Business Critical: Facebook Insights, Parenting by Search, COD Content
By Ryan Parlee
Business Critical is our weekly collection of what’s new, exciting, and insightful for business leaders from the world of the web, marketing, social media, and more.
Facebook’s a Bit More Insightful
This week, Facebook rolled out a more comprehensive data dashboard for advertisers. The new functionality should give marketers a bit more of a holistic view of the types of audiences they’re targeting when placing ads on the social media site.
But, even beyond that, this type of data (which looks quite a bit like Google’s new-ish Display Network targeting system) can be used in a broader context as a research tool for all types of marketing. The new system displays aggregate demographic, lifestyle, location, and household data. For marketing folks, it’s sort of like Christmas — but any time.
Learn more about Facebook’s Audience Insight tool from the horse’s mouth.
New Parents Go Goo Goo Ga Ga for Google, Apparently
According to a new report released from Google, new parents are turning to the search giant to answer most of their burning questions about rising a child.
One finding from the study concludes that new parents use Google twice as often as non-parents. These budding families are looking for information on when and where to buy baby clothes, how to clean or reuse clothes, and even looking at school and college information in tandem with searches about pregnancy.
All in all, the study shows a surprisingly broad range of topics on the mind of new and expecting parents. And, it shows once again how powerful search data can be in understanding and predicting both thought and behavior patterns in marketing.
Take a look at the full study from Google’s Think Insights.
COD and Vice Team Up
As we’ve mentioned before, the lines between traditional editorial journalism and branded story content just continues to blur. In the latest example, we see international media company Vice teaming up with video game producer Activision on a documentary that’s meant to promote their upcoming Call of Duty release.
The new film, Superpower for Hire, pairs Vice’s penchant for covering dangerous areas and situations with Call of Duty’s military theme to cover the realities of private military contractors.
Read up on the campaign at Fast Company.
Top image via Google’s Think Insights report on parent searches.
