I’ve got loads of good stuff for you this week. From LinkedIn’s new Sponsored Content carousels to loads of awesome Adobe news to the latest dog v. towel challenge, this week’s a doozy. Buckle up.
Social nets update stuff
LinkedIn has introduced a new ad format — Sponsored Content carousels. These fun little swipe masters allow you to add texture to your stories by featuring multiple visuals that people can horizontally swipe through while on the LinkedIn feed. Carousel ads are nothing new to the social media world, so it’ll be interesting to see how these do on LinkedIn.
Twitter is opening up its in-stream video ads to all advertisers via its self-serve ad tool (and now the video ad product is avail in 12 global markets). And according to Nielsen Brand Effect, these in-stream video spots result in Twitter users being 70 percent more likely to remember a brand’s ad, and 6 percent more likely to make a purchase.
Anddd it looks like Reddit is getting deeper and deeper into the dark side of advertising… The platform announced that it’s rolling out auto-playing video ads across the site on mobile and desktop. The video ads business will be built onto the company’s native video product, which only recently came to exist.
Good ol’ FB is introducing autoplay video ads into Messenger and I don’t know how I feel about it. Now, the same autoplay video ads that have been available for Facebook’s News Feed and Instagram are available on its messaging app for all advertisers. Apparently, Messenger ads are only being served to “a super-small percentage of people” to start, so that Facebook can keep a close eye on how they affect the user experience. My hot take? People will hate it.
Adobe does stuff
I have lots and lots of awesome Adobe news to share with you this week. Hope you’re ready.
Like any milestone worth celebrating, the Adobe Acrobat 25th Anniversary has an amazing origin story. From a 1985 PostScript graphics program, to a 1990 white paper called “The Camelot Project,” and the launch of PDF and Adobe Acrobat in 1993… Take a trip down memory lane and see how the trajectory of digital documents changed forever. Not to mention, we announced some powerful new enhancements to Adobe Document Cloud this week with new PDF integrations across Microsoft Office. Oh, and a new feature in Adobe Scan (powered by Sensei) that allows you to turn physical business cards into sharable digital contacts.
This week is Refinery29’s 29Rooms! And Lightroom and Spark are coming together to participate in the San Francisco installment. This year’s 29Rooms theme is Turn it Into Art – a place where you can come create, play, and explore in a multi-sensory playground, while celebrating the transformative power of creativity. Which is a natural fit for Lightroom and Spark! We’ve created a Photo Studio and Editing Bar to drive social engagement and app downloads around these tools. With more than 20,000 attendees expected to explore 29Rooms, we’re excited to showcase these two apps and how easy and seamless it is to edit and post beautiful, engaging images and stories.
We also closed the acquisition of Magento. Launched the Adobe Spark beta for Android. And generally just crushed it this week.
Other brands do stuff
I honestly couldn’t decide whether this belonged in this section or in Fun Stuff, but here we are. Diet Dr Pepper’s new ad is pretty hilarious. It’s a rap song all about treating yourself when you accomplish little tasks, you know, like calling your mom. The video debuted on Facebook and the song is pretty dang catchy.
Interesting stuff
I found this opinion piece about how creative should be just as targeted as media buying fascinating. I think we can all agree that most ads are pretty generic, and it’s kind of wild that we aren’t using the same data we have to target individuals with personalized experiences to also serve them personalized creative.
Instagram is apparently coming out with a self-regulating tool so you know just how much time you’re actually spending on the ‘Gram. The unlaunched version of Instagram’s Usage Insights tool offers users a daily tally of their minutes spent on the app. Users will also be able to set a time-spent daily limit, and get a reminder once they exceed that. I’m doomed.