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In News

Oath CEO Tim Armstrong slightly backed off his claim of challenging Google and Facebook in online advertising

July 6, 2017 No Comments

Oath CEO Tim Armstrong is slightly backing off his bold attack on Facebook and Google. Meanwhile, the company also seems to be somewhat downplaying its Verizon relationship in its pitch to advertisers.

Those were two of the takeaways from a press conference hosted at the Cannes advertising festival by Oath–the Verizon-owned company’s first public sit down since the telecom giant completed its acquisition of Yahoo.

Armstrong has spoken openly about taking on Google and Facebook, the two giants of online advertising. But at the event, Armstrong said, “Our goal is not to directly compete with Google and Facebook. Our goal is to basically open up new relationships with consumers in a differentiated way.”

Instead, Armstrong looked to paint the company as being a safe company for marketers, without mentioning the challenge that Google and others have had when it comes to ads landing in the wrong place (like next to hate videos on YouTube or on Breitbart articles without their knowledge).

“You hear the advertising world really, vocally crying out for trusted relationships,” he said. “We feel very strongly that from our current position from what the marketplace wants today, we’re going to be able to deliver a very trusted safe audience experience.”

Still, Armstrong acknowledged that brand safety may not be a huge selling point long term. Thus, hinted that over the next year, the company is planning to introduce a set of ad products that “include the consumer in a disruptive way,” and that the future is about “two way relationships between consumers and brands.”

Yet, when asked about the power of using Verizon’s robust consumer data for ad targeting, Oath president Tim Mahlman quickly steered the question toward the company’s plans to use Yahoo’s data from its registered users and other third party data sources for advertising.

A big motivation for Verizon’s acquisition of AOL and later Yahoo was to take advantage of Verizon’s vast pools of data on its subscribers — it knows where they live, what apps they use, where they go, etc. — and use that for powerful ad targeting. Ideally that asset puts the company in a better spot to compete with Facebook and Google, which also boast of powerful consumer data sets that help set the companies apart in the ad business.

The executives behind Verizon’s Oath gathered in Cannes on Monday Business Insider

It may be that Oath wants to be cautious when talking up using its wireless customer data, given the tough regulatory environment in Europe when it comes to ad targeting.

Still, Oath’s goals are lofty. By 2020 the company wants its sea of brands, from HuffPost to Yahoo Sports to TechCrunch, to reach 2 billion consumers and pull in $10 to $2o billion in revenue.

To get there, besides integrating Yahoo, Verizon wants to grow its global footprint, Armstrong said, while also “disrupting” brand marketing. “I like to say, ‘Google is search, Facebook is social and we’re going to be brands,” he said.

“Our challenge is, we have to do more than meet the market growth rates,” Armstrong said. “We have to take [market] share overall … Our engines need to fly faster than the tailwind.”

Feature Image: AOL CEO Tim Armstrong speaking at IGNITION 2016. Michael Seto/Business Insider

By Mike Shields

Sourced from Business Insider UK

In News

Facebook Unveils New Tools For Marketers To Create And Test Mobile Ads

June 27, 2017 No Comments

By Jeff Beer.

The social network hits Cannes with new features for creative marketers to use on its Creative Hub platform.

In 2016, Facebook took in about $27 billion in ad revenue, second in the world only to Google’s monstrous $79 billion, and more than double the globe’s third-biggest advertising earner Comcast. So it’s understandable why the social network is an influential presence at the 2017 Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

The company is hosting a whole host of panel talks, discussion sessions, and more, between its own beachside speakers series, and execs like Sheryl Sandberg talking about how creative mobile advertising work can help brands build communities around their mission and products.

But behind the obligatory show of the Cannes Lions stage, Facebook is also taking the opportunity to unveil new tools for marketers to use on its platform, and talk to both agencies and brands about where to go from here.

“This year in Cannes one area of focus will be how marketing is becoming more agile,” says Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s VP of Global Marketing Solutions. “To move at the speed of the consumer and drive results, marketers must test, learn and iterate much more rapidly than they have in the past, and it’s our job to work across the industry, to build tools and solutions that will help marketers succeed in today’s mobile world.”

Last year at the festival, Facebook unveiled Creative Hub, an online platform for agencies and brands to more easily create ads for Facebook and Instagram. This week they’re launching two new features for Creative Hub around a more efficient way to test and distribute the ads created on the platform.

Agencies have praised working with the Creative Hub, so these new tools should only improve their ability to create and distribute ads. JWT New York executive creative director Ben James says the Creative Hub has completely changing the way they present work to clients. “Because of this tool, I think we’re going to see creative work from agencies speeding up dramatically when they understand and use this tool. We were shocked at how we could so easily share work straight to our phones. We just can’t educate people about this fast enough.”

