Facebook’s “Shop” Feature Breaks The Wall Between Social Media And Ecommerce
Facebook has recently launched an option of “Shops” on its social networking platform. This Will allow its 2.6 billion users an opportunity to shop while browsing through their favorite social networking website.
As the demand for the e-commerce market rises, Facebook sees this as an opportunity and is ready to cash more money. Facebook “Shops” will provide room to merchants, SMB, and product companies to build a virtual store on Facebook. Facebook is calling it “Social commerce”.
“We want to give people a place to experience the joy of shopping versus the chore of buying. And we want to help small businesses adapt and make it easier for people to discover and shop for things they love,” Facebook said in a press release.
To make things easy and secure, the products that will appear on Facebook and Instagram as the ad will not be linked to any third-party website or server. Instead, it will be linked to a zippy on the Facebook portal which will take the user to a catalogue from where the user can choose or purchase the product. It will also show the saved card details if the user has ever purchased from Facebook or any of its applications.
Live shopping experience:
Facebook will also provide live shopping features on its platform. According to Facebook, People have always been showcasing their products in live videos. Now, they can link these products with their store. The products will appear on the bottom of their live feed. By tapping on the product on their screen users can get all the details of the product. Live shopping feature will be available worldwide to its users!
“Shops” will be an integral part of the Facebook family. Users can save products in their cart on Facebook, and complete the checkout process on Instagram, or vice-versa. Facebook aims to target small vendors for his aspirations, and nearly 1 million users have registered to be a part of this experiment.
The other principal dissimilarity from past commerce enterprise is that Facebook “required the small businesses to go all-in on our tools,” Zuckerberg said.
The platform is free for everyone and Facebook is partnering with other tech giants to provide services at the back-end.
Zuckerberg further stated, “Rather than charge for Shops, we know if it’s valuable they’ll want to bid more for ads.”
One of the key partnership deals is made with “Shopify”, According to Facebook, in just a few clicks you can operate a Facebook shops account from Shopify.
Shopify founder and CEO Tobi Lutke said, “It’s an incredible new reality in the retail space to have these tools natively in the Facebook platform,” he further mentioned, for small businesses it’s very crucial to find new customers.
CEO Tobi Lutke added, “Communications is incredibly important, for so long that’s been monopolized by large CPG brands on television.”
According to him instead of going to different levels of media and advertisement, sellers will be able to reach directly to the customer. “The DTC industry, as some people call it, really happened on top of Facebook and Shopify.”
With Facebook focusing more on small scale businesses adding Shopify having the strength of entrepreneurs, the model looks like a rival of Etsy and doesn’t seem to target retail chains like Target.
According to the Zukerberg and Lutke analysis, this model will help to empower small-scale businesses. Helping those sellers who are genuine, and want to provide efficient services to their customers. The model will help small businesses to highlight their product in the market without expensive advertising. As most of the small scale businesses can’t afford the luxury of advertisement.
The users will also be able to earn rewards for their purchase. Rewards will be known as loyalty points. Facebook will motivate the sellers to provide these points to the customer on their purchase. This will help them to lure more customers. Users will be able to easily keep track of their loyalty points.
PepsiCo Survey Unveil What Consumers Hope From Brands In COVID19
Our world is fighting a war against COVID-19 and to make sure we win, we will have to fight this together. We live in a competitive world, with an ongoing race in our heads. This competitive approach sometimes rises friction, and sometimes even gets converted into heat.
We are rushing, trying to win an invisible race among ourselves. Even the mindset is visible from the brands we use. All of them making similar products wants to defame their opponent, and prove their superiority.
But in these rough times, people are willing to unite. They want to fight this crisis supporting each other, and even they want their favorite brands to achieve harmony amongst each other during a crisis. No more fights! The only fight we should be fighting is against Corona(Covid-19).
Several brands are realizing this fact and according to the chief marketing officer of PepsiCo Beverages Greg Lyons, If brands want to earn customers loyalty, they have to learn empathy.
“I do fundamentally believe that something good will come out of this shared experience,” Lyons said. “It will force us to have deeper empathy toward one another. How organizations and brands respond and lead through these times will have a lasting impression on consumers.”
