Tech Talk: Weekly wrapup, Cannes Lions edition

Facebook launches four new solutions

The company also announced new solutions intended to make it easier for advertisers to share their messages across mobile platforms:

The launch of a Creative Hub, where the creative community can learn and build on mobile. The hub is now in testing and is expected to be available in the next few months.

Features include:

• A new interface for creative agencies that educates and enables businesses to design ads
• A collaborative area to experiment, preview, evaluate, and showcase ads
• Ads guide: Explore and select from the broad range of formats available on Facebook and Instagram
• Ability to create and preview mocks on mobile: Easily upload a creative asset to the tool to see it as an ad format.
• Preview URL: Share with all stakeholders and preview in a dynamic mobile feed
• Creative Inspiration: Easy to navigate repository of case studies

An Audience Insights API, to help businesses build better insights to fuel campaigns, will available to partners early next year. 

As part of the beta programme, the company has partnered with a small group of advertisers—including Mondelez and Anheuser-Busch InBev—to understand how to develop insights from aggregated and anonymous demographics, psychographics, topic data and reports from Facebook IQ.

Facebook claims that four months after global availability, more than 100 years of time have been spent viewing Canvas, with people in more than 180 countries having experienced Canvas with average dwell time on a Canvas ad at 31 seconds. 

Updates to Canvas ads that make it easier for marketers to design, create, share and gain insights:

• Advertisers can now share their Canvases with stakeholders to simplify the review process.
• Canvas will have a new feed unit to help entice people to engage and Canvas will be available for all Pages to use in a post (even when it's not promoted as an ad).
• Marketers will be able to access detailed metrics such as dwell time per component and clicks per component to track Canvas performance.

New enhancements to slideshow ads that make it easy for businesses to create videos from photos, in addition to:

• The ability to create slideshow ads from mobile devices
• An easy “video-to-slideshow” creation tool
• Integration with Pages Photo Library and Shutterstock stock image library
• Audio and text overlay

Yenni Nathalia, brand manager at Paddle Pop:

We know that more than half of the consumers we serve in Indonesia have trouble viewing video, since they experience low bandwidth. Facebook’s Slideshow solution helps us create a simple, lightweight yet engaging mobile asset from our current video creative. Now we don’t have to worry whether it will load fast for slow connections, so we have assurance that the ad delivers our complete brand message.

In addition, the company also reported that Instagram now has more than 500 million monthly active users worldwide—and 300 million who use the app every day, with more than 80 percent of users coming from outside the US. 

New ways to tap video on Twitter

Twitter has announced new upgrades to video on its platform. From a limit of 30 seconds, users can now create video Tweets up to 140 seconds long. Select publishers will continue to be able to post videos up to 10 minutes long via the company’s professional publisher tools.

Vine users will also soon have the option to share longer videos, with the company trailing up to 140 second-long videos with a small group of creators.

The company is also also making it easier to explore videos. Tapping on a video Tweet or Vine open up a full-screen viewing experience, where more video and Vine Tweets will be suggested below. The feature will be rolling out soon on Twitter for iOS and for Android.

Twitter Engage, a new companion app for Twitter, is now available and provides real-time data and insights, intended to make it easier to manage daily interactions and measure success. Features include the capability to review all of videos, GIFs, images, and other Twitter activity, to track post-by-post performance and continue conversations around content.

YouTube launches certification programme for brand partners

Three years after the launch of the YouTube Brand Partner Program, the company has announced a new Brand Partner Program Certification that will be available online for agencies across the globe in 22 languages.

The online curriculum designed to equip agencies with the knowledge and tools they need to design effective video content strategies. From publishing frameworks, how to best partner with YouTube creators, to campaign optimisation, the certification is intended to provide a guided learning path that will help agencies create successful YouTube content and distribution strategies for their clients.

MEC global COO Alastair Aird:

The launch of the YouTube Brand Partner Program Certification is incredibly timely and exciting for MEC. With MEC Wavemaker we have a different kind of content offer, one that helps our clients see exactly what role content and platforms play in their customers’ lives and how that will directly impact their brand’s performance. Equipping our people with the necessary knowledge to design the most effective video content is key to our service to clients.

MediaMonks says “hello Shanghai”

MediaMonks is now on-ground in China, with the launch of its ninth international office in Shanghai, headed up by executive producer Niels Monsieurs.

The new office is touted as a natural extension of the digital productio company’s extensive working relationships with Chinese agencies based out of the company’s Singapore office, which launched in 2013.

MediaMonks Shanghai already works with the Chinese offices of AKQA, JWT, Ogilvy, and TBWA and is responsible for one of MediaMonks’ biggest projects of the year, with the Intel-powered personalised film History Comes Alive produced for JWT Beijing.

MediaMonks CEO, Victor Knaap:

China is a unique market with its own digital platforms and culture. As a technology-driven company in advertising, we need to be close to the prevailing platforms and agencies we do business with to stay current and produce culturally relevant work. With a Shanghai office, we are doubling down on innovative advertising platforms such as WeChat while extending our footprint as a global production partner to creative agencies and their brands.