Ten Things You Need to Know — 02/02/18

• Adobe and App­nexus Move To Rad­i­cal Trans­paren­cy On Fees: Build­ing on last year’s announce­ment around adver­tis­ing sup­ply chain trans­paren­cy, Adobe Adver­tis­ing Cloud will, begin­ning March 2018, reveal all fees tak­en by the DSP, includ­ing the plat­form fee and any add-ons, as well as App­Nexus’ bill to the pub­lish­er, which will help mar­keters track media dol­lars through the sup­ply chain. From this point on, users of Adobe Adver­tis­ing Cloud will be able to see exact­ly where—and how—their bud­gets are being spent, in a move which we hope will help the pro­gram­mat­ic indus­try take a step towards bet­ter busi­ness prac­tices and increased trans­paren­cy through­out the marketplace.
• Face­book Watch Par­ty: Do you remem­ber how nice it was, in THE PAST, when we all used to clus­ter around the tiny 13” black and white ana­logue tele­vi­sion wear­ing deely bop­pers and munch­ing on card­board ready meals, laugh­ing togeth­er at bad game shows and vari­ety hours? When we all used to have real con­ver­sa­tions like a real fam­i­ly, before The Screens came and RUINED IT ALL? Well fear not, because Mark’s going to bring the good times back, and that won­der­ful com­mu­nal feel­ing of star­ing at an ENTERTAINMENT all togeth­er! A fea­ture com­ing to Face­book Groups “over time”, cur­rent­ly being test­ed, “In a Watch Par­ty, allows mem­bers of a Group to watch videos togeth­er in the same space at the same time—videos are cho­sen by the Group admins and mod­er­a­tors, and can be any pub­lic videos on Face­book (live or record­ed).” Superb for fan groups, won­der­ful for fan ser­vice, great for adver­tis­ers (and fur­ther evi­dence that Group-lev­el adver­tis­ing is very much on its way).

• Some Changes Poten­tial­ly Com­ing To Mes­sen­ger: Every­one was appar­ent­ly too stunned by Facebook’s BIG NEWS to actu­al­ly put out any news this week, so instead I am feed­ing myself (and, by exten­sion, you, nib­bling par­tial­ly-digest­ed scraps of news­cud from my slaver­ing maw) on what­ev­er mea­gre gos­sip leav­ings I can find. This is a whole arti­cle based on a series of quotes from some­one who runs Mes­sen­ger, which sug­gest that the ser­vice might get a fea­ture cull lat­er this year, which will stream­line it a bit, add prop­er group video chat, bet­ter cus­tomer ser­vice options, and more ads. It’s all very exciting.
• How FB Changes MAY Affect Pub­lish­ers: Take a pinch of salt along with this piece, not least because it’s increas­ing­ly clear that Facebook’s own engi­neers don’t actu­al­ly quite know how all this stuff’s going to work yet and are scrab­bling to keep up with Zuckerberg’s god­like pro­nounce­ments. But it’s an inter­est­ing look at how the algo­rithm changes _may _affect pub­lish­ers, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the UK. The short answer, accord­ing to this analy­sis, at least, is that Pages whose arti­cles see a high­er degree of peer-to-peer shar­ing will do fine, where­as those whose reach is pred­i­cat­ed large­ly on posts from ded­i­cat­ed Pub­lish­er Pages will find that reach being chopped off at the knee. Real­ly, though, NO ONE KNOWS.
• Page Speed To Deter­mine Google Rank­ing: As of July 2018, a Page’s rank­ing on Google’s mobile search will be part­ly deter­mined by its load speed. That means if you’ve got a rub­bish mobile site, you might want to spend the next few months fix­ing it. It’s gen­uine­ly amaz­ing to me quite how many large busi­ness­es have web­sites which would have been con­sid­ered shon­ky in 2013
• You Can Now Link To Snapchat Sto­ries: This has been trailed pre­vi­ous­ly, and is now HERE! You can now get a url to link direct­ly to a Snapchat sto­ry from else­where. These cur­rent­ly only play nice­ly with Twit­ter, where a linked Sto­ry will play in-feed. Else­where it’ll just be a link which takes you to the Sto­ry on Snap, and it could, poten­tial­ly, bring the plat­form to a whole new audi­ence (who will in all like­li­hood look at it and go “Oh, look, it’s like an Ins­ta Sto­ry! They copied Ins­ta! Weird.”).
• Snap App Install Ads Now Come With Deep Links: I can’t be both­ered to para­phrase this, sor­ry. This means Snap ads will now have the abil­i­ty to “dri­ve traf­fic to a spe­cif­ic sec­tion by tar­get­ing users who have already down­loaded and opened an app. For exam­ple, a mobile game devel­op­er might want to tar­get play­ers once they hit a spe­cif­ic lev­el in the game, or a retail­er could spot­light a prod­uct page that a user added to a shop­ping cart but didn’t buy.” GOOD NEWS!
• Snaplens­es: There was, when I checked at the start of the week, a whole web­site col­lect­ing Snap Lens­es that had been built by the com­mu­ni­ty as part of Snap’s Lens Stu­dio roll­out, which you will, of course, recall hap­pened last year. The site’s now down, sad­ly, so instead the link above sends you to the sub­Red­dit­which col­lects exam­ples of home-made Lens­es. The main take­away from this so far is that mak­ing a good lens is HARD, and that there is a lot of real­ly lame humour going on over on Snapchat. Still, you can get a 3d Clip­py on your Snaps, so, you know, 2018’s look­ing pret­ty good. If you’re gen­er­al­ly inter­est­ed in see­ing more cre­ative uses of Lens­es on the plat­form, Snapchat’s own ‘Lens­es Chal­lenge’ rewards cre­ators who make the best use of the platform’s tech each month, and could pro­vide some inspi­ra­tion should you need any.
• DDDance Par­ty: You remem­ber Gif Dance Par­ty from a few years ago, right? Well this is that but BETTER (or worse, depend­ing). You’re pre­sent­ed with a 3d “dance­floor” onto which you can place a seem­ing­ly HUGE num­ber of ani­mat­ed 3d fig­ures, all tak­en from memes and pop cul­ture (from the danc­ing hot­dog to Mike from Mon­sters Inc., to a very much not approved by Dis­ney Luke Sky­walk­er, and on and on). Select the back­ing track, move the dancers around, set their danc­ing speed and size and jank­i­ness, and YOU TOO can cre­ate your own total­ly point­less slice of inter­net dance floor. This is a sil­ly and fun thing to play around with, but it’s also incred­i­bly impres­sive as a piece of web­dev. Oh, and you can also sub­mit your own char­ac­ters for inclu­sion. We’ve been busy sub­mit­ting fig­ures from Adobe Stock all week to enjoy the fun.
• You Are The Styl­ist: SUPERB inter­ac­tive music video, this, for the band Bro­ken Back’s lat­est song — the gim­mick here is that at any point once the video kicks in you can change the lead character’s out­fit with sim­ple con­trols. The joy here is not so much in the inter­ac­tiv­i­ty, though that’s beau­ti­ful­ly exe­cut­ed, but the seam­less­ness of the tran­si­tions between out­fits; this is superbly built, so well done to the devs who­ev­er they may be.