Hulu Launches Ad Manager Beta & This Week’s Digital Marketing News [PODCAST]

Hosts Jess Budde, Greg Finn, and Christine “Shep” Zirnheld tell you everything you need to know about Hulu’s self-serve ad platform, Spotify video podcasts, and Google News traffic in Search Console reports on this week’s Marketing O’Clock podcast.

Plus, Google is caught up in a couple of lawsuits right now, but we think we have a chance to win a criminal case over egregious close variant matching.

Hulu Ad Manager

Hulu’s new ad platform, currently in beta, appeals to SMBs with its familiar self-serve functionality and low $500 ad spend minimum.

The platform will make it possible for brands to have their ad appear on shows nation-wide without going through a sales rep or testing a huge budget.

Advertisers cannot request placements on specific shows, but they can target genres, audiences, ages, geographic locations, and genders. Ad creative must be 15-30 second videos in HD with stereo sound.

Spotify Video Podcasts

Podcasters can now upload episodes in a video format for both paid and free subscribers to watch. The feature, currently only available for select podcasts, will be available on both desktop and mobile.

Unlike YouTube, Spotify will have the ability to continue to play the audio in the background if a user closes their phone or uses other apps.

Search Console Update for Google News Traffic

Webmasters and marketers can now filter and analyze Google News traffic in Search Console reporting.

This new functionality should be helpful for those that want to optimize their content for Google News.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to group data by multiple search types, such as web, image, and video traffic.

Then, in our take of the week segment, Barry Schwartz isn’t pulling punches.

All my stories are copy and paste. If you want, I can not cite sources and make stuff up like the WSJ?

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) July 16, 2020

And, Aleyda Solis has a reminder about geolocation in Google Search results in this week’s ICYMI,

Reminder: Google geolocates not only w/ ccTLDs, hreflang, GSC geolocation, but also by identifying location name within content (the more signals aligned, the better). Eg. Searching for "remote jobs" (withoutlocation) from Canada will show the page of the Canadian Remote Jobs… pic.twitter.com/h0KhJQGVqA

— Aleyda Solis (@aleyda) July 21, 2020

Then we answer your burning digital marketing questions during our lightning round segment:

• Who is suing Google now?
• What changed with Google’s latest Ads Editor update?
• When will Google’s mobile-first rollout finally happen?
• Where you might be seeing verified brand logos in your inbox?
• Why we love Bing’s new URL submission plugin
• How you can fundraise on Instagram

Check out the Marketing O’Clock site to subscribe to the show! You will also find links to all of the articles featured in this episode.

Featured Image Credit: Cypress North