Pinterest Makes First Push in Targeting Super Bowl Viewers With Personalized Microsite

Twitter and Facebook are the go-to online properties for keeping tabs on the Super Bowl during the game, but what about Pinterest?

This year, the site is taking its first stab at courting Super Bowl watchers and advertisers with a microsite dubbed "Most Valuable Party Planner," which scrapes users' accounts for their likes to create a football-themed board of recipes, fashion and party tips. Based on the stat that there are more than 600 million pins about cheese on Pinterest, Sargento is sponsoring the section.

"We started looking at our insights and saw that the different things that people come to Pinterest to plan and get inspired in advance," said Alastair Cotterill, global head of The Studio at Pinterest—the company's in-house creative team. "For sports events, they tend to come about a week before."

"This year, we've seen three times as many searches for football-related recipes, so we came up with the idea of creating something that really adds to people's experience. Our internal creative team came up with the idea and then took it to Sargento."

The site asks people a few questions about what type of Super Bowl party they are planning and their style and then pulls in data from Pinterest's API to create the digital board of recommended recipes and football content that is published to users' profiles.

Sargento's Promoted Pins push cheese chips and appetizers that users can save to their profile. Clicking through on an ad directs folks to recipes on the brand's website.

"This is a trend that we're working with lots of brands on—how to create experiences that make sense with how people are using Pinterest but also ones that are personalized and tailored," Cotterill said.

Pinterest is promoting the microsite with cinematic and one-tap ads on its own site and is also interestingly buying Facebook and Twitter ads that link to the content.

"In terms of driving people to the experience, Sargento wanted Promoted Pins and we also have some media outside of Pinterest," explained Cotterill. "Sargento has a broader campaign that this is part of."

Pinterest has steadily built an ad business over the past couple of years with a search-like model that rivals Google and has recently put a big emphasis on measurement, research and video ads.

"The eye-opening point that you're going to hear from us all year is, 'We're a mass reach play,'" president Tim Kendall recently told Adweek. "If you think about the major CPGs and retailers, the audience that drives all the decision-making are women, 25 to 54. If you want to reach those people, we reach 80 percent of what Facebook reaches every month. And we reach more of that segment than Instagram, Snap or Twitter."

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Bleacher Report Caters to Millennial Men With Thoughtful Sports Analysis and Parody Videos

People talk about sports a little differently than they used to. Post-game discussions don't have to wait for the next morning's water cooler chats. Instead, fans turn to Twitter during the game for up-to-the-minute reactions, GIFs, jokes and memes. 

That's not something that traditional TV-first media brands can easily identify, and it's why Dave Finocchio, the co-founder and CEO of Bleacher Report, has built such a successful brand for millennial men.

"The culture of sports includes talking about it," Finocchio told Adweek, "and our transition from a news media brand into an influencer brand has been really cool."

At Bleacher Report, which was acquired by Turner in 2012, the team have been attracting "people of the culture" for a while, as opposed to just reporting on the culture of sports from afar. And luckily, advertisers are also paying attention.

Currently, 80 percent of Bleacher Report's 50 million monthly unique visitors is under the age of 34. Additionally, the site is up 300 percent year-over-year in video streams.

Not only are people turning to Bleacher Report for thoughtful sports analysis, but they're also tuning into the different kinds of programming that the site, and it's highly engaged social platforms, provide.

"A lot of our audience is in that phase of life where they're ready to make big purchasing decisions," said Finocchio. "They're ready to learn more about products or services that will make their lives better."

According to Finocchio, sports is the one content vertical that men will share at any sort of scale. Bleacher Report has fully embraced the concept of branded content. The team, which includes David Eichenstein as the vp of branded content and sales, and Beckley Mason as head of branded content, built its own in-house creative studio.

There's an animation team, parody-esque videos and other episodic branded content to entertain viewers while connecting them to brands.

Prominent players, including the top college football recruit out of Alabama, have started to want to spend time in the Bleacher Report offices, in order to "speak to their generation."

"Some players will just roll their eyes at the media, but that's the media that's covering sports instead of sports culture," said Finocchio. "Now, they want to be involved with our content."

         

        A new animated, branded series will feature the voices of Michael Che and Roy Wood Jr. among other stars.Bleacher Report

Think of those SportsCenter promos with players palling around ESPN offices, but with more GIFs and laughs.

Bleacher Report takes a similar approach with its brand partners.

"Brands want people in the room that know their business," said Finocchio. "Members of our team will be specialists in different fields. The future of advertising has to be about moving the needle for the brands."

With narrative-based content, both in their own ads and in articles, Bleacher Report is well poised to connect brands to millennial dudes. 

"Content is valuable because it's entertaining," he said. "This is how you stay effective with a younger generation."

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AlternativeFacts.com Is Now Redirecting Viewers to an Article About 'Gaslighting'

Three days ago, people found it interesting that AlternativeFacts.com was redirecting readers to a New York Times story about White House senior advisor Kellyanne Conway's reference to "alternative facts" on a Sunday morning news program. 

Now, the anonymous owner of AlternativeFacts.com has changed where the URL sends viewers, redirecting them instead to an article about gaslighting on PsychologyToday.com. Gaslighting is the mentally manipulative practice of making someone feel crazy and confused using lies and other misinformation to gain power over them.

