Ten Things You Need to Know—06/04/18

• Adobe Adver­tis­ing Cloud Cre­ative Explained: Adobe’s Adver­tis­ing Cloud Cre­ative offer­ing is a gen­uine­ly inno­v­a­tive set of tools allow­ing for dynam­ic work­flows between cre­atives and mar­keters to deliv­er agile, effec­tive cam­paigns at scale. This short video explains what it does, how it works, and why you’ll want to take a clos­er look.
• Insta­gram Expands Shop­ping Ads to 8 New Coun­tries: And lo, it came to pass that the abil­i­ty for retail­ers to cre­ate Insta­gram adverts link­ing direct­ly to their e‑commerce offer­ing was expand­ed out­side of the US to encom­pass eight addi­tion­al coun­tries, includ­ing the UK, Brazil, Ger­many, France, Italy and oth­ers. Not a huge surprise—they’ve been trail­ing this for a while now—but for those of you look­ing to make Insta­gram a dri­ver of attrib­ut­able sales, this is poten­tial­ly very use­ful indeed.
• Snapchat Fea­tur­ing More Cre­ator-Made Lens­es: It’s now going to be even eas­i­er to use some stranger’s shon­ki­ly-cre­at­ed AR over­lay in your Snaps! As of … immi­nent­ly, Snap users will be able to find cre­ator-made lens­es above and beyond the stan­dard offi­cial set, sim­ply by swip­ing up in the app. Ini­tial­ly there will only be a selec­tion of the best com­mu­ni­ty-made con­tent out there, but it seems like­ly that this is going to be opened up a bit more wide­ly soon. No obvi­ous brand oppor­tu­ni­ty here—branded lens­es still need to be cre­at­ed as a pro­mo­tion, because, well, they’re not idiots—but you might be able to have some fun with this if you can think of some tan­gen­tial­ly brand-relat­ed graph­ics and sneak them past the THOUGHT POLICE.

• Snap Intro­duces @Messaging:In its con­tin­u­ing quest to make the plat­form more user-friend­ly to new joiners, and to enable bet­ter dis­cov­ery of oth­ers’ accounts, Snapchat has final­ly intro­duced the abil­i­ty to tag users in posts, much as you cur­rent­ly can on Twit­ter, for exam­ple. This is huge­ly sig­nif­i­cant for brands look­ing to engage influ­encers on the plat­form, or to devel­op a greater degree of dia­logue and inter­ac­tion with fans through Snapchat. It’s also intro­duc­ing up to 16-per­son group video calling—which, if I’m hon­est, sounds like a noisy mess—that could have inter­est­ing appli­ca­tions in terms of fan engage­ment and influ­encer activation.
• LinkedIn Launch­es Native Video Ads: In a move which you prob­a­bly thought had already hap­pened, LinkedIn will now let users pro­mote native video on the plat­form. It might make a nice change from the seem­ing­ly end­less stream of inspi­ra­tional “broetry” clog­ging the place up at the moment.
• Pin­ter­est Expands Shop­ping Ads To More Busi­ness­es: Pin­ter­est is often over­looked in the dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing space, which is a shame. Its tools are excel­lent, and the con­ver­sion poten­tial high. Its lat­est announce­ment comes as it expands its “Shop The Look” ser­vice, which is the abil­i­ty to tag brand Pins with prod­uct cat­e­gories to enable an eas­i­er cat­a­logue brows­ing expe­ri­ence. They’re open­ing it to new coun­tries, includ­ing Japan and the UK, and expand­ing the num­ber of retail­ers able to make use of its dynam­ic inven­to­ry plat­form. Poten­tial­ly very use­ful, depend­ing on the cat­e­go­ry you oper­ate in.
• Spotify’s Self-Serve Ad Plat­form Now Com­ing to the UK!: SO EXCITING! Actu­al­ly, a real­ly sen­si­ble ad prod­uct, as I prob­a­bly said last year when it was first announced in the US. Remem­ber: “Brands can either upload scripts and choose back­ground music, with Spo­ti­fy Ad Stu­dio record­ing voiceovers for the spots, or they can upload full audio spots direct­ly to the plat­form. Ads cre­at­ed with Spo­ti­fy Ad Stu­dio can be tar­get­ed via musi­cal taste, loca­tion, gen­der, age and activ­i­ty, as well as to users on mobile or desk­top.” See? EXCITING, isn’t it? Ear­ly-adopt­ing brands could have fun mak­ing HUGELY sur­re­al stuff here. Give it a go.

• Your Lon­don Com­mute: Nice lit­tle toy from TFL, which asks you to tell it your com­mute and then tells you rough­ly how many oth­er Lon­don­ers do the same jour­ney as you each day on the tube. What it ALSO does is take data from you about where you live, where you work, and your email address for mar­ket­ing pur­pos­es, which is obvi­ous­ly the point. It’s not par­tic­u­lar­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed, but it’s a good exam­ple of how easy it is to trick peo­ple into hand­ing over data with some sort of banal ques­tion about their day-to-day life.
• Face­book Adding Sup­port For AR Mark­ers: Yes, it’s a tedious and tech­ni­cal head­line, sor­ry. Still, unless you work for Layar or Blip­par or one of those lads, this is EXCITING NEWS. Basi­cal­ly Facebook’s mov­ing to bake AR mark­er tech into its Cam­era soft­ware, which means it’ll be able to do all that “point your phone at a real world thing and see some slight­ly dis­ap­point­ing CGI over­laid onto the real world!” stuff you were excit­ed about when you first saw it 7 years ago but which now just makes you think that the future is just going to be dirty and mis­er­able and sad, type stuff. Still in beta, it’s being used as part of the launch mar­ket­ing for 2018 megafilms Ready Play­er One and A Wrin­kle in Time first, but it will almost cer­tain­ly roll out rea­son­ably quick­ly. Could THIS be the thing that even­tu­al­ly helps AR go mainstream?
• Face­book Launch­es Improved Ad Offer­ing for Retail: Here are three sig­nif­i­cant updates to Facebook’s suite of adver­tis­ing prod­ucts, specif­i­cal­ly focused on dri­ving sales. The new prod­ucts include bespoke cat­a­logues, pow­ered by Face­book Can­vas, which pull in dynam­ic con­tent based on a tar­get­ed user’s inter­ests; store sales opti­mi­sa­tion ads, which use machine learn­ing to tar­get users who are more like­ly to com­plete an in-store pur­chase; and dynam­ic sales ads designed to reach peo­ple ear­li­er in the sales fun­nel. Tru­ly, it is a glo­ri­ous time to be alive.