What a weekend! My daughter’s birthday is today, and I’ve been thinking about how the way I talk about this event online has changed over the years. When she was born, I posted pics on Facebook and shared all the details. I remember thinking, “How cool is this? I can let so many people know right away she’s here and everything is good.”

And I shared more and more over time, until she started getting older and it dawned on me I might be sharing stuff she’d read, or see, about herself in the future. Maybe I’m being too cautious, but if Facebook sticks around I wouldn’t be surprised if they create a feature to change the privacy settings for posts about our kids in the next few years.

Anyway, on to this week’s marketing news.

Snapchat ad API getting some press

A couple of weeks ago Snapchat launched a new playlist features for stories, you click on stories from people you follow and hit play. Then those stories are played back in the order you chose. This allows advertisers to insert ads between spots while you watch the stories of accounts you follow.

This change can be managed through an ads interface Snapchat released this summer, and AdWeek has an interesting story featuring Gary Vaynerchuk talking about how VaynerMedia is helping companies A/B test and improve their ads on Snapchat.

Snapchat Extra: I’m a big fan of Disney and comicbook.com reported a partnership between Disney and the LA County Museum of Art. The LACMA and OhMyDisney Snap accounts will be retelling classic Disney movies together on a bi-monthly basis.

Two things from the campaign trail

During Wednesday night’s debate Excedrin rode the #DebateHeadache hashtag to the top of Twitter’s Trending Topics and a ton of mentions in other media. Usually when you see these stories it’s about how a big company jumped on an real-time opportunity to grab attention like this, but those posts go viral on their own.

So it ends up being a crapshoot. But Excedrin’s tweet was promoted, and I’d bet this is something they cooked up over a few days at least. It’s clever, and it builds on Excederin’s advertising, but it didn’t take the quickest wits or require them to be first to post.

I love it! One more brick on the scale pushing people to pick up Excederin when they have a headache.

The other campaign story I loved this week was Hillary for America releasing a Troll Trump fundraising bot. Visitors can pledge to donate a set amount each time @DonaldJTrump tweets, with a set daily limit.

This story feels kind of dicey, but I want y'all to know I’m not sharing it for a political guffaw or two. It’s pretty genius to create per action campaigns to draw attention to your platform. It could be simple like “We’ll give 10,000 credits every week for the best Tweet about Postmark”(shameless plug for Wildbit <3) or some other way to engage your audience and grow your business.

ProPublica slams Google for combining DoubleClick database

On Friday, ProPublica released a report about Google combining their advertising database with DoubleClick. In the past, Google kept data generated through their flagship products separate from DoubleClick data. This is a concession they made to the FTC over a privacy uproar when they bought DoubleClick.

Google made this change over the summer with an opt-in announcement through Google accounts. Their wording was vague, which ProPublica points out in their article.

This move is definitely about giving Google a chance at competing with Facebook for retargeting and interest targeting. The big difference to me is that Facebook doesn’t have anything I’m not consciously sharing with them. Google has a trove of search and email information that I don’t really want advertisers using to target me. It’s all led me to start looking for paid alternatives for my personal email accounts.

Pinterest launches Pin Collective

Pin Collective is a new ad partner program from Pinterest to connect advertisers with their top creators. This comes a week after Pinterest announced they are on pace to triple revenue to $300 million this year. Their partners include publishers, production shops, independent creators, who’ll join Pinterest’s internal Pin Factory program to help advertisers create promoted pins to capture attention from their target audience.

eSports are the future

ESPN has been broadcasting eSport events for the last couple of years. The first one I remembering watching was a college competition using a game from ActivisionBlizzard called Heroes of the Dorm.

It’s funny, because it feels like a joke to anyone my age who grew up playing the NES or Civ II. Then you read reports that the total eSports market is going to be $916 million by the end of 2016.

The laughing stops right about there.

Activision’s CEO was in the news this week when he announced ActivisionBlizzard has 500 million active monthly users in 196 countries. That’s more active monthly users than Netflix. Five times more. If your audience plays video games, eSports is something to keep an eye on.

Howdy friends! It’s been a week and it’s time for the AmpKnob newsletter. We took my daughter on a trip for her birthday, and I’ve been on the road all weekend. Jumping right to the news…

YouTube buys FameBit. Continues to suck up revenue from partners.

I’d never heard of FameBit until Google bought them this week.

