Tag: plans

Advertising & Marketing

How TikTok plans to secure ad dollars for this year’s holiday season

This holiday season could be pretty instructive as to whether TiKTok will continue to be a place for smaller-sized ad budgets, rather than larger ones.

After all, this season is notorious for its bouts of irrational budget spending — a “use it or lose it” scenario when it comes to marketing expenditure.

If TikTok is ever going to capture a larger share of the advertising pie, this is the opportune moment. Marketers tend to be more generous with their budgets during this time of the year than any other, primarily because if they don’t utilize their remaining dollars, they risk having a smaller allocation in the future. 

Yet, up until now, TikTok hasn’t made a huge dent in those advertising budgets. Yes, more money is pouring into the app at a faster rate than many of its competitors, but it’s starting from a smaller base. Advertising on the platform is still predominantly in the experimental phase, and it’s not where the big ad dollars are going. You only need to look at the likes of Uber and Athlete’s Foot to see the focus is still on their organic strategies.

“While TikTok accounts for less than 10% of total spend for our marketing firm, it has more than doubled year over year,” Rob Jewell, chief growth officer at marketing agency Power Digital, which works for clients such as Procter & Gamble, Uniqlo and Casper, previously told Digiday. “We anticipate a similar growth trajectory in 2023 as the channel keeps attracting more advertisers eager to scale their TikTok efforts.”

Fast forward to now and Power Digital’s existing clients are already on a 32% upward trajectory from the same period last year, both in scaling their spend and new brands entering the TikTok advertising space with lower budgets. The agency’s director of TikTok,

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Android Google

Google plans RISC-V Android tools in 2024, wants developers to “be ready”

Google plans RISC-V Android tools in 2024, wants developers to “be ready”

Google

Android is slowly entering the RISC-V era. So far we’ve seen Google say it wants to give the up-and-coming CPU architecture “tier-1” support in Android, putting RISC-V on equal footing with Arm. Qualcomm has announced the first mass-market RISC-V Android chip, a still-untitled Snapdragon Wear chip for smartwatches. Now Google has announced a timeline for developer tools via the Google Open Source Blog. The last post is titled “Android and RISC-V: What you need to know to be ready.”

Getting the Android OS and app ecosystem to support a new architecture is going to take an incredible amount of work from Google and developers, and these tools are laying the foundation for that work. First up, Google already has the “Cuttlefish” virtual device emulator running, including a gif of it booting up. This isn’t the official “Android Emulator”—which is targeted at app developers doing app development—Cuttlefish is a hardware emulator for Android OS development. It’s the same idea as the Android Emulator but for the bottom half of the tech stack—the kernel, framework, and hardware bits. Cuttlefish lets Google and other Android OS contributors work on a RISC-V Android build without messing with an individual RISC-V device. Google says it’s working well enough now that you can download and emulate a RISC-V device today, though the company warns that nothing is optimized yet.

The next step is getting the Android Emulator (for app developers) up and running, and Google says: “By 2024, the plan is to have emulators available publicly, with a full feature set to test applications for various device form factors!” The nice thing about Android is that most app code is written with no architecture in mind—it’s all just Java/Kotlin. So once the Android RunTime starts spitting out RISC-V code, a lot of

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Android Google

Google unveils its plans for Android 14’s advanced cellular security features

Last updated: August 11th, 2023 at 10:37 UTC+02:00

Google has been continuously working to improve the security features of its Android OS since its initial versions to protect users from increasing malware attacks. Now, while we are on the verge of the release of Android 14 OS, Google has revealed a ‘first-of-a-kind’ cellular connectivity security feature.

The company already introduced the option to turn off insecure 2G connections two years ago with Android 12. Now with Android 14, they wish to take the cellular security features to another level and combat poor connectivity and encryption standards for phone calls and messages.

