Harmonic Aftershock

What's so special about Facebook Autoplay Ads?

I was quoted in today's Adweek article about Facebook's autoplay ads.

Here are my full thoughts:

Facebook has become a place where people share content in all kinds of formats. Bandwidth and streaming technology is finally at a place that makes video extremely accessible and easy to consume across devices in various conditions. With its emphasis on native video, Facebook is beginning to contend with YouTube—especially for ad dollars.

However, just because it’s an autoplay video ad, doesn’t mean it’ll perform well. Relevance through targeting is an important factor of success and most of all, the actual creative is key. The power of autoplay is in its potential to break through the clutter and grab people’s attention. The first few seconds of the video is crucial to doing that.

Content matters big time both to draw audiences in and to sustain them long enough to make a brand linkage. Taking a brand’s 15 second TV spot and force fitting into a Facebook autoplay ad isn’t going to cut it. The creative must be tailored to the native format and consumption behaviors of the specific platform it’s running on. Facebook, Snapchat, Vine, etc. are all different in format, storytelling, and audience norms but they all must ladder up to a larger video strategy.

Twitter recently launched their autoplay ad solution and just last month CNN’s getting in on their own autoplay game. Publishers are going to chase the ripest revenue streams and build out their ad tech accordingly. It’ll continue to evolve as tech capabilities advance with consumer behavior. But one thing is absolutely certain: Video has been a central part of people’s lives since the dawn of motion pictures in the early 1900s. How we experience video will continue to evolve. And you can bet that advertisers will find ways to be part of it, as publishers need to monetize.

It’s ironic to think that regular TV commercials have always been inherently “auto play” but in a world of ad skipping, they have to work so much harder to grab viewers’ attention. That’s why brands are now creatively embedding themselves into actual TV programming with less singular reliance on the standard commercial pod.

But the bigger question is what’s “television” today, anyway? The lines between TV and video content have blurred. Gone are the days of TV campaigns. Brands today need a comprehensive video strategy that transcends media channels while creatively respecting their uniquely native opportunities. It’s time we’re all coloring outside of the lines.

You can read the resulting Adweek article.

6 ways Facebook is turning into Twitter.

A year ago, I could emphatically say that Facebook and Twitter were complementary social networks – each with a set of fairly distinct use cases – and that as such, the two companies weren’t really direct competitors. 

Today it’s become a lot harder to say that since with each new Facebook feature comes with it a giant Twitter déjà vu. Here are six ways that Facebook is turning into Twitter:

1. Follow
From its earliest days, Twitter was designed around the ability for Twitter users to non-mutually follow others. In September of 2011, Facebook launched the ability to “subscribe” to an individual’s public posts. And this past December it changed the name from “subscribe” to “follow” – the exact term Twitter uses.

2. Hashtags
For years hashtags and Twitter were essentially synonymous – When you’d see a hashtag, you immediately thought of Twitter. But then Instagram adopted the familiar tagging lexicon and three months ago, Facebook began supporting hashtags.

3. Instagram Video
In January this past year, Twitter’s Vine app was launched bringing short social video directly to the platform. Six months later, Facebook-owned Instagram began supporting video.

4. Embeddable Posts
In May of 2010, Twitter launched the ability to embed Tweets into third-party web properties. A month ago, Facebook launched “embeddable posts.”

5. Contests/Promotions
As a marketer, I can say it’s much easier to run a contest on Twitter than it is on Facebook. Historically, the only way to execute promotions on Facebook was on a separate tab. 5 days ago, Facebook loosened the reigns on promotions now allowing the use of their main platform functionality for contests.

6. Trending Topics
One of the most powerful features of Twitter is the ability to see “Trending Topics” – which have been credited for breaking news stories. Two days ago, Facebook confirmed its now testing out a “Trending” topics section on its newsfeed.

It’s doubtful that Facebook’s seemingly “copy cat” strategy will in any way have a negative effect on Twitter – as the latter platform continues with strong growth and to solidify its niche as the real-time social platform. After all, imitation is flattery, right?

Facebook hashtags make their social TV debut on the BET Awards.

During Justin Timberlake's intro of the lifetime achievement award for Charlie Wilson at the BET Awards, a lower third appeard (photo below) with a big Facebook icon along with the hashtag #CharlieWilson asking people to go to Facebook to "show their love." 

In a previous post when Facebook first launched hashtags, I mentioned that this signals the platform’s movement toward more real-time and open posts organized by hashtags -- which Twitter has been doing for years. So to no surprise when I searched on Facebook for #CharlieWilson, what did it look like? Something very familiar to Twitter users...

I used to emphatically say that Facebook and Twitter were two very different social networks each with a farily mutually exclusive use case -- especially when it came to social TV. But the lines are becoming more and more blurry.

Facebook hashtags signal a shift in Facebook culture.

Today’s news from Facebook is yet another indictor that the hashtag has become the universal currency for organizing conversations in social media.

And it’s no surprise that in its announcement of hashtag support, Facebook started off with stats about television. “During primetime television alone, there are between 88 and 100 million Americans engaged on Facebook - roughly a Super Bowl-sized audience every single night.” Facebook wants a bigger piece of the real-time social TV audience.

The announcement’s title alone “Public Conversations on Facebook” signals the platform’s movement toward more real-time and open posts organized by hashtags. Sound familiar? This is the very essence of what Twitter is, how it works, and the value that it brings to its users every day.

