The Latest in #DigitalMarketing & #SocialMediaMarketing – September 22, 2016

Here is our take on the most notable stories in Digital and Social Media Marketing from last week.

Last week, Facebook received praise from marketers for its ability to keep their users captivated through video ads, according to eMarketers’ latest forecast, digital advertising will overtake television by the end of this year, and Snapchat unveiled new tools for their ad platform that will rival the other giants in the industry.

Report: 66% of social video advertisers plan to run campaigns on Facebook

Marketing Dive | September 7, 2016

In a pool of surveyed marketers, 70.8% of them plan to execute social video ads within the next 12 months. Within the group, 65.8% will do so on Facebook. A programmatic social platform, Kinetic Social, has concluded that Facebook video ads that are :30 to :60 seconds long perform exceedingly well amongst viewers, with a completion rate of 44%.

Our Take

Facebook has been hard at working making tweaks to their video ad offering over the last few month. Notably, their ‘Clicks to Website’ video objective now does a better job at driving people to an advertiser’s website. How did they improve? Well, instead of waiting until the end of the video to give users the option to go to the website, every user who plays a video is now taken to a Facebook-hosted landing page that combines your video ad with the landing page on your website.

In the example below, when we clicked on a Sling TV video ad in Facebook, we were sent to the landing page below. If you notice, this Facebook-hosted landing page has the Sling TV ad embedded on top and Sling’s own landing page on the bottom. For advertisers, this is advantageous because once a user is on your website, you completely control the messaging and the conversion paths.

US Digital Ad Spending to Surpass TV this Year

eMarketer | September 13, 2016

According to eMarketer’s latest forecast, Digital will exceed TV ad spending by the end of this year for the first time, $72.09 billion to $71.29 billion. Of the total media ad spend in the US, digital will curate 36.8% and TV will represent 36.4%.

Recent growth in digital can be attributed to mobile and video, while television’s great year is thanks to major events like the Olympics and the upcoming Presidential Election.

Our Take

We are at an interesting crossroads with television. While the channel itself is not going anywhere, Addressable TV, which should be a rapidly growing sector in the next few years, will make television more programmatic and act more like direct. It’s not too farfetched to assume that in the near future the lines between digital and television will be greatly blurred, giving digital marketers the opportunity to easily add television to the list of media channels at their disposal.

Snapchat launches three new ad targeting tools

Marketing Dive | September 14, 2016

Snapchat introduces Snap Audience Match, Lookalikes Audiences, and Snapchat Lifestyle Categories, as new targeting options for marketers. Using email addresses, device-specifics advertising identifiers, and content-based categories, marketers will now be able to more accurately target users. For now, these targeting tools will only be in use for any of Snapchat’s vertical video ads.

Two of the three new features are now readily available. Snapchat’s Lifestyle Categories is estimated to launch at the end of Q4.

Our Take

Snapchat looks to be quickly catching up with Facebook and Twitter in terms of the capabilities of their marketing platform. For digital marketers, the ability to create lookalike audiences and target via Snapchat’s categories is a great addition, but being able to onboard an audience and match by email address should be what really excites them. This will pave the way for exact targeting and, through carefully coordinated campaigns, reach an audience across Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Stat of the Week

via Marketing Dive | September 9, 2016

In a survey conducted by Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, Social Media will account for 11.7% of marketing budgets in 2016. This is up from 3.5% in 2009.

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