The aim is to deliver visual content that renders for each individual customer at the moment of impression. This builds on Movable Ink’s experience with providing dynamic content for emails that renders at moment of opening, and a similar offering for web pages and landing pages.

Why we care. Two reasons. First, it’s yet another example of a vendor originally known for innovation in one niche channel — in this case email — gradually expanding their offerings to encompass the much wider range of channels marketers need to address today.

Second, there’s a recognition that the way to stand out from the endless noise of mindless and predictable re-targeting is to send rich messages designed to engage users in the moment.

Dig deeper: Email creation platform Stensul expands its offering to landing pages

Based on SMS in beta. This development is supported by data from an SMS beta trial in the U.S. and the U.K. that showed lifts in click-throughs, conversions and average order value.

The mobile suite enables the following capabilities:

• Capture behavioral data within apps and use it to generate 1:1 personalized content across mobile and other channels.
• Deep linking to allow seamless connections between, for example, email and mobile messages and specific locations in the mobile app.
• Improved attribution in mobile channels.

The post Movable Ink unveils mobile suite appeared first on MarTech.

In-game advertising merges ads with the game environment seamlessly. Imagine seeing billboards while racing through the streets or branded in-game products you can purchase. These ads are more powerful and effective than in-app advertisements — those annoying pop-ups or banner ads you commonly see in mobile app games.

With nearly 3 billion games worldwide, in-game advertising can give brands incredible reach. From virtual billboards to branded experiences, video games have become a marketer’s paradise for reaching the coveted gaming demographic.

This guide covers the basics of in-game advertising, including common ad types, available targeting options, associated costs, challenges and best practices.

Types of in-game advertising

Before exploring how to take advantage of in-game advertisements, let’s review the most common types of game ads.

Static in-game advertising

These ads are directly hardcoded into the game. Since the ads can’t be changed and will exist in the game ad infinitum, rates are expensive and charged on a fixed-fee basis.

Dynamic in-game advertising

Dynamic ads can be replaced quickly and deployed instantly. These ads can appear in different places and formats (display and video ads are the most common). The 2008 billboards from Barack Obama in Need for Speed: Carbon are a great example of this ad format’s simple yet powerful use.

Sponsored game content

Sponsored game content involves integrating a brand or product into the actual game content, making it even more tangible and visible to the player and engaging them with the brand.

Dig deeper: PepsiCo’s strategies for marketing via online games and esports

KFC did this exceptionally well when it partnered with Nintendo to create a virtual island in the popular game Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The island was designed with KFC-themed items and decorations and even allowed players to win a voucher for chicken in real-life.

Advergames

Rather than integrating the ads into an already existing game, advergames are games specifically designed to promote a brand or product. They provide a fun and engaging way to interact with a brand and can effectively build brand awareness and loyalty.

Chex Quest, made by Chex, was the first video game ever to be included in cereal boxes as a prize. It was a top-to-bottom conversion of the popular game Doom but adjusted it to be family-friendly. The game was a hit among consumers and even won several awards.

Activision Blizzard Media has recently created many Playables — branded stand-alone mobile app games.

Product placement

The classic advertisement method still works. Advertisers can put their products directly into video games to guarantee players see the brand and “use” the products.

I remember playing Mario Kart 8 on the Nintendo Wii and unlocking the Mercedes-Benz cars. This made the branded products more exclusive since they had to be earned.

Targeting options for in-game advertising

The other unique benefit of in-game advertisements are the targeting abilities. It starts with choosing the right game (or games). Advertisers can focus on consumers based on demographics, geolocation, device type or platforms. However, integrating these traditional targeting approaches with behavioral targeting makes in-game advertisements even more effective.

Behavior targeting uses the actions the player has taken (or has not taken) to create an ideal segment of users to reach. For example, an advertiser could target players who have demonstrated a willingness to open their wallets by spending money to buy items in a game — or players who have reached a certain level and are, therefore, more engaged.

Combining these different ways of targeting and deploying them across various games that reach consumers on multiple platforms (gaming consoles, computers and smartphones) makes in-game advertising extremely powerful. With abundant reach and powerful targeting, brands can build awareness, drive engagement and boost sales quickly and effectively.

How to buy in-game advertising

Getting started with in-game advertising will ultimately depend on the types of games you want to appear in and your budget. 

