Global Marketing News – 19th August 2015
Global governments reach new heights with Twitter data requests
Twitter has received a record-breaking number of information requests from governments.
The social network has released its latest transparency report detailing the number of account information requests it has received from governments over the last 6 months.
Worldwide, it received a record-breaking 4,363 requests for user information, up from 2,871 in the previous 6 months.
The US made more requests than any other country, asking for user information on almost 2,500 accounts, with 80% of these requests being complied with.
The UK, France, Spain, Turkey, India and Japan also made a high number of requests, with each country making over 100 requests each.
While Twitter complied with a fair amount of information requests for many countries, there are some notable exceptions.
Twitter refused to hand over any user information to Russia or Turkey, despite the two governments making almost 500 user information requests between them.
Yandex to change auction model and ad ranking rules
The Russian search giant Yandex is changing its auction model and ad ranking rules.
Starting from the end of August, the current General Second Price Model (GSP) will be replaced with the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves model (VCG).
Unlike the current auction system, where an increase in the cost-per-click is only associated with an increase in position, the new auction system increases the cost-per-click based on the additional traffic received.
The principle behind it is that the advertiser with a higher position would only pay higher price for the extra clicks gained in comparison to those that he could achieve in the lower position.
Yandex claims that, as a result of the change, the price for the top positions will go down significantly.
The way the ads are ranked on the Yandex search results page is also changing.
In the past, if, for example, eight advertisers were trying to get to the premium placement, only 3 of them would fill in the available places; the ones with the highest combination of click-through-rate and bid would enter the adblock. However, out of the 3 selected, the highest position within the adblock would be given to the advertiser with the highest bid.
Now this is changing. The ads will be displayed based on their ranking points achieved simply by multiplication of the bid and click-through-rate.
The new ad ranking calculations show that Yandex is putting significant pressure on advertisers to make sure their campaigns are of a high quality. The advice for advertisers with low click-through-rates is therefore to take steps to improve this.
Latin America global leader in mobile video viewing
Research by IAB and On Device Research has revealed that Latin America is the global leader in mobile video viewing.
A staggering 61% of Latin American smartphone owners watched short videos on their devices every day, with 41% watching longer videos over 5 minutes long every day as well.
Brazil was the leading country for mobile video viewing within Latin America, with Argentina and Mexico coming in second and third place.
Macy’s to launch in China
The American retailer Macy’s is to open a store on the Tmall Global platform to sell their products to the Chinese market.
Macy’s is a US retailer that sells clothes, shoes, accessories, jewellery, beauty products, furniture and household items.
A spokesperson from Macy’s commented on the expansion, saying: “By making Macy’s accessible in China, we have an opportunity to deepen our relationship with domestic and international customers and to grow sales.”
BMW accuses Google of breaching its copyright
And finally, the car manufacturer BMW has said it is looking into whether Google has breached its copyright.
Last week, Google launched a parent company called Alphabet, which happens to be the name of BMW’s business mobility company.
BMW has said that it will not be giving up its alphabet.com domain to Google, and that it has asked a team of lawyers to look into whether copyright law has been breached.
Google’s Alphabet has been using the domain abc.xyz.
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Gemma Houghton
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