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Instagram unveils a new video service, challenging YouTube

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Sourced from FLIPBOARD

Facebook Inc.’s Instagram service is loosening its restraints on video in an attempt to pull younger viewers away from YouTube when they’re looking for something to watch on their smartphones.

The expansion announced Wednesday, dubbed IGTV, will increase Instagram’s video time limit from one minute, making it 10 minutes for most users. Accounts with large audiences will be able to go as long as an hour.

Video will be available through Instagram or a new app called IGTV. The video eventually would give Facebook more opportunities to sell advertising.

This is the latest instance in which Instagram has ripped a page from a rival’s playbook in an effort to preserve its status as a cool place for young people to share and view content. In this case, Instagram is mimicking Google’s YouTube. Before, Facebook and Instagram have copied Snapchat — another magnet for teens and young adults.

Instagram, now nearly 8 years old, is moving further from its roots as a photo-sharing service as it dives headlong into longer-form video.

The initiative comes as parent company Facebook struggles to attract teens while also dealing with a scandal that exposed its leaky controls for protecting users’ personal information.

Instagram Chief Executive Kevin Systrom said he hopes IGTV will emerge as a hub of creativity for relative unknowns who turn into internet sensations with fervent followings among teens and young adults.

That is what’s already happening on YouTube, which has become the world’s most popular video outlet since Google bought it for $1.76 billion nearly 12 years ago. YouTube now boasts 1.8 billion users.

Instagram, which Facebook bought for $1 billion six years ago, now has 1 billion users, up from 800 million nine months ago.

More importantly, 72% of U.S. children ages 13 to 17 use Instagram, second to YouTube at 85%, according to the Pew Research Center. Only 51% of kids in that group now use Facebook, down from 71% from a similar Pew survey in 2014-15.

That trend appears to be one of the reasons that Facebook is “hedging its bets” by opening Instagram to the longer-form videos typically found on YouTube, said analyst Paul Verna of the research firm eMarketer.

In addition to giving Instagram another potential drawing card, longer clips are more conducive for video ads lasting from 30 seconds to one minute. Instagram doesn’t currently allow video ads, but Systrom said it eventually will. When the ads come, Instagram intends to share revenue with the videos’ creators — just as YouTube already does.

“We want to make sure they make a living because that is the only way it works in the long run,” Systrom said.

The ads also would help Facebook sustain its revenue growth. Total spending on online video ads in the United States is expected to rise from nearly $18 billion this year to $27 billion in 2021, according to EMarketer.

Lele Pons, a YouTube sensation who also has amassed 25 million followers on Instagram, plans to launch a cooking show on IGTV in hopes of increasing her audience and eventually generating more revenue. “It’s like Coca-Cola and Pepsi,” she said. “You will never know what you like better unless you try both.”

IGTV’s programming format will consist exclusively of vertical video designed to fill the entire screen of a smartphone — the devices are emerging as the main way younger people watch video. By contrast, most YouTube videos fill only part of the screen unless the phone is tilted horizontally.

Snapchat began featuring vertical video before Instagram, making Instagram’s move another example of its penchant for copying rivals.

But Systrom sees it differently. “This is acknowledging vertical video is the future and we want the future to come more quickly, so we built IGTV.”

Sourced from FLIPBOARD

Article originally appeared in Los Angeles Times

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As brands take marketing in-house, consultancies cash in

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By Shareen Pathak

What’s agencies’ loss is consultancies’ gain.

Consultancies like Accenture Interactive, PwC and Deloitte Digital are all making one core tenet part of their pitch to marketers: If you want to take back more marketing in-house, we’ll help you do it. They’re buoyed by a stronger relationship that goes beyond the chief marketing officer and an overall perception that they’re objective partners, not simply vendors — putting them in a good position to remain top of mind for advertisers even as agencies can’t.

For example, an Accenture Interactive rep said inside the company’s newly launched Programmatic Services division, one of the core competencies is “in-housing,” which includes helping advertisers take back control of their media capabilities — building programmatic strategies, in-sourcing technology, changing operational models and creating internal capabilities.

Accenture is working with companies including HP and Radisson Hotel Group. For Radisson, it was a way to take back control of the customer journey from third-party partners — and feel comfortable that it would deliver what it wanted.

Antonio Lucio, HP’s chief marketing officer, has been a loud voice calling for a serious internal cleanup of capabilities as part of an overall mission to take back control. Most of this, said Lucio, is driven by a change in mindset that the brand, not the agency, controls and must take ultimate responsibility for the customer. “To do marketing today … you need deep analytics and insight capabilities, creative content, programmatic buying capabilities. As a client, you have to build internal capabilities in four or five of those areas,” he said on Digiday’s Starting Out podcast earlier this month.

