Garett Sloane

YouTube ran a series of secret ad tests to help brands get a sense of what works in digital video and what grabs people's attention for the most amount of time. The Google Creative Lab ran the experiment using 16 different videos with variations on pacing, sound and other factors, including whether vertical video was important. Those with longest view-through rates were obviously the most compelling, and could be used for coming up with best practices in online video.

The point of the tests was to see how ads might perform creative choices are made with mobile environments in mind as opposed to desktop, or even TV. The average completion rate for the average video ad on mobile devices is 22%, according to Google. On desktop, it's 28%. The best-performing video in the test, one in which fast pacing was the dominant factor, achieved a 33% "view-through" rate on mobile., Google said.

Forget bloatware. Brandware may be the next extraneous app software coming to Verizon customers' smartphones. The wireless carrier has offered to install big brands' apps on its subscribers' home screens, potentially delivering millions of downloads, according to agency executives who have considered making such deals for their clients. But that reach would come at a cost: Verizon was seeking between $1 and $2 for each device affected, executives said.

In some alternate social media history, the term Crush List is a verb -- meaning to elevate a friend to the most prominent position within one’s social network. And somewhere MySpace founder Tom Anderson is cursing the name Orkut Buyukkokten -- not Mark Zuckerberg.

And in this reality, social media giant Google has more than a billion people on Orkut, the service that defined the next great Internet era after search.

The loss of Orkut is yet another sign of how social still vexes Google, a company that tinkers with autonomous cars. Sure, it has Google+, but even that strategy has its troubles to the point that tech blogs are reporting on its imminent demise, too. With Orkut gone, it’s a good time to highlight Google’s failures in social media:

• Orkut
• Dodgeball
• Latitude
• Google Buzz
• YouTube
• Google+
• Waze, Twitch

Skype is making its case to marketers that it is hip with millennials, that highly coveted youth demographic.

Skype now counts more than 300 million users, and said it reaches 24 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds worldwide, according to advertising gm Lovina McMurchy. Mobile messaging has attracted the attention of brands and marketers who are following the users, especially youth who have embraced these communication platforms.

Companies like Microsoft and BlackBerry are eager to remind marketers of their entrenched messaging platforms. BlackBerry Messenger introduced new sponsored content opportunities on its app with 85 million users. Facebook has detected a slight drop in interest from young teens, but still more than 80 percent of US adults under 30 use the social network, according to Pew Research.