Twitter Announces Autoplay Ads; AOL Adds Content Creation Divison

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It’s An Autoplay World

Following in the footsteps of Facebook and Google, who took some blows while paving the road to user acceptance of autoplay video ads, Twitter announced Tuesday that it will debut its own digital video format with a baked-in viewability guarantee. For Twitter, that means videos will be 100% in-view for three consecutive seconds. The ads will autoplay whenever a user comes to rest on a video while scrolling the social media feed, and will apply to all video content uploaded to Twitter, such as GIFs and Vines. “We have learned just showing a thumbnail with a play button isn’t enough to entice consumers,” said Adam Bain, Twitter’s president of revenue and partnerships (who might be a candidate for the recently-vacated CEO position, according to Re/code). Check it out at The Wall Street Journal.

AOL Gets Crafty

AOL has debuted an internal content creation division dubbed Partner Studios. The division will churn out banner and branded videos ads and manage the distribution of that content across AOL’s digital properties. Georgia-Pacific, Partner Studio’s first client, is working with AOL to promote six of its brands, including Angel Soft, Brawny and Dixie. Considering advertisers in the US will spend $4.3 billion on native ads this year, per eMarketer’s estimates, content creation is hotter than ever. “We see this as that next high-growth sector in the industry,” AOL CMO Allie Kline tells Ad Age. Read it.

McSnaps

In its latest ad offering to brands, Snapchat is making its geofilter digital stickers available to brands. The ephemeral messaging platform’s some 100 million daily users incorporate digital sticker overlays onto snaps to communicate their current location to friends, and now brands can do the same. McDonald’s is the first brand to trial the location-centric stickers. Users can now decorate their messages with McDonald’s-themed graphics from any restaurant location in the US. Read on via LA Times.

Price Checkers Consolidate

Connexity, Shopzilla’s parent company, snapped up PriceGrabber for an undisclosed sum on Tuesday. PriceGrabber’s core service offers comparison shopping, but the firm also provides data to retailers and merchants, as well as to AOL, Bing, Comcast and Yahoo. The price-aggregation space has seen a consolidation in recent months, including Connexity’s Become acquisition some six months ago. “Together the combined company will be one of the world’s largest sources of high-intent shopping leads that result in over $2 billion in annual sales for retailers and brands,” Connexity says in a press release. VentureBeat has more.

Better Off Paid

A report released from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism documents some of the trends affecting the digital media world, including the rise of video and social media as a tectonic force in modern journalism. The report also documents a surprisingly high percentage of consumers who say they felt “disappointed or deceived” by sites that produce sponsored content. However, sponsored content does remain the bread and butter for some of the news industry’s fastest-growing brands, and BuzzFeed has indicated it gets better views and engagement on sponsored posts. Read the full article at Poynter.