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Nielsen competitor ComScore is trying hard to create a product that will loosen Nielsen's grip on TV ratings, but that's a nearly impossible task. The question is less whether Nielsen's TV ratings will go away than whether traditional linear cable agreements will eventually go away and Nielsen's ratings system will become obsolete

There's just too much that's too similar on TV, and the wars of attrition with cable operators mean all packages just aren't going to contain all channels anymore. They can't afford to.

Third parties like Acxiom and Experian have an incredible amount of information, and the CEO of Acxiom told us consumers should have to pay to prevent their financial data from circulating among anybody who wants to buy it, basically like getting an upgrade on an airline.

Problem number one: Building a relevant and engaged audience on Snapchat is difficult, compared to other social networks.

Issue number two: Snapchat has its own vibe. It may be difficult for many companies to achieve Snapchat credibility without some help from the cool kids.

the third issue is, the challenge of creating continuous, credible, snap-worthy content that disappears can be significant.

86 percent of marketers say they will own the end-to-end customer experience by 2020. To accomplish this, the report found that marketing leaders must have a single view of the customer that allows them to engage in two-way, personalized conversations across technologies, locations, and physical objects.

Marketing complexity is growing: More than half of respondents believe the accelerating pace of technological change, mobile lifestyles, and an explosion of potential marketing channels via the Internet of Things (IoT) will change the field the most by 2020. This is driven by the billions of possible interactions these channels will create between a company and its customers.

The top marketing channels are those that can be personalized: The top channels to the customer in 2020 will be social media (63% of respondents), the World Wide Web (53%), mobile apps (47%), and mobile web (46%).

Reply threads: more reminiscent of a message board, replies are indented and replies coming from people you follow appear with a blue line (making them easier to find if a tweet goes viral or is otherwise cluttered with replies) A “show more” option: not all replies will be displayed. Instead, high quality or otherwise preferable responses will migrate toward the top, and others can be displayed when clicking “show more.”

Twitter will be conducting an audit of any third-party apps that meet a certain threshold of access, ensuring that their use of the site’s APIs is safe and legitimate.

recently released diversity report included a rise in female, Black, and Latinx employees, in areas including overall leadership and technical roles. But attrition numbers were also high among those populations

U.S. truth-in-advertising enforcers have sent letters to supermodel Naomi Campbell, actresses Lindsay Lohan and Vanessa Hudgens and other celebrities asking whether they have paid deals to endorse products on the photo-sharing app Instagram.

Instagram, which is owned by Facebook Inc, has seen a sharp increase in recent years in promotions of products and services by famous people, often without disclosures of whether there was an endorsement deal. Celebrities have talked up clothing brands, food, alcohol, spa treatments and a wide array of other items.

In May, the agency released dozens of letters it had sent to companies and stars giving them notice that they must tell fans about compensation for promotions on social media.

Try Mute, a way to quickly mute 100 words from Twitter as chosen by the wisdom of people on the internet — aka crowdsourced.

Twitter has long supported muting words, but Mute makes it easy to really get into the feature. Its Mute.life website lists 100 keywords that have been added and then voted on by visitors to form a ranked list. By installing a bookmark in your (Google Chrome) browser, Mute can be used to automatically add those top 100 words into your muted word list for Twitter.

By 2014, “Facebook the big news machine” was in full swing with Trending, hashtags and news outlets pouring resources into growing their Pages. Emphasizing the “news” in News Feed retrained users to wait for the big world-changing headlines to come to them rather than crisscrossing the home pages of various publishers. Many don’t even click-through, getting the gist of the news just from the headline and preview blurb. Advertisers followed the eyeballs, moving their spend from the publisher sites to Facebook.

In 2015, Facebook realized users hated waiting for slow mobile websites to load, so it launched Instant Articles to host publisher content within its own app. Instant Articles trained users not to even visit news sites when they clicked their links, instead only having the patience for a fast-loading native page stripped of the publisher’s identity and many of their recirculation and monetization opportunities. Advertisers followed, as publishers allowed Facebook to sell the ads on Instant Articles for them and thereby surrendered their advertiser relationships at the same time as their reader relationships.

