Snapchat

02
Dec
2018
Vertical Take-Off

Vertical Take-Off

More people than ever are watching Stories, but marketers are still obsessed with the Feed.

Originally featured in the December 2nd 2018 issue of Campaign Middle East magazine

In the not-too-distant past, the humble News Feed was the centre of all life on social media. Whether on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, this was where the action happened. Snapchat shook up the scene with its vanishing person-to-person photos in 2012, but it wasn’t until the launch of the ‘Stories’ feature in October 2013 that the focus started shifting from scrollable feeds to more intimate and spontaneous sequences of videos that effectively let everyone cultivate their own personal reality TV channel. In August 2016 this format really started to hit the mainstream when Instagram introduced its version of Stories. It proved so successful that its parent company, Facebook, rolled it out across the Facebook and WhatsApp apps six months later. Because Stories disappear after 24 hours, they inspire an urgency that most forms of social sharing don’t. There’s nothing like a little FOMO to grab people’s attention.

Today, more than 1.2 billion users share Stories each day across Instagram (400m+), Facebook / Messenger (300m+), WhatsApp (450m+) and Snapchat (150m+). People can’t get enough of them. Facebook Chief Product Officer, Chris Cox has predicted that Stories will surpass feed posts as the top way to share by next year. Where eyeballs go, ad dollars are not usually far behind. But it seems that marketers are a little slow on the uptake in shifting their spend towards Stories from the News Feed. Mark Zuckerberg himself has has attributed some of the parent company’s slowing revenue growth to an explosion in Instagram Stories usage. Basically, proportionately fewer ads are being seen in the Feed because users are spending more time watching Stories, but advertisers haven’t yet made this leap too.

The ads on Stories are hard to ignore because they take over the entire screen of the phone, offering brands a large, interactive canvas to play with. Many brands that have taken the plunge with Stories have reported a higher engagement over Feed ads, seeing users swiping up to learn more about a product when compared to clicking on an ad in the Feed, and generally viewing these ads for longer. While the Feed’s biggest selling point has traditionally been a chance to reach more people, even this is about to change.

So why are advertisers seemingly hesitant to embrace Stories?

Advertiser demand for new formats can typically lag user engagement as marketers figure out how to take advantage of them. Because the way users consume Stories is so different than the way they consume content in the Feed, everything from the creative strategy, to the story you want to tell needs a fresh consideration. Not to mention creating the assets. The vertical ad format is still relatively uncommon outside of Snapchat so many advertisers have a decision to make over whether to adapt current assets for Stories, or create them specifically from scratch – a potentially expensive process. Either way, there is certainly a learning curve for brands to navigate to keep up with consumers’ evolving digital usage.

For those first mover brands, the benefits are real. In addition to a potential boost in viewability and engagement, a lack of initial demand can lead to lower prices in the auction-based ad environment, an opportunity for savvy marketers that are quick to dive in. According to marketing technology company 4C Insights, the CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) on Facebook Stories, which only rolled out to the masses in September, is currently around 25 per cent cheaper than on the Feed, although this gap is expected to diminish over time.

As more and more platforms embrace Stories, and the vertical ads that go with the territory, it will gradually become more worthwhile for brands to create vertical advertising content. Both Netflix and LinkedIn are planning to introduce Stories-style video formats over the coming months, while YouTube and WhatsApp recently started rolling out vertical video ads within their apps. Similarly, Snapchat have recently launched another new format in the Middle East that features locally produced content, called Shows, which will also host vertical ads.

Facebook itself has been trying to make advertising in Stories simpler by allowing advertisers to easily modify their current assets for the vertical format at the click of a button on Ad Manager, as well as simultaneously rolling them out on Stories across both Instagram and Facebook for maximum reach. To boost uptake, the company has recently launched an initiative to educate SMEs and agencies on the benefits of Stories, a so-called Stories School.

