By Aaron Bunch and Harry Pearl

SYDNEY (Reuters) – President Donald Trump has confirmed that his administration will honor a refugee resettlement deal with Australia, a source close to the Australian government said on Sunday.

Trump spoke by telephone with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull earlier on Sunday, officials in both countries said, one of a number of conversations the new U.S. president held with world leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

The Australian government source told Reuters Trump confirmed the deal to resettle asylum seekers currently held in offshore detention camps to the United States would go ahead.

Former U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration had said the United States would take a substantial number of the 1,200 asylum seekers, who are held in the procession centers on remote Pacific islands in Papua New Guinea and Nauru, after Turnbull agreed to resettle refugees from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

U.S. Homeland Security officials have begun assessing the asylum seekers, although it was unclear when those found to be genuine refugees would be resettled.

Many of those in Australia’s offshore camps have fled conflict in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere.

Confirmation the deal would proceed came less than 24 hours after Trump signed an executive order that put a four-month hold on allowing refugees into the United States and temporarily barred travelers from Syria and six other Muslim-majority countries, including Iraq and Iran.

Trump’s « extreme vetting » order had cast doubt on the future of the refugee resettlement deal.

Australia’s hardline immigration policy is a contentious issue that has drawn international condemnation from the United Nations and other rights groups, but which remains popular at home and has bipartisan political support.

Once fringe, far-right political parties like Pauline Hanson’s One Nation have gained wider backing, which sometimes spills over into calls for a ban on Muslim immigration.  

Australia, a staunch U.S. ally, has been on heightened alert for attacks by home-grown Islamist radicals since 2014 and authorities say they have thwarted a number of plots.

(Reporting by Aaron Bunch and Harry Pearl in SYDNEY; Editing by Paul Tait)

President Donald Trump’s executive orders on immigration are not sitting well with many leaders in the business community, particularly in the tech industry. These titans of industry — who largely hail from the Silicon Valley area — not only view the travel ban on immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries as discriminatory, but also detrimental to economic and technological growth, as well as their staffing needs. TIM COOK, APPLE « Apple would not exist without immigration, let…

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Neither mobile marketing nor loyalty programs are new ideas when it comes to increasing share of the customer wallet, but the strategy behind both has evolved dramatically in the past few years.  This evolution is set to explode in 2017 because 2016 data shows that the number of people accessing the Internet through mobile devices worldwide surpassed those using desktops. 

For brands and marketers, their strategy needs to go beyond just having an application or a stagnant paper-based or physical loyalty program. There are a multitude of mobile channels, methods of communication and personalisation capabilities that can be leveraged to really engage consumers through their mobile devices. 

Here are my top predictions to help steer both brands and marketers’ mobile and loyalty strategies in the year ahead:

• Mobile will bring about real world interactions
  With more connected devices than ever before and the slow but increasing prevalence of the Internet of Things, the smartphone’s dominance now extends into the offline world as well. Today a smartphone is the primary connected device for most consumers. In 2017 mobile’s ability to assist with real-world interactions and transactions will really come to the fore.
• AR and VR set to dominate the next 20 years
  According to CES, one of the largest global consumer electronics and consumer technology tradeshows AR and VR will be the primary disruptive technologies for the next 20 years. In 2016 Pokemon Go and Snapchat have shown how brands can effectively capture consumer attention and monetise augmented reality experiences at scale. Recent news from Digi-capital showed that in the 1st quarter of 2016 investment in Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality grew to $1.1 billion (compared to $700m total in 2015).
• Mobile shopping just keeps growing
  From coupons to receipt processing to promotions, brands will increasingly adopt mobile as the platform of choice for their consumer marketing efforts. According to the DMA, today 80 per cent of millennials use their phones in-store as part of their purchase process, providing marketers with plenty of opportunities to appropriately target these consumers and affect real-world purchases. 94 per cent of smartphone users that currently use a mobile wallet said they are likely to save personalised mobile wallet offers and coupons, and 82 per cent agree that digital coupons are much more convenient than their paper counterparts.
• Ease is the new loyalty
  We have seen such a huge rise in mobile usage because it makes life easier. You can now get anything you want with the tap of a button. We are becoming loyal to the brands that are smartly using technology to simplify every aspect of our lives. The brands that do it best will create experiences that have you asking how you ever lived without them. We should also expect things to change in 2017 for loyalty schemes. Personalisation is a higher priority for driving loyalty with Generation K and Millennials, than it is for Generation X and Baby Boomers.
• Mobile video will dominate
  Let’s face it, websites that don’t offer a mobile option are a relic of the past. To try to differentiate between the two is to ignore the fact that your audience slips between traditional and mobile seamlessly and demands the same of your marketing. Indeed with the launch of Facebook Video Live, the growth opportunities with video will only grow and the demands on marketers, too. In fact, mobile video is expected to grow by 30 per cent this year. We will see more innovation in pre-roll, live video and video embedded directly into email which will “pop-up” on our screens.
• The growth of app messaging
  I think one trend to definitely watch is the continued proliferation of messaging and how messaging services and messaging platforms are creating value and disrupting the industry, often where you wouldn’t expect. Last year Slack, Facebook Messenger Service and What’s App took off and I think we will see more this year. According to Business Insider, more people use messaging apps today than social media, and adoption continues to increase rapidly. Further, messaging apps are slowly but surely evolving into full-fledged marketing and commerce platforms. In 2016, Facebook slowly opened up Messenger to chatbots and the ability to natively pay for services, but the experiences were undercooked and overhyped. As chatbots become more sophisticated and prevalent, expect to see click-throughs become further devalued as advertising currency and become replaced with more end-user, action-based payment structures such as purchases.
• One single view
  Companies need to have a single view of online and offline systems across multiple channels so that they can build single, operational profiles for each customer. 2017 will pave the way for becoming more agile and making data real-time and actionable in a mobile-first world. Behavioral and transactional data and syncing individual profiles will be the only way to reach customers, not through campaigns built for large masses.