Earlier today, White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon lambasted The New York Times' and the Washington Post's coverage of President Trump, stating countless times in a single interview that the newspapers and the media in general should be "embarrassed" and "humiliated."

"The media should keep its mouth shut," Bannon told the Times.

So it appears AlternativeFacts.com's owner is implying Bannon and his team are engaged in a sophisticated game of gaslighting. 

And, as was the case a few days ago, social media users are having fun with it. 

Oh gosh. Thank you to whoever came up with https://t.co/kl1DX7pxDO

— K. Locke (@Bibliogato) January 26, 2017

I meant to say - nicely done Internet. Type in alternative facts . com https://t.co/9uLTSojzbg

— Kanine Records (@kaninerecords) January 26, 2017

While we're talking creative URL acquisition, check out https://t.co/EAIryDu1F2. Yep.

— Tammy Gordon (@tammy) January 26, 2017

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Google Misses Fourth-Quarter Earnings Despite Increased Advertising Revenue

Google's parent company Alphabet reported lower than expected earnings growth for the fourth quarter of 2016, hurt in part by a lower cost per click on advertising, even while the total volume of clicks grew.

According to the company's earnings released today, net revenue increased to $26.1 billion, up from $21.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2015. Earnings per share increased to $9.36 from the $8.67 reported during the same period a year earlier. Analysts had expected earnings of $25.26 billion, or $9.64 on an earnings-per-share basis, according to Thomson Reuters.

Growth was driven by revenue from the company's mobile search business as well as YouTube, according to Alphabet. 

Quarterly advertising revenue grew by 17 percent over the same period in 2015, from $19.1 billion to $22.4 billion. Revenue from so-called "other bets," businesses made up of everything from cloud computing and hardware to self-driving cars, increased to $262 million from $150 million. Operating losses for other bets decreased slightly, costing the company $1.1 billion in the quarter compared with $1.2 billion during the same period in 2015.

"We're seeing great momentum in Google's newer investment areas and ongoing strong progress in Other Bets," Alphabet chief financial officer Ruth Porat said a statement.

Aggregate paid clicks in the fourth quarter grew 36 percent, even while cost per click fell 15 percent. Between the third quarter and the fourth quarter of 2016, aggregate paid clicks increased by 20 percent while falling on a cost-per-click basis by 9 percent.

Peter Reinhardt, CEO of customer data platform Segment, said that despite the lower numbers, Google and its rival Facebook are still at the top.

"We can expect to start seeing the smaller networks scramble in order to keep up with Google and Facebook, who are clearly at the top while the rest are falling behind," Reinhardt wrote in an email. "As this trend continues, this will lead to a significant decrease in relevance for these other ad networks, and companies will start to figure out new ways to cope with a new landscape."

Google doesn't differentiate how YouTube's earnings factor into the company's overall revenue. However, according to a Google rep cited by CNBC, YouTube has been "slower to pick up the slack" from the company's other advertising revenue generators that have seen slower growth.

In a statement to Adweek about Alphabet's earnings, Forrester analyst Thomas Husson said the stability of Google's revenue over the next few years will depend on maintaining momentum from mobile revenue.

"While there might be slower growth, the midterm prospect looks good given the fact that advertisers will wake up to the mobile web opportunity after having focused too much on mobile apps," he said.

Husson also noted that Google, like Apple, has been diversifying its core business. While Apple is beginning to move away from relying so heavily on hardware and growing its service business, Google has been leaning more into hardware. Last summer, Google announced its first self-branded hardware products, including a smartphone, a virtual-reality headset and a voice-assistant speaker.

"Both are now the most valued brands globally, according to Interbrand, and their role in the economy is much bigger than what Wintel used to represent 15 or 20 years ago," Husson said, using the monicker to describe Windows and Intel products during the personal computer era's first big boom.

On an earnings call Thursday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company is planning to invest "a lot" in Google Home, the company's voice-assistant speaker. In December, Google opened Home's software to third-party developers, which could help it catch up with the vast capabilities of Amazon's own voice assistant, Alexa.

"We think of this as an end-to-end thing, and all of this means users engage more with us," he said.

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Facebook Is Changing How It Ranks Videos in the News Feed

Facebook announced today that it's changing how it ranks videos that appear in the News Feed. The social network will favor longer videos with high percent-completion rates over short-form content and long-form videos that people don't spend much time viewing. 

In a blog post explaining the updates, product manager Abhishek Bapna and research scientist Seyoung Park said long videos that viewers come close to completing could see a "slight increase in distribution." At the same time, they said shorter videos might see a "slight dip" in the overall number of users who see them.

Bapna and Park said longer videos require more commitment from viewers, so completion stats can tell Facebook how "compelling" a post really is.

"As we continue to understand how our community consumes video, we've realized that we should therefore weight percent completion more heavily the longer a video is, to avoid penalizing longer videos," they wrote.

The two suggested brands and media companies focus on creating videos that are relevant and engaging, rather than simply going long for the sake of length. And they didn't specify what constitutes a long video.

"The best length for a video is whatever length is required to tell a compelling story that engages people, which is likely to vary depending on the story you're telling," they wrote.