Droga5 strategist Adam Van Dyke says these tools help them stay as up-to-date as possible on the ever-changing social media landscape. “The Facebook Creative Hub is a valuable tool that provides creative inspiration, helps us to understand the intricacies of each ad format, and allows us to easily mock up work for presentations,” says Van Dyke.

The first new Creative Hub feature will give marketers a snapshot of video results, insights advertisers need to optimize their ads based on real metrics, to make sure it’s perfect for the mobile feed. The second major development is the ability to create and deliver your ad, all from directly within Creative Hub, cutting out the time and, often, extra formatting of ads when being sent between creative agencies and media agencies or other partners. Both touch on Everson’s themes of agility and speed.

Graham Mudd, director of product marketing at Facebook says these tools not only help their marketing partners, but also Facebook itself make its ad system more efficient.

“The new tools allow a creative agency to test a campaign or work, then once it decides it’s good to go, allows it to bundle it up and pass it to the media agency who puts the budget behind it and executes the buy,” says Mudd. “Underlying this is that a connection has been made between the creative assets, the creative agency, the media agency and the advertiser, can now all be associated together in our systems, which we’re hoping will allow us to continue to build functionality that continues to connect these areas of the (advertising) ecosystem.”

The theme of agility and speed continues in the company’s annual Creative and Client Council meeting, which puts two of Facebook’s advisory councils in one room to discuss industry issues both generally and how Facebook can help address them.

Facebook Creative Shop chief creative officer Mark D’Arcy says the meeting will involve new idea presentations, a look at the year that was, and a lot of discussion around the need for more collaboration between the clients and agencies of the world. In that sense it’s continuing a conversation D’Arcy spoke about here last year.

“We spend a lot of time in our industry talking about what we make–and Cannes is a perfect example of that–and I think one of the big conversations we want to have is around how we build, and the agility of how we build, and the way in which the creative process needs to look at other ways to come together,” he says. “How do we work at a greater velocity? How do we approach diversity? How do we approach collaborative credit? These are questions that come up in our industry around the globe. So we talk a lot about providing forums for these questions to be addressed.”

In News

Apple’s new anti-tracking system will make Google and Facebook even more powerful

June 20, 2017 No Comments

By Russell Brandom.

The brutal logic of online advertising

The internet is an ad-tracking machine. It’s been true for long enough that we rarely talk about it anymore, but it bears repeating. For all the free speech and free information, nearly any site you visit will come with a dozen different tracking cookies, enabling uniquely tailored ads to follow you from site to site. Targeted advertising is still the best way to make money on the internet, so those cookies are everywhere. (The Verge is no exception; that VR room isn’t cheap.) Sites try not to be creepy about it, some harder than others, but the overarching logic is hard to escape. It’s a multibillion-dollar business, and it pays for nearly everything you see online.

Yesterday at WWDC, Apple threw a wrench into that system. Alongside new autoplay blockers, the latest versions of Safari (currently in beta) will have a new tool for blocking third-party ad trackers, aggressively identifying and blocking any cookies used to track users across the web. As Craig Federighi said onstage, “It’s not about blocking ads, but your privacy is protected.”

It’s an important move, particularly for the mobile web, where Safari manages just under 30 percent of browsing sessions. When Safari added the option for ad-blocking with iOS 9, it was a day of reckoning for many web companies — raising hard questions about the future of mobile browsing. This week’s announcement is primed to make a similar splash.

According to Marc Al-Hames, who works on the privacy-focused browser Cliqz, companies are already scrambling to figure out the best way around the new restrictions. “This is a cat-and-mouse game, and it always has been,” Al-Hames says. “Users try out different things to protect themselves, and there’s a multibillion-dollar ad tech industry thinking of ways to circumvent it.”

Surprisingly, Google and Facebook are poised to come out of that game ahead. But to understand why, we need to dig into how the new policy works. Safari has had some version of cookie-blocking for years, but the previous default was to allow cookies “from websites I visit.” The new policy goes further, using machine learning to identify tracking behavior no matter how the cookies are served. In many cases, blocking those cookies outright would break basic functionalities. Instead, Safari puts a strict time limit on how long the cookie can stick around, keeping cookies available for 24 hours after a visit and outright deleting anything older than 30 days.

The crucial distinction is between the first-party sites you’re purposefully visiting and the third-party trackers that come along for the ride. As long as a cookie is associated with a website you’ve visited in the last 24 hours, Safari won’t change much — which gives popular sites like Facebook and the various Google services an easy way around the new restrictions. The systems hit hardest by Safari’s new policy will be third-party systems like Criteo or Adroll, which silently coordinate cookies in the background of thousands of sites. Not coincidentally, Criteo’s stock plummeted in the wake of the announcement.

