Facebook Sets The Record Straight On Its Advertising Principles

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Facebook, lately under fire for its lack of transparency in its advertising policies, has gone on the record about what it stands for as a social network and platform.

Rob Goldman, Facebook’s vice president of ad products, stated that his advertising team’s goal is to primarily make connections, going on to add that they strive to “show ads that are as relevant and useful as the other content you see.” In general, the language in the blog post is consumer-facing, meant to assuage fears drummed up by Russian election interference.

The post begins by tying Facebook advertising to the health of the American economy, establishing the somewhat inescapable necessity for businesses to work with the social network to survive.

In a status update promoting the announcement, COO Sheryl Sandberg summed up Facebook’s advertising principles in a few bullet points:

  • We build for people first
  • We don’t sell your data
  • You can control the ads you see
  • Advertising should be transparent
  • Advertising should be safe and civil; it should not divide or discriminate
  • Advertising should empower businesses big and small
  • We’re always improving our advertising

The first point, “We build for people first,” simply reflects Facebook’s policy of prioritizing relevant ads over higher-CPM keywords, meaning that companies cannot just throw money at Facebook to make up for improper targeting.

The post also highlights the company’s plans to introduce transparency features permitting users to see all ads paid for by any given Page but does not give any further information on when this feature might be released.

However, a few of these points may be misleading. Primarily, Facebook very much does sell data. The company specifically withholds users’ names, posts, email addresses and phone numbers from advertisers, but everything else, such as liked Pages and interests, are fair game.

Also, although Facebook announced that it would be tightening enforcement of its advertising policies related to hate and discrimination, a recent report by ProPublica found that this may not be the case. Several housing ads specifically excluding ethnic and religious groups were not flagged by Facebook, a possible violation of federal fair housing rules.

Sandberg’s post also urges users to provide Facebook with feedback, and the blog published Monday points to the company’s shift to mobile advertising four years ago as evidence of the company’s willingness to change. The post compiles information from Facebook’s other promises in recent months but provides very little new on its own.

Even the central theme, that the advertising team seeks to build “connections” between users and brands, was a sentiment similarly espoused by Facebook’s CMO Gary Briggs earlier this year.

Inside The Quirky Marketing Of Obscure Holidays

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‘Tis the season for marketers to clamor for consumer attention and affection. Amidst the sea of noise, less-exposed holidays like National Cookie Day, National Lager Day and National Bacon Day are also offering brands a chance to potentially stand out for cheap.

For every product, service or organization under the sun, there are seemingly endless relevant quirky holidays and opportunities around it to build buzz. The database for all these obscure dates is National Today, which has so far scrounged up 698 of them and promises to add more every day. The company has turned whimsical, offshoot holidays into a business by partnering with brands to build marketing and PR campaigns around the obscure celebrations.

“The most viral holidays are the ones that are simple, surprising and significant,” Ben Kaplan, CEO of National Today, told AListDaily.

Several major brands have already incorporated quirky holidays into their marketing strategy to deliver interesting messaging to their fans, including National Geographic (Pi Day), Macy’s (National Believe Day) and McDonald’s (National Hamburger Day).

In return, the holidays are covered by mainstream media and picked up on social media, resulting in more exposure. But brands aren’t the only ones benefitting. The business model behind National Today, which is owned by digital agency PR Hacker, has yielded approximately $500,000 to $1 million from promoting these holidays.

An example of this sort of obscure holiday marketing came from a Budweiser partnership on National Drink Beer Day (not to be confused with National Beer Day, International Beer Day or National American Beer Day). The actual content Budweiser produced was cheap and straightforward. The domestic beer brand commissioned a 2,000-person survey to measure the popularity of beer as a social drink, according to state, playing both into regional rivalries and Budweiser’s “Made In America” appeal.

“We piggy-backed on a holiday that is mentioned sporadically in the media each year—and reached 320 million people via 230-plus mass media placements and 11,000-plus social media shares,” Kaplan said. “It was more than a Super Bowl ad’s worth of media exposure simply by leveraging a lesser-known holiday.”

