Happy 4th of July week! Here’s all the digital media news you may have missed:
General
- It’s the end of an era, with Google retiring the Doubleclick name, replacing it with “Google Marketing Platform“. Announced in this blog post, the change sees tighter integration of Google’s Analytics platform (Analytics 360) and essentially deletes “Doubleclick” and appends “360” to every product name. Google will be providing more details on the change during a live stream on July 10 (sign up to watch here).
- Instagram has released a 48page best practices handbook (PDF) for creators with a focus on IGTV and how to create a great video. The document doesn’t include any guidelines on what content is appropriate for Instagram (community standards, advertising friendly, or brand safe). On a more personal level, if you want some tips on good apps for photo and video editing, there are some good suggestions in the document.
- Facebook is experimenting with keyword snoozing that lets users hide content from their feed by identifying keywords in a post. Snoozed keywords are in effect for 30 days. This is an expansion of the page snooze function announced back in January.
- Pandora has completed the acquisition of AdsWizz, a programmatic audio advertising platform, used by all of the major streaming providers. AdsWizz will continue to operate as a separate standalone company.
- During Google I/O back in May, there was a preview of Google Duplex – Google’s AI-based voice assistant that could talk to real people. Google recently provided journalists with a more hands-on experience where some new details came to light, one of which is human operators may take over if Google assistant gets stuck.
eSports
- eSports continues the move to mainstream acceptance, with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) hosting an eSports forum on July 21. The forum isn’t a commitment to bring eSports to the Olympics but is a step by all parties to identify areas for collaboration.
- More details are coming to light on Snapchat’s gaming platform (rumored since April) gaming platform. According to reports, gaming on Snapchat is expected to be available this fall, leverage browser-based gaming engine PlayCanvas, and conversations are already underway with mainstream publishers.
OTT
- Roku is introducing an audience marketplace, aiming to streamline addressable TV advertising. Fox, Tuner, and Viacom have signed on to participate and will be able to use Roku data to inform targeting.
Trust, Transparency and Safety
- both Facebook and twitter launched their ad transparency products this week:
- Facebook’s transparency changes cover both pages and ads. The transparency updates include the ability to see active ads a page is running and apply to all pages and advertising, not just political content (even if the ads are not targeted at you). To see details, select “Info and Ads” on any page when logged into Facebook.
- twitter’s “Ad Transparency Center” will let you search for any twitter handle and see what ads have been associated with the handle in the last 7 days. The twitter transparency UI is not intuitive, but if you use the search box in the top-right of the page you query any advertiser see the results for yourself.
- Marketing and data aggregation firm, Exactis, experienced a major data leak, with 340million records exposed (essentially everyone in the US). The data wasn’t hacked or stolen but left exposed on a publicly available server.
- Facebook has had another data leak, with the app “Nametests” alleged to have leaked over 120MM records. There is a detailed post on Medium from the hacker that discovered the problem, Facebook has yet to respond, and Nametests said that “none of the data was misused“.
- California’s Consumer Privacy Act has passed into law. The law, which comes into effect in 2020, gives consumers much more power over their data including the ability to sue for privacy violations. While somewhat similar to GDPR, the legislation does not require consumers to opt-in to sharing information.
- In a somewhat counter-intuitive move, given Facebook’s privacy woes and denials, Facebook has applied for a patent that would enable it to turn on a device’s microphone using high-frequency tones and then record the ambient audio (patent application here, PDF). Facebook has stated it has no plans to use the patent and it’s more about pre-emptive protection of an idea.
Enjoy the 4th of July holiday!
Joshua