Ten Things You Need to Know—29/06/18

• Adobe At Cannes: As the Uber heli­copters depart and the dust set­tles on the Croisette, it’s worth exam­in­ing some of the big announce­ments made by Adobe at Cannes in 2018. Reflect­ing the stag­ger­ing rise of the smart speak­er in homes around the world, Adobe Adver­tis­ing Cloud’s On Demand mar­ket­place now let’s adver­tis­ers auto­mate ad buys across TuneIn’s diverse array of con­tent streamed across devices, from Amazon’s Alexa to Google Home. Attri­bu­tion also got smarter, thanks to the launch of Adobe Attri­bu­tion IQ in the Ana­lyt­ics Cloud, enabling mar­keters to visu­al­ize the cus­tomer jour­ney and all the points at which they inter­act with the brand.
• AI Takes Cen­tre Stage at Cannes: the big buzz at this year’s Fes­ti­val of Cre­ativ­i­ty was all around AI and its mul­ti­far­i­ous appli­ca­tions. The most excit­ing dis­cus­sions Adobe took part in were all focused on the trans­for­ma­tive poten­tial of AI and machine learn­ing, from design to med­i­cine to urban plan­ning. We take a look at those con­ver­sa­tions, and exam­ine some of the most excit­ing AI appli­ca­tions iden­ti­fied by Chris Duf­fey, head of AI inno­va­tion and strat­e­gy at Adobe.
• Ins­ta TV: LOOK! IT’S YOUTUBE ON INSTAGRAM!!!! There’s a rea­son­able write­up of the new video offer­ing here, but the pre­cis is basi­cal­ly: a) you can now post video that’s up to an hour long on Ins­ta (and there are rum­blings that they may go even longer, even­tu­al­ly); b) it’s all ver­ti­cal; c) you can now skip through the videos à la YT; d) it has its own app in InstaTV, but can also be viewed through trad Ins­ta; e) it’s firm­ly focused on sin­gle “cre­ators” and as such, is pitched right at YouTube from a com­pet­i­tive point of view; and f) it’s ad-free at the moment, but the nature of the IGTV app (you open it, video starts play­ing imme­di­ate­ly, there’s a feed of STUFF from the peo­ple you fol­low on IG, etc) sug­gests that “pay to dis­cov­er my stuff” is like­ly to be one of the first mon­eti­sa­tion options the plat­form explores. If you were won­der­ing whether it’s worth invest­ing in train­ing around shoot­ing ver­ti­cal, this is prob­a­bly the thing that tips you toward actu­al­ly doing it.
• Ins­ta Adds Shop­ping Tags To Sto­ries: You can now sell things—actual things! — to peo­ple using Insta­gram sto­ries. It’s slight­ly unclear whether this is a fea­ture avail­able to every­one or only to select retail part­ners. Either way, this will be every­where in six months so DON’T FRET KIDS.
• Face­book Launch­ing Paid Tier to Groups: This is a real­ly inter­est­ing move IMHO. FB is launch­ing a paid tier to Groups, mean­ing that ad ins can effec­tive­ly cre­ate a tiered mem­ber­ship scheme, with access to pre­mi­um con­tent restrict­ed to Group mem­bers who pony up some cash. This effec­tive­ly becomes a rather neat crowd sub­scrip­tion ser­vice with inbuilt reach and pro­mo capabilities—a pret­ty strong lure. Face­book cite the fol­low­ing use case as an exam­ple: “One such com­mu­ni­ty leader look­ing to sup­port her work, Sarah Mueller, start­ed a group called Declut­ter My Home as a way to inspire and moti­vate oth­ers to tidy up their apart­ment or house. The group quick­ly became an active com­mu­ni­ty for help­ing tens of thou­sands of peo­ple across the world to reduce clut­ter in their spaces. With her new sub­scrip­tion group, Orga­nize My Home, mem­bers will be able to work togeth­er on bite-sized projects, and have access to eas­i­ly action­able check­lists, tuto­ri­als, live videos and more to help with home orga­ni­za­tion.” While this is inter­est­ing, it does make one won­der about the inner lives of those pay­ing for home tidy­ing tips.
