So-Called Social: Week of February 4

Your weekly dose of social news.

It’s Fri-YAY! Stoked for the weekend. I’ve got lots of good stuff for you this week — especially in the Adobe section! Some Facebook news, all sorts of cool stuff Adobe is doing, some brands that did some stuff for the Super Bowl, and more. Keep on reading.

Social nets update stuff

Reporting a blowout first quarter, Facebook’s ad revenue rose 38% year over year to a record $16.64 billion in the quarter, with a record $6.8 billion in profits. Yowza. The star of the show? Stories. Increasingly growing on FB, and hitting 500 million users per day on IG, the Stories feature continues to prove itself as champion. Looking forward, the company plans to release more products that will make “major improvements” in people’s lives. This includes increasing encryption and privacy, revolutionizing messaging features and payments, FB Watch becoming mainstream, and the expansion IG commerce and shopping.

A new ad targeting feature on Facebook now allows advertisers to target people based on household income by U.S. ZIP code. Woah. For marketers, this means customizing creative based on the typical products or perceived needs of people in a specific income bracket. The feature doesn’t identify explicit income ranges, but instead allows advertisers to choose based on where the user’s household income falls percentage-wise (top 10%, top 25%, etc.).

Starting in September, all Facebook ad campaigns will run with campaign budget optimization, and advertisers will no longer be able to define budgets at the ad set level. That was a lot of words. Essentially, advertisers will set one central campaign budget, and Facebook will continuously distribute the budget in real-time to your top performing ads. This takes a certain amount of control away from advertisers, who will have to trust that Facebook’s automated allocations will deliver favorable results.

Adobe does stuff

Our Adobe Students team shared an inspiring new social video showcasing how students used their creativity to bring hope to the community of Paradise, California following the devastating Camp Fire last fall. The video follows a digital media class that made a difference by directing, editing and sharing a music video for an original song written by two talented local students about what “Home” means.

In early December, we partnered with Casey Neistat and his new company, 368, to open up 3 job opportunities to our community to help create the 368 visual identity. Casey’s social posts about the project drove over 12,500 portfolio submissions across Instagram and Twitter in just 3 days. After hand selecting a graphic designer, photographer, and video creator, he brought the lucky individuals to NYC for an intensive week of creation, which was all captured on video. Check out the highlights here.

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, the Lightroom team has shared a new blog post that spotlights the unsung heroes of some of the most-followed Instagram accounts – the “Instagram Husbands”. The post includes interviews with several prominent IG husbands, a research study, and some fire “Kamra Shootra” pics.

Creative Cloud is partnering with legendary skateboarder Tony Hawk on a new contest called Skate Jam! Participants are challenged to design a skateboard deck to be featured in his new mobile game. Other prizes include MacBook Pros, CC subscriptions, and skateboards (of course).

Other brands do stuff

So, the Super Bowl happened, and the game wasn’t very super. Luckily, the ad game still remained strong. Online viewing of related Super Bowl content before the game soared to its highest viewing levels in five years. Days before the game, some 36 brands released 108 pieces of ad creative, totaling to 110 million online views. Dang! MVP goes to Mr. Peanut, according to Twitter’s second annual #BrandBowl, which calls out brands driving the highest amount of discussion on the platform. Planters got the most brand-related tweets during the game, and the Game of Thrones/Bud Light partnership didn’t do so bad either.

Remember that egg that became Instagram’s most-liked post? It used its recently acquired fame to shed light on mental health and the pressures of social media. Pretty neat.

Interesting stuff

Ah, the endless quest to seize the attention of Generation Z… and rightfully so. As of 2019, Gen Z is on track to become the largest generation worldwide. Marketers are on a mission to understand what makes a Gen Z’er tick. Step one is earning their trust – studies show that members of this generation have a hard time trusting businesses. This means that influencer marketing has to translate as highly authentic, which is where micro, or even nano-influencers come in. Video is huge. YouTube tops the list as the preferred way to learn, with nearly half of Gen Z’ers spending around three hours daily on video channels. Creative, short-form video is the way to go. Lastly, 92% of Gen Z’ers believe that helping others in need is important, which means social responsibility is immensely important for brands.

Speaking of influencers, has everyone watched the Fyre Festival documentary on Netflix? If you haven’t, it’s about a music festival falsely advertised as a glamorous, exclusive experience by world-famous celebrities all over social media that eventually turned into an epic disaster. The whole ordeal sparked an important conversation about the rights and wrongs of influencer marketing. The influencer marketing industry is estimated to be worth $6.5 billion this year. Brands and influencers are under close watch to make sure things stay lawful and genuine.

Fun stuff

We Rate Dogs is making a card game and you better believe I’m pre-ordering.

Nothing says “1999” quite like NSYNC covering the PokéRap.

SMOOSH.