Snapchat recently posted a blog where they reflected on their performance. It was separated into three sections: its recent upsurge in engagements, how the coronavirus has caused its users to shift their priorities and using habits, and finally the blog focused on the resources that Snap Inc., Snapchat’s parent company, is using to keep the public informed about the pandemic.

Big gains

They stated how that as coronavirus has developed and the crisis has worsened how the number of Snaps that were being sent was at an all-time high as a result. It has exceeded the levels usually reserved for the major holidays like Christmas. Apparently, group chat engagements have also reached record highs.

It isn’t just those features on the rise, either. Remarkably voice calling is up by fifty percent based on last month. And additionally, the company revealed that these conversations often incorporated AR.

Snap games grow

Snap games are also enjoying an increase in popularity. The function that debuted last April features multiplayer games that take advantage of voice and chat features. The company has also highlighted that people are using their AR lenses far more than they have previously with an increase of twenty-five percent compared to this time in February.

In terms of the applications video functionality, people watching videos has peaked as well. Interestingly the app has seen an increase in engagement on their news, gaming and health wellness sections.

Massive rise

The numbers aren’t small either. The company revealed that it had produced almost 500 stories or shows about the coronavirus pandemic and that content has been viewed by more than 68 million people across the globe. It’s even more interesting when you dissect the demographics to see that almost half of the people classed as Generation Z in the United States had viewed Covid-19 content on Snapchat.

Ad growth

The company has seen an upturn in ad engagements too. Figures suggest that there is a whopping thirty six percent increase in people downloading apps following watching ads, with a nineteen percent increase in right swipes in march compared to the previous month. The company reported that in general news and financial sites are seeing massive increases in activity, along with trading and equity apps. Perhaps unsurprisingly the use of online stores has increased drastically with people trying to avoid going out where they can. This has seen an increase in spends in areas such as leisure and pet supplies.

Self promotion

The company said in its blog post, “Our top priority is ensuring that Snapchatters have the resources they need to stay informed.”

Snap referred to it’s Discover content platform which is proving massively popular at the moment. They were quick to highlight that they carefully curate their content to make sure it is all fact-checked and verified. They also highlighted how they were working closely with trusted news organisations and the World Health Organisation.

Mental health

Also mentioned its blog was the long-awaited arrival of their, Here for You feature. This appears when users search for topics like depression, anxiety and related topics. When they do this they are presented with a range of content issued by the WHO to provide the best possible advice that they can.

Previously, Google Ad Manager (the company formerly known as Ad Exchange or Adx) operated on a second-price auction model – which essentially meant that a winning bidder would pay only incrementally more than the next highest bid, rather than the value of the bid itself.

For example, if a company was to bid $1 for an ad and another company was to bid $2 for the same ad, under second-price auction rules the latter company would only have to pay $1.10. Under first-price auction rules, however, the latter company would be paying its committed $2.

According to Sam Cox, group product manager for Google Ad Manager, the transition to first-price auctioning is expected to be completed by the end of the year. “By switching to a single first price auction, we can help reduce complexity and create a fair and transparent market for everyone,” wrote Cox on the topic.

“With this change, every offer from programmatic buyers will compete in the same unified auction, alongside inventory which is directly negotiated with advertisers.”

The shift in maintaining a new model means that Google’s auctioning system will now align with its peers ad markets, with OpenX, Rubicon Project and Index Exchange transitioning to first-price auction systems.

The modern programmatic ecosystem, according to Cox, has evolved into an overly complex system, with single ads passing through a variety of auctions with different sets of rules.

Cox also went on to explain, “This complexity has made it difficult for advertisers and agencies to properly value programmatic inventory and it has driven our publishers and app developers to implement increasingly complicated ad monetisation strategies, reducing transparency across the industry.

“Further, the increasing intricacy of programmatic has made it operationally very difficult, even for experts, to determine what’s going well and what needs to be improved.”

The shift is expected to have a significant impact on the programmatic landscape, with many demand-side platforms not optimise to operate on first-price auction rules.

Michael Connolly, CEO of adtech platform Sonobi (used exclusively by publishers) told AdAge, “The challenge here is the demand side is not set up to bid this way.

“Demand side platforms have invested a lot of money in algorithms and machine learning to figure out bidding strategies that fit in a second price environment. To switch it to first price will require some adjustment.”

Late last year, Google also announced a number of new Google Ads features for consumers to potentially utilise in 2020.

This year, Google set out to combine the intent of search with a more interactive and visual ad format. Gallery ads allow advertisers to combine compelling images and copy to serve prospects their offering on the search network.

