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Snapchat is at the mercy of competitors like Facebook and Google that can simply copy its products.Advertisers say Snapchat's unique selling point is that it is cool, new, and has created its own advertising "currency."But ad-buyers also need Snapchat to do more to prove its ads actually drive sales if they are going to commit meaningful budgets to the platform.

the barrier to entry for new entrants is low, and the switching costs to another platform are also low. Moreover, the majority of our users are 18-34 years old.

Users under 25, it says, visit Snapchat more than 20 times and spend more than 30 minutes on the app each day. It may have fewer users than its rivals, but, for now at least, they are highly-engaged

Talk Time is a sales concept backed by research that values conversation with clients and prospects. Regardless how good a sales or account person is at “selling,” every minute they’re talking to a client or prospect is worth $25 per minute in future revenue. Whether you’re a bartender selling a drink or a Boeing VP selling a 737, the time you spend developing a relationship is valued at $25 a minute towards future revenue.

Agency owners should take note that obsession with the billable hour without creating connection is akin to stepping over dollars to pick up pennies.

the new social model is simply to harvest social signals and sell personalized ads, however and wherever possible.

The purpose of Facebook’s upcoming mobile ad network is to sell ads outside of Facebook.com and its mobile app. This “multiple app” strategy often accompanies a network’s own app offerings — in Facebook’s case, Messenger, Facebook Camera and Paper. According to Elgan: If Facebook’s direction or strategy isn’t clear, let me spell it out: Harvest personal data from multiple apps, then sell personalized advertising in multiple locations.   Here’s an oversimplified example: An ad for a Starbucks promotion presented to you in a mobile game (sold through Facebook’s upcoming ad network) might be based on knowledge that you spend a ton of time at Starbucks — information harvested from the Moves app.   As you can see, there’s no Facebook — no social network — involved in this series of events. But Facebook gets paid anyway.

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.

"Facebook is establishing itself as a destination for premium video content, and demonstrating a willingness to pay significant amounts of money for that content. Facebook can likely drive revenue growth to offset content costs, albeit at lower margins than what the company currently generates," analyst Brian Wieser wrote in a note to clients Wednesday. "However, because of measurement issues the company has faced in the past (and possibly a new one identified by a trade publication in Australia and replicated by us within the United States), we think the primary winner of Facebook's expansion in video will be third party measurement firms," he added.

Facebook apologized for overstating video viewership times in September last year. The company said a metric for average user time spent on videos was artificially inflated.

The firm's analyst cites Australian trade publication AdNews, which revealed last week "Facebook's claims to reach 1.7mm more 16-39 year-olds in Australia than exist in the country according to its census bureau."

it is no longer relying solely on what Facebook users reveal about themselves. Instead, it is tapping into outside sources of data to learn even more about them — and to sell ads that are more finely targeted to them.

The push to refine targeted advertising reflects the company’s need to increase its revenue. Its shares are worth far less than its ambitious initial public offering price of $38 a share last May, and Wall Street wants to see it take concrete steps to prove to advertisers that it can show the right promotions to the right users and turn them into customers.

Last fall, it invited potential advertisers to provide the e-mail addresses of their customers; Facebook then found those customers among its users and showed them ads on behalf of the brands.

Advertisers on Snapchat will now have access to goal-based bidding for app install ads, an industry term that means an advertiser can target Snapchat users who are likely to install its app. Snapchat is targeting its app install ads, which ask users to swipe up on full-screen video ads, using machine-learning technology it developed in-house.

Aside from app install ads, Snapchat is also beefing up its ad targeting. For the first time, advertisers can target Snapchat users who have previously interacted with other ads they've previously ran in the app.

if an advertiser buys one of Snapchat's more expensive selfie filters (which the company calls Lenses) for a national campaign, now the buyer can later target those same users again with one of Snapchat's full-screen video ads.

Last April, Gamestop Corp. (GME) opened a store on Facebook to generate sales among the 3.5 million-plus customers who’d declared themselves “fans” of the video game retailer. Six months later, the store was quietly shuttered. Gamestop has company. Over the past year, Gap Inc., J.C. Penney (JCP) Co. and Nordstrom (JWN) Inc. have all opened and closed storefronts on Facebook Inc.’s (FB) social networking site.

