Digital Digest

The 5 Things You Need To Know This Week

5th Nov 2020 It’s no secret that merchants need to be where consumers are spending TikTok money, and at the moment, with its global scale able to reach new and highly engaged audiences, that money is being spent on TikTok. Partners With In the US last week, TikTok announced a new partnership with ecommerce platform Shopify, to assist US merchants with advertising on Shopify As the app. This union will give Shopify users access to core functions of the TikTok For Business Ads Manager, without requiring them to leave The Video Shopify's dashboard. This will enable merchants to create and manage TikTok campaigns using App Moves features like the video app's creative tools and one-click Ads Pixel. TikTok is offering merchants $300 in ad credits to help interested sellers get Further Into started. Social The partnership is a key development in TikTok's social commerce strategy. It helps TikTok build a foundation for future ecommerce activity on the app by creating a pathway to integrating Shopify's back-end Commerce functions, which include managing payments and logistics for online retailers.

This continued push toward social commerce comes ahead of a holiday season when consumers will be increasingly turning to social media for Read more here: shopping, https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktok- partnered-with-shopify-to-help-merchants-with- For now, Irish advertisers can only watch from afar, but should the new advertising-2020-10?r=US&IR=T strategy reach our shores in the near future, we can certainly expect https://www.globalcosmeticsnews.com/shopify- many SMB’s to follow suit and sell directly from the platform. That will announces-tiktok-partnership/ likely result in more competition for Facebook & Instagram and lead to better pricing at auction for advertisers on both. 1 User privacy and confidentiality has been an ongoing priority since the Microsoft General Data Protection Regulations were introduced to the EU. However, as digital advertisers, understanding the granularities of users' Launches online behaviours and trends has been challenging with these privacy laws in place (and rightly so!).

New, GDPR Microsoft identified the opportunity to find a new, innovative way to understand these online behaviours without breaching any privacy laws. Compliant They recently announced the new, GDPR compliant, analytics tool "Clarity" for marketeers and business owners. This tool helps publishers "Clarity" Tool obtain actionable data by analysing visitor interactions with their site. It provides specific engagement metrics and website performance analytics, all while respecting each visitor's privacy rights.

According to Microsoft; “We are GDPR compliant as a data controller for visitors to our site and processor for the data gathered by the Clarity script on your site.”

The pros for Irish advertisers? • There is no cap on your traffic analysis, whether you have 10 users or 1 million users on your site. Read more here: • It is designed to have low-impact on page loading times. • It's free – always a plus. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/microsoft- clarity-analytics/385867/#close • Clarity has 3 main features to track user behaviours: ➢ Session Playbacks: publishers can replay user page visits, playback cursor activity, follow the user clicks. ➢ Site Heatmap: this records where the users move across the site. This can be useful when optimising the website/user experience. ➢ Insights Dashboard: a hub that provides an overview of performance metrics and user behaviours. 2 With the US Justice Department’s Antitrust action against Google, Apple Search will this accelerate the plans Apple has to launch a new search Engine Looking engine? Looking at Apple's current tech setup, one could argue that Siri is a search engine. However it relies heavily on Google and Yelp. Users More And More can swipe right from the home screen to start a search. Apple typically presents Google results on top, which open in Safari as Likely indicated by the icons, followed by “Siri suggested websites”. These links send users directly to publisher sites and not through Google.

One of the major discussions in the DOJ Antitrust complaint against Google is about the iPhone default search deal. One of the potential outcomes of this case is the end of this deal, which is highly lucrative for both companies generating billions of dollars in ad clicks for Google and billions in services fees for Apple. Neither company would want to lose this deal.

However, if Apple do decide to invest in search as a strategic component of its mobile-user experience, it could win the hearts and minds of digital markets by applying transparency around their ranking models. Apple paid-search ads could be entirely privacy Read more here: friendly, heeding back to the early days of Google, but also allowing https://searchengineland.com/does-the-google-antitrust- them to generate revenue from paid search ads. case-make-an-apple-search-engine-more-likely-342971

From an Irish perspective, should an Apple Search Engine arrive at our fingertips, we can expect to see a shift in budget from Google and therefore we might see deflation in the search market due to more options available. Ultimately, that could lead to better performance for marketing budgets. 3 Snap has been on a wild ride as a public company. The first few years Snap’s Well after its 2017 public debut, the company was cursed with declining user growth, partially due to one of the most blatant copycat moves Timed, in tech history: Instagram Stories. Followed by the short-lived Spectacles experiment, which didn’t help.

