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💉 OOPS: Instagram's Ad Algorithm Showcases Illegal Content

You don't have to run ads on Meta's platform for long before the automated policy enforcement bots think your ad campaign violates some kind of policy.

It's become a rite of passage, really. If you've never been on the receiving end of an ad takedown — are you really a media buyer?

My most viral TikTok was a skit I did about this, where an advertiser tries to run ads for his hat company.

@todayindigital

Answer @tiktok The life of a digital marketer #facebookads #mediabuyer #digitalmarketing #agencylife #marketing

Which is why a story yesterday from 404Media is particularly frustrating. Quoting their reporting:

"For the last few months Instagram has served me a constant stream of ads for hard drugs, stolen credit cards, hacked accounts, guns, counterfeit cash, wholesale quantities of weed, and Cash App scams, as well as a Russian-language job posting seeking paid-in-cash massage therapists.

Nearly all of these advertisements link directly to Telegram accounts where the drugs or illegal services can be directly purchased.

With one tap, I was repeatedly taken from bouncing through Instagram stories of my friends on vacation to Telegram chat accounts where I could buy automatic weapons, meth, and stolen credit cards."

Indeed, we were able to see dozens of examples of questionable campaigns by searching Meta's ads library for t.me — the link shortener for Telegram, the instant messenger used by many people wanting to keep their identity private.

Not all the ads were marketing illegal things, but many are clearly way, way outside Meta's own ad standards — captions like “join tele to make $50k a month” and "TAPPIN in for the CASHAPP MONEY DROP to get RICH!” The report says once you do go over to Telegram, the get-rich method is usually recruiting you to deal drugs, hack bank accounts, be the middleman in the sale of stolen Netflix and Disney+ logins.

It is a huge gap in Meta's automated policy enforcement — something 404media in their coverage called a “massive ad screening failure.”

Meta's systems do check more than the ad copy; they also look at the landing page to make sure nothing nefarious is being sold behind the click. But Meta's systems don't appear to be able to analyze content within chat platforms. And really, how could they, other than deploying fake people bots to have conversations with the accounts behind the illegal ads to suss out what they're selling.

But hey, if Ashley Madison can write bots that convince thousands of men that they're talking to a real person, can't Meta?

If nothing else, it does seem like Meta's basic image recognition isn't even working right. Karan Lala, a former engineer on Facebook’s Integrity team, told 404media:

“There’s things like weed photos—that’s something that should just be getting caught. If I were an engineer on the integrity team, I would want to know why our systems aren’t catching them."

Worse, Instagram's discovery algorithm is even involved. Quoting the piece again:

"Since clicking on [one of these ads], I’ve been bombarded with hundreds of Instagram ads for illegal services and drugs. Nearly all of these advertisements link to Telegram accounts where the drugs or illegal services can be directly purchased...

"At one point, I was asked by Instagram if I 'want more or less of your ads to be like this?' beneath an advertisement that featured blank credit cards and stacks of cash."

It's hard to know how long this has been going on, since Meta's ad library only shows ads that are actively in distribution.

We asked Meta for comment. They opened our email, but we did not hear back by deadline.

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📧 EMAIL: Experian Hit with Fine for Spammy Practices

You've probably seen these emails before — they're from a company you've done business with, but they're nothing you want to see.

So you go look for the Unsubscribe link at the bottom.

But there is none.

Instead, there's a note saying that you can't unsubscribe from these kinds of emails because they're not marketing, they're important updates about the status of your account.

It is true that in many jurisdictions, anti-spam legislation has a carve-out for legal notices, privacy policy updates, critical information, and so on — things you can't unsubscribe from, unless you delete your account from the service entirely.

But it is a bit of a gray area.

For instance: Can you tag a tiny promotional call-to-action at the bottom of a legitimate privacy update? Can you suggest an upsell in small print?

The American credit reporting agency Experian, as the kids say, f***ed around and found out.

Experian has been fined $650,000 for violating spam laws. And the American justice department and trade regulator also slapped a permanent injunction on the company, forbidding them from f***ing around any more.

Quoting The Verge:

"If you’ve been unlucky enough to receive Experian spam, you may already know the format. 'A new car has been noticed on your account — please confirm it! You need dark web monitoring to protect you!' [Or] that old classic: 'Boost your FICO score.' When you log in to your account, you’re treated to a page that wants you to upgrade your account or sign up for a loan."

Indeed, email shown in court documents actually have the audacity to start with "This is not a marketing email." There was no subscribe link, only a note that customers “can update some alerts and communications preferences” but will still “receive notifications like this one” on account status.

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🧵 THREADS: Marketers Weigh X vs. Threads Amid Social Shift

A new study finds that of the marketers currently using X or Instagram, 80% said they will try Meta’s Threads — even though they realize this will fragment their social outreach.

The numbers come from Capterra’s 2023 Social Media Landscape Survey.

66% say they think Threads will weaken the marketing potential of Instagram and Facebook. And more than two-thirds of marketers say their brand has indeed created an account on at least one upstart Twitter competitor (like Mastodon or Bluesky).

Quoting a marketing analyst at Capterra:

"Experimenting with new social media platforms should be encouraged, but avoid overcommitting. Marketers need to assess whether they are equipped to manage another platform, if the app delivers on safety and security, and if the platform offers must-have capabilities or features."

Their study found 52% of marketers polled said they were likely to use Threads because they believe it has better user safety and security.

