Two years ago, Snapchat started rebuilding its advertising business from the ground up. Following the launch of Snap’s Conversions API (CAPI), the social media company has reported an increase in small business advertisers, CAPI integration partners, and a revenue boost.

Now, Snap is providing further advertising updates, including redesigned formats and more.

Snap says its redesigned ad formats are driven by a focus on the “intentionality” behind every action a Snapchatter takes on an ad in order to deliver more reliable and desired results to the company’s ad partners. 

In a press event at Snapchat’s New York headquarters, the company said it has worked to remove loose or accidental clicks, which helps its advertising system better understand what is most relevant and intentional, thereby driving more relevant ads.

This strategy includes a new full-screen display to highlight ad offers and messaging in Snap promotions, improved augmented reality (AR) ad options for brands to boost exposure around their branded Lenses, and an expansion of its “Total Takeover” ad product, including a new “State-level First Story,” which prioritizes reach in specific regions in the United States –– an option that may interest political candidates and organizations ahead of the next US presidential election.

Eventually, advertisers will also be able to launch full-day takeovers of the Lens Carousel through what Snap is calling “a higher-impact AR product.”

The company has also introduced a new, streamlined app download experience on iOS, allowing users to install apps with fewer taps and without ever leaving the Snapchat app. As a result, Snap says it is seeing lower Cost-per-Installs and improved ROI for advertisers.

As for advertisers involved in gaming, Snap is introducing new bidding capabilities specifically designed for the mobile gaming category. The company is currently testing a Value Optimization offering that advertisers can use to bid on the value of purchases driven, not just the quantity of the purchases. Snap believes this will be helpful for advertisers who care about maximizing their ROAS.

For advertisers who prefer click-only conversion outcomes, Snap has introduced a new way to bid within seven days called, “7/0 delivery optimization,” which the company says showed a 75% increase in purchase-related conversions year-over-year in Q1.

To help improve lead generation, Snap has also begun working with CRM partners by building integrations with their systems. “With these new integrations, when Snapchat generates a lead, we are able to better determine how useful that lead was and what the interaction ultimately led to,” the company said in a statement. “This information allows us to further optimize our lead gen product and improve advertiser ROI.”

The company has also partnered with Snowflake, Datahash, LiveRamp and Tealium to help their customers easily adopt CAPI and adopt more insights into their Snap ad campaigns. Snap reports a 300% increase year-over-year with CAPI integrations, with an increase in attributed purchases (+22%), purchase value (+25%) and a decrease in cost-per-purchase (-18%).

Finally, Snapchat has launched a new Landing Page View optimization goal “to help marketers deliver on KPIs like session volume, landing page views, and reduced bounce rates,” providing web advertisers with more specific insights that connect with their overarching objectives.

By refining and improving its machine learning models to optimize for specific objectives, Snap says it has seen over 60% lower cost for some advertisers versus traditional click engagement models.

The California Assembly overwhelmingly passed a bill that would require browser developers to offer a tool that allows consumers to easily opt out of online behavioral advertising throughout the web.

The measure (AB 3048), introduced earlier this year by California Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal (D-69th District) and passed Wednesday by a vote of 53-7, is now with the state Senate's rules committee.

The bill specifically would prohibit companies from developing or maintaining web browsers that lack an opt-out preference setting. The best known example is the Global Privacy Control -- a tool created by privacy advocates that sends opt-out signals to every site consumers visit.

In the absence of a global setting, consumers who want to reject receiving ads targeted based on cross-site data can click on individual companies' opt-out links, or use a tool created by an ad industry organization to opt out of many ad-tech companies' behavioral-targeting platforms.

Privacy advocates have said those methods fall short for several reasons, including that consumers can't always find opt-out links, and that opting out site-by-site can be cumbersome.

California's Consumer Privacy Rights Act currently gives consumers the right to reject “cross-context” behavioral advertising -- meaning ads served based on activity across different sites. The state privacy agency has interpreted that law as requiring companies to honor opt-out requests that consumers transmit through browser-based tools.

Other states including Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Montana and Texas have recently passed laws or regulations explicitly mandating that companies honor universal opt-out mechanisms -- but some specifics vary. For instance, Texas only requires companies to honor a global opt-outs if that business does so in other states.

Business and advertising groups oppose AB 3048, arguing in a letter sent to California lawmakers in March that universal opt-out mechanisms raise “unanswered policy questions,” including how the signals will be treated different jurisdictions.

Universal opt-out preference tools "are not yet ripe to consider as a device- or browser-mandated option,” wrote the California Chamber of Commerce, American Association of Advertising Agencies, Association of National Advertisers and eight other groups.

