Healthcare is undergoing a transformation. Consumers want to make informed choices and take control of their lives, and pharma companies must be ready to meet their needs. This means building a new healthcare ecosystem that places the patient at its center, with the “person” fully engaged in his or her own healthcare. But with this move to person-centric healthcare, payers and providers are no longer the main decision makers.

So what does this mean for today’s marketers?

Last week, Ogilvy CommonHealth and OgilvyRED held the Worldwide Marketing Summit to address this question. Joined by some of the industry’s foremost thought leaders, the event explored the issues and challenges faced in modern marketing for the healthcare industry.

In this webinar, Ritesh Patel EVP and Chief Digital Officer at Ogilvy CommonHealth, and Peter Fasano, Global Consulting Principal of Digital Strategy at OgilvyRED, will share key takeaways from the event as we discuss:

• Where marketing is failing to address healthcare concerns
• How “big data” is a change-driver for a new healthcare ecosystem
• New opportunities for predictive and preventative medical intervention
• Impact of digital healthcare on patient privacy

Join the discussion this week at these times:

• Thursday, 1st of October @ 1pm BST: http://bit.ly/EAME_PCHC
• Friday, 2nd of October @ 1pm EST: http://bit.ly/AMER_PCHC

Even if you can’t make it to the session, sign up anyway for a copy of the deck.

See you on the webinar!

Last week was a busy one! Stealing the headlines were the Papal visit and last night’s Blood Orange Moon, which we totally thought was a Halloween-inspired cocktail last week when the media started preparing us. (And that’s because it is. Thank you internet.) In other news:

• Ad revenue per user is how platforms are monetizing YOU
• Did the Christmas lights at Target this weekend freak you out? Blame Pinterest.
• Periscope is not a fad

Have a wonderful last few day’s of [OMG] September!

Twitter

Best Practices for Promoted Video

A new study by Twitter explores best practices for promoting a video on their platform. This includes humanizing your first impression, highlighting product value, aim to entertain, structure your storytelling and leverage the power of influencers. For the full report, click here.

Instagram

And the second runner up is…

Instagram has officially surpassed Twitter in users! Just this week, Instagram has announced that they have 400 million users. That’s plenty of selfies, food photos, and TBTs for all to see. If there’s a place for your client on Instagram and they aren’t already there, now’s the time.

Twitch

Since they claim YouTube Gaming ripped them off, spotlight please

When YouTube announced its new gaming-focused livestreaming program, YouTube Gaming, Twitch SVP of Marketing Matthew DiPietro released a statement reminding everyone that his company did it first. And, following YouTube Gaming’s robust, feature-laden launch, Twitch needed a serious update. Now, as announced at the first-ever TwitchCon keynote address, it’s getting exactly that. Source. [Key takeaway: TwitchCon is a thing.]

Facebook

Congratulations! You’re Going to Make More Money for Facebook!

Facebook, like other social networks, makes the bulk of its money from advertising, and last quarter, each U.S. Facebook user generated $9.30 for the company, $8.63 of which came from advertising. Research firm eMarketer predicts Facebook’s ad revenue per user will increase more than 37 percent over the next two years, and as much as 50 percent for U.S. users.

There are really two main ways for Facebook to increase your value. It can either increase its ad volume (i.e. show you more ads) or it can start charging marketers more money for the ads it already shows you. In Facebook’s case, there’s a good chance it’ll be a little bit of both. Facebook isn’t the only place where your stock is rising. Twitter’s ad revenue per user globally is expected to grow, too, by more than 62 percent in the next two years. Again, more ads and more expensive ads are likely on the way. – re/code

Pinterest 

Pin The Halls: 38 Million Pinterest Users Save 92 Million Holiday Pins

October is almost here and before we know it Christmas will be over. Just kidding. However, Pinterest hasn’t delayed pushing Holiday Pins. After a recent analysis of their 2013-2014 holiday season, pinners start pinning holiday themed content around September 1st.  Over 92 million holiday pins were saved and 43% of those pinners were millenials. Check out the rest of the infographic here.