When selecting an approach to buying in-game advertising, consider the specific goals, budget and target audience of the campaign. 

Game publishers

• Example: Activision Blizzard Media

You can work directly with game publishers to create custom ad campaigns within their games. This approach provides more control over the creative content and targeting and a deeper level of integration with the game environment. 

However, it can be more time-consuming and expensive than other options and may not offer as much scale or reach since it is limited to a single game.

In-game ad networks 

• Examples: Admix, Unity Ads

Ad networks connect brands with multiple game publishers, providing access to a broader collection of games. They offer greater scale and reach and more efficient pricing and targeting options. 

The downside is that you have less control over the creative content and placement. Some ad networks are not as high-quality and have limited targeting options. 

Programmatic advertising platforms 

• Examples: Bidstack, Anzu

Programmatic platforms use data and algorithms to automate the buying and placement of in-game ads across multiple publishers and platforms. This approach can offer greater efficiency, scale and advanced targeting options based on user data and behavior. However, programmatic platforms may have less control over the creative content and placement and may require more technical expertise.

The costs of in-game advertising

How expensive are in-game ads? It depends, but it’s only going to get more expensive. In-game advertising pricing can vary based on several factors, including the type of game, ad format, targeting options and the size and scope of the campaign.

CPM pricing is the most common approach, and rates can vary widely based on factors like ad format and targeting. The average CPM for in-game display ads ranges from $10-20, with video ads from $15-30.

These numbers will vary dramatically depending on the audience, game, targeting and ad formats. For example, CPMS for in-game ads targeting Gen Z and Millennials were 30-50% higher than those targeting Gen X and Baby Boomers, according to an Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) study.

You can also expect CPMs to continue to rise with the growing popularity of games and the high demand to reach gamers who are otherwise difficult to reach. Other in-game ads follow a flat-rate pricing model, especially static ads or advergames.

Challenges and best practices

It’s all fun and games until your campaign stops performing well. In-game advertisements come with their own unique set of challenges — and fatigue is a real concern. 

• Players can quickly become bored or annoyed by seeing the same ads repeatedly. Be sure to monitor frequency and refresh creative as often as possible.
• Players will also be upset if ads are intrusive, distracting, or disrupt their gameplay in any way. This isn’t commonly an issue, but it’s an important consideration.

As with any advertising, targeting is critical. It’s best to use non-intrusive creative formats to engage users. If possible, rewarding users with in-game currency, items, or exclusive content can increase engagement rates and brand affinity. The aforementioned example of being able to earn Mercedes-Benz cars in Mario Kart is a simple but effective model of this in practice.

What’s in store for in-game advertising?

In-game advertising is a powerful way to reach a highly-engaged, lucrative and fast-growing audience. There is no shortage of different types of games and no reason not to try in-game advertising.

Mobile games and handheld gaming platforms like the Nintendo Switch make it even easier for brands to stay connected and engaged with users even more than ever before.

New technologies like virtual reality and the Metaverse will bring more gaming environments, unique experiences and even more diverse opportunities for advertisers to explore.

The post In-game advertising: A marketer’s guide appeared first on MarTech.

Given all of that promise, marketers are certainly evaluating these technologies and one crucial part of that process is the demo.

It’s important to set up demos within a relatively short timeframe of each other to help make relevant comparisons. Make sure that all potential internal users are on the demo call and pay attention to the following:

• How easy is the platform to use for the day-to-day tasks handled by each department that will be using it?
• Does the vendor seem to understand our business and marketing needs?
• Are they showing us our “must-have” features?

Explore platform capabilities from vendors like Sitecore, Optimizely, Pantheon, WordPressVIP and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on digital experience platforms.

Click here to download!

Here are 13 questions to ask each vendor that will help you narrow the field:

• What kind of content delivery speed improvements do you typically see with your clients?
• Why have you adopted the approach you recommend (fully headless or hybrid content delivery) and what does that specifically mean in terms of how the whole system comes together?
• How is the DXP hosted? PaaS? SaaS? Private cloud? On-premise software installation? Or some combination of these?
• How does the platform integrate with other martech platforms (i.e., CDPs, marketing automation platforms, CRMs, DSPs, DAMs)? What capabilities are native to the new platform and how is it modularized?
• Do you have pre-built connections to solutions we already use or sources of content or functionality that we need?
• What reporting do you provide that will document the ROI from our efforts?
• What kind of customer support is included? Can we pick up the phone to report problems?
• Will we have a dedicated Account Manager and technical support, especially with the initial migration?
• Do you have other clients in our vertical?
• What kind of professional services are available? And how much do they cost?
• How does the company handle requests for product modifications?
• What new features are the vendor considering?
• What’s the long-term roadmap and launch dates?

