Chatvertising; Reddit's New Ad Biz

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Chatvertising

A new wave of advertising may be upon us in the form of chat bots, writes WSJ tech columnist Christopher Mims. Services like WhatsApp and Facebook have been popular for quite some time, but new chat apps are cropping up, designed with brand engagement in mind. Kik is one such service, most popular among teens in the US. Four in 10 American teenagers are active on Kik, and these users are already “chatvertising” with a handful of brands like Moviefone and Funny or Die. “This is what native advertising in chat apps looks like,” writes Mims. “And chat apps, we keep hearing, are the future of social media. Mark Zuckerberg, are you listening?” Read on.

Threading In Ads

The NY Times reports that, for the first time since its inception nine years ago, Reddit is looking to kick-start its advertising business. Reddit officials declined to share specifics on their ad strategy but, according to NYT sources, “a large campaign” will cost advertisers about $100,000 and a single ad sale should go for $20,000. “People on Reddit want to be anonymous, and at some point these brands want to have a real relationship with their customers,” Gartner Research Internet analyst Brian Blau offered. The question: “Can Reddit deliver that over time?” Read more. Lots of uniques doesn’t necessarily mean a lot of $$$.

Exchange Access

Google, which wasn’t part of the initial creation of open standards for RTB bidding in 2010 known as OpenRTB, has joined the club. On the Google Ads Developer blog, DoubleClick’s Mark Saniscalchi announces his company’s development of two OpenRTB libraries, including “the openrtb-doubleclick library [which] is an extension of openrtb for DoubleClick Ad Exchange that provides interoperability between the OpenRTB model andDoubleClick’s Real-Time Bidding protocol.” Read more.

The Twitter Vs. The Facebook

Ad Age looks at why some believe Twitter’s chances for success shouldn’t be judged apples-to-apples with Facebook, which has several hundred million more unique users. Ad Age’s Mark Bergen reports, “Next to Facebook, [Twitter] is a superior conversational medium, and so, a better space for real-time marketing, several marketers claimed. It is morphing into a media portal, where people turn for news and to explore their interests. And it is beefing up its tools for targeting these consumers, including its Tailored Audiences program and Crashalytics, its mobile-app dashboard.” Read more.

In-Store Alerts

Hudson’s Bay is debuting a mobile ad strategy that sends messages to in-store shoppers while they browse. The retail giant is working with tech company Swirl to identify consumers via beacons, and will send location-based messages to consumers beginning with a handful of Bay and Lord & Taylor stores in the US and Canada. Only those shoppers who’ve downloaded the Bay’s mobile application or the coupon app Snip Snap will receive the in-store alerts. This mobile-first step is but one leg of Hudson’ Bay’s increasingly digital strategy, and the retail giant will purportedly spend $40 million this year on digital advertising. Read more via The Globe and Mail.

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Ditching Last Click

Writing for The Next Web, Struq CEO and co-founder Sam Barnett pens an anti-last-click manifesto for the multidevice epoch. “The last click attribution model has always been flawed,” he writes. “It attempts to simplify complex conversion paths on a last come first served basis, and allows advertisers to ignore the vast amount of data available to them.” Advertisers should instead embrace a move away from traditional attribution models, says Barnett, and focus on incremental campaign performance. Read on.

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