Ten things you need to know — 22/12/17

Only the sec­ond edi­tion of Ten Things You Need To Know and already we’re slack­ing off for Christ­mas. Scan­dalous. Then again, most of you are too, so it’s prob­a­bly fair. This week sees some big news for Snapchat, some updates to Insta­gram, and a few impor­tant tweaks to News­feed, which you real­ly ought to pay atten­tion to. Oh, and pos­si­bly the occa­sion­al unex­pect­ed out­burst of sea­son­al cheer. Hap­py hol­i­days to you from us here at Adobe, and see you again in 2018!

• Adobe Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er Inte­grates with Microsoft Dynam­ics 365: While that might not sound like the most excit­ing news of the year, this is the lat­est inte­gra­tion between Adobe prod­ucts, includ­ing Adobe Mar­ket­ing Cloud and Adobe Expe­ri­ence Cloud, with Microsoft’s CRM offer­ing. What this means is that you’ll now be able to seam­less­ly merge two prod­uct datasets to assist with one-to-one per­son­al­i­sa­tion of Web con­tent, as well as con­nect­ing any lead gen­er­a­tion data input on the Web to a Microsoft CRM sys­tem. Which, coin­ci­den­tal­ly, was just what we want­ed for Christ­mas too
• Snapchat Launch­es Lens­es Stu­dio: BIIIIIG Snap news—lenses for every­one! Well, if you can work the software—but effec­tive­ly this democ­ra­tis­es the lens-mak­ing process. Rather than sole­ly being the pre­serve of brands with enough mon­ey to spend on spon­sored lens­es, it’s now pos­si­ble for any­one with the req­ui­site 3d-mod­el­ing chops to cre­ate one and get it on the plat­form. Lots of fun stuff cer­tain brands could do; I par­tic­u­lar­ly like the ‘Snap­code to unlock’ fea­ture, which means you can cre­ate prop­er lim­it­ed-edi­tion Lens­es for SOCIAL CACHET AMONG SUPERFANS. The one impor­tant caveat here is that, giv­en the pre­vi­ous­ly lim­it­ed nature of lens­es on the plat­form, yours will stand out a mile (and not in a good way) if they err more towards the ‘Tum­blr Fan Art’ aesthetic.
• Fight­ing ‘Engage­ment-bait’ on Face­book: Anoth­er step in Facebook’s con­tin­u­al quest to clean up the bad­lands of the Newsfeed—or, for the more cyn­i­cal­ly-mind­ed, anoth­er nail in the increas­ing­ly por­cu­pine-like cof­fin of organ­ic reach (no, chil­dren, once upon a time it real­ly did exist!). Face­book recent­ly announced that it would begin tak­ing proac­tive steps to throt­tle the reach of posts employ­ing News­feed-gam­ing tac­tics of the sort designed to boost reach. From now on, posts which play the clas­sic ‘Like if you agree!’ game to boost vis­i­bil­i­ty will find that they don’t real­ly work any­more, and pages repeat­ed­ly employ­ing these sorts of tac­tics will be pun­ished accord­ing­ly. It’s ok, though, we know that none of you do that sort of thing.
• Changes To Face­book Video Dis­tri­b­u­tion and Mon­eti­sa­tion: The tl;dr here (it means too long, didn’t read, if you’re strug­gling to keep up) is that Face­book con­tin­ues to rein­vent tele­vi­sion. This series of updates is main­ly to do with ad breaks with­in videos (now only avail­able on videos above a cer­tain length), and ad breaks in Live broad­casts (now restrict­ed to pages with over 50,000 ‘Likes’). Basi­cal­ly, this is to pro­mote the cre­ation of EPISODIC CONTENT to which VIEWERS WILL RETURN LIKE MOTHS TO THE VIDEOFLAME—or, as some might like to term it, mak­ing Face­book Watch JUST LIKE TELLY. The oth­er update buried in here is that Face­book is ‘updat­ing News Feed rank­ing to improve dis­tri­b­u­tion of videos that peo­ple active­ly want to watch’—basically cre­ators mak­ing recur­ring series of CONTENT will get an algo­b­ump, because Face­book wants to get to a point where broad­cast­ers don’t both­er host­ing video on their own sites any­more, and instead, accept FB as the de fac­to con­tent vehi­cle of the future (with Net­flix). Great!

