December: A Time to Celebrate?

We made it to December, the last month of 2018 and the most wonderful time of the year! Traditionally, the holidays are a slower time where we take time to reflect on the year and spend time with family and friends. But the marketing world stops for nothing. Here’s what’s been going on.

Executives and share-holders at Microsoft have plenty to celebrate this season. Microsoft has surpassed Apple as the world’s most valuable publicly-traded company. How did they do it? We can all take a lesson from their strategy. They diversified. They focused on the Cloud, new software and platforms like LinkedIn and Skype, and didn’t focus all their efforts on consumer retail products.

Forecast for 2019

The holidays are fast approaching, as is the end of the calendar year. It’s time to reflect on what worked this year and more importantly, what didn’t. And of course, it’s time to predict what’s going to be the hottest marketing trend of 2019.

According to Buffer, social media personalization is going to be all the rage next year for businesses of all types and sizes. Buffer sites a recent Epsilon study that shows that 80% of consumers are more likely to buy a product if the company offers a personal experience. Computers can do a lot, but for now, this type of marketing will heavily on actual human interaction.

Video is the Future

Zuckerberg has spoken and he’s betting the future of Facebook on video and disappearing stories, not the newsfeed that has made the platform so successful. For now, investors seem to be behind him as stock prices rise higher than they have in six months. But 2019 is going to be a make-it or break-it year for the popular platform.

Currently the main video services, Facebook Watch and Instagram TV are way behind leader YouTube, but Zuckerberg insists this signifies room to grow. There’s also the tiny issue of needing to win back user trust.

One Breach Too Many?

Nearly two weeks after the most recent Facebook security breach, the platform is releasing more details into the extent of the hack. The good news is that the breach only effected 30 million users, versus the original estimate of 50 million users. The bad news? Extensive personal data was collected from about 15 million users. While that info hasn’t yet been used on the web to Facebook’s knowledge, its worth knowing where you stand. Check here to see if your account was affected.

Facebook—Back in the Headlines Again

Facebook has managed to lay low the last couple months—relatively speaking. But this week, they are right back to the top of our round-up with the announcement Thursday that the popular platform has once again suffered a security breach—this time affecting 50 million user accounts. Although the breach has been corrected, hackers were able to gain access to accounts and Facebook has admitted they do not know whether any personal information was gathered from those affected. But the damage has been done and Facebook may now be facing a class-action lawsuit.

Death by Marketing or a Brilliant Move?

Obviously the hot-button marketing topic of the last few weeks is Nike’s Colin Kaepernick campaign. Since the minute the campaign hit—via tweet from Kaepernick--it has been shared, mocked, picked apart, praised and shamed all over every single social media platform and at every office water-cooler. But love it or hate it, the campaign did what it set out to do. Between September 2 and 4, sales sky-rocketed 31%.

On the heels of the tweet that launched fifty-thousand retweets (okay, 56,000 within a couple hours of being posted), Quinnipac University conducted a poll to test popularity of the ad. They polled 1038 people and found that the majority of American voters approved of the ad—with approximately 67% of voters aged 18-34 in that group—a demographic that makes up two thirds of Nike’s customer base.

Social Media Security Remains King

As we’ve shared on this blog—and seen all over the net—Twitter has been working hard to clean up their act, reducing fake accounts and bots in-an-attempt to stop the spread of fake news. But is it enough?

Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, doesn’t think so. He acknowledged this week that the work Twitter has done so far has just been to tackle the surface of the problems the platform faces. In an interview with the Washington Post, Dorsey says he is planning reforms that will affect Twitter’s basic functionality including changing “likes, sharing alternative viewpoints and labeling bots.

The Ad Age of Transparency?

Are we entering an age where transparency and collaboration are key to a successful ad campaign? Many experts think so. After the scandals of the last year where social media platforms were forced to come clean about who they are sharing information with, consumers demand transparency.

In an opinion piece, Chris Wallrap, President of Hill Holiday, suggests that in order to stay competitive, agencies must adapt a high-performance collaborative culture—a place where insiders and clients meet around a table to brainstorm as a team. The thinking behind this? How can an ad agency design ads and campaigns that are honest without also adapting those practices in-house?

Stocks Plunge at Facebook and Twitter

Facebook announced last week that sales growth has slowed, and projects it to continue to stay slow for the remainder of 2018 as they work to provide a higher level of security for users. The result? Stocks plunged 19% and Mark Zuckerberg dropped from #4 on the list of the world’s billionaires all the way down to the #6 spot.

Similar issues over at competitor Twitter. We reported on the Twitter purge in our last newsletter--the platform’s big fake account and spam clean-up that has drastically reduced some celebrities’ followers.

Advertisers: Don’t Fear, Help is Here!

Having the right message, design, ad words and timing across multiple platforms is a HUGE challenge for today’s marketers.

Google wants to help. The company has announced a new suite of machine learning tools, aimed at helping marketers create more effective ads. The new products include responsive search ads, maximum lift for YouTube, local campaigns and smart shopping campaigns. Marketers who tested the services saw a 15% increase in click-throughs.

Facebook wants to help too. The company has announced a new augmented reality feature that allows users to virtually try on items with “just-one-click”. The new feature was designed to give advertisers more bang-for-their-buck on the platform. At launch, the feature is limited to users in the US.