OMD FWD w/c 5th November
Hello and welcome to your weekly FWD,
Never ones to stay still for long, Apple has been rolling out updated products at an event in New York earlier this week. Along with some impressive new features comes a heftier price tag and analysts wonder whether the public will continue to open their wallets. Conversely, reports indicate that thesmartphone biz is taking a nosedive. After estimating that year-on-year sales fell 8% worldwide in Q3 this year, Strategy Analytics has declared that the handset segment is “effectively in a recession”. Have we finally reached peak tech?
Ads seem to be creeping into every faction of our online lives of late. Google matches with Tinder as they partner to generate programmatic ads – and no, you can’t swipe left on these ones. Pinterest’s new Promoted Carousel ads display swipable images in a bid to increase in-platform sales. Finally, in a move that goes against WhatsApp’s founders’ wishes, Facebook is set to squeeze ads on to the messaging app within the status function. On your marks, get set, go! to a new generation of advertisement visibility.
HEADLINES
- Snapchat extends its content offering with 25 new shows for the UK
- Pinterest has launched a new promoted Carousel ad format
- Facebook’s average revenue per user (ARPU) increases despite slow user growth, they are reorganising their VR/AR capabilities for the long haul and are looking to build a TikTok competitor
- WhatsApp have announced that they will be putting ads into the Status
- Google matches with Tinder, supplying the ad tech for the dating app. They have also created a newsfeed of News with their new Discover section, will it face the same issues as Facebook has?
- Amazon is testing search based retargeting, the first time it will allow it’s search data to be used outside of their walls
INSIGHTS
- Buzzfeed is getting further into product development
- Learnings from Facebook Watch’s evolving commissioning strategy
- Have we reached peak smartphone? Sources suggest there might be a dip in smartphone sales next year
COOL
- Are you ready to read fiction in Facebook Messenger? James Patterson debuts his first interactive fiction on the platform
- Forget 280 characters this one tweet contains the entire collected works of William Shakespeare using a technique called steganography
- This computer game faithfully restores colour to Ancient Greece
DEEP READS
- Facebook has opened up some of its AI functionality for developers and brands
- Celebrities are now digitally preserving themselves to ensure their careers live on beyond the grave
- Are we on the brink of a visual search revolution?
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