It’s Friday. We’re keeping it short.
View Counts Coming to Instagram: If you’ve ever run video ads on Instagram, you’ll know that its reporting lacks one of the most essential data points: view counts. But that’s going to change soon, according the company’s blog. The announcement doesn’t say if it will report views to completion as Facebook does, but they imply in the announcement that the metric doesn’t matter much anyway, citing research that 47% of a video’s value is delivered in a the first 3 seconds. Max Headroom’s blipverts have become reality.
The Twitter Disaster, Explained in Four Minutes: This is a pretty cogent explanation of how Twitter f***ked up so completely. One reason, a management team more concerned with celebrity than the experience of their users. We agree with the commentator that it can’t be fixed.
Priceline Embraces Content Marketing: Priceline has always been an innovative marketer, even if they did keep William Shatner around for just a tad too long. But even with Captain Kirk gone, they still haven’t lost their sense of humour, and just launched a series of digital shorts. The Facebook contextual placement strategy is especially smart, leveraging user profile data to show the most relevant version. The Eastern European baby adoption one is very funny, and probably offensive to Eastern Europeans.