Good luck!

The post 13 questions to ask digital experience platform vendors during the demo appeared first on MarTech.

“Downloading an app is a big step in customers showing their loyalty to a brand,” said Sydney Smith, client marketing manager at cross-channel marketing platform Cordial, at The MarTech Conference. “So as a brand, you want to ensure you pay respect to that loyalty by sending the right kinds of messages through your mobile channel.”

There are three main categories of mobile app messages, each with their own strengths and best practices.

Dig deeper: Why we care about mobile marketing

Push notifications

Push notifications are the most common form of mobile app message. They arrive on the home screen or lock screen of a user’s phone.

“The first question you could ask yourself is, ‘Do my customers need to know this right now?’” said Smith. “If the answer is yes, then you should probably send a push notification.”

These messages are often automatically triggered, based on customers’ product preferences, orders and behaviors on the app.

“Some great examples of push notifications are order updates, abandoned cart reminders, last-minute sales, back in stock or low-inventory alerts, and subscription reminders,” Smith said.

Just because your customer downloads your app doesn’t mean they automatically receive push notifications. They have to opt in. Don’t abuse that ability by sending out too many notifications.

Marketers should think about their own experience with this. Why did they find some push notifications helpful and were others irritating. Use those insights to help inform the messages you send.

In-app messages

In-app messages are those customers receive when they’re already in the app.

“These are pop-up alerts that happen while you’re already using the application, and they’re usually event-driven because of this,” said Andrew Shields, Cordial’s senior technical product manager. “Since the user is interacting with your app, you can capture that real-time data, and they almost always use deep linking so that when the user clicks on them [the messages] take them to somewhere specific in the application to then complete some action.”

Shields added, “There are a lot of valuable use cases for in-app messages. You can welcome users with a series of onboarding screens. You can alert them to new products, or let them know about targeted promotions that might fit their previous behaviors.”

Additionally, in-app messages can be used to send loyalty status updates. If the customer has reached a new tier in the loyalty program, send a message of congratulations. You can also send messages about updates and new features in the app to spur them on in engaging with the app.

Dig deeper: Mobile leads growth in the expanding in-game ad industry

Inbox messages

Inbox messages are the least common of the three categories. They tend to be longer-form and kept in the customers’ app account. They are sometimes sent to customers who have disabled push notifications.

“[Inbox messages] sometimes have an expiration date tied to them that make them disappear eventually, but in general they allow users to refer back to them so they can read that information at a later date,” said Shields.

“Customers aren’t alerted to this information that you’re sending immediately, but instead this information is being stored in a place that customers can check on their own time,” said Smith. 

She added, “Some brands use inbox messages to send information to customers who have push notifications disabled… That way they could reach everybody who had push enabled [during a current promotion], but they could reach everybody who had pushed disabled whenever they checked their app again.”

Marketers who have a solid game plan around these three kinds of mobile app messages will be able to keep customers informed and interested in the brand. They can also use combinations of the three to handle specific promotions, depending on how their customers respond to previous mobile campaigns.

Register for The MarTech Conference here.

The post How to send mobile app messages that build loyalty and stay relevant appeared first on MarTech.

We took the opportunity to sit down with Rob Garf, VP and GM retail, to talk about prospects for retail and ecommerce coming off of a booming Cyber Week in late November.

Why the World Tour? The Salesforce World Tour is not something new, but it’s less familiar than Dreamforce, of course, and arguably Salesforce Connections, the annual conference with a focus on marketing and commerce.

“It’s really about bringing the magic to areas where we have a high concentration of customers,” Garf said. “Not everyone can get to some of our cornerstone events, so we just want to bring our community together. It’s also really nice for our partners too because they haven’t necessarily been able to get out there in the world and see their customers — or our mutual customers — so they’re using this as a bit of a halo event and having other peripheral events around it.”

The retail roller coaster. While ecommerce soared during the pandemic, brick-and-mortar retail faced challenges. Since then, despite the ongoing supply chain crisis and rumors of recession, ecommerce and retail seem to be resilient. Cyber Week saw a record-breaking $281 billion in global online sales.

