regulartrends

Trends and insights from a regular human.

[regulartrends]

Facebook users can now see all the active ads run by a Page

Facebook today released a new tool that will allow users to see what advertisements a Page is running — whether or not all of those advertisements are targeted at that particular user. It’s the latest in a string of new features from Facebook to give users more insight into how advertisers are using its platform.

Starting today, users will see a new button called “info and ads” at the top of a Page belonging to a business, nonprofit, or other organization. “Page info” will allow them to see when the Page was created and if its name has been changed at all, though the company said there would be more information available to view in the tab in the coming weeks. The “active ads” section will allow users to see what ads that page is currently running across Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. The tool has previously been tested in Canada.

https://venturebeat.com/2018/06/28/facebook-users-can-now-see-all-the-active-ads-run-by-a-page/

[regulartrends]

Twitter launches its Ads Transparency Center, where you can see ads bought by any account

Twitter says that with this tool, you should be able to search for any Twitter handle and bring up all the ad campaigns from that account that have run for the past seven days. For political advertisers in the U.S., there will be additional data, including information around billing, ad spend, impressions per tweet and demographic targeting.

Everyone should be able to access the Ads Transparency Center, no login required.

As part of  the political ad guidelines that Twitter announced last month, the company says it will be visually identifying ads that are tied to federal elections in the United States. Over time, it plans to develop a policy specifically around “issue ads” (i.e. political ads that aren’t explicitly promoting a candidate) and looking for ways to expand these policies internationally.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/28/twitter-ads-transparency-center/

[regulartrends]

With debit card, Venmo eyes retail partnerships as path to monetization

While rolling out a physical card may seem odd for a mobile-first payment platform, it’s a recognition that mobile payments aren’t quite mainstream yet, and most transaction activity still occurs in physical stores. According to Huber, nine out of 10 transactions are still carried out at the physical point of sale, allowing PayPal to bridge the gap between physical and online transactions.

Venmo’s social feed is of particular interest to retailers. Transactions that take place through the debit card will be logged in Venmo’s user history, much in the same way peer-to-peer payments are recorded — adding possibilities to promote purchase activity through Venmo’s social feed. It’s a largely untapped method for consumer companies to acquire social endorsements from the Venmo feed, and push targeted ads to users based on their behavior.

“The unique social aspects of Venmo could provide a path to advertising revenue — few other payment platforms make it fun for users to share their payment activity with friends,” Morningstar analyst Jim Sinegal wrote in a recent report.

https://digiday.com/marketing/debit-card-venmo-eyes-retail-partnerships-path-monetization/

[regulartrends]

Chipotle Wants to Become a ‘Lifestyle Brand’

Niccol also said he intends to make Chipotle “more culturally relevant” and turn it into a “lifestyle brand,” which sounds an awful lot like more moves from the Taco Bell playbook. (Is it just a matter of time until Chipotle launches a fashion collection complete with burrito hoodies and “guac is extra” t-shirts?)

Chipotle fans can also expect some new happy hour deals: Niccol said the chain intends to launch $2 tacos and alcoholic beverages between 2 and 5 p.m., with a similar deal in the later evening (post-8 p.m.) hours. A new customer rewards program will debut in 2019.

Niccol’s had his work cut out for him: Following E. coli and norovirus outbreaks, Chipotle’s profits plummeted by 95 percent in 2016 and has struggled to recover. Since the former Taco Bell CEO joined the company in February 2018, Chipotle’s stock price has risen more than 75 percent.

https://www.eater.com/2018/6/28/17512340/chipotle-lifestyle-brand-closing-stores-delivery-app

[regulartrends]

Facial recognition is here to stay. And we should all probably accept it

Today these same companies are under fire from their employees over who this technology is being sold to, namely branches of the US government like the Department of Defense and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Workers from Google, Microsoft, and now Amazon have signed petitions and quit in protest of the government work. It’s had some impact: Google released AI ethics principles and publicly affirmed it would not renew its contract with the Department of Defense in 2019. Microsoft told employees in an email that it wasn’t providing AI services to ICE, though that contradicts earlier descriptions of the contract on the company’s website, according to Gizmodo.

This debate, playing out in a very public manner, marks a major shift in how tech companies and their employees talk about artificial intelligence. Until now, everyone has been preaching the Gospel of Good AI: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has called it the most transformational technology of a generation, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai has gone even further, saying AI will have comparable impact to fire and electricity

[regulartrends]

THE TRUE HISTORY OF 'YANNY' AND 'LAUREL'

Reddit user RolandCamry, a friend of Castro's, says he then took the video from Castro's Instagram and posted it to r/blackmagicfuckery. "I originally saw it on an Instagram story," says RolandCamry. "From there I put it on Reddit."