Snapchat

Vertical Video Pays Off For Snapchat

According to Snapchat’s head of content, vertical videos have seen a 9 times higher engagement rate than horizontal video. Watching video is so popular that one Snapchat production company has even built a customized vertical kitchen. Snapchat continues to adapt to their audience’s behavior rather than try and change it.

BuzzFeed

BuzzFeed, Denied Credentials For Pope Visit

The Archdiocese of D.C. have been denying BuzzFeed reporter, Lester Feder, to cover the Pope’s visit since January. BuzzFeed News believes it is because a spokesman of Cardinal Donald Wuerl doesn’t approve of BuzzFeed’s coverage of LGBT issues. However, Feder, has reported inside the Vatican, covered the White House and Congress, and reported in 25 Countries. Source.

LinkedIn

Did you notice that SlideShare is called LinkedIn SlideShare? 

If not, you’re not the only one.  The name change happened subtly a few weeks ago, coming about three years after its acquisition by LinkedIn.  Don’t expect huge changes to come with this rebranding, but one difference is that SlideShare users should be able to more easily access the profiles of people who post slide presentations and quickly get more background information. More from LinkedIn’s marketing blog here.

Periscope

Now You Can See If Someone Screenshots Your Periscope Broadcasts

Periscope released an update today for iOS users that lets you see if people are taking screenshots of your videos. Read More

The White House Joins Periscope and Broadcasts Pope’s Visit

The White House used Periscope to live broadcast Pope Francis stepping off his plane and greeting the Obama family. More than 11,000 viewers tuned into the White House’s inaugural stream. Read More

Web Profiles for Periscopers

Periscope web profiles are finally here! Read More

Compiled by our West Region strategists including Melanie Taylor, Cameron Joye, Toby Phillips, Laura Graham,Austin DeArman, Lindsey Mills, Kate Acker, and Lauren Wesche.

1. State the Purpose

First and foremost, a good policy will address the why, who, and what:

• WHY does this policy exist? Provide context around the brand’s social media activities and explain the importance of social media in supporting the broader communications and business objectives.

• WHO is the policy for? Outline teams and individual who may engage in social media on the brand’s behalf and that are required to know the policy.

• WHAT will those persons gain from reading the policy? State the key takeaways and how having this policy will help individuals in their day-to-day activities.

2. Define the Responsibility

• It is imperative to set the expectations for those engaging in social media on behalf of the brand.

• Persons who represent the brand, either individually or as the face of the brand, must know that they are taking responsibility for what they write and need to exercise good judgment and common sense.

• Make clear the expectations and potential outcomes should they not be met.

3. Set the Standards

• While at times there may be gray areas regarding what a brand can or cannot do in social media, it is always best to comply with the strictest standards. For example, healthcare brands who must comply with FDA marketing standards should outline this in their social media policy and instruct readers where to find a more information on FDA guidelines.

• Setting the rule for which standards must be met will reduce the risk of the appropriateness of actions being left to individual interpretation.

4. Establish Guidelines

• Providing guidelines around proper social media ethics will ensure that those engaging on behalf of the brand will always act in the brand’s best interest and in an way acceptable to those with whom they are engaging.

• Five key areas to be covered include:
  • Transparency about who is acting on behalf of the brand
  • How to correct mistakes openly, rather than trying to sneak edits past fans
  • Proper grounds and process for removing posts
  • Crediting work by others and avoiding illegal use of copyrighted material
  • Offering a value exchange to fans and influencers engaging with the brand

5. Plan Distribution

• However clear a social media policy may be, it is of no use unless employees are provided with the proper training and resources to become comfortable with the policy.

• Creating a distribution plan is important to providing ample opportunity for employees to learn and ask questions about the policy. As well, looking for ways to emphasize its importance will encourage employees to familiarize themselves with the policy.

