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E-COMMERCE
Shopify + augmented reality
Augmented reality can put products right in front of you, let you size them up and down and put them in the environment around you.
Now Shopify’s services marketplace lets you create 3D Models of your products. With Apple’s recent announcement of AR Quick Look, these 3D models are viewable in AR directly through the Safari browser on iOS 12 devices.
So far getting someone to download an AR app and use it as their shopping app was a major hurdle for the user. With Safari’s ability to enable 3D models directly in the browser this traffic is expected to increase a lot.
It’s not just about increasing conversions, it’s also about reducing returns. Through AR Quick Look, customers can get a better way to get to know their products before they walk into the shop. That way customers are able to visualize the product within their own settings.
Shopify AR provides an accessible toolkit for businesses to create their own AR experiences. If you’re interested in Shopify AR and want to learn more about how to get your store AR-ready click here.
NATIVE
Quora brings machine learning to optimize ad delivery
Haven’t heard of Quora?
It’s a Q&A platform – you ask something and community members answer. They actually show up in Google’s top 3 results very frequently for any questions.
And that means they generate a good amount of traffic.
About 300 million monthly users to be more specific, up from 200 million last year! That’s pretty darn good. A few months ago we brought up that Quora expanded their ad offering into native ads and there’s more good news.
They are now allowing so-called broad targeting which is basically just letting their machine algorithm do its thing without specifying any other targeting. You probably could figure that out…
So why is this interesting?
Well, Quora is a relatively new traffic source, their ad business is just about 1 year old. It’s growing, it has multi-event conversion tracking, retargeting and lookalikes. You can also target by Topic, Question or Interest.
So it has a pretty nice set of capabilities, plus we’re pretty sure being so young it means it’s far from saturated. Especially when users grow 50% year-over-year.
If you’re having trouble with Facebook, native ads have been touted as an alternative… Well, what about native ads with some nice add-ons that many people like about Facebook?
GENERAL
Google bugging publishers with their… bugs!
As you might know, Google’s advertising products are going through some changes.
And just like a teen who goes through some changes, Google’s products are also not always doing what they should.
Case in point, Google Ad Manager, which used to be DoubleClick for Publishers and DoubleClick Ad Exchange had been down for several weeks.
The good thing is that traffic kept flowing. The bad thing is that publishers had no idea about how much traffic and what eCPM… Basically, they didn’t have reports so were driving blind.
It’s one thing to have a sudden bug for a few hours but a few weeks is just abysmal.
Our favourite quote from someone affected: “There was no feedback from Google about the issue until I spoke to them directly on it. It’s now working, but I have had no feedback as to why the issue occurred and how it has been rectified. Poor but not unexpected.”
So maybe you feel better knowing bigger advertisers and publishers also face the same issues as small time affiliates when it comes to communicating with Google…
Is this targeting or discrimination?
Hmm, familiar territory again where Facebook might not be just a social media platform like it says to be.
This time it’s about ads promoting job openings. Let’s first explain what happened.
Employers used Facebook’s targeting to show their job openings to males only. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) saw this and filed a complaint against FB and the employers in question.
So… why against Facebook? That’s really the first thing we’re wondering about. But, it seems some people think Facebook should police targeting based on the ad type even more.
Next question that came to our mind – Are you or are you not allowed to split test job openings ads based on gender?
We are asking this because the article shows ads that were indeed targeted at men only… But if the employer was running a split test targeted at women only, are those two wrongs that make a right?
And what if you just go broad targeting and Facebook’s algorithm delivers your ad to men or women only?
Anyway, the lesson here is that there’s sometimes a thin line between targeting and discriminating. And a likely consequence is that Facebook will have to exclude certain targeting capabilities from special categories as they’ve done in the past.
PSYCHOLOGY
Here’s how to always be right!
We’ve mentioned before that we like more than just marketing, right? Here’s something cool we found when it comes to logic, psychology and winning debates.
Coffee Break on YouTube created a video looking at some ways to seem right to others even when you’re not, inspired by Arthur Schopenhauer’s The Art of Being Right.
Debates are all about seeming right, so these tips could help you both BS your way through to try to win, just like the political class everywhere in the world tends to do. Or, you can see when people are using BS against you.
Alright, here are the 6 tips or lessons or whatever you want to call them…
1. Postulate what has to be proved
You take something that would be the conclusion of your argument and put it up front instead, but present it as a fact without explanation. That way you get your point across immediately.
2. Choose your definitions
Describe things deliberately using words that advocate your standpoint. As the video says, “What some might call ‘a right to assembly’, others might call “disrespectful” or ‘disruptive’”.
3. Persuade the Audience
If you’re in front of an audience, the person who can get those people to be on their side wins the argument. This can be easiest done by making them laugh, or generally bringing witty remarks and one-liners, as they probably view the whole thing as a spectacle rather than being there to judge you objectively.
4. The Kafka Trap
The really unkind method of accusing someone of something, and when they deny doing “The Thing” you say “That’s exactly what someone who did The Thing would say!“. This way, every denial further proves the person’s guilt.
5. Ad Hominem
When you deviate from the actual topic of the argument and instead start to insult the person personally. Versions of this are often witnessed on Twitter, when a person states an opinion and someone who doesn’t agree just replies“we don’t have to listen to someone with a cartoon icon on their profile”.
6. The Absurd Proposition
If you do it well enough, you can equate two things that don’t relate to each other at all, and maybe your opponent will find it easier to agree with you instead of trying to argue against something that kind of sounds like it make sense.
An example of this that most of us have probably heard in their childhood and hated, yet weren’t able to articulate why exactly it seemed so wrong:“Well, if all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?”
If you want some examples, watch any Presidential Debate, or the video, you’ll see all candidates use pretty much all the tricks here, especially point 3 – putting their focus on the audience!
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
55% of all BTC is held by 1% of wallets
Yep, BTC is not evenly spread out, some very few people do own the majority of it. While crypto can be helpful for troubled countries, like Venezuela, it’s certainly not going to mean everyone gets an even share.
This also looks oddly similar to the world’s wealth, where a few own a very big share.
Is this wrong? Depends how it happened and since we have no idea, we’re not going to go into it.
We just wanted to bring it up because many people we’ve spoken to are under the impression that BTC is sort of magical and everyone has a nice share of the whole thing…
Well, no. Early adopters and people who could afford to buy or mine it still have more – so people who took a risk got rewarded.
Oh, and some might say “That’s not a good stat, some exchanges are included in there, but exchanges don’t own the BTC”.
If you think that, you should read again how you prove ownership of BTC… We’ve got bad news – if the exchange has the private keys, it’s their BTC, not yours.
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