Apple yesterday shared new information regarding upcoming ad formats on News, its iOS 9 app and content-aggregating platform.
A developer document, titled “Ad Specifications for iAd” (PDF download), highlights several new ad formats that content creators and publishers can deploy in the News format, including so-called native ads which are basically sponsored posts that resemble normal articles and appear directly in users' feeds inline with regular articles.
According to a document Facebook has sent to some of its biggest advertisers, a copy of which was obtained by TechCrunch, the social network may start injecting ads into people's conversations on Messenger in the second quarter of 2016. Specifically, Facebook currently plans to allow businesses to send ads as messages to users who previously interacted with that company using the Messenger service.
The leaked document advises that businesses “get consumers to start message threads with them now so they’ll be able to send them ads when the feature launches,” as per TechCrunch.
The leading photo sharing service Instagram, owned by Facebook, is testing various new ad formats—among them interactive ads with In-App Purchases and built-in support for Force Touch and Apple Pay.
As reported last evening by Digiday, citing an ad agency source familiar with the test, the company is hoping that new ad formats will help drive sales by selling items right from the Instagram feed, without the need to click off the app.
Less than two weeks following its iPhone 6s commercial that focused on 3D Touch, Apple's begun rolling some new ads for the handset.
Adopting the dynamic and to-the-point format inaugurated by the previous ad, a trio of new commercials—titled “Crush,” “The Camera” and “Flip a Coin” and all starring actor and singer Jamie Foxx—showcase other iPhone 6s capabilities, like hands-free 'Hey Siri' and a variety of camera features.
Apple is out tonight with seven new short TV ads for Apple Watch. The format is similar to what the company company up with two weeks ago, when it debuted the first ads in this series.
Each short film focuses on a specific feature of Apple Watch, from apps, Apple Pay, Siri, physical activity tracking, to the convenience the device can offer. Yes, convenience is a feature!
I just finished tracking a run using the free version of Map My Run, and after saving that workout directly from my Apple Watch, I was presented with the above screen. Granted, I use the free ad-supported version of the Map My Run app, and while I do expect to see ads on the iPhone app, it was kind of surprising to see an ad right there on my wrist.
Before today, advertising on Instagram was mostly limited as media buyers had had to contact an Instagram sales representative directly. But things have just changed for the better (or worse, depending on your point of view) as Instagram's parent company, Facebook, has officially switched on Instagram's advertising application programming interface (API) to allow brands to buy ad slots on Instagram in a more automated fashion, Business Insider is reporting.
Because there's a lot of pent-up demand for targeted ads on the popular mobile photography service, this major move practically spells an end to Instagram's light ad experience as Instagram is poised to make big bucks by shoving more and more ads down users' throat.
In a pair of new television commercials, Samsung is back at what it does best: bashing Apple's iPhone. Promoted under the tagline “six is greater than six,” the 30-second videos highlight three features of Samsung's Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge: wireless charging, a wider-angle lens on the selfie camera out the front and a curved screen which displays tidbits of information across the edges of Samsung phones.
I've included both ads for your viewing pleasure.
Taking a page out of Facebook's playbook, Twitter has begun testing autoplaying videos on the timelines of a small group of users, AdAge first spotted. With the test, you may see videos playing without tapping a play button - and this means ads, too.
A Twitter spokesperson confirmed the test that's occurring on Twitter's iPhone and iPad apps. The autoplay test applies to Promoted Video ads, along with videos uploaded through Twitter's mobile app through its new video service.
The situation in Cydia right now is one of sadness. I'm sad, because nearly every time I try to download or purchase a new tweak or app, I have to finagle and wrangle with the App Store redirects that seem to have multiplied as of late.
I kid you not, I get about 5 pop-ups every time I open a page on Cydia's BigBoss repo, and sometimes I just give up after wrestling with trying to open a tweak's page. At first this behavior was tolerable, but over the last few weeks, it seems to have reached a boiling point. It generally takes a lot of inconveniences for me to decide to write about one of my annoyances, but this situation is just flat out of control, and I need to vent.
Someone needs to fix this. The problem primarily seems to happen with tweaks hosted on the BigBoss repo. If this happened to any other repo, I'd simply uninstall that repo and go about my business. Sadly, I can't do that, because the BigBoss repo is more or less Cydia. It hosts 99% of the tweaks that we report on, and it's generally where all of the action is when it comes to tweaks. Themes are a different story, and sometimes you'll find a really cool tweak on ModMyi, but it's obvious that the BigBoss repo is where most of the activity resides in this community.
Twitter, the popular micro-blogging platform, said on Tuesday that it will be pursuing ads outside of Twitter for the first time, with plans to sell Promoted Tweets on the popular news reader app Flipboard as well as on the Yahoo Japan website.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the company will permit advertisers who are already buying ads on the service to start running Promoted Tweet ad units on other people’s apps and sites that display tweets, with undisclosed revenue sharing between Twitter and partner websites/apps.
If you thought Apple's Watch would be totally free of pesky ads, you have another thing coming. A mobile marketing firm called TapSense announced at the CES show yesterday a brand new software platform to bring contextually aware advertisement to Apple's hyped Watch.
Billed as a programmatic ad platform, the TapSense SDK for app makers, along with programmatic APIs for brands, makes opt-in advertisement on the Apple Watch a reality.
The question is, are we as a society ready for coupons and other marketing offers on our wrist? And if so, will Apple actually allow third-parties to inject advertising into Glances and Notifications on the Watch?