Facebook Just Changed the Mobile Web Landscape with Header Bidding. Last Wednesday, the social giant announced that it’s partnering with six ad tech firms to open up its Facebook Audience Network. The move will allow developers and publishers to make money from their apps and mobile sites with ads on their header bidding platforms. In other words, Facebook is not building its own header bidder, but opening its Audience Network to mobile web publishers who use header bidding technology provided by Amazon, Index Exchange, Media.net, Sonobi, Sortable, and AppNexus.
This is a move by Facebook to make the platform more attractive to publishers and will increase the amount of money they can make from their ads. Tech companies love it because it will decrease Google’s monopoly. To find out more, check this article shared by Bob Williams on Twitter.
Facebook Just Changed the Mobile Web Landscape With Header Bidding #digital https://t.co/YCevjutz8u pic.twitter.com/GBy6GJVfj1
— Bob Williams (@bobwillia) March 23, 2017
Retail Stores Increase Advertising. According to a report released by BDO, The 2017 BDO Retail Compass Survey, retail stores will increase advertising, especially via social media. Around 62 percent of retail CFOs are planning to devote more resources to marketing and advertising in addition to free shipping, email, and social media campaigns. As time spent on digital media (and shopping via device), continues to increase, it only stands to reason that marketers will increase reliance on email and social media advertising. Think about it: How many times have you clicked on an email read on your device and made a purchase in the last week? How many purchases have you made in the last year because of a Facebook ad you’ve seen? If you’re like me, you’ve lost count. When you add Millennial and Gen Z’s domination of the market combined with their use of devices (and social), well, none of this should be a surprise. Great insights in the report as a whole, and definitely worth your time checking out.
Retailers Increase Advertising, Especially #SocialMedia @BDOConsumer https://t.co/C2puMRMWcT @mahoney_sarah #retail #teens #advertising
— Danita Blackwood (@DanitaBlackwood) March 22, 2017
New Ways to Go (Facebook) Live: Now From Your Computer. The ability to go live on Facebook from your smartphone has been around for over a year. You could even go live on your Facebook page using professional equipment. Now, Facebook is making the ability to stream live video to even more people and allowing you to go live from your personal profile on your desktop!
To make this possible, Facebook is opening its Live API to everyone which will allow for more professional productions by using external equipment and encoders. This seems like a play to encourage content creators to produce more professional videos and distribute on Facebook’s vast platform. In addition, this will allow anyone with a webcam to dive into live video and even share their screen.
To access, simply click “Live Video” at the top of your News Feed or personal profile, add a description, choose your audience and go live. This update will likely delight gamers who like to stream their play to share and engage live with their followers.
To find out more about this expansion of Facebook Live, check out the article shared by Charles Milander.
New Ways to Go (Facebook) Live: Now From Your Computer https://t.co/hUthttrx8M pic.twitter.com/BPGxRqfquM
— Charles Milander (@charlesmilander) March 22, 2017
Snapchat is Proving its Street Cred with TV Advertisers. If you’re like most adults, you still rely on television for most of your at home entertainment, and we likely all universally hate the frequent disruptions served up by commercials. Teens are another story and according to a recent Neilsen’s report, American’s aged 18-24 watched less traditional television than the rest of the population. This is where Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, sees opportunity, which makes sense since their primary demographic also watches the least amount of television.
Since it’s more than a little critical for Snap to prove its worth and ability to turn a profit for its investors, the company has been looking at ways to tap into the big budgets from TV advertising. That’s why the company is working on the ability to put its audience in front of their TV screens by developing ways to measure whether users intend to watch a TV show that’s been advertised on the app and also the measure whether those users actually watched the show. An interesting move—we’ll see if it works. Check out the article and the results of the campaign shared by Lisa Illman.
Snapchat is proving its worth for TV advertisers like NBC https://t.co/HtE8LqBXXM
— Lisa Illman (@lisaillman) March 23, 2017
Marketers Have Three Big Problems with Snapchat. The previous story described Snapchat as a promising vehicle for advertising television shows, but when you ask marketers, they are seeing a small return on Snapchat. In a survey conducted by RBC Capital Markets in partnership with Ad Age that included 1,600 marketers, it showed most marketers would rather spend money on rival Instagram and Facebook’s recently launched Messenger Day platforms. Check out this article shared by Bo Woloshyn that talks about the three biggest challenges Snapchat needs to overcome in order to encourage marketers to invest more and recommend Snapchat to their clients.
Marketers Have 3 Big Problems With Snapchat
—> https://t.co/7iNl1SKGyq pic.twitter.com/wi7apBQbMj— Bo Woloshyn (@BoKnowsMarkting) March 21, 2017
YouTube’s Terrible, Horrible, Very Bad Week. It started with the Times of London reporting that major brands were pulling YouTube ads as a result of their content appearing alongside hate speech and rapidly gained momentum. The boycott spread throughout the US with Verizon and AT&T, two of the biggest advertisers on YouTube joining the boycott, and has spread to include massive ad pulls from the likes of Walmart, Starbucks, PepsiCo, and GM, to name just a few. To say this pull out is having a major impact on YouTube, and its parent company Google, and the trust-ability of these advertising platforms based on their reliance on programmatic advertising is an understatement at best.
Google is promising a fix as soon as today, but the fact of whether the companies have the ability to scale these “fixes,” which are likely to require human intervention, remains to be seen. Not a great week for the search giant. Great coverage on this front here from the team at The Verge.
YouTube is facing a full-scale advertising boycott over hate speech https://t.co/P4S4okrB7M pic.twitter.com/qPFhLLy4pt
— The Verge (@verge) March 25, 2017