Like Discovery ads, Gallery ads exist in the carousel format and allow consumers to seamlessly swipe through your image creative. Unlike Discovery ads, they sit at the top of the search results page. That means advertisers now have the ability to not only show ads to prospects at the precise moment they’re searching for keywords related to their products or services; but show those same prospects the kind of legitimately immersive image creative that is going to induce clicks. As for the specs, Gallery ads let advertisers feature:

• Between 4 and 8 images
• A 70-character tagline with each image
• Up to 3 headlines (for CTA experimentation!)

On average, campaigns that leverage Gallery ads have experienced an increase in user interactions of up to 25%.

For starters, their marketing team at Battersea needed an overhaul. Their application process was almost medieval. They also had a much outdated social media presence. In the modern world, this is one of the main ways a company connects with its clients.

Once they set about reinventing how the company operates they came it at with a three-pronged approach. The ultimate aim was to digitalise their entire service. Since taking that tack there is technology at the heart of the charity. So impressive was their transformation that it saw them pick up the coveted Digital Transformation of the Year at the Marketing Week Masters awards. A big achievement for a company that was miles from paperless a couple of years ago.

First steps

The first steps that the company took was to start to update its communication systems. Their newsletter moved to an online format, and their rehousing application moved that way too. They also began using search engine optimisation on their website to make sure they appeared on the front page of google and therefore were able to get pet tips to the entire country.

Adverting is king

The company then began its second phase. It started to look at its marketing strategy and in particular its advertising. They introduced an always-on strategy which meant that they were able to communicate their message to the people who needed it, exactly when they needed it. This radical approach, that put the user at the forefront of the experience, represented a massive change from the approach the company had taken in the past where they had broadcast static messages to their entire audience, instead of using targeting.

The final part of their approach was to look at their content production. Anyone who has run a website will tell you that content is king. It’s not enough just to have a catchy title in the modern world. Gone were the shoddy stories and poor video, replaced with a top-quality YouTube series and a far better maintained social media presence that helped the charity connect with its users and also boosted massively their online donations.

Startling results

The approach was a massive boon for the company. They saw their online donations grow by 63 percent and also saw an increase of 34 percent on online fundraising. Their social media figures went through the roof as well, especially on Instagram where they saw their followers grow by more than 100k with a fifty percent increase every year since.

It hasn’t just been beneficial financially either. It would appear the company is far better connected with the public now. Which is vitally important for a charity. Their online content is helping to sell the good work that they do and help the people at home understand what they do. It’s also helping to emphasise the importance of reforming animals.

However, the in-house team were not dismayed by the meagre amount. The Royal Museum began working diligently on their new project, Space LIVE. The concept was simple, via the medium of Facebook they would broadcast major astrological events in video form. This meant that the likes of the lunar eclipse and the Ramadan new moon sighting were viewable by people all over the globe.

Inspired

The project was inspired. It took live streams of these events and added expert commentary from astronomers. In addition to this, the team revamped its website introducing features like user-generated content and taking advantage of search engine optimisation. In addition to this, they used press channels to generate interest in what it was doing. It’s safe to say their approach hit the spot. The campaign reached almost a third of a million people on Facebook and wracked up and impressive 190k views as well as 100k engagements. As well as attracting a vast amount of traffic the site also achieved the number one ranking on Google. The holy grail for a website. It was the surprise of nobody when the campaign won a Marketing Week Masters Award for Best Use of a Small Budget.

How did they do it?

The approach had a five-pronged attack. They aimed to achieve the following: To extend the museum’s target audience and to improve their reputation. To engage the general public and increase their knowledge of space and astronomy, to give the public enjoyable experiences in ways that they can all access, to provide purposeful innovation, and finally to show how effective their facility can be in order to attract and secure future investment. That was a bold vision for a budget little more than half a grand.

The facility had been blessed with the installation of a brand new telescope a couple of years ago and this offered them the capability to share footage online. It was then a bit of a no brainer to draw on the expertise of its astronomers to help engage and attract viewers online.

Small budget

Unfortunately, the RMG didn’t have the resources to promote their facility and their new project in the usual way. So it was forced to be resourceful and develop an audience using lower-cost approaches such as Facebook live and taking advantage of SEO. They were also shrewd in providing coverage of important events with regards to the cosmos. The company also cleverly partnered with organisations such as NASA to help attract a much wider audience.