• Brands may consider distribution through:
  • Internal communication channels (newsletters, regular email updates)
  • Online and/or in-person training sessions
  • Incorporating the social media policy into company guidelines manuals and/or onboarding materials
  • Communications from upper managing showing their support of the policy and emphasizing its importance

• Facebook is trying to make Google obsolete for journalists
• Learn what a Cashmoji is
• Snapchat makes it way easier to vomit rainbows – in an fun way
• Pinterest is HUGE

Facebook

Facebook Tries to Lure Journalists Away From Twitter

Facebook is hoping to make it easier for reporters to surface and follow news on Facebook and Instagram as well as track down users’ reactions, photos, and videos related to news, sports, and entertainment. And now it’s created a free news gathering tool called Signal to help journalists do just that. Signal offers a dashboard where journalists can follow trending and emerging topics, track chatter around public figures on a leaderboard, and search to find public conversations, photos, or videos. Reporters can seek out stories and sources via hashtag or location on both Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram. – Wired

Twitter

The Rise of the Cashmoji

Before today, you may have seen custom emojis on Twitter created specifically for special events like the VMAs and the release of the new Star Wars film. But Twitter got smart and realized that pretty much everyone wants their own emoji (duh), and they’ve decided to monetize. Starting with Coca Cola and the #ShareACoke hashtag/custom emoji that started trending on Twitter the day it was released. How much does a custom emoji ad campaign cost? We’ll likely know soon, but for now check out this Tech Crunch interview about the future of the Cashmoji.  [here’s to hoping they rename that soon]

PLUS:

With the 2016 election heating up, Twitter users can now make donations to their favorite presidential candidates in a tweet via a partnership with Square.

AND:

Mobile devices represent 60% of browsing traffic for shopping sites, but only 15% of purchases. This week, Twitter launched a partnership with the new API, Relay, to allow stores to publish their products directly in your newsfeed for instant purchase. Check out the announcement article from Relay/Stripe here.

Snapchat

A Whole New Way To See Yourself(ie)

If your Snapchat Feed was filled with people puking rainbows and aging 70 years, you’ve heard about Snapchat’s latest update. When you’re using the camera to take a selfie, press and hold on your face to activate the different lenses.  The second new feature to the update includes the option to purchase extra Replays. Lastly, you will be rewarded a Trophy when completing Snapchat milestones, such as 50,000 Snaps. Blog. 

Here’s a great POV from Social@Ogilvy highlighting how brands can use these features.

LinkedIn

New Messaging Experience Comes to LinkedIn, Finally

You’ve probably realized that messaging is the cool new thing for social platforms (Facebook Messenger, longer DMs in Twitter). Now LinkedIn is joining the fun. They’ve been rolling out a new messaging experience that is supposed to feel more like a “chat-style” interface. They’ll also soon start letting you add stickers, emojis and GIFs — although, you may want to think twice before sending a winky-face emoji to a new business prospect. More details from the LinkedIn blog. 

Pinterest

Pinterest Hits 100 Million Users

Pinterest announced it crossed the threshold of 100 million monthly active users. In the last 18 months the number of searches on its service increased 81%. Buyable Pins are the site’s newest feature. Of Pinterest’s 50 billion pins, 30 million are buyable. Advertisers have found that Pinterest’s average customer coming from Pinterest spends 50% more than regular customers.Read more.

Periscope

Periscope Has Introduced Web Profiles

The social platform has recently hit the 10,000,000 users milestone. In order to keep the growth going, Periscope created web profiles.  The web profiles could help create a little more engagement for desktop users. Source.

BuzzFeed

How Google Glitch Propelled BuzzFeed Into a $1.5 Billion Company

In a recent Recode Interview, BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti shared stories of the company’s early days. One of these stories included a scare that took away all of the company’s search traffic. Relying on Google to drive search traffic and social simultaneously turned out to be a huge mistake. There was a bug that Google thought BuzzFeed was promoting malware when it embedded videos. BuzzFeed forgot Google and turned all their focus to social media. They now dominate social media and are a $1.5 billion company. Source

Tumblr

Nescafé Declares the Brand Website ‘Dead’ As It Moves to Tumblr

Nestlé, one of the giants of the food industry, is trying hard to present a human face to its operations and products, and its latest move has been to convert its Nescafé.com website into a Tumblr blog. Read More

Compiled by our West Region strategists including Melanie Taylor, Cameron Joye, Toby Phillips, Laura Graham,Austin DeArman, Lindsey Mills, Kate Acker, and Lauren Wesche.

