Yahoo’s recent acquisition of Tumblr, and the parallel overhaul of Flickr,  are just part of the latest examples. If you visit these sites, they are highly visual and revolve around images. Text is not dead, but it certainly gets a smaller cut of the real estate.

It seems like these two little friends are all that matters in digital

Here’s another angle on it: Were you surprised by the big huh-hah around the new X-box launch? It seems that no one saw it coming a week ago, and now, suddenly Microsoft is praised for the bold move putting it in front of the competitions both from leading gaming consoles from Sony and Nintendo, and home TV hubs such as Apple TV. Indeed, the Xbox One technology is impressive and cutting edge – and its interface generates excitement and awe because it is visually smart. Users can intuitively manage and operate aspects of their digital entertainment without reading lengthy manuals and sifting through endless menus of options.

Every smart TV, at least from the major manufacturers, comes with built-in or shared web access, some kind of app interface, and already contains apps from the big players as custom options – Facebook, Skype (Microsoft), YouTube and Gmail (Google), and local music and movie streaming services such as Netflix where applicable. All these are controlled from a pretty remote control device, through a visual interface. Wherever you can be given the options to speak a command, or perform it through a gesture, it is preferred over typing in text.

We’ll wrap it up with the fascinating Pew Report,  showing that Facebook acceptance by teens is not waning as formerly announced, and more importantly, that twitter, instagram and Tumblr adoption is doubling year over year. Let us think now: Teens stay on Facebook but at the same time communicate more where they can be brisk with their text and where they can easily share and promote lifestyle using images. Social Media owes its success to visual content, video or photo, and it’s the main reason for the mountains of servers that all the big internet players need to stay in the game., big enough to draw the attention of environmental organizations.

Have you aligned your product and digital sales strategy to harness the power of visualization? Share your experience with us.

And then, once you have created engagement, you need to work really hard to maintain it. From the hundreds of parameters that decide success or failure, many are not really in your control. For example, there is recent data indicating that web and mobile page loading times are actually expected to start slowing-down over the next couple of years. The amount of data sets and their size are simply growing faster than the infrastructure to support them, or so they say.

So if you managed to catch a user’s attention, you either want to keep them hyper-engaged or be able to meet them again when they skip to the next item or task in their lives. Supposing that you have the capability to create content which is as good as your competition’s, and to use the traditional digital channels to spread it, there are 3 main digital advertising practices that help you keep more users on your properties:

How much of it can you really process?

Cross-Platform Presence

Advertiser side or media side, your audience is switching devices several times a day. They use their laptop, tablet and Smartphone, all increasingly synchronized and customized to personal tastes. If your content, your product offering and your advertising are responsive, aimed at all screen sizes and coding formats, and adapted for correct measurement, you can diversify away a lot of the above-mentioned risks.

Retargeting

This technology has been around for several years and has developed itself into a thriving industry for one main reason: you can get back the good ones. There are so many reasons, both technical and psychological, for why a user will not complete a transaction. So getting them back into the process can win you back a lot of your lost crowd. The Facebook Exchange’s latest results are a great example.

Content Marketing

If you have original content, or the ability to produce it, this is a great way to leverage the web’s “Shary-feely” nature. By showing your visitors other related content, you actually increase your engagement and conversion rates. This can be also implemented by e-commerce vendors by populating their eCommerce pages with content related to their products and business.

Tell us more: What methods have you been using to engage your audience and keep them coming back and staying longer?

The numbers are all there. Mobile web access is already at pars with landline and cable connections, an on the road to exceed it by the end of the year.  In fact if you consider the much shorter startup time and browser launch of mobile devices, content is probably hitting the eyeballs of mobile device users much faster already as it is. Books can be written on the effects this will have on content and related marketing technologies. So let’s dissect this holy mobile trinity one by one:

Mobile - It literally "touches" everything else

Why Social is Mobile

It seems that wherever you cast a stone, there’s a Facebook executive talking about Mobile and how Facebook is there to meet the challenge. Facebook Home’s Cover Feed is expected to reflect News Feed ads in coming months. And according to Sheryl Sandberg, Mobile is tantamount to TV, as its huge audience reach potential make videos on mobile available to mass amounts of eyeballs. Not all the minds in the business agree on that, but the above mentioned data access capabilities fall in nicely with her claims. The argument is on the timing.

