Pwned through Pins Tim Kendall, formerly of Facebook and Tumblr, has helped to revolutionize social image sharing service, Pinterest. Promoted pins and buyable pins are changing Pinterest users’ experience of the service. Kendall claims that, according to internal research, promoted pins have proven effective throughout the sales funnel from introduction to consideration to purchase intent. Ultimately, the success of buyable pins will indicate if this is a useful, new advertising medium. Application to Marketing: Many consumers who use Amazon Prime or Jet.com have regular, recurring orders for CPG products they want delivered every week or month. The key to greater repeat purchases is getting your products into the subscribe and save cart. If buyable pins are successful, a brand could drive to Amazon and encourage consumers to add the product to their cart for regular purchase. Availability: Buyable pins are coming soon to iOS devices in the United States. Read More All the G’s Verizon Wireless has announced that they are developing a new 5G mobile service. Of course, it’s hard to know what they mean by G (for “Generation”). In their press release, Verizon claims that 5G will allow much greater throughput speed. This is good news for streaming services. It’s also good news for advertisers as they break into mobile video. One of the last, remaining justifications for the old, absurd 40K file limit on digital display ads is the need for it to work cross-platform. If 5G is real, look for that limit to be raised soon. Application to Marketing: File size limits are strangling creativity in digital display and contributing to the growth of ad blocking technology. After all, who wants to look at low resolution images and primitive animations. (Unless it’s South Park.) Availability: Verizon has suggested they will start testing 5G in market in 2017. That’s probably not realistic. Look for that date to slip into 2018. Read More Links get Deep There is a huge amount of content locked up inside native mobile apps; content that could be being used to promote, cross-sell or add functionality. For a long time, specific pages or content in an app didn’t have Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI’s). If you wanted to link from one app to another or from a social network to an app, or even share content between an app and a website, there was no way to do it. However, both Google and Apple have shown a new enthusiasm for “deep linking” based on these URI’s. As a result, lots of utility has been unlocked (like linking between Google Maps and the Uber App.) Application to Marketing: Many companies jumped on the app-building bandwagon in the last few years, only to realize that the content on their apps was captive to their development cycles. With deep linking, marketers can integrate their apps into their digital marketing ecosystem. Availability: Right now. Read More Malvertising is a Real Thing Digital display advertising has been in trouble for a while. There’s the bot problem, the viewability problem and the just-plain-annoying problem. Malvertising is about to make this worse. Up until now, annoyance has been the biggest problem for consumers. But malvertising is advertising that infects people’s system with malware in order to steal information or hijack aspects of the system. Once this information becomes more generally known, downloads of ad-blocking technology will spike again. Application to Marketing: Content providers can’t afford to have people block their ads. Websites will start to collect around reputable ad-serving networks that screen for malvertising. Make sure you get ahead of the curve by evaluating your ad-serving partners. And, for goodness sake, stop using Flash. Availability: Right now. Read More Mary Meeker – Everyone’s Source Mary Meeker is a partner at prestigious Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. Her yearly Internet Trends report is considered the gold standard for statistics and projections on what is happening on the Internet and across all digital media. Everyone should read this report every year in order to know what everyone else will be talking about in six months.. Application to Marketing: It’s all here. Every page has implications. Everyone in the business agrees that Mary Meeker has the best statistics and the clearest vision on where the market is going. Availability: Just click on the link. Read More