Another masterstroke was the level of community interaction with people being encouraged to like RMG’s Facebook page as well as uploading their content. In addition, they hosted a section for people to upload their pictures of the cosmos and created a newsletter. All the work was done in house and the only money spent was on their Facebook advertising budget

The campaign was incredibly successful. The sites footage of the lunar eclipse attained the most views from any museum-produced video. Their Facebook page also has the highest interaction rate for any museum. This in addition to the massive increase in their social media following just goes to show what you can do with a bit of ingenuity and hard work.

Among their more creative ideas was the McWhopper concept which they dreamed up way back in 2015. It began as a letter in the New York Times offering a truce between themselves and long term, and fierce rivals McDonald’s. The dream was that the two companies would come together to produce a burger to celebrate Peace Day. The dream was a burger that combined the best parts of a Whopper and a Big Mac (surely that’s just a Whopper?)

McWhopper

Admittedly McDonald’s decided against joining forces, perhaps realising that their food just wasn’t as tasty? But regardless of their reluctance to get on board, the campaign helped Burger King score a massive 8.9 billion impressions. The campaign got them trending worldwide and all in all, netted Burger King 174 million.

It wasn’t just that campaign that gained them their gleaming reputation either. Their “google hack” campaign was a stroke of genius. It was so simple, a 15-second tv advert that triggered anybody who happened to have a Google Home device to tell them all about the Whopper Burger. So simple, but so clever. Their campaign, entitled ‘Google, Home of the Whopper’ did an impressive 9.3 million global impressions. The profit off the back was slightly less impressive at “just” 135 million but it has become one of the most talked-about advertising campaigns of the last decade.

Breaking the mode

And more recently the company broke the mode with their divisive campaign where they posted a picture of a mouldy burger. The campaign was certainly striking and was designed to highlight the fact that their burgers are using fresh ingredients, that they are not filled with preservatives. It was a brave move, most companies would shudder at the idea of portraying their food in such an unappealing way. But you have to think that it was at least partially throwing shade on McDonald’s, where there is a long-held urban myth that their food doesn’t rot because of the artificial nature of their food.

In fact, throwing shade at Maccy’s seems to be a pastime of Burger King. It is not that long ago they created a campaign where they secretly hid Big Macs behind all of their burgers in their advertising campaign, showing how much better value for money their burgers are.

Clear goals

Although if you quiz him on the companies marketing successes, Machado is equivocal on the companies creativity, commenting how “We hardly ever brief for an idea that works on X channel, we focus on having great ideas that deliver our brand and business objectives.”

Machado is quick to point out how the company is never being creative just for the sake of it. He states how the company has a clear set of objectives and a well-established brand and that they have clear key performance indicators. He described how when they are planning a new campaign how they set out exactly what they want to accomplish rather than putting the horse before the cart. Machado commented,

“We are not in the pursuit of random ideas. We’re in the pursuit of ideas that will link back to our business and brand strategy, which have clear targets and objectives. Not all campaigns will do everything, but they should be doing something in the direction of the objectives you have.”

Increased Brand Engagement

Naturally, the worlds social space continues to grow and develop each and every day, and due to it, it’s now being overrun with content saturation and the eager need to constantly grab the attention of an audience before another brand does. Brands are finding it harder than ever to generate real ‘qualified’ and sincere interactions across their channels with their consumers, but thankfully, there’s ways around it.

For this reason, this particularly is where employee advocacy can help and deliver significant impact and results alike. Past research shows that content shared by employees can receive up to eight times more engagement than if posted across brand channels – an incredible difference for those wanting to gain more attraction. In addition, employees can also drive a click-through rate which is double that of their organisation when sharing company-relevant content.

People are reportedly also more likely to engage with content shared by their personal connections. By that, if only 3% of employees advocate for you brand, it will result in a 32% increase in engagement.

Identify Social Leaders

Another key factor in advocacy is to identify the individuals within your business who are already socially active and thriving within’ the company. Identifying socially active employees could potentially have a huge benefit – the networks and the owned communities that they have and the opportunity that you could have if you create tension and increase your employer brand. For example, LinkedIn is the largest professional network in the world and you can determine which employees are most influential on this network in a couple of ways, and also advertise your own brand in doing so.

When logged in to your account, you can see which employees in your company are most viewed on LinkedIn. The employees with most profile views are typically the most active on the network, adding connections, sharing updates and engaging with LinkedIn Groups and other members.

