Bullseye Strategy Special Correspondent
With next week’s holiday top of mind, we’re all looking forward to the usual July 4th festivities: the sparklers and hot dogs, the red-white-and-blue everything…and the bliss of sleeping in on a hot Thursday morning. In digital marketing, this week’s news suggests some fireworks in our industry as well, which will blow things up long after Independence Day has come and gone. We’re especially excited about stop-motion video coming to Instagram Stories and new Google text carousel ads popping up on mobile devices. Meanwhile, we’re seeing stars over the latest report about brand display ads on Amazon.
Lights, Camera, Stop-Motion
Instagram Stories has posed a bit of a riddle for marketers: we all know this content performs better than static posts, and its above-the-feed placement is prime real estate. But generating content for Stories isn’t super-easy if you don’t have a video production studio located next to your mail room. That’s why we’re so excited–for ourselves and our clients–about Instagram Stories rolling out stop-motion capabilities. Instagram hasn’t made an official announcement yet, but follow us if you want to know when it becomes a reality. We can’t wait to create stop-motion posts of our furry friends the next time #BringYourDogtoWorkDay rolls around!
Carousel of Progress
In other exciting news, Google is testing a text-only carousel for mobile devices. These ads will serve a sizable threat to ads that aren’t in top position. With two headlines and a truncated description line, there’s not room to say much with these text-only ads, but we advertisers are used to keeping things short and sweet.
Amazon Display Ads Blow Up Sales
Most consumers think of Amazon as a place to buy, well, anything (from A to Z, or Aardvark hot sauce to zithers, as the company logo implies.) Amazon can now also claim that they are the place where businesses can sell anything, and not even strictly from Amazon’s own website. In fact, a new report finds that 70-90% of Amazon display ad sales are from non-Amazon websites. This is great news for those Aardvark hot sauce and zither retailers looking to grow their own site sales rather than feeding all of their profits to the ecommerce behometh.
“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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