Monthly Brandtech Blend – October 2020

Home Blends & Trends 4 November 2020

What’s been going on in the brandtech ecosystem lately? Google unveiled the new version of Google Analytics and goes on the offensive against e-commerce with YouTube. Samsung is taking on the Connected TV advertising challenge, Facebook’s MRC audit is in progress, and we tested a new AR immersive app for you.

The new version of Google Analytics is out: here’s your cheat sheet

This month, Google announced the launch of the new version of GA, “Google Analytics 4”, replacing the previous “Universal Analytics”, or “GA 3”. The field of webanalytics has changed, and Google is adapting: the focus, which once was about sessions and “last click” attribution, now is all about a user-centric approach and the analysis of user behavior.

The new paradigm is now centered on events and users under a unified data model, inspired by Firebase and App+Web Beta. Among the main highlights, machine learning takes center stage and enables automatic business insights, mobile and desktop are unified and – last but not least – this new Google Analytics is future-proof, which means it will work in environments without cookies and identifiers.

Learn more on Google’s blog, and read our review on the tea house.

Samsung wants a piece of the pie in Europe’s Connected TV advertising business

The business of Connected TV has been around for a while, but lately, there has been an increase in usage for this kind of device: people are streaming more content or playing games via their CTV, which attracts advertisers. Samsung has consequently taken this opportunity to make its CTV inventory available programmatically for the first time. The company has built a mini walled garden around connected TVs, which gives advertisers exclusive access to inventory when they buy ads from the company’s own DSP. Samsung claims to offer “cookie-free, first-party deterministic, TV-level data” which supposedly makes it very competitive.

What’s more, the ad spending CTV market is set to double from $7bn to $14bn between 2019 and 2023, which will make the competition fierce, as large media owners in the online video industry like Amazon, Hulu or YouTube will also want their share of the pie.

Facebook’s brand safety audit is underway, but it doesn’t include the newsfeed

The Media Rating Council (MRC) and Facebook have come to an agreement regarding the scope of the firm’s brand safety audit, which won’t yet incorporate Facebook’s newsfeed feature. The social media giant had previously committed to the MRC audit last June, following the “Stop Hate for Profit” advertiser boycott and growing pressure to take action against the spread of fake news and hate speech across the platform. The MRC and Facebook will first work together on an “education process” which will help the MRC comprehend how community standards are currently enforced on the platform. Also, Facebook has agreed alongside YouTube and Twitter on a common set of standards to address harmful content, as part of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media. To be continued…

Google enters the e-commerce race… with YouTube

The Mountain View firm wants to integrate a large catalog of items which can be purchased directly through YouTube into its video streaming platform. Google has indeed asked creators to use YouTube’s software to tag and track products, directly linking resulting data with the parent firm’s shopping and analytics tools. These features are currently being tested on a limited number of video channels. The goal is simple: transforming YouTube from advertising giant to a new e-commerce competitor for Amazon or Alibaba.

Google, which suffered its first ever revenue decline in the second quarter of 2020 because of marketing budget cuts during the pandemic, is taking action to revamp its e-commerce strategy, placing YouTube at center stage. But the idea of shoppable videos is not new: companies like Amazon or Walmart have been trying to crack it for years without significant success, unlike China, where it has really taken off, especially with the ByteDance-owned app Douyin.

My Own Assistant: a Black-Mirror-like AR experience you should try!

My Own Assistant (MOA) is a mobile app built around an interactive augmented-reality story set in 2040, where you put your life in the hands of a virtual assistant who knows you by heart, guides and influences you through every decision you have to make, and ultimately helps you earn “citizen points”.

This 20-minute immersive journey into this Black-Mirror like experience is inspired by a French novel, Les Furtifs by Alain Damasio. So, fiction or future? You be the judge!

To learn more, you can download the app on the App Store or on Google Play.