Tag: ad targeting

Snapchat Let Brands Target Users Based On Third-Party Data

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Following its introduction of sequential video ad yesterday, Snapchat announced today that it is enabling brand advertisers to target users based on third-party data. The popular messaging app follows the lead of Google and Facebook and started working with Oracle Data Cloud to help marketers plug in offline purchase data, such as from supermarket loyalty cards, to improve the relevance of their ad targeting as well as measure offline attributions of their Snapchat campaigns. Brands such as STX Entertainment, Kia, and The Honest Company are testing the new ad-targeting tool.

What Brands Need To Do
This new targeting product brings vast improvement to Snapchat’s ad operations, which has been quickly catching up to the app’s exploding popularity. With this new tool, marketers will be able to zero in on their potential customers and see if their Snapchat ads resulted in real-world sales. As Snapchat continues to expand its user base and improve its ad products, it is an important social marketing channel that brand marketers need to consider in their media planning and develop a strategy for.

 

Source: AdWeek

Reddit Launches Interest-Based Ad Targeting Product

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Reddit has offered subreddit-based ad targeting for a while now, but it is now broadening its targeting capability to be more interest-based, allowing brands to target audiences based on “a handful of predefined interests (e.g., sports, gaming, music, and more) which will be informed by which communities they frequent,” according to CEO Steve Huffman. Interestingly, Reddit is also allowing users to opt out of this new ad product so as to appease a significant portion of its user base that is adamantly anti-ad.

What Brands Should Do
This new interest-based ad product allows brand advertisers to reach an audience that shares a particular interest across different subreddits in a more effective way. Reddit currently has over 240 million monthly unique visitors, and despite its notoriously ad-avoidant user base, some brands such as Toyota and Ford have found moderate success in their content marketing efforts on Reddit by playing to user interests and sensibilities. If your brand wishes to incorporate Reddit into your marketing channel mix, this new ad targeting product should be useful to locate an engaged audience.

 

Source: Marketing Land

Facebook Starts Testing Ads In Groups

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Facebook has started testing ads in Groups, the interest-based, user-generated communication channels that the company released as a standalone app in 2014. The ads in Groups look identically to standard News Feed ads and will be targeted by Group topic as well as the standard identity-based targeting.

What Brands Need To Do
As Facebook is looking to reach maximum News Feed ad load in mid-2017, the company has been turning to its other properties, including Instagram and WhatsApp, to further fuel its ad revenue growth. So it makes perfect sense that Facebook is now putting ads in Groups as well, opening up yet another marketing channel for brands to reach their audiences on Facebook. The topic-based nature of Groups also enables brands to target niche audiences with tailored content and brand messaging.

 

Source: TechCrunch

 

Snapchat Introduces New Targeting Options For Video Ads

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Snapchat is introducing three new targeting options to its vertical video Snap Ads as the company continues to improve its ad products. Now brand advertisers can choose to target Snapchat users based on email address-matching or target users that share similar characteristics with those defined groups. Later this fall Snapchat will also allow brands to target ads based on the type of content users view.

What Brands Need To Do
According to comScore, Snapchat’s core audience of 18-to-24 year-olds is nearing full saturation but older demographics will provide growth. As Snapchat continues to expand its user base and improve its ad products, it is an important social marketing channel that brand marketers need to consider in their media planning and develop a strategy for.

 

Source: Marketing Land

How An iOS 10 Update Could Undermine Ad Targeting On iPhones

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Earlier this week, Apple unveiled a major update to their “Limit Ad Tracking” setting in iOS 10, which will give users more control over their “Identifier for Advertising” (IDFA) and the data that is shared with advertisers. In current iOS versions, activating this feature sends developers and advertisers the user’s IDFA and a flag indicating that the user wishes not to be targeted based on their location or behavior. In the forthcoming iOS 10, however, developers and advertisers will receive a zeroed-out value instead of the IDFA, effectively anonymizing all activity from users with that setting enabled.

Why Brands Should Care
According to Fiksu, 14% of iOS users currently have the “Limit Ad Tracking” setting turned on, so this update will at least somewhat undermine the tracking and targeting capability of mobile ad networks that rely on IDFA to target iOS users. For brands seeking to reach mobile consumers, however, this presents a good opportunity to reconsider your mobile strategy and shift towards a social-heavy media mix for your mobile campaigns, as most ads on social networks are targeted by user profile and are therefore immune to this privacy setting update.

To learn more about how brands can deal with the consumer resistance against seeing ads, please check out the Ad Avoidance section of our Outlook 2016.

