Don't Underestimate a Man With a Plan, and a Beer in One Hand.

FRIDAY QUIZ: Who's The Worst?

In the summer of 2013, executives at Twitter made a fateful decision. A hard decision. One that changed Internet culture at the time, though today, it's been largely forgotten. That decision: They retired the whale.

In Twitter's early days, the platform would crash so frequently, all you could get on the web site was an image of a whale with the message "Twitter is over-capacity."

Related: The Story of Twitter's Fail Whale

It wasn't just Twitter, crashes happened all the time. 

Since then, software engineering has gotten more robust, so there are fewer outages among the social media platforms. But they do happen. 

Which brings us to the Friday Quiz:

What social media platform has had the most outages in the last 12 months.

Here's a hint: It's not Twitter.

The answer is further down in today’s issue.

Incidentally, the whale may be gone, but Twitter's downtime isn't — just this afternoon, they reported their APIs and Developer Portal were both down for some people.

TWITTER: New Monetization Features Are Stalled

Twitter's platform may not be crashing as much, but their most recent feature isn't exactly blowing the doors wide open.

Their creator platform Super Follows, which they launched three weeks ago, has only generated a little more than $6,000 in total revenue on Apple devices. In Canada, it's made a whole $600 bucks. In total. Oh, and that includes revenue from their Twitter Blue upgrade package. (The data is from Sensor Tower.)

Super Follows is like a sub on Twitch, joining as a channel member on YouTube... that sort of thing, where users pay $5 a month for access to private tweets.

One potential issue is they're really picking and choosing who can be on the selling side of those. Most people who apply are turned down. That said, the number of people who can buy is not limited — any iOS user in the U.S. or Canada can “Super Follow” any number of accounts with it on.

In the U.S., Twitter has 37 million monetizable daily active users. And yes, only a portion of those will be iOS users, but come on — that's still millions and millions of people.

Digital marketers were indeed watching Super Follows as a potential path to a new revenue centre — looks like the good money is on "Keep watching."

Twitter's take on this: They didn't refute the numbers, but said it's still too early to make any decisions on it.

RETAIL: Ikea Offering to Buy Product Back

If you're a retail marketer, and looking for a way to differentiate yourself, consider this move that IKEA's making — buying their products back.

They're testing this in one U.S. store right now. The idea is if you've used their stuff and it's not damaged, they'll buy it back from you when you're tired of it.

To be clear: This is quite different than a refund for product quality issues. This program will take your couch or bookshelf years after you bought it, and give you a portion of your purchase price for it.

There are, of course, some catches:

1. First, you need to be part of its free-to-join loyalty program

2. The items need to be only gently used; you can't trash them then expect them to take it

3. And it has to come back fully assembled, functional, and not subject to any safety recall.

What IKEA's doing is jumping on the concept of a circular business — which it says it plans to fully embrace within nine years.

It says once it reviews the data from this test, they plan to add more cities and eventually make it a fixture of all American stores. It's something they've already been doing in some European countries for the last couple of years.

VIDEO MARKETING: Vimeo + Facebook

Facebook has added some new video tools into Facebook Business Suite: ‘Vimeo Create’

Vimeo is a premium video platform, and they have their own set of tools they sell as a plug-in to other platforms — kind of like how you sometimes see mini versions of Canva in other social media tools.

Vimeo Create is a paid tool, though, so this is really meant more for people with existing Vimeo accounts to make some quick edits prior to sending a video into an ad campaign or asset library.

The tool is also inside Pinterest and TikTok.

With the announcement, Facebook offered three tips to marketers wanting to up their video game. Quoting SocialMediaToday.com:

1. Capture attention within the first few seconds – With users scrolling by quickly, you need to grab attention, and the first seconds of your clip are critical in this. Facebook also notes that custom thumbnails can play a key role here.

2. Repurpose your creative assets - Vimeo Create enables you to change the ratio of your video, so you can convert assets into 9:16 for Instagram Stories, or 1:1 for Facebook ads, while you can also edit, trim, and plug in different product shots. This can be particularly beneficial for creative split testing, as you can easily chop and change elements in the app

3. Test and optimize – Which leads to the final point – “You can use Facebook Business Suite to monitor performance of your video ads to easily see which video is performing best”. Integrating the two elements then streamlines this process, and facilitates more capacity for trialing different creative elements.

TIKTOK: The Bad Hashtag

TikTok is limiting the searchability of a specific hashtag after it was found to be encouraging kids to steal.

It's part of a viral TikTok trend happening now — one of many that pops up on the platform. But this one encourages students to steal small items from their classrooms — things like COVID test kits, soap dispensers, and even school technology.

Techcrunch reports:

By Monday of this week, the hashtag in question — #deviouslick — had amassed more than 175 million views.

So, two days ago, they limited searching for it, removed videos with the tag, and encouraged users to be kinder to their teachers.

RESEARCH: How Much Racial Bias is in Marketing Data?

As digital marketers, we like data. Lots of it. Some of us spend millions to get detailed market research. And the providers of that research spend a lot of time trying to ensure their methodology is sound and they've removed as much bias as they can.

But, a new study has found that there may still be a long way to go. 

The Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing has found that while White people were accurately identified 68% of the time in large datasets used for marketing, only 49% for Hispanics were, 28% of African Americans were, a number that dropped to 24% for Asian Americans.

Quoting MediaPost:

The group says the marketing industry should require data providers to show the composition of the segments they use and the date ranges when that data was compiled. And those providers should consider investing in getting self-reported identity data.

Friday Quiz Answer

Let's quickly get back to the Friday quiz!

Which social media platform had the worst track record for uptime in the last 12 months?

Instagram.

In fact, it's not even close. Instagram logged 192 outages in that time period in the U.S. and the U.K. Second place was Twitter with only 54 outages, then Snapchat at 48.

Your company can sponsor a full month of the Friday quiz for less than $100. Go to todayindigital.com/ads or tap the link in the episode notes.

CREATIVE: A Clever Political Ad

As you may know, Canada is currently in the throes of a federal election — and regardless of where you may fall on the political spectrum, you've got to acknowledge the tweet that the Liberal party put out today was a great idea.

The Liberals are the governing party right now; they're led by Justin Trudeau. This morning, they put out this tweet, which is a video of Trudeau, looking right into camera, delivering this — apparently, in one take:

Currently, polling shows the Liberals are most likely going to win, but will return to Parliament with a minority government.

REMINDER: We're Hiring!

One last reminder — if you know of anybody looking for work who has a background with both journalism and digital marketing, please send them our job listing for an associate producer. Send them to TodayInDigital.com/job

Today in Digital Marketing is produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw first nation on beautiful Vancouver Island. Production support and fact checking by Sarah Guild. Theme composer Mark Blevis has a plan and a beer in one hand. Podcast music licensing by Source Audio.