“The consultancies’ most relevant strengths in this case are organizational structuring or restructuring and digital transformation,” said Ann Billock, partner at Ark Advisors. “If companies take, say, programmatic, content or digital and production inside, the consultancies — with their C-level connections — can be called in from the top to help structure the organization and processes of the newly in-housed functions.”

The interesting question for the industry is this, said Billock: “Do the consultancies come in before the decisions to in-house are made, or are they parties to those decisions from the outset?”

One agency executive who didn’t want to be named because he is entertaining a job offer from a consultancy said it’s mostly the latter: Consultancies are buoyed by louder calls for transparency and control from advertisers and riding the wave of the bombshell Association of National Advertisers report from 2016 that alleged widespread issues in the agency business, plus ongoing issues of fraud in the digital advertising ecosystem.

Much of the pitch was on display at the Cannes Lions festival last week. At Deloitte Digital, which took over a suite at the top of the Majestic hotel, the talking points were clear: We’re not here to displace agencies, but we are here to service the CMO. “The message is: So, we’re here to optimize for the brands. We’re helping brands own capability sets like in-housing. We’re helping the ecosystem at large,” said Todd Paris, managing director at Deloitte Digital.

Deloitte Digital helps clients do more things in-house, including customer and audience data, augmented reality, media buying and event execution. Deloitte Digital CMO Alicia Hatch said this puts consultancies in a stronger position than agencies.

“Helping a client in-house marketing capabilities isn’t just about putting teams under one roof,” she said. “In-housing is a strategic business decision that can ultimately impact a company’s bottom line. We are able to help clients decide if in-housing is the right decision for them, identify the right technologies and talent, and undergo significant organizational restructuring to ensure in-housing efforts are successful and sustainable.”

Paris agreed that consultancies like Deloitte aren’t here to necessarily take on the role of agencies. But, he said, there has been a marked shift in companies realizing they need to control the customer experience.

“From an opportunity perspective, brands and CMOs understand now that ‘I’m the owner and the owner of the data, and of the customer experience,’” said Paris.

Bill Duggan, svp at the ANA, said he expects about 65 percent of marketers to say they’ve taken some part of marketing capabilities in-house in the next release of a survey it does on the topic. In-house is attractive to companies because of cost and speed as well as transparency.

“Unlike agencies, consultants are more used to one-off projects,” said Duggan. “When it comes to helping brands figure out in-house capabilities, for example, they’re in a better place. Plus, they have their ear all the way up to the CEO or CFO, not just the CMO. They’re stronger in that way.”

Marketing services is also just one thing that consultancies do. They already count major marketers in their parent companies’ client bases, helping them sort out business processes, from technology to auditing to risk to even helping pick partners and manage agency review processes. That means they’re already often part of advertisers’ expenditure — putting them in a good position to take on projects like building internal programmatic capabilities, for example.

Paul Marcum, co-founder at Big Finish Digital and the former president at Truffle Pig, said consultancies often win because brands see them as being more “objective” and results-oriented. That means a chief financial officer can get behind a CMO’s decision to use them. “And all of the key components to in-housing, like IT, systems integration, workflow optimization, training are core competencies for consultants,” said Marcum, who is making it a point to provide more of a services model at his agency and recognizing that a shift must happen to compete in this new mode of working.

Consultancies, to brands at least, place a higher premium on business analytics and return on investment, as well as data. So, whether a marketer wants to just understand more about what’s happening with their spending or take back control of some of it, consultancies are seen as more trusted and capable of doing that, said Marcum.

Dan Salzman, global head of media at HP, told Digiday that even though HP is focusing on building internal capabilities, agencies remain important to HP, especially in creative. “We believe that deep creative capabilities will always sit outside of brands,” he said. “And that this is not a strength of today’s consulting firms. So, we are asking our agencies to return to their roots and invest deeply in creative.”

“We want to make sure we’re free to optimize for the brands,” said Paris. “Our incentives are directly aligned with the CMOs’. We can listen and work in the marketing organization.”

By Shareen Pathak

Sourced from DIGIDAY UK

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Brand Russia wins the World Cup

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By Steve Barrett

Fears about holding the biggest global sporting event in a country seen as cold, unfriendly, and austere were ultimately proved unfounded and a festival of football and friendship emerged from the brand misconceptions.

The quadrennial soccer World Cup reaches its climax in Moscow on Sunday when Croatia takes on France to determine who will win a tournament that has defied the skeptics on numerous levels.

Prior to the event there were many concerns raised about security, the readiness of Russia’s infrastructure and stadia to accommodate hundreds of thousands of visitors, and the ability of the host team to make a deep run in the tournament.

Four weeks later, all those fears have been allayed and the general consensus is that this has been one of the best World Cups since the first iteration of the competition in Uruguay in 1930.

Russia went out valiantly on penalties against Croatia in the quarter-finals, having vanquished Spain by the same method in the last 16. A host nation initially lacking in any positive expectations whatsoever was happy with that and pride was restored.

