Tag: google

Google Search Starts Streaming Android Apps Over The Web

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Earlier today, Google started rolling out the app-streaming options in its Android app, which allows Android users to stream certain apps over the web without downloading them first. The streamed apps will be running on virtual machines on Agawi’s cloud platform, which Google acquired in June, and respond to taps and touches similarly to how native apps do. This feature is currently only enabled for nine launch app partners, which include Hotel Tonight, Weather, and New York Subway. Moreover, Google is no longer requiring that apps have matching web content in order to be indexed through its search engine, which makes app-only content searchable.

What Brands Need To Do
As consumer attention on mobile devices continues to be dominated by apps, app discovery has become a real issue for brands. Making branded apps streamable via Google Search can help brands give consumers a preview of what their apps have to offer, which may lead to app downloads. If your brand has yet to index your app content to make it discoverable via Google Search, now is a good time to start.

 

Source: TechCrunch

Header image courtesy of Google’s Inside Search Blog

Google+ Revamped To Focus On Brand-Friendly Features

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
For a while, Google’s social platform Google+ looked like it was heading towards the sunset, as Google pulled out its key features like Hangouts and Photos and promoted them into separate services. But with an overhauled site that debuted on Tuesday, it seems like the Alphabet company is not giving up on Google+ just yet. The redesigned site runs on Material Design, which helps to boost its performance on mobile devices.

More importantly, the new Google+ puts two features, Communities and Collections, front and center. Communities, first introduced to Google+ about 3 years ago, is functionally equivalent to Facebook Groups, allowing users to come together and form groups based around a specific interest, organization, or cause. Collections, on the other hand, was added this May to give users a way to build Pinterest-like curations around certain topics and share them with others.

What Brands Need To Do
Both Communities and Collections are very brand-friendly features, allowing businesses and brands to leverage their content to reach Google+ users with specific interests. For instance, a restaurant can post pictures of their dishes in the foodie community, or a travel brand can start a Collection called “Coolest Places To Visit.” The redesign puts an emphasis on giving users designated spaces to share content and browse curations around their specific interests, an emphasis that brands can utilize for targeted content marketing.

 

Source: Marketing Land

Header image is a promotional image from Google’s Official Blog

Facebook To Make Its In-App Content Searchable By Google

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Google’s effort to keep its search engine relevant in a mobile-first world just got a boost from one of its biggest rival. On Friday, Facebook began allowing Google to crawl and index its mobile app. Google searches on Android devices will now surface information from public Facebook profiles, Pages, Groups, and Events, all embedded with deep links that will direct users to the content within Facebook’s app.

What Brands Need To Do
In order to make its search more useful on mobile devices, and therefore not losing a big portion of its search ad dollars to apps, Google has been working on convincing app developers to index their apps for deep linking. Meanwhile, Facebook looks to route more users to its mobile app via Google search, thus further cementing its lead in mobile attention. For brands, this means their Facebook content will become more discoverable, increasing their content reach.

 

Source: Wall Street Journal

IPG Lab + Google Release Deconstructing Branded Content: The Global Guide To What Works

Posted on by Lab Team

Click here to download the report.

Branded content, defined in this research as content that lives on its own, produced by and for the brand, as opposed to content produced by someone else the brand affixes itself to, has transformed marketing, overall. With the increased emphasis on cross-screen viewing, and digital at the core of brand communications, branded content has become a core part of many brand campaigns.

IPG Media Lab, a division of IPG Mediabrands, in conjunction with Google, today announced the results of the industry’s first global comprehensive branded content effectiveness study. Aiming to understand consumer perceptions and to compare the effectiveness of branded content and video advertising, this closed study surveyed 14,780 consumers, looked at 50 brands, across 19 verticals, in 10 countries, assessing how branded content is perceived in different parts of the world and how this translates into branding effectiveness.

Content That Works

Based on the research we conducted, here are two examples of content that was effective and seen differently by consumers.

Nutroplex: 

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Rexona: 

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You can download and read the report here.

 

Google Brings Podcasts To Google Play

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Google is ready to challenge Apple’s close ties to podcasts, whose name derived from Apple’s iPod. The Alphabet company is readying the launch of a dedicated page for podcasts in Google Play, allowing podcast creators to upload content directly to Google Play Music. Podcasts will also be included in the Google Play Music app, making it the first first-party app for podcast listening on Android devices.   

What Brands Need To Do
Thanks to last year’s surprise hit “Serial” from This American Life, podcasting has been enjoying a surge in audience interest and resultingly, marketing opportunities, where brands aim to reach a targeted audience of specified interests with sponsorships and native ads. Earlier this month, Coca Cola struck a content deal with iHeartMedia to produce a coke-branded music podcast to target teens. Google’s added support for podcasts on Android devices will no doubt help further expand the reach of podcasting and solidify its status as a burgeoning marketing channel.