FameBit is a platform for branded videos on YouTube and Instagram who’ve helped create 250,000 video sponsorships. Companies set their budget and target audience, and FameBit connects them to video creators.

I get why Google/YouTube is getting into this space, but if I owned a profitable YouTube channel it’d add to my growing concern about the platform. YouTube wants to get in the middle of every revenue opportunity. The more they control, the less revenue my channel ends up gettting.

Facebook ad platform gets better and better

Look, if anyone is telling you Facebook doesn’t work for B2B they’re wrong. It might not work for their business, but I’d bet money there’s a way to make money with their business with Facebook ads.

It might’ve been true a few years ago, but Facebook is building an ad platform juggernaut. And while their platform isn’t transparent like open-source, you can narrow your audience and target contextual behavior and interest you can’t with AdWords.

I’ve got some more thoughts on all of this, but want to keep this focused on news. A couple of stories this week really drive home how impressive Facebook Ads are becoming.

1. Audience Network gets a ranking upgrade First, late this week Facebook announced they are going to start ranking their Audience Network ads based on the expected response. This means advertisers will be charged based on what happens to clicks those sites generate.

So if clicks generate bounces, those sites will get paid less than sites that generate quality visits for your website.

Ad networks have traditionally been a terrible value, and Facebook has been no exception. I’ve always turned these off to save money towards quality visits sent directly from Facebook or Google, but this change is worth investigating.

1. Facebook halts ads in Thailand King Bhumibol Adulyadej died at 88 on Oct 13th.

Facebook suspended all ads for their users in Thailand for the duration of the formal month-long mourning period. Analysts say this advertising generates somewhere near $6.8 million per month.

It’s a Thai tradition to remove all advertising during this formal mourning. Advertisers from Thailand would have probably recognized this on their own, but the suspension helps companies around the world avoid an embarrassing, and potentially costly, mistake.

FCC forces opt-in for ISP tracking

The FCC pissed off ISPs by making it more difficult to share web browsing data with advertisers.

ISPs are claiming this isn’t fair because Google and other major sites collect this same data as advertisers.

It’s all bullshit and this is a good thing for consumers. ISPs are the worst.

Limit Ad Tracking is a hit with iPhone users

Apple uses a ‘Identifier for Advertising’ or IDFA to deliver targeted ads to iOS users. The IDFA is a alphanumeric used per device. Before iOS 10, you could reset this IDFA.

In iOS 10 you can turn it off completely and 20% of iOS users in North America have opted out so far.

Not much to add to this story, but it’s worth pointing out because targeted advertising works but we want to be in control of when we’re targeted.

Fall is in the air, which in my part of Florida means it only got up to the mid-80’s today. We spent the afternoon decorating our front porch for Halloween and I’m writing this as the Packers and Giants are going after each other on Sunday Night Football.

Enough about my day, let’s jump into the marketing news.

Ads in the App Store and other drama

Apple announced they’d start selling paid placement for search terms in the iOS App Store and started rolling out those paid ads this week. This is going to be a great thing for apps and consumers. The Verge has all the details and a screenshot if you haven’t seen this yet.

The other side of the Apple coin this week was the story surrounding the removal of Dash in the macOS App Store. Dash is built by Bogdan Popescu and when he tried to migrate his app from a personal to company account, Apple yanked Dash from the App Store. As the story unfolded Apple told Bogdan they pulled Dash because they saw review manipulation, which he denied. And that their decision was final.

It’s interesting to see the differences between the iOS and macOS App Stores continue to grow. Part of me wonders if the problems for the macOS store stem from the fact Apple doesn’t own the entire lifecycle like they do for iOS. There’s no way macOS would be any where near as powerful if I could only install apps from the App Store.

Penguin 4 update rolled out

Google rolled out an update to Penguin, a signal in their algorithm designed to detect spammy links. Until recently, this signal was collected slowly with results fed back into search results.

Google presented this as a small change in their blog post announcing this update, but MozCast tells a different story going back to September 23. MozCast is a tool built by Moz.com to provide a quick reference for changes to Google search results due to algorithm changes.

Over the last few weeks they’ve tracked quite a bit of volatility, so if you’ve seen your traffic from Google organic results go up and down during this time it’s due to these changes.

Rand Fishkin covered all the details about the real-time Penguin update in his latest Whiteboard Friday if you want to learn more.

Kit Kat + Chance the Rapper = Halloween ad gold

Like every self-respecting musical nerd, I stayed up to watch Lin-Manuel Miranda host SNL.

