Snap May Finally Have a Vision

April 09, 2019 by Taylor Wiegert in Snapchat

2019 needs to be a big year for Snap, Inc. The company was once on the tip of every marketer’s tongue as the next big thing, but it’s had trouble since its IPO in shaking its user growth struggles. While Snap hasn’t been losing users on its core Snapchat platform, it hasn’t been able to grow users either. Its Q4 2018 earnings showed flat growth overall, which has led to the widespread notion that Snapchat isn’t the place to reach an audience. Instead, marketers are shifting their focus, time and efforts to other, larger players like Facebook and Google.

Last week, Snap worked to retake the narrative and establish a vision for its future at its first-ever Partner Summit, an event for developers, advertisers and content creators to see just what Snap has in store. Overall, Snap’s approach could be bucketed into two key areas: remove the necessity of users for scale and maintain camera leadership.

Things I’ve Learned from Lately #141

September 30, 2017 by Taylor Wiegert in Things I've Learned From Lately

“Things I’ve Learned from Lately” is a regular compilation of articles that have made me a smarter marketer. Hopefully, they’ll help you, too.

This Week: Practicing for a Crisis, The Facebook Dilemma, Visual Search on Retail, Filters are Just the Beginning and Sears is the OG Amazon.

The Battle for the Camera

April 25, 2017 by Taylor Wiegert in Facebook, Content Marketing, Snapchat

All eyes are on the camera. Last week Facebook took the stage at F8 to launch the Camera Effects platform in an effort to get developers to help it dominate Snapchat.

Camera Effects is an augmented reality platform that lets developers add augmented reality overlays to people, table tops and anything else that can be viewed through the lens of a camera. The potential is huge with the ability to play AR games (think Pokemon Go to the next level), tag AR pieces in the world for friends to find, leverage object recognition, do 3D mapping and so on. Facebook is giving developers tools turn Facebook Camera into the the best way to create and share with friends.

Why would Facebook do this? Well, the camera is Snapchat’s game. It does after all call itself a camera company, and not to be outdone, it launched World Lenses that allow users to add virtual, augmented reality objects to landscapes and the world around them. What Snapchat did for the selfie, it aims to do for the world.

Brave Ad World Podcast - Episode 277

April 24, 2017 by Taylor Wiegert in Podcast

This week we had F8, changes to Snapchat Lenses and so much more to cover on Episode 277 of the Brave Ad World Podcast.

This week’s headlines: Snapchat Launching Self-Serve Snap Ads, Facebook F8 is All About the Camera, AR and VR, Facebook Sets Sights Beyond Its Core and Snapchat Launches World Lenses.

The week’s news quick hits: Instagram Launches Collections, Steve Balmer Re-Emerges with New Organization Focused on Government Spending, Tumblr Launches Cabana, F8 Includes Updates to Facebook Analytics, Twitter Launches In-Stream Video Ads and Google Developing Browser with Ad Blocking Built In.

Get this episode and many others in the podcast section, and be sure to subscribe via iTunes.

Brave Ad World - Episode 261

December 19, 2016 by Taylor Wiegert in Podcast

The last episode of the Brave Ad World for 2016 is here, and it is full of news.

This week’s headlines: Facebook Reports More Measurement Discrepancies, Instagram Live Becomes Available to All Users, Snapchat Adds Four New Features, Twitter Adds Periscope Streaming to Core App, Facebook Launching Massive Update to Messenger’s Camera and Facebook Launches Effort to Fight Fake News.

The week’s news quick hits: A Slimmed Down Moments App Comes to Desktop, Facebook Launches Live 360 Videos, Snapchat Inks Slew of New Discover Deals, Flipboard Launches Promoted Roundup Editorial Ad Unit, Facebook Events App Available for Android, Instagram Launches Post Saving Feature, Instagram Reaches 600 Million Users, Facebook Testing Suggestions for M Virtual Assistant, Facebook Notifying Pages to Remove Snapcodes as Page Profile Pictures, Twitch Launches IRL Content Category, Yahoo Hit by Second Security Breach Affecting 1 Billion Users and Amazon Unbundles Prime Video.

Get this episode and many others in the podcast section, and be sure to subscribe via iTunes.

Talk to you next year!

This Week in Social and Digital (Week of December 12)

December 18, 2016 by Taylor Wiegert in This Week in Social

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.