In an official blog post, Google announced that with the arrival of Android 14, users would get a new toggle called  ‘Require Encryption.’ As per the currently available draft, the description of this toggle reads, “Encryption is more secure, but you might not be able to connect in some locations. For emergency calls, encryption is never required.” Google has added this toggle because users cannot tell whether their calls and SMS are adequately encrypted.

Android 14 will offer the option to turn off unused 2G connectivity

Many carriers use null ciphers, opening gates for foreign actors to intercept SMS and call over the air. While these null ciphers are there for testing and debugging purposes, the report clarifies that many networks always use these misconfigured null ciphers. Thanks to the new Android 14 advanced cellular security toggle called ‘Require Encryption,’ the phone will reject null cipher connections, making it harder to intercept your calls and SMS. Also, it will turn off unused or less used 2G connectivity.

There is no clarity on whether this new feature will come on the already-sold devices in the market because it requires a tweak to the underlying hardware, the Hardware

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Advertising & Marketing

How Spikeball’s CEO plans to build the brand without paid advertising

Chris Ruder wanted Spikeball to be known as the beach game when he founded the company in 2008—so much so that he made it the product’s tagline.

It turns out that playing on the beach isn’t necessarily representative of the game’s clientele. “When sales started coming in, I realized that most of our customers didn’t live within 100 miles of a beach,” Ruder said. He ended up scrapping the original tagline and going with “Find Your Circle” instead.

Regardless, it’s not appearing in any massive ad campaigns: The company has, for the most part, forgone more traditional types of advertising, instead taking cues from sports like Formula 1, which have relied on storytelling and community to build the brand and the sport.

Story time

Summer’s an important time of year for a sport like Spikeball (which is actually called roundnet, but that’s a whole different story). Frequency of play is 100x higher in the summer than in January, Ruder said, and mid-April through early August marks the time when sales tend to, well, spike.

As a result, it’s also when players are creating the most content around the game. And for better or worse, 99% of that video content is of “what happens on the field,” Ruder said.

While it’s fun to watch, videos of players diving to make sure the ball doesn’t hit the ground don’t exactly provide viewers with much background on the sport and its players. So, in addition to that type of content, Ruder said he wants to follow the Netflix documentary formula, citing the success of the streamer’s tennis series Break Point, its golf series Full Swing, and the F1 series Drive to Survive—the last of which helped boost the sport’s popularity among viewers and advertisers in the US. (While there’s no

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Advertising & Marketing

Travel brands’ Super Bowl plans, future marketing strategies as demand softens

Chasing the waterfall

Some travel and tourism brands—including Alaska Airlines and Priceline—are skipping national Super Bowl ad buys in favor of a more targeted approach, including regional buys, pre-and post-game spots, brand partnerships and market activations. Compagnone dubbed this as tapping into the “waterfall effect” of the Big Game, in a reference to the massive amount of attention it gets.

“The travel industry at its core is finding more targeted, less cost prohibitive methods in advertising and marketing more broadly, but specifically around the Super Bowl,” Compagnone said.

Booking.com is returning to the Super Bowl for the second year in a row in continuation of its Booking.yeah campaign. The online travel agency, which is owned by Booking Holdings and counts Kayak, Priceline and Open Table as sibling brands, will work with creative agency Zulu Alpha Kilo for the first time. While online travel agencies such as rival Expedia are well known in the U.S., Booking.com, which started in Europe, has to play catch-up here. Booking Holdings Executive VP and Chief Financial Officer David Goulden spoke about this recently at an investor conference.

“In the U.S., we still recognize, whilst we’re gaining lots of share, we have some brand awareness [to] try and build,” he said, according to a transcript, noting that the brand is now spending more on awareness marketing in the U.S. than it has historically. He also said that last year’s Super Bowl spot, which starred actor Idris Elba and heralded a yearlong campaign, generated “decent” results in terms of awareness and financials.

“For them to continue brand-building for a U.S. audience might make sense,” said Sileo about Booking.com’s Super Bowl spot.  

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