The changes—which will roll out gradually in the coming weeks—follow a familiar trend of Facebook tweaking its algorithm based on what it's pushing and what people are watching. In 2015, it shifted weight to videos that prompted people to take actions like turning on sound or watching in full-screen mode. Last year, it gave more preference to Pages that used live video.

Facebook has sought to maintain the trust of advertisers since last fall, when it revealed that a video metric for marketers had been miscalculated and inflated by as much as 80 percent over a two-year period. Some of the company's top executives have said that while the metric was "minor," the error was a lesson in how to be transparent with the way data is calculated and communicated.

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68% of Snapchat Discover Ads Are Direct-Response Campaigns

As Snap plugs away at proving to advertisers its vertical video ads work with data and machine-learning targeting, advertisers are slowly testing more direct-response campaigns on the platform.

For the past three weeks, Adweek has tracked 53 campaigns within Discover, the section of the app where marketers run short video ads alongside content from publishers, and found that 36 of them (or 68 percent) prompted users to take an action by swiping up on the screen. The other 32 percent were Snapchat's standard 10-second video ads.

A third of Snapchat's advertisers this month were entertainment companies including Lionsgate and MTV. Food brands were another big category, with 13 advertisers including General Mills, Nabisco and Starbucks.

Snapchat has been pitching something like direct-response ads that link to app installs, longer videos and websites since last year as a way to compete for mobile advertising dollars with Facebook and others as it gears up for a rumored IPO this year. As part of its API program, Snapchat also has 15 partnerships with measurement companies—including Moat, Oracle Data Cloud and Nielsen—to help advertisers quantify their campaigns.

Fifteen (42 percent) of the direct-response campaigns Adweek observed led users to longer videos when swiped. Another 14 campaigns directed users to websites, and eight campaigns pitched app-install ads.

It's worth noting that the test was only with one reporter's account, and a Snapchat rep said each user is served different ads based on targeting that gauges which ads people are most likely to swipe on based on the content they look at.

Christina Miller, supervisor of social strategy at VML, said she has used Snap Ads with attachments to push consumers further down the purchase funnel. "We use the Snap Ads that link out if we have a deeper goal, further content, acquisition of some sort," she said. "The plain videos are more just for the goal of views [or] awareness—quick consumable content."

And to avoid bombarding consumers with too may ads, "[Snapchat] was so careful in how they rolled out—they give a lot of guidance on that," she added.

But Jill Sherman, DigitasLBi's svp of social strategy, warned that brands shouldn't go all in on swipe-up ads quite yet since users' messages are capped at 10 seconds.

"Snapchat is first and foremost still a messaging app, and Discover content created by publishers is still relatively short form," she said. "That said, I think brands should experiment with it, and learn where the drop-off is. There are best practices, but no hard and fast rules and some brands will likely find that the 10-second spot makes the most sense."

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MailChimp Is Helping Small Businesses Integrate Facebook Ads With Email Marketing

MailChimp is evolving from being an email-marketing company to something that could soon resemble a more diverse marketing platform.

The quirky Atlanta-based company is launching its first product outside the world of email marketing to help clients integrate their Facebook advertising directly within MailChimp's dashboard. The service, announced today, will help advertisers target Facebook users based on brands' email lists while also using Facebook to grow the lists they already have. (Along with email lists, marketers will also be able to target based on Facebook's look-alike audience segments and brands' own audiences.)

According to CEO Ben Chestnut, the company will help not only with buying Facebook ads, but also designing them with a similar process already used by those running email campaigns. The service will let marketers run click-based ad campaigns with small and medium-sized budgets while also tracking ROI with a new revenue-reporting feature. 

Chestnut said it's a way to give marketers a chance to "sprinkle the MailChimp magic" across other platforms.

"A couple of years ago, I remember feeling liberated," he told Adweek. "I no longer have to stay inside of the email space. For me, it's always been about building a great brand, no matter what the channel. So I came back excited, I told the team, 'Hey, we're not stuck in email.' Our brand has come to represent something much larger."

While MailChimp is integrating first with Facebook, Chestnut said the company is also testing integration with other platforms including Instagram and Google AdWords. He said the company has also started alpha testing direct-mail campaigns.

The shift could soon place MailChimp, which has around 15 million customers, in a category with more broadly focused customer-relationship-management companies such as Salesforce and Adobe. (Last year, Wired reported MailChimp sent more than 1 billion emails a day on behalf of its customers.)

"Salesforce, Adobe would be decent comparisons" Chestnut said. "But those are for enterprise. Try to tell a small business that they need a marketing cloud. That might not make much sense for them."

The news comes just days after MailChimp launched a series of quirky videos created by Droga5 that will appear in movie theaters in several U.S. cities. The 60-second spots, produced by Riff Raff Films and directed by The Sacred Egg, are part of a broader national campaign Chestnut said will hopefully drive awareness for the upcoming year. 

"When you launch something new that your audience hasn't seen before, gosh, it's a really risky thing to do," he said. "It's kind of ballsy, and so what we really need to do is make a really good first impression."

The integration could potentially help MailChimp further expand its ecommerce business, which has grown over the past year by 46 percent and now accounts for about 16 percent of the company's total business.

