Global Marketing News – 22nd July 2016
Baidu investigated for sneaking in gambling ads
Baidu is facing an investigation into overnight gambling promotions.
Regulators in China are looking into the search engine company, after online gambling sites allegedly registered corporate accounts with Baidu, acting under the names of real companies that did not hold accounts with it.
The sites would then post ads that appeared only at night on the search engine’s pages.
The Cyber Administration of China announced that it would publish the finding of its investigation “in due course”, whilst Baidu said that it had reported the latest case to police themselves.
Gu Guodong, executive marketing director of Baidu, also said that “Baidu’s anti-cheating system still has deficiencies”, but that it would be combatting these issues immediately.
This is now the second ad scandal the company has faced this year, after it faced controversy surrounding its medical advertisements.
Google announces faster adverts for AMPs
Google has announced the introduction of faster adverts to its AMP project.
The AMP programme is currently an open framework developed by the company allowing publishers to create faster loading articles, allowing for a better experience for users on mobile devices.
Now, Google has announced the introduction of an AMP for Ads programme, allowing marketers to create similarly accelerated adverts, to be visible alongside the same news articles.
Paul Muret, Google’s vice president of display, video and analytics, wrote in his blog that “AMP for Ads allows advertisers to build beautifully-designed ads in AMP HTML”, so that “both the publisher’s content and the advertiser’s creative, load simultaneously” at high speed.
Meanwhile, the search engine also announced AMP landing pages that are expected to allow marketers to create equally fast pages for users, after they click on the ads.
CNN launches chatbot on Kik
The American news outlet CNN has launched a chatbot on the messaging service Kik.
After being one of the first news organisations to launch a chatbot on Facebook Messenger when the service was opened to developers, it now has become one of the first to join Kik.
Samantha Barry, head of social news for CNN, said that it was “actively exploring all voice activated chatbots”.
Barry also said that users of the two messaging services would notice a difference between the stories that they were targeted with, due to Kik’s largely teenage audience.
An example given was the ways in which CNN report the currently ongoing Republican National Convention, as Kik’s younger users are likely to receive “a broader guide to the convention”.
Apple Pay launches in France
The Apple Pay service is now available in eight countries, after its recent launch in France.
Becoming only the third European country to receive the service after the UK and Switzerland, French iOS users will be able to pay for items in shops with any of their Apple devices.
Major French banks Caisse d’Épargne and Banque Populaire have signed up to allow their customers to use their cards on the system.
Apple Pay is also expected to be launched in Spain in the near future, where Apple hopes to add to the 12 million monthly users who already use it.
Meanwhile, Apple also announced that its e-wallet is now available in Hong Kong, expanding the service even further around the world.
UK lags behind with digital skills
And finally, a report by Barclays has found that the United Kingdom is lagging behind other countries when it comes to digital skill sets.
The survey revealed that only 16% of workers in the country would feel comfortable building a website, whilst 39% of people in Brazil and 37% of people in India felt the same.
Meanwhile, Brits were also found to be less secure with their passwords, with just 13% saying they used password-generating software, far below the 32% of people in China and India who do the same.
After surveying 10,000 workers in 10 countries, Barclays found that this pattern continued across many areas including digital training provided at work, where the UK fell behind Estonia, South Korea, China, the US and India.
Ashok Vaswani, chief executive of Barclays UK, said that due to high levels of “digital empowerment” Brits could “compete globally across all sectors and industries”, but only if they “significantly develop digital skills and expertise”.
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Cal O'Connell
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