The incredible popularity of the Stories format is even further proof that we are well and truly in an era of visual communication and Facebook knows how important it is to get ads on Stories right. Mark Zuckerberg admitted as much back in April – “one of the interesting opportunities and challenges over the coming years will be making sure that ads are as good in Stories as they are in Feeds. If we don’t do this well, then as more sharing shifts to Stories, that could hurt our business”. With Facebook’s platforms accounting for over 1 billion of the more than 1.2 billion daily Stories users, they sure have more skin in the game than most.

Posted by Rob in Campaign Magazine, Snapchat
21
Oct
2018
What next for Instagram?

What next for Instagram?

With Instagram’s co-founders both quitting Facebook, are we about to see a more aggressive pursuit of ad dollars on the platform?

Originally featured in the October 21st 2018 issue of Campaign Middle East magazine

Seemingly out of the blue on Monday, September 24, Instagram’s two co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, who had both remained with the company since being acquired by Facebook in 2012, both abruptly resigned from the social media giant. The reason seems to be that Mark Zuckerberg had become overbearing in his control of the company, wanting to take the app in a direction that the founders disagreed with.

While this is a bombshell in-and-of itself, the fact that it comes hot on the heels of the two WhatsApp co-founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton also quitting Facebook back in April for similar reasons, points to a broader movement. Despite Zuckerberg being traditionally quite facilitating to the founders of the companies that have been acquired by Facebook over the years, it seems that he is gradually starting to exert his influence and take a more active role in the business side of things with these companies.

So what has changed?

While Instagram initially relied on Facebook to help launch and scale its advertising offering, now it is Facebook that relies on Instagram for future growth. While revenue and user growth on Facebook is flagging, Instagram is booming. In the latest earnings call in July, the company forecast a continued slowdown in revenue growth and a slimming of profit margins, but disclosed that the growing number of ads on Instagram is an increasingly significant contributor to Facebook’s overall revenue. They also emphasised an intent to secure more ad dollars from Instagram going forward. It is this fixation on perpetual growth that is worrying for Instagram users. As Instagram becomes more-and-more important to Facebook’s bottom line, there is a continued risk that we will see the platform being overly commercialised.

Users have been drifting away from Facebook recently, not just because of ‘fake news’ or privacy breaches, but also because much of the recent growth in ad revenue has come from smaller companies that have clogged the Newsfeed with spammier content. While early corporate advertisers tend to be big brands or smart startups with relatively high quality ads, over time that quality tends to dip. As a platform matures, there is a clear trade-off between making it more accessible to smaller advertisers, and maintaining the quality of ads, a compromise that can affect the aesthetics of the platform in general.

The worry for Instagram is that something similar could happen to it too, and that this could be more strongly felt as lower quality ads could jolt the user out of the polished, picture perfect world of the Instagram feed. We are already starting to see this in effect in Dubai, with ads for massage parlours and furniture-moving companies that look like they were created by an eight-year old on Microsoft Paint. Not to mention the raft of wannabe influencers that pay to promote their own posts in a bid to grow their following, and subsequently, their ‘influence’.

Interestingly, the Stories format is relatively untapped from a monetisation point of view so far. In fact, Facebook has attributed some of the company’s slowing revenue growth to increased Instagram Stories usage. That is, more and more users are watching Stories at the expense of scrolling through the feed. But you can be sure that Facebook are eyeing this up as prime real estate for growth, and have recently launched an initiative to encourage SMEs to run ads there. Expect to see your local dog walker or handy man popping-up in an Instagram Stories ad in the not-too-distant future.

Ultimately, an increase in ads combined with a reduction in the quality of these ads affects the user experience and the overall quality of the platform. If Instagram too becomes chock-full of trashy ads, the people that moved from Facebook to Instagram to get away from the bombardment might just move on to somewhere else again in time. Generally speaking, this has been one of the more successful acquisitions in tech history, with Facebook playing it excellently so far, waiting for just the right moment to introduce ads to Instagram. It’s only been three years since Instagram opened up their self-service ad platform to a broader market in September 2015. While this certainly is not a long time in the grand scheme of things, they still have to play it carefully or risk turning Instagram into an inhospitable wasteland.

