Technology

Google Unskippable Labs team has been testing ad effectiveness in a compelling new way: It created a fake pizza brand called Doctor Fork, used stock footage to create 33 ads and then served them up on YouTube and reached 20 million impressions.

Ben Jones, creative director at Unskippable Labs, explained that there are certain axioms among advertisers that are never really put to the test. For example: &You can&t show somebody chewing food and looking at the camera.&

If everyone sees this as an obvious &third rail,& then no one puts it in their ads, so thereno testing to see if chewing and looking at the camera is really a problem. By creating a fake pizza brand, Jones said his team suddenly had &a very different kind of freedom to be wrong.&

&Maybe I can&t look directly at the camera, but Doctor Fork can do whatever he wants,& Jones said. &Letuse the freedom of the unbranded ad to be wrong, to push in directions and ask questions that a brand will not, because a brand has a complex brief and very focused set of objectives.&

Plus, YouTube provided Jones and his team with an enormous number of real eyeballs to test out their ideas, rather than limiting them to a small focus group.

This initial experiment was developed in partnership with Nestle andRyan Elder, an associate professor of marketing at Brigham Young University. The Doctor Fork ads were created to answer questions in two broad categories: the effect of sensory cues on ad effectiveness (an area where Dr. Elder has done research) and man versus food, i.e. how much human presence there should be in food ads.

As for what they learned, herehow Google summarized the findings:

1. Immersive, multi-sensory experiences drive better recall than single sensory experiences. Implications: Food ads should stimulate the full range of senses and use the full potential of audio, visual and text cues to do so.

2. Separating visual input from text (voice and supers) increases both recall and favorability. Implications: Brands making short-form ads should consider separating visual clips from audio/supers for maximum impact.

3. Explicit instruction to imagine increases both recall and favorability. Implications: Brands should use instruction to drive impact until they can prove more effective options.

4. We want edge-to-edge food in our food ads. Implications: Food ads should include super close shots of the food to drive favorability and recall.

5. Bite and smile is not the only way to show a pleasurable food experience. Implications: A range of human/food approaches are equally valid. Brands should feel there is freedom in how they present their food being enjoyed, not constrained by bite-and-smile.

6. Younger audiences responded better to first-person perspectives (POV) than older audiences did.

&It is increasingly rare that academic research actually makes its way into practice, or when it does, ita little too late to make an impact,& Dr. Elder said via email. &Similarly, many times academics focus more on the theoretical rather than practical consequences of their research, limiting its impact. This collaboration with Google created a unique environment where creative development in advertising could be informed by academic theory, tested in the real world, and immediately disseminated to companies to use. The findings from the large scale YouTube experiments led to very fruitful brainstorming with the agencies and brand teams.&

Meanwhile, Jones said his team will be applying this methodology to investigate other questions, like the ways that various audience interests and affinities can affect advertising. Or as he put it, &How can we say, ‘Here is an audience that has some commonality that makes my ad more effective besides the year they were born&&

Twitch Prime, the perks program for Amazon Prime members offering free loot, games and other benefits, is ditching one of its best features: ad-free viewing. According to an email sent out to Amazon Prime members today, ad-free viewing will no longer be included as a part of Twitch Prime for new members, beginning on September 14. However, members with existing annual subscriptions will be able to continue to enjoy ad-free viewing until their subscription comes up for renewal.

Those with monthly subscriptions will have access to ad-free viewing until October 15.

Twitchemail offered a simple explanation as to why ad-free viewing was no longer going to be a part of the benefit program, saying that: &advertising is an important source of support for the creators who make Twitch possible.&

The company also stressed that this change would &strengthen andexpand that advertising opportunity for creators so they can get more support from their viewers for doing what they love.&

In an accompanying blog post, Twitch further explained that the change will allow Twitch to remain a place where &anyone canenjoy one-of-a-kind interactive entertainment& and where creators can &build communities around the things they love and make money doing it.&

In other words, creators need to make more money, and so does Twitch — especially if it ever wants to challenge YouTube.

As you may expect, Twitch user reaction has been swift and negative. In the comments of Twitchpost, users are threatening to ditch Twitch Prime altogether saying that its other features — like in-game loot, monthly channel subscriptions, exclusive badges and the like — were not the main reasons they were interested in this perks program.

Twitch Prime was launched in September 2016 as a benefit for Amazon Prime members — one of the now many perks that accompany a Prime subscription, in addition to AmazonPrime two-day shipping. Amazon had acquired Twitch in 2014, and this was the first big move it made to integrate the two properties beyond airing some TV pilots on the service.

Since Twitch Primelaunch, Amazon has been adding features to the program — most recently, free games every month, for example. Twitch says this year itgiven away more than $1,000 worth of games and loot to members, and promises &more and better free games& and loot in the future.

Although ad-free viewing across Twitch won&t be included in Twitch Prime in the future, the company did note that there will still be a way to turn off ads.

If Twitch users have an Amazon Prime membership (meaning they&ll still have Twitch Prime, too), they can use their monthly subscription token on a channel that offers ad-free viewing to subscribers.

In addition, users can opt forTwitch Turbo, a separate monthly subscription program that offers ad-free viewing across all of Twitch, plus other features like additional emoticons, chat badges, priority support and more.

Users, of course, are outraged that a benefit that used to come free with a Prime subscription will now cost an additional $8.99 per month.

Twitchdecision to remove ad-free viewing could be a part of its bigger plan to woo creators to its service.

The company has been in the news as of late for having YouTube-esque ambitions. According to a report from Bloomberg, the company wants to turn the game-streaming site into a broader video service and has been pursuing live-streaming deals with dozens of popular creators and media companies that have large YouTube fan bases. The company has been offering minimum guarantees as high as a few million dollars a year, plus a share of future advertising sales and subscription revenues, the report said.

Animoto, a cloud-based video maker service for social media sites, has revealed a data breach.

The breach occurred on July 10 but was confirmed by the company in early August, and later reported to the California attorney general.

Names, dates of birth and user email addresses were accessed by hackers, but the company said it wasn&t known if data had been exfiltrated. The company also said that users& scrambled passwords were exposed in the breach, but it wasn&t clear if the hackers gained the private key, which could be used to reveal the passwords in plain text.

The company also said in a security announcement that user geolocations were also exposed to hackers, but noted that it &does not keep geolocation information for all users.&

Payment data is not thought to be affected as itstored in a separate system, the company said.

Animoto did not immediately return a request for comment. TechCrunch will update once we learn more.

The New York City-based company did not say how many users were affected by the breach, but last August claimed more than 20 million users on its platform.

Animoto is the latest social media service to be breached. Last month, Timehop revealed a breach affecting 21 million users, exposing their names, email addresses, gender and dates of birth. Timehopbreach was largely attributable to the companylack of two-factor authentication on its network, which helps prevent hackers from reusing already exposed credentials from breaches of other sites and services.

Animoto didn&t say how its breach occurred but pointed to &suspicious activity& on its systems. The company also said it reset employee passwords and reduced employees& access to critical systems.