Breakfast Update Week 47

Huge update on Instagram, and very advertiser-relevant news on Facebook Metrics. Also a bit of impressive AI and an update to Google Maps.
Enjoy your breakfast!

Big Instagram update: Instagram is gearing up for the coming war with Snapchat. The photo/image sharing platform will start rolling out live-videos as well as disappearing videos/photos that can be send directly. Both features seems to be the “it” of social media at the moment, however there are a few things that differentiates Instagram.

In the growing feature Instagram Direct, the new disappearing messages will work exactly as a direct Snapchat. You can send photos and videos to friends or groups.

The live videos largest unique feature is that thefeed you’ve broadcasted isn’t saved for later. As Instagram puts it: “When you’re done, your live story disappears from the app so you can feel more comfortable sharing anything, anytime.”

Read all about the update in this blogpost from Instagram.

Fakebook: Alot of buzz in the media about fake news on Facebook and the influence it has. Digital Trends wrote a good round-up with what you need to know. Read it here.

News to Facebook Metrics: In a recent blogpost, Facebook updated some metrics and measurements. Some were understated and some have been overstated. But the most important thing for advertisers is that none of them are billable metrics. There is a full summary in the blog-post, but here are the main changes:

• Page Insights — Organic Reach: 7-day and 28-day organic page reach miscalculated as a sum of daily reach instead of de-duplicating repeat visitors
• Video — Measuring Completions: discrepancy between audio and video sync on some devices can cause ‘views to 100%’ to be understated by roughly 35%
• Instant Articles: average time spent has been overstated by 7–8% due to a miscalculation
• Analytics for Apps: ‘referrals’ metric has been miscalculated to include all clicks on content, vs. clicks specifically to an app or website
• Interest Lists: being retired due to low usage. Total followers for profiles that created interest lists will drop by less than 5%
• Canvas Time Spent: this metric includes both time with the canvas unit, and time spent in the in-app browser experience of a client’s website if the user chooses to click to site.
• Video Views to 3, 10, 30 seconds: metric includes the term ‘aggregate’ to clarify it is based on an aggregate view time of at least the specified number of seconds.

It seems like Facebook is developing their transperancy, and though these are quite substantial metrics, but will also lead to a bigger integration between paid and organic reporting. A struggle that advertisers and agencies have had for a long time. Please ask your MediaCom contact for further info, if needed.

Google Popular times — live: Last year, Google added the Popular Times feature to places, for users to see the how busy a certain business was at a certain time. Since then, they updated with an average on how long people normally spend in a place. Now, Google has updated the feature again, so you can get an idea of how busy the place is. In real time. Check it out here.

Facebook Rooms: Facebook is testing a feature called Rooms within Messenger in select market. In a code discovered in September the feature was explained: “rooms are for public conversations about topics and interests. Each Room has a link that can be shared so anyone on Messenger can join the conversation.”. Seems like another move away from the Newsfeed. Read about it here.

And some smaller, but nonetheless rather important news.

Google AI: People from Oxford University and Googles AI division have created the most accurate lip-reading software ever. Even better than humans. The AI was shown more than 5.000 hours of TV to develop. Read the paper here. Luckily, Verge did an easier accesible article.

Google Team Drives: As announced earlier, Google is now launching its Team Drives in an EAP (Early Adopter Program). Basically the business version of Google Drive. Read about it here.

Adobe: There is a new way to “Photoshop” voices…

And okay, the Mannequin challenge is over. But here is one last piece. Microsoft did a challenge with a Hololens. Watch here.

Enjoy your weekend!