Teads Enables Brands To Buy 360-Video Ads On Popular Sites

What Happened
Teads, an online ad marketplace that handles the video ads on sites such as Mashable, The Guardian, and Forbes, has added support for 360-degree video to its inRead toolkit for advertisers. This addition allows brands to buy this immersive video format on those popular news sites to reach a wider online audience with 360-degree content.

What Brands Need To Do
As popular platforms such as Facebook and YouTube have started to support 360-degree video content, the vieo format is gaining momentum among mainstream consumers. But compared to regular video content, 360-degree videos are not as easy to produce, and the ad network infrastructure for 360-degree video is still in its infancy. Therefore, early adopting brands should consider giving Teads a try to amplify the reach of their existing branded 360-video content. For other brands, we suggest working with content creators to build up a library of branded VR content to engage with their audience.

 


Source: The Drum

Publishers Bullish On VR And 360-Degree Videos At NewFronts

What Happened
Another year, another round of NewFronts where digital publishers tout their viewership numbers and hawk their video ad products. This year, a number of publishers seem to be quite bullish on virtual reality tech, choosing 360-degree video as a main selling point to attract advertisers. Refinery29, for example, plans to develop a weekly immersive video series on topics like music, sports, and travel starting this June via its new VR production arm VR29 Studios. The New York Times plans to double down on its VR commitment by shipping 300,000 more Google Cardboard headsets to its subscribers this year so that more readers can experience the NYT VR app it launched last year. Similarly, AOL and PopSugar are also among publishers that are incorporating immersive video content into their pitches at this year’s NewFronts.

What Brands Need To Do
As more publishers start to produce VR and 360-degree video content, it offers brands more opportunities to work with them to create new types of branded content. The New York Times, for example, has created half a dozen VR videos for brands like BMW Mini and Tag Heuer, and the publisher says some of those branded VR videos have been more successful than the non-branded VR content that it produced. As VR and 360-degree content continues to gain traction among consumers and publishers, brands have more options in choosing the publishers whose audience best matches with theirs to create immersive video experiences to engage with consumers.

 


Source: AdAge & AdWeek

How Brands Can Make Use Of Twitter’s New “Moments” Feature

What Happened
Earlier today, Twitter officially launched Moments, a brand new way for users to discover top tweets and for brands to reach a wider audience. Previously known as Projected Lightning, this new Moments feature presents editorially curated collections of best tweets in regard to various news items and live media events. With this new feature, users can now easily find the top tweets of the moment in a separate tab across Twitter’s mobile apps and desktop sites, therefore shifting its content focus from a user’s timeline to breaking news and events in real time. Major publishers like BuzzFeed, The New York Times, and The Washington Post have signed up to try out this new product. Twitter also reportedly has deals in place with a number of unnamed brands to run ads within the collections in coming weeks.

What Brands Need To Do
This new feature makes content discovery on Twitter easier and quicker, especially for casual users. Therefore it enhances Twitter’s appeal as a go-to site for real time news and events, which in turn brings a bigger audience for brands. Moreover, it also provides brands specific channels to reach different audience segments based on their interests, such as a sportswear brand reaching sports lovers by live-tweeting a major sports event. Although Twitter’s selections seem to be fairly news-centric at the moment, we can already foresee brands of all types getting on board during live media events with high-quality, timely tweets to get a piece of the amplified attention.

 


Source: The Verge

Promotional image courtesy of Twitter 

How Snapchat Revived Its Discover Content Channel

What Happened
Partners of Snapchat’s Discover content channel are reporting quite positive results since the popular messaging app revamped its layout two week ago to give Discover content to give Discover content more, ahem, discoverability, as well as, adding a shareable feature to Discover content. Snapchat claims that half of its 100 million daily users visited the Discover section in the past month, while publisher partners like Daily Mail and Hearst also reported huge spikes in views and engagement. Discover, which launched with 11 media publishers in January, hasn’t yet lived up to the expectations of some partners around traffic and ad revenue. It was under fire earlier this year for overcharging for its ads, and the company quickly dropped its ad price to a much more reasonable two cents per view.

What Brands Should Do
With the revamped Discover section seemingly delivering the good results that Snapchat had hoped for, it could be a good time for brands and advertisers, especially those seeking to reach the younger audiences, to consider looking into Snapchat’s content channel and its ad units.

 

Source: Digiday

Facebook Adds Critics’ Reviews To Restaurant Pages

Read original article on: The Verge

Continuing its grand plan of swallowing digital publishers and creating its own ecosystem, Facebook has started adding food critics’ reviews from to pages of restaurants. By partnering with publishers like Bon AppetitConde Nast Traveler, Eater, and New York Magazine, the social network is looking to leveraging its newfound access to editorial content into influencing the restaurant choices of its users.

With competition from Yelp and Google, Facebook’s local-search product has yet to gain much momentum. This new addition should give it a boost, while also becoming a testing ground for more Facebook-sanctioned editorial content to appear on other brand pages. While the sheen of critical validations could work wonders, brands also need to be aware of the risk as Facebook says that it will unselectively show all reviews provided by the publishers, negative ones included.