Having spent the last two weeks in Russia following the brave but ultimately unsuccessful England team, I can also attest to experiencing a country that was warm and welcoming and truly embraced this global sporting spectacle.

Russia laid on free train rides for fans to travel between the 12 host cities; they waived visa requirements for visitors and allowed free movement under temporary fan IDs for soccer fans; they allowed free use of buses, subways, and trams for fans traveling to stadiums; and there were thousands of super-friendly volunteers in cities, stadiums, and communal areas to help visitors with anything they needed.

My trip encompassed five disparate cities: Moscow, St Petersburg, Kaliningrad, Nizhny Novgorod, and Samara – the latter three of which have only allowed in foreign visitors since 1991.

As such, the Russians are not particularly used to tourists, especially rambunctious soccer fans from England and many other corners of the world. In such an atmosphere, it is no wonder that stereotypical views dominate the outlook of locals and visitors alike in their initial interactions.

Most Russian young people speak at least a little English, and one waitress in Nizhny Novgorod plucked up the courage to ask me and my friends “Do you like our city?” She was genuinely emotional and placed her fist over her heart when we assured her that yes, we loved her city and, in fact, we had loved our experience in Russia in general. She was so surprised and happy.

For England supporters, there was extra trepidation following events in Marseille two years ago during the Euro 2016 tournament, when hundreds of savage and well-organized Russian thugs attacked the English following a game between the two countries in the second-largest city in France.

The episode was compounded when Russian MP and football official Igor Lebedev tweeted “well done lads” and “keep it up” following the violence.

Further pre-publicity in English media prior to the tournament suggested Russian stormtroopers were gearing up for repeat performances on home turf, and consequently many fans stayed away. England fans were outnumbered in stadiums by countries including Panama and Colombia, which is unheard of and was unfortunate. It was only during this week’s semi-final in Moscow against Croatia that England fans really turned up in force.

But none of this scaremongering materialized and, frankly, one look at the Russian police was enough to deter even the bravest of wannabe football hooligans from causing trouble. I befriended one British news journalist who was there pretty much specifically to document any aggro caused by English fans, and he was reduced to writing pieces about the “middle-class World Cup” and supporters’ efforts to secure tickets.

The tournament was played out amid a festival atmosphere that portrayed the best of sport and its ability to bring many and disparate people together under a common cause.

Brand Russia has come out of the tournament well, and President Vladimir Putin will be well pleased with the World Cup experience. Whether the warm glow will continue once it’s over is another question. Locals I spoke to certainly noted there had been a totally different atmosphere in the country during the tournament.

And, of course, there are perennial skeptics such as former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, who has lived outside Russia since 2013 and maintains the World Cup is just a front for Putin propaganda and that journalists should have dug a little deeper beneath the surface to uncover the real truth about life in Russia for ordinary citizens.

It was unfortunate that the United States, along with Italy, Holland, and Chile failed to qualify for this year’s tournament. The U.S. and its fans have become fixtures at World Cups over the past decades and qualified for every one since 1986.

There were still lots of U.S. visitors in Russia for the World Cup, though it seemed they were more likely to be called Jose, Rohit, or Wei Yi rather than Chad, Chuck, or Chet.

To boil down the branding to its essence, the World Cup proved that nothing beats authenticity when it comes to communicating your values and that when people actually got together and talked face to face all the pre-publicity about rioting England fans, unfriendly Russians, and austere Soviet-style cityscapes disappeared into the ether.

Roll on the next World Cup, which is in 2022 in… Qatar. Oh my, a whole new set of perceptions ready to be deconstructed. Hopefully. Bring it on!

By Steve Barrett

Sourced from PR WEEK

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What you need to know in advertising today

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AT&T’s acquisition of AppNexus will open up loads of new web inventory and technology pipes to power the telecom’s aggressive ambition to challenge not only the duopoly of Facebook and Google but also rival TV networks for ad budgets.

And according to industry experts, we can expect to see similar ad-tech deals in the coming months — although it will be hard to top the size of AppNexus. After a few quiet years of ad-tech acquisitions and rough markets for public companies, expect more acquisitions.

To read more, click here.

In other news:

“Small but growing”: GE’s CMO Linda Boff reveals why it’s finally embracing programmatic advertising tactics after years of shunning them. While it’s not buying through programmatic ad exchanges yet, GE has started to experiment with different ways of targeting and using first-party data.

Inside the investor revolt that’s trying to take down Mark Zuckerberg. Business Insider has spoken with six prominent shareholders who said there was an unprecedented level of unrest among Facebook’s backers following a series of scandals.

Tim Cook continues to hold Facebook’s feet to the flames, arguing that hoarding data does “significant harm.” Cook said at a Fortune event that Apple “felt strongly about privacy when no one cared.”

Facebook hosted a meeting at its HQ with the FBI and other big tech companies, including Apple, Google, and Twitter. The New York Times described a tense atmosphere in which the tech companies repeatedly pressed federal officials for information, but with no luck.