Why Video is Mobile

Sandberg’s quotes can be carried into this part as well. Check yourself, and more probably than not, the amount of short videos you watch on your phone, and longer videos you watch on tablets has likely increased by a factor of hundreds over the last couple of years. And them, technologies which sync your pocket device with bigger screens are multiplying faster than you can say “streaming”. This excellent study on Cross-Screen engagement, released last month by our partners at Microsoft Advertising, is the second but not less crucial aspect of video “mobilization”. As wearable tech such as Google Glass and the iWatch, which are simply more elaborate mobile devices, start appearing over the next few years, they will nicely blend into that ecosystem (For example, your TV can play for you at home the show that you watched the trailer for on the bus/train, etc).

Why Rich Media is Mobile

Let us be clear that by Rich Media, we mean “non-video ads that move”. The distinction is important because the boundaries in digital advertising, between formats and platforms, are not always standardized on a global scale. The fabulous DG Mediamind Benchmarking Study we shared last week shows 50-75% higher CTRs for Rich Media vs. Traditional display. The ubiquity of mobile devices dictates Rich Media as the minimum standard for “Mobile Display” – traditional web banners do not translate well to the small screen size. App banners are adapting banner blindness faster than their web predecessors as adoption lifecycles shrink and larger portions of the user base are “touch-native”, so Rich Media is the most readily available solution.

Are those the foundations of the stellar growth in Online Ad Spend last year and last decade? In the US probably more so than in other markets, but we believe this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Headlines have been mostly focused on Facebook Home‘s launch, but don’t let it blind you from other important updates that can affect your social advertising strategy. Tune in for latest the latest developments on Facebook’s platform and how they may affect your advertising efforts:

1. Creative Image For Mobile App Install Ads

Mobile App Install ads

A custom creative image will now be required for all Mobile App Install Ads. The default banner image will no longer be used. Make sure you use relevant images in Mobile App campaigns.

2. Page like ads in Facebook’s native iPhone app

iOS Page Like ads

From now on, Page Like ads can be delivered in Facebook’s native iPhone app. This change will allow advertisers to reach a larger audience, through the most engaging placement on Facebook, with an ad unit optimized to convert people into fans.

3. Mobile OS Version & WI-FI Targeting

Facebook has released an enhanced device targeting for:

A. Specific versions of Android and iOS mobile operating systems

B.devices on Wi-Fi only connections

This targeting can be applied to any ad type, particualrly Mobile App Install ads.

4. Announcing Tracking Specs

Facebook is launching the ability to track any action for any ad type, and defining the two goals of tracking and optimization separately. Advertisers can now define the actions they wish to track or the actions the actions they wish to optimize towards.

5. Introducing Replies To All Pages

Reply on the fly

This new feature called “Replies” will improve the quality of conversation on Pages. Replies help admins manage multiple conversations on a post, and ensures that people who visit the page always see the best conversations. Currently only available on desktop, it is planned to be available on mobile in the near future.

6. Unpublished page posts

Dark posts are now renamed  “unpublished page posts”.

7. Newsfeeder launched!

The new Newsfeeder home

Newsfeeder.com is a website showcasing the most creative Facebook page posts by brands. A collaboration between Onewhow and Facebook Studio, its goal is to highlight and celebrate the best published work being created on Facebook, and to inspire people in the industry who are skeptical about the Facebook platform to start looking at it as a highly creative and effective medium.

8. New Games sections on timeline!

The new Timeline games section

This new section will appear for people that have played one or more social game in the last 30 days or have previously liked a game.

9. Ads Manager Updates

To focus more on goals and ROI, advertisers can see how they are performing against specific goals, allowing to see progress in regard to these specific actions, evaluate the price paid per action and use this information to optimize ads and measure ROI more accurately.

10. Local Currency – For Game Developers

Prices show in local currency too

As announced in June 2012, Facebook is moving from Facebook Credits to local currency pricing. Local currency payments simplify the purchase experience for users, improve the performance of the payments flow, and makes it easier for developers to price virtual goods for a global audience.

For any questions and ore information, connect with your Ybrant contact, or visit our pages.

January 2012 -  Facebook opened the year with a new version of Insights – seems like they’ve been here forever – and the way digital advertisers have become familiar and involved in Facebook metrics within one year is worthy of an academic study in socio-economics. Ybrant topped it up by offering exciting and exclusive features in its advertising technology such as day-parting for Facebook campaigns.