Ecommerce also accounts for a substantial part of MailChimp's overall revenue. Around 46 percent of the $400 million in revenue Chestnut said it brings in comes from ecommerce companies. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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12 Really Intriguing Digital Marketing Stats From This Week

It's been a white-hot week so far for digital marketing statistics. We've seen numbers roll in about Reddit viewers, digital-media growth, bad ads, web bots, Amazon Echo, ecommerce and the hit film La La Land.

Check out these dozen data points that grabbed our attention:

1. Big Game versus going big on Snapchat
On Thursday, we looked at how many types of digital ads equaled the cost of a 30-second Super Bowl TV spot, which comes in at $5.6 million this year. For Snapchat sponsored lenses, 17 of them add up to one Big Game commercial. A branded lens on the mobile app, according to digital agency Essence, costs roughly $329,400.

2. Redditors love mobile reading
Reddit didn't have a mobile app one year ago today, but on Wednesday it revealed that more than 40 percent of its content views occur via its app. 

3. Bigly billions
Digital media spending will total $118 billion by 2021, per Forrester Research. The Cambridge, Mass.-based organization also predicts the rate of spending overall will eventually slow down as marketers increasingly demand high-quality brand experiences, often instead of volume-oriented ad campaigns.

Additionally, Forrester said paid search, display advertising, social media advertising, online video advertising and email marketing will account for 46 percent of all advertising in five years. 

4. Video ads soar
Kinetic Social's Social Trends Report was released this week, analyzing what retail, travel, consumer-packaged goods and gaming marketers have been up to on Facebook and Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest. The tech company found that video ad views on the platforms were up 38 percent in the fourth quarter of 2016 compared with the previous quarter, and that category increased 112 percent over the same period a year prior.

5. Too many damned bots
Incapsula looked at 16.7 billion website visits from early August to early November 2016, and it found that 51.8 percent of traffic was created by bots. That means less than half of the content, according to the web-security player, was seen by humans. A full infographic on the subject can viewed here.

6. Traffic violations, indeed
The volume of ads that violate Google's advertising policies has grown substantially. In fact, last year, Google's systems identified and took down 1.7 billion ads across the internet, double what it did in 2015. 

7. Socialized television
Twitter partnered with Vizeum and Dentsu Aegis Network to study 7,000 multicultural Twitter users considered U.S.-based "superfans" of television programming ages 16 and older. They found that 60 percent of such fans share opinions about their TV shows on Twitter, and 72 percent say social media affects what they watch on the tube. 

8. Digital shopping for soups, sodas, laundry detergent and garbage bags
Consumer-packaged-goods brands may want to ramp up their online marketing. According to Information Resources Inc., ecommerce will account for 10 percent of all CPG sales by 2022.

9. Echo, she said … she said … she said …
More women are evidently buying Amazon's Echo smartspeaker. Slice Intelligence said the artificial-intelligence-friendly trend surfaced in December, when 50 percent of Echo revenue came from females, compared with only 23 percent at launch.

10. Do the Fandango
The film La La Land picked up more Oscar nominations than any other movie on Tuesday, garnering 14 nods. In the hours after the news broke, movie platform Fandango said it saw tickets sales jump 50 percent for the film, which stars Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. 

11. Live sauce
McDonald's is giving away 10,000 bottles of its Big Mac secret sauce on Thursday at dozens of its U.S. locations, as well as via live video on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

12. A banner month
Adpiler, a tech company that focuses on banner and display ads, studied more than 634 billion ad impressions during the first three weeks of the year. When it comes to the banner and display ads market, its infographic below gives you about all the details you could want about what brands are investing in. Check it out: 

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Twitter Is Showcasing the Top Tweets, Hashtags and Moments in a Single Place

Twitter is finally adding a long requested feature: A better way to discover people, events and trends.

The company is introducing Explore, a tab that the company says will be a home for the most popular and relevant content on the platform. In a blog post today, product designer Angela Lam said the addition will house Trends, Moments, Search and live video.

"Over the past year, we've been exploring different ways to make it simpler for people to find and use Trends, Moments, and Search," Lam wrote. "During our research process, people told us that the new Explore tab helped them easily find news, what's trending, and what's popular right now."

Explore—which will begin rolling out for iOS today and for Android within the next few weeks—is similar to what Twitter has been testing with some users a few months back. The news also comes just a few weeks after CEO Jack Dorsey used his own account to crowdsource suggestions for what users think Twitter could do to improve the experience.

Users have wanted Twitter to showcase the best parts of the platform in one location for a while. Agency execs and average users have pointed out how making it easier to navigate could help increase engagement—something Wall Street would certainly love to see as the company struggles to grow its user base fast enough to please investors.

Twitter is expected to report its fourth-quarter earnings on Feb. 9.

 

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McDonald's Is Giving Away Its Big Mac Sauce via Livestreams on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter

Facebook Is Testing Ad Placement on the Messenger Home Screen

Facebook users might soon see ads in another part of the coveted digital real estate—the Messenger app.

This week, the company started testing ads that show up on the Messenger's home screen. The ads, which for now are being tested on a "very small" scale in Australia and Thailand, appear below users' recent conversations, similar to how the platform might remind them of someone's birthday.

In a blog post today announcing the news, Facebook product manager Eddie Zhang said users won't see ads within conversations unless they click on them and start conversations with brands.