That’s much less of a problem for Google and Facebook, which already dominate online ads. Most people visit Facebook or a Google service every day, and those users will never be too far outside the 24-hour window. Both services also work as a kind of permanent login, used to access sites like Twitter or WordPress without a separate password. As a result, most users stay logged in to Google and Facebook as long as they’re online. Combine that with omnipresent Like buttons, and you’ve got an easy way to see what people are doing on the web. And as long as you’re visiting Facebook once a day, Safari won’t get in the way of that tracking.

Google and Facebook’s biggest challengers in ad-targeting are telecom companies like Verizon and Comcast, which were given a huge boost by recent shifts in US telecom policy. But those companies should fare just as well. Both Verizon and Comcast invested heavily in web media alongside advertising tech, which means they can take advantage of the same first-party exception as Google and Facebook. (Disclosure: One of Comcast’s media investments is a minority stake in Vox Media, parent company of The Verge.) As long as you’re visiting AOL or Huffington Post sites once a day, Verizon will have no problem targeting ads, and cookie-serving deals may extend that reach even further.

At the same time, ad networks that aren’t attached to popular websites will take a serious hit. It won’t be a total blackout, since most modern networks supplement cookies with more advanced fingerprinting techniques that profile visitors without transmitting any data. They can also try to make cookie-serving agreements with websites, collecting data at the same time that they serve the ads themselves. But the new Safari policy will still put those ad companies at a permanent disadvantage to more powerful players like Google and Facebook. Those companies were already outmatched — with Google and Facebook capturing 90 cents of every new dollar spent on online ads — and the new browser moves will make it even harder for them to survive. The result will tip the balance even farther toward the handful of giant companies that already dominate the web.

Apple isn’t the only force pushing the web in that direction. The European Commission’s recent anti-tracking proposals would establish a similar distinction between first and third parties. Only last week, Google announced an ad-blocker for Chrome that’s likely to edge out small players even further. It’s still hard to say what that will mean for smaller websites and everyday users, but Google and Facebook will only become more central to the business of the web.

Underneath it all is the basic logic of consolidation. These players — Google, Facebook, Verizon, and Comcast — control huge portions of how we connect to the web, from the servers to the fiber to the device, ending with the browser itself. Now, they’re using that control to play for advantage in ad-tracking, with users stuck in the middle. iOS and Safari are incredibly powerful tools in that fight, and by all appearances, Apple is using them to try to craft a less invasive web experience for its users. But after more than a decade of ad tech, untangling that knot may be harder than the company realizes.

By Russell Brandom

Sourced from THE VERGE

In News

7 Common Facebook Advertising Mistakes (And How to Fix Them)

June 14, 2017 No Comments

By Braveen Kumar.

It’s no secret that Facebook offers one of the largest, most robust advertising platforms for businesses of all sizes to reach their target customers.

But as a do-everything-yourself entrepreneur, it can be frustrating to discover just how much trial and error and learning is involved in the beginning, especially as you bet real dollars on real outcomes.

The good thing is that many of us tend to make the same mistakes, especially when we’re starting out.

Whether your Facebook ads haven’t gotten you a single sale or it feels like you’re not seeing the right return on what you’re spending, here are some common (and sometimes costly) Facebook advertising mistakes and how to fix them.

If you’re completely new to Facebook Advertising, be sure to check out: The Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Advertising.

1. Not Investing In Audience Research Upfront

Which one do you think is more likely to perform better?

A good ad in front of the wrong people? Or a mediocre ad in front of the right people?

I’d probably put my money on having the right audience first.

Facebook is home to a diverse audience and, depending on what you’re selling, your audience could be bigger, smaller, or even completely different from the one you set out to target.

You’ll have to test out some audiences in the beginning, before you start testing specific stuff like ad copy or format. But that doesn’t mean you can’t give yourself a head-start with some educated guesses.

A good way to look at targeting is to ask yourself if you’d be willing to bet money on the odds that those people would be interested in buying your product (because that’s technically what you’re doing).

For example, you might think people who like “Starbucks” on Facebook might be interested in buying your specialty coffee. Maybe some of them will, but a lot of different people like and drink Starbucks (over 33 million on Facebook in fact). You want to find a niche that aligns with your products.

If you’ve chosen a niche product (e.g. t-shirts for people who own pugs), you’ll have a much easier time than someone whose products don’t have a specific audience.

One of the best ways to find interests you can target is to put yourself in the shoes of whoever you think your customer is:

What would they Google?
What pages would they “like” on Facebook?
What influencers or celebrities would they follow?
What apps would they use?
What publications/blogs do they read?
What competitors are they already buying from?
Where would they hang out on Reddit?

