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Starting September 1, Amazon will no longer allow any flash-based ads on its site, or its Amazon Advertising Platform where advertisers can place ads on websites owned by Amazon.The e-commerce giant posted the following notice on its Technical Guidelines page, confirming its decision to remove Flash because of recent browser settings that limit Flash content:Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Safari all limit Flash content, while Apple has long restricted Flash on its iPads and iPhones.Amazon’s move to eliminate Flash follows a malvertising attack on Yahoo’s ad network earlier this month by hackers that exploited Flash ads.“Its decision to block Flash content is significant because it is a clear sign that some in the ad industry are responding to Flash’s imminent demise,” reports Digiday.com, which noted that Amazon will own three percent of the U.S.’s $27 billion digital display market.

via Marketing Land

Twitter’s Audience platform is taking a big step forward today with changes that affect ads both on and off of the Twitter platform. New creative options as well as ad types will make Twitter advertising much more appealing to traditional (non-app) marketers.New Audience Platform Ad TypesWhen the Audience Platform launched in 2014 the ad options for marketers were either app installs or re-engagement ads that were only available for select advertisers. While great for app advertisers and a specific set of advertisers, they lacked the mainstream marketing appeal for traditional businesses. Today that changes. Twitter has rolled out the addition of Promoted Video and Tweet engagement ads across the Audience Platform on a global scale for all managed clients.Many of the same traditional targeting features will still be offered with these ads, but now advertisers will be able to extend their reach in order to find new customers.Promoted videos can play automatically on a device and all vi…

Bing has announced a new Knowledge and Actions Graph API for Android developers. The objective is to get Android developers to deeply integrate Bing Knowledge Graph information — “21 billion associated facts, 18 billion links to key actions and over 5 billion relationships between entities” — into their apps to enabled an enhanced experience and improve app engagement and retention.Here’s Bing’s pitch to developers:Developers can innovate using this enormous asset to fulfill their users’ information needs and help users perform searches in context, instead of forcing users to leave their apps to perform searches. For instance, a messaging app could add a Bing snapshot with actionable info on a restaurant, making it easier for a group to plan an evening. A social media app could augment users’ photos with information about the locations of each photo. A news app could show definitions and descriptions of terms that users want to drill into. A music app could augment content with snapsh…

Lifescript, a website for women’s health, is a flourishing player in a high-stakes game where precision execution and technical finesse have to function in harmony with spot-on content that’s rigorously factual but also embraces celebrity culture and entertainment. (Disclosure: Lifescript is a Message Systems client.)First, let’s lay out a little context:Women make approximately 80 percent of the health care decisions for their families and are most likely to be the caregivers if a family member becomes sick.Women use heath care services more than men and account for 57 percent of expenses in physician’s offices.59 percent of women make health care decisions for others.53 percent of women turn to the Web for health care information, but only 31 percent trust the info they find online.One in every 20 searches on Google is about health information.And 86 percent of online women use the Web to find health information, compared with 73 percent of online men.It’s no surprise, then, that th…

How do you decide which elements of your site to test? This question is at the heart of website optimization.A better question is, “How do you determine what NOT to test?”It’s relatively easy to come up with ideas that might increase your conversion rate. We typically come up with 50, 75, 100 or more ideas for each of our client sites. Filtering through this list is the hard part.Here’s the approach we take at Conversion Sciences (my employer).Step One: Look For EvidenceYou should never test anything if you don’t have some evidence that it is a problem. These ideas are called hypotheses for a reason. A hypothesis is an educated guess, an informed fabrication, a data-based brain fart.So you need to educate, inform and find data on your ideas, or they don’t qualify as hypotheses. They’re just happy thoughts.The first benefit of looking for evidence is that you might be able to eliminate a hypothesis. You might find evidence that it’s NOT a problem.Here’s an example hypothesis for the pr…