Thought Leadership

Empowering and encouraging your employee brand advocates through an effective employee advocacy program reveals them that you are investing in their personal and professional development. This, in turn, can create a wonderful branch of new opportunities to foster thought leadership using your content marketing efforts, which also inspire employees to become more creative. The thought leadership content brings more qualified referrals and leads to your business.

Increased Brand Visibility & Improved Brand Recognition

Trust becomes an essential part in in any business and people – possible consumers, employees, etc – typically only trust family, friends and peers and their opinions at the time of purchasing, without any prior information of a product. Your employees have a great marketing potential to amplify always on content that increases brand awareness of your organisation online. According to a recent survey by Hinge Research Institute and Social Media Today, organisations with employee advocacy programs have seen increased brand visibility, improved brand recognition and better brand loyalty. Go ahead and unlock employees’ brand potential to boost your social brand reach in real-time.

Basically, educating the importance of employee advocacy programs and its benefits to your employee brand advocates, and is typically a full win-win situation for both employees and organisations.

Improved Customer Communication

In most brands, there is typically at least one huge communications gap which could improve. Businesses usually need to plug accordingly to new research from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc while still keeping relevant and on-brand, and enticing new customers while doing so. While seven out of 10 businesses believe they are communicating effectively via platforms such as Facebook Messenger and Facebook stories, just 20% of their customers agree with them, according to research.

Employee advocacy allows brands to increase connections between people, increase person-to-person conversations and build more meaningful relationships.

With one in every £5 spent in UK shops now being online, employee advocacy bridges the disconnect between online and offline to drive more people in store.

Additionally, according to MSL Group brand messages are shared 24x more when distributed by employees, rather than the brand itself. Employees also collectively have social networks ten times that of a single corporate brand, according to research from LinkedIn.

“High-profile headlines about issues give people concern and in the case of some of the content on YouTube they were accurate, what they sometimes miss is proportionality. No impression served on video that shouldn’t be served on is acceptable, but proportionally, in terms of the huge volume of impressions they were getting, these were very small numbers.”

Criticism

This comes in the wake of a lot of negative press. In particular, YouTube came under fire for how it dealt with the New Zealand terror attacks. A lot of content from the attack surfaced on the platform and remained there for up to 24 hours, many believe this is unacceptable.

The problem lies in that the amount of content uploaded to the platform is astronomical and that makes it difficult to police. It wasn’t that long ago the company came under fire for rude comments on videos aimed at children. That issue caused the platform to lose a lot of ad. spend from some very prominent brands such as Nestle and McDonalds. Britain said,

“I don’t think you can ever do enough to make everything as safe as possible. You have to have zero tolerance but that doesn’t mean to say you can achieve zero occurrences in any walk of life – whether that’s crime on the street or bad actors in the technology world,” he added
“If you look at the violent extremist content, where we started and where we are now, that is huge progress and demonstrates that improved policies, enforcement and people can get us to a better position. There’s a lot to do, we’ve invested a lot. Never satisfied, zero tolerance, but also constantly trying to look at how we can improve on speed.”

Violation

The company claims the more than 80 percent of the videos uploaded that violate its strict policies are taken from the site before they are even flagged. But the New Zealand incident pushed YouTubes staff to its limits, so much so that they were relying on AI to remove offensive videos that were being uploaded at a rate as quick as one per second. So when you consider that it’s perhaps unsurprising that some videos slipped through the net.

The site has invested in technology to push a counter-terrorist narrative. So if a user is watching pro-terror videos they will have anti-terror videos suggested to them to show them that there are two sides to the story. It is hoped this will help reduce cases of radicalisation. It also has algorithms that identify when videos are posted by terror organisations and helps stop those videos spreading.

Issues

The problem is that as fast as YouTube’s tech develops so does the cleverness of people who would seek to use the site for nefarious purposes. It has played a role in political discourse and as a result, social media sites, not just YouTube but the likes of Facebook too have come under increased government scrutiny. The UK government conducted a report which suggested that big players are not coping tackling these issues.

Brittin suggested that YouTube will never be entirely safe from these issues and pointed out that trust in advertising platforms had been low way before the internet took off. He commented,

“It’s incumbent on us to be in a position where people see we have got the expertise and a will to make changes that help us get to a better outcome together. It’s a responsibility of the ad industry, a technology player like Google, and policymakers. We’re not anti-regulation, we’re pro better regulation and up-to-date regulation. We don’t want to be policing the internet, it’s up for governments to define the framework we work within.” He continued,

“We’re not [ungoverned by rules]. YouTube’s got very serious responsibilities just like any publication or press would have. But they’re different responsibilities because they’re different types of property.”