A prototype of the massive solar-powered drone Google plans to build as a platform for delivering Internet service from the sky was destroyed in a crash at a New Mexico test site.

The unmanned Solara 50 fell to the ground shortly after takeoff on May 1 and the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board is investigating, Keith Holloway, an agency spokesman, said in an interview. The accident occurred at a private airstrip east of Albuquerque and no one was injured, he said.

The crash is a setback for Google’s high-altitude vision of how to bring Internet access to areas of the world without sufficient infrastructure on the ground. Google last year bought Titan Aerospace Corp., which is building the unmanned aircraft, for an undisclosed sum.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

…read more

Source:: AdAge – Digital

Mobile technology has marketers excited. As consumers spend more time connecting to the internet on a device beyond a traditional laptop or desktop computer, they are creating more signals marketers can use to target and tailor ad messages. Some of those signals are being leveraged via in-store beacons, which can trigger location-specific messaging to drive purchases.

This combination of online ad serving and offline activity is exciting, but it’s also very much still in its nascent stage, lacking clear benchmarks and best practices. Fortunately, marketers don’t have to wait for beacons to mature to realize their full promise of offline-to-online marketing. It’s possible to leverage very similar strategies right now using mobile as a proxy to tie offline information back to mobile and desktop ad serving.

Mobile data emphasizes physical context, and that’s where the true value comes from. The promise of beacons is that the mobile signals create an understanding around physical location. But marketers can get a similar 360-degree view of the consumer using cross-device data and targeting.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

…read more

Source:: AdAge – Digital

Brands can use Twitter’s live-streaming app to hold special contests, have influencers perform demos, do live Q&As with customers and tease or reveal new products, attorney Brian Heidelberger says in this video. But a new platform doesn’t mean anything goes.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

…read more

Source:: AdAge – Digital

By Yuyu Chen McKinsey’s David Edelman speaks to ClickZ about how marketers can invest in new models for employee management and how the industry should be guiding young talent.

…read more

Source:: ClickZ – Internet Marketing

Twitter is tweaking its Amplify program to make it easier and quicker for brands to run ads against videos certain media companies post to the social network.

As first reported by Forbes, Thursday Twitter announced a program called Auto Amplify that makes it so brands don’t have to wait on sales reps to run an Amplify campaign. The program is a new spin on Twitter’s two-year-old Amplify program that has enabled TV networks and other media companies to sell pre-roll ads against video clips uploaded to Twitter as promoted tweets.

Here’s how Auto Amplify works: A brand surveys Twitter’s library of Amplify videos and selects the one it would like to advertise against. The brand then pays Twitter to run that video as a promoted tweet with a pre-roll ad playing before the video.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

…read more

Source:: AdAge – Digital

Google has two main rivals — Apple and Facebook — and on Thursday the search giant unveiled new ways it’s competing with both companies.

At its annual developer event in San Francisco, Google announced a new mobile payment service, an operating system for internet-connected devices and an update to its personal assistant app that will help it compete with Apple’s similar products. And it showed off new products that can counter Facebook’s app-install ad business and Oculus VR virtual reality headset.

Android Pay

Continue reading at AdAge.com

…read more

Source:: AdAge – Digital

By kkaye@adage.com(Kate Kaye)

“Sit down and shut up!”

In a new ad, that bit of vintage Chris Christie serves as an implied response to a series of strategically-edited clips of President Barack Obama, portrayed as a fumbling, wishy-washy orator. The spot, loaded with other one-liners from the New Jersey governor, was produced for just-launched CitizenSuperPAC, a quirky brainchild of small digital political consulting shop Tusk Digital.

But the ad has yet to be funded and hasn’t run on YouTube or TV. If all goes according to the CitizenSuperPAC plan, funding will come from everyday people pledging small amounts of money to the PAC via a platform developed by Tusk.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

…read more

Source:: AdAge – Digital

Much has been said and written in the marketing industry about Twitter’s decision to have its CFO Anthony Noto, an alumnus of noted Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs, oversee the company’s marketing organization.

Bottom line: How can a left-brain numbers guy oversee a right-brain, creative marketing organization?

The truth is that how marketing is managed in 2015 is very different from how it was managed even 15 or 20 years ago. Here are four reasons why a CFO, particularly for a well-known and publicly traded company like Twitter, can oversee marketing today:

Continue reading at AdAge.com

…read more

Source:: AdAge – Digital

By Crispin Sheridan Location-based marketers have the most to gain from Google’s new relationship with Twitter, especially given the popularity of Google Now.

…read more

Source:: ClickZ – Internet Marketing

In the opening keynote presentation Wednesday at BMA15, the annual conference of the Business Marketing Association in Chicago, Jim Lecinski, VP-U.S. sales and service at Google, said b-to-b marketers need to “change our game” to reach an exploding audience of millennial b-to-b buyers.

His presentation, “The Changing Face of B2B Marketing,” presented some of the top findings from recent Google research, conducted with Millward Brown, on the “B2B Path to Purchase,” and implications for marketers.

One of the key findings is that 46% of b-to-b buyers are now millennials, up from 27% in 2012, when the survey was last conducted.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

…read more

Source:: AdAge – Digital