Posted by Rob in Advertising, Campaign Magazine, Facebook, Mobile, Snapchat
09
Jul
2018
The paradox of long-form vertical video

The paradox of long-form vertical video

Originally featured in the July 8th 2018 issue of Campaign Middle East

Not content with pick-pocketing Snapchat in 2016, Instagram seems determined to muscle in on YouTube’s turf as well by launching a video hub and standalone app that they’re calling IGTV. And for good reason too. According to a recent Pew Research survey in the US, Instagram is trailing only YouTube in usage among teens. 85 percent of Americans aged 13 to 17 say they use YouTube, with Instagram coming in second at 72 percent, and Snapchat close behind at 69 percent. While Instagram could definitely do with a better ‘home’ for its video content outside of users’ Stories or Feeds, their emphasis on catering to the longer-form video that YouTube currently dominates clashes somewhat with their insistence on using vertical video.

The vertical format that currently features on Instagram and Snapchat lends itself well to shorter content; an impromptu piece to camera, a quick glimpse around a quirky cafe, a short makeup tutorial etc. But the type of video that typically garners a following on YouTube, the kind that Instagram wants to attract to its platform, is a fundamentally different type of content altogether; longer, better structured, with a higher level of production value, and more importantly, horizontal in format.

Viewers on these ‘vertical’ platforms have been primed for brevity and, because of this, the big question for Instagram is whether users will spend as long watching vertical videos as they already do with horizontal videos. The average YouTube viewing session on mobile is an impressive 40 minutes according to Google. But for Instagram, the average mobile session duration is a mere 3.05 minutes. Instagram hopes that, by increasing the maximum time limit for its videos from 1 minute to 60 minutes, it will enable longer-form quality content to flourish and keep users on the app for longer. But will users really watch 10, 20, even 30 minute vertical videos on their phone? Instagram clearly thinks they will, but there will need to be a change in current viewing habits for this to happen, especially as these platforms currently appeal to short attention spans with quick-fire content that is easy to jump through.

From a creation point of view too, there is a chicken-and-egg challenge of trying to encourage longer-form content creation without evidence for creators that it will find an audience on these channels. Instagram must try to both convince their current top content creators to fundamentally change the type of videos they make for the longer format, while also trying to attract YouTube creators to the platform, which would in turn require them to drastically adapt their content for vertical video. For these creators, the vertical format is a restrictive one in comparison, with valuable screen real estate at the sides being sacrificed for length, and a heavy trade-off in the amount of information they can show on the screen at any one time. For YouTube content creators, this could be a serious stumbling block.

At the moment, Instagram has said that they will not show ads on the new IGTV, although this will inevitably change over time once the platform finds its feet. But by shutting off a potential revenue stream for creators at the beginning, and by not making direct payments to stars either, they could initially struggle to attract the talent that they want to come to the platform. It seems like a stretch to expect YouTube’s most popular creators to jump ship to a format that doubles their workload without cutting them in on the ad revenue. Ultimately, the old cliche is true, content is king, especially for video. Facebook has already found this out the hard way over the past couple of years by not being able to take market-share from YouTube due to a lack of exclusive quality content on the platform. Can IGTV succeed where Facebook ultimately failed? Stranger things have happened, but it’s certainly a tall order.

Posted by Rob in Campaign Magazine, Mobile, Snapchat, Social Media
17
Dec
2017

You can now create your own AR lens on Snapchat

This week Snap launched a new feature called Lens Studio that will let third-parties develop their own custom AR lenses for the Snapchat app, opening the floodgates like they did with Geofilters a couple of years ago. Expect a load more stupid little AR cartoons like the dancing hotdog seeing the light of day over the next few months.

