Tag: Mobile

Snapchat To Add App Install Ads In Discover And Live Stories

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Snapchat’s ad sales team has indicated it is considering introducing app install ads to its platform. This new ad product will likely be placed on Snapchat’s content portal Discover channels and Live Stories as video ads that redirect users to the app stores for iOS and Android. App install ads have been a key piece of mobile advertising, fueling Facebook’s ballooning ad revenue with nearly 300% year-by-year growth in Q2 last year. So it’s no surprise that Snapchat is also looking into this important ad product in order to grow its ad revenue.

What Brands Need To Do
For brands, Snapchat offers a great platform to reach young Millennials and teens on mobile. This new ad product can be useful for brands to drive downloads for their branded app and help increase awareness among key demos. In doing so, brands should also be conscious of the content channels they will be featured in, and pick the ones that fit with their messages best. For example, a bank advertising its personal banking app should consider putting the ads in Wall Street Journal’s Discover channel to match with their audience.

 

Source: The Information

Header image courtesy of Snapchat on YouTube

Google Announces More Ad Tech Partners For AMP Project

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
In early October, Google announced its answer to Facebook’s Instant Articles named Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to make webpages load faster on mobile devices. Since AMP was announced in October, it has gained support from publishers, platforms like Twitter, analytics providers, and initially, five major ad networks. Now, Google has added several new ad tech platforms to the AMP project, announcing that Outbrain, AOL, OpenX, DoubleClick, and AdSense are now working within the framework to improve the advertising experience. Google also said that AMP will be officially launched in early 2016.

What Agencies Need To Do
These new additions offer publishers greater flexibility to monetize their pages, especially compared to some of the limitations in rival systems like Facebook’s Instant Articles and Apple News. For ad agencies, this means more ad networks to choose from that may results in faster-loading mobile ads. AMP has been evolving quickly since Google’s initial announcement, and agencies should keep a close eye on its continued development.

Source: Marketing Land

 

How Burberry Tripled Its Base Of Mobile Shoppers

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Burberry has been embracing digital channels with a bullish strategy, and its effort is starting to pay off. The British luxury retailer retooled its online store to be more mobile-friendly and built a frictionless checkout and payment process. Those changes helped it triple its base of mobile shoppers since the site relaunched at the end of 2014, with online and mobile sales doubling their share of the company’s revenue in the past year.

Moreover, Burberry has been eagerly experimenting with new mobile platforms to reach younger consumers. It debuted its Spring/Summer 2016 collection on Snapchat, became the first brand to have a branded channel on Apple Music, and partnered with messaging app Line in Japan to court shoppers with branded stickers.

What Brands Need To Do
Burberry’s success shows the importance of building a frictionless online shopping experience and engaging today’s consumers on the popular mobile platforms with branded content. More retail brands should take some cues from Burberry and revamp their mobile strategy to cater to today’s mobile-first consumers.

 

Source: Digiday

Why More Companies Should Sponsor Developer Tools Like Capital One Did

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
In a surprising move, Capital One bank has sponsored a developer for his work on CocoaPods, an open-source platform for managing and scaling Swift and Objective-C Cocoa projects. It is rare for a non-tech corporation like Capital One to sponsor a developer tool, but as technology continues to infiltrate all facets of people’s daily lives, recruiting top-tier technical talent is becoming increasingly important to non-tech-related companies. Therefore, it makes sense for Capital One to make a nice gesture towards the developer community, especially considering it is coming out with its own mobile payment app.

What Brands Need To Do
As more and more companies realize the need for app developers and engineers to help them transit towards mobile, the market for recruiting those talents has become highly competitive. Normally, top engineers choose tech companies like Facebook and Google over non-tech corporations, as they are typically solving more interesting problems there. In order to compete with the big tech companies and startups, companies in other industries should consider following Capital One’s example, and build good will in the developer community to raise their profile among the highly sought-after talent.

 

Source: CocoaPods Blog

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

Facebook Partners With Shopify To Build Shop Sections On Pages

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
A week after Facebook first announced the addition of a new mobile-optimized Shop section to Pages, Canadian ecommerce platform Shopify is revealed as the partner that will be powering those new shopping channels on the social network. Shopify says the feature will be made available for all page-owners for free, and merchants can active it by simply adding the Facebook sales channel within the Shopify dashboard in the “coming weeks”. In related news, Shopify has also been selected by Amazon as a preferred Webstore alternative, as the ecommerce giant begin shutting down its own Webstore ecommerce platform in July.