• Pin­ter­est Lanch­es FB Mes­sen­ger Bot: This is rather clever. It’s an update to the Face­book Mes­sen­ger SDK dressed up as a Pin­ter­est announce­ment. The­o­ret­i­cal­ly, any brand can now do sim­i­lar (though with­out the fan­cy Pin­ter­est-spe­cif­ic search gub­bins). Users who share links to items on Pin­ter­est in Mes­sen­ger will now see those items dis­play with an image and prompt to ‘search for sim­i­lar’. Click­ing on that will let you use Pinterest’s sim­i­lar items search from with­in Chat. A real­ly clever piece of cross-plat­form inte­gra­tion with use­ful appli­ca­tions, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the home­ware sector.
• Imgur Adds New Fea­tures: Not the most impor­tant point con­tained with­in this arti­cle, but it did teach me that Imgur is pro­nounced Image-ur, which momen­tar­i­ly stunned me. Any­way, the image shar­ing plat­form rolled out a host of updates, includ­ing a news­feed for users and the abil­i­ty to post videos—what it terms ‘snacks’—which rather than just being loop­ing gifs are instead paus­able, rewind­able and all that jazz. No fol­low­ers on Imgur, inter­est­ing­ly, just an algo­rithm to punt stuff at you and the abil­i­ty to direct said algo­rithm through tags, etc. If you’re a brand with decent pho­to assets and the time to both­er, it may be worth con­sid­er­ing chuck­ing some stuff on there and hav­ing a play.
• Key Dig­i­tal Trends 2018: This is the sea­son in which every agency in the world feels com­pelled to make pre­dic­tions as to what the next year will hold. Some are good, some are bad, and some, as hap­pened last year, do things such as pro­claim the com­ing 12 months the era of the ‘new witch’ (no, real­ly, that did hap­pen). This, though, is one of the good ones: Ogilvy’s annu­al ‘things to expect next year in dig­i­tal’ con­tains very lit­tle ‘YEAR OF MOBILE’ or ‘YOU NEED TO GET INTO VR NOW’ but instead is a bit more sen­si­ble and nuanced. It con­tains some sound obser­va­tions, which you could do worse than take on board.

• A good agency Christ­mas video: Ok, so the Santa/Satan gag isn’t a par­tic­u­lar­ly new one, but this is cute and fun­ny and they got Patrick Stew­art to do the v/o, so WELL DONE, peo­ple at Anomaly.
• Paper Sig­nals: A very fun lit­tle Google project. This site gives you instruc­tions on how to build your very own paper­craft Inter­net of Things toy, from a lit­tle card­board arrow that changes which direc­tion it’s point­ing depend­ing on the cur­rent val­u­a­tion of Bit­coin, to, say, an umbrel­la which furls and unfurls depen­dent on the like­li­hood of rain. It’s such a love­ly thing to play with as an intro­duc­tion to con­nec­tiv­i­ty and elec­tron­ics, and if you’re a cer­tain type of family/person, this is absolute­ly going to be your Christ­mas project
• A Mes­sage From Earth: When Voy­ager set off from Earth 40 years ago, it famous­ly car­ried a gold­en record, etched with Da Vinci’s Vit­ru­vian Man and con­tain­ing media designed to be playable by whichev­er far-flung civil­i­sa­tion was lucky enough to come across it. This web­site is a beau­ti­ful 40th anniver­sary trib­ute to that record. It’s just GLORIOUS. Forty dif­fer­ent artists cre­at­ed their own inter­pre­ta­tions of what the record means to them (yes, I know, the most tedious of ALL the faux-cura­to­r­i­al expla­na­tions), and hence this site, which is a gor­geous scrap­book of words and sounds and ideas, and is so won­der­ful­ly rich with CONTENT (sor­ry, but) that you could lose your­self in it for days. I can’t stress quite how won­der­ful this is. Well DONE, who­ev­er made it, it’s a joy.