Tag: branded content

Publishers Can Now Publish Branded Content On Facebook

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
If you get your news from Facebook, you are about to see a lot more brand-sponsored content. On Friday, Facebook announced it is loosening its rules on branded content, allowing publishers to post branded content in all formats, including video, as long as media companies and marketers go through a simple verification process. Previously, publishers were technically prohibited from posting advertorial content as organic posts on Facebook unless they are part of a paid ad placement, despite some publishers’ attempts to sneak them through.

The announcement comes at a time when publishers are increasingly turning to branded content to supplement ad revenues. For example, earlier this week, The Economist started pitching brand advertisers sponsored mini-documentaries as a new ad unit for brands to attach themselves to the social and environmental causes they care about.

What Brands Need To Do
Facebook recently reported that 83% of the ads running on its Audience Network are now native ads. We expect more to pop up now that Facebook has opened the gates for branded content. With consumers continuing to shun away from traditional ads, it is important for brands and media owners to try engaging with their audience in new ways, such as branded content and native ads.

For more information on how brands should leverage interesting branded content to earn consumer eyeballs, check out the Ad Avoidance section of our Outlook 2016.

For more updates on Facebook, Remember to check back next week to read our in-depth take on Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference.

 

Source: WSj

Cadillac Partners With Emerging Fashion Designers To Elevate Its Brand

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Cadillac is teaming up with the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) on a Retail Lab initiative that aims to foster young fashion talent. The Retail Lab will have a custom retail shop on the ground floor of the Cadillac building, where up-and-coming designers can showcase their latest work and receive mentorship in marketing and business development. As part of its rebranding efforts following decades of declining sales, Cadillac relocated its headquarters from Detroit to New York City in early 2015.

What Brands Need To Do
By working closely with the CFDA, Cadillac is integrating its brand into the glamorous fashion scene and trying to develop a halo effect that can help the luxury automaker elevate its brand. At a time when consumers are growing tired of being bombarded with ads and starting to actively avoid ads with the help of ad-blockers and ad-free subscription services, it is important for brands to try out new ways to reach their target audiences. Cadillac’s new initiative provides a good example of how a brand can enhance its brand equity and unlock a new audience by associating itself with a compatible cause, in this case prompting consumers to make the connection between stylish designer clothes and stylish luxury cars.

 

Source: Digiday

Branded Content and Customizable Ads Coming To Snapchat

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Snapchat made two moves this week to ramp up its ad efforts. On Wednesday, the popular photo messaging app started testing a new ad product that allows brand advertisers to attach branded articles containing text, images, and GIFs to their video ads in Live Stories and Discover channels. AT&T appears to be the first brand to try out this new product with a listicle of GIFs to promote its mobile live-streams for NCAA games. Earlier this week, Snapchat also updated its privacy policy to allow for ad targeting. Under the revised privacy policy, the Los Angeles-based company will be able to use customer data to customize ads going forward, increasing its capabilities for brand advertisers and catching up with the other large social networks.

What Brands Need To Do
Snapchat has been working on improving its ad products for the past few months. In February, the company struck a deal with Nielsen to bring some much-needed transparency to its ads. As Snapchat continues to diversify its ad products, brands will have better tools at their disposal to effectively reach the coveted demographics of young Millennials and teens on the app.

 

Source: Marketing Land & Digiday

Native Ads Are Coming To Apple News

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Apple is dipping a toe into native advertising with a new format for sponsored posts in the next update for its Apple News app. With the new format, sponsored posts will “display directly in the content feed, in line with News articles” from a publisher’s feed and can link to an article in the News app. The new ad format will clearly label branded content in the app with a small “sponsored” tag, and Apple will keep 30% of the revenue. The Apple News app will be updated as part of the upcoming version of iOS, expected to be released next week as Apple announces new devices.

What Brands Need To Do
In January, Apple reported that 40 million people had used the Apple News app. Now, Apple is opening a way for brands to get in front of an audience that is increasingly shunning mobile ads and turning to the likes of Facebook’s Instant Articles or Apple News for a faster, leaner reading experience. Native ads remain a good way for brands to cope with this behavioral shift and reach their target audience.

To learn more about tailoring your ad content and format to the platform of choice, check out the Ad Avoidance section in our Outlook 2016.

 

Source: Engadget

Brands Get Another Tool To Publish Instant Articles

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Following last week’s announcement of a plugin that automatically generates Instant Articles pages for WordPress sites, brands are getting another tool to publish their content with Facebook’s fast-loading program. Facebook has opened up Instant Articles to mobile publishing platform Steller, allowing all users, including brands, to use Steller’s app to create and distribute content on Facebook through Instant Articles.

What Brands Need To Do
Since its debut last May, Facebook has restricted access to Instant Articles to publishers only. Now with these two new tools, brands can easily publish content in Instant Articles without piggybacking on publishers’ content. As media consumption shifts toward mobile, it is crucial for brands to start using the tools available to optimize their digital content so as to deliver a leaner, faster user experience to mobile consumers.

 

Source: Marketing Land

Here Comes Nom, The Twitch For Food Shows

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Live-streaming platforms continue to diversify as Steve Chen, co-founder of YouTube, launched Nom, a livestreaming site for food shows. Similar to the way Twitch has enabled video gamers to broadcast themselves, Nom is aiming to provide a platform for anyone who loves to cook to showcase their culinary skills via live broadcasts and connect with others in the food community.