AdRoll’s retargeting capabilities are now integrated into Shopify’s e-commerce platform.With the Adroll For Shopify app, merchants will be able to upload and activate retargeting display ads from within their store accounts without having to add code to their sites.“We know that merchants are leaving money on the table by not retargeting ther customers. The data shows that of all those who abandon shopping carts, three quarters intend to complete their purchase at a later date,” said Adam Berke, AdRoll president and CMO. “Our goal is to help all 175,000 Shopify merchants seamlessly implement the proven retargeting tactics that the largest retailers use to solve this problem.”Retargeting campaigns executed from within Shopify can run across devices on web and mobile sites as well as on Twitter and Facebook and target past site visitors using the retailer’s first-party data.“Shopping cart abandonment is still a huge challenge for online retailers, and we’re committed to building out our…

Last quarter, Facebook surpassed Google in referral traffic to news sites, challenging the search giant's dominance and becoming its most formidable competitor in yet another area.

via Search Engine Watch

There are many forms of content marketing, though it typically poses the same struggles, such as budget and talent acquisition - for brands, no matter their industry and offerings.

via Search Engine Watch

Though good PR is valuable to any client, it doesn't necessarily include links. When that's the case, here are 14 things to focus on for maximizing the benefits of coverage.

via Search Engine Watch

Huawei has added a new entry to its Honor life of products, the Huawei Honor 7i smartphone. The company has silently introduced the handset on its official Chinese website. What makes it stand out is the flip-out rear camera that can rotate up to 180 degrees, thus transforming itself into a quite capable selfie shooter.The 13-megapixel rear camera features a Sony sensor and comes with dual-tone LED flash. There are special software features, such as Auto Exposure, Auto White Balance, Automatic Face Recognition and Auto Smile Shutter. The camera is also said to provide great low-light performance thanks to the SLR grade iSP. Besides the ingenious camera setup, the phone also comes with a fingerprint scanner on the side panel, which, according to Huawei, is “industry’s first” and also the “smallest fingerprint modules.” But it’s worth pointing out that the recently launched ZTE Nubia Z9 Exclusive also features fingerprint scanners on its side panel, so Huawei’s affirmation isn’t quite a…

True professionals are never off duty, even on Facebook. For most marketers, media spend is precious and not to be wasted, especially when playing the high-stakes, long game of B2B sales. B2B marketers need to ensure their message hits the right business professionals who are high enough in the hierarchy of a company to make purchase decisions. This Psychographic Targeting Hot House post by Chris Davis, Account Manager at aimClear, will expose Facebook’s new B2B targeting showcase how marketers can use Facebook’s mashed-up targeting to ensure their ads are seen by the people that can write the checks.Why not just use LinkedIn?Sure, marketers can go to LinkedIn, famous for its B2B targeting, but they could end up paying more per lead on average with less reach. Couple LinkedIn’s limited, pricey platform with the fact that LinkedIn’s ad selection is limited, and it can become frustrating to marketers looking for modern, creative ways to reach their customers without paying an arm and a …

More than 50% of marketing decision makers believe that organisations should have both a CMO and a Chief Marketing Technologist (CMT), according to a recent study. Nearly three quarters of them believe more companies will begin hiring CMTs in the next five years.The undeniable truth is that marketing is now a technology-powered discipline. Organisations conceived and configured for that new reality will be most effective. Attend MarTech Europe and you’ll learn from thought leaders transforming their teams and getting the most out of their technology investments.You’ll participate in 20 sessions and hear how:Carlsberg Group harmonised marketing and IT and created a digital-saavy organisation to ensure growth, profitability and sustainability;Marks & Spencer balanced in-house and agency martech roles when investing £150 million to rebuild its e-commerce environment;Allianz selects and implements marketing technologies while meeting stringent governance requirements;and 17 more! See …