Those entities also argued that California's privacy law (which they refer to as Proposition 24) doesn't require companies to honor browser-based signals, but instead allows companies to either place an opt-out link on their home page or honor a browser-based signal.

“In contrast to AB 3048, Proposition 24 does not actually mandate businesses to provide a global opt-out signal; it provides businesses the option and requires regulations around that voluntary use,” the groups wrote.

Advocacy groups including Consumer Reports and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, along with trade organization Digital Content Next (which represents publishers), support the bill.

Those groups said in a letter sent to state lawmakers in March that the proposed law “will help reduce opt-out friction and make it easier for California residents to control their data.”

“Today, if a user wants to send an opt-out preference signal on Chrome, Safari, or Edge, they need to download a third-party extension to do so, while a mobile platform user cannot configure their device to send an opt-out preference signal at all,” those groups wrote. “As a result, millions of Californians, while technically enjoying the right to send such a signal, likely have no idea that this right even exists and have no easy way of acting on it even if they did.”

Some developers including Mozilla, Brave and Duck Duck Go have already built the Global Privacy Control into their browsers.

Apple used to include a “do-not-track” setting in Safari, but disabled the setting in 2019 due to concerns that ad-tech companies would exploit the signal for device fingerprinting -- a tracking technique that identifies users based on characteristics of their browsers.

Google's Chrome doesn't include the specific “Global Privacy Control” setting, but has long had a “do-not-track” setting, which sends a no-tracking request to all websites consumers visit.

The California privacy agency has suggested that this older “do-not-track” command isn't equivalent to an "opt-out preference signal," but it's not clear whether other state officials will agree -- or whether Google could revise the do-not-track command so that it could serve as an opt-out preference signal.

It should come as no surprise that the criminal element has also discovered generative artificial intelligence GenAI.  

There has been a 4,151% increase in malicious emails since ChatGPT was launched in November 2022, according to The State of Phishing: 2024 Mid-Year Assessment, a study by SlashNext.

In the six-month period ending in March of this year alone, there was a 341% hike in malicious emails and 856% compared to the prior 12 months, according to the study.

Legitimate email marketers are facing the threat of AI-driven inbox glut. There are so many suspicious emails coming in that consumers may be reluctant to click through at all.  

Indeed, there have been 59,000 average new threats per day from trusted domains during that six-month period. Credential phishing jumped by 217% from October 2023 to March 2024. 

Mobile phones are particularly vulnerable. Of all mobile attacks, 45% are of the smishing category.  

Business email compromise attacks grew by 29% since January of this year. 

All this has been fueled by increasing technical sophistication on the part of phishing artists. For instance, bad actors are now using CAPTCHA-based attacks.  

Wait, shouldn’t CAPTCHA prevent such attacks? Yes, but… 

“Attackers are exploiting this tool by generating thousands of domains and implementing Cloud-Flare’s CAPTCHAs to hide credential phishing forms from security protocols that are unable to bypass the CAPTCHAs,” the study claims. 

In addition, QR-based attacks have grown to the point where they now represent 11% of all malicious emails. 

“Security vendors and organizations need technology that can identify malicious QR codes in emails and all messaging channels, including personal email and mobile apps, to stop these threats before they experience a costly breach,” the study advises. 

Patrick Harr, CEO of SlashNext, concludes: "Humans have been, and will continue to be, the weakest point in any organization's security. There is a reason threat actors continue to iterate on tactics like phishing that have been around for decades – they are highly effective.”

Advertisers seem to have squandered large amounts of money in the first quarter of 2024. Some $1.4 billion was lost to mobile in-app ad fraud, per Pixalate’s estimates, but data shows budgets were also impacted in other media.

The company’s data-science team analyzed more than 19 billion global open programmatic advertising impressions across desktop and mobile web in Q1 2024 to compile this research. 

The invalid traffic (IVT) rate in Q1 2024 for the open programmatic desktop web ad marketplace rose to 12% -- up from 11% in Q4 2023, which dropped from 12% in Q3 2023.

The mobile market rose to 10% in Q1 2024 globally -- up from 9% in the previous quarter.

North America saw the highest rates at 15% and 11%, respectively. The U.S. and Argentina each had the highest IVT rate, 15%, for mobile-web open programmatic traffic in Q1 2024, according to Pixalate.

Apple had the second-highest IVT rate -- at 15% -- for traffic coming from its devices in the open programmatic mobile web ad marketplace in Q1 2024, followed by Vizio at 14, and Samsung at 14%.

Amazon -- the company with the lowest percentage measured by Pixalate in the report -- had 8%.

In another report, Pixalate's data-science team analyzed more than 94,000 connected television (CTV) apps, including non-open programmatic ad supported, and more than 3 billion global open programmatic advertising impressions in Q1 2024 to compile this research.