What Brands Need To Do
Following Facebook’s official launch of Live Video at the end of January, live-streaming has been in the media spotlight and getting brands interested in trying out this emerging medium. In fact, a recent research from Brandlive found that 44% of companies have created live video content in 2015. With the launch of Nom, QSRs, cooking equipment makers, and other food-related brands gain a great new channel that they can reach targeted audience with sponsorships and branded content.

To read more on how brands can reach viewers on OTT streaming platforms with branded content, please check out the Appified TV section in our Outlook 2016.

 

Source: VentureBeat

Snapchat Expands Live Stories To The Web For The Oscars

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Snapchat has always been mobile-only, in the sense that all its content and services live on mobile devices. But on Sunday, it broke with its tradition and extended its Live Stories for the Oscars to its website, so that people who are not using the popular messaging app can also watch its live content curation from the red carpet and ceremony. Just like Live Stories inside the app, the Oscars’ Live Story was only available online for 24 hours. But Snapchat says it is considering making more Live Stories for big events accessible via its website.

What Brands Need To Do
Making its content more accessible will no doubt help Snapchat amplify its content viewership and reach new audiences outside the app. For brands advertising on Snapchat, such increased visibility should come as a welcome development. Snapchat has been making an effort recently to appeal to brand advertisers, including the debut of on-demand custom Geofilters and a new partnership with Nielsen to improve its ad measurement, as well as enlisting Viacom’s help to sell more ads in its Discover content channels and Live Stories. As Snapchat continues to grow its audience and make its platform more brand-friendly, it remains a leading channel for brands to connect with today’s teen and young Millennial audiences.

 

Source: The Verge

Event Recap: NY MusicTech Meetup February 2016

Posted on by Ben Hone

On Thursday, February 25th, the Media Lab attended the NY MusicTech Meetup. The groovy event was hosted at the Harman store on Madison Avenue where a number of interesting music startups demonstrated their products for the crowd.

The first was CymbalFM, a social music discovery app for iOS. Users post their favorite song of the moment so others can listen and discover new tunes. Users have the ability to like and comment on posts, or explore a friend’s entire history of posts as one playlist. The platform is built on top of Spotify and Soundcloud’s APIs so people can listen directly on the platform. Soon they will be launching a discovery-specific page that surfaces trending hashtags and recommends users that have similar tastes as you.

Next was Cadenza, an app that provides an entire classical orchestra to accompany you while you play your instrument. Through AI and machine learning, the app adapts the tempo to your playing style in real time to create an ensemble performance consisting of one musician. The app is currently being used by young students who are taking music lessons and has a user base of around 40,000. They also have a social component where people can record their sessions and share to Facebook. Cadenza is a very powerful tool for beginning and intermediate musicians and it will be exciting to see how they grow as their tempo matching technology becomes even more robust.

Finally, Feature.fm discussed how they are helping aspiring musicians get discovered on streaming services. Their ad platform allows users to easily create and distribute sponsored songs that play natively during a user’s listening session. The artist can customize their message, a call to action, and their album artwork as well as select which region, genre, and tags they would like to target. The average cost-per-play is around 2 cents. However, there is no cost if the user skips the song before 30 seconds has elapsed. The ad unit is currently integrated into 8Tracks with plans to expand to 3-4 more services during 2016 (although they were not able to share which ones at the time).  There is an opportunity for advertisers to brand the info box that appears with the sponsored tracks or even sponsor the artists’ advertising budgets themselves in order to provide real value to consumers by surfacing new music.

Lots of exciting things are happening in New York’s music tech scene. As audiences become increasingly averse to being served with bland messaging, there are lots of opportunities in this space for brands to provide audience with real value to earn their attention.

Forbes Wants To Help Brands Connect With Industry Experts For Content

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Similar to so-called “influencer marketing,” where brands turn to social media stars to promote their products and services, Forbes is now offering brands a chance to connect with industry experts in certain areas to help brands get the word out for their content. Working with social media analytics firm Traackr, Forbes will connect brand advertisers participating in its BrandVoice Premium program to “a network of journalists, academics and bloggers who wield influence in key subject areas” to promote their content to a more targeted audience via their own social network. The expert influencers won’t be paid to promote the branded content, but Forbes can ask these influencers to create content on the brand’s behalf that would be posted on Forbes.com.

What Brands Need To Do
While Forbes’ BrandVoice initiative comes with a rather hefty threshold of at least $100k ad spending per month for a minimum of six months, it nevertheless illustrates the growing importance of leveraging social influencers to get branded content in front of the right audience. At a time when 14% of internet users are now using ad-blockers to avoid online ads, it is especially important for brands to use branded content to spread the word.

For more information on why brands should leverage partnerships with social influencers and content creators to reach new audiences, check out the Ad Avoidance section of our Outlook 2016.

 

Sources: Wall Street Journal

Snapchat Launches On-Demand DIY Geofilters For Everyone

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Snapchat has opened up its location-based Geofilters for everyone, as it continues to explore revenue streams. Now any Snapchat user can design their own Geofilter, set the availability of time and location, and submit it for review. The turnaround time for review is about a day, and pricing starts at $5 and goes up based on the allocated time (as few as half an hour) and space covered (starting at  5,000 square feet).

What Brands Need To Do
In the age of ad avoidance (more on this in our Outlook 2016), branded Geofilters offer a great tool to get your brand seen via user-generated social content. Last July, McDonald’s became the first brand to create a branded Snapchat Geofilter for its stores. Now with DIY Geofilters widely available, brands can easily set up their own branded Geofilters to promote stores and special events, and experiment with different designs to find the best way to engage young consumers on Snapchat.

 

Source: TechCrunch