Twitter hires new exec in bid to win China advertisers

SAN FRANCISCO, California — Twitter introduced a new head of operations Friday for what it calls Greater China despite still being banned in the mainland, as it attempts to boost already booming advertising.

While San Francisco-based Twitter is not allowed to operate in mainland China under the country’s strict Internet censorship, it does have an office in Hong Kong that courts advertisers over the border.

Twitter chief Jack Dorsey fired off a tweet from his @jack account welcoming former Microsoft and Cisco general manager Kathy Chen as managing director of Twitter’s Greater China operations.

“I’m really excited to find more ways to create value for our advertisers, enterprises, creators, influencers and our developers, and partners as well,” Chen said in a video snippet posted in a tweet from @TwitterGCN.

Twitter shared a link to a story in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post that reported the company has seen advertising triple in Greater China since it opened an office in Hong Kong in March last year.

Twitter has been banned in mainland China since 2009, but the service is a way for businesses there to get advertising messages to potential customers in other parts of the world.

“We’ve seen success with Greater China export advertisers and publishers using Twitter to reach global audiences,” Twitter chief operating officer Adam Bain said in a tweet welcoming Chen to her new job.

Twitter last week added a PepsiCo executive and a British entrepreneur to its board as Dorsey continues an effort to shake up the stagnating one-to-many messaging service.

Twitter marked its 10th birthday last month, having become a powerful communication tool but still struggling to win users and reach profitability.

Since making a star-quality entrance a decade ago, Twitter has become a must-have tool for journalists, activists and celebrities but has struggled to show it can expand beyond its devoted “twitterati” to become a mainstream hit.

Twitter’s woes include a slump in its stock price to all-time lows this year — down nearly half from its 2013 stock market debut — and ongoing losses, even as its revenue grows.

Twitter’s base of monthly active users remained stuck at 320 million at the end of 2015. While that is a big accomplishment, Twitter has failed to keep pace with fast-growing rivals and to expand beyond its base.

Dorsey said Twitter priorities for this year include making it more intuitive to use; live-streaming video, and making it safer for people to freely express themselves on the platform.

source: interaksyon.com

Twitter Ads expands to over 200 countries, territories

MANILA, Philippines -– Twitter expanded its self-service ads platform from 33 countries to over 200 countries and territories.

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) from Honduras to Hong Kong can now effectively reach target audiences on it social media platfom in 15 languages according to a Twitter statement.

Furthermore, Twitter said that Asia Pacific is the fastest growing region worldwide and the platform expansion provides additional support for SMBs in Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, and the Philippines. In a recent research study from the Asian Development Bank (ADB), 98 percent accounts for SMB enterprises in Asia.

“Small and medium-sized businesses face the most challenges and are least resourced to promote the good work they do,” said Emily Huo, SMB lead for Asia Pacific at Twitter. “With the expansion of the Twitter self-service ads platform, we are excited to help SMBs level the playing field with digital advertising.”

Twitter launched Twitter Ads for SMBs over two years ago. There are now approximately 100,000 active advertisers on Twitter, including SMBs.

source: interaksyon.com

Facebook rolls out video ads, aims to capture part of TV-marketing budgets

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook Inc will allow more marketers to run video advertisements on its website, provided the world’s No.1 social network deem them to be of high-enough quality.

Facebook and social media rivals like Twitter are increasingly trying to grab a slice of lucrative TV-marketing budgets as they try to sustain rapid growth. That market is considered crucial to supporting Facebook’s growing market valuation and poses a potential long-term threat to traditional TV networks.

Facebook has moved cautiously to avoid annoying users. Social media players like Twitter are typically careful not to clutter up their users’ pages with unwanted material.

The 15-second video ads, which appear in newsfeeds and will play automatically with sound muted, will become available to a limited number of marketers over the next few months, Facebook said on its official blog on Thursday.

It first tested video ads with a single advertiser in December. Facebook said Thursday that video ads will be available to a “a select group of advertisers,” without details.

