Ten Things You Need to Know—16/03/18

• Adobe Updates Adver­tis­ing Cloud Search: Cam­paign opti­mi­sa­tion is, it’s fair to say, an increas­ing­ly com­pli­cat­ed and unwieldy process. To help uncom­pli­cate things, Adobe has announced the inte­gra­tion of Adobe Adver­tis­ing Cloud Search with Sen­sei, its AI and machine learn­ing frame­work. What does this mean in prac­tice? Well, loads of stuff, and I’d encour­age you to click the link and read all about it, but here’s a brief sum­ma­ry: improved UI, bulk-edit­ing, AI-assist­ed dis­crep­an­cy-flag­ging between mod­elled and actu­al cam­paigns, and the high­est degree of trans­paren­cy of any com­pa­ra­ble search plat­form. Frankly, that’s not even the half of it, you’d be amazed. You can find more about the update at the link above, or head straight to learn­ing more about Adobe Adver­tis­ing Cloud Search right here.
• Face­book Jobs Rolls Out To 40 Coun­tries: Are YOU a recruiter? Would YOU like to be able to spend more time “doing your job” while you’re on Face­book with all your friends? Well HUZZAH! Facebook’s jobs list­ing ser­vice, hav­ing been live in the US for a bit, is extend­ing to a whole bunch of oth­er ter­ri­to­ries, includ­ing the UK. Busi­ness Pages can now cre­ate job list­ings, in much the same man­ner as you can on LinkedIn, with users able to browse jobs in Mar­ket­place. No clar­i­ty as to whether you’ll be able to adver­tise posi­tions, but, well, it’s a mon­eti­sa­tion oppor­tu­ni­ty, so let’s take a moment to con­sid­er the like­li­hood. I’d imag­ine this is going to skew local—remember, Facebook’s all about YOUR LOCAL COMMUNITY in 2018—but I don’t doubt there are some incred­i­bly cre­ative appli­ca­tions to which you can put this, from an adver­mar­ket­inprcam­paign point of view. Time before a Face­book reboot of THE BEST JOB IN THE WORLD tac­tic goes viral?
• YouTube Live Gets Improved Replays, Etc: It was some­thing of a sur­prise to me that YouTube didn’t already do synced com­men­tary when replay­ing a Live video, but appar­ent­ly it didn’t. Now, though, if you re-watch a YouTube Live broad­cast you’ll be able to see all the love­ly, hate­ful com­ments played back to you as though in real time. Which is, er, well, hor­ri­ble real­ly, but what can you do? There’s auto­mat­ic cap­tion­ing being intro­duced for Eng­lish broad­casts, as well as loca­tion tag­ging for Live broad­casts, and the exten­sion of Super Chat (where com­menters can pay to have com­ments fea­tured right in the broadcaster’s eye­line) fea­ture, and—OH IT’S ALL TOO MUCH.

• Google Hang­outs Chat Rolls Out For All: This is basi­cal­ly Google’s ver­sion of Slack. It’s now wide­ly avail­able, and an inter­est­ing alter­na­tive for those who find Slack a hor­rif­ic, con­fus­ing mess. It prob­a­bly won’t be any less hor­rif­ic and con­fus­ing, in all hon­esty, but it will inte­grate real­ly nice­ly with GDocs, Cal­en­dar and the rest. If your busi­ness uses GSuite tools, this is prob­a­bly worth a look.
• Voice Notes Com­ing to Face­book: Already avail­able to What­sApp and Mes­sen­ger users, Face­book is tri­alling the abil­i­ty for peo­ple to record short voice mes­sages as Sta­tus Updates on the main plat­form. Which is nice. I’d imag­ine this will be pri­ori­tised in areas of the devel­op­ing world where vari­able lit­er­a­cy rates and mul­ti­ple writ­ten dialects make it most use­ful to have a voice option, but don’t doubt for a sec­ond that we will get it all too, ush­er­ing in an excit­ing new ERA OF STORYTELLING and INTERESTING NEW MEANS OF COMMUNICATION. You could, as the arti­cle sug­gests, do pod­casts, or EXCITING CELEBRITY REVEALS, or all sorts of things real­ly. What fun.
• FB Now Lets Pub­lish­ers Label News As ‘Break­ing’: Still in beta, and only rolling out to a select num­ber of pub­lish­ers ini­tial­ly, but we will, of course, all wel­come anoth­er fea­ture that makes the world even more colos­sal­ly screamy and demand­ing of our atten­tion. “Pub­lish­ers in the test will be able to label Instant Arti­cles, mobile and web links, and Face­book Live as break­ing news. They can use the indi­ca­tor once a day, set­ting how long the sto­ry is marked as break­ing for (up to 6 hours). Pub­lish­ers also have an extra pool of 5 indi­ca­tors per month. The posts will appear in News Feed and there will be infor­ma­tion in Page Insights so that pub­lish­ers can track how their tagged posts per­form. Read­ers will also be able to pro­vide feed­back when they don’t con­sid­er a sto­ry to be break­ing news by click­ing in the top-right drop-down menu of a post.”

• Video Chat Com­ing To Mes­sen­ger Lite: Lit­er­al­ly that: users of FB’s stripped-back-for-2G vari­ant will now also be able to do video calls, like users of the reg­u­lar ver­sion. What’s remark­able about this is the cod­ing required to make this pos­si­ble. The com­pres­sion and all the rest here is huge­ly impres­sive, and is one rea­son why Face­book is so miles ahead of all oth­er net­works glob­al­ly. How can any oth­er app com­pete in the devel­op­ing world when they can’t pos­si­bly hope to com­pete at fea­ture devel­op­ment and opti­mi­sa­tion for low-con­nec­tiv­i­ty? Rhetorical—they can’t.
• Snapchat Launch­ing Abil­i­ty To Tag Friends: Slow­ly, slow­ly, Snapchat begins to make itself more user-friend­ly. You’ll soon be able to swipe up on a Snap you’ve tak­en to tag oth­er users in your EXCITING CONTENT, which will give them a noti­fi­ca­tion and, y’know, START CONVERSATIONS, or what­ev­er breath­less social bro­mide Snap is ped­dling today. Use­ful for influ­encer net­works, and for the intro­duc­tion of a degree of inter­ac­tiv­i­ty or user feed­back to your Snap con­tent; there are quite a few poten­tial­ly inter­est­ing appli­ca­tions for this, and it’s anoth­er step towards mak­ing inter­est­ing for brands.
• The Inclu­sive Inter­net: A whole bunch of NEW DATA from Face­book about online con­nec­tiv­i­ty world­wide. It doesn’t say any­thing huge­ly sur­pris­ing, but if you ever need a bunch of num­bers about how fast inter­net con­nec­tions are in French Guyana or Burun­di or wher­ev­er, this might be of use.
• DIY Toolk­its: This is an inter­est­ing (Look, right, it’s not _real­ly _inter­est­ing, it’s just poten­tial­ly a bit work use­ful. I feel I need to be hon­est with you about this sort of thing) set of plan­ning and think­ing tools, show­ing a whole host of mod­els and process­es for inter­ro­gat­ing busi­ness prob­lems. It describes itself as being for “Devel­op­ment,” but gen­er­al­ly any sort of con­sul­tan­cy-types might find use­ful stuff in here. Some of it will obvi­ous­ly be beneath you—I know how sophis­ti­cat­ed you lot are—but it’s worth hav­ing a dig through if you’re inter­est­ed in new process­es and meth­ods to use when deter­min­ing strategy.