Do some exploring and see what you learn about the interests that make them unique compared to the masses.

If you can find a Facebook Page that relates to what you’ve found in your research, go Like it under your personal profile. Facebook will suggest related pages that offer up even more interests you can potentially target. Again, ignore the ones that don’t have a strong connection to purchasing intent in some way.

You can use Facebook’s Audience Insights tool to help brainstorm additional targeting ideas based on the interests and qualities you have a good feeling about. You can also use it to get some insight into how that audience behaves, how they spend, and more if you’re curious.

2. Targeting an Audience That’s Too Broad

A common mistake with paid advertising, regardless of platform, is going too broad with the audiences we choose to target.

You might think everyone is a potential customer, but what you’re paying for is the people your ads reach. Why pay to reach the wrong people?

A potential audience that’s between 500K to 1.5 million is often a good size to start with for many ecommerce businesses.

If your audience is too big, try narrowing it with interests that your main audience “must also match for”. If it’s too small, try adding interests to create a larger pool of users until you find your sweet spot.

3. Impatience

With any kind of paid advertising, it can feel like you’re losing money if you’re not getting any results right away. Sometimes you may feel compelled to take control of your ads and tweak things to “optimize” them so they can perform better as soon as possible.

But in the beginning especially, gathering data and insight is key.

That’s why it’s important to have a clear idea of how much you’re actually willing to spend to get one customer.

Let’s say your cost of goods is $17 and you’re selling the product for $50. That gives you around $33 to spend on acquiring a customer to break even. Be willing to go beyond that with your budget in the beginning as you test your audience and ads.

Try not to make any decisions about your ads, like pausing or tweaking them, until you’ve reached 1000 people. At that point you’ve got enough data to at least learn something from your ads’ performance, even if they don’t get any sales.

The other way that impatience ends up harming your performance is when you don’t give Facebook the opportunity to learn over time. If you haven’t installed your Facebook Pixel (which is super easy to do on your Shopify store), you should definitely do so. Facebook’s advertising platform uses the Pixel to track and learn based on performance data to improve its targeting.

For example, if you set your Campaign’s objective to optimize based on purchases at the start, Facebook may not know what a “purchasing” customer looks like when you’ve had zero sales. But as you rack up more purchases, that data set becomes better informed.

4. Not Isolating What You’re Testing

In marketing, insight is often undervalued in the pursuit of results. And while it’s strongly encouraged that you experiment and test things with your ads, you can only really learn as you go if you test one variable at a time.

Testing different audiences, each presented with different ads, at different times won’t tell you much even if you stumble across something that gets you better results. Was it the audience? Was it the ad? Was it the timing? Was it a combination of a few things?

As much as you can, try to isolate one variable to test so you can go forward after the experiment with knowledge you can act upon. In the beginning especially, you should be testing at the Advert Set level with the audiences you’re targeting.

Keep in mind what you can change and test at each level of your Ad Manager account:

Campaign: Your objective that Facebook will optimize based on (add to cart, purchases, etc)
Advert Set: The audience you’re targeting, placement, and schedule.
Ad: Links, format, creative, etc.

5. Not Squeezing the Value Out of Your Ad Spend

Even if your primary goal is to get sales, that’s not the only possible return you can get on your ads.

In fact, there’s a lot of additional value you can get from an ad that “failed” to get your any customers.

You can:

Collect emails from visitors to your site.
Get more likes and comments on your post to build social proof for your ad over time.
Engage directly with people who comment on your ads to help them purchase.
Retarget visitors to your site as “warm traffic” in the future.
Set up an email sequence to recover any abandoned carts you might’ve gotten.
Invite people who have liked or reacted to your page post to also like your Facebook Page (simply click on the reactions of the post itself).

There’s also the priceless insight you can collect from your paid traffic.

I strongly recommend that you set up Google Analytics and Hot Jar (both are free) and take a look at how your traffic is actually behaving on your website. This will help you identify whether your problem is your audience, your website layout, or some other issue.

Hot Jar, in particular, is useful because it lets you visually see how traffic is behaving on your website: how far down the page visitors are scrolling before leaving, what they click on, as well as recordings of actual individual visits.

6. Not Optimizing Your Ad Creative for Attention and Clicks

Once you’ve figured out your audience, a good creative for your ads can help you improve your results.

