Go Home, Google. You're Drunk.

Why being promoted to the C-suite may not be your best career move... Reddit adds a new placement... How to change the content indexed in a search engine instantly... and much more!

FRIDAY QUIZ: Who's #1 on Instagram?

Instagram is a wildly popular site for us digital marketers — Facebook Corp has given us placements in the feed, in between Stories, in IGTV, in Search. And indeed when you poke around, it's clear that it's a popular platform. More than a billion people use it regularly.

And it's also true that big celebrities rely on it to get their message out. But — how popular is the most popular?

The Friday quiz: What type of brand is the most popular account on Instagram? (Remember, we're talking about the account with the most followers.)

Is it:

  • A football player

  • A pop singer

  • A corporation

  • A movie star

  • A reality TV star

The answer, later in the issue.

C-SUITE: CMOs Are Too Jargony and Untrustworthy?

So you applied for that CMO job and didn't get it. It went to Debbie, who — I think we can all agree — hasn't looked at marketing tech since fax machines were a thing. 

Anyway, forget Debbie. Because it turns out, you probably didn't want that job anyway.

Some new research from Boathouse and GLG finds that while most CEOs believe their CMOs can influence key decisions at the boardroom table, less than a third actually trust their CMOs to grow the business.

The study polled more than more than 150 CEOs of the largest companies in the U.S. across 13 industries.

More than 70% of CEOs believe their CMO would save themselves before taking a bullet for the team. More than half (56%) of survey respondents believe the CMO is more committed to themselves and personal gains versus the CEO/board.

Only 34% of CEOs have great confidence in their CMOs, and only 32% trust them overall. More than half of CEOs (58%) believe a key issue with CMOs' short tenure is their lack of general business communication skills and use of too much marketing jargon.

The report also noted that none of the leading organizations in the industry, such as the American Marketing Association, have studied the CMO tenure problem and there is nothing on conference agendas addressing the topic.

MEDIA BUYING: Reddit Adds Placements In Conversations

Reddit continues to build its ad platform out, this week launching a new placement option for us advertisers: the ‘Conversation Placement.’

This lets brands advertise right within the post comment threads.

It shows up below the original post and above the first comment. You also can get a prominent CTA button in that placement.

The company says their testing of this involved more than 600 partners and those partners saw an average 9% boost in clickthrough rate and 23% lower Cost Per Click — though those numbers include both this new Conversation placement and the main Feed units.

The bigger question... is how will Reddit users respond, and will it be a welcome and effective placement option for brands...

Some Redditors will no doubt be unhappy about seeing ads in comment streams, but most are now more open to ads, given the broader placement options across the web, and the general understanding that this is a requirement to fund the services they use.

Reddit’s Conversation Placement option is available to all advertisers starting today.

SEO: Instant Way to Alert Bing About Content Changes

When you think about SEO, most people first think of Google, of course. Few think of Microsoft's Bing. Which is a shame, because Bing is the default search engine on Windows and powers a bunch of smaller but growing search engines like the privacy-aware DuckDuckGo.

Microsoft has continued to improve Bing and now their latest announcement will be welcome news to anyone responsible for the back-end of a web site.

They've launched the Bing Content Submission API. This is a tool that lets you notify Bing in real-time when changes are made to a web page.

And Bing does say — real-time. When you ping the API with a page address, apparently it will register and will index the new content.

To be clear, this is different than the URL Submission API, which you'd use to point Bing to a new PAGE. This tells Bing to re-index the content on a page it already knows about.

It's available now in their Webmaster Tools.

GOOGLE ADS: Industry Reacts to Sunsetting of ETAs

Earlier this week, Google Ads confirmed they'll be dropping ETAs — Expanded Text Ads — after next June. They want us to all move toward RSAs — Responsive Search Ads — which in Google's world doesn't mean responsive like a web site's design, but rather dynamic content where different fields of your ad, like body copy, headline, and description, will move around at the drunken whim of some machine learning code.

SearchEngineJournal.com today has some industry reaction to the news.

Most people they spoke to said they expected this change — and you really have to be quite out of touch to not see that the digital marketing industry is moving toward more automation and AI making campaign decisions.

