Download on Digital: Marketing news for October 2019

What’s the latest marketing news leading into October? Some new Amazon products look to destroy text and image based advertising, Reddit continued to double down on video ads, and Linkedin made some seriously amazing updates to their audience targeting.

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Amazon unveiled wearable Alexa products
Amazon is going where no company has gone before taking a shot at smart glasses, despite the failings of Google Glass and Snapchat Spectacles. Amazon’s Echo Frames are different in that they don’t utilize screens or video. Really, they’re just glasses (they fit prescriptions) enabled to run Amazon Alexa.

What makes this troubling for marketers is the fact that the Echo Frames, along with the Echo Buds (Alexa enabled earbuds) and Echo Loop (Alexa enabled ring) look to take people away from their screens, which is where many of us do the most of our marketing. We’ll be exploring this further in a blog over the coming weeks, so stay tuned for more.

Reddit launched mobile landing pages for video ads
Reddit continued to build out its video ad platform by launching mobile landing pages. It’s a cool new feature where audiences who click an ad will be redirected to a mobile landing page where they can read more about the promoted offering and continue watching the clicked video.

Reddit also updated its video ad sizes, which now includes aspect ratios you’ll probably recognize from Instagram, Facebook, and other social media platforms. With this, Reddit is making it easy for marketers to repurpose their video content from other platforms.

LinkedIn added Boolean logic to targeting queries
That means LinkedIn audiences can now be targeted using “and” and “or” campaign setups. If this doesn’t get you excited, you’re not running enough LinkedIn campaigns. Seriously, this is huge. This small addition will allow marketers to grow their targeting profiles to account for multiple descriptors. See the explanation from Marketing Land below:

“Let’s say you wanted to target people using Director seniority and the Finance job function. Previously, within a campaign you could only do so by targeting Directors in Finance roles,” wrote Shirvastava, “Now, with Boolean targeting, you can use a single campaign to reach people who are Directors at any job function, as well as people in Finance roles of any seniority.”