"Businesses have long been telling us that they are very excited about the potential of the Messenger platform to reach their customers and help them to drive sales, build brand awareness and increase customer satisfaction," Zhang wrote.

According to Zhang, the addition could provide a way for users to easily find relevant businesses that are active on the platform while also letting brands target users with promotions. While the update might seem like further intrusions to users, Zhang said businesses still won't be able to message them directly unless they initiate an interaction.

Direct messages have become big business for Facebook. In November, the company began letting brands brands promote their Messenger bots in news feeds via targeted ads. A report last year by eMarketer predicted Messenger would have more than 105 million users in the U.S. by the end of 2016. (According to Facebook, more than 1 billion messages are sent between people and businesses via Messenger each month.)

Today, Facebook also made updates to its flagship app, introducing Facebook Stories, essentially a clone of Instagram Stories and Snapchat Stories that have increasingly become popular on their respective platforms. So far, the feature is only available in Ireland, and reports have called the update a "test" rather than an official rollout.

The company did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the Facebook Stories rollout.

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7 Digital Ad Alternatives You Can Buy for the Same Price as a Super Bowl TV Spot

The 30-second Super Bowl TV ad remains the undisputed king of the advertising world, but year after year, marketers continue to wonder if it's worth it, especially as platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat tout new targeting and ad formats.

Advertisers will again shell out more than $5 million for a 30-second ad during Super Bowl LI this year. Not surprisingly, that amount buys a lot in digital media.

"The value that you can get in digital is much more substantial," said Jeremy Sigel, global director of partnerships and emerging media at WPP-owned Essence.

For $5.6 million, a bit more than Fox is reportedly asking for, advertisers could buy 90 Snapchat Discover takeovers (at roughly $62,200 each) that let brands sponsor a publication's daily edition. "[That] would almost let you buy the entire Snapchat portfolio," Sigel said.

Here's a short list of six other digital ads that marketers could swap for the same price as a TV ad, according to Essence:

17 Snapchat lenses
According to Essence, a national sponsored Snapchat lens, the fun colorful filters that overlay selfies, costs roughly $329,400, meaning advertisers could create 17 of them for $5.6 million.

Sponsored lenses have steadily caught on with advertisers and also appear to be significantly cheaper than they were six months ago when some ad buyers claimed the one-day takeovers could cost $600,000.

35 homepage takeovers on 'tier-one' sites
Before the rise of social and video platforms, the homepage takeover was the crème de la crème of digital advertising.

Advertisers still buy the prominent ad placement, but with more of publisher's traffic and chatter about events coming through social media, it's likely not as big of a sell as it used to be. For $5.6 million, advertisers can buy 35 homepage takeovers of top publishers at roughly $160,000 apiece.

22 custom BuzzFeed videos
A sponsored video on BuzzFeed is worth $254,500. That means brands could buy 22 of the digital publisher's campaigns for the same price as a 30-second TV spot.

220 million full-episode player video impressions
At a cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM) of about $23.30, advertisers could buy 240 million impressions' worth of ad inventory within full-episode players like Hulu or TV networks' platforms.

370 million display video impressions
For a cheaper $15.13 CPM, brands could buy more than 370 million display video impressions, per Essence's estimates.

800 million impressions from banner ads
Banner ads are notoriously the cheapest, and often the most ineffective, digital ads. However, brands that want reach could buy 800 million worth of banner ads for $5.6 million at a $7 CPM. Put another mind-boggling way: Advertisers could reach every 18- to 49-year-old in the U.S. (or 132 million people) two to six times in one day with an online ad.

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Facebook Is Changing Its Trending Topics Section Again, Removing Personalization

Facebook is hoping the latest changes to its Trending section will make the company's attempts to be a news service a little stronger.

The social network has begun rolling out updates to the list of news items on every user's homepage, adding more context with headlines and moving away from personalized suggestions. 

In a blog post today explaining the latest version of Trending, Facebook's vp of product management, Will Cathcart, said the updates reflect the most requested changes from users. Changes will start appearing today and will be available to everyone in the U.S. within "the coming weeks," according to Cathcart's post.

In order to make the section more relevant, Facebook is changing how it identifies trending topics. While topics were highlighted in the past based on what users were engaging with on the platform, Facebook will now factor in the number of publishers posting about a given topic, along with the type of engagement it's getting.

"This should surface trending topics quicker, be more effective at capturing a broader range of news and events from around the world and also help ensure that trending topics reflect real world events being covered by multiple news outlets," Cathcart wrote.

Facebook is also adding context to each set of keywords. Now, topics will be accompanied by a headline from one of the publishers that's written about the subject, a feature Facebook says has been requested more than any other since it fired most of its journalist curators and gave more authority to algorithms in August. (At the time, Facebook said it was intended to help remove political bias from the system.)

According to Facebook, headlines will be automatically selected based on user engagement with the topic, overall engagement with the publisher and whether people are clicking on the link. Headlines have appeared for months when users hover over links, but now they will appear right next to the topic.

Topics will also soon be more relevant regionally, allowing Facebook to show everyone in a given area the same news.

Facebook is also beginning to roll out its game plan for showing real news. After months of widespread criticism for its role in helping disseminate rumors and falsehoods during the 2016 presidential election, the company said its changes to Trending could cut down on fake news on the platform.

