✅ Monday briefing: ESG opportunity, PR weak, bounce rate bounced, presenting data, hiding likes, considerate Twitter and more...

Media, industry, best practice, research, social media and platforms

This newsletter is crowdsourced each week from my blog and community of practice for people studying and working in marketing, media and PR. It’s a hive mind, newsroom and source of information, help and support.

April’s WaddsCon raised £500 for The BAY Foodbank in Newcastle. Thank you to the presenters and everyone who came along and donated. You can catch the replay via YouTube.

Farzana Baduel, Orla Graham, Asif Choudry and Ursula Ojiji will join WaddsCon at the end of May to discuss agency/client relationships, measurement frameworks, the renaissance of print, and professionalism in PR. Book yourself a ticket.

Media

📺 MEDIA CONSUMPTION: COVID-19 has been a boon for streaming and news services but has hit production and out of home. A DigiDay report examines the impact of COVID-19 on the media industry and explores how it will adapt. It has been produced as a guide for media planners. Spotted Dawn McGuigan.

Industry

📢 UNDERREPRESENTED SPEAKERS: The Leader Like Me team Advita Patel and Priya Bates has created a database of underrepresented speakers in marketing, media and public relations. A Leader Like Me helps underrepresented women and non-binary people of colour progress in their career. Source Advita Patel.

📏 ESG OPPORTUNITY: ESG is both a label and an organising principle that represents everything about the people and the planet. A new report published by Vuelio explores the role of PR in supporting planning, horizon scanning, metrics and reporting. Source Stephen Waddington and Dr Jon White. (Disclosure: Vuelio is a Wadds Inc. client).

🗞️ PR WEAK: Karan Chadda created a new PR paper. Inevitably there was not room in the first edition for a few classic headlines such as “What is PR,” “PR is dead” and “PR has a PR problem.” Source Karan Chadda.

Best practice

⛹ BOUNCE RATE BOUNCED: Bounce Rate has been replaced in Google Analytics (GA4) by engagement rate. This new metric is the inverse of bounce rate and can be applied across mobile apps, single page apps, and content sites such as blogs and news outlets. Source Andrew Smith.

📊 PRESENTING DATA: People need access to information in an easy-to-understand way to make decisions. Simplicity, annotation and accessibility are key to making data understandable according to UK government data champion Catherine Hope. Spotted Karan Chadda.

Research

🔢 QUARTERLY AD NUMBERS: Amazon, Facebook and Google recorded a total ad revenue income of more than $77 billion in Q1 2021. It is a growth of 40% from the same period in 2020. Digital advertising has effectively become a pandemic tax on businesses. Spotted Stephen Waddington.

🤑 LINKEDIN AD REVENUE: Microsoft reported that LinkedIn’s ads business generated more than $3 billion in revenue during the year ending March 2021. The company doesn’t typically breakout ad revenue but says its growth has accelerated during the pandemic. Spotted Andrew Smith.

Social media and platforms

🙈 HIDING LIKES: Instagram has confirmed that it is set to enable users to choose whether or not they display likes. Instagram began hiding post like counts two years ago in a series of tests across various regions. Spotted Arianne Smart.

🖼️ IMAGE DISPLAY: Images will no longer be cropped in the Twitter newsfeed on mobile devices. Instead, images will be show full size in either a 2:1 or 3:4 aspect ratios. Spotted Andrew Smith.

💲 TWITTER ACQUISION: Twitter has acquired Scroll a platform that provides an ad-free media service. The acquisition is part of Twitter’s investment strategy in long form content. Twitter said it will be winding down Scroll’s news aggregator product Nuzzel to the dismay of many users. Spotted Stuart Bruce.

😡 CONSIDERATE TWITTER: Twitter now prompts users to pause and reconsider a potentially harmful or offensive reply before they hit send. In tests Twitter said people revised their initial reply or decided to not send their reply at all. 11% fewer offensive replies in the future. Spotted Alan Morrison.

📢 REDDIT GETS SERIOUS: Reddit, the social news aggregation site, is targeting growth. The community site is among the top 20 however its income and valuation are a fraction of its peers. The site is trialling audio, video, and a subscription model. Source: Sarah Waddington.