Ten Things You Need to Know—05/01/18

Wel­come to 2018! Look­ing, it must be said, remark­ably sim­i­lar to 2017, it is nonethe­less a new and excit­ing year, full of promise! Despite 2018 being less than a week old, we already have a packed selec­tion of ten things you need to know. We hope you had rest­ful and hap­py hol­i­days, and that these help to inspire you for what we hope is a great year ahead!

• Pro­gram­mat­ic Ad Buy­ing Only Get­ting Big­ger: At the end of 2017, we sur­veyed Euro­pean adver­tis­ing agen­cies and pro­fes­sion­als, and found that an enor­mous 86 per­cent of brand mar­keters, and 89 per­cent of their col­leagues in agen­cies, plan to ramp-up their invest­ments in pro­gram­mat­ic ad buy­ing in 2018. What does that mean for you? Well, I could tell you, but instead I’d direct you to click the link and read our esteemed col­league Phil Duffield’s take on the Five Things You Need to Con­sid­er when think­ing pro­gram­mat­ic in 2018. Smart advice here.
• Face­book Launch­es ‘Click to What­sapp’ Ads: What do cus­tomers like most in terms of brand inter­ac­tions? Why that’s right, it’s being shuf­fled from one com­mu­ni­ca­tions plat­form to anoth­er! That said, this development—which enables adver­tis­ers to include a but­ton in their ad that lets peo­ple call or mes­sage via What­sApp with one tap—has clear poten­tial ben­e­fits when it comes to devel­op­ing quick, direct engage­ment with a poten­tial cus­tomer. Not cur­rent­ly avail­able in Europe due to con­cerns about pri­va­cy (no, me nei­ther), but expect­ed to expand glob­al­ly over the com­ing year.
• View Counts Com­ing to Twit­ter Videos: Yes, ok, fine, if you’re a pub­lish­er you should already be able to track the num­ber of views your videos have been get­ting on Twit­ter. This change, though, makes that fig­ure pub­lic-fac­ing, mean­ing every­one will be able to tell if that ‘viral con­tent’ is, well, not actu­al­ly viral at all. This means two things: first, that it might be worth invest­ing in pro­mot­ing videos on Twit­ter more than you’ve done pre­vi­ous­ly, to cash in on that old psy­cho­log­i­cal trick where­by peo­ple are more like­ly to watch videos they already know to be pop­u­lar; and sec­ond, you’re going to have a much hard­er time lying to clients about your results (not that any of you do; not since that New Year’s res­o­lu­tion kicked in, in any case).
• Insta­gram Adds Rec­om­mend­ed Posts to the Feed: In a move lit­er­al­ly no one has asked for, and which caused pre­dictable short-term furore before every­one calmed down and remem­bered that none of this real­ly mat­ters, Insta­gram has intro­duced ‘Rec­om­mend­ed for You’, a new sec­tion appear­ing below a user’s reg­u­lar feed which will sug­gest posts that they might find inter­est­ing, based on algo­rith­mic mag­ic (ok, prob­a­bly not mag­ic). The point of inter­est here for mar­keters is that it seems like­ly that this might become an adver­tis­ing vari­ant in the future.
• Adverts Com­ing to Alexa: A spe­cial con­grat­u­la­to­ry hand­shake to the peo­ple at Ogilvy, whose ‘Pre­dic­tions for 2018’ report we fea­tured in the last ‘10 Things…’ of 2017. One of their pre­dic­tions was that Ama­zon would become sig­nif­i­cant­ly more impor­tant for mar­keters in the com­ing year. And lo, it came to pass that Ama­zon revealed it was plan­ning to expand the oppor­tu­ni­ties avail­able to brands to mar­ket to con­sumers on Alexa. It makes per­fect sense. The amount of data Ama­zon has about actu­al con­sumer behav­iour is unpar­al­leled, and giv­ing brands the oppor­tu­ni­ty to be first in the queue to be rec­om­mend­ed to cus­tomers ask­ing, “Alexa, please buy me some­thing to cope with my creep­ing sense of anx­i­ety about moder­ni­ty,” seems like a sen­si­ble step. This will inevitably be rolled out to the FMCG giants first, but expect there to be an ele­ment of self-serve to this as time moves on.

• We Are Social’s 2018 Trends: It’s still ear­ly enough in the year that we can link to trend pre­dic­tions, and this short pre­sen­ta­tion from We Are Social is refresh­ing­ly sen­si­ble and free of (too much) flim­flam. It includes a few neat ideas and plat­forms you might have missed.
• Imag­i­nary Sound­scapes: Some­thing else we’re going to see a lot more of this year is com­put­ers learn­ing how to make things up. This real­ly impres­sive project—currently only avail­able to PC owners—uses Google Streetview to let you nav­i­gate to wher­ev­er you like in the world. A beach in Tahi­ti. The end of your street. The soft­ware then analy­ses the image present in Streetview to deter­mine the type of envi­ron­ment being dis­played, and gen­er­ates a machine learn­ing-derived sound­scape which it ‘thinks’ fits the view in ques­tion. So trav­el to a sports sta­di­um and you’ll hear the sound of a crowd, or to a motor­way to hear traf­fic. Aston­ish­ing, real­ly, and a won­der­ful exam­ple of how fast this is mov­ing. A cou­ple of years ago this would have been rock­et science—today it rais­es nary an eyebrow.
• Face­book Ana­lyt­ics Fun­nels: This is a gen­uine­ly inter­est­ing and use­ful blog­post by Jon Loomer, walk­ing you through some pow­er­ful-yet-under­used Face­book fea­tures which will let you devel­op some use­ful insights into your mar­ket­ing fun­nel using the Face­book Pix­el, and some nifty audi­ence and goal seg­men­ta­tion. Fur­ther proof that there is a wealth of use­ful data avail­able through Face­book, often buried some­where you might not nec­es­sar­i­ly be aware of. This one’s a real­ly use­ful read.
• Mix The Body: A real­ly beau­ti­ful web­site, by the British Coun­cil, which allows users to ‘cre­ate’ their own dance, using pre-pack­aged video which can be stitched togeth­er based on a user’s selec­tions in order to cre­ate a seam­less new rou­tine. An excel­lent exam­ple of how exist­ing assets can be used to pro­duce new content—and a par­tic­u­lar­ly nice exam­ple of how impres­sive full-bleed, inter­ac­tive video looks in HTML5, on both mobile and desktop.
• UPS Deliv­ery Day: Final­ly, in this edi­tion, in an attempt to ease the inevitable pain of being back at work (because, let’s be hon­est, how­ev­er much we love our jobs, there’s a rea­son this is called ‘work’ and not ‘fun’), here’s a rather enter­tain­ing piece of mar­ket­ing from UPS—a puz­zle game based around deliv­er­ing parcels that has all the shiny, pas­tel-coloured addic­tive­ness of your favourite mobile game. Enjoy, and a hap­py new year to you all.