That explains how Laurel and Yanny went viral. But where did the audio clip actually come from? While many have speculated that it was computer-generated, the reading was actually recorded by an opera singer in New York in December of 2007.

"It's an incredible story, it is a person, he is a member of the original cast of CATS on Broadway," says Marc Tinkler, the CTO and cofounder of Vocabulary.com. He says that when the site first launched, they wanted to find individuals that had strong pronunciation, and could read words written in the international phonetic alphabet, a standardized representation of sounds in any spoken language. Many opera singers know how to read IPA, because they have to sing in languages they don't speak.

"We hired a bunch of opera singers to record 200,000 words, basically," says Tinkler. He didn't want to reveal the pronouncer's name, since he doesn't know if they're comfortable potentially becoming a viral star. The same person recorded over 36,000 words for Vocabulary.com, according to Tinkler. He added that his favorite word spoken by the same person is "audacity."

[regulartrends]

YouTube’s Plan to Clean Up the Mess That Made It Rich

Much like Facebook and Twitter, however, YouTube has long prioritized growth over safety. Hany Farid, senior adviser to the Counter Extremism Project, which works with internet companies to stamp out child pornography and terrorist messaging, says that of the companies he works with, “Google is the least receptive.” With each safety mishap, he says, YouTube acts freshly shocked. “It’s like a Las Vegas casino saying, ‘Wow, we can’t believe people are spending 36 hours in a casino.’ It’s designed like that.”

That’s not how Google or YouTube see things. Over the past year, YouTube has made the most sweeping changes since its early days, removing videos it deemed inappropriate and stripping away the advertising from others. But to date, both the video-sharing service and its corporate parent have struggled to articulate how their plan will make things better. Only recently, as Washington has edged closer to training its regulatory eye on Silicon Valley, did YouTube executives agree to walk Bloomberg Businessweek through its proposed fixes and explain how the site got to this point. Conversations with more than a dozen people at YouTube, some of whom asked not to be identified while discussing sensitive internal matters, reveal a company still grappling to reach a balance between contributors’ freedom of expression and society’s need to protect itself.

[regulartrends]

‘My Generation Is Never Going to Have That’

To Lubarsky, a number cruncher-turned-housing activist, Wallingford’s architectural jewels, with their grand front porches and exquisite topiary, are emblematic of this city’s potentially fatal flaw: a housing market so expensive it’s throttling one of America’s biggest urban success stories. Decades ago, these tidy homes were cheap enough for schoolteachers and firefighters. Today, most cost at least a million dollars, and what was once a proudly middle-class neighborhood has morphed into a financially gated community.

Part of the problem, Lubarsky admits, is people like himself: Seattle’s red-hot tech economy, led by companies such as Amazon and Groupon (where Lubarsky works), has filled the city with an army of well-paid workers bidding up the price of housing. But that tech-fueled demand has tended to overshadow the other driver: insufficient supply. Since the end of the financial crisis, Lubarsky says, Seattle has added roughly 100,000 jobs, but barely 32,000 new homes and apartment units. “We’ve underbuilt every year since 2010,” he adds. And a big part of that deficit, Lubarsky says, is due to neighborhoods like Wallingford, where zoning laws make it almost impossible to build anything other than a single-family house.

That’s why Lubarsky wants to radically reconceive the way Seattle lives. For several years, he and fellow activists have waged a data-driven campaign to change the city’s zoning to allow more “density” in single-family neighborhoods, which account for more than half of the city’s land. If this pro-density campaign succeeds, neighborhoods like Wallingford could be transformed by a wave of new construction that would gradually replace single-family homes with duplexes, town homes, apartments and other multifamily housing types. And that would go some of the way toward solving a paradox that threatens many of America’s most successful cities: the younger workers needed to maintain that urban success can no longer afford to live there.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/04/26/seattle-housing-what-works-next-218058

[regulartrends]

A Lynching Memorial Is Opening. The Country Has Never Seen Anything Like It.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opens Thursday on a six-acre site overlooking the Alabama state capital, is dedicated to the victims of American white supremacy. And it demands a reckoning with one of the nation’s least recognized atrocities: the lynching of thousands of black people in a decades-long campaign of racist terror.

At the center is a grim cloister, a walkway with 800 weathered steel columns, all hanging from a roof. Etched on each column is the name of an American county and the people who were lynched there, most listed by name, many simply as “unknown.” The columns meet you first at eye level, like the headstones that lynching victims were rarely given. But as you walk, the floor steadily descends; by the end, the columns are all dangling above, leaving you in the position of the callous spectators in old photographs of public lynchings.