Finally, I think it is most likely that 2017 will be the year of Artificial Intelligence enabled platforms. Imagine a phone that knows you so well it launches your favorite app before you’re able to tap the icon or it launches Google Maps knowing where your friend lives and has your route ready waiting for you! ΑΙ technology has been and it is on a continuous evolution that will offer amazing capabilities to users.

So whatever trend you think will be the biggest one thing is sure, brands and marketers will have no choice but to get on board with mobile in 2017 – and they need to get on board fast!

Matthew Winters, CEO, Veoo
Image Credit: Nito / Shutterstock

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Facebook video was named by many of the top marketing experts as one of the hot social media trends for 2017. As organic reach has evaporated, brands and businesses have been embracing video on Facebook as a way to increase their reach on the social network.

The result: every day it seems like we’re seeing more and more videos. So Facebook needs a new way to rank all these videos that are vying for our attention in the News Feed.

As usual, Facebook will rely on an engagement metric to do the algorithmic trick.

Facebook to Rank Videos by Percent Completion

Facebook has announced it will be looking at a new News Feed ranking signal for videos: completion rates. According to Facebook:

“One of the signals we look at is ‘percent completion’ — the percent of each video you watch — to help us understand which videos you enjoyed. If you watch most or all of a video, that tells us that you found the video to be compelling — and we know that completing a longer video is a bigger commitment than completing a shorter one. As we continue to understand how our community consumes video, we’ve realized that we should therefore weight percent completion more heavily the longer a video is, to avoid penalizing longer videos.”

Facebook said most pages wont see much change in visibility. However, they noted that it’s possible that “some shorter videos may see a slight dip in News Feed distribution.”

Until now, Facebook has determined the rankings of videos by looking at factors such as:

• Reactions, comments, and shares.
• Whether it was watched with sound on.
• Whether it was watched in full screen.
• How long people watched.

What’s it mean for marketers? Well, make sure that your videos are engaging, whatever the length. Short or long, if people aren’t watching, you will lose visibility.

Check your Facebook video analytics to see how your videos are performing now. If you have a low completion rates, then you better head back to the drawing board with your video strategy and start figuring out how you can start sharing more interesting videos that people will engage with and watch longer.

This video rankings change will start rolling out to all Facebook News Feeds in the coming weeks.

Image Credit: Depositphotos

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Former Dirty Jobs host Mike Rowe took to Facebook this week to share a brilliant piece of marketing written by his friend’s 11-year-old daughter. Charlotte McCourt knows how to sell Girl Scout cookies with the best tool she’s got: the truth.

« I would like to tell you about the cookies themselves, for some of the descriptions I am afraid [to] use false advertising, » she wrote in an email to another of her dad’s friends. Though we wish we could hear Charlotte herself read the letter aloud, we have to settle for the TV host-turned-podcaster. These are her brutally honest reviews.