To prove this point Pepsico conducted a survey. They asked around 5000 consumers about, what expectations do they have from there favorite brands during this epidemic crisis?
More than 94% of Americans clearly stated that the world needs empathy in our society, among them 79% stated that it has become even more important during the tough time of the epidemic. Many of them also agreed that people are becoming more empathic during these tough times.
Regarding their favorite brands showing empathy, they said; they want to see hope, in their brands’ advertisements. They don’t want to watch catfights, procrastination, and sarcasm between competitors.
“Tone is very important. … I believe we are past the more serious, overly emotive ads, and the survey supported that as well,” Lyons said. “In my opinion, the key is striking that balance of tone and being authentic to what your brand stands for.”
Consumers want brands to be taking actions, instead of mere words. They want to see, “focus on employees and community first.” This includes sick leaves for their employees, helping the employee to feel safe, and encouraging small businesses to sustain during these tough times.
Due to Covid-19 consumers have more time to see what’s good for them and what’s not. Therefore, brands must be extra careful to not portray any such behavior which might infect, or degrade their brand image and value.
“I’ve seen us make faster end-to-end decisions versus where we were before the pandemic,” Lyons said, “much less siloed, functional thinking and more consumer-centric than ever.”
We all can understand that it would be hard for brands to attain a common ground. After all, they have been fighting against each other decades. However, as per the survey conducted by the consultancy Business of Purpose, likely 52% of customers purchase a brand product, which understands and reflects their values.
Covid-19 will only strengthen this belief of consumers.
“As marketers, I believe it has made brand purpose more important than ever before,” he said, “making sure that our marketing is authentically making people’s lives better.”
Newspaper Industry Witness Disruption In UAE Due To COVID-19 Crisis.
The current crisis has forced people to stay inside their houses. Several businesses are confronting adverse outcomes due to the circumstances of lock-down across the planet. The familiar lifestyle of people has changed. Human beings are struggling to finish off their daily life work, as there are limited resources available. In these times of adversity, several lines of work are closing or transforming themselves according to the new trends, sustaining, in a new era.
However, the crisis has also provided us with opportunities. Our Earth is healing, the rivers and oceans are cleaning themselves. The air is less polluted, the biggest ozone layer hole is healing by itself. It’s not just the Earth showing good signs of healing and development, many business models have also blossomed. These emerging markets were struggling to survive from old unstoppable human rituals.
Humans are now learning new ways to live. We are learning social isolation, but being a social animal we can’t stop interacting.
Therefore, social networking platforms have seen a sudden increase in their viewers. Even new viewers are joining on a daily bases. The time spent by them on these platforms has increased.
It’s not just limited to the social networking platforms, e-commerce has also seen a high rise in its user database. Hundreds of thousands of new users have changed their purchase habits, now they are shopping online for their needs and will continue to do the same.
Since centuries news has been a crucial part of our everyday life! To satisfy this need newspapers have played a crucial role in delivering the information to us. During the early days, the news was shared among each other verbally. To share news over long distances trained birds were used to deliver handwritten notes over long-distance. Soon, time changed and things developed. Our world became modern, we started using printed sheets of paper to publish news.
The culture of printed newspaper sheets stayed with us like a lifestyle for centuries now. In the digital age and emerging markets, the digital platforms started publishing the news on their digital platform(E-Newspaper). This epidemic has increased the number of viewers and subscribers for these digital platforms.
In today’s world, we must read the news and get updates from authorized sources. The situation has made paper media a less favorable option for everyday usage. People are preferring digital platforms(E-Newspaper) to keep themselves updated with the news.
In UAE leading news platforms ALBAYAN.AE and EMARATALYOUM.COM have reported an enormous amount of audience shifting onto their digital platforms during this period of crisis. They have experienced a huge increase in their unique users as well as a massive increase in daily viewers of their E-Newspaper.
Nearly 6 out of 10 people are reading news on online platforms. According to the reports, around 46% of people spend time reading news via online platforms.