That kind of automation works better at scale, though, and not as much for campaigns where small budgets provide a small amount of data for the AI to do its work.

Plus, as the owner of one agency said, there are lots of times when an advertiser wants to tightly control its messaging, and this complicates things.

Others said that in their accounts, ETAs perform as well or better than responsive search ads.

Quoting the piece:

Other advertisers also noted the difference in delivery – with RSAs often getting more visibility than ETAs in the same ad group, even when campaigns were set to rotate indefinitely.

Advertisers shared concerns about the lack of control both in terms of control over the ad copy, control over specific ad copy testing and also control in a broader sense, as it pertains to a greater trend with Google Ads moving toward automation.

One area in particular where this kind of mixing and matching of ad creative elements is troublesome is in regulated industries, where each line must be approved by a number of levels and departments and teams. How do you get approval for an ad when the ad platform might just decide to swap stuff around.

Worst of all, the reporting on RSAs is — well, lacking. You don't really get to see much on which combinations of elements did the best. All you get is how many impressions they served.

Google says it's sticking to its guns, and you won't be able to create or edit ETA campaigns starting next June.

TWITTER: New Features Being Tested

Twitter's on a bit of a bender these days. After years and years of not doing anything to its platform, the last couple of months have been packed with changes — mostly welcome changes, like being able to restrict replies to only people who you follow, or only people you mention.

Word this week that they're also considering some other options.

Those are, quoting Bloomberg:

  • Archive old tweets – This option would enable users to archive their old tweets after a certain period of time so that they’re no longer visible to others. Users would be able to manually set a time as to when the archive would kick in, with 30, 60, and 90-day thresholds, or hiding tweets after a full year, being tested as potential options.

  • Remove individual accounts as followers – This has recently been spotted in testing, with Twitter working on an option that would enable users to remove specific profiles from their Follower list, without having to use the current block and unblock workaround. That could make it a less confrontational way to avoid certain users in the app.

  • Remove yourself from a conversation – Also spotted in testing last month, this option would enable users to untag themselves from any discussion, and keep them from being mentioned again within that thread. The option was originally called ‘unmention yourself’, but Twitter says that the updated wording better clarifies what the function is.

  • Hiding tweets that you’ve liked – Likes have always been a little confusing for Twitter users, with some seeing them as a level of endorsement, and others using them as a marker of things they want to read later, or similar. By hiding your liked tweets, that could remove any confusion, while also letting users feel more free in what they do on the platform, without consideration of judgment for such.

All this is just in consideration or testing right now; no word on if any of them will make it to the final product, though if history is any guide, these all should be part of the Twitter experience in the next year or so.

TYPEFORM: Your Free Plan Is Going to Suck A Lot More

And finally, if you're on a Free plan over at Typeform, your account is going to be smacked down with the force of 1,000 greedy accountants.

Currently, you get 3 forms and up to 100 responses per month.

But that plan is changing. Now, you'll get unlimited forms — but you'll be capped at 10 responses per month, which is just nonsense of course.

They're also taking Ending screens away, limiting the metrics you can see, and they will no longer email you when there's a form completion.

1,000 greedy accountants.

FRIDAY QUIZ: Who's #1 on Instagram?

Back to the Friday quiz: What type of brand is the most popular account on Instagram?

I'll bet you all got this wrong — it is: A corporation.

Which corporation? Instagram!

The Instagram account is the top-followed account on the platform, followed by (in order:)

  • Cristiano Ronaldo, a football player

  • Ariana Grande, a pop singer

  • Dwayne Johnson, a former wrestler and now movie star

  • And Kylie Jenner, a reality TV star

Sponsor the Friday quiz for a whole month for less than $100. Visit TodayInDigital.com/ads.

And finally…

Today in Digital Marketing is produced on beautiful Vancouver Island by engageQ digital. Production support and fact checking by Sarah Guild. Theme composer Mark Blevis is kicking in chairs and knocking down tables in a restaurants in a West End bar. Podcast music licensing by Source Audio. 

Have a restful long weekend, and I'll be back in your inbox on Tuesday.

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