Tag: mobile ads

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

Spotify Extends Full-Screen Display Ads To Mobile

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Spotify is bringing its full-screen desktop display ads to mobile in an attempt to grab more attention of mobile users. Starting today, the music streaming service is offering a new mobile ad unit dubbed Overlay Mobile, which allows advertisers to buy display ads for both iOS and Android mobile devices. Spotify says this new ad unit provides 100% viewability, as it serves as the “welcome back” ad and only appears when a user has the app open.

What Brands Need To Do
This new mobile ad product shows that Spotify is following its audience, as 65% of global streams are now on mobile devices. The streaming service shared earlier today that it now has 30 million paying subscribers out of a total of over 75 million active users, which leaves around 45 million Spotify users on the ad-supported free tier. If your brand wants to reach those Spotify listeners on mobile, this new ad unit should provide an effective way to do so.

 

Source: AdWeek

Header image courtesy of Spotify for Brands

Google Brings App Streaming To App Install Ads

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
In November, Google started testing an app streaming feature, which surfaces in-app only content and allows mobile users to experience select apps for one minute right from search results. Now Google is bringing that demo experience to search ads with the debut of Search Trial Run Ads, which will run through AdWords and include a “Try Now” button. After tapping the button, users will have a chance to try out the advertised Android app for up to ten minutes before deciding whether to download the full version.

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. With this new ad product, brands now have more time to demonstrate the features and benefits of their apps and convince users to download. Plus, the targeting capabilities powered by Google’s vast user data should also make this new ad product more appealing to brands and developers looking to acquire users for their apps.

 

Source: Marketing Land

 

SXSW 2016: Buzzfeed Launches New Ad Product To Help Brands Reach Social Audience

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Buzzfeed, master of viral videos and sponsored content, announced at SXSW on Saturday that it is launching a new premium ad product designed to help brand advertisers better reach audiences on mobile, desktop, and various social channels where Buzzfeed has built strong followings. The new ad product, Swarm, will allow brands to run campaigns simultaneously across all of Buzzfeed’s web and mobile properties, as well as six of its social platforms: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, Vine, and Snapchat Discover.

What Brands Need To Do
As media consumption continues to fragment, it is becoming increasingly important for brands to reach out to consumers on as many media platforms as possible. This new ad product from Buzzfeed can mitigate some of the stress of running a multi-channel ad campaign, and also give brands a comprehensive look at where they are most likely to find their target audience. Last month, NBCUniversal also launched a new ad division specifically for handling multi-channel ad campaigns. As new holistic ad products become available, brands would be wise to experiment with such products to get in front of more people.

 

Source: AdWeek

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

Facebook Extends The Instant Article Experience To Ads With “Canvas”

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
On Thursday, Facebook officially launched Canvas, an ad product that loads full-screen rich media right from the news feed, bringing a faster, cleaner mobile experience pioneered by Instant Articles to ads. Facebook started testing this immersive full-screen ad unit last September, and the company says early tests have shown users spend more time on Canvas ads, with the top Canvas ads gaining over 70 seconds of view time per user.

Facebook is also offering brands a straightforward self-serve tool to help brands build Canvas ads with no coding required, allowing brands to add interactive rich media like animations, carousels, product catalogs, tilt-to-view images, and videos to their ads with ease. Different versions of a Canvas ad can be targeted to different demographics, just like regular Facebook ads.

What Brands Need To Do
Facebook made Instant Articles available to all users last week, which means Facebook users will soon be served with a lot of Instant Articles-enabled pages, familiarizing them to the fast-loading experience. And they will soon start to expect a similar experience when it comes to Facebook ads as well. Therefore, brands should take the initiative to use Canvas to create rich-media ads that work best on Facebook’s mobile app.

 

Source: TechCrunch

Header image courtesy of the Facebook Canvas site

Facebook To Loosen Restrictions On Instant Articles Ads

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Facebook might soon allow more ads into Instant Articles, a fast-access publishing tool it first introduced in May. Faced with mounting pressure from publishers over the limited ad revenues, Facebook is said to be considering loosening policies that limit the number of ads and prohibit rich media in Instant Articles. Facebook currently only allows one banner ad for every 500 words of content within Instant Articles, while also banning rich media ads within Instant Articles for the sake of faster loading time.

