TikTok marked its first foray into ecommerce by announcing a global partnership deal with Shopify on Tuesday, a deal that it said will help more than a million merchants reach new audiences and drive sales on the popular video-sharing app. The integration deal with Shopify – the Canada-based ecommerce giant – is intended to help […]
Snap’s First Commercial, a reach product that advertisers can use to position their message so that it’s the first ad Snapchat users see when they open the app, is now generally available, Snap said on Tuesday during Advertising Week. The ad is up to six seconds long and unskippable. First Commercial launched in the United […]
Influencer marketing is maturing on YouTube. On Tuesday, YouTube rebranded FameBit, the influencer marketing and branded content platform it acquired in 2016, as YouTube BrandConnect. YouTube hopes to make BrandConnect into a full-funnel offering, from making it easier for brands and creators to collaborate through to campaign creation, management and measurement. Influencer marketing has been […]
Twitter will ban political advertising as of Nov. 22. CEO Jack Dorsey broke the news with a tweet storm on Wednesday, citing conflicts of interest that occur when politicians use targeted advertising to influence votes. Read it. “We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought,” he wrote. “A political message earns reach when […]
Chipotle delivers. Getting customers to switch to online ordering has been a key part of Chipotle’s brand transformation. Digital sales soared 100% YoY for the first half of 2019. That metric, along with an increase in same-store sales, doubled its stock price. Chipotle’s app enables in-store pick-ups or, through a DoorDash partnership, delivery requests. And […]
Snap is reorienting its ad strategy in rocky waters. On Monday, Snap’s chief strategy officer, Imran Khan, said he was leaving the company he helped take public four years earlier. Khan’s departure came shortly after the company reported in its Q2 earnings that its daily active viewers had dipped by 3 million, even as revenue […]
Instagram dropped its answer to YouTube on Wednesday, and the timing couldn’t be riper. Ad spending across the top 70 YouTube channels is essentially flat, with only a 0.2% increase this year, according to ad sales intelligence business MediaRadar. Why? Marketers are increasingly worried about their brand reps on YouTube, said MediaRadar CEO and co-founder […]
In Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s prepared statement for Congress, he describes how his company hopes to prevent illicit data sharing and enhance transparency around political advertising. The testimony, which will be delivered Wednesday, partially reiterates changes that Facebook publicized last week. Last Wednesday, Facebook detailed API data restrictions. And last Friday, it described the tools […]
Designer fashion retailer Monton is trying on messenger bots for size. On Thursday, the brand, which targets the trendy millennial aged 25 to 30, exited beta on a product discovery tool that allows Facebook Messenger users to chat with the brand and scroll through recommendations based on previously selected items. The images link directly to […]
The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has no trouble getting people interested in March Madness, when the fans are rabid. It’s the rest of the year that poses a challenge. “The hardest thing is that we have a brand everyone wants to be a part of – but only at the end,” said Chris Dion, the […]
A new Snapchat campaign from 20th Century Fox for “X-Men: Apocalypse” will drive awareness and ticket sales for the movie’s Friday premier. Snapchat has run plenty of branding-oriented campaigns, but this new effort is one of very few forays that include a direct-response component (in the form of a Fandango e-commerce call to action), a […]
Turner-owned Bleacher Report is going all-in on social platforms because the chance to set roots in social broadcasting before ESPN does, whether or not reliable platform monetization is a mirage, is too tempting to ignore. Bleacher Report’s future success will “key off our ability to leverage the social graph,” said Rich Calacci, Bleacher Report’s CRO […]
Affinity Answers, founded under the name Colligent in 2005, has spent a decade building a new metric for brand success. The data measurement company processes the social information of more than 400 million users per day to identify mutual affinities between brands and publishers that help them uncover, target and monetize untapped audiences. The company […]
Advertisers are embracing Instagram, with its video and direct-response potential gaining particular interest, according to a new report from social advertising and content marketing firm Brand Networks. CPG, fashion and retail advertisers in particular have been quick to embrace Instagram, which proved to be a significant player over the 2015 holiday season. The study examined more […]
Publicis Groupe agency MRY has been working with social media management startup SocialRank to help its clients get smarter about their social audiences and identify niche segments using a tool dubbed Market Intel, which came out of beta on Monday. The company also launched on Monday a product called SocialRank for Teams, which allows agencies […]