This insight, and others described below, is based on aggregated data from the online activity of over 1.5 billion global shoppers in more than 60 countries powered by Commerce Cloud, as well as Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud data from retailers.

Dig deeper: Online retail kicks off holiday season with record sales

“A roller coaster is a good way to describe it,” said Garf. “We saw a real surge in digital because people, unless it was essential, were unable to go into physical stores. Over the course of 2020, we saw a 40% increase in net new digital shoppers according to our Shopping Index. These were people who would go online, send emails, check out social, but they weren’t clicking the buy line. And these people were buying whole new categories as well — think about grocery.”

There’s been a levelling off in digital commerce over the last year, but Garf doesn’t believe digital and physical stand in opposition any more. “What I’m talking with retailers about more and more is how they streamline the experience the consumer has on mobile out of the store, to when they actually come into the store so it’s not this disjointed experience.”

The journey works in the other direction too. “Our research shows that 60% of digital orders are now influenced by the physical store.” As an industry we’ve looked at it the other way, which makes sense; but we’re now seeing the reverse phenomenon.”

A quiet start to the holiday season. After a spike ahead of Amazon’s Prime event — likely caused by other retailers discounting ahead of Amazon — there was a dip in sales approaching Cyber Week. Over Cyber Week itself, however, there was a 9% increase in sales YoY in the U.S. (2% globally).

“The reason was that retailers started the season with lackluster deals,” Garf explained. “Consumers noticed; they waited and were patient; and it paid off.” Garf regards this as a game of “discount chicken.” Retailers start the holiday season with a planned discount calendar. “After the first weekend, they rip it up, call an audible and chase the deal — which is a race to the bottom.”

After the last two years of delivery and inventory problems, retailers thought consumers were now conditioned to buy early. That’s why they didn’t kick-off with their best deals. “Consumers snapped back to their pre-pandemic buying. With the aggressive deals we saw during Cyber Week, there was a correlation, more than we’ve ever seen, between discounts and purchases.

Mobile and social commerce trends. “People weren’t on the go the last couple of years during the holidays,” said Garf. “We saw a re-balancing toward desktop. This year we saw a spike, compared to the last two years, in mobile traffic and purchases — and traffic referrals through social on mobile devices.”

Around Cyber Week, roughly 75% of traffic was mobile, and — dependent on category — around 60% of orders. The reason? People are traveling again. “On Thanksgiving, we saw a spike in sales between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. and on mobile in particular.”

Dig deeper: What is ecommerce and which trends are shaping its future?

Slack for retail. Salesforce now sees a key role for Slack, acquired two years ago, in the retail space. “We see retailers taking it beyond the technology function for collaboration and bringing it into the store for collaboration and communication,” said Garf. Not only can there be in-store communications, but stores can communicate with each other.

“We’re seeing some stores and service agents communicate with suppliers to establish visibility into when products will be available. They’re swarming on it immediately; you don’t have to wait two weeks for an email.”

Why we care. The lesson for all marketers, not just those in commerce is, first, that the pendulum is still swinging; second, that it’s a multi-dimensional pendulum. During the pandemic, it swung from mobile to desktop, and — okay — it’s swinging back again. But although it swung from physical to digital, it’s now swinging in a different direction, towards a bidirectional relationship between physical and digital (research on mobile, buy in store; or, see in store, buy digitall).

That pendulum is going to keep swinging. That is, unless we’re on the brink of an extended period of peace and well-being for the planet — and who’s betting on that? It’s incumbent upon marketers to observe very closely the direction in which buyers are headed and understand that the customer journey still has levels of complexity yet to be achieved.

The post Salesforce: The trends underlying a record-breaking Cyber Week appeared first on MarTech.

“The idea at the heart of this program is that customers — both consumers and B2B buyers — are accelerating away, designing their own customer journeys, looking for seamless and often self-serve experiences, and are able to surf away from a friction-packed brand experience with the click of a mouse,” said Kim Davis, MarTech’s editorial director. 

“The challenge for marketers is to catch up with those customers. If possible, get ahead of them, and be waiting in the right place with what they need,” he added.

Here’s how brands can catch up to these evolving, and accelerating, consumer expectations.

Understand your untethered customers

Davis pointed to a recent MarTech article where contributor Gene De Libero described “untethered consumers who move faster than every brand they engage with.”