"Trending uses a variety of signals from News Feed, including when people report news as fake or spam, to help prevent fake news, hoaxes or spam from appearing in Trending," Cathcart said. "Today's update may also help prevent hoaxes and fake news from appearing in Trending because the updated system identifies groups of articles shared on Facebook instead of relying solely on mentions of a topic."

In response to the updates, Media Matters president Angelo Carusone issued a statement describing the changes as "at best a marginal improvement."

"While moving in the right direction, these half-measures will not stop the rampant lies spreading on the platform," Carusone said in the statement. "We can't forget that Facebook made the problem of fake news significantly worse when they acted on right-wing misinformation and fired all their human editors over the summer and let their algorithms get gamed."

Carusone also commended Snapchat for updating its own policies this week by prohibiting publishers from posting false or misleading content or linking to outside websites that do.

"Facebook's timidity in addressing this problem will prove bad for business and stands in stark contrast to Snapchat's bold actions earlier this week that were aimed at stopping the spread of lies and false impressions," he said. "So, we're encouraged by the small improvements, specifically the changes to transparency in the trending topics section, but we await Facebook prioritizing truth in the same way their competitors have demonstrated."

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Can't Deal With People? These Cringey Ads Say a Quick-Charging Phone Can Help

A few weeks ago, I went on a trip. By the time I arrived at the airport, my phone was a dead brick—obliging me to hunt down the nearest charging station and, upon spying one, immediately elbow in and seize it. 

But you're never really alone at a charging station. I was sharing this one with a woman in the middle of a heated argument with somebody on her phone—still plugged in, just above mine. 

I didn't want to be there, anxiously checking my social networks and waiting to be released. She clearly didn't want me there. But we were using a public utility, and we had to make do. So we sat very close together, each of us pretending the other woman didn't exist at all, and tried to continue our individual life trajectories unencumbered. 

As she arched her back and shouted "WHY DON'T YOU GO LIVE WITH HIM?" our arms touched, tense yet somehow still feather-soft on contact, because that's the way you politely touch someone that you're trapped next to. 

Perhaps inspired by moments like this, smartphone startup One Plus released two ads that focus on how quickly you can charge your phone and, in essence, run away. 

Made by Carrot Creative, the first, titled "Just Kidding," opens with two women sharing a charging station in a café. One is a mother whose children are playing tug-of-war with her listless body while she checks her messages. The other woman watches, with growing anxiety, as those tiny human nightmares explore more sadistic ways to attract attention. 

"I'm charged," she says when it becomes clear that the stakes are about to go way, way up.



OnePlus smartphones, powered by the brand's exclusive Dash Charge technology, promise users "a day's power in half an hour." It's able to do this with a larger electric current that maintains a steady hyper-fast charging speed, even if you're using your phone while it's plugged in. 

A second ad, "Mr. Roboto," might resonate with anyone who's still shaking off a CES hangover. 

A woman shares a charging station with a guy playing a VR game. He's wearing sandals over socks and his pants don't fit, a caricature straight out of Revenge of the Nerds—long-limbed, awkward, poorly dressed and unaware of where he begins and ends, a problem exacerbated by his headset.

He's also got a whole media array plugged into the shared station, and appears to be wearing some sort of disgusting phone harness. As he jerks around, invading space, the OnePlus owner stares. Then, quick as anything, she leaves. 



The ads do their job well. We resent the quiet, condescending stares of OnePlus' protagonists, but recognize the situation they're in—trapped way too close to people whose lives appear to be an expanding hot mess. In the mental battle between elitism and convenience, where are you most likely to bend? 

Then again, if the paragons of preparedness shown here were real people, they probably would have done what lots of people do already—bought a mobile charger. It does the job just as well. And if you're so wary of the chaos of human contact, you don't have to stop at the plebeian charging station at all. 

CREDITS
Client: OnePlus

Agency: Carrot Creative
Account Director:  Anne Flavin
Account Supervisor:  Rachel London
Producer:  Rucyl Mills
Creative Director:  Tyler Pierce
Art Direction:  Alex Rainone
Copywriter:  Bennett Einbender
Illustration:  Adam Lowe
Animation: Whitney Brown

Pulse Films LA
Executive Producer:  Casey Engelhardt
Producer:  Caroline Oliveira
Director:  Brendan Hearne
Director of Photography: David Wilson
Editor: Jarrah Oliveira 

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When the Weather Is Bad, Digital Billboards for the 'Baywatch' Movie Will Try to Cheer You Up

The ad campaign is underway for the Baywatch movie, which opens nationally on May 26. While the forthcoming flick most likely won't go down in cinema history with the likes of Citizen Kane or Chinatown, its Paramount Pictures marketers are approaching out-of-home with a bit of innovation. 

Utilizing the digital billboard system from Lamar Advertising, Paramount and its team are targeting 16 mostly rust-belt or corn-belt mid-sized markets with ads that change according to the weather happening around the signage. The towns being pitched include the likes of Flint, Mich., Waterloo, Iowa, Lincoln, Neb., Sioux Falls, S.D., Green Bay, Wisc., Syracuse, N.Y., and Casper, Wyo. A total of 52 digital billboards will be employed through Feb. 5 in the endeavor. 