ALBAYAN.AE
ALBAYAN.AE is one of the most preferred newspaper in the UAE. Even in this time of crisis, it stayed as the most prominent and trusted source for people to gather information. However, the only thing that has changed is the source of ALBAYAN.AE. Earlier people preferred a printed copy of the newspaper, but now most of its audience has shifted to its digital platform(E-Newspaper).
In 2019 March, ALBAYAN.AE had 867k unique users on its digital platform. Whereas in March 2020, its unique user database has increased to 1.7 million. It’s an increase of +94% in the digital user database. Next month in April 2020, this number further increased from 1.7 million to 3 million which is a +77% increase in unique user data.
Also, the page views of AL BAYAN in March 2019 were 4.1 million. In March 2020, the views increased to 13.8 million(+231%) which was a record-breaking increase viewership. It is still increasing, as per April 2020, the total number of views was 15.3 million, which was another +12% increase in total viewers
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Image Credit – Campaignme.
From last year, this year Ramadan has shown a significant increase in unique users. The growth rate is +87%, the numbers add up to 1,335,460 unique users. Viewership has increased +177% since last year, the numbers add up to 9,349,310. These are the data of the first three weeks of Ramadan ie. from 24th April to 12th May 2020.
EMARATAL YOUM
EMARATAL YOUM is a wonderful reference for people staying in UAE. It helps them to stay updated with the news, and laws that are being introduced, or old ones that are updated.
The digital user base of EMARATAL YOUM has increased tremendously. In the year 2019, March the total number of unique users that EMARTAL YOUM had was just 804K.
In March 2020, this number increased to 2 million showing an increase of +149%, and another +55% in the month of April making the number of users rise to 3 million.
The viewership of EMARATAL YOUM in March 2019 was 5.1 million. The numbers skyrocketed to 17.5 million(+238%) in March 2020. In April 2020 it is setting a benchmark for the number of viewers at 18 million(+3%).
In the month of Ramadan, the unique user base has shown an increase of +76% (1,283,908), and the viewership increased to +141%(10,031,460).
This huge increase in numbers is an indication of the digital boom in the UAE. Hence, brands should make sure that they connect to their consumers as several portals of opportunities are opening. Also, they can advertise their products or do promotions as time is most opportune.
Some of the other famous newspaper of UAE which is receiving a hugely positive response on their e-platforms are listed below:
- Khaleej Times
To increase the viewership, Khaleej Times is providing free E-Newspaper for its users. The viewership of the newspaper has also increased at a huge pace.
- National.ae
- Gulf Business news
- Sport360
- YOUM7
- Al-Masry al-Youm.
Identity Resolution Platforms Helps Marketers Tackle Consumer Data Crisis.
Every new electronic gadget in the market is now getting more user interactive helping users to personalize as per their needs and choices. Therefore, with the help of Identity Resolution Platforms, marketers can connect their customers with the things they need!
Today every customer is using multiple smart devices in their daily life. Maintaining a collection of data usage for each device is elusive. This is where Identity Resolution Platforms come into the picture. They accumulate consumers based on their identity. Likely, based on IP, they make sure that the marketers can approach them in a much efficient manner.
This not only helps the marketers but also help the government to make sure the compliance is followed. For example, helping in compliance with the privacy of consumers by the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
According to an Annual Internet Report released by CISCO, the number of smart devices connected to a single IP is going to increase tremendously. The number will be three times more compared to the global population by 2023. These include devices like Smart TV, speakers, wearable, and other home management solutions. By 2023, the consumer share of the total market will increase approximately 75%.
Similarly, consumer demand for much more personalized and interactive devices is increasing. Therefore, the whole market can’t be evaluated in a single parameter. This requires a much wider approach to the market.
Today, consumers are sharp-witted, they grant permissions to applications and brands of their choice. According to a survey made by Forrester, nearly Three-quarter of people wants the brands and application to know in advance why they are making a call.
Situations like these make marketers thrive for goal orientation and perfection. They must familiarize themselves with consumers’ online and offline behavior and even know who the customer is?
