Global Marketing News – 25th July 2016
Facebook Messenger reaches 1 billion users
Facebook Messenger has reached the impressive milestone of one billion users this month.
Five years after its launch, the app has become just the third mobile app to reach the number, after WhatsApp and YouTube.
With 17 billion photos and 22 million GIFs sent on the service each month, Facebook Messenger also has 18,000 bots currently on the platform, with 23,000 developers signed up to its wit.ai bot engine.
The app originally came about as a way to improve group chat on Facebook’s site and on mobile, before it was removed and developed into its own app.
Facebook’s current head of Messenger, David Marcus, believes that due to that fact that users “don’t need a phone number but you can find each other by name”, it is becoming “an important communication tool for the world”.
Google bans payday loan adverts
After an announcement in May, Google is putting its ban on promoting payday loans into effect this week.
The ban will globally stop the acceptance and display of any adverts that promote loans requiring a repayment time of less than 60 days.
It will also stop the promotion of any loans with an interest rate above 35%, although this will only affect marketers in the US for the time being.
In addition to new ads no longer being accepted by the search engine, Google will also spend the next few weeks removing any current adverts that break the new rules as well.
Meanwhile, the black-listing of these adverts has been criticised by some commenters for being a form of censorship, with Philip Johns, chief executive of the National Credit Providers Association in Australia, saying that Google had “let the industry down badly”.
Social media affects purchase decisions more than TV
A new report from Influence Central has shown that social media has a more effective impact on purchasing decisions than television.
The research showed that a positive post or review seen on social media affects the decision making for around three times as many people than a TV advert for the same product.
This research shows that social has become a powerful tool in helping marketers convert awareness into purchases.
Also concluded, was that 72% of respondents think the ability to check a product on social media takes the ‘guesswork’ out of the decision to buy it.
Stacy DeBroff, founder and CEO of Influence Central, also suggested that “social even transforms traditional retail approaches”, as in-store promotions become more effective if the item is first seen on social media.
Digital video ads on the rise in South East Asia
The South East Asian countries of Thailand and Indonesia are seeing an increase in digital video adverts on both desktop and mobile.
According to TubeMogul’s Q1 2016 update, in Thailand there are over 139 million digital video ads served every day across the country on desktop, with 14 million served on mobile.
Meanwhile, Indonesia is seeing its mobile ad completion rates surge from 30% to 77% in just the twelve months following Q1 2015.
At the same time however, desktop ads have dropped steadily from 75% to 50% over the same period.
Within the countries, Thailand is now the largest consumer of digital video ads in the region, whilst Indonesia has experienced a huge spike in completion rates.
This can be attributed to increasing internet connectivity and smartphone user numbers across South East Asia.
South Korea investigates Google on anti-trust
And finally, Google has come under yet more fire regarding its anti-trust measures, this time in South Korea.
As a similar legal case with EU officials hots up, the American company has now had its Seoul headquarters investigated by the country’s anti-trust regulators, concerning alleged anti-competitive behaviour regarding its Android operating system.
The Korea Fair Trade Commission inspected the offices in the capital last week, after the EU filed its own complaints over the same matter; i.e. the fact that Google made it impossible for smartphone producers who used Android to sell another operating system.
This also comes just three years after the company was cleared over anti-competition claims built on the fact that smartphone makers using Android were forced to build the search engine into the devices.
Webcertain’s global marketing news bulletins are daily 5-minute videos, providing marketers with the latest international digital marketing news in an easy-to-digest format.
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Gemma Houghton
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