A lot of different things go into a good ad, but here are some best practices to help:

Have a focal point in either the image, copy, or video thumbnail that grabs the eye.
Consider using emojis to add personality and visual elements in your copy.
Collect social proof (likes, comments, shares) over time each time you run an ad, which makes your ad that much more powerful.
Create multiple clickthrough opportunities with links and product tags (you’ll need a Facebook Shop, which you can easily add through Shopify).
Experiment with different ad formats within the same Advert Set, especially video as Facebook has been known to favor this format.

For more ad inspiration, be sure to take a look at the Adicted.io ad gallery.

7. Not Taking Advantage of All Your Available Insights

A lot of the features in the Facebook Ad Manager get lost in its own complexity, especially when it comes to getting a view of your performance to glean insights.

The default columns you see in the Ad Manager, for example, don’t show all the data that’s actually useful to you. You should definitely customize your columns to get additional information.

Consider adding the following to get a better idea of ad performance, along with whatever else you think might help:

CTR: Click-through rate is the percentage of people who clicked on your ad after seeing it.
Cost-per-click: How much you’re paying for each click on your ad.
Website Purchases: The number of purchases the ad brought in.
Website Purchase Conversion Value: The total value of purchases made attributed to the ad.
Frequency: How many times on average each person you’re reaching has seen an ad. Sometimes you’ll see your ad performance significantly dip, and it’s because Facebook is simply showing the ad to the same people multiple times.
Reach: How many unique (not repeat) people you’ve reached.
Relevance Score: How relevant your ad is to the audience you’re targeting, based on your first 500 impressions (this has a big impact on your costs).
Budget: How much money you’ve dedicated daily or in total to the advert set.
Cost per Result: How much it cost to get your campaign objective.
CPM: How much you’re paying for 1000 impressions.

You can also use the “Breakdown” options to analyze your ad performance based on a number of factors, such as the devices that sales were made on, and how gender impacts performance.

A super simple, but highly impactful practice you can also adopt is using a standardized, meaningful naming convention across your Ad Manager account at each level. This way, at a glance, you can tell things like what audience you’re targeting and what you’re testing.

What Have You Learned?

Facebook advertising can take some time to get the hang of, but as one of the most effective ways to distribute any message, it’s definitely worth investing in and learning from the experiences of others.

By Braveen Kumar.

Braveen Kumar is a Writer at Shopify where he develops resources to empower entrepreneurs to start and succeed in business.

Sourced from Shopify Blogs

In News

Facebook And Google Shareholders Make Noise About Fake News

June 2, 2017 No Comments

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Fake news was “both widely shared and heavily tilted in favour of Donald Trump” in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, according to a March 2017 NYU/Stanford study. Their database detected 115 pro-Trump fake stories shared on Facebook 30 million times, and 41 pro-Clinton fake stories shared 7.6 million times. Nearly a quarter of web content shared on Twitter by users in the battleground state of Michigan during the final days of last year’s U.S. election campaign was fake news, according to a University of Oxford study.

These are mind-boggling statistics.

Facebook and Alphabet Inc. (the parent company of Google) are now currently under pressure. The perception is that they have not done enough to curb the online epidemic of “fake news.” And shareholders are starting to worry. They are pressing for Facebook and Alphabet Inc. to issue detailed reports.

Investment advisor Arjuna Capital engaged both companies to evaluate the impact that fabricated content is having on their platforms and business. Arjuna Capital is an investment firm focused on sustainable and impact investing.

Natasha Lamb, managing partner at Arjuna Capital, said: “Fake news is not about spin or confirmation bias – It’s about fabrication. And when fabrication is disseminated so easily at scale, the way we have seen through social media, it represents a threat to our democracy. If Facebook maintains a platform of confusion and distortion it will lose the trust of its users, in which case they will simply move on to the next thing. And that’s what concerns long-term investors. We need to know this is being handled responsibly over time. It will not be solved through a simple algorithm tweak or better user education—those are merely pieces of a larger puzzle. Right now, we think the issue is being fumbled.”

Michael Connor, executive director of Open MIC, a non-profit organisation that works with investors on media and technology issues said: “Issues like fake news and hate speech aren’t going to go away any time soon – and Facebook’s responses to them thus far are perfect examples of too little, too late. The company needs to start reporting regularly – and in a consistent fashion – about the impact its policies and practices have on billions of Facebook users all around the globe.”

According to Pew, 64 percent of U.S. adults say fabricated news stories cause a great deal of confusion about the basic facts of current issues and events. The confusion cuts across political lines: 57 percent of Republicans say completely made-up news causes a great deal of confusion compared to 64 percent of Democrats.

Fake news is a problem. But since the beginning of news media, there has always been a problem with subjective bias. Are we ever going to be able to argue that some news, any news, is more genuine than other news? Probably not.