Speaking of Facebook, Instagram would be worth $100 billion if it were a standalone company. An analysis by Bloomberg Intelligence found the picture sharing platform is worth 100 times what Facebook bought it for in 2012.

Hearst Magazines President David Carey is stepping down from his role at the end of the year. Carey will serve as chairman through 2019.

Check out Business Insider’s annual list of The 25 most innovative CMOs in the world in 2018.

By 

Sourced from Business Insider UK

 

 

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Can Purpose Save The Advertising Agency Business?

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By  Russ Stoddard

It’s widely said that the traditional advertising industry is on the decline. Last year, according to an article published in The Atlantic, ad agency jobs declined by 5,000, while firms that focus more on strategy, design or video haven’t grown since 2013.

The Wall Street Journal has reported on the declining tenure of CMOs. Forbes has written elsewhere about this trend, citing books like Madison Avenue Manslaughter that attribute the industry’s fall to the fact that large agencies rely on outdated business models. These models prioritize hourly rates and media sales mark-ups while “juniorizing” the industry as senior professionals move in-house for higher salaries.

Funny, because that’s not my experience at the agency I started back in 1991. From my vantage point, creative firms that serve a higher purpose are doing better than ever. Whether it’s our firm or fellow Certified B Corporations like the Black Sheep Agency in Houston and Public Inc. in Toronto, in my mind, there’s never been a better time to build purpose-driven brands.

While it can be tempting to blame the industry’s decline on technology and decry the commodification of traditional advertising services, that’s short-sighted. Sometimes entire industries die for a good reason. (My guess is that no one out there is still mourning the loss of VCRs.)

Our industry has long been complicit in promoting rampant consumption regardless of the consequences. To revive advertising – and to be an industry worth reviving – we need to get back to why we exist in the first place. It’s more than the problem we exist to solve; it’s about the fundamental social good that we aim to do in the world. Instead of simply trying to sell stuff, we need to refocus on helping build companies and brands that are worth something and helping design and promote products that create public benefit.

My purpose, for example, is to serve others and improve the world through social impact. My agency pivoted first in 2011 – heck, it was more like we stopped driving and taught ourselves how to fly a plane – by becoming a Certified B Corporation, and again in 2015 when we become our state’s first public benefit corporation.

Yes, survival in this ever-changing advertising industry informed our decision to build a different kind of agency, but more than anything, our decision to become a different kind of agency was about living our values fully and attracting more like-minded people with whom we wanted to work. While there’s always room for improvement, overall, I’d say it’s working.

Living your values looks like implementing creative benefits that reflect your shared humanity (think paid parental leave for all and 100% employer-paid health, vision and dental insurance). Also, try to volunteer each month as a team, regardless of how busy you are, because it reminds your team that you all serve a higher purpose than getting paid for client deliverables. Living your values also adds buzz as a great place to work. For example, beyond awards like Best in the World, our commitment to a purposeful culture has meant that employees come to us and choose to stay with us.

So, is social purpose the salve the ad world needs to thrive in an increasingly commoditized and complicated economy? I believe so. Trust in traditional institutions – from the media to Congress – is at historic lows. Consumers are increasingly inclined to make purchasing decisions that support their values. And workers are investing their talent with employers who intentionally integrate social purpose into their core business. As brands heed the call from leaders like BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, who in January called for all companies with assets under management to positively impact society, the pivot to purpose will go beyond being a “nice to have” and become a “must have” to succeed.

More companies must prioritize brand activism and employee engagement and pursue authentic, meaningful values rather than corporate robo-speak. Purpose-driven agencies that can shape and communicate this transformation effectively – from a position of demonstrated credibility within their own business actions – will remain strong, even in the face of a “dying” industry.

Feature Image Credit: Pexels

By  Russ Stoddard

Russ Stoddard is the Founder and President of Oliver Russell, a public benefit corporation that builds brands for purpose-driven companies.

Sourced from Forbes

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Email Marketing and Online Advertising – The Perfect Duo

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By Kevin George 

Being a marketer is tough. From identifying the different sources for capturing prospects and onboarding them to nurturing and motiving them to convert, a marketer needs to jump through a lot of hoops to win a loyal customer. To make matters worse, there are a million marketers globally striving to capture the attention of a prospective lead, making the marketing realm heavily competitive.

Thankfully, owing to the different channels available for marketers to reach out to their target audience, they can analyze the performance of each channel and improvise their marketing strategies accordingly. While ROI is the prima facto for analyzing the performance, it indirectly depends on how well you managed to acquire your customers and how well you retain them.

As per a survey done in 2017 by Targetmarketing, email was observed to be the most preferred source for both. Interestingly, online advertising has seen a substantial growth in acquiring new customers (i.e. from 43% in 2016 to 56% in 2017).