While they’ll be rolling out to users over the next few weeks, Facebook hashtags only (currently) work on its desktop platform (so much for its “mobile first” strategy) and at the moment advertisers can’t target or promote hashtags nor are they being tracked by Facebook Insights. While I’m sure this will quickly change, the question remains whether or not the Facebook community wants a platform that is feeling more and more like Twitter.

At the same time, if Facebook weren’t to move in this direction, they would be ignoring a huge opportunity to continue to grow and monetize its platform with all of the data each and everyone of us produces as we post.

Betty White on SNL: Disses Facebook

Earlier tonight, Betty White made her hugely anticipated debut as host of Saturday Night Live as a result of a campaign on Facebook resulting in over 500,000 people joining the Betty White to Host SNL (please?)! group.

And in her opening Monologue, what started out as a seemingly genuine thank you to her fans on Facebook quickly turned into a rant about how Facebook is a waste of time.

 “I have so many people to thank for being here. But I really have to thank Facebook. When I first heard about the campaign to get me to host Saturday Night Live, I didn’t know what Facebook was. And now that I do know what it is, I have to say, it sounds like a huge waste of time. I would never say that people on it are losers, but that’s just because I’m polite.”

Did her remarks offend people? It doesn’t seem so. The comments on Twitter all seem very positive and fans raved about her performance tonight. This, so far, is an opposite response to when William Shatner hosted SNL in 1986 and in a sketch about a Star Trek convention told a group of “trekkies” to “get a life.” And back then, there was no Twitter to create an instant groundswell.

The best line in her monologue? “Needless to say, we didn’t have Facebook when I was growing up. We had Phonebook but you wouldn’t waste an afternoon on it.”

And using Google Insights for Search to help predict interest over time, it's clear that at 88.5 years old, Betty White has blasted off once again.

 

Facebook’s Platform Enhancements: The Implications for Brands

Among the mantras we live and breathe everyday at Hill Holliday are “all media is social media” and “everything’s connected.” Facebook’s latest platform enhancement, announced at the F8 developer conference, represent a promise to make our online experiences a lot more personalized and social through our inherent connections. And, quite simply, it all boils down to one very fundamental thing: What we “like”.

The platform enhancement makes it possible for 3^rd party sites to extend and embed an advanced form of Facebook’s “like” feature through two different vantage points:

1. Your specific likes: Sites become more personalized based on your interests.
2. Your friends’ likes: Sites can highlight content that your friends recommended.

Your Specific Likes:

There’s a very good reason why Facebook recently changed “becoming a fan” of a brand to “liking” a brand and helped to link your profile interests to even more “liked” pages. It’s consolidating all of your individual tastes & preferences into a standard and portable set of “likes” that, in effect, travel with you as you surf the web.

And so when I visited Pandora earlier this evening, the site (using Facebook’s new open graph protocol), was able to see that on Facebook I “like” the band Empire of the Sun and recommended that I create a Pandora station because of it.

From Facebook’s perspective, the more I build up what I “like”, the more I am defining my preferences and, therefore, I will be met with very personalized web experiences as more 3^rd party websites take advantage of the open graph protocol.

This is huge for brands who own content-rich websites in that visitors are apt to consume more content because it’s, by default, resonating with their individual preferences (without them having to do a thing except be logged into Facebook).

Your Friends’ Likes:

In a world of “info flood” it’s very natural that we are apt to be much more receptive to content that our Friend’s recommend. So now when I visit sites using Facebook’s new “activity feed”, like CNN.com, I am quickly met with recent articles my friends “like”.

And the bonus is that each time me or a friend “likes” an article on the CNN site, it also gets published to our Facebook news feeds, exposing the recommendation to our friends on Facebook and, now, when they also visit CNN.com. 

[Facebook was brilliant to leverage a simple and, now, commonly used low-barrier form of participation]

The average user clicks "Like" on nine pieces of content each month on Facebook, according to the company. So why not take something that’s become second nature to more than 400,000,000 people and embed it into their 3^rd party site experiences? Done.

As I visit sites like IMDB.com to, let's say, check out info on my favorite TV show, I can “like” it directly from the IMDB page. It not only gets broadcast to my Facebook friends, but also becomes part of my ever-growing list of personal preferences and, thus, better defining who I am.

What does this mean for Brands?

There are a number of implications for brands and marketers as a result of Facebook’s platform enhancements. Here are four outcomes you could have:

1. You’ve increased your brand’s content consumption by making it more receptive and relatable through friends’ recommendations.
2. You increased awareness and consideration because you’ve enabled your hottest products on your website to be “liked” and hence be discovered by non-site visitors within Facebook.
3. You increased online sales conversions because you served up opportunistic personalized items that speak directly to a site visitor’s “likes.”
4. You gain a new dimension of insights and customer/prospect intelligence based on site visitors' collective and common “likes.”

As human beings, there are things that we like and things that we don’t. The aggregate collection of what we like helps to define who we are. Each time I “like” something, I’m electing to express and share a personal preference. And because these preferences are now available in Facebook’s open graph protocol, brands have one more tool in their arsenal that enable them to speak to people not in generic masses, but more intimately as unique individuals.

This was originally posted on Hill Holliday's blog.