What you need to know in advertising today

Evan
Spiegel, CEO and cofounder of Snapchat, talks at the 2018 Code
conference.
Greg Sandoval/Business
Insider

It’s no secret that Snapchat has been leaning
into augmented reality in recent years, arming
marketers with a suite of products that enable
them to test the technology in their ads.

But it turns out, some brands have it better than others.

Select marketers, including Adidas, Anheuser-Busch and McDonald’s
are part of of an exclusive group that gets early access to
Snapchat’s latest proprietary AR tools and ad formats — before
they become widely available.

They are part of what Snapchat is calling “AR Partnership
Program,” a pilot initiative where 10 of its partners get early
access to new formats and buying methods in the form of alpha and
beta tests, as well as visibility into Snapchat’s AR product
roadmap.

To read more about the exclusive program, click here.

In related news:

Snapchat figured out how to analyze people’s selfies to
score their emotions. Snap has patented a way to
monitor precisely how people are feeling at events like gigs or
speeches using facial recognition on Snapchat selfies, as well as
by taking cues from messages, to score how happy, sad, or
terrified people are feeling.

In other news:

Facebook Watch is expanding globally and giving
publishers one stat to track how many people watch their videos
week after week. It will now let international
publishers earn money from their videos, starting with the UK,
Ireland, New Zealand and Australia.

Amazon is preparing to roll out a new, free video
streaming services for Fire TV users. The service,
tentatively called FreeDive, would be available free to users of
the Amazon Fire TV device.

If you have a Yahoo account your emails have probably
been scanned to figure out what you buy — and they may have been
read by employees of the company. Oath — the Verizon
business that includes Yahoo and AOL — scans user emails for ad
targeting, The Wall Street Journal reported.

‘All three companies do the same thing:’ Digital
publishing mashup Maven cut $5 million and laid off 17 Say Media
staffers to reach profitability. Say Media let go of
17 staffers as the company merges with Maven and HubSpace to
create one digital publishing entity.