He did not disappoint.

As I was watching, I saw Chance the Rapper dressed up as a lion as I sped through commercials after watching the monologue again. Which stuck in my brain and made me want to see what this ad was about.

It was for Kit Kat, and it’s glorious.

Amazon boots paid review placement

Amazon reviews move product and early this week they announced they’d be banning reviews solicited with free or discounted product. This change doesn’t apply to books or reviews through Amazon’s Vine program. Vine is a review generation system managed by Amazon where they send customers items for review, some of which those reviewers get to keep.

Basically, they’re going after sellers who were giving away product for reviews. I expect to see this policy become standard for reviews across the Internet, and Amazon to eventually phase out their Vine program.

Oculus is getting a browser

Oculus Connect took place this week and served as a keynote for the platform covering hardware and software coming to the VR platform. The avatar demo got a lot of attention, but one piece of news not getting the same amount of attention is that Oculus is getting a browser.

Details are sparse about how this browser is going to work, but it’s worth keeping an eye on how this develops.

Display ads should be seen a minimum of 14 seconds

A new study from Sticky, InSkin Media, and Research Now used eye-tracking and an follow-up survey to find how long display ads need to be seen to be remembered. They found [most ads are only seen for an average of .7 seconds, with bigger ads getting a larger share of attention.

They also found an ad needs to be visible for 14 seconds to actually receive a view of 1 second.

It’s interesting by itself, but it’d be nice to see a follow up that looks at how well animated ads compare to static ads for clickthroughs.

It’s Sunday night and like every self-respecting dad in his late 30’s in early fall, I’m watching Saturday Night Live on Hulu as I write this week’s update.

This week’s update is going to be to the point. I’m not feeling great, there’s a tiny snot troll sitting inside my head pushing yellow and green stuff around.

Google announced a free version of their Optimize tool.

Google launched Optimize 360 back in March for companies using Google Analytics 360. Optimize powers A/B tests for websites, just like Optimizely or Visual Web Optimizer.

This might have been on your radar, but Analytics 360 is an enterprise tool with a big price tag. Until this week when Google announced they are releasing a free version of Optimize.

Optimize joins DataStudio in beta to compliment Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics.

AdWords retargeting launches across devices

Facebook has offered cross device retargeting for a long time now, and Google announced this week they’ll be adding the same ability to Google Display Network and DoubleClick Bid Manager.

This means you can use AdWords to deliver retargeted ads via Google Display Network. Which is nice, but if you don’t have time or bandwidth to design the banners you might want to look at retargeting on Facebook.

Gmail (finally) goes responsive

And in the final piece of Google news this week, Litmus reported that Gmail will start supporting embedded styles and responsive design.

It’s really interesting to see big mailbox providers like Outlook/Live/Hotmail and Gmail starting to listen to long-time gripes many designers and marketers have had about how their platforms display email.

Here’s hoping the trend continues.

Twitter launches moments for everyone

Sharing a conversation from Twitter can be a pain in the ass, which is why it’s nice to see Twitter release Moments for everyone.

Twitter is catching a lot of shit, and it’s all well-earned, but I love it and it makes me happy to see them putting out useful things we can all use.

South Park celebrates 20 years with mobile billboards

South Park has been on the air for 20 years now, and this week they celebrated by sending mobile billboards across the country.

Instead of sending them rolling around cities, they parked them in front of the Church of Scientology HQ, the Lincoln Memorial, and the White House.

Uber driver delivers cable boxes

Love What Matters shared a story from a guy from Brooklyn who needed to return some equipment to his cable company. He called an Uber and when the driver arrived and saw the equipment he offered to deliver it for the guy.

He was kind of floored and let the guy take the equipment. The Uber driver only charged him for the trip out and it saved him $20 off his trip.

The entire story is worth a read and it’s a great reminder of how a little thought creates a unique experience people will remember.

Okay, campers, rise and shine, don’t forget to read AmpKnob this week!

I took a big part of this week off to enjoy Walt Disney World with the family, but getting home on Sunday night gives me plenty of time to get this to your inbox for Monday morning.

Do you want to keep getting this delivered on Sunday night for you to read on Monday morning? Email newsletters normally get sent after the crush of the Monday morning inbox, but since this newsletter should have tidbits you can fit into your work for the week it makes sense to send it now.

If you want it at a different time, can you send me an email? I can setup some personalization for delivery times, but I don’t want to spend time doing that if no one is interested.