 

 

(Source)

What if we managed to combine the customer acquisition ability of online advertising with the already sky-rocketing statistics of email? Would it help create a better customer journey ending in better conversions? Let’s check out.

How online advertising can benefit email marketing

The global availability of internet means while everyone may not have an email address, they surely access popular websites on a daily basis. This means, while you need the email address of your lead to send an email, an online ad is easily viewable by your prospect on a website that they are currently browsing without you needing to collect any data of them beforehand. Moreover, the overall reach of a display ad, strategically placed on a website, has a greater chance of reaching your audience than a cold email sent to a prospect. Online advertising can help the email marketing realm in the following three ways:

  • List Growth: By displaying ads to prompt the viewer to subscribe to your email newsletters is the most prime application of online ads. You begin with identifying your target audience, building your customer persona based on common interests, provide an alluring incentive in your ad and BOOM! Your ads are displayed on webpages that your potential subscribers are visiting. Based on whether your ad copy resonates with their pain point and the incentive is a solution that they are looking for, you receive the email address of those prospects.In fact, Time Magazine used 9 banner ads based on the devices used to visit their website to generate email leads. The results were great as the CTR of the displayed banners went from 0.01$ to 0.08% all traffic.
  • Campaign-specific tone: Online ads have an advantage of being customized based on age, sex, location and behavioral By amalgamating your subscribers’ email addresses with the stored cookies, you can monitor the kind of ads the subscribers engage with and customize the email message tone for better engagements.
  • Setting email sending time based on ad viewing: Every email marketer has looked for the optimal sending time for ensuring maximum open rates before realizing that there is no specific sending time that is one-size-fits-all. Based on the time when you get maximum clicks on your display banner in a specific geographic zone, you can have an estimated time window when your subscribers might open your emails. Although this might not pin-point the best time for sending an email, with trial and error, you can experiment.

How email marketing can benefit online advertising

An average person is served around 1700 banner ads per month yet 85% of display ads clicked are by 8% of internet users (Source). This means that:

  • Your subscribers might not be getting relevant ads based on their purchase history.
  • Your subscribers might be suffering from banner blindness owing to the high volume of ads on a different website they had visited.

Email marketing can be helpful in such cases by providing relevance based on the preferences of the subscribers. Email marketing can be the leverage for your online advertisements in the following scenarios:

  • Increasing brand visibility: Online ads are displayed based on the search criteria which can be as broad as “Men” or “Men of 30-35 age” and as specific as “Men of 30-35 age from San Francisco Bay area looking for Hiking boots”. When you already have a buyer persona built purely from the online behavior of your subscribers, you can target your ads to only those prospects who come under your buyer persona. This way you tend to use your existing emailing list to identify and target more such people and thereby increase your brand visibility.
  • Retargeting ads: A rough adaptation of the conventional site retargeting, you can target email subscribers using email-based retargeting. Email retargeting depends on placing a tracking pixel or tracking cookie within the email body. Depending on which was the last email opened by your subscribers, you can display custom online banners and ads that serve as a reminder for the subscriber. This is especially useful in a situation where a subscriber has abandoned their cart and opened the relevant cart abandonment emails but not yet returned to their cart.
    1. Social media ads using email lists: Social media ads are where you build an audience segment based on their social interactions. The core advantage is that re-targeting options are already supported by social media platforms such as Facebook Custom Audiences, Twitter Tailored Audiences, Google’s Customer Match and LinkedIn’s Advertisers.

Wrapping Up:

Sometimes, the amount of boost you get from one marketing platform might not be sufficient and dabbling with two different platforms may consume a great deal of time to set up. However, the disadvantage of one platform being countered by the second one may work wonders in the longer run. Do you agree with the article above or not? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

By Kevin George 

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Sourced from Business 2 Community

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Snap Can’t Repeat YouTube’s Mistake

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By Rick Munarriz

Snapchat’s parent company is moving into soft-scripted documentary shows featuring a YouTube star — a recipe that hasn’t worked for Google before.

Snap Inc. (NYSE:SNAP) continues to go Hollywood. Snapchat’s parent company is dipping its feet into the soft-scripted docu-series niche, according to Variety. The move will expand its push into original programming to drive user engagement.

Endless Summer will star teen model Summer Mckeen, a beauty and fashion vlogger that has built up a huge following on Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) subsidiary Google’s YouTube. Mckeen now has more than 1.4 million subscribers to her YouTube channel. Hitching one’s post to a young YouTuber on the rise seems like a no-brainer. The built-in audience is there, and the salary demands are modest relative to actual movie and TV celebrities. However, Google itself has stumbled in plucking its most magnetic YouTube stars in its own push for original content. Snap is hoping to avoid failing as well.

Snapchat's live video chat feature in action.

Image source: Snap, Inc.