February 2012 – Facebook shortened the character limit of its native ads text to 90 (from 135) – forcing a large pool of professionals to adapt their tactics, systems, and to get more punch out of less space. 11 months later, this probably had exponential consequences both in terms of infrastructure (servers) and ad effectiveness (user response). Ybrant was able to provide its partners with an adaptation period of another few weeks.

March 2012 – The Facebook Marketing Conference took place in New York City, to great acclaim and with enormous attention from the media and from leading consumer brands in the US. Once again, formats that seem standard practice that has been around forever, have been announced then and deployed soon after: Timeline for brands, Stories on Newsfeed and mobile, Premium promo products, Real-time insights and offers for pages, among others. Ybrant attended and tweeted live from the event.

April 2012 – Most of the features announced by Facebook in the first quarter came into effect and changed the digital marketing world forever. Studies showed an immediate impact on engagement metrics and we haven’t looked back since.

June 2012 – Ybrant was once again setting the trend in the social sphere by becoming part of the Preferred Marketing Developer program on Facebook, having obtained the relevant certificate under the Advertising API. The program recognizes companies that have developed technology in one or more of the key areas of the Social Network: Solutions for managing pages, services and platforms for the integration of social solutions, tools for analysis of social data and advertising solutions for social ads.

July 2012 – Instead of delving on the breathtaking first half of 2012, we took the opportunity to look ahead and try and clarify to our readers and partners where we think this is all taking us. The Facebook Exchange, albeit being planned for launch only a quarter later, was taking its first steps and like we predicted it became a disruptive player in the display re-marketing vertical in some markets within weeks.

August 2012 – We took the liberty of NOT lazing away in the (northern hemisphere) summer months and shared our thoughts and predicaments on Big Data, Video advertising, the hands-on impact of Facebook’s Sponsored Stories and translating offline objectives into realistic and achievable digital goals that can still be ambitious and demanding.

September 2012 -  We took our readers to the exciting challenges facing digital marketers in China and APAC, discussed the challenges and changes overcoming cookie tracking technologies, explored how to go local with your digital spend and provide insightful tips on Mobile advertising that can help you reach both branding and performance goals.

October 2012 – We swept into October reminding our audience that despite all these wonderful technologies, it’s the people behind them on both sides of the spectrum that make the difference. This led us to provide a deeper profiling of the generation of audience that will shape and define most of the 21^st century. And we wrapped up with a status check on Facebook’s overwhelming impact.

November 2012 – Digital marketing is so central and touches so many lives globally that we felt the need to discuss the moral aspects of being influential players in this industry. Content in itself cannot be overlooked as a central aspect of any digital strategy and we gave a few pointers from our experience of helping many content providers leverage it across digital platforms. This tied in well into how to prioritize across all these possibilities and to leverage your data for that end.

This month was according to tradition a period of looking ahead into the near and not so near future, and collecting our thoughts on the directions our industry may take and the possible strategic alternatives that apply. One is sure, in one way or another, we will all be surprised by some disruptive change that no one could see coming – story of our lives… And the reason we already can’t wait to see what 2013 has in store. Happy New Year!

First of all, text will be a thing of the past. The reasoning behind this claim is that technology will allow us to go back to pre-print way of thinking – our natural given capability of audio-visual expression will be enough to operate any technology or platform. Liking and supporting ideas will be deduced by machines from our tone of voice, choice of words, and other body language, closer than today to conversation between humans. Text, at least for day to day communication, will become redundant, but will still be used to store abstract information (ideas, stories, events, etc)

What does this mean for advertising? It sounds spooky, but there is no need to prepare for an onslaught of retina scanners from futuristic movies like Minority Report. If it doesn’t inspire trust in you right now, it won’t hold water then. Consider it this way: If communication with the internet is much more like human interaction, then advertising techniques will have to play along to stay effective. If a sales person can understand your needs and provide you the best service or product, they should get your business.

The second major landslide affecting the online world by 2020 will be the capability to analyze content in any form, including pictures, art, videos and even texture of surfaces. What we know today as the boundaries of the world covered by our devices such as tablets and phones is still all in the virtual realm. Smart homes already exist, and the next step is smart public environments that adapt to the needs of a collective group within a given space.

Last but absolutely not least, power will be completely at the consumer’s hands. Already today, Social Media has toppled regimes and brought corporations to their knees, forcing large organizations to be more open about their activities, interests, and their social responsibility. In the same way that opinions, support for causes, funding and consumer action can be crowd-sourced, so can advertising regulations and best practices, getting us closer to an optimal balance between privacy and quality of service.