Savannah Smiles: « Like sweet lemon wedges with just the right balance of sweet and sour. This cookie gets a 7 for its divine taste. »

Trefoils: « This is a plain peanut butter cookie that pairs nicely with a hot drink. I give it a 6 because … it’s kind of boring. »

Do-Si-Dos: « I give it a 5 for its unoriginality and its blandness. »

Samoas: « Wow, the Samoa. I give it a 9 for its amazing flavor. »

Tagalongs: « I give it an 8 for its chocolate peanut butter combination. Inspired. »

Thin Mints: « I give it a 9 for the delectable chocolate mint combination. Also inspired. »

S’mores: « If you have a wild sense of adventure, try the S’more. Full disclosure, I have not tried the S’more. »

Toffee-tastic: « The Toffee-tastic is a bleak, flavorless gluten-free wasteland. I’m telling you it’s as flavorless as dirt. »

« My name is Charlotte, and I love being honest with my clients, » she says in conclusion.

The standard sales tactic for Girl Scouts involves the appeal of their cuteness in door-to-door sales, or at stands outside the supermarket. There is also the making-your-parents-beg-their-coworkers route, which banks on grownups fondly remembering the cookies of their youth. This might be the better option, judging by the fact by Thursday, a day after Rowe posted the video, they had already sold over 7,000 boxes. The video has reached 7.2 million views, and many commenters on Facebook are asking viewers to buy from their local troops instead of from Charlotte.

London (AFP) – Oscar-nominated British actor John Hurt, known for his roles in « Elephant Man » and « Harry Potter », has died aged 77 after a battle with pancreatic cancer, his wife said Saturday.

The versatile actor, who played Mr Ollivander in « Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone » and in two other films in the series, passed away in Norfolk, eastern England, on Wednesday, according to wife Anwen Rees Meyers.

He starred in the movie adaptation of George Orwell’s novel « 1984 » and played the role of Kane in « Alien », who dies when the creature dramatically bursts from his chest in one of the most memorable death scenes in movie history.

He was twice nominated for an Oscar, in the best supporting actor category for his performance in the 1978 film « Midnight Express » as Max, a British man imprisoned in Turkey, and for his starring role two years later in « Elephant Man » about a severely deformed man in 19th century London.

He received a BAFTA award for « Midnight Express » as well as a Golden Globe in the best actor in a supporting role category.

Hurt’s death was confirmed by his widow Anwen.

« It is with deep sadness that I have to confirm that my husband, John Vincent Hurt, died on Wednesday 25th January 2017 at home in Norfolk, » she said in a statement released by publicist Charles McDonald.

« John was the most sublime of actors and the most gentlemanly of gentlemen with the greatest of hearts and the most generosity of spirit. He touched all our lives with joy and magic and it will be a strange world without him. »

« Lord of the Rings » star Elijah Wood paid tribute to the actor, writing on Twitter: « Very sad to hear of John Hurt’s passing. It was such an honor to have watched you work, sir. »

Among many other tributes to flood in, American actor Chris Evans described Hurt as « remarkable ».

« John Hurt was one of the most powerful, giving, and effortlessly real actors I’ve ever worked with Remarkable human being. U will be missed, » he wrote on Twitter.

– ‘Cinematic immortality’ –

Born on January 22, 1940 in Chesterfield, central England, Hurt first began his career as a teacher of drawing.

But he quickly moved to a life on camera and, after entering the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London, he began his career in British film in the 1960s.

But it was at the end of the 1970s when his career definitively took off following back-to-back roles in « Midnight Express » and « Alien ».

Hurt, who appeared in some 140 films, often playing supporting roles, also maintained a strong television presence, making appearances in cult British series « Doctor Who » among others.

He also showed a lighter side, playing a parody of his Kane character in spoof sci-fi comedy « Spaceballs », directed by Mel Brooks.

The veteran US comic posted on Twitter that he was « terribly sad today to learn of John Hurt’s passing.

« No one could have played The Elephant Man more memorably, » he added. « He carried that film into cinematic immortality. He will be sorely missed. »

The actor, who received a total of four BAFTAs, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2014.

His cancer was diagnosed the following year but he did not give up his profession.

For his final role, he played Father Richard McSorley in the biopic « Jackie », the story of the former American First Lady, which was released in December in the US.

He was however forced to pull out of a play last July on the advice of his doctors.

« It is therefore with great sadness and disappointment that I must withdraw, » he said at the time.

Aside from his wife, he is survived by two sons, Alexander and Nicholas.