So where to you put the most important part of your brand messaging in your video ads?  You might not have had any guidance about that in the past but now you will.  Twitter and IPG Media Lab did a study all about memorability and recall of Twitter video ads.  Okay the short answer as reported in SocialTimes is put the best messaging up front.  Branding above videos before what’s called the “viewability timer” kicks in makes a strong impression at low levels of viewing.  IPG Media Lab SVP Kara Manatt said, “We were struck by how valuable the impact of front-loading your branding and messaging can be.”  And know this, about half of Twitter users recalled video ads after seeing just one second.  The 3-second mark, however, is critical because recall jumped 13% between 1 and 3 seconds.

 

You know what a great idea it is that there’s no sound when you’re scrolling through your Facebook newsfeed and come across videos unless you click to get the sound?  Yeah well Facebook might be in the business of getting rid of good ideas, because Ariel Bogel in Australia says they’re running a test down there in which that sound kicks right on in the mobile app.  They want to see just how much users hate that and just how many awkward situations it creates in public.  Automatic sound on video includes ads and Facebook Live.  Now if that’s too embarrassing for you there are two ways to stop the sound.  Leave the sound off on your device.  Or you can turn the sound to “always off” in settings.  But why are they testing this to begin with?  Facebook’s own research learned 80% of people react negatively when mobile video ads play without warning.

 

Frederic Lardinois tells us that Google, you know Alphabet’s Google, is switching a couple of things up.  One change makes decent enough sense, and the other one is simply awesome unless you’re a slimeball shady marketing weasel.  One, they’re getting rid of the “mobile-friendly” label in mobile search results because, well, 85% of resulting pages ARE mobile friendly, so label was just clutter.  Second, if your site has intrusive popup interstitials with microscopic close buttons that make it annoying to get to the content, Google will punish you with lower rankings.  They already do that to app install ads, the point being to reduce accidental or deceitful ad clicking.  If your pop-up and over is for login or legal requirements, they won’t spank you.

 

Nothing looks better than a good piece of stock photography.  A carefully diverse group of executives wearing 80’s business attire pretending to talk on phones or pointing to a graph.  That kind of stuff is irresistible to website users.  Well Dr. Janet Bastiman poses the poser, what if you could write a text description of what you need, and a computer generated photo depicting what you described is cranked out?  They’ve had some success with super small images, 40% of the time test subjects couldn’t tell it was made by a computer.  Now they’re working on more complex and bigger such pictures.  Anyway, until robots can make our pictures, Dr. Janet says think UGC.  Using on-open live UGC in email has been known to return a 43% CTR increase and up to 3x improvement in conversion rate.  Plus, it’s 50% more trusted than the 80’s people pointing at things.

 

When we talk about content marketing, most of the time we’re talking about making stuff for the public or consumers.  But how much effort have you put into making stuff for your sales team?  Ohhh, I hear what you’re saying, you’re making plenty of stuff but the salespeople won’t use it.  In fact, official estimates are that 60 to 90% of content goes unused by sales.  How do you convince them to use it to cultivate relationships?  Samantha Owens Pyle of Green Apple Strategy suggests some ways to do that.  Send downloadable content to a stalled decision-maker.  Blast it to existing clients to remind them of you.  Print it and include it with seminar or workshop materials.  Send it as a follow-up to a conference call.  And/or use it to arm your internal champion at the prospect company.

 

NPR, that stand for National Public Radio you know.  It’s the people’s radio!  Except for they don’t really want to hear from you anymore.  Okay that’s an extreme exaggeration and not true.  But they are shutting off public commenting on its website.  And let’s face it, they’re hardly the only media outlet that’s done that.  You people just can’t resist hiding behind a pseudonym and writing things that would not make your mother proud, even if she is in prison.  Michelle Manafy reports NPR will focus the interactions on social, and will support their journalists in using their social accounts.  NPR’s Elizabeth Jensen says sites that still allow comments spend a lot on moderation tools.  And they make you be a registered user using your real name, like my real name of Rutherford B. Hayes.

 

Are you ready for the new YouTube?  You’re indifferent?  Okay well you should at least know what it looks like.  It’s an update to the YouTube TV app and the rhyme and reason is to make it a better experience on that big screen in the living room/den/Big TV room.  Sarah Perez reports that mostly, it’s about where categories are.  Forget that side thingy, high level categories like News and Trending are at the top now with subcategories below.  Why?  Because you use YouTube differently on TV than on desktop or mobile.  On those last two things you’re probably going right to a video that was shared or posted somewhere.  On big TV, you’re chillin, you’re bingin’, you’re in Netflix mode.  So the YouTube TV update is about browsing around and discovering things to watch.  There are also new sections for live streams and 4K content.

 

Sensor Tower, it’s an application store optimization company, puts out on a fairly regular basis the Ad Intelligence Digest.  It takes intelligence about ads and digests it.  For the purposes of this story, let’s look at what they found out about Instagram advertising.  You know the pretty pictures and filters app started supporting longer videos and marketers went yay!  The average length of a video ad on it went up to 25 seconds.  In fact, video is increasingly the darling of Instagram advertising.  26% of its total ads were video ads.  That’s a jump of 23% just since January.  Brandy Shaul goes on to report some fun facts about app install ads too.  That kind of ad made up 26% of all Instagram ad impressions, the rest is trying to send people somewhere on the web.

 

Hey would a Twitter follow kill ya?  @mikestiles