To avoid getting lost in the noise around the more popular quirky holidays, brands can push a more obscure day into the spotlight, Kaplan said, listing three requirements to “create” a new holiday: a batch of initial “seed” influencers, shareable social assets and a hook that news media outlets can pick up on.

Singles Day, according to Kaplan, is the platonic ideal of the viral potential for obscure holidays. It was, after all, invented by college students on a whim more than 20 years ago, but only broke into the popular consciousness when Alibaba co-opted it in 2009.

Beyond awareness, obscure holidays lend themselves to driving immediate action. By emphasizing scarcity, time pressure and locality for an emotional appeal, brands can push consumers to try something new—and to do it quickly.

“For instance, for the Postmates food delivery app, National Today drove 12,000 new customers on Father’s Day weekend, a time trigger, by saying that we were giving away 10,000 orders, a scarcity trigger, of dad’s favorite meal, an emotional trigger, to Houston families, a location trigger,” Kaplan said.

As social media usage becomes increasingly ubiquitous, the viral potential of obscure holidays increases.

“We used to think that Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style’ was the gold standard of viral videos, reaching two billion views nearly two years after its 2012 release,” said Kaplan. “But in 2017, Luis Fonsi’s ‘Despacito’ video reached four billion views in only nine months.”

Even if brands aren’t planning on large-scale PR campaigns around quirky holidays, keeping a calendar handy can help with social media planning. Many lesser-known holidays, especially simple ones with broad appeal, often generate popular hashtags.

“These holidays provide a roadmap for what will go viral,” Kaplan said. “For instance, every year on September 29, National Coffee Day will generate 250,000-plus Google searches and 500,000-plus Instagram posts.”

If you can’t find an obscure holiday that quite fits your brand, don’t worry, you can even pitch to add new ones to National Today’s calendar.

Here’s Your Fast-Food Cornucopia For This Year’s Thanksgiving

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With brands starting the marketing storm for Black Friday earlier and earlier every year, it’s easy for Thanksgiving to be lost in the chaos. But for fast-food restaurants, Thanksgiving is a chance to creatively promote themselves to those either gorging themselves at home or looking for something less traditional.

Staying In

Popeyes is stepping in again to help out the over-busy or culinarily incompetent, offering a pre-cooked and frozen turkey for fans of southern cuisine. Interested eaters have to pick up the 10-pound, $40 birds in store, driving additional customers into the restaurant in addition to providing a novel revenue source. And if Brand Eating‘s review is to be trusted, they don’t taste half-bad, either.

If Popeyes isn't open on Thanksgiving, you can bring something like it home with you.
Popeyes Cajun-Style Turkey

White Castle is also helping out family-dinner diners for Thanksgiving, putting out a recipe for turkey stuffing made from its signature steamed sliders, which consumers can pick up either from the fast-food restaurant itself or frozen at most supermarkets. The recipe wisely suggests removing pickles before making the stuffing.

If your local White Castle isn't open on Thanksgiving, you can still pick frozen sliders from your local grocery store.
White Castle’s Special Slider Stuffing

This means that, theoretically, one could eat a Popeyes turkey stuffed with White Castle sliders, though whether one should is an entirely separate matter.

Though technically related more to Cyber Monday, Kentucky Fried Chicken‘s November holiday offering merits mention for upholding the traditional Thanksgiving values of family togetherness and lack of internet service. KFC has manufactured their very own branded Faraday cages, designed to protect families from the “hailstorm of coupons, BOGOs, hot dealz [sic], and brand advertising.”

Let Colonel Sanders' protective embrace take you back to a simpler time, the store page reads.
KFC’s “Internet Escape Pod”
In spirit of the holidays, however, the “Internet Escape Pod” has been discounted from its normal price of $96,485.34 to the far-more-reasonable $10,000—an 89.6 percent discount, practically a steal.

Going Out

For those looking to get into the Thanksgiving spirit early or want to experience holiday dinners at their local fast food restaurants, Subway and Arby’s are offering their own takes on turkey dinners.