Winterberry Group surveyed half of the total marketers. According to their survey, audience matching and identification on cross-platform is marketers’ highest priority. Every time a customer interacts with a brand he is assigned with a different identity(Key) element. This identity can be an IP, email, or a physical address like MAC, mobile phone number, a digital tag, or a cookie.
So many customer identities is a challenge faced by marketers. They struggle To keep a track of their customers. Nearly, 71% of marketers acknowledged that they lost the trail of their consumers with time. They were unsuccessful in maintaining a record of their online and offline customers. Thus, marketing campaigns struggle and fail to provide accurate data for their customer.
The identity resolution market projected to cross $2.6 billion by 2022.
Several platforms maintain databases for households or individuals’ data. This database is based on the user’s first-second-or third party data. These data sources help marketing companies to overcome the problem of consumer tracking and record keeping. US marketing is anticipated to disburse $2.6 billion on the identity resolution project by the year 2022. This will be a 122% increase in the time frame of four years. The money will be consumed potentially so that the customer gets the best experience. whereas marketing campaigns will be conducted successfully, keeping the choices of their customer in focus.
According to Forrester, two-third of marketers accepted that with identity resolution policies in place, they have started seeing strong returns in their investments. They also accepted that with Identity Resolution Platforms their customer data is secure, and profiles are easily traceable.
With an emerging market, many brands are applying Identity resolution strategies to their business. However, businesses are still facing significant challenges in their success models, maybe because consumer details are dispersed throughout the business. Many of it often resides in a vault that is jamming marketers’ potential to establish and encourage relationships.
A consumer might use variable identifiers to look-up something on one gadget (i.e., login name or desktop cookie), call on different (i.e., mobile), and then purchase something from the supply (i.e., credit card or loyalty ID). All of these identifiers will be stored in a different vault with the contrasting collection and parallel requirements.
Marketers also lose data, these likely include location, and third-party cookies. Application developers and Google provide security so that these data can’t be traced or stored.
Location Sciences is a company that helps in verifying the location data. They have estimated that since September 2019, with the release of iOS 13 on iPhone it is impossible to track users’ locations when mobiles are inactive.
To resolve this issue for marketers Identity Resolution Platforms has developed solutions like Merkle’s Merkury. This can help brands to stock data as first-party details in graph format.
However, retailers create graphs from the second-party data. They receive these data based on their agreements on data-sharing.
One such vendor is Neustar, it is a second-party data marketplace. It uses first-party-data from different brands employing a common, anonymous identity valuable. Engaging businesses can create plans, trigger, and compute customary audience inventory to either pick or censor customers across addressable media.
Oracle Data Cloud Cooperative is a similar example that collects data from more than 1500 retails partners. In return, these retail partners get a model that can predict the best approach for the audience. It can even help in guessing the next best thing that can be pitched to the user.
Users providing misinformation and Strict government policies increase the challenges for marketers.
As people are getting smarter they have also started to understand the data linking techniques of marketers. Customers sometimes themselves enter a piece of wrong information, for example, typing their name incorrectly! just to make sure that they can’t be traced by that data. This makes the job of marketers even dreadful.
Winterberry Group and the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) Data Center of Excellence in a joint report stated that marketers have complained, that due to strict restrictions on user data access and re-usage policies their jobs have become relatively difficult. Due to the increasing pressure of government in the field of user data privacy, and the implementation & introduction of new reforms in data privacy laws, they can’t access value data with ease.
The compliance rate of GDPR for marketers range from 8-42%. GDPR was implied on marketers in May 2018. In January 2020, CCPA became effective and the brands that won’t comply will be facing fines.
DSPs Fobid Bid Duplication: New Fairplay In Programmatic Advertising.
Publishers use the exchange to bid on their behalf for ad impressions. Exchanges try playing smart by trafficking multiple bids for the same ad impression, to increase the probability of getting the bid. Their smartness failed them in this economic downfall and guided them towards extinction.
