Want a Metaverse? Here's How Much It'll Cost
Today In Digital Marketing is a daily podcast showcasing the latest in marketing trends and updates. This week, Tod touches on:
It's a Bird... It's a Plane... It's Super Meta?
Marketing in the Metaverse
Pinterest Q2 Results
LinkedIn Gets Stickers
YouTube Lets Your Viewers Zoom Into Your Face
New Tool for Auto Advertisers
9:16 Photos Coming to Instagram
Google Rolling Out Keyword Automation Feature
Below is the transcription from this weeks topics
It's a Bird... It's a Plane... It's Super Meta?
Meta isn't just chasing the TikTok dream. Now, the tech giant is testing a new live streaming platform for influencers called "Super" which bears some resemblance to the game-streaming platform Twitch.
Super describes itself as a live-streaming and digital events platform that lets creators host events, engage with the audience, and earn revenue.
A Meta spokesperson confirmed that it is "a small, standalone experiment being built by [its] New Product Experimentation [team] and currently testing with a small group of creators".
What It Looks Like
As for the viewer experience, it's kind of like watching a YouTube Live broadcast, but with more light interactive features popping up — like polls, comments on the screen, and visual templates like two-up or a panel discussion.
This is something Twitch does quite well. Most people know of it as a place to watch people play video games live, but one of its most popular categories is called "Just Chatting."
The Money Equation
Super operates on a tier system that charges viewers for certain features in streams. Viewers may also tip livestreamers, and creators keep 100% of tips and revenue.
Business Insider reports that the company has paid influencers between $200 and $3,000 to use the platform for 30 minutes.
Creators can also set up sponsored events. Paid collaborations with brands can be facilitated through Super by incorporating branding into an event, such as:
Branded backgrounds
Brand-led giveaways
Mid-roll ad mentions, and more
But the Product Kill Streak Continues
The news that Meta is testing the new livestreaming platform comes just 24 hours after it announced it was killing off Facebook Live Shopping on October 1st to focus on Reels.
And today, Meta announced it's killing off another social commerce product.
On August 31st, Instagram will be discontinuing its affiliate commerce program.
The program, which rolled out last July, let participating creators add product tags to their content and earn commissions when consumers tapped on the tags to view and purchase products.
This time the company isn't abandoning its social commerce plans to push Reels.
Quoting Meta:
We want to make Instagram the best place for creators to earn a living by partnering with brands. To do this, we are focusing on Instagram’s Creator Marketplace – a singular destination where brands and creators can more easily build content partnerships – and ending the current test of Instagram onsite affiliate.
Images: Meta
Meta is testing a new livestreaming platform for influencers called 'Super'
Instagram will shut down its affiliate commerce program on Aug. 31
Marketing in the Metaverse
Meta’s P.R. department probably won’t want to admit this, but it’s not like Mark Zuckerberg invented the Metaverse.
It’s been around in varying forms for years.
From the old-school but surprisingly detailed Second Life, to applications like Rec Room. Or even inside game environments like the virtual concerts that Fortnight puts on.
You could even say really any shared online space where people are represented by an avatar qualifies.
Is Minecraft multiplayer a metaverse? Sure it is.
"We Need a What Now?"
So what does a marketing manager do, then, when their well-meaning but mostly clueless VP or CMO hijacks a meeting and says “Do we need a metaverse? I feel like we need a metaverse.”
What some brands do is turn to an ever growing list of programmers and developers who, for a fee, will build you a presence inside one of these existing spaces. Or even build you your own branded virtual environment you can host on your company web site.
That latter is the model Arhead uses. Ivan Puzyrev is the CIO and co-founder.
I spoke with him recently and asked him how much a metaverse costs.
Ivan: We prefer to keep the price around USD$30,000 to USD$50,000. That's the average price from scratch to the final version of the metaverse, including customized avatars, and from 5-10 custom-made 3D objects, which will be presented inside and could be part of the storytelling of presenting your products or could be part of the NFT campaign, you want to sell something it's really up to you.
This is a basic set. You need items, space and an avatar. Also, you need to run it under your website. So the price also includes half a year or one year, it depends on the conversation we have with the client.
Tod Maffin: Is $30,000 to $50,000 to build it? Or is that in subscription fees?
Ivan: To build it and to keep it under your website domain for half a year.
Tod Maffin: Why am I'm paying a subscription if it's hosted on my website?
Ivan: It's represented under your website but it's hosted and operated by our systems.