Subway brought back its Autumn Carved Turkey sandwich back in September, letting customers enjoy the Thanksgiving leftover experience months in advance of the holiday itself.

https://twitter.com/SUBWAY/status/910249412131217408

Meanwhile, Arby’s decided to depart entirely from Thanksgiving traditions, introducing a line of deep-fried turkey sandwiches, saving curious customers the difficulties of frying enormous birds themselves. Apparently, it can be quite dangerous.

Taco Bell has jumped on the Friendsgiving bandwagon, inviting a group of influencers to its headquarters to try a Tex-Mex-themed dinner menu, including “Butternut Squash Chalupa Bites” and “Baja Blast Glazed Ham.”

Taco Bell’s “Friendsgiving Feast” works for many millennials choosing to celebrate the holidays with their friends before (and sometimes instead of) their families.

For Brands, Twitter’s $99 Per Month Promote Mode Is ‘Always On’

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Not content with launching just one major platform update in a week, Twitter announced Promote Mode on Wednesday, a new automation tool targeted at smaller brands without the time or funding to manually manage amplification campaigns.

Promote Mode is, as far as advertising tools go, fairly simple. In the announcement, Wook Chung, Twitter’s director of product management, describes the services as an “always-on amplification engine.” In essence, for a flat fee of $99 per month, the service will automatically promote the user’s account every time they Tweet, up to 10 times per day.

The service offers simplified, user-friendly analytics tools, displaying total reach, followers and profile visits gained while Promote Mode is active as well as colorful graphs displaying organic reach alongside the higher promoted figures.

The service emphasizes ease of use over personalization, however. Users cannot select which Tweets are promoted, they must pause Promote Mode to Tweet without amplifying them. The service will never promote retweets, replies or quotes. Furthermore, users can only select five different interests or regions to target, which is far less than the app’s main advertising service offers.

Twitter’s announcement calls the service “mobile-first,” but at the moment it’s available mobile-only through the app. Users must sign up through Sprout Social, a Twitter partner, to track engagements on desktop.

Though Twitter did not guarantee any results for Promote Mode subscribers, it stated that one of the initial testers, @RIMtailing, gained 30 followers and reached 30,000 new people per month.

The program is releasing in beta form, so its current state may not reflect its final release.

“We know that budding businesses and individuals with personal brands want to grow their presence on Twitter,” said Chung. “But this can be hard—especially for those who are new to Twitter.”

Twitter Doubled Its Character Limit—Here’s How Brands Are Using It

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After a limited roll-out in September, Twitter has now officially doubled the character limit for Tweets in most languages. Space-saving languages such as Japanese, Korean and Chinese will retain the classic 140-character aesthetic, however, due to “cramming” not being nearly as much of an issue.

The move is an effort to address issues of “cramming” for English-language Twitter users, where a significant amount of users hitting the character limit when Tweeting. “This reflects the challenge of fitting a thought into a Tweet,” writes Aliza Rosen, Twitter’s product manager, “often resulting in lots of time spent editing and even at times abandoning Tweets before sending.”

According to Twitter’s analytics, the longer character count has solved the problem, with just 1 percent of 280-character Tweets hitting the character limit, down from 9 percent of 140-character Tweets.

However, the Twitter community at large has been less than receptive, expressing fears that the new longer character limit will dilute Twitter’s trademark pithiness and brevity, exemplified by Brian Barone’s markup of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s original announcement:

https://twitter.com/brianrbarone/status/912788388150960130

Rosen addresses user fears outright in her blog post. “We–and many of you–were concerned that timelines may fill up with 280 character Tweets, and people with the new limit would always use up the whole space,” she writes.

However, Twitter’s data indicates that this won’t be nearly as large of a problem as some users fear. “Only 5% of Tweets sent were longer than 140 characters and only 2% were over 190 characters,” the blog post reads. “As a result, your timeline reading experience should not substantially change.”

So far, Tweets under the trending hashtag #280characters have fallen into three major buckets: users testing out the feature for the first time, users complaining about not getting an edit button, and, most of all, users reacting to the first two groups with gifs.