Think about it, online advertising is only about 15 years old. It needs to grow, shape, storm and norm before it reaches its huge, promising potential. We’ll be there, hoping that in this case, foresight is 2020.

Happy Holidays from the Ybrant family!

Here are the top two trends expected to grow in 2013, and the most interesting new trends technologies to watch for.

Expected to grow:

Big Data – We’ll say it again and again: If you don’t have data, start collecting. If you are collecting, get it sorted. And if you have it sorted, start leveraging the information it provides you about your existing and potential customer base. The Facebook Exchange is probably the biggest and most influential project in data and media integration, because of Facebook’s huge reach within the global online user population.

Content Marketing – It may mean different things to different people, but it can be simplified to taking publishing best practices and applying them into digital marketing. Effective content needs to be created, managed and curated, and there are already new companies focusing on taking this industry into the next level of measureable results.

Newer, emerging trends:

Responsive web-design – If you haven’t heard of it you will very soon. Today’s cross-platform reality means that your visitors will consume your content on several devices, sometimes at the same time, and you need to be adapted to as many screens, social networks and languages as possible, with the right prioritization of course.

Second Screen TV – In direct continuation to the above point, using tablets or phones to interact with TV content is just another vertical that everyone could imagine but very few saw coming in full force. As TV’s get smarter and present their own connectivity and application ecosystems, users are not waiting and are already leveraging their smart and fast devices to get more information and content in sync to what their watching (vote for contestants, read more about characters and/or cast, and even see video or extra content in parallel.)

Visual (will be?) the new king:

The push for this is strong because online interaction and consumption of content is moving in that direction at huge speed. Recent acquisitions such as Instagram and Face.com by Facebook are just the beginning. Here is the need to control and manage all this visual information. People use better and faster mobile devices with better cameras, and the infrastructure of the web grows fast enough to support this traffic, but there are still gaps in what we can do with this visual information, compared with words and numbers. We will be seeing more and more original ways to leverage visual data from the online sphere (photos, videos and even artwork and sketches) into analyzable and useful information.

Ybrant Social preaching Facebook ROI to brand marketers in London last week

It’s in many aspects a mature ecosystem with its own in-laid rhythm. As Preferred Marketing Developers specializing in ads, we want to share with you some of the more influential updates and developments in recent months:

Custom Audiences:

Allows brands to identify their client base on Facebook, and reach them with the  most relevant message at the most relevant time. Advertisers can segment their client database based on their consumption habits, loyalty, and any other parameter, creating a unique offer type for each group. Custom audiences can be used in parallel to Facebook’s demographic, geographic, and other targeting capabilities available.

Offers:

Allows brands to create a unique offer for their Facebook followers, and use it to amplify their reach by showing ads to the followers, their friends, or any Facebook user, increasing actions such as sales, and engagement. Offers can also be enhanced with Facebook’s abovementioned targeting capabilities, to reach audiences in certain locations, age group, etc.

Mobile app ads:

Advertisers with dedicated apps and app developers at large can leverage their Facebook audience in two different methods:

1-      Apps:

a.       By integrating an SDK in their app, adding the ability to track performance parameters such as installs and conversions

b.      By creating a Facebook application, which can generate content with any action on the app (Install, play, advancing a level, etc), and using this content to generate an ad to amplify their message and reach with friend recommendations

2-      Ads

1. Advertisers can concentrate on their mobile users by showing specific ads to a specific audience. As the mobile news feed is one of the most valuable real estates within Facebook, a mobile ad’s reach is directly related to the ad’s relevancy, to ensure the best user experience.

Premium Ads:

Ybrant Digital, as a PMD, has been granted the ability to manage (upload, run, optimize, etc) premium campaigns in most countries around the globe (excluding logout screen ads). The key advantages are a relatively lower starting budget, no limit on the number of creative used, optimization based on the advertiser’s goals, ROI tracking, and a tailor-made SLA to suit even the most demanding clients. Premium ads are a terrific option for short-term and immediate impact campaigns, such as product launch and focused branding campaigns with good creative and/or video.

Sponsored results:

Advertisers can today leverage searches generated within Facebook for a specific page or pages, being able to use a specific message, Facebook tab. The ad will be shown only on Facebook’s search in real time, not under the “more results” page.