In News

Facebook is reporting another data error, and it’s giving some advertisers their money back

May 29, 2017 No Comments

By Mike Shields

FILE PHOTO: The Facebook logo is displayed on the company’s website in an illustration photo taken in Bordeaux FranceThomson Reuters

Facebook has found another data error related to advertising, and this time it has to return some cash to marketers.

The social network giant recently discovered a data bug tied to a specific ad unit known as video carousel ads. These ad units allow marketers to showcase multiple ads in a single ad slot in Facebook’s news feed.

In some cases, when people clicked on one of these ads to watch an advertiser’s video, Facebook was reporting that people were actually clicking all the way to that advertiser’s website or app.

Unlike several of Facebook’s more recent measurement errors, such as providing inaccurate data on how much time people were spending with video ads on Facebook, this carousel mishap was fairly limited in scope. It only oc cured when people accessed Facebook via a mobile browser like Safari or Chrome, and not via Facebook’s mobile app or desktop site. And it only impacted a few advertisers.

Still, the bug went undiscovered for roughly a year, meaning that some advertisers were paying for clicks they believed would potentially result in visitors to their properties for an extended period of time. Thus, Facebook is sending these advertisers refunds.

Overall, the company expects that it may have impacted 0.04% of ad impressions during that period. That’s hardly going to impact Facebook’s revenue trajectory, but given the growing volume of ad-related metrics mistakes, it’s not what the company needs right now.

Advertisers have long complained about the perception that Facebook and Google don’t allow for third party measurement companies to the same degree that most media companies do (such as TV networks having their ratings tracked by Nielsen). This mobile rebate will only add fuel to that fire.

“We are committed to transparency with our partners when it comes to driving results on Facebook,” said the company’s vp of global marketing solutions Carolyn Everson in a statement. “As part of our new review process, we recently uncovered a bug. While this bug was small and make goods are a common part of the ad industry, we take all issues seriously and are notifying our clients and agencies and crediting those affected.”

By Mike Shields

Sourced from Business Insider UK

In News

Facebook Has a Monopoly Amongst Travel Marketers

May 25, 2017 No Comments

62% of travel marketers rate Facebook as the most effective social media network.

By MediaStreet staff writers

Facebook is peerless amongst travel marketers according to a new industry-wide survey from EyeforTravel. The State of Data and Analytics in Travel Report 2017 found that 61.6% think Facebook is the best performing social media network, leaving Instagram – also a Facebook company – a distant second at 15.8% of respondents.

Twitter rounds out the top three at 10.3% of respondents and is followed by YouTube at 6.2% of respondents. No other social media network had a significant response rate.

“Facebook has numerous advantages above its rivals, but the largest of these is the depth of information it has on its users,” said Alex Hadwick, Head of Research at EyeforTravel. “Potentially Facebook has the majority of a Millennial or Generation Z’s life recorded in detail, from their interests and preferences, to the places they have travelled to. This gives them enormous power that has been multiplied by the clever acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. In my opinion these acquisitions also help to future-proof Facebook from potential downturns in usage of its original platform.”

The survey also found that 78% of travel marketers are using social media data in their marketing campaigns. This level of integration illustrates the importance social now plays in marketing efforts, a position that is likely to increase rather than diminish in the medium-term.

The travel industry is clamouring for more and better data, as well as the tools and skills to understand it. This survey was conducted across all the sectors and received responses from more than 450 professionals working with data in travel. They came from across the world and from a variety of different professional areas, including C-suite executives, marketers, revenue managers, and analysts.

In News

Now Marketers Can Actually Read Your Photos On Instagram And Facebook

May 24, 2017 No Comments

By Jeff Beer

For almost as long as we’ve been typing words into Google’s search bar, we’ve been trailed by online ads based on those searches. The logic being that if they put ads in front of our eyes that are related to what we’re searching–shoes, diapers, cars, anything–we’ll be more likely to click. And even though ad tech has advanced by leaps and bounds over the last decade, that’s still essentially what advertisers are trying to do.

Recently, in order to boost its competitiveness with Nike among serious runners, and raise awareness for its Run Camp program, Under Armour targeted photos on social feeds–finding people who were posting specific models of its running shoes, specific running shoes of its competition, as well as photos that featured running bibs, belts, and other accessories. Once found, that person would be served up a short video ad about Run Camp after they’d left Instagram or Facebook.

So if you posted the new bib for that half-marathon you’re training for on Instagram or Facebook, later while browsing The Huffington Post mobile site you might see an ad for Run Camp. All because of your photo.