“And it’s not just consumers, B2B buyers are unleashed too,” Davis said. “Customers are way ahead of marketing and sales — doing their own research, reading reviews, showing up everywhere and expecting to be recognized and remembered.”

With customers in the driver’s seat, brands have to make it even more attractive to engage with them. Otherwise, the competition is a click away.

“Brands really need to be easy to work with,” said Alicia Arnold, manager director for martech consultancy fifty-five. “They need to provide a positive experience. And they need to meet customers’ needs.”

Brands also need to understand the customer journey across digital and offline touchpoints, and be able to orchestrate that journey.

Dig Deeper: What is customer journey orchestration and how does it work?

“What are those customers looking to do with you?” Arnold asked. “And how can you best understand what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling, what they’re doing so that you can tie together that technology and all of those pieces across your internal teams that make your processes the best that they could be for these customers?””

Get more personal to match customers’ values

Consumers are also raising their standards for the values they expect from brands.

“If you don’t share your customers’ values, if you can’t empathize with them, if you don’t bring them into a community and offer them not just a product or service but an experience, forget about it,” said Davis.

This same principle applies to B2B buyers.

“What we’re expecting from brands is almost personified,” said Arnold. “We’re expecting brands to be trustworthy, we’re expecting brands to provide value. Almost like you’re looking to take brands and have them as your personal network – you’d want a brand that resonates and fits with those things that matter most to you.”

Marketers should adopt a dual strategy that includes brand goals and customer expectations. Begin with your brand, then tailor it so that you can meet the customers where they are.

“Think about what you’re looking to do as a brand and where that intersects with the consumers,” Arnold explained. “It’s got to be a mix of both, the brand and the consumer. Find that commonality. Once you find out what that is, you can start to set the strategic direction.”

Eliminate the waste in communications

A lot of these shifts in customer expectations were accelerated during the pandemic, as many jobs transitioned to work-from-home. This merging of work duties and home responsibilities means there’s even more of a need for marketers to cut through the noise. This applies to consumer marketing, but also especially for B2B messaging.

“More and more of the workforce has been positively influenced to manage their work responsibilities within their personal life and obligations,” said Jess Weimer, VP, enterprise marketing at freelancing platform Upwork. “This further underscores the need to eliminate wasted or non-compelling outreach to your prospects.”

She added, “It’s important to get to the point on how you can solve their problem from a human-to-human perspective, not business-to-business. And that’s where tools like marketing automation and sales sequence tools can be a blessing or a curse.”

The same message can’t be used generically for every team member within an account. Instead, multiple messages have to be tailored and humanized to individuals.

One thing marketers seem to agree on — there’s no going back. The bar will continue to be raised, and brands must meet it by delivering humanized messages and experiences that demonstrate to customers their shared values.

The post How to keep up with accelerating customer expectations: The MarTech Conference keynote appeared first on MarTech.

While it’s difficult to conjure any sympathy for these social media giants, marketers and smaller app developers are seeing their entire businesses being upended by these changes, as Facebook is often a primary channel for audience targeting. 

All is not lost and there are ways to help you navigate these new changes.

iOS still dominates ad spend market share — here’s why

It’s helpful to look back at the impact of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) privacy features on marketers’ ability to target iOS users. 

iOS’s market share for ad spend was 34% in April 2022, down 4% from April 2021, when Apple implemented iOS 14.5, according to a report from mobile ad-tech firm Adjust. In the latter half of 2021, the iOS market share dipped below 30% by October 2021.

Many marketers and industry experts forecasted that marketers would shift ad spending to Android targeting to compensate for the loss. But new data shows that from April 2022 to the third quarter of this year, that shift to more Android targeting isn’t yielding the results they were getting from iOS device targeting. 

Dig deeper: Study finds iOS 15 is inflating email open rates

Now, marketers are moving ad spend back to targeting iOS devices, even with the limited scale and higher CPMs. According to Adjust, this new gain in market share can be traced back to conversion data, where even the limited number of opted-in iOS users compared to Android are yielding more revenue through larger average order sizes. 

This notion may not surprise many retail marketers, but it’s important to note that new data backs this up. Even with Apple users making up just 27% of the US market compared to Android’s 72% market share, Android users purchase less at a lower average order amount. While it may seem counter-intuitive, “iOS users are still not only a more lucrative customer base, but they are potentially more cost-effective,” says Thomas Petit, an independent app development consultant. 