Now, on to the news.

People remember branded content when they forget ads

IPG MediaLab released a study this week showing people recall branded content 59% more than other display ads. The results are similar to a study from 2013.

This is kind of incredible stuff.

We should all be thinking through ways to pay to have our best content setup as branded content in the right publications.

Egg all over Facebook for video metric error

Facebook announced an error in one of their video metrics this week. If you saw this story at all, the headlines discussed it with breathless headlines.

Businessweek said, “Facebook says it gave advertisers inflated video metrics!”

David Fischer, from Facebook, shared a post where he clarified exactly what Facebook miscalculated.

“About a month ago, we found an error in the way we calculate one of the video metrics on our dashboard – average duration of video viewed. The metric should have reflected the total time spent watching a video divided by the total number of people who played the video. But it didn’t – it reflected the total time spent watching a video divided by only the number of “views” of a video (that is, when the video was watched for three or more seconds). And so the miscalculation overstated this metric. While this is only one of the many metrics marketers look at, we take any mistake seriously.”

Facebook video ads are super cheap, somewhere around $.01 for many advertisers, so I’d take this story with a grain of salt and continue to experiment with Facebook ads.

Don’t go spending your entire marketing budget on Facebook, but test to see if you can find a cheap method to get in front of your target audience.

Media links don’t count against character limits on Twitter now

While we’re talking about social media stories, back in May Twitter announced they’d stop counting media links against the character limit for tweets.

This feature has fully rolled out now. This doesn’t extend the limit for links to posts outside of Twitter, but does change the rules for Retweets so you can RT a reply to all of your followers instead of using ‘.@’ to broadcast.

Reflik geohacks TechCrunch Disrupt. TechCrunch is pissed!

This story made me laugh pretty hard.

TechCrunch Disrupt was in SF. In the immortal words of Fred Armisen as Joy Behar, “So what? Who cares?”

Well, Reflik snapped up a Snapchat geofilter to cover the spot where the event was being held for $58. So, attendees who paid $2,995 per ticket were getting hit with an ad for a product they could use on Snapchat for peanuts.

A TechCrunch writer took to his keyboard to call for Snapchat to open up a bidding system for their geofilters. It all read as a bit of sour grapes on the part of TechCrunch, and I frankly loved the hustle of Reflik figuring out how to get the word out on the cheap.

Spotify and Tinder team up to power matches

Spotify announced they’re going to help people decide if they want to connect on Tinder. Once they opt-in, folks using Tinder can now see artists you have in common, pick an ‘Anthem’ to share on Tinder, and view other people’s Anthems on their profile.

The interesting thing about this announcement is Spotify is spreading their data out to other apps to make interesting connections based on listening habits. There’s a ton of untapped potential for music preferences and apps to crossover and provide a better experience to both sets of users.

Share AmpKnob?

This is the end of the second week of the AmpKnob newsletter. Have the last two weeks helped you keep up with marketing news you might’ve missed without it?

If it has, it’d mean the world to me if you could share it with your friends on Twitter or Facebook. I’m going to keep the goodness coming, and have a few special projects you’ll hear more about over the next couple of months.

The idea for AmpKnob has been something I’ve thought about for the last couple of months. I’ve got an idea for ways to help small teams save time with a bunch of different marketing tasks.

But to get there, I have to get started.

The first step was setting up a landing page to connect with folks looking to keep up with marketing news and trends without having to think about marketing all the time. I started with a free landing page template from Justin Jackson but hit a snag when I tried to use Mailchimp to start my list. I had to setup DNS to forward an email to a domain I have email setup on Google Apps.

Then I got distracted and let it sit there for a couple of weeks.

Last week, I went to SumoCon and in addition to learning a ton of good things for my 9-5 job at Wildbit I was inspired to get off my ass and get started on this project. One of the little hacks I decided to use was to pay for at least one tool, and pay enough where it created a little pain. Which is why I decided to ditch Mailchimp for Convert Kit.

Like every pretty much everyone who works online, I’ve got a whole staple of domain names I’ll get around to using one day. None of them were a great fit for this project, so I decided to come up with a new name. I was inspired by a video from Aaron Draplin where he sat down to design with pen and paper. I wasn’t designing, but I thought it’d help to get my ideas as fast as possible. This page kinda shows how I arrived at the name AmpKnob, minus running my idea past a few friends to make sure I was on to something that worked.