Snapchat Replay

What’s new?

• US Users can now buy snap replays, but still can’t replay any individual snap one more than once.
• Three snaps will cost US$0.99.
• Pay for Replay is an extension of a feature Snapchat introduced approximately two years ago. They said on their blog, “”We’ve provided one Replay per Snapchatter per day, sometimes frustrating the millions of Snapchatters who receive many daily Snaps deserving of a Replay. But then we realized — a Replay is like a compliment! So why stop at just one?”
• The feature may be a little pricey (as Snapchat said on their blog) but they feel users will want a more customized experience on their favorite app.

Why should a brand care about Pay for Replay?

Replays are Snapchat’s first foray into monetizing the app from users. They have been working with select brands for sponsored content and advertising but this is a new monetization avenue for the app which potentially decreases reliance on brand partnerships.

The feature has the potential to increase engagement with your content – if consumers feel it is worth paying for!

How should brands use Pay for Replay?

Create content that is so compelling people will want to pay to watch it a second time. However, note that brands aren’t technically supposed to have Snapchat accounts according to the Ts&Cs so create an account with caution.

Snapchat Lenses

What’s new?

• When taking a selfie, Lenses lets users choose one of several face filters (e.g. heart eyes, rainbow vomit, wrinkles) that can distort or add to the picture. New lenses will rotate in every day.
• The lenses show automatically when the app is in selfie mode, and a user presses and holds on the screen.
• The functionality feels similar to Photo Booth on Mac computers.

Why should a brand care about Lenses?

Lenses will likely increase Millennial ‘stickiness’ with Snapchat. If your brand is targeting young people ensure you have a compelling branded presence (via sponsored content, Stories, user account etc) on this platform if you don’t already.

How should brands use Lenses?

If your brand has a user account then consider how you could play with these filters to create more engaging content. For example, a fashion brand could engage an influencer to use the ‘heart eyes lens’ to create a ‘looks I love at NYFW’ Snapchat story by stitching the selfies together with other video/photo content; or skincare brands could have some fun with the aging filter.

Mountain Dew was the first brand to experiment – see example on the right – to appeal to young males.

Using these filters shows your brand knows the platform and creates a deeper, more trusted connection with your audience.

Note that brands aren’t technically supposed to have Snapchat accounts according to the Ts&Cs so create an account with caution.

Statistics Source: Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel at Re/code Conference in May 2015

For many brands, collecting likes and fostering engagement by any means necessary is a sign of a successful social media program. But if you dig deeper into these metrics, what do they actually mean? What is driving the actions? Are they taken by true brand advocates? Are the engagements contributing to the business’s bottom line?

A recent study conducted in partnership with SurveyMonkey has uncovered valuable insights into how to cultivate advocacy. With over 5,000 respondents from 11 countries, the results map how to build relevance and trust and drive forward a brand, business, and reputation around the globe.

In this webinar we welcome Bennett Porter, VP of Marketing Communications at SurveyMonkey, who will join us to dive into the survey’s findings as we answer:

• Who interacts most with brands online?
• Why do people engage with brands?
• What is the difference between a “sharer” and a “promoter”?
• Where is brand advocacy strongest?
• How do brands cultivate advocacy?

View the presentation from the webinar below. And if you’d like to sign up to receive notifications of future webinars register here.

But of course there was also news around the non-stop innovation at social platforms:

• Periscope had the best week ever
• Snapchat proved that tweens don’t need their MTV on TV
• Learn how a “Prepper” can help you build that bomb shelter you’ve been considering

Facebook

Facebook Adds a ‘Shop’ Section to Pages

In its quest to keep people within the site, Facebook introduced a new sections to pages, called Shop and Services. With the new sections of Shop and Services, small business pages can display what they have for sale, or what services the businesses offer. Wait, your client doesn’t count as a small business? Stayed tuned, Facebook plans to build out similar sections in the future, so other types of business pages can have new ways to connect with customers.