Lens Studio is a free desktop app for Mac and Windows with easy to use guides and tools that students, creatives, and developers alike can use to bring their creations to life. Whether you’re just starting to dabble in 2D animation or are a professional artist interested in creating your own experiences, Lens Studio makes sharing your creation with the world fast and fun!

On a side note, I love the short, simple explainer videos that Snap uses to announce each new product update. They’re generally no more than 30 seconds long and show a brief use-case of the product to get the point across. Nice.

Posted by Rob in Augmented Reality, Snapchat
28
May
2017

Facebook & Snapchat are battling it out to change the way we visualize the world around us

Originally featured in the May 28th 2017 issue of Campaign Middle East

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. And that’s probably never been truer than it is today. It’s no surprise that people are communicating less and less through text these days – and more and more through visual means on mobile messaging apps and social media platforms in particular.

Instagram may have kick-started this trend a few years ago on social media, but Snapchat dragged it into the personal messaging space and other platforms have followed suit, so much so that now, rather than using digital imagery as a way of simply documenting and presenting our lives, we actively use visuals to communicate in the place of text. Snapchat has been the poster child of this movement over the last 3 years or so, tripling its daily active users to over 160 Million. Not content at being left behind, Facebook has copied pretty much every visual messaging feature that Snapchat has popularized on each of its four platforms – Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook itself.

While facial lenses and basic image editing have become a bit of a commodity on social messaging channels though, both platforms are trying to branch out from this to a more ‘augmented reality’-style future where users can actively overlay digital elements onto whatever they are looking at in real-time. Think Pokemon Go, although much more interactive and responsive to your actual surroundings. Snapchat describes it as “painting the world with 3D experiences”.

Snapchat may have been the catalyst for this trend, but it seems that Facebook are innovating at faster speed. At the company’s recent F8 event Mark Zuckerberg launched a host of new 3D camera effects, highlighting a renewed focus on creating a ‘camera platform’, an onus on the camera not simply being a tool used just to capture images, but to communicate too. He even went as far as to say that the camera needs to be more central than the text box in all of their apps.

This is a way for Facebook to fully insert itself into the real world, to become the link between your smartphone and everything you see around you. Speaking to BuzzFeed News, Zuckerberg expanded on this approach, “Facebook is so much about marrying the physical world with online. When you can make it so that you can intermix digital and physical parts of the world, that’s going to make a lot of our experiences better and our lives richer”.

Demoing these new 3D camera effects, one Facebook engineer pointed his phone at a table and a 3D propeller plane appeared on the screen, flying around a water bottle on the table top. Another used his phone’s camera to turn the room into a planetarium, with planets and stars spread out across the ceiling. Another took a normal photo of a face, then manipulated the expressions into a smile and then a frown.

Facebook also showed off various 3D scenes created entirely from a handful of 2D photos. The scenes had real depth to them, allowing viewers to tilt their head to see behind a bed in a room, or peer around a tree in a forest. Users could dim the lights in the image of a room, flood it with water, or even leave a digital object in the room that would still be there for someone else to discover at a later time.

The ultimate idea here is to turn the real world into an extension of Facebook itself. While Zuckerberg highlights examples like using Facebook’s camera to view pieces of digital art affixed to a wall, or to play a digital game overlaid on a table-top, you can see the long game here – dragging elements that would normally appear in your feed, for example, into the real world. But as well as pieces of content from your friends and family, surely this means ads too. As the traditional Facebook Newsfeed takes a back seat to messaging apps, this could be one way of keeping this type of content relevant going into the future, as well as expanding their ad inventory in the process.

But what will this mean for brands when consumers are living in an augmented world, constantly interacting with and visually manipulating their surroundings? And what happens when we are all wearing AR glasses or contact lenses 24/7? Visions of a Minority Report-esque world where ads bombard us at every turn spring to mind, but surely there must be another way. I guess we’ll have to just wait and see.

Posted by Rob in Augmented Reality, Campaign Magazine, Facebook, Snapchat