📉 WEB TRAFFIC: Referral Traffic from X Drops

Web traffic coming from X — formerly Twitter — has declined sharply in the past year.

The parent company of Wordpress says traffic from X to a sample of large and small news web sites fell by an average of 24% from the first half of last year to the first half of this year.

A source at the New York Times told Digiday they'd seen a sharp drop since X started throttling links to the news site — artificially adding a 4-5 second delay before the site loaded. It wasn't clear why X implemented those delays on the Times and a handful of other news sites and competitors, but I don't think you need to have a PhD in psychology to understand how Elon Musk thinks.

Several months ago, Twitter inaccurately labeled several national public broadcasters like America's NPR and Canada's CBC as "State-owned media." Both those large networks stopped posting on Twitter, and have not returned, despite the labels being removed.

As for regular web sites, like the kind brands and marketers manage, those too are seeing drops in traffic, as X's user base and engagement continue to fall. An executive at a large lifestyle site told Digiday this week they saw traffic from X drop by 72% year over year – but they weren't really concerned because traffic from X now only accounts for 2% of the company’s organic traffic this year. That's half of what it was last year.

Statistica forecasts that X will end the year with 4% fewer monthly active users than it had at the end of last year.

Also still dropping — advertisers. A MediaRadar analysis found that of the 3,100 brands left advertising on X in May, the month the company gained a new CEO from the ad business, 34% chose not to return in June.

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👨🏻‍⚖️ REGULATION: EU Laws Forcing the Hands of Social Platforms

As new European legislation takes effect tomorrow, the rest of the world is gaining some ad platform enhancements. The new Digital Services Act is forcing the hands of many large social platforms, and requiring them to be more transparent in paid promotions and influencer disclosures.

And that could end up being a benefit for you, if you're interested in checking out what your competitors are up to.

Here's a quick rundown of the announcements in that space this week:

META

Meta now lets you track branded content campaigns in its Ads Library, so you'll be able to see how other brands are using influencer marketing across Facebook and Instagram.

You can find it on the front page of the Ads Library, under the button reading "Go to branded content."

You'll be able to enter the platform, the date range, and the brand or competitor name.

This addition to the Ads Library is available globally.

GOOGLE

The same can't be said for Google's update this week, which they are restricting only to Europe.

In fact, not much can be said about Google's plans at all, because they were awfully vague about how they'd be updating their tools for the incoming DSA. Google’s VP of Trust and Safety would only say in a blog post that they'd be expanding its Ads Transparency Center but didn't say how.

There was some talk about expanding its annual transparency reports, and maybe updating its appeals processes.

SNAP

And Snapchat yesterday said it would let users opt out of content personalization in the Discover and Spotlight tabs, add some new ad campaign insights, and increase transparency around audience targeting. But those updates, again, only for users and advertisers in the EU and UK.

They're also going to start providing more detail around why content was removed and how to appeal.

And they say they're building their own Ads Library, which again, for the time being, will only include European ad campaigns.

👥 LINKEDIN: LinkedIn Boosts Feed Personalization

If you've noticed a change in your LinkedIn feed lately, it could be because of some algorithm changes discovered by researcher Richard van der Blom — changes you might want to work into your content strategy, if you're in the B2B space.

According to his findings:

• LinkedIn has been putting more focus on hashtag engagement lately

• They're also showing users more content from the people and Pages they engage with most

• Posts are getting more reach over a longer period of time — a change from when posts would get the most traction on the first day of posting. He says posts actually now get more reach on the second and third day after posting.

LinkedIn did say recently it updated its feed algorithm to pull in more engagement signals — they mentioned the hashtags specifically.

Or, as the company said:

"Embeddings represent high-dimensional categorical data in a lower-dimensional continuous space, capturing essential relationships and patterns within the data while reducing computational complexity."

Alright then. What did we say about letting the engineers write the blog posts?

Takeaways: You probably should make sure you'd adding hashtags to your LinkedIn posts from now on, and even have your brand account jump in on discussions that are happening between others, since that too appears to be affected.

LinkedIn says sharing of original content on their platform increased by 41% year-over-year in 2022.

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🎙️ PODCASTING: Spotify Unveils Features for Podcasters

Spotify is adding some new tools for people who market podcasts.

• Podcasters will soon be able to feature one episode more prominently on their show page, guiding first-time listeners to their best starter content

• They're also adding something called “Host recommendations” where you can choose up to two pieces of content from other creators on Spotify (a different podcast, music album, playlist, or audiobook) and pin them to the top of the “More like this” tab.

• For podcasters using Spotify Open Access through partners like Patreon or Supporting Cast, you’ll be able to activate a promotional banner on your show page.

• Starting this October, you’ll be able to select your podcast’s preview clip that appears on the Home feed and Podcast & Shows subfeed.

• You’ll soon be able to see the total number of impressions for your show and the individual episodes over a 30-day period, including trending data and a breakdown of where on Spotify the impressions came from.

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📺 And finally…

People over 60 make up 16% of the population and have 25% of the world's spending power.

But a new study has found they're barely in ads.

The data platform CreativeX looked at 126,000 ads from different industries like food, healthcare, and alcohol, and found that only 4% of people in ads are over 60 years old.

Of those people, fewer than 1% were shown as business leaders or professionals. Most were shown in family settings.

It's not just ads. The American AARP association found that one-third of the U.S. population is over 50, but they're only in 15% of media images.

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