 

Source: Re/Code

Yahoo Enlists Google To Help With Its Search Ads

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Earlier today, Yahoo announced it has reached a non-exclusive deal with Google to display the latter’s search results and ads in its own services, both on mobile and desktop devices. Yahoo has a similar arrangement with Microsoft’s Bing in place, but it states that the new Google partnership will only be supplementary to its existing deal with Bing. Yahoo will have near total control over when or where to pull in Google’s search results or ads, but it remains unclear whether advertisers would have the option to opt out of having their Google search ads shown on Yahoo sites.

Market Impact
According to a comScore report released in August, Google dominated the U.S. desktop search market with nearly 64% market share, whereas Yahoo’s search network trailed far behind with only 12.7% market share. Therefore, it makes sense for Yahoo to team up with the biggest search engine on the planet in order to leverage some of Google’s search technologies and ad products to better manage search queries and serve ads. For Google, this deal helps to further expand the reach of its search ads, which in turn increases its revenue. Overall, the search market now faces the challenge of losing search to apps on mobile devices, and we expect to see more consolidating partnerships like this as search giants continue to battle with this issue.

 

Source: Business Insider

 

Google Surfaces iOS App Content In Search

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
In May, Google started encouraging iOS app developers to index their app content so that it could eventually be surfaced in search results. This feature has been made available to “a small group of test partners” only, but now Google is expanding it by making the feature compatible with the deep link standards for iOS 9. This means now users can find iOS apps by searching for keywords like “chess games” and install them directly from the results page, or find relevant in-app content directly in the search results using Safari or Chrome for iOS. Google expects iOS users will start seeing app content in Safari by the end of this month.

What Brands Need To Do
For iOS app developers, this expansion means that they need to make sure their app is submitted to Google for indexing. For brands, app indexing will be key to allowing users to go directly from search to a branded app, which helps close the gap between mobile web and apps, as well as increasing the reach of in-app content.

IPG Media Lab, Ansible, and Reprise Media can help you strategize and produce content that will maximize the benefits from this new distribution tool on iOS devices.

 

Source: VentureBeat

Google’s AMP To Support Five Ad Networks, For Now

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Yesterday, Google unveiled the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project, giving online publishers and content creators an open standard that aims at speeding up the mobile web. Based on the information available yesterday, we gathered that it wouldn’t support the tracking codes necessary for targeted ads, therefore most ads delivered on AMP pages would be static. Now, new details on AMP have emerged that indicate, while it is true that all ad networks using third-party JavaScript will be banned, it will in fact support five ad networks at launch. Four of those networks are owned by Google, Amazon, and AOL, putting smaller networks at a disadvantage. Google is said to be open to adding support for other ad networks in the future.

What Agencies Need To Do
A number of online publishers are reportedly on board with AMP, such as The New York Times, The Guardian, Washington Post, and Vox. For ad agencies, this means their choice of ad networks will have to take AMP’s limited support into consideration if those aforementioned platforms are involved. Now that AMP has been released to the public and Google is getting feedback, it is evolving quickly and agencies should keep a close eye on its continued development.

 

Source: NiemanLab

Google Speeds Up The Mobile Web With AMP

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Earlier today, Google unveiled its answer to Apple News and Facebook’s Instant Articles: the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project. Unlike Facebook’s or Apple’s content initiatives, AMP is an open standard that is essentially a subset of HTML, meaning that publishers and content owners won’t need to strike a deal with Google to use it. Instead, content creators can use AMP’s tools that take advantage of smart caching of content—either on their own servers or on Google’s servers—to make various webpage elements load faster. Google announced a number of platform partners for AMP, including Twitter, Pinterest, Adobe, LinkedIn, and WordPress, while major publishers such as The Guardian, Washington Post, and Vox are already trying it out.

What Brands Need To Do
Google is understandably invested in speeding up the mobile web, given it gets the majority of its revenue from web ads. And as mobile browsing continues to outpace desktop, media owners really need to take notice and put mobile optimization first. More importantly, AMP doesn’t seem to support the tracking code embedded in many targeted ads, therefore rendering those ads static. So brands need to be aware of this trade-off between access speed and ad targeting and pay attention as AMP evolves.

 

Source: VentureBeat

New Chromecast To Support Spotify, Sling TV, And More

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Google announced yesterday that the new Chromecast 2 will have native support for a slew of popular streaming services including Showtime, Sling TV, NBA, and NHL. Google also introduced Chromecast Audio that connects speakers to Wi-Fi for wireless audio streaming from services like Spotify. The Chromecast Android app also received a major update that added features like content discovery, multiple device control, and a more comprehensive video search tool, vastly improving the user experience.

What Brands Need To Do
So far, Google has reportedly sold an impressive 20 million units of the original Chromecast, which helps users enjoy a living-room viewing experience powered by mobile devices and laptops. All brands that have video content should consider adding support for Chromecast in their branded apps. For media owners that have content apps that already support Chromecast, this upgrade brings some new opportunities in increased audience reach and improved content discovery, and content owners need to make efforts to ensure the consistency and quality of viewing experience as viewers consume content on bigger TV screens.

 

Source: TechCrunch