The price that marketers pay to run a video ad on Facebook will be determined by the size of the audience as measured by measurement firm Nielsen, Facebook added. Marketers will be able to choose specific times of day for their spots and will be able to target ads according to age and gender.

However, Facebook said it would review the creative quality of any video spots that appear on its website, assessing ads for criteria such as watchability, meaningfulness and “emotional resonance.” Such reviews will be done in partnership with video analytics firm Ace Metrix.

“We’re taking this step in order to maintain high-quality ads on Facebook and to help advertisers understand what’s working to maximize their return on investment,” Facebook said in the post.

source: interaksyon.com

Google stock hits new high as mobile bets pay off

Google Inc shares jumped to an all-time high above $1000 after the search engine giant reported a surge in mobile and video advertising that helped drive quarterly revenue up 23 percent.

At least 16 brokerages raised their price targets on the stock to between $880 and $1,220, with Deutsche Bank bumping up its target price by 26 percent.

The shares rose 13 percent to $1007.40 after the opening bell on the Nasdaq, before easing back a few dollars.

Google said paid clicks increased by a quarter in the three months ended September 30, from a year earlier, the highest rate of growth in the past year.

This offset an 8 percent fall in average cost-per-click, the price advertisers pay Google when consumers click on their ads.

“We view solid paid clicks growth to be a good indicator of demand, driven by the continued shift to mobile,” J.P. Morgan analysts said. They had expected 21.5 percent growth.

In contrast, analysts say Yahoo, which this week reported a tepid quarter, has lost market share in display and search advertising in the face of strong competition from Facebook Inc and Google.

Google shares have climbed 38 percent this year, rewarding investors such as Fidelity Investments’ $101 billion Contrafund.

Contrafund added to its stake in Google in the third quarter and got a big lift from the surging performance of Facebook and Tesla Motors Inc as well. The fund, managed by star stock picker Will Danoff, returned 8.94 percent in the third quarter, easily beating the 5.24 percent advance of the S&P 500 Index.

Facebook is expected to report its third-quarter results on October 30.

To counter declines in cost-per-click rates, Google rolled out in February a service to help advertisers market through a mix of smartphones, tablets and desktops.

The J.P. Morgan analysts said this drive was a major opportunity for Google in the upcoming holiday season.

Analysts also highlighted Google’s ability to generate revenue from its video-streaming website, YouTube.

YouTube branded video-ads grew more than 75 percent in the quarter, from a year earlier, with 40 percent of traffic now coming from mobile devices.

“We estimate that Google’s key YouTube asset generated approximately $4 billion in revenue in 2012, positioning Google extremely well for the strong growth in video advertising,” RBC Capital Markets analysts wrote in a note.

Analysts at Jefferies said Google is best positioned to benefit in mobile with one billion Android activations. The company sells applications and content through its Google Play Store.

The Mountain View, California-based company – known for its Google Maps service, Chrome browser and Nexus line of smartphones and tablets – reported a 32 percent jump in revenue from the rest of world (excluding UK) during the quarter with growth coming from Japan, South Korea and Australia.

” is an encouraging bright spot. Google should be a good play off any European and Emerging Markets recovery,” analysts at RBC Capital markets said.

“We think the worst is behind Google from a sentiment perspective,” Deutsche Bank analysts said.

source: interaksyon.com

Facebook says 56 million active users in Arab world

DUBAI — Facebook announced Tuesday that it has 56 million active users in the Middle East and North Africa, where activists used the social media network to organize Arab Spring uprisings.

Half of these users returned to the website on a daily basis, Facebook regional chief Jonathan Labin told a news conference in Dubai, noting a significant increase in the number of people connecting from mobile devices.

“Every month, 56 million people are active on Facebook across the MENA region, with 50 percent of those returning on a daily basis,” Facebook said in a statement.

In total, “33 million people in MENA use a phone or tablet to access the service every month, while the number of daily active users on mobile has reached 15 million.

