TWW 003

Friday 29th January

January 28, 2021

Things you may have missed🏖

You won’t believe what company is going public!
Hundreds of Parler Videos from that day, released.
Google threatens to leave Australia
Twitter acquires Revue, a newsletter platform.
Good to see Pele is still getting a runabout

Things You Should Know👀

Tweet, tweet. Chill out, ornithologists. It’s a different type of Birdwatch! Twitter has rolled out its community-driven approach to addressing misleading information.

Twitter has admitted that this could be “messy and have problems at times,” but it believes the model is “worth trying.” The world is healing!

Oh no. Oh no. Oh no,no,no,no,no. Another victim of GDPR, dating app Grindr has been fined €10m for collective sensitive information on users of the app.

We haven’t seen too many victims of GDPR, but safe to say Grindr is one of the biggest to fall so far.

“We can’t target or capture data on individuals, right? What if we -stay with me here- target ads at groups?” Well FLoC me, Google has done it.

FLoC (pronounced “flock”) allows businesses to send ads to groups of potential customers rather than specific individuals. Using ML algorithms, this will create clusters of people with similar browsing habits. Smart.

Cool Stuff😎

Dem Stonks! r/WallStreetBets is the 2021 Occupy Wall Street. As they go against Hedge Funds that are shorting stocks, to pump up these forgotten titans, that have faded since Digitisation.

Gameshop is up 150% as I write this, thanks to Day Traders and trolls going against those shorting stocks. [UPDATE - RobinHood, the popular day-trading app has halted trading on GameStop, Blackberry, Nokia & AMC]

Well, this is tortellini awesome, this definitely pasta’s the test. Barilla X Spotify is the most genius activation!

I dread to think how long the team behind this spent in a ‘war room’ discussing Brand Purpose and what consumers really want. But, hats off. This is fantastic!

Look, I don’t want to experience 2020 again either. But this little game has it all…Koala’s, toilet roll and stock market crashes

Starting off in Australia, this side scroller throwback is well designed, funny and a good way to burn 10 minutes.

What we’ve learned📚

THE BIGGEST GAME IN THE WORLD. THE YOUNG BUCK VS THE OLD GUARD. THE BIGGEST AD SPOTS. What do you mean you’re not buying one this year?! Please?

Coke, Pepsi, Anheuser-Busch are the biggest names so far to pull out of these iconic spots. Instead of spending money on the ad-spot, Budweiser is committing $1m towards vaccine education.

Gucci Debuts Snapchat AR Shoe Try-ons – WWD

No longer a niche? Snap is moving VR & AR into the mainstream, as they enter the plateau of productivity.

A good article from WSJ, delving into a year that suited them perfectly. A mixture of e-commerce, quarantine and creativity.

The Nerd Corner🤓

A multi-billion loss for Facebook?! 2021 is going to be a wild ride. The changes around iOS14 have put Facebook on the offensive and still so many unknowns.

The deepest dive I’ve seen so far on the evolving topic. Interesting point around targeting in platform though, a top tip is to delete your Facebook account and start a new one. Little to no data captured on you…

Context is 👑. Relevant ads appearing against/in negative content outperformed those ads with irrelevant copy. Water is wet, Arsenal will win the league.

Okay, we all knew that relevant ads perform better than irrelevant ads. But the placement is an intriguing one, does this mean that Brand Safety is just a media proverb? Or, does detection and programmatic context need to improve?