Due to high traffic, the cost to request bids has increased. The demand-side platforms were already under pressure, and economic situations made things critical. This led to the pounding of the concept of bid-duplication. Now, MediaMath is establishing a new supply chain that won’t include SSPs selling duplicate impressions. To make an example of that, last month, Trade-desk had already given notices to all the SSPs to demolish all the duplicate bids which are there for the same auction. The Trade-desk gave SSPs a two-week time frame which is further extended, but DSPs are expecting the SSPs to fall in line in time.
Joey Livesey, The Trade Desk director of partnerships EMEA said: “By tackling the bid duplication problem we’re hopeful that it will give publishers visibility into an egalitarian measurement of their SSP partnerships as adding another isn’t necessarily going to drive additional revenue for them in a big way.”
This could be a problem for some SSPs. As, Karim Rayes, chief product officer at Tremor International’s stated: “The clampdown does affect our SSP — as it does every other SSP out there — as we cannot send the full breadth of our supply to our buyers using these DSPs.”
Since the emergence of header bidding four years ago, publishers like Trade-desks were rewarded by DSPs for auction duplication. More bids for the same impression meant more revenue generations for a DSP. This crackdown of Trade-desk doesn’t remove the incentives completely, but in a manner reduces the extent of rewarding publishers for the usage of the same exchange several times.
Founder of ad tech consultancy, AdProfs, Ratko Vidakovic said: “I understand the economic rationale for why The Trade Desk is trying to flush outbid duplication but they’re doing so in a crude manner.”
Further, he stated that “The Trade Desk is asking publishers and SSPs to chop off branches to their supply in a way that treats them all equally when they’re not. One SSP might sell specific inventory, for example, so it’s just not about these partnerships being used to serve multiple bids requests for the same impression.”
It might be one of the reasons why MediaMath is applying a different approach for the SSPs it works with to suppress the use of bid-duplication. Now, DSPs will only be allowing those exchanges to place a bid that doesn’t barter various impressions to the identical publisher.
Jeremy Steinberg, from MediaMath, who is the global head of the ecosystem stated: “We’re more focused on precision when it comes to bidding duplication.”
Further, he said, “The aim is to work with SSPs and publishers on a partner basis to understand how we can leverage performance data alongside tools like sellers.json and SupplyChain Object to understand what’s the best impression for our clients.”
However, SSPs gave a positive response to the Trade-desk crackdown. CEO of Engine Group’s SSP EMX Global, Michael Zacharski, welcomed the decision as a positive approach towards a non-duplicative inventory.
“We believe that one impression should be sold one time from an individual exchange, but I don’t think we are yet in a world where publishers sell inventory through just one exchange or source,” stated Zcharski. “Cost reductions up the funnel on the buy-side will shift dollars towards stronger alliances between buyers and sellers creating a need for more custom and flexible marketplaces on top of a simplified supply chain.”
Integrating multiple wrappers to duplicate bids made events doubtful, and unfairly exploited for programmatic auctions. This kind of process will no longer be tolerated and will be screened efficiently. But, the basic proposition of heading bidding — allowing publishers to execute concurrent auctions for analogous impressions — isn’t going off.
Founder of programmatic consultancy Jounce Media, Chris Kane stated:
“What’s clear is that The Trade Desk is using its market power to change incentives for publishers and ad exchanges.” He further added, “Sellers will do what buyers reward, and we are beginning to see buyers reward more efficient supply paths.”
Reddit Beats Facebook And Telegram In The Race Of Cryptocurrency.
While Telegram and Facebook are still facing issues in their planning and launch of their cryptocurrency, Reddit took the leap and launched it’s very own crypto for its users named “Moon”. The working strategy of Reddit cryptocurrency is different from that of Facebook and Telegram. But at least for Reddit, the game crypto is on.
Reddit has always been in controversies, it is a discussion platform with around 430 million active monthly users. The Reddit cryptocurrency will provide people with the lucky chance to purchase exclusive badges on the website. They can even buy exclusive emoji GIFs and post them as a comment. As stated, the Reddit game plan for the cryptocurrency is a lot different when compared to others. The Reddit crypto will be available to around 1million users from the midsummers.
Reddit Crypto will not work as a cryptocurrency launched for in-game cash prizes or like other video games cash. It is an actual cryptocurrency that is running on Ethereum Network. We shouldn’t forget that Reddit has a huge user, and launching its cryptocurrency means that it will be ahead in the game from tech companies like Facebook and Telegram.
