Latest News from the World of Digital Marketing – August 2024 Part 1
Welcome to our blog, where innovation and strategy meet in the dynamic world of digital marketing! In this post, we’ll explore the top news and emerging trends that are redefining the digital landscape. From the latest social media algorithm updates to artificial intelligence-based marketing strategies, each piece of news brings exciting opportunities for brands and marketers.
Get ready to discover how these innovations can transform your campaigns, optimize your reach and maximize ROI. We’ll dive into the developments that are shaping the future of digital marketing, offering detailed analysis and insights that will help you stay ahead of the curve in an ever-evolving environment. Don’t miss this comprehensive look at the most relevant trends and news that are setting the pulse of digital marketing today!
US federal court finds Google is a monopolist
Google violated U.S. antitrust law in the field of online search. A U.S. federal court ruled this Monday, dealing a blow to one of the giants of the technology industry.
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that the billions of dollars Google paid to other tech companies to keep its search engine as the default engine in web browsers and other platforms violates U.S. law.
“Having carefully considered and weighed the testimony of the witnesses and the evidence, the court comes to the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist and has acted as such to maintain its monopoly,” Mehta wrote.
The court’s ruling follows an antitrust case that concluded in Washington in May of this year. The case has raised much anticipation around the world, as it is interpreted as a symptom that other tech companies could face increased scrutiny from authorities.
Ken t Walker, Google’s vice president for Global Affairs, has already advanced in a statement that the company plans to appeal.
“The decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine on the market, but concludes that we should not make it easily accessible,” Walker laments.
Evelyn Mitchell-Wolf, senior analyst at Emarketer, says Google’s defeat could be “a big deal,” depending on the remedies – remedies, measures – imposed on the multinational.
Google, for example, could be forced to split up its advertising business, making it a standalone company, or it could lose the power to strike deals to make that engine the standard and determined search engine across multiple devices.
But Mitchell-Wolf warns that “an appeal in the proceedings will postpone any immediate effect the ruling may have on users or advertisers.”
Big implications for tech giants
When the Justice Department filed its first lawsuit against Google in 2020, it alleged that the company’s agreements to make its search engine the default on various devices – such as iPhones – violated free competition.
In the lawsuit, it emerged that Google went on to pay $26 billion in 2021 to various smartphone manufacturers – with Apple getting $18 billion of this split, The New York Times reported at the time.
Both Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Google CEO Sundar Pichai testified during this 10-week trial.
Although Google’s legal battle has been seen as the biggest antitrust case against a tech giant since Microsoft’s dispute in the late 1990s, this time the tech company is not facing scrutiny from authorities alone.
The Department of Justice filed another antitrust lawsuit against Apple in March of this year, accusing the iPhone maker of harming free competition in the handset market. In September last year, the Federal Trade Commission denounced Amazon for inflating prices and overcharging costs to small sellers using its platform.
Many people have been closely following the Google lawsuit since Mehta’s ruling could give some clue as to how future cases against multinational tech companies might be resolved. Now, these corporate titans have a first answer.
Video
Google Trends gets a makeover
Google Trends, Google’s tool for exploring and analyzing search trends from around the world, has reinvented itself and launched a new design for its trends tab, seeking to offer more filtering options and provide more keyword data on the same page.
New features on the Current Trends page
On this page you can see some of the most important keywords that are being searched for in the country along with some very interesting data to better understand user behavior.
Like the old design, in the new page design you can see the volume of searches for each keyword, however, the data is organized in a much more fluid way and also shows other important data, such as the growth rate of the keywords, how long it has been active and a movement of its activity in the last 24 hours.
If you click on any of the trends, you get a detailed view of its evolution in the last day, as well as options of web results in which to expand the information about them.
As you can see, the new Google Trends Current Trends tab allows you to filter by country, time range (you can choose between the last 4, 24, 48 hours and 7 days), active trends (popular hashtags) and search volume. In addition, all this data can be sorted by title, search volume, most recent and relevance. All these results can be exported in CSV format, as a copy to your clipboard or as an RSS feed. So it will be much easier to find the most searched on Google.
Explore page
In any case, Google Trends has many other useful tools for SEO. One of the most important functions of this page is that it allows you to enter a search term (word or phrase) to give us a movement of its activity over time and the interest that this search has in the regions of the selected country.
In addition to this, on the right side of the search term we can find a second box where we can enter another term and compare the activity and trend of both searches, as well as a comparative breakdown by regions or sub-regions.
On the other hand, on this page we can also find a small list of the top searches in the last hours divided into two columns that include “Related Topics” and “Related Queries” of the term we want to explore, along with its growth status. This data can be easily shared on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Tumblr.
As in the Current Trends page, on the explore page we find several filters to optimize our search, such as country, time range (it is possible to explore terms up to the last 5 years) categories and type of search (images, news, Google Shopping and YouTube).
Finally, Google Trends presents a drop-down menu on the left side of the page that includes the Explore and Current Trends pages we already talked about, along with two very interesting options: the year in searches and Subscriptions.
On the Year in Searches page we can find a summary of search trends from 2001 to last year, being able to explore both international and country trends for keywords and their different search categories.
On the “Subscriptions” page, you can create an alert for the latest news of outstanding events. To do so, you must add your e-mail address, the topic you are interested in, the region and the frequency of notifications (once a week or once a month).
Video
All AI news in one video!
If you want to be up to date on artificial intelligence, but you’re a little lazy to be looking for scattered information out there… Jon Hernandez sums it up for you in a single video.
The most important news of the last week: OpenAI, Google’s acquisition, Synthesia, the expansion of Taco Bell’s AI system, new versions of Midjourney, Runway… everything, come on.
Learnings from the video
00:25 Alpha GPT-4o model with voice. One of the most important new features not of the week, but of the whole year. Want to know how ChatGPT’s conversational mode with voice works? Here it is.
04:15 Acquisition of Character AI by Google. Character AI is the 2nd most used AI worldwide (after ChatGPT) and is acquired by Google, thus improving the other models.
12:11 Taco Bell AI system expansion. The system of picking up orders in vehicles thanks to AI is doing very well and they are expanding it to the rest of the stores. Digital displays, voice-personalized customer service chatbots…
19:02 Image to Video at Runway. Runway has released this new feature for paying users. As OpenAI’s Sora can’t be used yet, this is a very interesting option that you can already try.
Latest Tech and Digital Marketing Updates
📌Meet Livi. She’s Spotify’s DJ, and she’s an AI you can now reach out to in English… if you’re Premium. She recommends songs based on your tastes and contextual feedback, making discovering new music more fun and efficient. It’s designed to connect with you and give you a top experience.
📌“Views”, the new Instagram metric. From now on you will have to look, and a lot, at the views of each content. The social network has just released this new metric and it will be as important as the rate of shares.
📌X wants to be the app for everything. They keep putting in new features because they literally want to do everything. The next thing they are going to put in is “Payments”, so you can manage your own money as if it were your bank’s app and make transfers.
📌Gemini comes to YouTube. This is “Brainstorm with Gemini,” a new tool that uses Google’s AI to help creators generate video ideas, titles and thumbnails. The tool is being piloted with a small group of creators and could give YouTube an edge over other video platforms.
📌ChatGPT breaks record. Its mobile app has had its best month to date, marking a milestone in popularity. This growth demonstrates increased acceptance and usage on mobile devices, opening up new possibilities for integrating AIs into marketing strategies and improving interaction with users.