Marketplace Ads:

We continue to serve hundreds of clients with Facebook marketplace ads, optimizing for their targets and managing campaigns at scale, aided by technology and experienced local teams.

All in all, choosing the right mix of Facebook ad types most suitable for your campaign requires experience and up-to-date knowledge. It needs serious preparation and thought with which we will always be glad to help.

Meeting with many other companies in the digital space, we are amazed time and again that even managers and teams dealing with digital content and online activities on a daily basis still have a huge knowledge gap in the requirements and best practices for advertising them. Come to think of it, it’s only natural that since Advertising is a profession, that Digital will come in to fill the constantly self-enlarging shoes that the unstoppable amount of platforms, devices and technologies rains upon today’s marketers.

So what have we to support the claim that Digital Advertising meets most of the characteristics of a profession?

It has professional associations, universities and colleges are teaching it and providing recognized academic degrees in this field. Competence in this field is easily measured, and all of the large institutions in the industry offer internships and training periods. And experience is a must-have for more senior positions. Professional ethics are a central aspect of the industry’s developments and have been around since it started with the likes of CanSpam, and the industry is probably among the most self- regulated you can find. As far as altruism goes, the advertising-based model has created an eco-system that can be directly correlated with the changing of certain regimes around the globe.  The founders of the big 5 companies are today’s business culture heroes; sometimes well below the age of 30. Most of the workforce, worldwide, is middle class, and enjoys high mobility: Any Digital Advertising professional can pick themselves up at any time and move to a competitor, or start their own shop.

Let’s be honest also that some parameters that are still lacking: An official licensing of practitioners and universal testing standards.

But most importantly, coming back to where we started this, Digital Advertising knowledge is indeterminate: Rules and guidelines alone won’t do. You need experience and accumulated knowledge to make the right choices.  So even if you can write the best blogs and design the most beautiful web pages and Facebook timelines, you still need to put your advertising dollar where it would bring you the most bang for your buck. Whether you do that in-house or hire the services, be sure to talk to a professional.

Not surprisingly, most agencies and organizations have modified their pitch accordingly and you will hear slogans like “on every screen,” “across all devices” and similar from every corner. Even the largest players keep coming up with solutions and products to bridge the gap between what they provide and what’s still out there. Facebook’s big investment in mobile ad formats, which took center page in its IPO, and the more recent Facebook Exchange initiative, are good examples. No one can allow themselves to stay put.

When you consider the resources you have at hand, putting your digital objectives vs. your digital budget, it can be quite a challenge to riddle out the priorities as the ground keeps shifting under your virtual feet. The range of possibilities to deal with this is very wide, so let us simplify it to only three:

1. Expand your advantages.

Some brands, particularly Consumer Packaged Goods, traditionally relied heavily on TV, radio and print advertising. The measurability was never spectacular, but mass reach combined with segmented content provided confidence in the effectiveness. It’s probably still true for TV, but the CPG multinationals are already been exploring online video for a couple of years already. Even without their financial power, if you have the content you should be able to easily make the skip over to online – and get much more measurability, exposure, and lower cost per eyeball. If you’re already active on social and display, you can leverage that for sharing, viral exposure etc.

2. Start experimenting with all platforms.

There is no excuse, no rational reason, for any brand, B2C or B2B, not to be active on Social networks or to have mobile-ready content. Your next customer is very likely to check you out form their phone, tablet, or hybrid thereof, while they’re on the move and with a very short attention span to your messages. So have your window dressed for these platforms, and your registration, sales and customer service interfaces aligned accordingly. The need to advertise there will come soon, very quickly and with a limited window of opportunity, so you better be ready.

3. “Get” fresh minds.

If you’re leading the marketing strategy for your organization, and you’re not younger than 21, you were probably born in the wrong time to really understand what’s going on. You may know hip terms like “Millennials,” “Influencers,” “Trendsetters” and such, but these are just translations into your language and conceptual space of a world you will never really understand. The people you will market to tomorrow will have grown up with more devices than shoes and you will only infiltrate their ranks by recruiting them not only into Junior positions, but also leveraging them into your thinking and strategy, and speaking their language. Crowdsourcing their thoughts and asking their help for your biggest and most crucial aspirations, is second nature for them

Start moving today about these three above aspects of your digital strategy, and you’re better equipped to cope with tomorrow’s challenges.