13th July 2021 - What articles you need to be reading

Google hasn’t always been the fastest to update their results for breaking news or emerging topics but they also claim that the first information published is not always the most reliable. But now Google will use AI to detect when a breaking topic is evolving and it’s still working to increase it’s index to cover the topic in more detail.

TikTok seems to be leading the way on cracking down on questionable content that is commonly found on social media platforms. The platform is banning all financial branded content which include crypto, pyramid schemes, loans, get rich quick schemes, credit cards and more. Part of the push has been supported by UK’s Financial Conduct Authority that is trying to protect younger and more vulnerable viewers.

As part of the process of re-opening the world a key step is vaccinations is digital vaccination and testing information. Google has updated their Passes API so you can now easily and securely store your vaccination and test results on your device. This is being launched in the USA first with the example cards below provided by Healthvana. Google has stated that they are not using this data for ad targeting at this point.

It seems AirAsia will be joining the market dominated by Grab + WeChat that are made up by dozens of mini programs that allow their users to run third-party applications within WeChat. Yandex Go operates in parts of Europe and Colombia’s Rappi is working to become Latam’s first super app operating across 200 cities in 9 countries. Rebecca Sentance has more details about the AirAsia plans over on Econsultancy but with 600 million passengers they certainly have a decent user base in SouthEast Asia to give it a go.

Twitter understands that people have short attention spans on their platform so it makes sense they optimised their Video ad product for a shorter time span of 15 seconds. At least based on Facebook data from 2017 it makes sense for advertisers to be buying the shorter video blocks but it also means Twitter can sell more video ads if they are shorter.

Mozilla organisation has released their 10 month crowd sourced investigation into YouTube’s questionable recommendation algorithms using their browser extension RegretsReporter. The biggest highlight was that non-English speaking countries are far more likely to get suggested videos they find disturbing. YouTube obviously isn’t doing enough in this space as 71% of the videos volunteers submitted were being recommended by YouTube’s algorithm. Of the 9% of flagged videos that were actually removed it wasn’t before they managed to reach 160 million views.

Shoppe Mall Brand Memberships will be rolled out across 7 markets Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines that offers a new CRM and retention tool for brands. The platform allows for brands to offer simple loyalty programs to drive more sales and encourage repeat purchases on the Shoppe platform. Early tests by Danone in a soft launch showed a +15% in repeat buyers since launching in April 2021.

Back in June 11th 2021 a vendor advised Mercedes-Benz USA that PID of less than 1,000 customers and potential buyers had been made accessible on a cloud stage platform. The vendor reported that the personal information for these individuals (under 1000) is comprised mainly of self-reported credit scores as well as a very small number of driver license numbers, social security numbers, credit card information and dates of birth. The data was gathered by customers and interested buyers on both dealer and Mercedes-Benz websites between 1st Jan 2014 and 19th June 2017 and no internal Mercedes-Benz systems were compromised.

According to Digiday OMG have formally endorsed Unified ID 2.0 as their post cookie solution that will be most suited for their publisher and client partners and start the process of ensuring publishers adopt this new standard.

Dr Web’s analysts have noticed a group of Android Apps on Google Play that trick users into providing their Facebook logins and passwords. The apps are fully functional apps that have been installed almost 6 million times but most of them have now been removed. The apps prompt their users to login to Facebook to add functionality or remove ads and when the users do a JavaScript file is executed which passes your login details and the cookies from the authorised session to the criminals server.

• Client names

• Advertising market (e.g., city, state, country)

• Campaign timeframes

• Medium (e.g., television, magazine, internet, etc.)

A this stage SalesForce have no evidence that your files were clicked on, viewed, or downloaded by another customer. On June 17, 2021, Salesforce Engineering deleted all remaining files from the SFTP server and ensured that all files would be uploaded to the Datorama server via private, customer-specific folders moving forward.