There are more than 45 million small businesses using Facebook pages. Pages are growing at a rate of roughly 1 million per month. – Source

Twitter

Twitter Opens Advertising in 167 More Countries

If geo-targeting for your Promoted Tweets campaign was too limited before, that might be changing now. Twitter now serves ads to more than 200 countries from 100,000 active advertisers. Check out the new advancements that could effect your next campaign. >>Read More

Plus: 16 Twitter Accounts That Will Make You Smarter

Snapchat

Snapchat proved a worthy second screen for MTV’s Video Music Awards:

12 million people watched the Snapchat Live Story from VMAs, technically exceeding the actual ratings of the broadcast and showing why brands are supporting alternative viewing options.

On TV, 9.8 million people tuned in, which represents the average viewership over the course of the broadcast, not necessarily the full tally of everyone who caught a portion of the show. On Snapchat, the average Live Story viewer watched for about three minutes, according to sources.

Source: digiday

Instagram 

These Are the Winners of the First Instagram Grants

Getty Images launched three $10,000 grants to support the work  of Instagram photographers. Each of the photographers’ styles were unique as they came from all over: Mexico, Russia, and Bangladesh. The three will also receive a mentorship from Getty Images Photography.

Because this some how feels important… Taylor Swift is officially the most followed person on Instagram with 45.5MM social media fans. Our condolences to Kim. [PS – IT IS IMPORTANT]

Tumblr

Tumblr Finally Makes “Reblogs” More Readable, Especially on Mobile Devices

One of blogging site Tumblr’s flagship features, the reblog – meaning the reposting of another person’s content onto your own site – is getting a significant makeover. Read More

Periscope

Periscope Headed to Apple TV – and Enables Landscape View [APPLAUSE]

It was a big week for Periscope. On Wednesday they were part of the Apple presentation teasing out their integration with the new Apple TV so basically you can watch Periscope broadcasts on your TV (we’ll never be bored again). And ahead of that existing in October, they released an update to the app yesterday which allowed for landscape view (just hold your camera sideways), Facebook connectivity, the sharing the link of the broadcast and to replay a video that’s complete. [What did you do this week?] Source.

Meerkat

Meerkat Now Lets You Download Saved Streams to Your Computer

Not as impressive as Periscope’s week, but still showing evolution, Meerkat announced that users who save video streams they record can now log in to the app on the Web and download those streams. From there, it’s possible to watch streams offline — or upload them to other websites. Read More

Pinterest

Inside the Fascinating, Bizarre World of ‘Prepper Pinterest’

Pinterest has a new and quite different demographic, “Preppers.” They are considered avid DIY-ers, life hackers, and even give their tips for doomsday preparation. The total volume for prepper pins are up 87%. If you’re wondering what to do during a natural disaster, after job loss, or stock market crash, preppers have your answer! Check it out  

Compiled by our West Region strategists including Melanie Taylor, Cameron Joye, Toby Phillips, Laura Graham,Austin DeArman, Lindsey Mills, Kate Acker, and Lauren Wesche.

For some time now, brands and agencies have used “community management” as a catch all for any communication over a social media site. As a result reporting back performance to the rest of the business (let alone senior leadership) has been a murky affair with “likes”, “comments” or “engagement” being used to justify spend. In other words, in the absence of clarity, performance has been measured in terms of platform, not business result because the platform “Likes” were easy, they were right there on the front page of Facebook.

About 18 months ago we embarked on a program to make sense of this mess. We analysed the conversations happening in the 1,400 communities we managed globally on all the major platforms and what we realised was there was a plethora of different reasons people came to talk to brands, and most of them weren’t about campaigns brands were running or to “participate in the community”. People are quite practical and typically come to brands in social to ask about products, get help with products or complain. In fact, we found that with some variance by market and platform, about 50% of the conversations were customer service conversations. This finding has been corroborated by public data numerous times since then.

The other business significant conversations included: business leads, product feedback / development requests and of course campaign related discussion.

