This Week in Social and Digital (Week of March 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.
Twitter Shows Signs of Embracing Programmatic Ad Tech
Twitter may soon be embracing programmatic ad tech in a way that other social platforms have not. The platform is looking to connect its ad inventory with third party buying platforms and agency trading desks in an effort to make Twitter one of the easiest places to buy social ads.
This would make Twitter a more integrated investment across the digital advertising space as advertisers would be able to target and buy an audience across Twitter and wherever they go on the Internet. The move is significant because other social platforms have worked to maintain their walled gardens and the control that comes with it.
Currently, the effort is being tested with a handful of brands.
Twitter’s had a series of wins as of late with rising ad revenue and being profitable for the first time since going public. It’s also increased its focus on video, and upping its game in programmatic would likely help its video advertising performance by making it easier to buy video ads.
Facebook’s Troubles with Watch
Digiday’s reported on some troubles Facebook’s having with its Watch platform. Watch was originally designed to include longer-form content that would feature mid-roll ad breaks, but the problem Facebook’s running into is advertisers aren’t biting.
Demand is low thanks to limited viewers of Watch content and brand-safety concerns, so Facebook is going to increase scarcity. It’s going to make Watch video shows more exclusive and limit which ones can have mid-roll ads. Facebook is “ensuring quality content.”
Publishers haven’t been pleased either. According to them, Facebook forced them to create as much content as fast possible, which likely hasn’t helped Watch deliver on quality, but beyond that, Watch content hasn’t delivered the ad revenue publishers were hoping.
Watch was launched as one of the primary ways Facebook was going to increase ad inventory, and it brought publishers on board with promises of revenue. The ad product hasn’t taken off, and publishers are growing frustrated. It just hasn’t garnered user attention.
Perhaps, this can be addressed within the app and through algorithm updates, but it may not be able to. Successfully launching Watch required training users to re-think the type of content they expect to find on Facebook. Users have decided not to cooperate up to this point.
News Quick Hits
- Facebook is pitching advertisers to run their ads around what it calls the most brand-safe videos. The offering requires an investment of $750,000 over three months. The offer has been met with a degree of skepticism as Facebook is offering ad buyers little control over where the ads actually run. Beyond that, the ads will be broadly targeted to video viewers 18 years and older. YouTube is offering similar so-called “brand safe” videos for advertisers that meet a certain spending threshold.
- Facebook launched video chat for Messenger Lite, the “slimmed down version of Messenger” that works on Android devices that have slower Internet connections as well as older hardware.
- Twitter updated notifications related to direct messaging. Now any participant that is mentioned in a group direct message will receive a notification of that mention.
- Twitter is following Facebook’s lead in banning ads tied to cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings. Twitter has restricted the @Bitcoin account, and Twitter has notified that it's become aware of cryptocurrency-related “manipulation” on its platform and is working to prevent any accounts that are “engaging with others in a deceptive manner.”
- Snap Inc. has removed more than 120 engineers from its staff. This largest round of job cuts to date have been positioned by the company as a move meant to emphasize performance. “We want to unleash speed and productivity in our organization, while keeping a high technical bar,” stated a memo distributed to staff.