(Editor’s Note: We’ll be tracking how brands are taking advantage of longer Tweets. Stay tuned.)

https://twitter.com/urbanskurge/status/928048729701191680

Several brands have sided with the 140-character Luddites, citing traditional values and the futility of ever capturing their qualities, no matter the character limit.

Nesquik also complained, but for different reasons.

Archie Comics got straight to the point.

Spotify used the longer limit to give their fans a challenge.

Twitter’s update has caused some internal existential conflict for McDonalds.

Discord used the update to give Twitter users a valuable public service announcement.

Other brands just couldn’t contain their excitement about things like space. And socks.

https://twitter.com/Virgin_Orbit/status/928021493321101312

Sometimes, on very rare occasions, brands used the longer limit without calling attention to it.

 

 

 

 

 

Snapchat Redesigns Itself To Address Investor Concerns

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In 13 pages of prepared remarks to investors for Snap Inc’s Q3 earnings call, CEO Evan Spiegel announced a major Snapchat redesign, focusing on ease of use and closer alignment with other, larger social networks.

Spiegel addressed several complaints about the app’s user-friendliness in the letter, an issue that has plagued the company from almost the outset, and one that spurred Snapchat to produce a lengthy user manual for its IPO.

“One thing that we have heard over the years is that Snapchat is difficult to understand or hard to use, and our team has been working on responding to this feedback,” the letter reads. “There is a strong likelihood that the redesign of our application will be disruptive to our business in the short term, and we don’t yet know how the behavior of our community will change when they begin to use our updated application.”

Spiegel did not mention when or even what to expect from the redesign, though he claimed that the company is looking at taking advantage of machine learning and personalization to “make it easier to discover the vast quantity of content on our platform that goes undiscovered or unseen every day.”

In layperson’s terms, part of the Snapchat redesign may include something similar if not in name then in functionality to Facebook’s News Feed. “We are developing a new solution that provides each of our 178 million Daily Active Users with their own Stories experience,” Spiegel writes.

Just last week Snapchat announced it would be adding audience tracking features similar to those offered by Google and Facebook. The company’s stock prices fell by 20 percent after the earnings call, and Snapchat continues to struggle to win new users over Instagram. The app must walk a narrow line over a yawning precipice, proving to investors that it’s following industry best practices without losing what made it special to begin with.

Kantar: Personal Information Doesn’t Help Brands Build Trust, Transparency Does

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Consumers are short on company confidence of late. New research by Kantar TNS indicates that Americans are becoming suspicious of even the most trusted brands with their personal data, and they are suspecting the government of invasion of privacy.

Sixty percent of American consumers object to having any of their online activities monitored, even in exchange for added convenience. Furthermore, many consumers feel that they are losing out on the value exchange even when they aren’t providing data, as 49 percent stated that content posted by most trusted brands simply isn’t relevant to them.

This mien of mistrust extends beyond just brand marketing, however.

Close to 60 percent of Americans believe that the government doesn’t use personal information it’s acquired to provide better services, and 53 percent claim that the information they see on social media is unreliable.

Despite the pervasive view among marketers that when it comes to data, more is merrier, Liam Hickey, vice president of Kantar TNS, recommends a middle path.

“Protect boundaries—only collect what you need, don’t be creepy and remember the value exchange,” Hickey told AListDaily. “Do people really feel it’s a fair exchange? Are you providing a real benefit?”

In most cases, the answer to these questions seems to be no.

The Brand Trust Divide

While the fake news crisis of recent months has caused many Americans to grow suspicious of global organizations, markets such as China and India feel differently.

“We see a big polarization between developed and developing countries,” Hickey said. “In developing markets, people tend to trust big, global brands more. In developed markets, it is the opposite—small, local brands are most trusted.”

In emerging markets, 48 percent of the study’s respondents claimed to place more trust in global brands, compared to just 23 percent in developed countries and 21 percent in the US. Outside of America, consumers are less suspicious of brands on social media as well, with only a third claiming that brand content is not relevant to them.