Hear the Full Conversation
Our full conversation is much longer… we cover what the bottom-line benefits to a brand could be, what the risks are of this technology just being a fad, and some specific examples of work they’ve done and how that appears to consumers… that’s all part of a special weekend edition of our podcast coming tomorrow exclusively to the premium podcast.
You can sign up now by going to TodayInDigital.com/premiumfeed
Pinterest Q2 Results
The Q2 declines continue.
This week, Pinterest reported its slowest revenue growth in two years.
Its second-quarter revenue grew 10% year-over-year, but growth in the U.S. was slower at 7%.
Monthly active users dropped by 5% from the prior year.
App usage worldwide, however, increased by 8%.
Google to Blame?
Pinterest said user growth was hindered due to Google's search algorithm change in November, making it harder for consumers to find products on its web site.
Looking Forward
In Q3 2022, the platform expects revenue to grow mid-single digits on a year-over-year percentage basis, which takes into account slightly greater foreign exchange headwinds than this quarter.
Image: Pinterest
Pinterest foresees lackluster ad growth amid economic uncertainties
LinkedIn Gets Stickers
LinkedIn is testing a new Instagram-like feature: Link Stickers.
The platform recently announced it is rolling out the new tool which lets you add a clickable link to your posts.
Now, brands can add a link to their content to generate external traffic to their site, including:
Product listings
Newsletters
Promotions
Sign-ups and more
Just like on Instagram and Facebook Stories, social marketers can place the link sticker anywhere on the image of a LinkedIn post. Meta, however, only lets you add a link sticker to a Story, which eventually disappears, whereas LinkedIn lets you add it to video and image posts.
Users will be able to access the new tool only through their post-creation tools as it is not yet available on the web. There are no branding or colour options, but you can customize the text displayed based on the link.
LinkedIn said Link Stickers will be rolled out gradually.
LinkedIn Adds New Link Sticker Option to Help Drive More Traffic From Your In-App Updates
YouTube Lets Your Viewers Zoom Into Your Face
No need to get out your reading glasses. YouTube is testing a new mobile app feature with its premium subscribers that lets them zoom in on any video. The platform added the new tool to its experimental features page yesterday.
9to5Google reports that videos can be zoomed with a "pinch-to-zoom" gesture — and it works in both portrait and landscape modes.
This can be useful for consumers to zoom into your brand's products, but it is also mildly alarming that they can also zoom into your face.
If you're a Premium member, you can access the new feature until September 1st in the YouTube app for Android.
YouTube's latest experimental feature lets you zoom in on videos
New Tool for Auto Advertisers
Max Connect, a digital agency that specialises in automobile advertising, recently launched a platform called Kudos to help marketers optimise their media spend during the economic slowdown.
How it Works
Kudos places hyper-targeted ads across a variety of digital platforms. Conversion data is then collected and tracked anonymously from those consumers.
The tool is designed to track the consumer journey in a shorter timeframe, as well as tracking the actions the consumer took, such as;
Website activity
Form submissions
Phone calls
Searches for vehicle detail pages, and more
Kudos' algorithm also forecasts campaign performance which lets its clients adjust and improve campaigns before any additional marketing dollars are spent.
Agency offers up new optimization tool as auto advertisers seek the right balance of spend
9:16 Photos Coming to Instagram
Even Instagram photos are getting TikTokified.
Last week, Instagram halted its redesign after user backlash, but today Instagram's head Adam Mosseri confirmed the app will begin testing 9:16 photos "in a week or two".
Currently, Instagram displays vertical images that have been cropped according to 4:5. Supporting slimmer, taller 9:16 photos to match Reels will allow for a more full-screen experience.
Quoting Mosseri:
You can have tall videos, but you cannot have tall photos on Instagram... So we thought maybe we should make sure that we treat both equally.
In other words, your brand may need to change its posting strategy when it comes to static posts.
Image: Instagram
Instagram will soon test ultra-tall photos to match its full-screen reels
Google Rolling Out Keyword Automation Feature
New keyword groups are coming — and, god help us all, more "automation."
Today, Google confirmed that it's rolling out a feature in the Keyword Planner Section that lets you organise keywords into ad groups.
Quoting Google:
You could always manually choose to add keywords to ad groups (manually picking which ones to add where). This feature adds the ability to use an automated machine learning system where we suggest which ad groups are the best ones for the keywords, instead of you manually doing the placement.
This should hopefully save advertisers time and effort if they have thousands of keywords/ad groups to sift through. The ability to manually add keywords still exists.
Credit to Tod Maffin and the Today In Digital Marketing podcast, Produced by engageQ.com