There are a number of daily digital developments and internally we always look to keep up to date with important and interesting stories within the digital and marketing space. We know that it isn’t always possible for everyone to keep a track of the key stories so every month we will compile what we feel are the top stories of the past month and post them on our blog to share in case anyone missed any notable developments. There are obviously hundreds and hundreds of stories but below is just a selection of key stories for the month of April.
Google launched their new +1 social search service as their major attempt to become more social. Here is a useful video explaining what it is and our thoughts on the development are here. Critically this will benefit consumers who search via their Google Accounts to ‘leave their seal of approval’ on relevant ads for their friends to see.
Facebook have turned their attention to marketers and developed Facebook Studio as a platform to showcase creativity. Here is our take on it and we are hopeful that it will lead to a greater pool of knowledge but it remains to be seen…
Behavioural targeting was once again thrust into the limelight as EU legislation is due to come into play later in May. To summarise, it essentially means that businesses who collect and store cookie data from visitors to their websites should gain consent for this moving forward – with the ultimate aim to protect consumers online. This is likely to have an impact on behavioural advertising moving forward and the Online Behavioural Advertising Framework has been launched as a self regulatory initiative. There are sure to be many developments over the coming weeks and here is our view on it.
The BBC have united with a number of commercial radio stations to launch an unified Radio Player that allows users to search by station, location, programme, presenter and interest on one site rather than having to go to each individual site to change the station. This will by no means be a challenge to offline radio but the ultimate aim is to make consumption of online radio easier. In terms of online advertising for the player, we still need to go to each sales house as there is no unified sales point as yet. The player is in its infancy but it will be interesting to monitor developments and listening figures over the first year to see how it evolves.
Online music service Spotify announced that users of its free service would be restricted to ten hours of listening a month with songs playable up to five times only free of charge. The move comes as they look to move people to their premium subscription account (in which there is access to exclusive tracks and also unlimited streaming) and as they also announced their plans to rival iTunes. The move coincided with this week’s nmain which research shows only 3% of people subscribe to music streaming services and shows the reluctance to pay for online content.
And finally, this last story isn’t a digital development but it is a campaign we came across and liked. Air France recently took to the streets of Manhattan with a free food gourmet truck which was promoted via their social media platforms and just demonstrated how brands can cross the bridge between online and offline ‘social’ campaigns