These differences between American and worldwide markets suggest that acting small can ingratiate brands with consumers. Compared even to other developed countries, US consumers more frequently rank local companies as their most trusted brands. Thirty-seven percent of Americans trust small brands more, with only 30 percent of developed-market consumers and 21 percent of emerging-market consumers sharing the sentiment.

As more consumers worry about invasion of privacy and companies selling their personal information, the best course forward may be to emphasize honesty over convenience and build brand trust with transparency.

“Keep your customers’ secrets safe,” Hickey said. “Be transparent in asking permission, and, crucially, own up if anything does go wrong.”

 

Snapchat Opens Pixel Tracking Despite Initial Reservations

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Snapchat is finally opening up further audience tracking features for advertisers, catching up with similar services run by its competitors. The new service, called Snap Pixel, allows advertisers to track users’ activities on their websites in relation to ads they’ve placed on the platform.

Put simply, Snap Pixel gives brands a more sophisticated picture of how well their ads on the platform are working, beyond just viewability and click-through statistics. So far Snap Pixel just offers measurement tools, but the company has promised to expand the technology to support ad retargeting and real-time optimization.

Snapchat has supported custom audience targeting since late 2016 and even tracked the offline behavior of its users since early this year, but this marks the platform’s most detailed audience tracking feature yet. Their previous partnership with Oracle’s Data Cloud split users into only 100 different general categories, rather than the ultra-granular, brand-specific profiles it could have tracked.

This latest update is a further about-face from what Evan Spiegel, Snap’s CEO, described in 2015 as “creepy” and another step in the same direction as other digital advertising platforms. Both Google and Facebook have long offered similar features to their advertising partners, including more sophisticated tools to segment audiences and target based on online behavior.

Snap Pixel in its current state does not allow users to opt out of the service, as it did with Snap Audience Match in 2016, but the company has promised that once the ad product supports more aggressive audience targeting, users will be able to.

A report earlier this week revealed that Snapchat is the weakest of the major social media platforms in driving direct purchase engagement, and with Snapchat losing new audience acquisition to Instagram, it’s likely that the company will continue to fall in line with accepted industry practices in the future.

Red Bull’s VR Experience Drives Year-Round Engagement

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Red Bull is furthering its footprint in virtual reality by bringing a driving competition to engage motorsport enthusiasts and caffeine-craving fans alike.

Fans who visit the Switzerland-located Red Bull Media World now have the chance to compete against Formula E driver SĂ©bastien Buem’s fastest lap time from last season’s Formula E Paris ePrix through a personalized and social VR experience.

VR entertainment company Virtually Live partnered with Formula E and created the Red Bull-branded bespoke activation by using real-time data from Buemi’s race car.

“The immersive nature of the experience makes it completely unique,” Oliver Weingarten, director of motorsport at Virtually Live, told AListDaily. “Giving a consumer the opportunity to not just sit in a race car going around a race track during the race, but being able to feel the speed and each turn is as close to the real experience of actually being in the car. Consumers crave content and access—and that’s what we’re providing in tandem with a social experience.”

Formula E driver SĂ©bastien Buem at Red Bull Media World

“This is a really innovative experience, which allows me to engage with my fans, at the same time as giving them the experience of driving my Formula E car in VR around the Paris ePrix track,” said Buem.

Weingarten said they’ll continue to update the campaign as required and showcase it to fans of not just Formula E and motorsports, but general visitors to the Verkehrshaus der Schweiz in Luzern through social media channels and ongoing publicity directly from Red Bull. In addition to the Austrian energy-drink maker, Virtually Live has also created experiences for Audi, TE Connectivity and Julius Baer.

A Red Bull spokesperson told AListDaily the brand is activating the experience at the Swiss Museum of Transport through its owned channels as well leveraging the platform the museum presents. The brand will also be using internal marketing channels, including web and social presences, customer mailings as well as numerous digital advertising opportunities on-site to market the VR experience.

“Red Bull Media World, located in Switzerland’s most-visited museum, provides the perfect platform to surprise and inspire our consumers and excite with the fascinating topics of media and innovation,” the spokesperson said. “It will be activated all year around.”