Seasons change

Endless Summer will follow the 19-year-old model and budding entrepreneur as she moves out of her home to live on her own in Laguna Beach. The show is currently in production. It is expected to debut in September.

This won’t be a one-time thing. Snap has other docu-series shows in development. Endless Summer just happens to be the first entry in this niche. Snapchat has had some initial success by turning to cable networks and other established media companies for the Snapchat Discover platform, but that content traffic took a hit earlier this year with the site’s controversial redesign.

Banking too heavily on a YouTuber isn’t a guarantee for success, a lesson that Alphabet has painfully learned with Google’s YouTube push to go premium. YouTube Red — recently rebranded as YouTube Premium — hoped to get its freeloaders to pay up for its subscription-based service by casting popular YouTube personalities in studio-produced scripted and reality shows. It didn’t work. The same stars that had amassed tens of millions of YouTube subscribers weren’t enough to sway people over to the other side of the paywall.

A couple of those original YouTube Red stars would also go on to get into hot water for comments and actions in some of their videos, hurting YouTube’s credibility in tapping marketable stars. Instead of trying to bring more creators into the fold, YouTube alienated the community by doubling down on its biggest stars in February by dismissing smaller contributors from its monetization platform. The purge continues, as many new creators applying for monetization on YouTube have been waiting for months since registering for the perk. Even many of those cut loose in February — told that their readmission to the program would be automatically reviewed within a week or two of meeting the minimum requirements for monetization — continue to be left out in the cold. I should know. I’m on my fifth week.

Snap should still make this work. An important distinction between Snapchat Discover and YouTube Premium is that Snapchat’s platform for professionally produced content remains a free ad-supported offering. Folks that didn’t want to pay up for YouTube Red (and now YouTube Premium) will not have to worry about that particular tollbooth here. YouTube may have had the data on the stars it would go on to cast, but Snap is the one that has the right price in the eyes of its young penny-pinching viewers.

Alphabet (A shares) is not on our top “Buy” list, but these 10 stocks are
Investing geniuses David and Tom Gardner just released their best stocks to buy now — and it could pay to listen. Especially when you consider their average stock pick is up 353% vs. a mere 81% for the S&P 500.

They just shared what they think are the ten best stocks for investors to buy right now to members inside their service Motley Fool Stock Advisor… and Alphabet (A shares) wasn’t one of them! That’s right — they think these 10 stocks are even better buys.

By Rick Munarriz

Sourced from The Motley Fool

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Microsoft takes first whack at browser ad blocking with Edge on Android, iOS

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Microsoft in the past week updated its Edge browsers for Android and iOS, adding a built-in web advertisement blocker – a first for the Redmond, Wash. company.

The browser, Windows 10’s default but since October available on the two mobile operating systems, was refreshed June 19 and 21 for Android and iOS, respectively, with technology based on eye/o GmbH’s Adblock Plus, one of the world’s most widely-used ad blockers.

Eye/o spokesman Ben Williams confirmed that a partnership deal between the two companies had been reached, but he declined to comment further or answer questions about the financial terms. “The real beneficiaries here are users, who now have more options to customize and improve their online experience on the go,” Williams said in an email.

The in-Edge ad-blocker is disabled by default in both the Android and iOS versions, requiring the user to manually switch it on. In both, the setting is accessible from Settings/Content blockers once within the browser.

“You’ll see acceptable ads. Change this any time in Settings,” reads text displayed in the iOS edition of Edge once Adblock Plus has been engaged.

This is the first time Microsoft has added a web ad blocker to any of its browsers, although Adblock Plus – and a multitude of rivals – have been available for years as browser add-ons for Internet Explorer as well as Edge.

Microsoft declined to answer questions about the partnership and, when asked whether it plans something similar for Windows 10’s browser, would only say that an Adblocker Plus extension is available for that version.

The move puts Microsoft in the same category as Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox, two others of the Big Four browsers with ad-blocking technology already baked in or planned for this year. Google introduced a form of ad blocking in Chrome earlier this year – an effort that purports to scrub the most annoying ads – and Mozilla has laid out a timetable for its own stab at deleting ads that will reach users in September or October.

Notably, Microsoft didn’t broadcast the news that it had integrated Adblock Plus with Edge on Android and iOS. That was decidedly different than the tack that Google took with Chrome; it made sure users – as well as site publishers – knew that ad filtering was coming, talking it up for a year prior to actual launch.

In the past, Microsoft has been hesitant to weigh in on one side or another when browser controversies have developed, perhaps remembering antitrust actions in the U.S. and European Union that originated in complaints about its integration of browser and operating system. For example, when the Do Not Track (DNT) privacy movement got rolling, Microsoft was initially adamant about automatically enabling DNT as it was developing Internet Explorer 10 (IE10) in 2012. Later, Microsoft backed away after ad industry lobbying groups yowled, calling the DNT move “unacceptable” and arguing that IE’s setting would “harm consumers, hurt competition, and undermine American innovation.”

