1. Facebook introduces In-Stream Reserve for premium video advertisers
“Showcase gives online video and TV ad buyers participating in the upfront selling cycle new opportunities to reach their target audiences within the highest-quality videos on Facebook.”
With more than 100 million hours of video watched every single day on Facebook, you can see why the platform is continuing to roll out more options to monetize this highly used feature. Alongside existing video placements like In-Stream and Rewards, this new option is “premium” in that you can reserve ad space “bought in advance at a fixed cost and delivered to in-target audiences verified by Nielsen.” This is a huge opportunity for getting long-form. storytelling videos, similar to TV commercials, in front of select audiences.
2. Instagram has quietly rolled out “ad spying” on accounts
This is something we found while playing around on Instagram. “About This Account,” similar to Facebook’s “Info and Ads” feature, lets you can see any brand’s ads on Instagram. See the video below for an example, or follow these steps:
- Go to a brand page
- Click the 3 dots at the top right
- Select “About This Account”
- Select “Active Ads”
3. Pinterest rolls out ads in Germany, Austria, Spain, & Italy
Pinterest is continuing to expand their ad platform and presence around the world. While the US boasts a full 39% of all Pinterest traffic, this ad expansion is guaranteed to earn Pinterest more money in the long run and enables the platform to remain a viable option for advertisers’ media dollars. Adding these 4 countries brings the total tally to 11, including the US, UK, Canada, France, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.
4. LinkedIn expands into HubSpot CRM integration
While this may not apply to some advertisers, LinkedIn is showing that they are continuing to work with CRM providers to make advertising easier on their platform. Not a HubSpot user? That’s okay, there are 9 other existing integrations already in place.
5. Facebook ads in Video Performance cards
While the ability to pull this data manually by filtering in the video metric data has been around for a while, Facebook is making it easier for advertisers to see ad, and video, performance at a quick glance (see screenshot below). This Video Performance Card visually shows the milestones people reach as a percentage of video played (25%, 50%, 75%, 95%, 100%) at different intervals for the first 60 seconds of a video. Having this insight allows for a deeper dive into video performance and drop-off to better optimize your video ad units. This should be rolled out across all ad accounts, so if you don’t have access yet, just be patient and it should become available.
