• Upward mobility. These days, Facebook videos, taken as a whole, are receiving a total of one billion views a day, and at least 65% of those views are occurring on mobile devices, Facebook VP of global marketing solutions Carolyn Everson noted at a recent Advertising Week panel discussion. Indeed, over the past two years, there's been an astonishing 532% increase in watching videos via mobile devices, including tablets. That means that advertisers now have the key challenge of creating digital video content that invites engagement by consumers across platforms and devices. People are carving out moments during their everyday activities to consume media via mobile, and advertisers will want to take this into account in planning their campaigns.
  • Blue platform, red platform. Is your choice of social media platform a clue to your politics? A current survey suggests that it might be.  For example, according to the survey, Pinterest fans are older and wealthier than users of other major platforms; hence, they tend to be more conservative than the average Internet user. On the other hand, Twitter aficionados are more interested in politics than most people—and also more liberal. Facebook is the most politically neutral, on average, perhaps because it is so large that pretty much every group is well represented. It will be interesting to see if these findings, released by Quantcast, have an impact on online advertising strategies.
  • Troublesome tweets? In the upcoming high-profile retrial on sentencing issues of Jodi Arias, the Arizona woman who was convicted in 2013 of murdering her lover in 2008, the defense has moved to dismiss on several grounds the prosecution's intent to seek the death penalty. The defense alleges, among other things, that a police detective's wife improperly tweeted sealed trial information and uploaded "insulting videos" to YouTube. The trial is set to start on October 20.

Because of the generality of this update, the information provided herein may not be applicable in all situations and should not be acted upon without specific legal advice based on particular situations.

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