Bullseye Strategy Special Correspondent
In this week’s digital marketing news, Google has changed its algorithm–again!–but the way they shared this update might be more newsworthy than the algo change itself. Meanwhile, Amazon’s eyebrow-raising acquisition offers more evidence that it intends to take over the entire online advertising universe, and Facebook has declared battle upon Snapchat’s Bitmoji with its own avatar product.
Google Announces Algo Change
Big news: Google has yet again updated its algorithm, this time indexing mobile-first new websites, with plans to offer the same preferential treatment to existing websites that are mobile-first in the future. Bigger news, perhaps, is the transparency with which they announced this algo update; Google is notorious for being a bit tight-lipped about changes. Could this harken the end of the “keep ’em guessing” era? Fingers crossed.
Amazon Gets Serious About Programmatic
Amazon confirmed the purchase of Sizmek’s ad server, leaving no doubts that the ecomm giant is about to go all out on programmatic advertising. Compared to its ecommerce business, advertising is a small piece of the Amazon pie. Yet, that pie slice grew 34% to $2.7 billion in its most recent quarter, and the Sizmek acquisition means we’re going to need a bigger fork. Amazon is now poised to dominate online advertising, taking on the two current biggest programmatic players, Google and Facebook.
Facebook v. Snapchat: The Bitmoji Showdown
Speaking of Facebook and its arch-rivals, Messenger launched Avatar Stickers today in an Australian pilot, in an effort to compete against ever-popular Bitmoji. As Techcrunch points out, Facebook Avatars aren’t as unique or clever as Bitmojis, but they sure are an improvement over the current non-text communication options within Messenger. As much as we all love a good “poke,” we’d agree that these Bitmoji wanna-bes are a step in the right direction for a social media platform that’s feeling a little bit uncool in recent days.
“Mark Eting” is the pen name of the Bullseye Strategy team. Check back with us next week for more news on what’s buzzing in the digital marketing industry.
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