This weeks’s Next to Now includes links to articles on standing out on Snapchat, partnering with Instagram, and checking out an experiment that gives people a real, human stake in an outdoor ad campaign.
HOW TO STAND OUT ON SNAPCHAT
This article gives a good primer about strategies to get a presence on Snapchat without shelling out the $750,000 per day spend. We’ve noticed that many of our clients are on board with recommendation number one: Replace your Twitter Avatars with Snapcodes.
INSTAGRAM ANNOUNCES PARTNER PROGRAM
Instagram announces a partnership with forty outside companies to help with various phases of Instagram advertising: from planning and execution to content partnerships. This Business Insider article talks about what this means.
EXTREME OUTDOOR
Reality TV meets outdoor advertising with an Xbox campaign: eight people are standing outside on a London billboard undergoing arctic blasts and continual video streaming while viewers can vote on what kind of conditions they should be subjected to. Last one standing “wins.” The real winner, of course, is Xbox.
MILLENNIAL MOMS BUY ON MOBILE
According to this eMarketer article, mobile is the way to reach young moms, not just with information, but increasingly with buy links:
“According to September 2015 research by Roth Capital Partners (ROTH), almost half (46.8%) of mother internet users ages 20 to 35 primarily made digital purchases via their mobile phone or tablet.”
WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BRAND AND DIRECT MARKETING?
This Seth Godin article articulates the difference between brand and direct marketing in a way that might have seemed self-evident 20 years ago, but has become increasingly clouded in a world filled with data where every ad budget has to respond in some way to data. This is a crucial question for book publishers, which used to be 100% clear that they were doing brand advertising — leaving the direct marketing to booksellers. But in the world of digital advertising and direct selling by book publishers (however low a priority it remains) those distinctions are getting cloudy.
DON’T WORRY ABOUT BEATING AD BLOCKERS, WORRY ABOUT BETTERING YOUR GAME
The IAB makes the case that ad blocking is best addressed not by blocking ad blockers, but by fixing the “pain points” that cause people to want ad blockers: slow loading pages because of tracking software, roll-overs, endless surveys, etc.
SNAPCHAT GAINS ON FACEBOOK IN VIDEO
This article in the FT reports that Snapchat is generating 6 billion video views on its app every day. This is triple what they were seeing in May, and approaching FB’s 8 billion video views per day. This article in Business Insider is where you can read about it if you’re not an FT subscriber.
PANDORA AIMS TO IMPROVE MOBILE USER DATA
As desktop use (and therefore use of cookies) declines, Pandora is taking steps to get better at identifying users on mobile devices.