So, why do these shifts in market share matter to us marketers? It’s because even with the impending impact of iOS 16, we still need to continue to target iOS devices despite limited reach to take advantage of the considerably larger purchasing power of iOS users. 

Even as the iOS landscape becomes more restrictive and shifts further away from any form of third-party tracking, there are tactics marketers can implement now to better position themselves for success. Here are just a few tips to get the most out of your iOS targeting.

4 ways marketers can navigate and succeed in the storm of iOS privacy changes

1. Prioritize and personalize your first-party data

Some levels of personalization and contextualization will be harder to achieve amid all the new iOS changes. However, it doesn’t need to be an impossible task. Now more than ever, marketers need to rely on their first-party data and make the most of personalization based on declared location, setting up multi-language campaigns, and moving toward more video advertising.

Another vital tool is to take another pass at your CRM segmentation, focusing on audiences that yield long-term value rather than short-term profit. Also, look at trusted third-party data companies that offer CRM enrichment services to help you learn more about your customer base. This additional data, including household income and the presence of children, will open up new ways to segment your first-party data and uncover new products and services that will resonate with them based on their household make-up and life stage.

2. Prioritize conversion events

While conversion-level data is a marketer’s primary tool to assess performance, iOS limitations within Facebook make this more and more difficult. It can also be helpful to flip this around and watch for other specific events in your Facebook Performance Measurement data. 

For example, if you’ve only been collecting post-purchase data, integrate other signals like last-click conversion events in both Facebook and Google Analytics. These additional signals can capture new data that can be incorporated into more meaningful path-to-purchase patterns.

3. Unlock more data with UTM tracking

iOS changes have given marketers no shortage of blind spots to navigate when it comes to campaign performance, but Google Analytics can help you navigate around this issue. 

When advertising on Facebook, use UTM parameters on your site’s URLs. As a result, any data tracked by Facebook will populate in your Google Analytics. UTM tracking allows you to backfill user insights and create additional info on your target audience – where they are from, links they click on, and more.

4. Optimize goals on Google Analytics 

Once you have set up UTM tracking, create additional goals in Google Analytics aligned with essential conversion actions tracked on Facebook. This tweak can offer some new insight to see how these other goals fit within your performance metrics. Any decrease in conversions will now be visible, which can help you optimize, improve, and create a better strategy for future campaigns.

The big picture  

We all know that iOS privacy changes will continue to become more restrictive. Still, marketers can use the data they have to build new levers and additional lenses to further optimize and meet their KPIs. 

A winning recipe involves pivoting away from the easier short-term ad targeting goals, dedicating more focus and tools to look at the long game, and building more holistic goals centered around customer lifetime value.

When you invest in higher value, long-term customers and prospects, you’ll reap the benefits, including lower long-term ad spend, less competition in long-tail audience targeting, and more personal and fruitful relationships with existing customers. 

The post 4 tips to navigate the advertising impact of iOS privacy changes appeared first on MarTech.

The update to Taboola News gives recommendations for reliable news sources via publishing partners, as well as working directly with device manufacturers like Samsung.

Dig deeper: TikTok is setting the ground rules for social media

What it does. Taboola News can now be installed on mobile device wallpapers by manufacturers, while also serving news recommendations to users directly on the mobile lockscreen. Recommendations from trusted publishers can also be delivered through browser notifications refreshed throughout the day. The product is now available in 80 markets globally.

The need for news. Journalism ratings service Newsguard found that last year eight of nine people under 18 were exposed to misinformation about COVID-19 in the first 35 minutes of a TikTok session. This year, 60 percent of videos with harmful misinformation are viewed by TikTok users before the content is taken down, according to TikTok’s own findings.

Why we care. Platforms like TikTok are designed to grow their audience and keep them watching videos, which cuts into time spent consuming other content like news. So, news publishers need ways to get to more readers. And, oddly enough, the existence of fake news on TikTok and social media shows that those platforms’ users do have some desire to be informed. 

By pumping news recommendations into the mobile device lockscreen, there’s a better chance that some of the accurate news will get to the users first.

The post New Taboola feature fights fake news on social media appeared first on MarTech.

