Daily Minute Master Series – October 31, 2019

Social Media

Twitter Bans All Political Ads in Response to Concerns Around Misinformation

While the debate around how social platforms should address political speech and misinformation intensifies, Twitter has made the major announcement that it will move to ban all political ads on its platform, in order to distance itself from such concerns. Dorsey says that the power of targeted social media advertising brings significant risks to politics, “where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions”. Dorsey’s stance comes in stark contrast to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who recently gave a public address in which he championed the role of social platforms in facilitating free speech – which, in Zuckerberg’s view, includes enabling politicians to not only advertise on Facebook and Instagram, but to essentially say whatever they want in their ads.

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Snapchat Adds New, Free Drawing AR Option Within the App

Snapchat is rolling out a new option which will enable users to paint their own 3D AR effects over their face, or anything else, from within the app itself. The option will enable users to use free form drawing tools, which will then be attached as 3D objects within your frame. With World Lens objects, users could virtually attach a 3D image to whatever they wanted in the frame. This new update adds more creative capacity through free-form drawing, but the idea is fairly similar. Despite the ongoing challenge from Instagram, Snap has arguably managed to remain one step ahead on the AR front, and facilitating community involvement has expanded on its creative options. Facebook, of course, also offers AR creation tools, but Snap, at least thus far, has held its lead in this respect, continuously coming up with new, innovative and trending AR options to keep its audience interest – and attract new users.

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Marketing

Shorter holiday season won’t dampen e-commerce sales with revenue expected to surpass $143 billion

With a head start on this year’s shorter-than-usual holiday season, e-commerce sales should remain robust, according to Adobe’s predictions. The company expects online holiday revenue to reach $143.8 billion this year, a 14.1% increase over last year. The 20% lift in e-commerce sales expected on Thanksgiving will account for $7 million more than was generated last Thanksgiving. Adobe also expects Cyber Monday to see record-breaking sales this year, climbing to $9.4 billion for the day — an 18.9% increase over last year. Adobe expects mobile shopping to account for nearly 50% of the overall retail holiday growth in the U.S.: “Americans will spend $14 billion more this holiday season on their phone compared to last year.” Christmas Day sales will also see more purchases happening on phones than on desktops — the first time ever mobile devices will own more sales than desktops for the day. This year’s shortened holiday season (there are six fewer days between Thanksgiving and Christmas) means marketers will likely need to start their campaigns earlier than usual to reach their holiday goals. Fortunately, according to Adobe’s predictions, the shortened holiday isn’t going to have much impact on how much revenue is up for grabs.

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Google Merchant Center updates rolling out ahead of holiday push

Google is out with its holiday updates for merchants. The company recently rolled out interface and navigation updates for Google Merchant Center. On Wednesday, Google announced a number of new and updated features aimed at simplifying the process of getting your product information on Google properties for the holidays. Starting in November, automated feeds will be available in all Shopping ads countries. Merchants can opt to let Merchant Center crawl their websites for schema structured product data and extract it into an initial feed.  Earlier this year, Google announced it would begin showing product information from Merchant Center in areas outside of Shopping Ads, free to merchants. With Surfaces across Google, any merchant can upload their product feed to Google Merchant Center and opt-in to enable their products to show up on Google platforms, including rich product results and Google Images. These options are aimed at making it easier for merchants to get their products showing on Google, whether in ads or free listings. For Google, removing friction for merchants helps make the search engine a better resource for searchers looking for products (it’s competing with Amazon, after all).

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