Shazam, now an Apple subsidiary , to become ad-free

September 2018: Apple finalized the acquisition of Shazam, one of the most popular music apps, used by hundreds of millions of users around the world.

After almost a year of several analyses requested by EU, concerned about how other music-streaming services — Spotify and Deezer for instance, which are headquartered in the EU — might fare if Shazam were to introduce exclusive features with Apple Music. The EU has finally decided that this acquisition would not reduce competition in the digital music streaming market.

As of 2014, Proximus Skynet Advertising was the advertising sales house for Shazam in Belgium. 

Soon, the app will offer an ad-free experience to all users. This means that the advertising market, advertisers and agency will have to find an alternative for their campaign aimed at young people to reach them effectively.

Youtube stops the retargeting of video viewers for display campaigns

Effective Sep 24th, Youtube has disabled the opportunity to build audiences based on exposure in display campaigns. Note that this does not apply to video campaigns.

As a solution display campaigns might be retargeted based on organic sources (such as clicks on brand website) or even on not Trueview video ads, for instance planned in the open exchange system or via Teads. Of course, this will not provide brands with the same reach levels as Youtube does.

Dailymotion new video format : Fast Impact

Dailymotion, the French based video-sharing platform, has launched a new video format now available for all advertisers.

Fast Impact is a preroll format that allows users to fast-forward directly to the key message of the brand.

How does it work? After 5 seconds viewing, Fast Impact format shows a Call-to-Action that enables the user to go directly to the final 3 seconds of the spot instead of skipping the ad.

What do we think? This new format provides with 8 seconds of actual viewing and enables brands to deliver their key message without being intrusive. However, we can see Fast Impact as a skippable format.   

This format will be only available on insertion order and the CPM price will fluctuate between 20€ and 29€. Dailymotion sales house in Belgium is Skynet.

Youtube: Vertical Video Ads now available

Online video consumption has never been more mobile-friendly than it is today, that is why mobile-friendly formats become more and more popular with publishers. Following this market trend, Google launches a new format specially designed for smartphones and tablets: Vertical Ads.

Until now, Vertical Ads were only available on a very limited closed Beta environment. From now on, neither whitelisting nor minimal budget are required anymore. The Vertical Ads are open to everyone.

How does it work? Vertical Ads can be easily uploaded on YouTube following the standard True View techspecs guidelines. It enables the preview of the vertical assets either in YouTube App or Google AdWords to ensure that the key message is visible. We recommend to avoid the core messaging on the top 10% and bottom 20% because the display on screen may change from one device to the other. When using Vertical Ads, the bidding of the campaign increases by 25%.

What do we think? Even if the price of a campaign which mixes vertical and horizontal assets can be higher, the mobile video consumption is also larger than desktop, especially on younger targets. A mobile-oriented campaign is always a good idea as we recommend to adapt creatives to user habits.

Better budget plans with Search ads 360

The new budget management tool offers interesting new features.

A new budget management tool in search ads 360 now helps better optimize budgets in line with goals and performance objectives.

It allows to manage and forecast budgets for an optimal spending spread, directly in the Search Ads 360 interface. The new budget management interface makes it possible to manage budgets for the search advertising networks of Google Ads and Bing Ads.

The new tool enables to create different budget groups, where campaign segments may be defined that reflect business objectives or structure. Within a budget group, a plan may be set up to manage adspends on any given period.

The tool  not only allows to better control under- or overspend,  but also to create a budget bid strategy which automates changing budgets and bids.

The budget management tool is in Beta but don’t hesitate to reach out to your search expert in order to get additional information on this new tool.