These other tech companies are fighting hard to enter the cryptocurrency market for a long time now. They have even faced clashes with regulators and authorities of the court regarding this decision. Telegram, on the other hand, has discontinued his plans of cryptocurrency launch after getting knocked down several times by authorities. Facebook is continuing with his struggle to make sure that his cryptocurrency Libra enters the market at the soonest. But synopsis says that Facebook’s Libra can’t be launched any soon.
Aaron Brown, a crypto investor and a writer at Bloomberg Prophets says, A “possibility is the plan is to introduce the currency and get people used to it and then gradually build it into a valuable general exchange currency.” The currency can further be used to buy content, subscription, or even to purchase goods on websites or even beyond that. A trading system can also be created using the currency.
Even if all that is possible it won’t be happening anytime soon. The reason being, before circulating the crypto exchanges have to list tokens and needed to be named differently for each Reddit subgroup. The user should be able to set a digital wallet to accept currency using Reddit mobile app using Android or iPhone.
According to Reddit, the cryptocurrency is just a try-out. Other subreddits are running tests on cryptocurrency. Fortnite BR is one such example that people utilize for playing Fortnite: Battle Royale. The concept of the token is very common among gamers. V-buck is another popular example which people can purchase or earn while playing the game.
“We continuously run experiments to explore features that engage our users and communities,” said Reddit spoke person, based in San Francisco. “With Community Points, we’re working exclusively with two communities to test this feature and gather feedback from our users.” It was further clarified that Fortnite Epic has no association with this effort of Reddit.
But some crypto analysts have their doubts clouding in their minds. They think that the awards of community point can be related to “karma.” Reddit uses “karma” as a source of income, for example for posting a smart comment.
Will Price, a data scientist at researcher Flipside Crypto says that Reddit needs to be careful with the policies and usage of its cryptocurrency so that the users don’t misuse the cryptosystem. Also, Reddit is keeping 20 percent of the tokens for itself, the users might not be united with it.
Price adds “That being said, if all goes well, this could be the first step towards a more engaged and invested Reddit community, raising the bar for quality content creation and curation.”
Apple Rises On The Frustration Of Publishers On Apple News.
For several months Apple is seeking participation from publishers in its premium program. Apple initiated this project a year ago aiming to create audio files of the stories published on its News+ platform. Apple thinks that this will be a great leap in the future of news reading. Nearly four separate publishers have listened to this approach now.
Apple declared that it’s going to handle the production costs. In a statement, Apple said that they will compensate the publishers of audio content in the same way they compensate their Apple News+ publishers for their written content. According to sources Apple pays around 50 % of the revenue amount to publishers which users spend in the duration of 30-days on its Apple News+ platform.
With its approach of audio content on Apple News+ Apple fancied to stay trending in the innovation market. The reason for the adoption of this format is a profound influence by other service providers. Many private websites started publishing podcasts(a digital audio file). It’s the new trend taking over! Therefore, you can imagine why Apple wants it so severely.
This decision received miscellaneous reviews from publishers.
Associates from publishers, who are in conversation with Apple for this project stated that Apple seeks permission to initially choose files for conversion. Most likely, this will be done as per the user’s interest.
They further stated that publishers are in conversation to handle any other obstruction that may subvert the deal. One of the issues which arise relates to the freelancer writers’ articles. Freelance writers compose many articles written in Apple News+. These articles forbid third-party re-usage to users similar to Apple.
Apple is making a huge effort to make this deal happen. Apple wants to lift maximum responsibility to make sure other participants don’t strive, still, Apple faces criticism on several fronts.
Many worry about the compensation, and some just think that it’s not feasible; as listening to audio takes more time than reading an article.
In a statement, an associate from the publication involved in the conversation with Apple stated, he heard Apple stating the following:
“All the publishers who were part of Texture are going to get into an arms race.”
No declaration for the release of the audio files can be provided.
Even Apple has declined to release any official statements regarding this!