So underneath the conflation that is “community management” there were very real business needs that required addressing from some very different skill sets.

Furthermore, often, the community management team are not incentivised, trained or supplied with the systems to manage customers. So they do what they’re resourced to do which is answer the question in a way that minimises the likelihood of an escalation and then they move on. Understanding the customer profile, enriching a customer database and up/cross-selling is not the priority. So in many cases, people have approached brand pages in the early stages of purchase consideration for information but the opportunity isn’t capitalised.

Once the problem is properly defined it can be addressed. What we call “community management” today is actually four main activities:

1. Moderation
2. Customer Service
3. Content publishing
4. Campaign management

For the sake of a sensible word count, I’ll talk about the first two.

Moderation

When someone first posts to a brand page, we need to make sense of it, beyond simply flicking it to another department, it’s important to understand:

• Is it a question, request or complaint?
• Is this about an existing case? Perhaps from another channel or medium? E.g., Did they call first but then get stuck on hold and are now furiously tweeting?
• Are they a VIP?
• Are they a customer or prospect?
• Is the post within community guidelines?
• Is any private data available?

These are some of the key factors we’ll need to look at but we also code specifically for client and client department e.g., customer service, PR, marketing, product may all have different data needs. Once conversations are coded this way, we can pump the data into our client’s existing business intelligence tools (SAP, Business Objects, Microsoft Dynamics) or any number of dashboards for business reporting. But more importantly, when the case gets passed to the right department for handling, they have the information they need. Also note, that we look at these not as posts, but as cases, which is customer service lexicon that is a better description of what they are.

This whole process is the Moderation or “tagging and flagging” as we call it.

Customer Service

Once the case has been moderated, it gets moved over to one of our social care centres (call centres that are specialised around social / digital rather than phone calls) or our client’s contact centres for resolution. These guys and gals have access to the customer data including: profile, bank records or phone records and resolve the case with the customer. The agents have access all of the conversations we’ve had with the customer regardless of channel.

This is all well and good, but adoption wouldn’t be taken up so rapidly without tangible results so what’s the deal?

Well, the publicly available Twitter data quotes “Customer service at one-sixth” the cost of a call center interaction. We can verify that for most of our clients (telecommunications carriers, cable TV providers, banks and airlines) social care delivers a higher customer satisfaction score with a 75% lower delivery cost than traditional channels.

If you’d like to learn more about Social Care for your brand, reach out to jonathan.nguyen@ogilvy.com or evan.shumeyko@ogilvy.com.

About Those GIFs

GIFs really started infiltrating pop culture when netizens began slicing up iconic moments from TV shows and films, and sharing it with their friends. It quickly gained popularity as people can relate to that singular moment, and sharing it with their friends is like sharing an inside joke, over and over again. Just like emoticons, it has slowly evolved into a way to express yourself on the internet.

Tumblr was one of the first platforms to truly embrace GIFs, and have since been the ruler of GIF sharing. When you land on the explore page, you’ll see “GIF” show up as one of the top tags. Google launched a separate GIF filter in their search engine for you to search specific animated images related to their search tags. Facebook finally introduced GIFs into their posts in May this year, allowing users to leave GIFs in comments or a post without ever actually leaving Facebook. They also allow these GIFs to autoplay as you scroll past, just like a video post would.

Apps like PHHHOTO creates instant GIFs for you to share on all your social channels, and others like PopKey can be downloaded to function as a keyboard on your iPhones to seamlessly add GIFs when you text your friends.

The Dawn of Cinemagraphs

If you haven’t heard by now, cinemagraphs are all the rage. Its file format is still .gif, but it is conceptually different from actual GIFs.

The term “cinemagraph” was coined by photographers Kevin Burg and Jamie Beck in 2011. They were the first photographers to really put cinemagraphs on the map through their stunningly beautiful fashion photography in conjunction with model, Coco Rocha.

Cinemagraph is the rendering of an image and a video together, where only part of the image is animated, and the rest remains static. It loops seamlessly, and its purpose is to create a surreal image, as though the image was a frozen moment in time.

