Ten things you need to know — 8/12/17

Wel­come to ‘Ten things you need to know’ — the first in what will hope­ful­ly be a fort­night­ly explo­ration of…er…news! Inter­est­ing and friv­o­lous things from the inter­net! Occa­sion­al nuggets of inspi­ra­tion for mar­keters! That sort of thing, real­ly. The idea is that this will be a reg­u­lar inbox drop of links which will hope­ful­ly help with your pro­fes­sion­al lives and which might on occa­sion pro­vide you with some­thing that you can amuse and impress your col­leagues with. Giv­en that this is the first one, we’d love to hear from you about what is use­ful, what isn’t, what you’d like more of and what we should nev­er, ever men­tion again — feed­back is always wel­come (except the sort deliv­ered with knives). We hope you like it…

• Adobe launch­es Adver­tis­ing Cloud Mobile App: Remem­ber the orig­i­nal sales pat­ter for Apple when they were launch­ing the App Store: ‘There’s an app for that!’ Well, now there tru­ly is. Wit­ness Adobe’s new­ly-launched Adver­tis­ing Cloud App, which brings the pow­er and flex­i­bil­i­ty of the Adobe Adver­tis­ing Cloud to your mobile device, mean­ing you can track, assess and imple­ment cam­paigns wher­ev­er you are, at any time. So, if your cam­paign is run­ning and you have a lit­tle life issue like, say, your kid’s birth­day or a touch of viral plague, but you need to ensure that your every­thing is opti­mised — well, now you can. It’s the first of its kind in the sec­tor and we’re pret­ty proud of it. Give it a lit­tle whirl and you’ll make our team of devs very happy.
• Face­book Tri­alling Mes­sen­ger Broad­cast: You know how peo­ple are get­ting a bit wise to online ads and how they’re start­ing to tune them out a bit, even on Face­book? Well NO MATTER, because here comes an excit­ing new way in which you can entice them to buy your things (or con­sid­er, or whichev­er point in the mar­ket­ing fun­nel you and they find your­selves). Only on tri­al, but I’ll eat my nonex­is­tent hat if this doesn’t become an actu­al prod­uct — Mes­sen­ger Broad­cast, at least in its tri­al form, will let brands fire pro­mos at a wide group of peo­ple using Mes­sen­ger; “As for who the mes­sage can reach, the inter­face out­lines that a cer­tain num­ber of users will receive it at no cost to the busi­ness. It’s unclear whether busi­ness­es will be able to pay for more reach, but that seems like a rea­son­able direc­tion for the prod­uct” — so, then, a clas­sic and dev­il­ish­ly intel­li­gent Face­book ploy where they’ll attract you with a mod­icum of organ­ic to get you hooked on that sweet, sweet engage­ment. Very clever Facebook….very clever (I say as I stroke my vir­tu­al white cat).
• Join Friends’ Livestreams On Insta­gram: To quote: “When watch­ing a friend’s live video, sim­ply tap the “Request” but­ton in the com­ments sec­tion. You’ll see a con­fir­ma­tion that your friend has accept­ed your request, and you’ll have a moment to pre­pare. Once you’re on, the screen will split in half so you can hang out live with your friend. You can leave your friend’s live video at any time, mak­ing it easy to join for a quick hel­lo or a longer chat.” There’s almost cer­tain­ly some GREAT fan ser­vice stuff that famous­es and brand ambas­sadors can do with this; just, er, take care as to who you let join you.
• The Snap Redesign: In this video (as an aside, the Snap YT chan­nel is a real­ly good resource for Snap tips, worth look­ing at), Snap founder Evan Spiegel explains the SNAP REDESIGN, which is large­ly UX stuff to make it less daunt­ing for new users, but which also presents two sep­a­rate feeds with­in the app — one for one’s friends, the oth­er for brands and pub­lish­ers (much as Face­book tri­alled to huge con­cern from media orgs ear­li­er this year). Which seems like an excel­lent idea for users and poten­tial growth but which, and I appre­ci­ate that Evan is the busi­ness­man here not me and all that, does strike me as a TOUCH risky. I’m sure ad prod­ucts will get around that, and maybe that will do the trick — there will be enough brands will­ing to pay to cross that CONTENT DIVIDE to com­pen­sate for those who aban­don the plat­form — but will be inter­est­ing to see.
• New Types of Snap Ads: New ads! “Pro­mot­ed Sto­ries which string togeth­er mul­ti­ple Snaps into longer-form slideshows open­able from a tile on the Sto­ries page that’s shown to every­one in a giv­en coun­try, and Aug­ment­ed Real­i­ty Tri­al ads that let peo­ple play with an AR ver­sion of a prod­uct over­laid on the world around them.” These are real­ly quite excit­ing in terms of the tech­nol­o­gy and the poten­tial reach, but be warned that I’ve heard it rumoured that the min­i­mum spend on each is like­ly to be a touch on the high side at first as they work out the possibilities.