It may not be the best time for Apple to fulfill the desire of releasing audio stories for its Apple News+. Many publishers have registered dissatisfaction regarding the amount of money they make using Apple News. In a quarterly earnings call, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple announced that they have an increase in their active monthly user. The number has increased to 125 million, which is indeed a wonderful number of audiences. Last year the number of users registered was 90 million. By these reports, you can calculate the tremendous growth in the user base of Apple News+.
With a huge increase in audience, publishers should be getting 50% share of users’ monthly expenses, still, why are publishers showing disappointment with Apple regarding money?
The answer to this could be the Last official announcement made by Apple regarding its users of Apple News, which was 48 hours after the product was launched. In this announcement, Apple stated that they have achieved 200,000 subscriptions in just 48 hours. According to a publisher, they just receive $20,000/month, they affirmed this while talking to a channel.
Several publishers shared similar experiences, describing the payment process of Apple News as “horrendous.”
As per the Alliance for Audited Media, publishers can count every download of their issue as a circulation number. The reason for this implies due to the media and ads which remain the same in both the versions.
Increasing speculations, Bloomberg in February reported, Liz Schimel, who was leading the News platform of apple resigned from his job without even completing a year with the organization.
No doubt that the demand for audio formatted content is increasing. Today, SpokenLayer is a star name in producing and distributing audio contents. They stated that their client base has gone wide in just four years. Before, the numbers neared Zero and now they are distributing Audio content over 12 distinct platforms.
Giant techs like Amazon, Google, and Spotify are already leading the audio content game in diverse genres. In some cases, publishers are getting funds directly from Google for composing their audio content.
Privacy Sandbox By Google Shows Backdoor To The Third-Party Cookies.
For the last two years, Google has been working to remove third-party cookies from it’s Google Chrome browser. Moving forward with this aspiration Google recently announced testing some of its “Privacy Sandbox” proposals. Google wants to test the algorithm with other exchanges and demand-side platforms. It seeks to examine the process of implementation and ways to deliver a better-guarded program to its users. Google will also make sure that this solution works inside the policies of advertising auctions.
It was in late April when Google made its big announcement. Google revealed its intentions on the “Bit Request Signal Experiment.” The announcement was made by a post on GitHub, which is a collaboration stage for software developers. Google invited advertising tech firms to take part in the testing so that they can receive some real-time algorithm test results. They affirmed the uncertainty of dates for live testing of Privacy Sandbox. They still wanted ad firms to respond to them, affirming if they are enthusiastic to help.
Soon speculations and news started flooding the tech industry!
“This is an early-stage concept and we don’t have more details to share right now, We plan to publish updates and progres s in GitHub as part of the process.”, quoted a Google spokesperson on GitHub.
Google team declared discontinuing support for the third-party cookies in January. Providing an explanation stating that they want to encourage publishers, advertising companies, and other providers of browsers to come up with a new set of rules which are user-privacy centric and follow open measures for the web.
Privacy Sandbox was launched in August, the idea was to innovate the ad recurrence and behavioral advertising. Aimed to help them work on the web without using third-party cookies. In a mega event with, 163 giant tech organizations like Apple, Facebook, Axel Springer, The Washington Post, Criteo, The Trade Desk, and even Google. All are requested to share their views via. World Wide Web Consortium or GitHub to help the project succeed.
A member from the “RTB group,” from Google posted on GitHub. Sharing insights on the bigger picture and a bit clear version of the cookieless browsing. Explaining the process, he talked about how user targeting will be done. He introduced the machine-learning algorithm known as “Federated Learning of Cohorts” which will be used in the working of cookieless browsing. Further, he explained that the algorithm will group people into different segments of the audience by understanding their behavior, likely by their browsing history.
He stated that this will improve the privacy of the users. This algorithm isn’t designed to target any user in particular. Instead, it will target a group of audiences. This group is also be known as “FloCs”. The algorithm is designed to group people on the basis of their similar interests.