Red Bull arguably is the envy of other brands, creating premium content and entertainment masked as marketing. The privately held company also creates extreme-sports-centric VR experiences on its own channels.

On its site earlier this month, Red Bull wrote “the verdict is still out on virtual reality’s best place in gaming” while favorably describing the PlayStation VR game Gran Turismo Sport.

Showcasing scintillating action in VR-branded experiences appears to be serving the likes of Red Bull well, according to recent reports. In-game virtual reality ads boosts same-day recall for 70 percent of users whenever a 3D-branded object is inserted into interactive gameplay, a YuMe study found.

Last year, Mountain Dew similarly put fans at the driver’s seat of immersion by creating a VR driving experience with NASCAR drivers Dale Earnhardt Jr., Kasey Kahne and Chase Elliott.

As branded VR content continues to rise, so does consumer affection. A Virtual Sky study testing the effectiveness of marketing in VR indicated brand recall was at least eight times more effective and resulted in double the intent to share.

“The stories that stick most and inspire our audience are the mind-boggling ones that are beyond ordinary and never been seen before,” Lukas Cudrigh, senior vice president of digital at Red Bull Media House, told AListDaily earlier this year. “The Red Bull brand is interdependent with experiences . . . It’s a super exciting era right now. Everything is in motion. We are evidence that anyone can be in entertainment today.”

Eggo, ‘Stranger Things’ Pairing Generates Over $200K Earned Media Value

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Netflix’ breakout hit Stranger Things is full of 1980s pop culture references, including Kellogg’s frozen waffle brand, Eggo. The sweet treat from many viewers’ childhoods is the favorite food of Eleven, a mysterious girl on the show with special abilities. Luckily for those who felt a strong connection to the character and nostalgia for warm Eggos, the brand is still alive and well today.

Completely unaware of the brand’s appearance—or importance—in the first season of Stranger Things, Eggo nonetheless felt an outpouring of love from the fans. Not wanting to “L’Eggo” of that brand affinity, the brand prepared for Stranger Things Season Two with a series of experiential marketing efforts and campaigns across social media.

One such campaign is a menu of Eggo waffle recipes to pair with each episode of Season Two. An Eggo food truck arrived at the Season Two premiere in LA, where attendees and fans could sample the promoted recipes.

Mouth breathers on the internet can be annoying, so the brand created an extension for Google Chrome called “L’Eggo My Spoilers.” The extension specifically blocks spoilers related to Stranger Things so audiences can let the story unravel in their own time.

Needless to say, the excitement leading up to Stranger Things Season 2 was widespread, especially on social media. In the last 30 days, the show has been mentioned two million times, according to measurements by social media analytics firm Talkwalker.

Now that Eggo waffles are synonymous with Stranger Things, we calculated the earned media value from posts about the two brands from October 1 to 30.

“Earned media” is the value of engagements a brand receives across channels as a result of their marketing efforts. To help quantify what the value of those engagements is worth, Ayzenberg Group established the Ayzenberg Earned Media Value Index (AEMVI) and assigned a quantifiable dollar amount for marketing gains a brand receives from a campaign or individual engagement that includes social media networks and similar digital properties. (Editor’s note: AListDaily is the publishing arm of Ayzenberg Group. To read the updated AEMVI report reflecting the rapid changes in social, click here.)

Throughout the month of October, Eggo was mentioned over 41,200 times on Twitter alone, with a spike on October 27—the premiere date of Stranger Things Season Two. Eggo was mentioned 10,564 times on October 27 and 9,087 of those posts also mentioned Stranger Things. This engagement continued over Stranger Things’ premiere weekend, with a majority of Eggo-related posts also mentioning the show.

As for the official Eggo Twitter account, the brand has shown its pride for being Eleven’s favorite food with a number of posts, including this one that garnered over $1,000 in EMV.

The official Stranger Things account also shared the love, especially when one episode featured a special, sugary treat made with Eggos.

Overall, it’s safe to say that being the favorite food of Eleven has its benefits. Mentions for both Eggo and Stranger Things on Twitter earned the waffle brand approximately $201,801 in earned media value.