The tech is from Toronto-based shop Cluep, which has been working with brands like Nike, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Toyota, and yep, Under Armour, on text and location targeting, but now, following consumer behavior on social, is pushing hard into visuals. Cluep Pics lets marketers target people based on the images they publicly post on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook and serve them ads in their mobile apps and mobile websites. It uses a proprietary image recognition engine that learns from every image it sees to identify brands, products, and scenarios to effectively engage people around their interests, activities, and lifestyle.

So if there happens to be a McDonald’s in the background of one of your photos, you may get a Golden Arches ad targeting you somewhere soon. To many people, this sounds pretty creepy. Of course, Cluep CEO Karan Walia (who co-founded company in 2012 with CTO Anton Mamonov and advertising operations director Sobi Walia) says the goal behind Pics is to effectively deliver advertising to the right people, at the right time, when they are most receptive based on the types of images they post on social media. Sound familiar? But contrary to creeped out, Walia says even just through beta testing, they’re already seeing conversions and click-through rates five to 10 times better than industry standards.

“Traditionally the click through rate is around 0.5-0.8%, however, we’re seeing results in metrics like video completion rates, visit lift rates, cost to drive back to store and more are between five to eight times the industry benchmark,” says Walia. “And this isn’t just in one, two, or three programs, this is the average across all the 500 campaigns we’ve done across different verticals. That would suggest we’re driving higher results than other vendors, and those engagement rates with consumers.”

Image recognition tech itself isn’t new, and Walia says Cluep’s primary competition for Pics is the social platforms themselves but believes his firm is just a couple of steps ahead.

“Right now, there is no ad tech platform that is doing image-based targeting like we are,” he says. “Getting a high enough accuracy to classify an image around a brand, logo or activity hasn’t been available at scale until now. I’m getting bombarded with back-to-school ads from Walmart on Instagram. I’m not a student and I’m not a parent. Why is this happening? Walmart is a client of ours, and now with Cluep Pics they’ll be able to better target potential consumers because they’ll see family photos or relevant photos that will let them know if these types of ads will be relevant.”

And you know what’s next, right? the growth of online social video has exploded over the last few years. It’s even been suggested that Facebook could be all video by 2021, which is also where Walia says his tech is headed. The Cluep Pics engine is a stepping stone to video, and the company hopes to launch it by Q2 2018.

[Photo: Flickr user S A N D Y D O V E R]

“For video, the back-end is very similar to Cluep Pics because video is just still frames strung together, so the challenge is to focus on the right frames, and being able to classify not just logos, products, and scenarios, but also actions,” says Walia. “That’s going to be a big next step, allowing brands to target consumers not only based on the type of videos they’re sharing but also know that the ads are being served in safe environments. We’ve seen the concerns over YouTube. We see a big opportunity in allowing publishers to let marketers select the kind of videos their ads appear in or around.”

By Jeff Beer

Jeff Beer is a staff editor at Fast Company, covering advertising, marketing, and brand creativity. He lives in Toronto. More

Sourced from FastCompany

In News

Facebook Is Going To Punish Websites With Junky, Sexy Ads And Little Content

May 23, 2017 No Comments

By Craig Silverman.

The social network is now scanning links to see if they contain “disruptive, shocking or malicious ads” and little real content.

Facebook’s quest to rid the News Feed of misinformation and misleading content has a new target: websites that are littered with “disruptive, shocking or malicious ads,” and that offer little actual content.

Beginning today, the social network will use artificial intelligence to determine if links shared on the social network direct people to websites that offer a “low quality web page experience” due to the nature of the ads and content being offered. Links that meet the criteria will show up lower in the News Feed, and will not be eligible to to be turned into an ad on Facebook.

The type of ads being targeted by Facebook most frequently appear in the form of content-recommendation ad units. These boxes placed adjacent to articles offer a headline and striking thumbnail image meant to entice people to click. The low-end variety of these ads use sexualized and sometimes shocking images, as well as celebrities, and misleading headlines to capture attention.

Here, for example, is a set of ads served by Content.ad on a fake news article:

A recent report from BuzzFeed News found content-recommendation ads are the primary way fake news sites are making money from their articles. A study from ChangeAdvertising.org also found that these types of ads, though not necessarily the lowest-quality versions of them, are present on more than 80% of the top 50 news websites in the US.

“We’re looking at the content of the ads themselves — are the ads these gross toenail fungus ads, are these sexually suggestive ads,” Greg Marra, a Facebook product manager who works on News Feed integrity, told BuzzFeed News. “We also look at ads in relation to the content on the page. Is it a page that has basically no substantive content and is full of these ads?”

BuzzFeed News recently profiled exactly the kind of site Facebook is now targeting. TrueTrumpers.com is a pro-Trump website run from Eastern Europe that often publishes completely false headlines meant to grab attention on Facebook. But once a person clicks through they are brought to a webpage that is littered with content ad units and that often contains no article text other than the false or misleading headline. The site also triggers a pop-up ad when a visitor clicks anywhere on the page.