What Brands Should Do
The new Shop section allows businesses to sell directly from their Pages, and merchants that are already using Shopify should definitely take advantage of this new partnership. As Shopify allows Shopify shoppers to save their payment information for future purchases, it can create a frictionless shopping experience, which is crucial for conversion rates. As mobile commerce continues to grow substantially, retail and CPG brands would be wise to make use of this new mobile-friendly feature.

The Lab has always kept an eye out for the ever-changing consumer behaviors in ecoomerce. To learn more about the shifting ecommerce space and the opportunities in social commerce, you can contact our Engagement Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) and schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: Marketing Land

 

Twitter And Google Team Up To Accelerate Mobile Web

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
In response to Facebook’s “Instant Articles” initiative to natively host publishers’ content for quicker access, Google and Twitter are teaming up to accelerate the speed of mobile web. The joint effort, reportedly to be launched with a small group of publishers this fall, differs from Facebook’s Instant Articles or Apple’s upcoming News app, as it won’t host publishers’ content, but instead to show readers cached Web pages from publishers’ sites.

What Brands Should Do
With Facebook’s dominance of the mobile ad market, it makes perfect sense for Google and Twitter – its two biggest rivals – to work together. Google’s cached Web pages will reportedly display the original ads the publisher sold along with the content, which in a way, would make these ad units more appealing to advertisers and brands. For brands that are skeptical of giving up total control over content to the likes of Facebook’s and Apple’s platforms, this new initiative between Twitter and Google would likely be worth looking into.

 

Source: Re/code

iPad Pro Gives Brands More Screen Space To Impress

Posted on by Lab Team

The much-anticipated new iPad confirmed the pre-announcement speculations, as Apple unveiled the brand new iPad Pro that boasts a stunning 12.9-inch multi-touch screen, capable of running two full-size apps in profile mode side by side. This will no doubt give brands more space to impress their audience on tablets with stunning graphics and more information.

iPad Pro boasts a new A9X processor, making it faster than 80% of the portable PCs sold in the past year, according to Apple. It also supports a new detachable smart keyboard a la Microsoft’s Surface and Apple’s first stylus named Apple Pencil for more nuanced interactions. Nearly as powerful as a regular laptop, iPad Pro signals the next stage of mobile devices’ takeover of consumer screen time. If your brand hasn’t adapted to mobile yet, you need to start developing a mobile strategy right now.

Instagram Gets More Serious About Ads

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
After experimenting extensively with various ad products and formats, Instagram is now getting serious about courting TV and online advertisers with more standardized formats and buying options. After lifting the restriction on “non-square posts” last week, Instagram is now allowing brands to run 30-second-long video ads on its platform, extending the previous video runtime of 15 seconds. The company will also start rolling out its ad products to 30 more global markets such as Mexico and India, further expanding its reach.

Moreover, the photo-sharing network is also introducing a new banner-like ad format called Marquee, which, according to Instagram, aims to “help drive mass awareness and expanded reach in a short time-frame”. It will also start offer more customizable “call-to-action” buttons that appeals to a wide array of industries, including travel, entertainment, and retail, with direct response formats that can link outside of Instagram.

What Brands Should Do
As Instagram becomes more ad-friendly, brands should obviously start experiment with the new formats and learn to use each ad product to its advantages. The new Marquee buying option, for example, should be a good fit for for big product launches or movie releases where brands seek big opening sales. Moreover, brands should keep in mind that Instagram is still very much a mobile-first platform, which means that vertical videos are going to look better than the landscape ones.

 

Source: TechCrunch

 

Adblock Plus Releases Mobile Browser App

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Eyeo, the creator behind popular ad-blocking extension Adblock Plus, has launched its own mobile browser apps for both iOS and Android devices, beating Apple at releasing content blocking tools with the upcoming iOS 9. Adblock Plus’ browser is free, and built on top of an extensible iOS browser called Kitt, which suggests that it is unlikely to be as efficient as Apple’s upcoming tools.

What Brands Should Do
Regardless of its efficiency and the fact that not many mobile users would actively seek out third-party browsers, this new browser from Adblock Plus continues the ascent of ad-blockers and the resulting debate among ad industry and online publishers. We details several ways that brands and media owners can do to minimize its impact in one of our most recent Fast Forward analysis, including adapting with native advertising and partnering with data owners that don’t rely on ad network tracking.

 

Source: The Next Web