A mazon Advertising is On the Rise, Twitter Introduces Popular Articles, and Facebook AI Camera Team Innovates
Here’s the news we’re talking about around the Zbra Studios water cooler. We’ve provided key bullet points from each article for the speed readers out there.
How Amazon is becoming the third force in advertising, making the duopoly an oligopoly
By Lisa Lacy From The Drum
- “As Amazon wields a growing power as a search engine, it is also becoming a more compelling advertising platform and, as a result, is posing the first real challenge to Google and Facebook, which have long commanded digital advertising budgets virtually unopposed.”
- “In fact, at Dmexco, Marc Pritchard, chief brand officer at P&G, said advertising on platforms like Amazon enable the brand to better understand consumer behavior and deliver ads when they are most likely to result in sales.”
- “…many companies are investing in Amazon advertising from their shopper marketing or retail teams and not their marketing budgets. This means they’re not necessarily taking dollars away from Google, but rather putting more money in Amazon.”
Twitter’s Popular Articles feature shows you the most shared stories in your network
By Nick Statt From The Verge
- “Twitter launched a news aggregation tool today that collects the most shared stories by people in your network. Twitter calls it Popular Articles, and it sounds, looks, and works a lot like Nuzzel”
- “To find Popular Articles, you’ll need to scroll down, past special-purpose sections like “Popular in General News” until you find it.”
- “…instead of moving to outright kill a product like Nuzzel, the company is borrowing what works and trying to offer it to more users…”
Facebook’s New ‘AI Camera’ Team Wants to Add a Layer to the World
By Alexis C. Madrigal From the Atlantic
- “Once all that electronic work has been done, and the phone knows roughly where it is, and the geometry of the scene, the next layer of technology gets piled on top: deep neural networks. The “neural” part means that this kind of software is “trained,” not programmed with traditional rules. After being shown large amounts of labeled data, the neural network can label new data based on what it has seen. The deep part refers to the neural network’s number of layers, which correspond to the complexity of features in a dataset.”
- “Imagine, though, the next step: Instead of merely recognizing objects in artifacts, the phone can recognize objects live within the model of a scene that the device has already built. That’s only become possible in the last year.”
- “Anyone with a Facebook account could create media and fix it to a spot in the world. There will be food recommendations and wedding photos and paintings dripping in the air. A globe of ghostly art and burrito spots.”
Nick Cotton is a project manager based out of Los Angeles, California. He’s got a background in the entertainment industry, and uses his talent at online messaging to extol the virtues of content marketing, interactive fiction and sentences measuring 280 characters or less.
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