At the time, IE accounted for more than half of the global browser share.

But Edge, whether on the desktop or on a mobile device, is no IE. According to analytics vendor Net Applications, Edge is the preferred browser on fewer than one out of every eight Windows 10 PCs. On mobile, Edge’s user share was an anemic eight-tenths of one percent last month.

In lieu of a mobile browser of its own – Microsoft forfeited that market when it surrendered to reality and gave up on putting Windows on smartphones – the firm used the guts of Chrome (the Blink rendering engine) to build its Android Edge, and the foundation of Apple’s Safari (the WebKit engine) to craft the iOS version. The company has pitched these Edges as companions to Edge on Windows 10, especially to flesh out a feature dubbed “Continue on PC” in the desktop OS.

Edge for Android can be downloaded from Google Play; Edge for iOS can be downloaded from the App Store.

adblocker in edge android Microsoft
Disabled by default, the baked-in Adblocker Plus can be switched on from Settings/Content blockers in Android (shown here) and iOS.

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Senior Reporter Gregg Keizer covers Windows, Office, Apple/enterprise, web browsers and web apps for Computerworld.

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AT&T’s advertising CEO: We want to change what ‘everybody still hates’ about ads

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  • “The world needs advertising more than ever. We just need to make it more relevant,” says AT&T Advertising and Analytics CEO Brian Lesser.
  • “Subscription video on demand is a great service” but won’t be able to fund “all the content that’s being produced,” Lesser says.
  • He dodges questions about a Wall Street Journal report that AT&T is in talks to buy ad tech firm AppNexus.
AT&T’s Brian Lesser on the future of advertising  

AT&T’s Brian Lesser on the future of advertising from CNBC.

The newly combined AT&T-Time Warner is looking to reinvent advertising — but to do so, it needs to buy more technology, AT&T Advertising and Analytics CEO Brian Lesser told CNBC on Wednesday.

Lesser, who spoke on “Squawk Box” from the Cannes Lions advertising and marketing festival in France, dodged questions about a Wall Street Journal report that AT&T is in talks to buy ad tech firm AppNexus in what could be a $1.6 billion deal.

AppNexus is backed by WPP, where Lesser used to work as CEO of the ad giant’s GroupM media unit. Lesser is also a former AppNexus board member.

“There’s lots of rumors that come up at Cannes,” said Lesser, though he did say “we need more tech” in order to build AT&T’s $2 billion ad business “into something more significant.”

Lesser echoed what AT&T Chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson told CNBC on Friday, a day after closing the $85.4 billion Time Warner acquisition. Stephenson said the company expects in coming weeks to make smaller acquisitions to enable its ad platform goals.

“The world needs advertising more than ever. We just need to make it more relevant and make matter for consumers,” Lesser said. “Everybody still hates advertising when it interrupts the content. It’s our job to reduce the load on consumers, make it a better experience.”

Lesser described technology that AT&T has to keep viewers more engaged. “Imagine you’re watching content [on TV] and instead of interrupting … with a traditional commercial break we can show an icon on the screen that indicates to you that there might be a mixed-reality experience [on mobile] where you can get more information about the car you just saw or the dress you just saw.”

Taking ads completely out of the picture with a Netflix-type paid subscription model is not sustainable, Lesser said. “Subscription video on demand is a great service and consumers love it. But you can’t possibly pay for all the content that’s being produced now through a subscription.”

Hulu offers a hybrid paid model, one subscription tier that’s completely ad-free and a less expensive tier with “limited commercials.”

Amazon, the other streaming juggernaut, offers its video and music services free to subscribers of Prime, which includes free, faster deliveries for purchases on the e-commerce side.

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Longer videos are coming to Instagram

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By Kurt Wagner

Plus Messenger’s autoplay video ads, Pinterest’s shopping ambitions and more news from Cannes Lions.

Greetings from Cannes Lions, the annual advertising boondoggle in the South of France where the ad industry gathers to wheel and deal, take advantage of lavish expense reports, and where drinking rosé is acceptable at any time of the day.

Many of the digital media industry’s largest advertising platforms — Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, to name a few — spend the week in Cannes in luxurious beachside cabanas, trying to lock down advertising deals for the back half of the year. But a lot of the hubbub is tailored around social events, like beach parties and fancy dinners at nearby hotels. As one ad tech executive put it to me Monday night, “there’s a fine line between networking and not working.” It’s sometimes tough to tell who’s doing what.

But real business does get done in Cannes [Ed. note: Kurt, you’re protesting too much]. Many companies see it as a mid-year check-in where they can talk to partners about plans for the second half of the year. (Vegas’ CES, held in January each year, is the early-year equivalent to Cannes Lions.)