What Brands Need To Do
By loosening its restrictions for ads in Instant Articles, Facebook aims to make nice with the publishers in order to keep them on board with its publishing platform. This move should increase the ad spots available in Instant Articles, which spells new opportunities for brands to reach their audiences.

 

Source: Marketing Land

Facebook’s Mobile Ads Are Killing It On Every Front

Posted on by Lab Team


What Happened
Facebook reported its quarterly earnings yesterday and, all things considered, the social network is doing splendidly well, especially in regard to its mobile ad revenues. The company reported a 45% year over year increase in ad sales in the Q3 2015, bringing total ad sales to $4.3 billion, of which mobile ads took up about 78% ($3.4 billion). Moreover, Facebook also reported 8 billion average daily video views from 500 million users, up from just 4 billion video views per day in April.

Facebook Q3 Growth Entirely Fueled by Mobile Ads

Market Impact
With mobile ads now accounting for the majority of its ad revenues, Facebook’s transformation into a mobile company is now more than half complete. The majority of users are accessing the social network via mobile devices, and its monetization focus has also shifted toward mobile. Although part of that 8 billion views is no doubt fueled by the autoplay videos on user timelines, the impressive number still indicates early success in Facebook’s ongoing efforts to build out its video platform, which bodes well for Facebook as it competes with YouTube for the TV commercial dollars that are shifting to digital video.

 

Source: AdWeek and TechCrunch; Chart from Statista

Instagram Tries Content Curation And Opens Self-Serve Access To Carousel Ads

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Taking a page out of Snapchat’s playbook, Instagram tested a Live Stories-like video content curation on Saturday, highlighting some of the best Halloween posts across its platform. Shown as a banner atop of its mobile app, U.S. users can click the prompt to see a curated video stream, stripped of the captions, likes, and comments that usually come with Instagram posts. Instagram has confirmed that this is “just the start” for this kind of event-specific UGC curation.

In related news, the photo-sharing network is also opening up access to its well-received Carousel Ads to more brands. Starting in the next few weeks, the multi-image ad unit will be available for all brands via Facebook’s self-service ad dashboards. First launched in March, Carousel Ads were the first Instagram ads that included clickable links that can direct users to destination sites outside the app.

What Brands Need To Do
According to Instagram, Carousel Ads on average drive an additional 2.5-point lift in ad recall. In particular, Ben & Jerry’s reported a 33-point increase in ad recall with Instagram ads. Offering its hottest new ad product via a self-serve interface should certainly attract more brands to try it out. Moreover, the new event-specific content curation holds great potential in becoming Instagram’s own Live Stories or Moments, potentially providing brands a new channel to surface branded content with sponsored posts or streams.

 

Source: Re/Code & Marketing Land

Global Watch: Facebook Debuts New “Slideshow” Ad Unit For Emerging Markets

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
In its latest bid to capture its “next billion” users in emerging global markets, Facebook is introducing a new ad unit designed to adapt to the limited mobile bandwidth in those markets. Aptly named “Slideshow,” this new ad product allows brands to replace video ads with 3 to 7 still images to create a slideshow up to 15 seconds long. Coca Cola, the first brand to try out this ad unit, successfully reached 2 million African consumers via Facebook and raised brand awareness by 10 points for its Coke Studio Africa project.

What Brands Need To Do
Facebook has long been working to capture consumers in emerging global markets, starting with the Internet.org project it launched in 2013 to provide free internet access in less developed countries. Earlier this week, the social network announced a new initiative that slows the internet connections at its company headquarters on Tuesdays to give engineers and employees a better understanding of what it’s like to use Facebook with a 2G connection.

For global brands that wish to conquer these emerging markets, Facebook’s approach provides a great example of how brands can work around the technological and infrastructure limitations in those markets and design a user experience that’s tailored to the realities of those consumers.

 

Source: AdAge