Incredibly — this article will not mention Pokemon GO. The weeks digital news round-up in a couple of minutes:
After weeks of post-Brexit doom and gloom in the economic news, it’s oddly comforting to hear that Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has reported a strong rise in Q2 revenues — a $21.5bn, or 21.3% increase.
To put these figure in context, note that at the beginning of the week we finally had the confirmation that Verizon had acquired Yahoo for $4.83bn.
In fact, Q2 has posted some very healthy numbers for the whole tech industry, with Facebook and Amazon also exceeding revenue expectations — in the latter case making Jeff Bezos the third richest man in the world.
Alphabet’s profit rise rise was partly due to a 29% rise in Google’s aggregated paid clicks (indication that their recent rejigging of their paid ad layout is paying dividends).
No surprise then that Google CEO Sundar Pichai declared earlier this week that “There’s an amazing atmosphere at Google”, and the company continues to make headway in confident, disruptive ventures such as Google Fibre.
Perhaps it’s no wonder that Mark Zuckerberg, announced in Facebook’s Q2 earning call that the social network are looking at expanding into the search advertising space.
Data-driven = winning
Digital marketers aren’t the only ones obsessed with data these days. With Chris Froome’s stunning third victory in the Tour de France, analysts have been burbling about how analytics played a pivotal role the Team Sky success train.
Brailsford’s approach to ‘marginal gains’ — the principle that when you make 1% improvements in a number of areas, the cumulative gain ends up being much greater — is well known, and this year’s Tour de France further affirmed the power of the concept.
Sky’s sheer domination of this year’s tour certainly makes a strong case for all of us to apply data-obsessed principles to many aspects of life, and it’s certainly a lesson that is also being increasingly adopted by Olympic teams in preparation for Rio.
Digital developments
A little closer to home, Google’s expanded text ads have rolled out, as has responsive ad functionality for native platforms.
And just in case you haven’t heard enough about the meteoric rise of a certain app… Prisma is building on its top 10 position in the iOS App store by rolling out it’s product to new platforms. Android users going into the weekend will be pleased to know that they too can add all kinds of artistic filters to their summer pics.