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Today, YouTube announced the launch of "Shorts" in the US. Following the TikTok ban in India, YouTube already launched a beta version of Shorts over there in September 2020. It nows generates over 6 billion daily views. For the beta launch in the US, Youtube has signed partnerships with over 250 publishers and music labels.
What's really interesting is that Google (and YouTube) might finally have found the product that will strenghten their lead in the mobile ad market. Over the years, Facebook, Instagram Snapchat, and more recently TikTok have been increasingly eating Google's lunch. With the launch of YouTube Shorts, Google might definitely reassert itself as the king of mobile and video ad networks. 1/29/21: Facebook CFO: "While the timing of the iOS 14 changes remains uncertain, we would expect to see an impact beginning late in the first quarter." At this point, Facebook is a mobile app, running a mobile ad network. Apple's latest measures WILL impact fb's bread & butter ... SIGNIFICANTLY.
Three months earlier CNBC's Meghan Graham wrote "Facebook under assault as Apple readies a change that would limit the ability of Facebook and other companies to target ads and estimate how well they work.” Facebook and Instagram should not worry; if users see value in the product (political ramplings, pics of their meals), they won't hesitate to pay for an ad-free account, especially in Tier 1 geos. Call it fb +. A fair price would depend on living standards & local ad markets (e.g facebook subscription in the US costs x times more than in India). Looking at their 2019 stats, a back of the envelope calculation shows that a monthly sub would be $2.50 to $2.75 a month with geo disparities. Free & paid accounts would co-exist. Given FB's scale, it'd not be difficult to test potential of the paid version. Would be a good way to diversify revenue sources w/o investing in R&D and marketing.  McKinsey's Fuel published an interesting report based a self-reported data from some of their clients in the Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) space in 2018. The graph here above clearly shows a predominant reliance on email marketing, and paid social media (Facebook, Instagram and to some extent Pinterest and Snapchat) while leveraging proprietary data (DMP) is clearly not a priority. Read our post to understand why you should build your own DMP to increase targeting and ROI for your paid acquisition campaigns.
 On Apr 29, Microsoft announced to the advertising world that Bing Ads was no more. New beginnings? It seems so as for years Bing Ads was just nothing more than a follower to Google Ads (fka Google Adwords). Microsoft announced a myriad of brand new differientiating features including 3D ads (you can click on a ad link to trigger a 3D view of the advertised product), and video extensions available in the top right corner of an ad ranking at the top of an ad block. For more info the announcement is available here.
 Mobile deep-linking company Branch has just acquired mobile attribution veteran Tune from HasOffers. HasOffers' Tune was once one of the most popular attribution analytics companies. Circa 2013/2014 it fell into disgrace when Facebook banned them from their measurement partner list after accusing them to keep customer data too long and fail to notify developers of their data-collection practices. Since then Tune relied on less than perfect fingerprinting to attribute installs. Thanks to this acquisition, Tune will regain access to Facebook data. The mobile attribution market is highly competitive. It will be interesting to see how market leaders Adjust, Appsflyer, and Kochava will adapt to this newcomer.
 Last month we wrote about Ad Management Platforms, and part of the post was on Marin Software's poor financial health. Little did we know that the situation would only get worse a few weeks later. Since our post, they posted their latest earnings and Marin Software's stock has fallen to all time lows ($3.80 on August 15, 2018). A very dire situation indeed...
 Programmatic buying is now widespread: 80% of agency-side media buying professionals use a Data Management Platform (DMP). However DMPs have many applications beyond sending targeted messaging to individual audiences. Learn why you should build yours.
 As SaaS Ad Management Platform Marin Software recently announced the launch of Marin One (the next generation of its cross-channel advertising platform) reminding us that they were still around, we took a look at their financials. Marin went public on 03/2013. In ten days, the stock climbed from $14 ($425M market cap) to $115. It would never go any higher. Fast forward 5 years later (with a 1-for-7 reverse split in 10/2017): the stock is now worth less than $6, losing 93% of market cap ($33M). The company has never generated any profit, revenue has decreased by 30% over the last 3 years ($75M in 2017 down from $109M in 2015), bleeds $30M a year, and does not appeal to analysts (we believe that there is no analyst covering the stock - we may be wrong though). This doesn't surprise us at all. We had twice the opportunity to work with Marin (SEM campaign management) and twice...the contract with them got cancelled. Even then, it was pretty obvious that working with such a platform was definitely not worth the price (they charge a few % points on spend as management fees). With a third company, we came across another vendor (Kenshoo) who met the same fate, and the contract got cancelled by management. This post is not meant to be disparaging to them or to any of their competitors but from a very operational prospective (always client-side, looking at $50M to $120M/yr in SEM budgets) such Ad Management Platforms have never proved helpful. They may be useful to some companies (or rather agencies?), and you may entertain the idea of using them to manage your hundreds of campaigns. That might be a good idea however our only advice would be to factor in the implementation cost i.e. set up fees, lower revenue (some of your campaigns will inevitably get rejected by the networks as you add marin URLs resources...they will take time to catch up with pre-implementation performance levels), and time to any revenue increase projection you may be working on. Multiply that cost by two while you're at it as you might end up disappointed and decide to kill the deal. For more info on Marin Software (reviews and competitors Acquisio, Kenshoo, etc), take a look here.
 Mobile marketing measurement company Adjust has just released a dashboard allowing mobile marketers to compare their Key Performance Indicators to other similar apps. Simply select your app category, your geo, mobile acquisition type (paid vs. organic), mobile operating system....and voila! Based on a sample of 7,000 apps and over 4 billion installs (from 01/01/2018 to 03/31/2018), the dashboard will give you averages for retention, sessions, post install events, fraudulent installs and much more. Check it out!
 In a previous post we covered the industry of influence marketing and its excesses. Meet Lil Miquela, a very famous Instagram influencer. The 19-year-old model repping from California launched her Instagram account in 2016. She counts over 1 million Instagram followers. Problem is, she's not real. Learn more here.
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