Sean Walsh
Sean is a Director at Intelligency heading up our digital marketing and client services operations. Sean has 15+ years experiencing working both in-house and agency with brands including Lloyds, Alstom, Hitachi, Lufthansa, Viaplay, DFDS Seaways and Mercedes-Benz.
Welcome back to the Intelligency Digital Roundup, the hottest outlet for advertising and digital marketing news from throughout the week.
From this week’s stories, we’ve got new content updates to Twitter, Speech Recognition becoming more accessible for users, and new Instagram adverts that could pave the way for paid social campaigns in the future.
Let’s dive in!
New Twitter Platform and Goal Updates
Twitter has announced that they’ve got a new goal as the company has updated the platform to become more of a multimedia-sharing platform, as it’s now easier for users to discover videos and content.
The announcement clearly stated that Twitter want to become “the best place to share media”, which the new features are helping to back up this statement. Transitioning from a primarily text-based social media platform, to a multimedia-sharing platform.
Twitter users are now able to include up to four videos, images, or gifs in a single tweet. As well as this, there’s now a video carousel in the Explore feature, which will enable users to discover and watch endless videos, similar to TikTok.
The announcement stated:
“This update is the latest example of how we’re working to make Twitter the easiest and most convenient place to share images, videos, and other creative content.
It complements the rollout of two new video products — full-screen videos and a new video carousel in the Explore tab — that help make it easier than ever for people to find and watch what’s happening on Twitter.”
The main goal of this update is to equip creators with new ways to express themselves, rather than just tweeting out witty pieces of text. The update will also allow users who aren’t creators to discover new content that creators are posting.
Twitter further went on to explain:
“Mixing different types of visual content together in a single Tweet allows creators to express themselves beyond 280 characters and gives them more ways to tell their story.”
What does the new format look like?
Here’s an example of what people are doing with the new creative formats:
This new kind of tweet allows an interesting comparison, as the photo shows side by side with a video which plays automatically, so whilst the photo is still, the video is much more active. PRoviding almost an alternate perspective for an event.
The American Baseball team the Kansas City Royals also took advantage of the new format:
New Video Features
As mentioned earlier, Twitter has integrated video discovery with a new video carousel, as well as improving the user experience for watching videos in full screen. Users almost immediately compared the features to popular social media platform TikTok.
Here’s some information about the new features:
Twitter Explore
The two video videos changes are now available on iOs devices.
Explore is a new Twitter feed which features a stream of tweets which are specifically aimed towards content that the algorithm belives users will be interested in.
The feed is available on both the app and mobile site, you’ll need to click the magnifying glass icon first, where it will show you trending topics such as “For you”, “Trending” and “News”
Video Carousel
Twitter has also added a new video video carousel where users will be able to select poluar videos to watch in full screen, which includes videos such as film trailers.
Twitter announced via Tweet:
“Now on iOS, videos on your timeline will open in our full screen immersive video player, where you can swipe up to keep discovering more content.”
Twitter described how the new feature will make it easy to keep discovering more videos.
“Some of you on iOS and Android will also see recommended content in a new video carousel on the Explore “For You” page.
Want to go back to scrolling? Tap the back arrow in the top left corner to exit the player to go right back to where you left off.”
For immersive video watching, you just need to tap on the video and it will be opened in an immersive player, and you just need to swipe to watch more videos after you’ve finished the first one.
Users have compared this feature to TikTok, time will tell if this feature will bring even more short-form video related features.
Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta & Microsoft Join Forces To Improve Voice Recognition
Google has announced that the company will be joining the Speech Accessibility Project, with the intent to develop more advanced speech reconigition software and systems in order to make them more accessible to users with impared speech.
Speech recognition is used globally and across the internet to access websites, translate languages, to act as voice assistants, and to even just operate devices.
But people with conditions that can affect speech such as Lou Gehrig’s disease, Parkinson’s, or Down Syndrome can have more trouble using speech recognition, as the systems in place now have more trouble recognising affected speech patterns.
The Speech Accessibility Project aims to change this by creating a project which brings together five of the biggest technology companies who are able to work together, in order to solve the puzzle of making speech recognition systems operate with non-standard speech patterns.
At first, the project will focus on the English language, and once successful, it will branch out into other languages.
Here’s some more information about the website and project.
An explanation for the Speech Accessibility Project website
“…without diverse, representative data, ML models cannot learn how to understand a diversity of speech. This project aims to change that by creating the dataset needed to more effectively train these machine learning models.”
The program has been created the University of Illnois in the USA, five technology companies have come together to create new technologies and systems that will be more accessible to everyone, but specifically those with speech-pattern related conditions.
The companies are:
- Amazon
- Apple
- Meta
- Microsoft
The website for the project states what they aim to solve:
“Today’s speech recognition systems, such as voice assistants and translation tools, don’t always recognize people with a diversity of speech patterns often associated with disabilities.
This includes speech affected by Lou Gehrig’s disease or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, cerebral palsy, and Down syndrome.
In effect, many individuals in these and other communities may be unable to benefit from the latest speech recognition tools.”
The project will collect samples of voice patterns, including that of people with the above conditions, then coalate them to create a dataset that’s anonymous.
Once the dataset jas been collected and created, it will be used to create new machine learning models that will be able to better understand different varieties of voice patterns.
The Speech Accessibility Project is a historic moment for technology, especially due to the fact that all of these companies who could be seen as competitors are working together to make everyday technologies more accessible.
Instagram Integrate Ads Into Profile Feed
In the latest of a series of updates targeting the advertising features of Instagram, the platform is beginning to incorporate more ads into previously unexplored places, such as public profiles and the Explore tab.
There are also now multi-advertisers ads as well as augmented reality ads.
Here’s everything you need to know about this latest ad update.
Profile and Explore Feed Ads
Ads in public user profiles over the age of 18 are currently being tested by Instagram, but only selected creators will see any revenue from it.
The profile feed is the vertical scrolling experience which appears when you tap a thumbnail of a post on a user’s profile, it’s separate from the profile grid, which will remain free from advertising.
Shared revenue from profile ads is being explored, but it won’t be a broadly available option, it could work similar you YouTube ads, where you need a certain amount of followers to generate ad revenue.
“As a part of this test, we will experiment with a monetization opportunity that will allow eligible creators to earn extra income from ads displayed in their profile feeds, beginning with select U.S. creators.”
There’s no further information available about this feature currently.
Another new type of ad is an Explore feed ad, the explore feed is what appears before you search for a specific profile or hashtag, and features a grid of photos and reels.
Here’s what an Explore feed ad will look like:
Multi-Advertiser Ads and Augmented Reality (AR) Ads
Multi-adveritser ads are an AI and machine learning ad grouping format that makes ads eligible to appear next to one another.
For instance, you might see an advert for a wedding dress appear next to an ad for wedding cake, from two separate brands.
Brands can choose to opt out of this feature, time will tell how users and brands feel about this new ad feature.
There’s also currently an open beta for AR ads in the home and Stories feeds.
The AR experience is powered by Spark AR, AR ads will will encourage users to interact with the ad effect through their surroundings.
Here’s how AR ads will look:
Is this just another advertisement gimmick? or will this feature help pave the way for what ads will look like in the future.
Royalty Free Music For Reel Ads
Lastly, the latest feature for advertisers is the ability to use selected tracks in Reels ads.
The high-qiuality royalty free tracks from Meta’s Sound Collection will be free to use for carousel ads on Reels.
Advertisers can manually select a track or like MEta do it for them.