Data shows advertisers lost $528 million to connected television (CTV) ad fraud, per Pixalate. Some 30% of EMEA has the highest CTV IVT rate compared with any other global region, closely followed by APAC at 29% IVT for open programmatic CTV traffic in Q1 2024, as measured by Pixalate. North America had the lowest percentage at 12% -- down from 15% in the prior quarter.

The U.K. had the highest IVT rate at 30% for global CTV open programmatic traffic in Q1 2024, followed by Canada with 25% and Germany at 24%. The U.S. came in at 12% -- one of the lowest rates with the exception of Guatemala at 8% and Chile at 8%.

Xiaomi and Amazon Fire TV devices had the highest IVT rate --at 32% for each globally. Vizio came in at 23%, with Philips at 21%. Chromecast and Roku had the lowest rate, at 8% each, while Roku dropped from 14% in Q4 2023.

Amazon Fire TV apps had an IVT rate of 48% in Q1 2024 that do not have an app-ads.txt file detected, compared with the apps that have app-ads.txt file detected at 30%, per Pixalate’s data.

Hyper-casual games are now drawing 34.4% of in-app advertising in the casual game category, according to an analysis by Mintegral, GameAnalytics and Tenjin. 

Puzzle games follow with a 20% share and then simulation games with 15.7%.

However, the average app retains only 17% of users after one day, the study reports. Top performers generate twice that. 

Video advertising draws an almost 70% market share, and this rises to 88% in EMEA and LATAM.

Hyper-casual garners a 56% share on Android, and 44% on iOS, the highest total on that technology. Android pulls 62%, the highest ad media spend. 

The U.S. has the highest casual game ad spend, with Japan placing second and the UK third. China is fourth. 

"Casual gaming remains a powerhouse in the mobile app industry," says Erick Fang, CPO of Mobvista, Mintegral's parent company. "Understanding user behavior and advertising trends is key to success in this competitive space.”

Data was collected between January 1, 2023 and December 31, 2023.

Mintegral is a programmatic advertising platform, GameAnalytics an analytics tool and Tenjin a mobile measurement platform. 

Men have been dropping their knickers around London, thanks to separate campaigns from prostate cancer charity Prost8 and cybersecurity company Surfshark.

 In Prost8’s out-of-home campaign, viewers are drawn to prominently displayed bare bottoms. Yet, “A prostate check isn't what you think,” declares accompanying text. “It’s just a blood test taken from your arm.”

The confusion, of course, stems from that other type of prostate exam, in which the doctor inserts a gloved finger into the rectum to check prostate size. The blood test, on the other hand, checks for PSA (prostate-specific antigens) levels.

“There are misconceptions about the testing procedure, and many men are reluctant to undergo it,” explained Glenn Scholefield, copywriter at Omicom’s TWBA\MCR in Manchester, who developed the campaign pro bono with agency art director Tom Holmes.

“Every hour, a man succumbs to prostate cancer, with one life lost every 45 minutes,” Scholefield said in a statement. “Because of this, Tom and I decided to come up with an initiative to drive home the message to men that it's important and not painful to get tested.”

“It's evident that the campaign is really helping to challenge perceptions, spark discussions, and potentially save lives," added Paul Sayer, founder of Prost8.

Surfshark, meanwhile, put a man sitting on a toilet inside a see-through truck. The aim: to expose leaks…data leaks that is.

“Why are you sharing data but not this?” read signage on one side of the truck.  “How much are you willing to share?,” read the other side.

The mobile loo spent a day on the road, stopping for half-hour stays at such heavily trafficked areas as Tower Bridge, Canary Wharf and Soho.

A video was then posted explaining the stunt, which the Verve Agency helped organize.

“The idea behind the campaign is to create an analogy between overexposing yourself online and in real life,” the company said. “Globally, billions of unique user accounts have unwittingly had their information disseminated beyond their control due to leaks.”

While Surfshark doesn’t expect to run the traveling toilet stunt again, the brand told Marketing Daily that otherprivacy-focused campaigns are planned for both London and New York.

Surfshark offers cybersecurity services through VPN (virtual private networks).

What better way to illustrate differential treatment than via love-hungry reality stars?

That's the inspiration for a new series of spots, in English and Spanish, that highlight the T-Mobile Metro Flex plan.

The "Nada Nada Island" campaign, created by Barkley OKRP, talks about relationships in which people feel ignored or ghosted. Airing on broadcast and streaming platforms, the focus, however, isn't love gone wrong. It's how cellphone carriers treat new vs. existing customers.

As one man throws his phone to the waves, the announcer says: “Stop getting mistreated by your wireless carrier. Now at Metro, existing customers are treated the same as new ones.”

