Another month goes by and Facebook release another update. They take the expressions "Staying on top of your game" to another level!

"Why don't you like the adverts?"

This week Facebook announced that it will start asking users for more information after they click to hide an advert. With the new feature, users will be presented with a number of options for why they are hiding the ad, including:

1. It’s not relevant to me
2. I keep seeing this
3. It’s offensive or inappropriate
4. It’s spam
5. Something else

The purpose is to try and improve the experience for users, and will also use the information to better target ads to other users on the site.

This may seem a little frustrating for users as its obvious that no one likes adverts! But this will be really beneficial for brands as it increases the effectiveness of targeting ads on the social platform.

Facebook; Power Editor Update

Facebook plans to roll out a number of updates to its Power Editor this month, which will make it much easier for advertisers to prepare and also preview adverts before launching them.

Facebook said the following on their planned changes; “In the past, since these ads were anchored to page posts, they were not changeable. With this change, advertisers can now create News Feed ads at scale, preview them during creation, edit them at any time, and bulk import/export them.”

Facebook is also updating its objectives, and will provide a number of new options for advertisers to choose to help Facebook optimize their ad performance.

These options include:

1. Clicks to Website
2. Website Conversions
3. Page post engagement for photos
4. Video View

These changes should simplify the process greatly for advertisers, particularly first timer users. It also makes it more accessible for people who are daunted by technology, especially when it involves parting with cash.

Facebook is Sharing King!

A new report from Fractl shows that over 8 in 10 shares on social sites are on Facebook!

Fractl analysed the one million most-shared articles from the first six months of 2014. Collectively, these articles generated more than 2.6 billion shares, and 81.9 percent of these happened on Facebook!

To put this into perspective here's the rankings of the other social sites; Twitter  (8.6 percent), Google+ (4.3 percent), Pinterest (3 percent), and LinkedIn (2.2 percent).

Social sharing has become a crucial part of online marketing and this information should be at the forefront of your mind when creating content. Every post should have a clear goal and be tailored to the social site(s) you (or your followers) plan to share this content on.

The ASA has decided to ban Captain Morgan's recent Facebook advert, as it implied that drinking rum cures boredom. Although some of you may agree with that statement, the Youth Alcohol Advertising council took particular offence to it. 

Captain Morgan's recent Facebook advert that was banned by the ASA.

Kronenbourg, part of the Heineken family, used French legend Eric Cantona to promote the "Gallic superiority" of Kronenbourg 1664. Athough a brilliant advert, it focused heavily on the French hops used and how it was produced in the small french town of Alsace, when in reality it was brewed in Manchester and the Steisselspalts hops made up a very small proportion of the four types that were used. This led to the ASA banning the advert for misleading about the true origins of Kronenbourg.

It's been less than a week since Germany were crowned World Champions in Brazil. Can you remember any of the adverts though?!

Preparation

Adidas' 6 month Pre-Planned Campaign 

"We want to be the most talked-about brand at World Cup," says Tom Ramsden, brand marketing director for Adidas Football, who oversees communications across advertising, PR, social and retail. "We knew we were going to do something real-time, that isn't completely brand new to us, but it is at this scale."

"The spin-off would be to be the most talked about in terms of how much traffic you can drive to retail, use of things like the hashtag and everything else," Mr. Ramsden adds. "But that simple goal is what is keeping the train on the tracks."

We Are Social has been flying across the globe to gather content on over 100 Adidas players that can be assembled on the fly regardless of who wins. This information was collected into a "Content Bible" of 1,000 images and 160 videos primed for use in reaction to game play, "It's basically spread betting," Mr. Ramsden added.

Nike's sponsored teams and players had a relatively unsuccessful World Cup performance in comparison to Adidas, but despite this it's World Cup campaign continues to raise the bar in engagement. Their “Risk Everything” campaign, which consists of several videos, have had over 400 million views, and over 23.05 million actual engagements. The brand’s Pixar-styled “The Last Game” animated short  leads the way with around 65 million views.

That Semi Final


It'll be hard to look back on this World Cup without mentioning the collapse on Brazil in their own backyard. It became the most talked about sporting event in the history of twitter racking up an impressive 35.6m tweets mentioning either #BRA or #GER. This smashed the Superbowl's previous record of 24.9 million tweets.


As a result brands took advantage of this opportunity in a variety of ways. From mocking to congratulating, below of some of the stand out responses.



The Suarez Bite

Were brands prepared for this incident or just responding in real time?

McDonald's, Nando's, BetFair, Listerine and Trident all used tongue in cheek adverts on social media and print.



However, it was Adidas's response which stood out. As oppose to jumping on the trend, they dropped Suarez from all World Cup marketing activities. "“Adidas certainly does not condone Luis Suarez’s recent behaviour and we will again be reminding him of the high standards we expect from our players. We have no plan to use Suarez for any additional marketing activities during the 2014 FIFA World Cup.”

Adidas's prominent role as a World Cup sponsor meant they didn't have to use this incident to raise brand awareness like many other brands did. They instead showed a responsible approach and limited long term damage to the brand.

Endorsement

With such a huge event looming and so much potential coverage, brands often associate themselves with potential stars. This can make it even harder to stand out? Yet mischief makers Paddy Power once against went against the grain. They managed to sign up Paul Scholes exclusively to front their World Cup campaign.

They started in October 2013 by asking "who would NEVER work for Paddy Power?".

"The company wanted someone to provide genuine insight to readers in this disruptive media landscape. Somebody who was really exclusive. Somebody who hadn’t done the rounds on the TV sofas" said Paul Mallon, editorial manager for Paddy Power.

"The results of this content deal have been exceptional. In terms of social media, our #AskScholes hashtag was trending organically for more than two hours with more than 30m potential impressions. These things normally get messy on Twitter (and they did with ludicrous questions) but we were confident Scholes’ clever answers would disarm any doubters." Paul added.



Failures

Obviously there was always going to be a couple of fails!