This Week in Social and Digital (Week of June 5)
This Week in Social is a weekly digest of some of the biggest stories in social media marketing news. These stories are the show notes for the Brave Ad World Podcast. Each story is discussed at a deeper level on the podcast.
Apple’s WWDC Brings Implications for Marketers
Apple held its annual WWDC in an effort to reach out to developers, announce new hardware and share updates on hardware. And as is the case whenever Apple takes the stage, there was no shortage of announcements and buzz. Some of those had implications for marketers.
The first, and most obvious, is the new HomePod, Apple’s in-home speaker assistant. HomePod is meant to compete with the likes of Amazon Echo and Google Home, but Apple also emphasized its sound quality, positioning it to go after Sonos as well. This speaker assistant features a Musicologist that will stream music and answer music-related questions. But it’s also open for developers to build on top of.
iOS 11 is also getting an update, which includes updates to Siri. Siri will now offer improved speech recognition and will also translate sentences.
iMessages will live in iCloud now, instead of on the device. Beyond that, Apple is going after Venmo with the ability for users to send and receive payments all through iMessages.
The App Store will be getting better discovery capabilities, as well as editorial content like a How To section for certain apps and an “App of the Day” promotion to keep users coming back and introducing them to new apps.
Augmented reality apps for the iPhone are now much easier to build thanks to the new ARKit. Pokemon Go is going to be updated to run on ARKit.
Finally, Safari is getting an update that will prevent websites from automatically playing video, while also offering a “no tracking” option that will block ad targeting. Apple has not shared if autoplay video applies to Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms. This move follows an announcement by Google Chrome that it will also be blocking ads deemed as delivering a poor experience.
There were several other hardware and software announcements that are less relevant to marketers as well.
When Apple adopts a new technology, chances are it’s fairly mainstream. After all, Apple lets others try it. Then Apple does it, Apple’s way. Apple’s announcements focused on a few trends that we can expect to continue to expand. Here we’re seeing Apple really focus on voice technology with an in-home assistant. Apple’s offering premium-priced hardware here, and the big test will be how Siri performs compared to Amazon’s and Google’s assistants. AI assistants have grown over recent years, and using artificial intelligence assistants is only going to to continue to grow.
The other huge pieces Apple’s getting involved with are AR and peer-to-peer payments. There have been apps that have proven he viability of both, and it looks like Apple’s ready to take part, which likely is a concern to apps and services like Venmo. Finally, ad blocking. Google announced it last week for Chrome, and it looks like ad blocking built into browsers is going to be more common than not.
Snap Acquires to Get More Location Aware
Snap just acquired Placed for $125 million, but once stock payouts are in place it could total as much as $200 million.
So, what is Placed? Placed is a location tracking company that can track store visits as well as lifetime customers. Last year, it conducted a study to identify the most popular stores for Snapchat users.
Placed will remain a separate entity, but it will work to help Snapchat improve location-based initiatives like Snap to Store, which measures foot traffic when Snapchat campaigns are in place.
The move is clearly one meant to improve tracking on the Snapchat platform to appease advertisers and in-turn investors. And that’s a big step considering Snapchat’s previous stance of being firmly anti-advertising.
News Quick Hits
- Click-to-Messenger ads are now available on Instagram. The ads rolled out on Facebook last year. Now, Instagram ads can have the same call-to-action and drive users to Messenger.
- Closed captions are now available on Facebook Live videos. Users who have caption settings turned on will see them, and Facebook’s doing this using speech recognition technology to automatically generate the captions for videos.
- Canvas ads can now be paired with Collections. When Collections launched they were meant to be paired with a piece of creative and then invite people to view specific products. Now, those Collections can be paired with Canvas ads as a way to drive goals beyond product sales to acquisition and awareness as well. That being said, pairing of Canvas and Collections means a pretty deep experience, which may be more than most users are willing to dedicate to an ad.
- Facebook is getting more into politics with new tools that allow officials to better connect with constituents with constituent badges, constituent insights and district targeting. Badges identify people as living in a representative’s district. Facebook uses address data to apply the badges, but users have to opt-in to have them applied. The badges are prompted to be turned on when a user likes or comments on something on a representatives’ page. It can also be turned on in the Town Hall section of Facebook. Beyond that, representatives can pull data on local stories that are popular in their districts and target content to people who just live in their districts.