GIFs vs. Cinemagraphs

First, here’s a side-by-side comparison of the two:

So when should we use GIFs and when should we use cinemagraphs? And what’s the difference between them?

If you’re feeling a little overwhelmed, here are a few tips to help you out!

So start immersing yourselves in GIF-dom, because I reckon it’s here to stay for a while.

Share your favorite GIFs and cinemagraphs in the comments below!

We survived the longest August EVER – at least in terms of Mondays and Fridays – and good news, the Internet did too. Despite Donald Trump, Kanye West and the Chinese economy. Social platforms continue to evolve per usual. Some highlights:

• Instagram breaks out of it’s square – no matter how much you might like it
• YouTube is moving past Minecraft player videos into true gaming
• Google is so not antitrust-worthy

Have a great week and a better holiday weekend!

Instagram

NEW FILTERS AND LANDSCAPE?!

Instagram has FINALLY given us the ability to post landscape and portraits rather than just squares…but that’ll change you’re whole portfolio presentation, won’t it?! Not to fear, everybody’s doing it. And there are new filters to help uniformity.  No more tyranny of the square.

Implications: Creative freedom, more professional profiles/portfolios for photographers to display their expertise, and video quality will increase when importing full scale videos filmed on your phone.

YouTube

Gaming

Twitch is about to meet its match with YouTube gaming making interactive gaming more accessible. On top of video, music, and content, the digital giant has now presented a Netflix-style gaming solution. The first problem: organization. It’s hard to browse and discover new games without sifting through hundreds of games in categorical order. This is a clear problem that will likely be addressed quickly.

Side-learning: Don’t be a cofounder of a major digital site and violate an NDA with KimYe.

Tumblr

Yahoo Announces New Tumblr Sharing Tools And Native Video Ads For Developers

Tumblr In-App Sharing is basically a Tumblr share button, but for mobile apps rather than websites. Users can now share the photos and collages that they’ve created in PicsArt, directly from the app into Tumblr. Read More

Google

Google Finally Responds to Europe’s Antitrust Charges

This week, Google made it clear it would not back down against the anti-trust charges slapped on it by EU regulators earlier this year. The EU says Google uses its no. 1 status in online search to undermine competitors in related businesses. Example: if you Google something, it might not rank Amazon shopping ads very high in its results. Google officially responded for the first time, saying the “conclusions are wrong as a matter of fact, law and economics.” This is one of the biggest anti-trust cases in years. If Google loses, it could have to pay billions in fines and change how it does business. Don’t expect a resolution any time soon. This case will likely drag on for years.
More

BuzzFeed: OUR NEW PARTNER!

The Perks BuzzFeed and WPP Will Get Partnering With Each Other 

GroupM (WPP’s media buying arm) and BuzzFeed announced a one-year partnership. This union is a match made in heaven and no agency has had access to this much data before. BuzzFeed looks to gain insights on how branded content spreads through digital networks and messaging. BuzzFeed will also benefit from WPP’s extensive client list and continue to expand their audience. Read More.

Facebook

Facebook Periscope Competitor, Live, Should Be Widely Available Soon

Facebook’s version of the real-time video streaming app will no longer be exclusive to celebrities. However, only verified profiles will be able to utilize the app. Fans will be able to leave their real-time comments. [Sucks to be a commoner.]

Snapchat

Snapchat Is Adding Three New Publishers But Won’t Cut Old Ones

The newest publishers to Snapchat’s Discover section are: Mashable, IGN (A Gaming Publication) and Tastemade (A Food and Travel Network). Not cutting any previous publishers makes sense for one very simple reason: revenue. With a total of 15 publishers, Snapchat will continue to make profit selling ad space. Read on. Speaking of that ad space… According to DigiDay  Snapchat is charging brands for video ads viewed less than a second.

Compiled by our West Region strategists including Melanie Taylor, Cameron Joye, Toby Phillips, Laura Graham,Austin DeArman, Lindsey Mills, Kate Acker, Pam Franklin, and Lauren Wesche.