A hoax from the site about actor Uma Thurman dying in a plane crash contains at least four different Content.ad units, three of which are displayed to the user before they see the text of the (fake) article:

Marra said he was familiar with True Trumpers as a result of the BuzzFeed News story, but declined to comment on the site specifically. However, the large Facebook page that was used to promote True Trumpers content was recently shut down by the company. A Facebook spokesperson said this was as a result of “fake account and spam violations.”

Marra said Facebook’s intention isn’t to single out content-recommendation ads as a whole — just the lowest-quality offerings that are draped all over a webpage by publishers in order to increase their revenue.

“This isn’t [targeting] every webpage that has a content ad network on it,” Marra said. “…. We’re focused on the worst of the worst of this segment.”

He described bad-faith players as “a group of people who are not trying to create news websites that are trying to establish a long-term relationship with you the reader. They are really just trying to get the click and monetize the click.”

Marc Goldberg, the CEO of Trust Metrics, a company that evaluates online publishers and apps for quality, told BuzzFeed News that Facebook’s decision to down rank links from sites with low-quality ads could help choke off revenue for fake sites and fraudulent publishers.

“Fake publishing, fake news — there is a tremendous underbelly there that continues to siphon off ad dollars,” he said. “Cutting it off from parts of the ecosystem will be very, very helpful.”

He also said Facebook’s effort could be positive for the higher-end content-recommendation ad companies, and punish bad players that trick users with misleading ads.

“Recommendation engines that have stricter policies will be rewarded because now they’re not playing against competition that doesn’t care about the end user or the advertisers,” Goldberg said. “Ultimately this potentially the improves the user trust downstream, where now you’re going to see a lot less of these ads designed to produce curiosity clicks. That can help earn back the trust of advertisers and users.”

Facebook’s Marra said the product team used data collected from “hundreds of thousands links with disruptive, shocking, or sexual ads and not a lot of content” to come up with criteria that will be used to scan links being shared on the platform.

“People will hopefully see less of this kind of junk that can clog up their feed,” he said.

By Craig Silverman

Craig Silverman is Media Editor for BuzzFeed News and is based in Toronto. Contact Craig Silverman at [email protected].

Sourced from BuzzFeed News

In News

What are Facebook ‘dark adverts’ – and could they swing the General Election?

May 22, 2017 No Comments

By Rob Waugh

So-called ‘dark adverts’ on Facebook are personalised political adverts which only you can see – and which some have blamed for Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump.

The adverts are tweaked according to psychological profiles of each individual user, and appear in user’s News Feeds – and could be used, for instance, to persuade certain voters to stay at home.

What’s certain is that political parties are spending millions on Facebook adverts tweaked by location, age, gender, and user’s personal interests – and they’re expected to be deployed en masse in the last 10 days of Britain’s General Election.

A new British group ‘Who Targets Me’ is attempting to monitor these adverts using a Chrome browser extension which looks for targeted adverts delivered via Facebook.

Who Targets Me? Co-founder Louis Knight-Webb, 19 told Metro.co.uk that the group already has 4,000 volunteers – and that such adverts are different from normal political advertising.

Knight-Webb says, ‘You can’t see what adverts I’m seeing – I can’t see what you’re seeing. There is no way government bodies can audit these kinds of adverts.

What are Facebook ‘dark adverts’ - and could they swing the General Election? — (Photo by Jack Taylor/Getty Images)

‘We don’t even know if parties are doing anything scandalous. Who Targets Me is a citizen-led inititiative to begin to create data on this subject.’

Recent reports have linked data companies such as Cambridge Analytica to multi-million Facebook advertising campaigns used by Donald Trump and the Leave campaign.

Knight-Webb says, ‘The adverts use Facebook data to psychometrically profile voters – so each voter might see an advert which is psychometrically tweaked specifically for them, right down to the language used.’

To help Who Targets Me, users install a Chrome extension, and fill out a short form with their postcode – and then the extension monitors for targeted ads.

At present, 55% of the ads detected by the extension are from Labour in the UK – but that could mean the Conservatives are ‘saving up’ for a last-minute splurge, Knight-Webb says.

Knight-Webb says, ‘They’re all playing by the rules, it is early days. There was a little flurry around the local election.

‘At present, 55% of all adverts from the Labour party – and we do have quite a good spread of voters from our 4,000 volunteers. My hunch is that the Conservatives will spend more in the last 10 days of the election.’

Metro.co.uk has reached out to Facebook for comment.

To use the browser extension, visit https://whotargets.me/ and follow the instructions.