Social Media

Social Platforms Cut Streaming Quality as ‘Social Distancing’ Wages On

Internet traffic is up, CPMs are down, and media platforms are pivoting to adapt to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. Media giants across the globe are hurriedly making adjustments to keep their platforms stable and functioning during the massive surge in traffic. As a result, major platforms in the EU – Facebook, Netflix, Disney+, among others – are reducing video bitrates or defaulting to lower qualities to make way for the influx. The push to downgrade streaming quality has been primarily focused in Europe with regulatory mandates to reduce network strain. But the U.S. might not be far behind – and advertisers will likely feel the impact. While it’s still uncertain when – or if – there will be broadband restrictions in the U.S., it’s likely that video streaming platforms will still make adjustments to offset traffic loads. Brands in the U.S. currently delivering high-quality, high-budget video campaigns will want to pay close attention to ad performance over the next several weeks. In the meantime, use the downtime to build a “worst-case scenario” strategy in case your video ad performance starts dropping due to buffering issues. If this happens, prepare to test alternative non-video creatives and potentially pause campaigns in the short-term.

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Why Facebook Ads are Critical for Your Business During COVID-19

There is no other way to say it, it’s a scary time to be a marketer and/or business owner right now. With all the uncertainty around how long the COVID-19 pandemic is set to impact virtually every aspect of how we live, it’s hard to decide what’s best for business when it comes to marketing. Should you stop your marketing and advertising initiatives in the midst of the crisis? And if you continue to advertise at this time, how will your message be received by consumers who are also stressed about their own situation?  In the end, each business and marketer needs to make the best decision for their own unique circumstance in order to ensure their business survives. However, if you are able to continue marketing, even in a scaled-back capacity, it is likely to be beneficial, and could end up being the thing that keeps you afloat through the difficult weeks and months ahead.

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Marketing

How B2B Companies Can Be Proactive About Managing Paid Media During COVID-19

B2B sales cycles tend to be longer, so making drastic changes to your paid media strategy could have lasting effects. While you may be reducing budgets overall, it’s important to keep feeding the upper funnel so that your brand remains top of mind when demand bounces back. Think about ways that you can repurpose existing content to fit the times, e.g. promoting a whitepaper with a lead gen form or turning a summit into a virtual event. Consider using sponsorship dollars that you recoup from canceled in-person events to produce a video content series, upgrade your webinar content, and more to connect with people remotely. Above all, maintain empathy for your users and their changing needs and challenges, and focus on the data, not fear or anxiety, to make the right decisions for your business. Staying strategic in this time means making quick adjustments as news cycles and performance reports dictate, so make sure you’re monitoring the macro landscape and your company’s internal and competitive reports aggressively to set your course with confidence.

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The New Contextual Ad Targeting Works, Study Says

What’s old is new again. Contextual advertising has come back on marketers’ radar as data privacy regulations (GDPR and CCPA) and browser crackdowns on cookies greatly limit how data and tracking can be used for targeting digital advertising. A new study aims to demonstrate how far contextual advertising has evolved in the age of machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) as an effective ad targeting method. The study was designed by GumGum, a contextual advertising company that uses computer vision and NLP to analyze the text, images and videos that appear on a web page (yes, it has skin in this game) and conducted by neuroanalytics company SPARK Neuro. Researchers used biometric sensors to monitor the participants’ brain activity, gauge their emotions and reactions, evaluate attention, and measure their skin response to stimuli as they were asked to read six articles on different topics. The small test involved 60 participants from the U.S., U.K. and Japan. Each article had three ads that had relevance to the article ranging from high to low. An article about soccer had ads for soccer apparel, beverages and electronics, for example. The placement of the most relevant ad varied across the articles. The researchers then conducted in-person interviews with the participants.

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