• LinkedIn Adds Carousel Ads: LinkedIn con­tin­ues to improve and diver­si­fy its ad prod­uct offer­ing with the intro­duc­tion of carousel ads, which are famil­iar to you from Face­book, Insta­gram and oth­er platforms.
• Ama­zon Launch­es Alexa for Hos­pi­tal­i­ty: Jeff Bezos’ mis­sion to ensure that one of his spy micro­phones is installed in every sin­gle human-occu­pied space in the world con­tin­ues apace. Now Amazon’s active­ly court­ing hote­liers to include its tech in their rooms. This is a huge oppor­tu­ni­ty for brands to cre­ate con­tent at very spe­cif­ic points in the cus­tomer jour­ney: for exam­ple, if you were Time Out, the idea of a “What’s on in XX city today, Alexa?” recipe is too obvi­ous to ignore, right?
• Snap Kit Launch­es: Snapchat launched its devel­op­er kit which allows, er, devel­op­ers to lever­age the app in EXCITING WAYS! From log­ging in via Snap, to allow­ing users to use Snap func­tion­al­i­ty with­in third par­ty apps, to—bafflingly—letting you do things like use Bit­mo­ji in Tin­der chats, this presents a whole host of fas­ci­nat­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties. The arti­cle in the link is very good on pos­si­ble appli­ca­tions, not least the inte­gra­tion of Snaps and Sto­ries into third-par­ty apps. Seri­ous­ly, read this one; it’s use­ful and poten­tial­ly important.
• Snapchat Adding Sales Track­ing To Ad Impact Met­rics: I saw quite a few arti­cles this week tout­ing this stuff with a strapline along the lines of, “Snap wants to show adver­tis­ers its prod­ucts are as good as Facebook’s.” That made me laugh quite a lot. Still, this ini­tia­tive (launch­ing with a UK super­mar­ket “immi­nent­ly”) is a use­ful step in the right direc­tion toward being able to prove exact­ly how lit­tle a Cus­tom Fil­ter will actu­al­ly affect your bot­tom line. Oh, and “Snapchat has also launched its mar­ket­ing mix mod­el­ling (MMM) part­ner pro­gramme, which includes tie-ups with Neustar Mar­ket­share, Ana­lyt­ics Part­ners, Kan­tar and Nielsen, to Europe. In com­ing this side of the ponds it’s also adding new col­lab­o­ra­tions with the likes of D2D (Dentsu Aegis), Ninah (Pub­li­cis) and inde­pen­dent MMM providers Ebiq­ui­ty, Eki­met­rics and Nepa. Skewed towards help­ing mar­keters jus­ti­fy their spend on Snapchat, the MMM scheme will see adver­tis­ers being giv­en access to third-par­ty data to bet­ter under­stand Snap’s impact on actions like sales and sign-ups.”
• Reuters Dig­i­tal News Report 2018: A whole report on how the world is con­sum­ing news in 2018, with coun­try-by-coun­try break­downs of media trust, pop­u­lar sources, and the like. The main take­aways are that Twit­ter is sur­pris­ing­ly pop­u­lar as a news source, sug­gest­ing that they may well be right in their deci­sion to go hard on this in their lat­est update, that peo­ple are shar­ing less news via Face­book and more via mes­sag­ing plat­forms, that embed­ded video on pub­lish­er sites is huge­ly unpop­u­lar, and that What­sapp is absolute­ly dom­i­nat­ing news dis­tri­b­u­tion in the devel­op­ing / sec­ond world. You can read some topline analy­sis by Rob Black­ie here, but it’s real­ly worth look­ing at the whole thing (no, real­ly, I promise it is)