• The State of Euro­pean Tech 2017:The State of Euro­pean Tech is a report pub­lished by VC firm Atom­i­co which looks at the start­up scene across the con­ti­nent — how much is it worth, where’s the mon­ey going, what has the deal land­scape been like over the last 12 months, that sort of thing. It’s an excel­lent exam­ple of how to take a large-scale research report and turn it into some­thing rather more com­pelling. The web­site presents an inter­ac­tive view of the data, enabling users to see dif­fer­ent datasets in sim­ple fash­ion; the graphs and charts are all share­able; the site works well on mobile…it’s not huge­ly shiny, fine, but as a ‘this is a sol­id piece of work to increase the reach and vis­i­bil­i­ty of a piece of research’ link, it’s a good one.
• Duroc Toma­toes: I have a very size­able soft spot for ridicu­lous­ly overengi­neered web­sites for indus­tries that might not be seen as huge­ly sexy to the out­side world; this may well be the ur-exam­ple of these. Duroc, I learned this week, is the largest sup­pli­er of ‘snack­ing toma­toes’ (no, me nei­ther) to the UK and a few oth­er Euro­pean coun­tries; what would you imag­ine the web­site of a major toma­to sup­pli­er to be like? Would you imag­ine it to have MUSIC and ANIMATIONS and a ridicu­lous­ly colour­ful aes­thet­ic that reminds one of the set of Play­days? NO YOU WOULD NOT, and yet here we are. This is just SO won­der­ful­ly, riotous­ly amaz­ing, and makes me won­der whether one of their star interns had just com­plet­ed a course in cre­ative web­de­sign or some­thing. Won­der­ful, huge­ly pleas­ing and made me actu­al­ly go out and buy a few toms — so it had the desired effect. I chal­lenge you not to sud­den­ly crave a snack­ing toma­to or two after a few min­utes of joy­ful time spent in their mag­ic online world. This came to me via the The Web­site of the Year Awards 2017, which fea­ture some tru­ly superb exam­ples of web­work if you’re in the mar­ket for some inspiration
• Snatch:This week’s BIG HYPE APP comes in the form of Snatch, which is an Aug­ment­ed Real­i­ty trea­sure hunt — using the app, you stare through your phone’s screen to find vir­tu­al pack­ages that you need to col­lect and pro­tect from oth­er com­peti­tors; basi­cal­ly it’s some sort of Poke­mon Go vari­ant where oth­er peo­ple can nick the Poke­mon off you, but with the added incen­tive of REAL PRIZES. If users man­age to keep hold of a box for six hours, they win its con­tents IN REAL LIFE. Worth a play while the user­base is still rel­a­tive­ly small and you might have a chance of actu­al­ly win­ning something.
• Ice­box: This is clever — fine, it’s a PR stunt for price com­par­i­son site Find­er, but the idea behind this is sol­id. Ice­box is a Chrome exten­sion which, when installed, grants an auto­mat­ic ‘con­sid­er­a­tion’ peri­od for online pur­chas­es, effec­tive­ly putting ‘buy’ but­tons on a reversible cooldown to make impulse pur­chas­ing hard­er. There are all sorts of twists on this which you could imag­ine work­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly for the char­i­ta­ble sec­tor, but I’ll leave you to come up with those.
• Just Type Stuff: This is what the web is for — not the bring­ing togeth­er of dis­parate peo­ples and view­points, not the shar­ing of ideas and feel­ings and knowl­edge and words and music and and and — no, it’s for this, a web­site which lets you type stuff into your brows­er and see it pop up in a lit­tle vir­tu­al world. I first saw this as part of the ‘Now Play This’ exhi­bi­tion at Som­er­set House ear­li­er this year, but it’s now avail­able to all; TRY THIS IT IS ACE. Seri­ous­ly, click the link, type stuff, hit return, see what hap­pens. It’s GREAT, and you will derive more plea­sure than you’d expect from cre­at­ing a tiny vir­tu­al uni­verse pop­u­lat­ed by float­ing cows and umbrel­las and dogs and stuff (no, I know you don’t under­stand, but JUST CLICK THE LINK).