The ads highlight whether passersby are experiencing either brutal cold, snow or rain, with the promise that summer is coming in the name of Baywatch, which stars Alexandra Daddario, Priyanka Chopra, Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron. What creative appears depends on the local weather data.

The movie, of course, is based on the themes of the Baywatch TV program that ran on NBC and in syndication from 1989 through 2001. 

Weather-data-based advertising has become a bit of a "bright, shiny object" in the world of marketing, and it's often attempted to be done via mobile phones with precise, one-to-one targeting. What makes the Baywatch effort different is not only the traditional mass-advertising medium being employed, but also that the endeavor combines real-time climate conditions via automation with the idea of empathy.

Can empathy be automated? Whether these digital billboards nudge folks to the box office may help answer that question. 

    

    

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Google Blocked Over a Billion 'Bad Ads' Last Year for Misleading Users

While everyone on the internet is used to seeing a lot of bad ads, there are millions of others that never see the light of screens.

Today in its annual report about ads that don't make the cut, Google revealed details of its own "bad ads" battle to showcase the kinds of real and fake promotions the company blocked in 2016.

The volume of ads that violate Google's advertising policies has grown substantially. In fact, last year Google's systems identified and took down 1.7 billion ads across the internet—double what it did in 2015. The way Google puts it, removing that many ads manually would take a human 50 years at a rate of 1 ad per second.

"A free and open web is a vital resource for people and businesses around the world. And ads play a key role in ensuring you have access to accurate, quality information online," Scott Spencer, director of product management for Google's Sustainable Ads unit, wrote in a blog post. "But bad ads can ruin the online experience for everyone. They promote illegal products and unrealistic offers. They can trick people into sharing personal information and infect devices with harmful software. Ultimately, bad ads pose a threat to users, Google's partners, and the sustainability of the open web itself."

Last year, Google updated its guidelines to expand and redefine what types of ads violate its policies, such as by banning payday loan ads, which accounted for 5 million of the ads removed last year. It also made improvements to technology, creating ways to identify "click-to-trick" ads such as those that appear to show a warning on a user's screen. According to Google, 112 million "click-to-trick" ads were removed last year, a totally that was six times as high than it was in 2015.

According to John Brown, Google's head of publisher policy communications, one of the main concerns he hears from publishers is how to grow in a challenging market. However, that doesn't mean they are allowed to post bad ads that others can't. According to Google, nearly 200 publishers were permanently removed from Google's AdSense network between November and December for violating policies about running ads that misrepresent content.

"It's important, especially for Google publishers, and user experience is paramount," Brown said. "Ads are part of user experience, so anything that's misrepresented or not relevant at all to their users, it's a negative to the publisher. And any negative experience can use to them not coming back to that site."

Brown said the company has a team of "thousands" who are tasked with monitoring Google's systems for bad ads.

Here's a look at some of the other "bad ads" Google took down last year:

Ads for illegal products
According to Google, some of the most common "bad ads" the company sees are those promoting illegal products and services. For example, 68 million ads for things that violate healthcare laws (up from 12.5 million in 2015) and 17 million ads for unauthorized gambling.

Misleading ads
Ads that attempt to mislead users with questions about being at risk for things like a "rare skin-eating disease" or miracle pills that help lose a lot of weight with no work accounted for 80 million ads last year.

Ads trying to game the system
Google says some companies that know their ads aren't allowed through detection systems try to game the system. For example, the frequency of "tabloid cloakers"—known by most as fake news—has grown substantially. Many of these ads look like they're going to an absurd and false story of some sort, but then only lead to a weight-loss product or some other promotion.

Last year, Google suspended 1,300 tabloid-cloaking accounts. And while that might not seem like a lot compared to millions in other categories, it actually is—Google said one scan in December revealed 22 cloakers that had shown ads to more than 20 million people in a week.

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Mark Zuckerberg Says He Has No Plans to Run for President

Mark Zuckerberg is unfriending the idea of running for president of the United States, at least for now.

Today, Facebook's CEO wrote to BuzzFeed News explaining that he has no plans to run for political office. The response comes after BuzzFeed asked about his presidential ambitions amid speculation Zuckerberg has been setting the stage for a potential White House bid in 2020.

Speculation about the internet's "Parent-in-Chief" started a few weeks ago, when Bloomberg News reported that Zuckerberg wanted to find a way to serve in government while maintaining control of Facebook. There have also been other reports, such as one from Vanity Fair tech writer Nick Bilton, who, citing Silicon Valley insiders, wrote that whether Zuckerberg will be the next president is "a serious question." However, Zuckerberg himself seems to want to keep his head down at the social network and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a philanthropic organization he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, co-founded.

"'No,'" Zuckerberg told BuzzFeed. "'I'm focused on building our community at Facebook and working on the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.'"

Of course, what he's focused on now doesn't necessarily rule out anything he might be focused on in the future. (After all, times change, people change, social networks change.) But Zuckerberg's certainly been acting more presidential lately, making plans to visit "small towns and universities" to meet with everyday Americans, for instance. On Christmas Day, the CEO announced he now views religion as "very important" after growing up Jewish and identifying as an atheist for years. (He also already has a team that helps maintain his online persona, a key piece of any political campaign.)