With Convert Kit setup, a new domain in hand, I finished the copy for the simple landing page I’d been working on from Justin. Then I set it up to work on GitHub pages and tweeted it out.

And 6 people signed up! How cool was that?!?!?

As I thought about it more, I decided I need something more than a simple landing page and it would be good to have a site where I could quickly add new pages and maybe even blog a bit to fully take advantage of Convert Kit.

So then I decided to get started with Octopress. I’m not a developer, but I’ve spent a lot of time getting to know some basics of Git marketing Beanstalk so I put those skills to work. It was a lot of trial and error Friday night, but by the time midnight rolled around I had a functioning site.

Now you can look around and see I’m not a designer but I know enough to know this rough. So I’ll be slowly improving this site, working design things that bug me as I have time to break off some CSS or want to dig into the guts of Octopress to make it do more of what I want.

But for now we’re ready to send a weekly marketing newsletter. :-)

This is the first edition of the AmpKnob newsletter and there’s still a ton I’m figuring out. I’d love to hear what you think of these stories, the format, pretty much anything. My goal is to make every week better than the last, and your thoughts will help make that goal a reality.

You signed up for a brand new newsletter with complete faith in me, and I take that really seriously. Thank you.

And now, on to the stories.

Changes coming for mobile search results

Back in August, Google announced a few big changes for mobile search users.

First, Google started using mobile-friendliness as a positive ranking factor in April 2015. Pages from mobile-friendly websites got a nice little tag in their Search Engine Results Page. Google said this update only impacts searches made on mobile devices, which means basically means there have been at least two indexes people can use to find your site. One for mobile searches and one for desktop searches.

Then in August, Google announced a couple of new changes for mobile search. First, they will be dropping the mobile friendly tag in search results on mobile devices. They’ve said that 85% of search results now meet their mobile friendly criteria.

Which is kind of like having a pie contest, giving an advantage to square pies, and then being surprised when 85% of people show up with square pies. Google waves their hands, but this is no magic trick.

The second change is a penalty for sites showing full page interstitials to mobile visitors. Since many sites use responsive elements, this change will also have an impact beyond mobile.

This penalty goes into effect January 10, 2017 so if you (or someone you know) are using interstitials to collect email addresses be sure to turn those off before this deadline.

Shane’s Google prediction corner

Prediction 1: Google will consolidate their indexes. I mentioned Google has pretty much admitted to running to unique indexes for mobile and desktop searches, and over the next two years my guess is we’ll see them consolidate this back to one as mobile traffic continues to gain ground.

Prediction 2: Google will incentivize dates on blog posts. Google has the power to improve user experience across the web, and I think in the next couple of year we’ll see them find a way to encourage people to include a visible publication date on their blog posts. SEOs using this as a trick to appear evergreen are going to attract the Google’s gaze and get this trend relegated to the scrap heap of bad UX.

Set support hours for your Twitter handle

Twitter announced this week they’re going to let products set availability for their handles. You can mark your account as a ‘Support Account’ and set support hours in your settings.

AdBlock Plus gets skeezy

AdBlock Plus made it’s name by blocking ads for users and this week courted controversy as they announced plans to test a programmatic ad platform within their Acceptable Ads program.

AdWeek reported Sridhar Ramaswamy, SVP of ads and commerce at Google, told reporters at the DMEXCO conference in Germany on Wednesday that Adblock Plus “erects toll booths on a public road and siphons off advertising dollars that should be going directly to publishers."

People block ads because their intrusive and ad platforms are abused by scammers. Company makes money by offering to block ads for free with a premium upgrade edition, and sells ads to people who use their free edition. Shakedown city.

“Would be a shame if these perfectly nice ads started showing up in your browser again.”

Brian Dean at SumoCon

I had a chance to attend SumoCon, and was floored by Brian Dean’s presentation. Reading Backlinko can feel like trying to drink from a fire hydrant sometimes, so hit this link and CMD+F ‘Sprinkle LSI Keywords’ to read his tip on how to find Latent Semantic Indexed keywords to sprinkle into your posts.

It’s really, really good. I’m sure you’ll be seeing many more tips from Brian on AmpKnob.

Tweets you shouldn’t miss

Brandon Mathis pointed out you can manage updates to apps in iOS 10 with Force press.

Scott Kerr shared an email chain between LEGO and a 7 year-old who lost a minifigure. It’s the kind of customer support story you hope your kid encounters.