 

Source: Fiksu

Spotify Goes Programmatic, Allows Playlist-Based, Real-Time Targeting

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Spotify is stepping up its ad game as it announced the launch of programmatic audio ads earlier today. The popular streaming service is partnering with three programmatic platforms – AppNexus, Rubicon Project, and The Trade Desk – to give brands access to over 70 million global users on its ad-supported free tier via real-time bidding. Along with that launch, Spotify is also offering ad buyers access to its demographic data and playlist data, allowing for real-time targeting based on age, gender, location, and even the playlists people are listening to.

What Brands Need To Do
With the programmatic ad platform, Spotify rounds out its programmatic ad offerings across audio, video, display ads. Allowing brands to target based on demographics and listening habits also opens up new opportunities for tailoring ads that match the audience behaviors and interests their playlists suggest. For example, a fitness brand can surface ads for listeners who played “workout” playlists, whereas a mattress company may choose to target users who listened to “insomnia” playlists.

 

Source: AdWeek

Snapchat Adds “Suggest Account” And Develops Ad Product Powered By Image Recognition

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Snapchat has quietly added a way for people to spread the word about the accounts they love. Along with the recent addition of Memories, users can now easily recommend friends follow other accounts by tapping the new “Suggest” button on profile cards. Users will receive suggestions as private messages with an account info card and a button to follow them.

In other Snapchat news, the company is reportedly developing a new ad product powered by image recognition technology. The idea is to use that technology to identify real-life objects that users have snapped, for example a can of diet soda, and surface related ads and coupons in other Snapchat channels such as Discover and Live Stories.

What Brands Need To Do
Snapchat has long been a hard nut for brands to crack because the app does not have a referral-based discovery system, making it difficult for brands to grow their followers. With the Suggest feature, brands gain a useful tool to ask their fans to spread the word and grow their fanbase in an organic and, if they’re lucky, viral way. The new image recognition-powered ad product, if realized, should provide brands a valuable targeting tool to run their Snapchat campaigns. As Snapchat grows more prominent in the social media landscape, brands need to keep up with brand-related developments of the app and learn to leverage them to their benefit.

 

Sources: TechCrunch & Business Insider

Twitter Opens Gnip’s Audience API To Offer Brands More Data

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Gnip, a data platform owned by Twitter, announced on Tuesday that it is opening up access to its Audience API, which was first launched with limited access in October. Now with easy access to Gnip’s data, brand marketers will be able to learn more about their Twitter audience, such as what languages they speak, what kind of music they like, and other demographic and interest data points. To ensure user privacy, Gnip’s data is anonymized and aggregated to groups of over 500 Twitter accounts.

Why Brands Should Care
Twitter has been steadily improving the targeting capability of its ad products, including an emoji-based targeting option introduced last month. By opening up Gnip’s Audience API to marketers, brands gain a valuable tool to gather insights on their audience, which can be then leveraged for ad targeting and improving customer services.

 

Source: Marketing Land

Twitter Introduces Stickers To Make Photos Searchable

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Twitter announced on Monday that the newest addition to its service will be stickers that users can add to their photos in tweets. Similar to the way stickers work on Snapchat, users on desktop and mobile devices will be able to add an unlimited number of resizable stickers to their photos to add some flair. Twitter is planning to roll out this new feature over the next few weeks, and those stickers will be searchable just like its hashtags.

Twitter stickers

Why Brands Should Care
This addition came on the heels of Twitter allowing marketers to target ads based on emojis that users include in tweets. Since the stickers will be searchable, it seems quite likely that brand marketers will soon be allowed to target by stickers as well. Moreover, this new feature opens the door for branded stickers that marketers can use to drive engagement, similar to Twitter’s branded emoji product. For now, however, the stickers simply offer brands a new way to jazz up their photos on Twitter and make them more discoverable through organic search.

 

Source: AdWeek

Images courtesy of @Twitter

Pinterest Releases Targeted Ads By Matching Emails And Device IDs

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Pinterest is taking a page out of Facebook’s playbook, officially rolling out an ad targeting tool similar to Facebook’s popular Custom Audiences product. With the new tool, advertisers on Pinterest can reach their existing audience by matching email addresses or mobile ad IDs from their CRM databases and further expand the reach of their ad buys via lookalike targeting. Pinterest has been testing this targeting option since March.

What Brands Need To Do
Pinterest has been ramping up its ad products, recently adding Millward Brown and Oracle Data Cloud as partners to offer brands advanced measurements. This new targeting tool can help brands, especially retailers with a substantial subscriber list, reach their desired audiences in a more granular way. For businesses with an overlap between their customers and Pinterest users, this should be worth a try.

 

Source: AdExchange