However, Zuckerberg focusing on Facebook is probably good news for Facebook. If he ever were to run, it could have potentially major implications for Facebook and its own various initiatives. Zuckerberg, who has over the past decade gained a reputation for being a visionary, business man and engineering genius, has grown the social network far and wide, beyond the college networking website it once was. He's also taken on international initiatives, such as providing internet via drones in Africa. And like Apple without Steve Jobs, Facebook without Zuck could be a very different company.

Zuckerberg also has another key advantage should he ever run: access to a massive trove of data about more than a billion people around the world. That should help a little with political ad targeting. But whether the public and political press would deem his usage of user data as appropriate would certainly be up for debate.

All that territory would be entirely unprecedented—not to mention unpresidented.

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Snapchat Is Now Selling Ads Against Nielsen's TV-Like Ratings System

Snapchat may or may not become mobile television for younger generations. But the app's parent, Snap Inc., which appears to be on the cusp of an IPO, wants TV advertisers to think about it that way and spend their money accordingly. 

Today, the Venice, Calif.-based company revealed a partnership with Nielsen's mobile Digital Ad Ratings (mDAR) unit, giving brands the ability to buy guaranteed Snapchat audiences by age group and gender. For the most part, it's the same kind of system—from ordering to measuring the results—that marketers are accustomed to with Nielsen's TV offerings.

The television-minded data endeavor meshes well with Snapchat's other recent announcements, such as striking an original content deal with Turner Broadcasting last month. Snapchat also has dedicated video agreements with TV brands like NBC and MTV. 

Tuesday's development expands the Snap-Nielsen relationship, which had been limited to ads measurement. And to be clear, the mDAR move simply gives brands another purchasing option, as the other methods of buying Snapchat campaigns via its ads API remain available. 

For the last two years, Snapchat execs have worked quickly on their advertising capabilities. For instance, they inked a deal with Oracle just last week to let brands use offline data to drive better campaigns on the app. 

In the end, it's all about mobile video with its Snap Ads, which are full-screen vertical spots that can be immersive, as Snap competes with the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest and hopes to impress Wall Street investors.

Snap declined to comment for this story. 

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Google's Virtual Reality Short Film Earns an Academy Award Nomination

Google is now competing with the Ryan Goslings and Emma Stones of Hollywood.

Today, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences named Pearl, an animated short created by the tech company, among its nominees for best animated short film of 2016. But Pearl isn't just any animated short—it was created for virtual reality, making it the first of its kind to be considered for an Oscar. 

The six-minute movie is a father-daughter road trip saga that features the duo driving along in a car, playing music and following their dreams from city to city. The film lets people view the YouTube Spotlight Series production in a number of ways. While anyone can still watch the 2-D version, viewers can open it via YouTube's app and spin the phone around 360 degrees to see various perspectives of the journey. The most immersive experience, of course, is to watch it with a VR headset, which lets users feel as if they're inside of the car. 

Google is competing with Pixar's Piper, a non-VR film about a baby seabird trying to find its way. Others in the category include Borrowed Time, a starkly darker film created by two Pixar veterans; the Kickstarter-funded Pear Cider and Cigarettes; and the Canadian creation Blind Vaysha.

While Pearl is the first VR film up for an Oscar, it's not the first one up for a major mainstream award. Facebook-owned Oculus has won two Emmys: one for Henry and the other for Sleepy Hollow.

However, being at the Oscars could help raise the profile of Google's other VR initiatives. It could also potentially help increase interest in Google View, the company's VR headset released last fall along with Google's Pixel smartphone.

 

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This Digital Agency Made a Bot That Analyzes Trump's Tweets About Brands, Then Shorts Stocks

For better or worse, brands are trying to stay out of Trump's tweets. When the president criticized General Motors for making Cruze models in Mexico on Twitter earlier this month, the brand's stock fell 0.7 percent. Shares of Boeing similarly dropped by 1.4 percent after Trump complained about the cost of building a new Air Force One in December.

After noticing a pattern between Trump's tweets and immediate stock drops, Austin, Texas-based digital shop T3 built a bot dubbed the "Trump and Dump" that scrapes Trump's tweets for mentions of publicly-traded companies. Each tweet is then scrubbed with a sentiment analysis to figure out if it is positive or negative. As soon as a tweet is deemed negative—which the shop claims takes less than 20 milliseconds—the bot automatically shorts the discussed company's stock.

"The unpredictability of it created a real opportunity," notes the agency.

Using the bot, T3 invested and then subsequently sold stock of Toyota after Trump recently threatened to give the automaker a "big border tax" if it opened a plant in Mexico, causing a 0.7 percent dip.

Toyota Motor said will build a new plant in Baja, Mexico, to build Corolla cars for U.S. NO WAY! Build plant in U.S. or pay big border tax.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 5, 2017

The bot then automatically pings a notification to the investor—T3 in this case—via Slack and the profit is donated to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). T3 declined to say how much its donation was worth but the agency says it plans to use the technology in the future, too.

"We've been using artificial intelligence to build bots, monitor social media experiences and engineer engaging applications," said Ben Gaddis, T3's president. "This project seemed like a natural progression—and who doesn't love puppies?"

The YouTube video below explains the process and the bot's algorithms a bit more.

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