20th July 2021 - What articles you need to be reading

While it is not a good idea to build your whole campaign around Emojis they do have a place for testing to see if you can stand out from the crowd in search but also in other marketing such as email and Google ads. Jon Henshaw has a good article on how you can look to get started with Emojis.

In a sign of how fast technology is progressing around AI can be seen in an upcoming film about the life of Anthony Bourdain. Helen Rosner breaks down the ethical discussion of using AI software to have Bourdain quote something that was never recorded while he was alive. Where is the line on ethics if they wrote something but never spoke it?

Google has added misleading “misinformation” content to their Google Docs abuse policies and enforcement guidelines. Part of the shift has been to battle the huge amount of fake information about Coronavirus store on Google Drive that Google has previously ignored. There is still a lot of questionable content and malware stored on Google Cloud but that looks to be ignored for now.

Facebook is forcing users to start to use the app for more than just sharing photos as they seek to ramp up the monetisation of their audience. The push will come focused on Creators, Video, Shopping and Messaging… the shift towards video is not really surprising considering the rapid rise of TikTok over the last year or two… but shopping is more about attracting advertising budgets focused on ecommerce that have gone to YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest and Amazon.

Twitter announced on Twitter and in a blog post that Fleets will be retired… the product was meant to motivate people to share their thoughts easily to encourage more people onto the platform. But it seems most people didn’t use them and those that did often used them to promote their tweets via screenshots so not really what Twitter had in mind…. The feature will sunset on the 3rd August 2021.

Twitter@Twitter

we're removing Fleets on August 3, working on some new stuff we're sorry or you're welcome

5:28 PM · Jul 14, 2021

76K Reposts · 498K Likes

In an effort to capture ad revenue shifting into ecommerce and increase the value-add of Epsilon, Publicis Group has purchased Australian based CitrusAd. CitrusAd is interesting because it’s the platform half of the world’s largest 20 retailers use to power their native ads. The CitrusAd platform offers retailers sponsored products, banner advertising, branded landing pages (campaigns) and email campaigns. It’s very interesting that such a well placed adtech company hasn’t been snapped up by Google or Facebook earlier. Publicis is well placed to benefit with the integration of Epsilon Core ID and CitrusAds.

Android Police seek to uncover a bit more about new Chrome commits which shows more detail around the intention to bring shopping list features to Chrome on your phone. It also works closely with “Wall-e” that is their new price tracker built into Chrome. It’s also likely that Google Ads team will be looking to build a new shopping ads extension around this feature to allow advertisers to target consumers tracking prices on a particular SKU.

We wanted to thank Luke for the message highlighting Search Atlas as something cool which is happening in tech. The beta platform displays 3 sets of images or results from different countries for any search. You can see in the image below how complex the rules and logic is each time Google returns you a search result, but Search Atlas seeks so show you side by side how different the results are depending on your location.

Once again in another sign of how useless Facebook is as a global platform they have opened up Facebook Pay but only for US businesses. Inside the US you get the opportunity to access a signup form but outside the US you get a 404 error… Time and time again US companies seem to miss the mark when launching US centric products but most of the time not informing their audience it’s US only.

RTL Nieuws has highlighted an issue at Testcoronanu that had an open database that allowed you to enter what kind of test you wanted (Antigen or PCR) but also when it was conducted and what was the result. This also issue a travel certificate from Testcoronanu with a signature from a doctor that you have tested negative but you could also adjust the test data from others from negative to positive or invalidate their past corona test. The database also allowed access to private data of over 60k people that used Testcoronanu that exposed full names, residential addresses, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, social security numbers (BSNs), passport numbers but also private medical information such as whether you have been tested positive or negative.