actually aren't gonna be You know taken down and goes back to what you said about the Facebook and making it these extra steps to canceling now if they're like being sued over it and now they're being forced to actually comply with [00:20:00] Not having these dark patterns and making it easy for people.

[00:20:03] These are going to be things that I think is going to be a real shake up for a lot of these big companies that have been used to doing it their own way of having these dark patterns of people. So that's why I wanted to really emphasize it. I totally agree because I had two Amazon accounts. I thought they were the same cause they had the same password and I thought it was one account, but you could flip between shopping in us and shopping in Canada.

[00:20:28] It turns out I was paying for [00:20:30] prime on both accounts for quite some time and it took me forever to detangle that situation cause I couldn't, I thought I was getting charged twice. And of course I wasn't. And so it is purposefully up until hopefully this will change, but as purposefully opaque on how you do any of this, how you set things up, you're just usually wizard through things to set up and then you can't find how to get out of it.

[00:20:54] I it's frustrating. Yeah, it is. It's intentional [00:21:00] how they do that stuff of, that they are doing these things in order to get you to walk down the primrose path and you don't even realize it. Like you didn't want to go down that path. You actually wanted to detour slightly. Yeah, actually they, it's really sketchy that you can have more than one account with like emails.

[00:21:17] Like you can actually, for the, I think I had two different. I don't know the cause what, not just Amazon, it's also Audible does the same thing. Oh, yeah, I know. Exactly. [00:21:30] And who doesn't have more than one email and who doesn't have more than one Audible or Amazon account. And I will tell you, yeah, it's all a mess out there with these big companies screwing you and nickel and diming you a little bit, right?

[00:21:44] I am. I did get two Audible accounts merged. You can do that, just in case anyone's wondering. Yeah. You know what I'd like? I'd really like Audible and Google Books to like work together. Yeah. Can we all just work [00:22:00] together, be friends, do we have any, yeah, do we have any website updates? Yeah.

[00:22:06] I was just going to mention The fact that there was a security release just in the last week that people probably had their sites automatically uploaded the new updated to the new version. But the bigger thing was the next release of WordPress 6. 6, which is scheduled for. Next month on the 16th currently and [00:22:30] that's the one that a lot of people are excited for that has updated patterns and the ability to my brain part is forgetting what they refer to as edit, editable patterns.

[00:22:46] Anyways, you can create patterns, but you can only lock. The design aspect of it and allow customers to change the content part of it. Currently patterns, and they're [00:23:00] locked and you can't change anything about them unless you unlock them and then they're not part of the pattern anymore. They're a separate item.

[00:23:07] Oh, it's called partial pattern partial pattern sync. So now you can create a pattern and have certain parts of it locked. So the design stays how designers design it. But the clients can insert these, this pattern all over the place and change the content that they need to change within it. But then if you want to change the design or [00:23:30] change the color in it, it will still be able to be changed and flow across all of the synced patterns, but not affect the content that the customer has used in wherever they've used it.

[00:23:45] Oh, that's terrific. I love that. I think we're that's amazing Patterns because what I like designers like myself and Rina's team we're going to be able to create patterns for customers [00:24:00] that have a specific look that when they're building out their site say they have a team page And we create a card for the way the person You know the person's bio headshot looks and then their name and whatever other details you have, and this card is used everywhere on their site.

[00:24:17] So that's created as a synced pattern. They can get a new team member, throw in that synced pattern. Change the name and the image and what they need, but the style of everything stays the [00:24:30] same. And if you change it in the future, everything will change except for the content that you're doing. It's the power of that is going to be really good because we have access to help our clients keep their sites more consistent in the design by creating these patterns that they can just throw in.

[00:24:48] And keeps the site a lot nicer and allows them to change the content, but doesn't, it doesn't, they don't have to worry about the design of it. I'd like to know, [00:25:00] will it be responsive to the amount of texts that they put in? So let's say we create a nice little small box that we want to fit on this part of the page.

[00:25:10] And we've got a couple of other things over here and they take that piece and then they have Three times to put in, is it going to go all the way down or will it constrain them to test? Won't constrain them. Okay. They will need to adhere [00:25:30] to these, like if, for instance, if it's that, bio team page kind of a thing, and they have a certain amount of text underneath each person's bio.

[00:25:40] They need to understand that they can't just write five paragraphs of stuff. It's not gonna stop them from being stupid like that, but maybe it'll give a, you know how you, with blog posts, you have to read more? And then it opens up further? It all really depends on how [00:26:00] we design the blocks what the constraints are.

[00:26:03] But you could have a block that you design and put in half a column, but you could also put that block in a full column and have it go both like it could be good, less of a width than full width. But it'll look the same. So it'll be like it really depends on how you build each of these blocks.

[00:26:24] Yeah Depending on if you set a fixed like this is only going to be 100 pixels versus A [00:26:30] hundred percent. If you do a percentage, it's just going to match to whatever the text is that you put in, right? It's just going to be filling in, whereas if you just give it a fixed amount, then it's just going to be the fixed amount.

[00:26:39] So I think that's how people work around it. It's they're going to put in percentages rather than it'll be really good for the types of sites where you have the same bits of content that you want on multiple pages, but maybe change slight wording. It'll be really good for that kind of a thing.[00:27:00]

[00:27:00] That sounds great. Okay. We are wait. I'm cutting you off, people. We are out of time, and we have not touched on search, which is really interesting because Phelan and I are actually going to do a separate live, probably this weekend, about the algorithm leak from Google because it's a whole thing.

[00:27:18] Google Ads changed a bunch of stuff on their interface. We'll talk more about that next week. And what are we talking about next week? There is, there's a spam update. There's lots to [00:27:30] go in to search, but we'll get more into that. There's also some big news coming up about our Facebook group and what we're going to be doing on Fridays with interviews.

[00:27:38] We're going to be interviewing business owners and other marketers to see their secrets. So stay tuned for that. Next week. Do we know who is doing the chat? It's you and Phelan next week, talking about Google ads and Basically what everybody needs to know. Yeah. Yeah. So that'll be great with the new update.

[00:27:59] So [00:28:00] No, it's only half hour so there's time for but there's so many changes right in this market It's so much. It's so much. So stay tuned join us next week thursday inside the facebook group or on linkedin or facebook business page or youtube. We are around And we are happy. We all connect and communicate in the Facebook group, cyberpunk geeks, marketing mixer, but there are other places to connect with each of us.

[00:28:25] And re oh, wait, last thing, aura told us that professional [00:28:30] photographers of Canada, C A P I C have some templates for the user contract. So what we, Rina was talking about earlier. Yeah. So thanks. Awesome. Yeah. And anybody with any links or anything about the stuff we talked about, we'll try to share them in the chat.

[00:28:47] Phelan, you were going to say something? No, just looking beautiful. All right. I can't wait to be home in my spot near Phelan and I love seeing you guys. I can't wait to see we're such a good, cool cohort. And [00:29:00] just a big shout out. I want to do a big shout out to someone. We all know who's very dear to us.

[00:29:06] Glenna just putting it out there that you're a rock star. We can't wait to see you on Friday. Maybe if you're coming to Rina's happy. Anyway, we'll talk soon. Okay. Bye everybody. Bye everyone.