The magnitude of the killing is harrowing, all the more so when paired with the circumstances of individual lynchings, some described in brief summaries along the walk: Parks Banks, lynched in Mississippi in 1922 for carrying a photograph of a white woman; Caleb Gadly, hanged in Kentucky in 1894 for “walking behind the wife of his white employer”; Mary Turner, who after denouncing her husband’s lynching by a rampaging white mob, was hung upside down, burned and then sliced open so that her unborn child fell to the ground.

[regulartrends]

Snapchat is redesigning its redesign to get people watching more Stories

And while this certainly feels like a big reversal in Snap’s philosophy to keep friend content and professional content totally separate, a Snap spokesperson pushed back, pointing out that Stories on the Discover page will still be confined to their own feed. That means you won’t start watching a Story from your college roommate and immediately jump to a Story from a celebrity, which is how it used to work (and how it works on Instagram). It also ensures that celebrities won’t dominate the feed and relegate friend stories to the bottom of the queue.

Snap’s argument at the time of the redesign was that pairing user content with celebrity content can create pressure on people to post something funny or fancy or totally unique.

For this test, Snap is organizing content inside the app based on the experience of consuming it. That means that even though Stories might be considered “friend content,” watching them is a similar experience to watching a show from a publisher instead of sending a private message. “With this test, we’re retaining that idea [of separating friends and publishers], but bringing back one place for talking and one place for watching — organizing around users’ behavior, not just relationships,” a spokesperson said.

[regulartrends]

Exclusive: YouTube ran ads from hundreds of brands on extremist channels

"YouTube's bottom line hasn't been hit," said Nicole Perrin, a senior analyst at eMarketer who covers advertising and marketing technology. "If brands want to make sure this stops, the only way for that to happen is for them to stop spending [on YouTube] until it's fixed."

Brands continue advertising on YouTube to reach its huge audience, especially younger generations. YouTube says it has over a billion users, and that every day those users watch a billion hours of video.

"We have partnered with our advertisers to make significant changes to how we approach monetization on YouTube with stricter policies, better controls and greater transparency," a YouTube spokeswoman said in a statement.

"When we find that ads mistakenly ran against content that doesn't comply with our policies, we immediately remove those ads. We know that even when videos meet our advertiser friendly guidelines, not all videos will be appropriate for all brands. But we are committed to working with our advertisers and getting this right," she added.

http://money.cnn.com/2018/04/19/technology/youtube-ads-extreme-content-investigation/index.html

[regulartrends]

IFPI Global Music Report 2018

The global recorded music market grew by 8.1% in 2017, its third consecutive year of growth since IFPI began tracking the market in 1997. Figures released today in IFPI’s Global Music Report 2018 show total revenues for 2017 were US$17.3 billion.

Streaming remains the main driver of recovering revenues and, for the first time, has become the single largest revenue source with 176 million users of paid streaming services contributing to year-on-year streaming growth of 41.1%. Streaming now accounts for 38.4% of total recorded music revenue and its growth has more than offset a 5.4% decline in physical revenue and a 20.5% decline in download revenue. Total digital income last year accounted for more than half of all revenue (54%) for the first time.

The industry's third consecutive year of growth follows 15 years of significant revenue decline. Despite the recent uplift, revenues for 2017 are still only 68.4% of the market's peak in 1999.

http://www.ifpi.org/news/IFPI-GLOBAL-MUSIC-REPORT-2018

[regulartrends]

A Ben & Jerry's 'Flavor Guru' Explains Her 'Swirls and Chunks' Strategy

What is your philosophy of creating ice cream? How much of it is your own approach and how much of it is The Ben & Jerry way? You know, it’s funny, I always think of it as just a liquid—ice cream, the base, it’s really just a liquid. You can infuse a liquid with so many different types of flavors and express yourself because it’s so easy to do with that base. That was the same with cider—it was fun to experiment for me with new flavor combinations there because it’s so easy to start with a liquid. The guy I was working with, I think I blew his mind when I explained it like that. He hadn’t thought of it that way before. But that’s how I think of ice cream, too.

For me, I feel very lucky in that I actually work and develop product for Japan and the Asian market, and what those customers want is a fun challenge for me because its very different from the American market.

Japanese snack foods tend to have more adventurous combinations of flavors, I bet that works well for ice cream. It does! And, you know, sure, they are used to culturally having flavors that are a lot bolder than the US, but they also still want something that reads as that American, Ben & Jerry’s product. They still want swirls and chunks and chocolate. … And that’s what we do best, swirls and chunks, swirls and chunks. It’s really easy to express yourself and be creative with those building blocks.

https://munchies.vice.com/en_us/article/43bedj/ben-and-jerrys-flavor-guru-job

[regulartrends]

Offensive Moves

Adidas excels at the fundamentals of social and digital marketing while also using flashier tactics to signal innovation and drive buzz. The brand calibrates product hype cycles to drive paid search traffic and send Confirmed mobile app users to the brand site. Case in point: the 2017 Yeezy collaboration drove nearly a fifth of Adidas’s desktop and mobile traffic.  