Pandemic- With advertisers cutting spending, the pandemic looked to worsen things. But more time at home has meant more time for devices, and Snapchat daily active users worldwide Induced with big advertisers leaving Facebook this summer, Snap was primed Q1 2014 – Q2 2020, millions to benefit. And so it did. Last week Snap reported +52% YoY revenue Comeback growth, with a +18% YoY uptick in daily active users, to roughly 250m.

Snap has been building a beast right before our eyes. At the June 2020 Snap Partner Summit, one investor noted that Snap reaches 75% of the US population between ages 13-34, totalling 78m users – more than Instagram or Facebook. They also highlighted Snap’s impressive engagement, with Snap Kit, camera AR and Snapchat Discover all bringing in over 100m users daily. Snapchat has been working on these features in the background for years, and it clearly paid off. Read more here: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/21/snap-results-signal- an-online-advertising-bonanza-for-tech-companies.html In Snap’s latest earnings report, CEO Evan Spiegel suggests this is the beginning of a ‘recovery from brand advertisers’. This is great news for other smaller social networks too: Pinterest (+20%) and Twitter (+10%) were both up last week.

Snap’s results signal advertisers’ spending behaviour on platforms outside of the behemoths of Facebook and Google. The big guys might never be knocked off their podium, but can smaller social media companies sustain their newfound growth? Stay tuned. 4 Following the lead of Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox, this Cookie-less January Google announced the end of support for third-party cookies in Chrome by 2022. It’s a big move towards addressing privacy concerns using technology that originated 25 years ago. World: Lotame However, this means that cookies will become obsolete and advertisers will have to find a new way to be able to target Unveils The First consumers across the web. The IAB’s Socioeconomic Impact of Internet Tracking February 2020 report found that if digital tracking ended without a replacement, “there would be a shift of Global Cookieless between $32 billion and $39 billion of advertising from the open Identity Solution web to the walled gardens by 2025.” This triggered all major ad tech players to find a solution that will replace cookies to enable advertisers to target and optimise digital campaigns.

Last week Lotame, one of the leading global providers of data enrichment solutions, announced the launch of Lotame Panorama ID, a people-based identity solution for a cookie-less open web. Best of all, the solution is freely accessible to all digital advertisers.

The Lotame identity solution allows publishers and marketers to: • Protect consumer privacy • Increase ad targeting accuracy and scale Read more here: • Effectively measure campaigns • Frequency cap by individual https://www.lotame.com/lotame-unveils-panorama-id-the-first- • Increase revenue beyond contextual targeting global-cookieless-identity-solution-for-a-privacy-first-open-web/ https://www.lotame.com/panorama/id/ Unfortunately, Ireland is a small market and there’s usually not enough 3rd party data available from likes of Lotame. However this is a step forward for ensuring that advertisers will still be able to run and measure digital campaigns outside of Google and Facebook. 5 Big news just in….Baby Shark has just become the most Bonus Material: watched video of all time on YouTube and most likely the Baby Shark internet! In a pandemic striken year that has witnessed a multitude of kid-friendly, adult terrorizing music videos, none have been Becomes The quite as successful as the craze for “Baby Shark.”

Most-viewed Released in 2015 by South Korean educational company , Baby Shark is incredibly catchy, and the YouTube Video lyrics and dance moves are easy to memorize. Of All Time, And The Baby Shark music video on has now crossed 7.063 billion views — overtaking other strong players such as and Daddy Yankee’s “” (7.042 billion) and There’s No End In Ed Sheerans “Shape of You” (5.050 billion) to become the most- Sight watched YouTube video ever. As Vox reported, the song became popular in Indonesia in 2017, with #babysharkchallenge eventually becoming a TikTok trend in 2018, accompanied by a popular remix of the song. Read more here: From there, the song started popping up everywhere online, with K-pop stars championing it on a variety shows and James https://www.theverge.com/21546350/baby-shark-youtube- Corden featuring it on “The Late Late Show.” video-most-popular-despacito-masha https://www.insider.com/baby-shark-video-dance-most- What’s more, experts believe that Baby Shark hasn’t even come viewed-youtube-video-history-record-2020-11 close to peaking yet, with it appearing to have a totally different trajectory than any of the big music video hits. Will Baby Shark be the first youtube video in history to break the 10 billion mark? We’ll just have to wait and sea… 5 Stay tuned for more updates! If you have any questions or feedback please contact your Core media planning team directly.

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