Obi Mobiles, the relatively new smartphone brand backed by ex-Apple CEO John Sculley has had a rough time since its launch last year. And it looks like the company is sort of relaunching the brand as Obi WorldPhone soon. Obi has sent out invites for an event scheduled for August 26th in San Francisco.As you can see, the invite simply mentions about the global launch of Obi Worldphone, but there seems to be more to it than a new lineup of smartphone(s) being launched. The previous ObiMobiles.com website now redirects to ObiWorldphone.com, so it’s some sort of a brand relaunch. We hear that the company is trying to address the yawning gap between “high design high price” smartphones and “low price generic design” smartphones. This is very much a niche segment out there, but not everyone looks to play the volumes game anyway. In a world which is getting heavily dominated by Asian and Chinese players, the likes of Obi (and Jolla) play a crucial role in adding balance to the growing smartph…

WhatsApp has finally added the Web functionality to iOS devices which means that iPhone users can now sync up their chats with the WhatsApp web app. As with most of the major WhatsApp features, this should be painfully slow and gradual rollout.WhatsApp Web feature was launched for Android, Windows and Blackberry platforms way back in January this year and the company had cited the delay in launching the feature for iOS “due to Apple platform limitations.”Interestingly, the feature was also supported by the almost redundant Nokia S60 but iOS was left out. WhatsApp spokesperson had told The Verge earlier that “Apple has no background multi-tasking and no proper push technology. So it is a bad user experience on iOS.”WhatsApp had launched the voice calling in January to keep at pace with its competitors and even then, iOS was the last platform to receive the update.

WhatsApp Web is a boon for people who are constantly working out of a laptop or a PC and don’t want to stare at their phone …

In my years of reading about blogging from the pros, I always came across this one simple advice: grow your email subscribers. According to blogging experts, email is the best way to reach out to your audience and keep them coming back to your blog.It sounds simple enough: get your readers to give their email so they can receive updates and other content related to your blog. However, implementing this strategy may prove to be a challenge. First, you’ll have to figure out which email subscription service to choose. There’s Aweber, Get Response, Sendy to name a few. Then there are other technical things like creating an email subscription form, putting it on your website, making sure it looks good, and other details you might want to deal with.For me, the challenge was committing to a paid service without knowing if my email subscribers would actually increase over time. As I completed everything and had my paid email subscription set up, I failed at my first attempt to grow my followi…

What phone can I get in the range of 10,000 INR which has a good camera and battery life? Yet another Zenfone 2! Allow us to introduce to you, the all new Zenfone 2 Laser, one of the many different variants of the highly successful and popular phones that ASUS has introduced this year, the Zenfone 2. It is hard to keep a track of so many variants and what differentiates them. And we if wanted to keep the distinguishing part simple by calling out the model number, there are many variants holding the same number. For now, lets draw our focus to ZE550KL and as we go through this article you will know what all this variant holds.Let’s start off with the design – it is the same as the original Zenfone 2, volume rockers and speaker grille at the back, power button and the audio jack at the top, charging port at the bottom. The front consists of a 5.5 inch IPS LCD display coming in at a resolution that pack around 267 ppi, protected by Gorilla Glass 4. And the set of three capacitive buttons…

Almost half (49 percent) of those 18 to 29 in the US are users of messaging apps according to new survey data from the Pew Research Center. While 36 percent of the total US smartphone population uses them.Those findings come from the latest study on Americans’ use of social media. The data were based on telephone interviews conducted in March and April among 1,907 adults.In addition to the growing use of messaging apps (e.g., Snapchat, WhatsApp, iMessage), the report examines usage patterns and demographics associated with the major social networking sites. The following are the demographic highlights of each of the major social sites profiled in the report:Facebook: Enjoys broad penetration and usage among all groups except those over 65 years oldPinterest: Females under 50 dominate usageInstagram: Used by non-whites more often (vs. other networks) and by female and younger usersLinkedIn: Used by older, working adults with higher education and incomesTwitter: Used by younger urbanite…