“People in the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council countries) are particularly well-connected with a mobile connectivity rate of 196 percent — an average of two SIM cards per person,” the US company added.

According to Labin, this increase in Facebook users offers great opportunities for advertisers.

“We are seeing an increase in the number of advertisers who are turning to Facebook to get their message to the people who matter most,” he said.

Facebook’s mobile advertising revenues have leaped from zero percent in the first half of 2012 to 41 percent of total advertising revenues in the second quarter of 2013.

In May 2012, Facebook announced the opening in Dubai of its sales office for the Middle East and North Africa, naming Dubai’s Emirates Airlines and Doha-based Al-Jazeera television among its advertising clients.

Activists in several Arab world countries have used Facebook and other Internet social networking sites as a speedy, anonymous and efficient engine to organise protests and campaigns that swept the region since 2011.

source: interaksyon.com

Facebook buys Microsoft ad technology platform

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook Inc said on Thursday it had agreed to buy advertising technology from Microsoft Corp that measures the effectiveness of ads on its website, which should help in its fight with Google Inc for online advertising revenue.

Under the long-rumored transaction, Facebook will purchase the Atlas Advertiser Suite, an ad management and measurement platform that Microsoft took on with its $6.3 billion acquisition of digital ad agency aQuantive in 2007. Facebook did not say how much it paid for the technology.


Unable to make it work for its own purposes, Microsoft wrote off $6.2 billion of the aQuantive deal’s value last year.

Facebook has long been dogged by doubts about the effectiveness of its ads and was embarrassed just days before its initial public offering in May when General Motors Co declared it was pulling the plug on all paid advertising on Facebook’s network.

Since then, Facebook has introduced a number of tools and partnerships to prove to marketers that advertising on its social network delivers enough bang for the buck.

Brian Boland, Facebook’s director of monetization product marketing, said the purchase of Atlas was not a step toward creating a much wider ad network beyond the Facebook site, but analysts believe that is Facebook’s ultimate goal.

“Although the statement announcing the deal focused on Atlas’ measurement tools rather than its ad targeting technology, we expect that Atlas will soon be using Facebook’s data to target sponsorships, in-stream ads, and other rich ad formats across the entire web, and that’s big news,” said Forrester analyst Nate Elliott.

“The question now is how quickly and successfully Facebook can integrate its data with Atlas’ tools, and whether they can avoid a privacy backlash as they do so. History suggests they’ll struggle on both counts,” he said.

Google leads the $15 billion U.S. market for online display ads with 15.4 percent share, according to researcher eMarketer, followed by Facebook with 14.4 percent.

source: interaksyon.com

Affiliate model justified in roundtable

a4uexpo London hosted a roundtable of various performance marketing figureheads. The discussion was filmed and organised by affilinet and featured representatives from companies such as Nectar, Holiday Autos and uSwitch.



Mary Keane-Dawson was chief instigator of conversation. She incited discussion about the entrepreneurial aspect of the industry. Publishers are uncovering new technologies and business models, which will help advertisers test and trial new CPA activity, a big positive for the sector.

There was talk about the perception of publishers. They should be pushing to become viewed as brands, especially the more mature, premium publishers. There will likely be a shift in perception where customers become brand-loyal in the UK, much like consumerism in the USA.

Publishers should become brands

Evidence of publishers becoming brands is no more evident than in the spate of TV advertisements that have been aired recently. The traditional role of affiliates as being purely a mechanism for generating sales is becoming somewhat of a grey area. Their increased media activities show they create demand too.

Big data’s still in its infancy according to the roundtable. You just have to look at the volume the industry has available and how little it’s capitalising on that volume. There was talk about pooling it together so publishers, networks and advertisers can create a bigger picture of future trends.

Talent is another issue that needs to be resolved. The roundtable felt so-called attractive digital channels like mobile and social were more appealing. Once affiliate business had recruited talent, they needed to be kept engaged. It’s a tricky prospect as new recruits look to broaden their marketing experience by hopping to other channel.

source: affiliates4u.com