This is how Facebook turns publishers into ghostwriters, a problem I blew the whistle on in 2015. Publishers are pitted against each other as they make interchangeable “dumb content” for Facebook’s “smart pipes.”

Facebook Connections Targeting, NOW the ONLY way to forensically slice audience psychographics. The good news is FB users who engage can be easily studied using free FB tools in Audience Insights, the API and subtractive campaign reach. Get a FB user to become a connection, like your page, use your app, engage with an event and/or any advanced combinations thereof.  THEN and only then can they easily be studied.

In the old days we didn’t have Custom Audiences, let alone the ability to study them. Still, we made major psychographic marketing strides. Remember the magic: Drive traffic from social psychographic targeting to your website. Keep track of that targeting and creative through UTM tags. Set Google, FB and any first-party cookies on your site. Because traffic came from very specific targeting, we KNOW what the audience is. No analysis required.

Instagram isn’t quite bringing back the chronological feed, but it will show more new posts and stop suddenly bumping you to the top of the feed while you’re scrolling.

It should be more coherent to browse the app now that you won’t lose your place because your feed randomly refreshes, and there shouldn’t be as many disparate time stamps to juggle. Instead, you’ll be able to manually push a “New Posts” button when you want to refresh the feed.

“Based on your feedback, we’re also making changes to ensure that newer posts are more likely to appear first in feed” the company writes.

Facebook Inc. scans the links and images that people send each other on Facebook Messenger, and reads chats when they’re flagged to moderators, making sure the content abides by the company’s rules. If it doesn’t, it gets blocked or taken down.

Facebook will focus on improving visual features in Messenger. In his post, Marcus says “people will expect a super fast and intuitive camera, video, images, GIFs, and stickers with almost every conversation.”

Messenger bet big on bots in 2017. Last year the company worked with small businesses and global brands to create more than 200,000 bots for Messenger. Marcus writes, “Look for investment in rich messaging experiences not only from global brands, but small businesses who need to be creative and nimble to stay competitive.” Since many of these bots provide very rudimentary features, we would expect to see improvements in overall user experience this year. We also expect larger brands to follow the lead of brands like Apple Music and Lego in creating marketing solutions made for the Messenger platform. 

Expect to see more businesses transitioning at least some of their customer service resources to Messenger. A recent study, commissioned by Facebook found that “56 percent of people surveyed would rather message a business than call customer service, and 67 percent expect to message businesses even more over the next two years.”

Snapchat users have a much more negative view of the brand since Snap redesigned the app in January. Its user sentiment — measured by having consumers rank their impression of a brand on a scale of 100 for “very positive” to -100 for “very negative” — among 18- to 34-year-old U.S. consumers declined 73 percent following the redesign,

“There’s a lot of exciting work being done around augmented reality,” an Instagram spokesperson said when asked about the app copying Snapchat’s face filters. “We’ve heard from our community that they want more creative ways to share everyday moments and engage with friends. With face filters, they have more tools than ever at their fingertips, and all in one place.” While that dodges the question a bit, the last part is revealing. Instagram wants to be the one-stop shop for visual communication

Instagram’s spin on Snapchat’s selfie masks is designed to make them simple and less wacky so they appeal to users beyond teens

The company, part of Google, says it's expanding its Custom Affinity Audience offering so advertisers can target users who search for ski resorts on Google Maps or download a ski resort app, for example, and serve them with ads for winter-related gear. It also provides targeting based on real-life locations that users may have visited.

Meanwhile, YouTube says its new Director Mix software can create hundreds or thousands of different video from a single asset.

Marketers who leverage Director Mix must provide YouTube with all the building blocks of video, including voiceovers, background and copy. YouTube says it will then create "hundreds or thousands of versions to match your audience segments."

Instagram said it will require birthdates from all new users starting on Wednesday, expanding the audience for ads for alcohol and other age-restricted products while offering new safety measures for younger users.

The policy change could help stave off passage of costly child safety and data privacy regulations as lawmakers and family safety groups in the United States, Britain and elsewhere criticize the app for exposing children to inappropriate material.