Google posted on GitHub stating:
“Exchanges could offer a uniform RTB interface for aggregated audience targeting to bidders regardless of the data source,”
Another post that surfaced on GitHub from Google stated the following:
“Exchanges can explore the separation between contextual and user interest components in the RTB data flow, along with hosting the ad selection logic that needs access to both components (for instance, brand safety checks for a product retargeting ad) in a sandbox.”
Google provides an exchange with options to set a “Privacy budget.” According to the budget, an exchange can request a particular unit of data. If the data limit will surpass the budget, it will lead to an error, or as a consequence the data will be preserved in greater privacy. Presenting an option for user privacy, it can easily be determined that how much data needs to be revealed?
Google is beseeching bidders and exchanges to run real-world small scale “RTB” experiments. This will help them to test the algorithm real-time bases and with live scenarios.
Tom Kershaw, chief technology officer of Rubicon Project and a member of the World Wide Web Consortium’s Improving Web Advertising Business Group, said that they welcome the proposals. But the project is in the exceptionally fundamental stage.
Another statement came from Kershaw, chairman of the Prebid.org ad tech industry organization stating that “These are experiments with a capital E, We support these initiatives but there is not a single proposal on the table close to being adoptable right now. A ton of work needs to be done.”
Another member of the Improving Web Advertising Business Group states that the project is in its evolution pipeline and it’s going to take a long time to develop a technical standard.
He also added “It’s great, given the implications of what’s at stake, that the advertising arm of Google is attempting to implement what the browser arm is doing. It’s a really important step in the process.”
Digital Marketing Strategies Fail Due To Fake Bots And Manipulated Data.
Digitalization in Marketing strategies has increased the demand for high inputs and better results from Digital Marketing Strategies. The game has changed and it’s no more about the number of likes and views, it’s about the engagement of the right audience with the content. A tremendous increase in marketing platforms has increased the demand for a target-oriented, and result-driven marketing.
As Peter Parker principle states: “With great powers comes great responsibilities!” the increase in marketing platforms, has increased the challenges to get the ideal data. Intensifying the challenges, Bots are manipulating customers’ data which the companies are extracting from various sources. These include data generated by the landing pages.
Marketing firms are struggling to distinguish between the data filled by humans and advanced bots. This leads to a rise in demand for developing technologies that can help marketing firms to resolve this issue.
Data manipulation isn’t the only thing that bothers! Countless people are investing their crucial money daily on digital marketing tools. They do this to gain marketing benefits. Each interaction with the customer costs them. Every interaction counts! Even if it’s with a bot.
A person running global campaigns, by utilizing Digital Marketing Strategies like landing pages analyzed the conversion rate. He observed that the traffic he’s attracting on his page is great! Yet, the conversion is grieving. The extensive analysis helped him to discover that around 37% of his page data is Bot-driven and fake. Meaning that a 37% share of his spendings went to total waste and became irrelevant. Don’t you consider this an unfair or fraud practice with those who are investing their money in digital marketing?
This doesn’t end here! The marketing team chases fake data received from the internet, resulting in loss of productivity and wastage of crucial time. The time and wasted efforts of teams are equivalent to companies’ money and resources. Companies can utilize these resources to provide better services to their customers.
How to avoid this crisis and find a resolution to this mounting problem?
Most importantly, instead of curing ie. differentiating data based on its authenticity, we should apply a preventative approach. Therefore, In other words, we should stop the bot from entering the marketing domains. Marketing teams likely don’t have the luxury of time which they can spend on examining data.
For instance, marketers should be equipped to examine the behavior and authenticity of a user session. This will very likely help them to monitor the behavioral dissimilarities between a well-bred bot and a genuine human. Firstly, these tactics can be applied to different campaigns, and the collection of fake data from the internet can be prevented. Secondly, with special techniques, methods, and similar additive challenges Bot should be stopped from filling web forms. In conclusion, this will not only help in maintaining the authenticity of data but similarly, it will also help in saving the money of the customers.
The results of digital marketing campaigns are effective only if humans are at the receiving end. Therefore, the development of industries and the evolution of new markets demand techniques that most importantly help in delivering the message to the right audience further, eliminating bots interference. By doing this they can obtain better results by keeping marketing humane not only today but even in the future.