The difference between UGC (user-generated content) and regular brand-generated content, no matter how clever, poignant or seemingly genuine, is the difference between a friend’s recommendation and an ad for a restaurant. Who would you trust more? According to Crowdtap, UGC is 35% more memorable – and 50% more trusted – than other forms of media. Dave Scott, […]
Analytics on Sina Weibo used to be fairly rudimentary – number of friends, number of followers, basic engagement metrics and the like. “The previous version wasn’t that good,” admitted Bryan Cheng, VP of commercial products and platforms at Weibo, commonly described as a sort of Twitter/Facebook mashup. “The point is to provide more actionable data.” […]
Jack’s wearing a lot of hats. After several months of will they/won’t they, Twitter announced Monday morning that Jack Dorsey will go from interim chief exec – shoes he’d been filling since Dick Costolo stepped down in June – to permanent CEO of the company. He’ll also continue on as CEO of Square, the mobile payments startup […]
Online shopping site Gilt Groupe has social on the mind, searching for ways to grab prospects off Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. That’s why it’s bought into social marketing tech firm Brand Networks’ newlyenhanced Brand Networks Platform (unveiled Monday). The updates promise to make it easier for marketers to ensure the relevancy of their native […]
Twitter’s comms chief, Gabriel Stricker, departed suddenly in July, and now more execs will likely follow. A key marketing figure is already job prospecting, sources say. Bottom line: If Twitter doesn’t find a permanent chief executive quickly it risks a flight of talent within its marketing organization. And it’s not at all clear how much longer […]
In the two years since Facebook’s huge image-sharing platform sold its first ad, Instagram has focused on fixed-price advertising from big national brands. In keeping with the platform’s emphasis on aesthetics and high design, many early advertisers were lifestyle companies like Starbucks and Disney. With Instagram’s 300 million global users now accustomed to seeing ads, […]
Prague-based Socialbakers added Robert Lang as its new CEO on Wednesday. The social media metrics firm described Lang as a key Criteo executive who helped the French ad tech company expand internationally. Lang replaces Jan Rezab, a founder of the company. Rezab will stay on as executive chairman. Coming from Criteo, Lang said he saw […]
For Hootsuite, it used to be all about text links on Twitter. Not so, anymore. The early Twitter client on Tuesday revealed native support for Instagram. So now, users can promote content on Instagram as well as across previously supported platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google pages. It also introduced recently link-to-buy functionality within […]
Kinetic Social is choosing growth over profitability. The social ads company, which announced $17.5 million in venture cash from Multiplier Capital and Bridge Bank on Tuesday, will use the bulk of its funding to ramp up its content management and creative services through an internal outfit the company is calling Creative Studio. The infusion brings […]
Remember StumbleUpon? The content discovery and social bookmarking site born in 2001 wants to go beyond its bread and butter, driving social shares and referrals to publisher sites. That means StumbleUpon is expanding into new channels – and with good reason. StumbleUpon had 30 million monthly active users in 2014, but that number pales in […]
Pinterest is proving to be a nice fit for secondhand online clothier Twice. The company, which acts as a sort of hybrid Amazon/eBay-like marketplace for gently used duds, had seen success with all the usual marketing mix suspects – display, search ads, Facebook, Twitter – but it was on the hunt for a fresh channel to reach […]
Since Yahoo’s maligned acquisition of Tumblr, many insiders have questioned its value as a marketing tool. Yahoo has made some overtures toward answering that. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said during the company’s Q3 2014 call last October that she expected Tumblr to drive $100 million in 2015 revenue, and that users increased 40% in 15 […]
Pinterest’s advertising business took its next step toward scale with the official launch of its ads API on Thursday. The ads API, which Pinterest introduced in beta in April, comes on the heels of a flurry of brand-focused products from the social platform, including an imminent buy button, a content API for businesses to manage […]
Twitter has a DM for brands: We care about DR. “We highly prize the ability to drive ROI,” said Richard Alfonsi, Twitter’s VP of global online sales. So do most of Twitter’s competitors, with Pinterest, Instagram, Google and Facebook all at various stages of buy button rollout. It makes sense. Social platforms are starting to […]
As consumers increase time spent on social channels, the data on those platforms is becoming increasingly valuable to advertisers. In its 2014 year-end report, Pew Research found that 52% of adults in the US use two or more social media sites, up from 42% in 2013. And though user growth on the leading social platform, […]