Navigating the space between lifestyle and performance, the brand’s micro-influencer network contributed to its outsized Instagram community growth, and Adidas became the top video advertiser in L2’s ranking for the second year in a row. Importantly, this growth didn’t come at the expense of its vertical footprint. From fitness consultations to product customization offerings, the brand has integrated digital and brick-and-mortar properties for a rich consumer experience.

Why did Nike fall to the Gifted class for the first time? Despite having more site traffic than any other brand, Nike made fewer investments in digital than its peers. The brand’s newly launched product pages often fail to provide on-model imagery, and category pages lack quick view, a tactic adopted by 77% of brands in L2’s study. However, Nike has seen a promising start to 2018, with an uptick in online sales buoyed by new women’s-focused initiatives like Unlaced and the launch of the popular AirMax sneaker. A Jordan year may be on the horizon.

https://www.l2inc.com/daily-insights/offensive-moves

[regulartrends]

Facebook moves 1.5bn users out of reach of new European privacy law

Facebook has moved more than 1.5 billion users out of reach of European privacy law, despite a promise from Mark Zuckerberg to apply the “spirit” of the legislation globally.

In a tweak to its terms and conditions, Facebook is shifting the responsibility for all users outside the US, Canada and the EU from its international HQ in Ireland to its main offices in California. It means that those users will now be on a site governed by US law rather than Irish law.

The move is due to come into effect shortly before General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into force in Europe on 25 May. Facebook is liable under GDPR for fines of up to 4% of its global turnover – around $1.6bn – if it breaks the new data protection rules.

The shift highlights the cautious phrasing Facebook has applied to its promises around GDPR. Earlier this month, when asked whether his company would promise GDPR protections to its users worldwide, Zuckerberg demurred. “We’re still nailing down details on this, but it should directionally be, in spirit, the whole thing,” he said.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/19/facebook-moves-15bn-users-out-of-reach-of-new-european-privacy-law

[regulartrends]

What the @#$%! Americans can’t get through the day without cursing

As mentioned above, cursing is the most popular way people express their frustration, with 63 percent saying that’s how it manifests for them most frequently. Yelling is another popular method of relief(49 percent) and, sadly enough, crying (39 percent).

So, with stressful events piling up in the thousands every year, how do we cope with it?

Listening to music is the most popular way of dealing (50 percent), followed by watching TV/movies (47 percent) and physical exercise (40 percent).

“People of all ages face stress every day and it can be difficult to find effective and healthy ways to cope,” said Shannon Hudson, CEO and founder of 9Round Kickbox Fitness. “While listening to music or watching TV can be relaxing, one of the best ways to reduce tension is through regular exercise because it improves both physical health and overall well-being. When you are physically and mentally strong, you are better equipped to handle life’s frustrations.”

https://nypost.com/2018/04/18/what-the-americans-cant-get-through-the-day-without-cursing/

[regulartrends]

Teen Vogue is ditching print, but it’s still making ‘magazine’ covers for Snapchat

“Even when there was a print magazine, most of our audience experienced our cover on social media and on digital only,” said Phillip Picardi, chief content officer at Teen Vogue and Them, Condé Nast’s LGBTQ-focused publication. “Beyond that, every brand ‘breaks’ their covers by announcing on social media. So we figured: Why not continue the press momentum of a ‘cover moment,’ and the editorial excellence that comes with delivering a cover, and simply package it for the medium where it’s most effective?”

Teen Vogue is joining an increasing number of publications that are experimenting with new digital models of the traditional magazine cover as many continue to say goodbye to print in an effort to cut costs. Complex, for example, launched Complex Cover last year, a video series that transformed the idea of a print cover into short clips that live on YouTube and are distributed on social media. Nylon, too, has turned to the digital cover to announce the latest issues, debuting its first with Jhene Aiko in November 2017 after announcing the end of its print magazine in September.

For Teen Vogue, the medium that has increasingly resonated with its readers is Snapchat. Whembley Sewell, channel manager at Teen Vogue who manages Snapchat Discover, said the team was inspired to launch today’s issue on the platform after seeing a spike in engagement levels surrounding its gun control content in March. While Teen Vogue’s presence on the platform has steadily grown in the last year, it experienced a 525 percent increase in unique viewers on Discover stories in March from the previous month. Teen Vogue didn’t share specific figures around its viewers on Snapchat Discover.

https://www.glossy.co/platform-effect/how-teen-vogue-is-reinventing-traditional-magazine-covers-in-a-digital-only-landscape