Ten Things You Need to Know—20/04/18

• Adobe Launch­es Audio Ana­lyt­ics: Audio is often over­looked when mea­sure­ment and met­rics are dis­cussed, but no longer. Adobe recent­ly launched on- and offline ana­lyt­ics for stream­ing audio, let­ting brands have data on exact­ly how long users lis­ten to a pod­cast or audio­book, whether they skip ads, how con­nec­tiv­i­ty affects lis­ten­ing behav­iour, and more. As a means of opti­mis­ing ad per­for­mance across the fast-grow­ing audio space, this is a huge­ly valu­able move, which will allow mar­keters to ensure that their audio ads are per­form­ing as effi­cient­ly as display.
• Face­book Rolls Out New ‘Sub­scrip­tion’ Mod­el for Cre­ators: This is a move from Face­book which adds Patre­on-like fea­tures to the plat­form in an attempt to lure the YouTu­bers, stream­ers and oth­er cre­ators. There are more details here. There’s an inter­est­ing line at the end about bring­ing adver­tis­ers and cre­ators togeth­er for BRANDED CONTENT OPPORTUNITIES, which sounds like it could be poten­tial­ly rather use­ful to brands look­ing to expand their work with influ­encers or brand ambas­sadors beyond the more tra­di­tion­al channels.
• Face­book Adds Boomerang and AR ‘Graf­fi­ti’: Have you spent the past few weeks wish­ing that you could do those Boomerang loop­ing vids you get on Insta­gram on Face­book? No, prob­a­bly not, and yet here we are. Oh, and you’ll soon be able to scrawl crude­ly-drawn “art­work” in AR space in your videos too, as FB’s imple­ment­ing AR draw­ing into its cam­era app too. There has nev­er been a bet­ter time to be alive. Face­tious­ness aside, the devel­op­ment of these AR tech­nolo­gies, whilst not seis­mic for brands, does raise the bar in terms of the qual­i­ty of fun and pol­ish, and tech users will begin to expect to see in brand con­tent across all platforms.

• 360 Pho­tos and HD Vids In Mes­sen­ger: A great oppor­tu­ni­ty for brands with access to com­pelling and high-qual­i­ty video to reach cus­tomers through Mes­sen­ger. In com­bi­na­tion with auto­mat­ed cus­tomer ser­vice func­tion­al­i­ty, and the exist­ing ad suite, this is poten­tial­ly an excel­lent and use­ful addi­tion to cus­tomer com­mu­ni­ca­tion on the platform.
• Snap Map Explore: Com­ing as it did in the mid­dle of all the recent atten­tion focused on social media and pri­va­cy, this didn’t quite get the excit­ed reac­tion I’d have expect­ed it to. Rest assured—it is SUPER EXCITING. This is an update to Snap’s Map fea­ture which effec­tive­ly turns it into the marauder’s map from Pot­ter. I mean, real­ly, read this: “you can see where your friends are and where they’re trav­el­ing. These sta­tus­es are gen­er­at­ed by your friends’ move­ments rather than them phys­i­cal­ly typ­ing out some­thing on their own…” The feed can give updates on the jet-set­ting habits of friends who are going on trips. It also can give loca­tion updates when they’re off to the beach or anoth­er note­wor­thy spot. What’s per­haps most inter­est­ing is that Snapchat says they’ll be using the fea­ture to push updates or break­ing news updates to users based on areas of the Snap Map that are see­ing a lot of traf­fic tied to news events. I do won­der what sort of ad tar­get­ing options will spin out of this as a result (LOTS, almost cer­tain­ly). The abil­i­ty to tar­get peo­ple “at the beach,” say, is real­ly rather interesting.
• Snap Intro­duces @Mentions and 16-Per­son Video Call­ing: While the con­cept of a 16-per­son video call does, I con­fess, fill me with slight trep­i­da­tion, the sec­ond part of this announcement—the abil­i­ty to tar­get oth­er users in posts on Snapchat, much as one can on Face­book, Twit­ter et al—is huge­ly sig­nif­i­cant in terms of both the platform’s usabil­i­ty and its util­i­ty to brands and mar­keters. The abil­i­ty to enter into eas­i­ly-tracked dia­logue with cus­tomers and fans, for exam­ple, or engage in tagged con­ver­sa­tions with influ­encers and brand ambas­sadors, is a mas­sive upgrade.
• Google Intro­duc­ing ‘Where Can I Buy?’ Ads: US-only at present but des­tined to become uni­ver­sal very soon indeed. It’s Google offer­ing retail­ers the abil­i­ty to appear in a search with a prod­uct link for user search­es such as “Where can I buy X?” or “Where can I find Y?”. Poten­tial­ly very con­ve­nient indeed for large-scale retailers.
• Google Chrome Now Auto­mat­i­cal­ly Silences Auto­play­ing Video: A new devel­op­ment which is vital to con­sid­er when weigh­ing up what sort of video con­tent to pro­duce. It’s worth remem­ber­ing that near­ly all users will expe­ri­ence video with­out sound at first, and to opti­mise con­tent along those lines. There­fore sub­ti­tles and ear­ly visu­als that pack a punch are vital!

• New Glob­al Social Media Stats: An update to We Are Social’s use­ful list of social media usage sta­tis­tics from around the world. It’s always help­ful to have new num­bers with which to make the case for social media, but the big take­away from this is the con­tin­ued dominance—and growth—of Face­book as a platform.
• Clip­isode: A tru­ly appalling­ly-named app, but a smart idea. This is basi­cal­ly a sim­ple way of crowd­sourc­ing video, work­ing in much the same way as those col­lab­o­ra­tive pod­cast ser­vices of which there seem to have been three mil­lion this year. You record a short video ask­ing peo­ple a ques­tion or set­ting them a task. Then you get a link that you can share with peo­ple, which allows them to record their own short clip (they don’t need to down­load the app). Then you, as the insti­ga­tor, get all the clips back and can com­pile, edit and top-and-tail them as you see fit. Huge­ly use­ful for the pro­duc­tion of col­lab­o­ra­tive video or indeed for sourc­ing UGC at scale from cus­tomers or advocates.