“We just didn’t get the return on investment we needed from the Facebook market, so we shut it down pretty quickly,” Sheetz said in a telephone interview. “For us, it’s been a way we communicate with customers on deals, not a place to sell.”

“It was basically just another place to shop for all the stuff already available on the retailer websites,” Gerten said. “I give so-called F-commerce an ‘F.’”

About 1 in 5 respondents said they have used Twitter in conjunction with a TV campaign. Promoted Tweets are the most popular of Twitter’s ad formats among respondents, used by about twice as many as promoted accounts, and by roughly three times as many as have used Twitter Amplify. Respondents’ primary goal for Twitter advertising is to build awareness and sentiment for their brand, with significantly fewer claiming as their main goal driving traffic to their websites, building followers, generating sales leads, selling products and staying in touch with customers.

58.6% share of respondents said that their Twitter budgets represent new spending. Those reallocating from other media are most commonly turning to offline (17.6%), online display (16.6%), email (12.3%), search (10.8%) and TV (9.9%) for funds. (Similar data concerning the constitution of online video and social media budgets can be found here and here.)

7 in 10 respondents – execs at marketers, agencies and media companies – use Twitter as a marketing channel, only a minority (46.5%) of those are spending on advertising on the platform. By comparison, a previous survey from Ad Age (covered here) found that of the 83% using Facebook, almost three-quarters were buying ads.

Facebook is reintroducing Atlas, the underused platform it bought from Microsoft last year.

it will allow them to buy ads on non-Facebook websites and apps, using Facebook targeting data

these ads aren’t “Facebook ads.” But it is also playing up the notion that the ads marketers buy via Atlas will be more effective than other big ad platforms, because they use Facebook’s data.

The company's newest marketing campaign, launched earlier this week, invites fans of Burt's natural skin and personal care products to receive eight different "moments" over eight weeks via online calendar notifications. The promotion is timed to coincide with the launch of Burt's Bees new Brightening skin care line, which promises to brighten users' skin in only eight weeks.

This will define the calendar category and other brands that sell on a subscription or seasonal basis will take notice,"

"We thought, what else needs a little brightening up? One look at our calendars, packed wall-to-wall with meetings and meetings-about-meetings, and we had our idea. Then we just went to work figuring out the best way to bring calendars back to life over an eight-week period,"

They’ve abandoned the promise of helping companies genuinely connect with their customers. They’re not even very good at the model they’ve chosen, which is as a Web 1.0 ad seller.

Ads aren’t the focus on what marketers want from Facebook in the first place.

Facebook has completely gone back on what they originally promised marketers in 2007. It’s what they promote today. They sell this promise of connecting companies with their customers. Eighty-four percent of the time they don’t do that.

as Page reach and engagement continues to dip for brands, Facebook has made some updates to help deliver value to businesses through Pages beyond just News Feed distribution.

Facebook Page is becoming more like a website for your business — a destination people will come to when they want information, or even make a purchase or booking, as well as a place to engage with great content.

Facebook has made it easier for people to recommend your business by bringing Recommendations to your Page. As shared by Facebook: People will now be able to post a Recommendation for your business including text, photos and tags directly on your Page. And Recommendations will also help you reach people while they’re searching for or talking about your business.

Not even the promise of lower CPMs as a result of less competition was enough to tempt large swaths of advertisers to change their view of the platform last year. But it wasn’t for lack of effort. Snapchat execs pushed the self serve auction model in the U.K. for much of 2018.

Snapchat’s impressions are now the cheapest of its peers, according to the ad buyers interviewed for this article.

ll told, the ephemeral mobile messaging app had a good year in 2018 thanks in part to the arrival of the Snap Pixel. When it launched last summer, the pixel gave its ad business more clout as agencies could go to advertisers with more accurate data based on how Snapchat’s ads drive direct response clicks to websites. Deeper data on what actions Snapchat’s ads drove meant ad buyers could move away from last click attribution models.

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 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.”