Metro Flex offers customers free 5G phones when they sign up and the same deals as new customers when they stay a year — a first for the prepaid industry.

Reality TV stars from recent seasons of "Love Island," "Love Is Blind" and "La Casa de Los Famosos" appear on TV and social video, including Marco Donatelli, Lauren Speed-Hamilton, Jessica Vestal and Clovis Nienow.

Trish Cox, vice president, national advertising and brand at T-Mobile, told Agency Daily: “It was this fun pivot point that we used to launch Metro Flex, a groundbreaking new program that acknowledges new wireless customers get treated better than existing customers. Our cast of cross-cultural reality stars have sparked a real conversation on social about Metro Flex. It’s a fantastic demonstration of what we mean by Nada Yada Yada.”

In addition, an integrated social campaign has the reality stars share "Nada Yada Island" stories with their millions of followers on social feeds. The campaign also features radio, OOH and digital advertising.

"No one likes being ghosted," says Rony Caster, group creative director at Barkley OKRP. "Once we tapped into that insight, and those words in particular, everything opened up for us."

Cable TV-focused communications companies -- those that sell mobile, broadband, and video TV network packages -- just upped the ante for pursuing consumers. 

Charter Communications is offering consumers up to $2,500 to switch to Spectrum Mobile. 

So I wonder what type of deal Charter -- or other similar companies -- will offer when it comes to hard-pressed businesses such as streaming packaging of networks or their big broadband businesses? 

The cable TV-based company says the $2,500 comes when covering the cancellation costs of other phone/communication and wireless companies long-term contracts with consumers who have multiple phone lines as part of those packages.

The goal for Charter is pushing new growth for business -- which is what mobile is currently for traditional cable TV-based distributors.

Charter has added nearly 500,000 mobile consumer lines -- up 36% from a year ago to 8.3 million.

Still, could traditional cable TV-based distribution companies find new businesses -- or possibly new outgrowth for their existing cable TV business --- that could be another promotional incentive area for consumers to consider?

Last year, Charter made a groundbreaking deal where in addition to continued carriage/distribution deal for TV networks owned by Walt Disney, it could also sell and package streamer platforms including Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+, and a new digital version of the full-fledged ESPN mothership cable TV network.

In reality, this can be trickier for a promotional attachment because the streaming platform marketplace is a more mature business, and it is more difficult to carve out big promotional deals for individual streaming platforms.

But there could be some promotional consideration for legacy cable TV distributors when it comes to bundling of new video services.

Bundling streaming platforms may have a higher price tag attached that consumers would not like -- perhaps $50 or even $70 a month for a collection of four or five streamers, for example, depending on the option. 

Over the course of a year, this could amount to $600 to $700. Could a distributor of such a streaming package offer $100 or thereabouts in promotional savings -- if a consumer commits to the package for a year, for example?

This would work for those streamers and bundlers if there was a clear sign of more expensive streaming business growth -- perhaps in new forms and bundles that could be forthcoming.

Scarlett Johansson has threatened to sue OpenAI for using a likeness of her voice to create voice app, "Sky," after the company approached the actress.

Days later Johansson rejected to proposal, OpenAI released GPT-4o with a replica voice, demonstrating it at a live and online event.

Observers found OpenAI's assistant's voice was similar to the voice of "Samantha," the character Johansson voiced in the 2013 sci-fi film "Her."

OpenAI immediately paused its AI voice assistant.

Lawyers for Johansson’s legal team are now demanding that OpenAI disclose how it developed an AI personal assistant voice the actress says sounds similar to her own. 

OpenAI said it worked with industry-leading casting and directing professionals to narrow down more than 400 submissions before selecting five voices with specific characteristics.

It also plans to give ChatGPT Plus users access to a new Voice Mode for GPT-4o in coming weeks.

GPT-4o handles interruptions smoothly, manages group conversations effectively, filters out background noise, and adapts to tone.

Some of the characteristics included: actors from diverse backgrounds or who could speak multiple languages, a voice that feels timeless, an approachable voice that inspires trust, a warm, engaging, confidence-inspiring with charismatic voice with rich tones, and a voice that sounds natural and is easy to hear.

OpenAI's Altman has said the 2013 film “Her” is his favorite movie. In a post on X, and after the incident on Sunday, OpenAI said the voice would be halted as it addresses "questions about how we chose the voices in ChatGPT." 

The X post links to a post on the company's website detailing how OpenAI developers created the voice.

In April, the company announced work on a voice engine with many possibilities for advertising, marketing, and other media. At the time it used text input and one 15-second audio sample to generate natural-sounding speech that closely resembles the original.

OpenAI first developed the voice model in 2022, and has used it to power the preset voices available in the text-to-speech API as well as ChatGPT Voice and Read Aloud.