Here’s what I’m hearing:

Instagram is preparing to launch longform video

Whoops! Scratch thatI This week’s most intriguing product announcement isn’t actually happening in Cannes — it’s happening at Instagram’s new San Francisco office, though media companies here are certainly taking notice and Instagram plans to stream it live to reporters here on the ground. (Another big ad story that people are talking about at Cannes, even though it’s not happening at Cannes: AT&T’s plan to acquire ad tech company AppNexus for $1.6 billion.)

The Facebook-owned app has a press event scheduled for 9 am PT Wednesday morning, and multiple sources say the company is planning to unveil a longform video feature, which would let people share videos up to an hour in length. The last time Instagram did a big press event like this was in 2013 when it unveiled Direct, its private messaging service. This doesn’t happen often.

The longer videos will reside in their own section of the app, these sources say, but it’s unclear if Instagram is going after the kind of original programming that Snapchat offers inside its Discover section. Instead, it seems Instagram is simply hoping that brands and advertisers will see the new section as an alternative to YouTube (and even Facebook) for posting longform shows and videos. Eventually, we imagine Instagram will try and monetize these longer videos with mid-roll or pre-roll ads, similar to what the company is doing now inside Facebook Watch.

We’ll know soon what the product looks like, but one possible benefit of Instagram’s new feature might be its openness. Snapchat Discover has always been exclusive, only available to certain media partners or big-time celebrities. It sounds as though Instagram’s product will be available to everyone, giving more people an opportunity to participate. Then again, there are obvious cons to letting more people participate. Ask YouTube.

The bigger question, though, is whether or not people actually want to watch longer video inside Instagram. One media executive I spoke with in Cannes on Tuesday likened it to McDonald’s selling a salad. That might work for some people, but, “It’s still not a burger.”

Messenger is running autoplay video ads

Facebook’s Messenger service started rolling out autoplay video ads this week, meaning you might soon see a video in your inbox alongside messages from friends and family. The messaging inbox is typically a personal space, and it’s unclear how the addition of video ads will go over with users.

“Top priority for us is user experience,” Stefanos Loukakos, who runs Messenger’s ad business, told me from a beachside cabana. “So we don’t know yet [if these will work]. However, signs until now, when we tested basic ads, didn’t show any changes with how people used the platform or how many messages they send.”

“Video might be a bit different, but we don’t believe so.”

Pinterest wants people shopping more on its service, and is hiring like crazy

Pinterest is in Cannes for the fourth straight year, and rented a nice pier on the beach that the company is using for meetings. A few takeaways from our sit-down interview with Jon Kaplan, the company’s global head of sales:

  • Pinterest wants more people shopping on Pinterest. To do that, Kaplan says the company needs more “shoppable pins,” or photos and videos that identify the products you see in them, and give you a chance to click and buy that product right there. Right now, a “single-digit” percentage of pins on the service are shoppable, Kaplan says. He wouldn’t share a hard goal, but says there are some categories Pinterest plans to focus on. “Home and fashion will be the two big focus areas for us to start,” he said. “We have aspirations for that to be completely shoppable in those categories.”
  • Pinterest is boosting its sales team. Kaplan said the company plans to grow the sales team, which was at “several hundreds” at the beginning of the year, by more than 50 percent.
  • Pinterest is finally starting to sell ads in non-English-speaking countries for the first time. The company started testing ads in France on Monday, and Kaplan says Germany is next on the list. All businesses would love to add more revenue, but Pinterest in particular. Last year, the company missed internal revenue targets, but many believe Pinterest is on an IPO track, anyway. More revenue streams should help with the process.

Snapchat and Instagram have dueling story exhibits

Both Snapchat and Instagram are showing off art installations at Cannes, and both companies are making user Stories a big part of the exhibit.

Snapchat’s exhibit is called Sound Stories, and the company worked with an artist named Christian Marclay who watched thousands of public user stories to find audio clips he then turned into art. In one section of the exhibit, Cannes attendees could play a piano where the keys correspond to sounds pulled from actual user Stories.

Instagram’s exhibit, which was created by artist Es Devlin, was less interactive, but flashier. Attendees could watch a three-minute video that showed the importance of storytelling over time, with some clips from users’ stories littered in. The show ends with the line: “Can one story change history? Does any story really vanish once it’s been told?”

The exhibits were interesting, but even more interesting was that Stories was the format of choice for companies. It’s clear that Stories are not just growing in popularity among users, but they’re growing in importance for these business, too.

Is Cannes Lions shrinking?

Cannes feels less crowded than years past, and attendees are noticing. The obvious explanation is that some major ad agencies, like Publicis, sat out of this year’s conference. We’ve asked Cannes representatives for attendance figures and will update if we hear back, but those figures may not tell the whole story. Many people come to the conference but don’t actually register — a badge isn’t needed to hold meetings or get into nearby hotels where much of the action takes place.

Feature Image Credit: Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom and Facebook CEO Mark ZuckerbergFacebook / Mark Zuckerberg

By Kurt Wagner

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