One sign of how the landscape is changing, adtech companies like Anzu are partnering with publishers to provide dynamic ad placements in-game. This allows brands who don’t have a comprehensive gaming strategy to test and learn, and also to incorporate gaming into a broader omnichannel media strategy.

But the sheer size of the gaming audience — over 200 million gamers in the US alone — means marketers who get more involved can produce greater returns by tapping into this engaged population.

Lead with brand strategy. Partnerships between game publishers and adtech companies are making it easier for brands to find their audiences in-game. Brands don’t have to speculate as much about if their customers are playing specific games. And if a brand’s customers are already playing the game, marketers should dive in, too.

“We don’t necessarily have a gaming strategy,” said Paul Mascali, head of games and esports for PepsiCo. “We have a brand strategy that gaming can help. We do this by leveraging data with third parties or internal data to reach those consumers who are consuming the content.”

Dig deeper: PepsiCo’s strategies for marketing via online games and esports

Understanding the community. Also, brands should be consistent and show that they’re invested in the gaming community, Mascali said.

That’s because the gaming community — or, more specifically, the communities built around specific games — are multi-faceted.

For instance, gamers aren’t just plugged into the gameplay. They soak in the culture around the games on streaming platforms like Twitch. But just because videogame fans are passively watching another expert player on a streaming video doesn’t mean they’re not engaged and listening attentively.

“Twitch streamers are a great example of modern day gamers,” said Sarah Ioos, head of sales for the Americas at Twitch. “Non-gaming content has erupted — it doubled during the pandemic in year one. Gamers are not a monolith, they’re multifaceted. We see Twitch streamers bringing more of their whole self into their streaming.”

More lifestyle categories. As PepsiCo has demonstrated, there is a natural crossover between gaming and sports, which leads to traditional sports categories like beverages and snacks. (Also, shoes and apparel.)

During the pandemic, when everybody, including gamers, were shut in, gaming content expanded. Gamers were sharing more about their lifestyles, including exercise routines, cooking, fashion and other interests.

This holistic perspective on gamers opens up more opportunities for brands that want to connect with Gen Z and Millennial consumers.

Many touchpoints. Another interesting aspect about Twitch is that desktop is still the preferred device for their audience, according to Ioos.

Consumers are engaging with gaming content on many different devices and in different contexts, and this allows marketers to finetune their mix. If hardcore gamers and Twitch watchers are on desktops at the home, other more leisure gamers might be playing on mobile while commuting or shopping.

Why we care. All of this means that the strategy has flipped for marketers. Instead of finding a subset of gamers within their audience, they can now look across the billions of gamers and find their audience and subsegments.

Addressability for in-game advertising is still in the early stages, but now there are more opportunities, according to Keith Soljacich, head of innovation at agency Publicis Media.

“More data means more actionable places to find our audiences,” said Soljacich. “[Publishers and tech partners] are building that intelligence for audiences at the same time that opportunities are becoming available to us as marketers.”

The post How marketers are preparing for the future of in-game ads appeared first on MarTech.

The report, “Adjusting to the New Economic Climate and Working Environment,” comes from mobile advertising platform LoopMe.

Cost-of-living sensitivities. At 38%, U.S. consumers were less likely to consciously cut their spending than consumers in the U.K. (50%) or Australia (54%). 52% thought their employers could help out by raising wages, while 17% would appreciate help with their home utility bills.

Dig deeper: Brands’ cost-cutting moves are costing them customers

Remote and hybrid working. On the one hand, consumers have sought to increase their home-working time to save on travel costs (11% on average, but 40% for 55-64 demographic the U.S.). On the other hand, an average of 7% across the countries studied had increased time spent in the office to save on home utility bills.

18% of consumers would accept a pay cut to work from home. Consistent with that, 21% would be incentivized to work in the office by a pay increase (26% of the 25-34 demographic in Australia would be incentivized by free lunches.

Why we care. This large sample of consumers serves to confirm that, as workers, they would like more money. Hardly headline-worthy, but it is interesting to see people trying to balance competing incentives as the cost of living remains high. Having your employer pay for 9 to 5 air-conditioning can result in significant savings withb the temperature going up even faster than prices. For some, however, these savings are clearly negated by the cost of commuting. What is eye-catching is the very high percentage that prefers home working, all things considered.

It would be interesting to compare these results with results from a low-inflation, affordable-living period. Let’s hope we’ll be able to do that soon.

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