editor, Author at Mediastreet

In News

You’re not uncreative, you’re just surrounded by uncreative people

April 12, 2021 No Comments

Feeling burnt out? Exhausted and unmotivated? Even if you’re attempting to reach your business goals, you could still feel trapped and dragged down by the day-to-day doldrums. But external forces could be dragging you down rather than bringing you up.

You may just be surrounded by uncreative people – those who don’t foster an environment of excitement and innovation, and who inhibit your ability to access your true potential.

Traits of uncreative people

Uncreative people can be anywhere, from your workplace to your home, from bosses to business partners and everything in between. How their lack of creativity manifests could be dependent on their role, but sometimes, there are overarching themes.

The first trait of an uncreative person is that they have inhibitory linear thinking. This just means that an uncreative person will want things done a certain way, even if that way isn’t as effective or productive. Think of a football coach who only wants to run the ball when their quarterback has the strongest arm of the NFL or a boss who only wants you to add numbers by hand, because “that’s the way we’ve always done it.”

Another trait of someone who could be considered uncreative is excessive emotion, such as excessive negativity, or even excessive positivity. Forbes argues that “life is too short for the negativity,” and that you’ll do much better for yourself if you “find and focus on relationships with those who can share their wins and positive vibes and help you realize that you can do the same.”

But a bunch of yes-men is just as unproductive as a bunch of no-men, and hearing the same opinions over and over in an echo chamber of your own making forms a business place that doesn’t value creative input.

One final trait of an uncreative person is adherence to current trends. Surprisingly, this might even extend to people who’ve hopped on the entrepreneur train, trying to start their own company or invest in a venture. If you see people reposting motivational memes, asking what’s trending in meetings, or looking to social media for where to turn next, they might be masquerading as a creative person, but really be relying on the world to tell them what moves to make next instead of learning from current trends to predict new ones.

What if I’m the uncreative person?

If you identify with any of the above sentiments, it’s possible that you might be an uncreative person. But don’t panic — it’s easy to deconstruct that, as long as you’re willing to do the work.

Being uncreative mostly revolves around getting stuck in unfortunate patterns of behaviour. To create a perspective change, the first step is getting out of your rut, and trying something new.

“Go for a mid-day walk,” LifeHack advises, “hit up yoga class, or even just do a face mask because when you’re burnt out, you’re never going to be able to show up at your best.” Ideally, these quiet moments of contemplation could foster insight as to why you might be resistant to change or feel trapped in a cycle of failure.

The difference between creative people and uncreative people, LifeHack advises, is that “creative people are able to consistently respond to the situations in which they’re placed and utilize the resources they have at their disposal.” You can’t be afraid to be “spontaneous … flexible, and willing to adapt.”

Another quick tip to encourage your own creativity is to find something you like and do it. It sounds silly, but even a hobby like knitting or exercise can kick-start the motivation it takes to devote yourself to a life of further creativity.

How to leave uncreative people

If there are uncreative people surrounding you, the usual advice is to ditch them for a more encouraging crowd. But that might be hard – while it’s pretty easy to give the old “cut out toxic people” retort, sometimes, you can’t just leave it all behind.

Imagine you’re working at an innovative, incredible company, and it’s just the guy who sits next to you who’s very uncreative. Or at home, if your husband or wife is worried about where your next paycheck is coming from, they may be less supportive of a risky creative choice. You could also have a good friend or coworker who you care about deeply, but they’re just not fostering your creativity or drive for progression.

Mossy Brain recommends asking yourself, “can you restrict their influence over your life? Can you find space from them, and grow?” It may be impossible to cut people out of your life entirely, especially if you find yourself in a grey area of people who are occasionally supportive, or only rigid on some topics. In this way, it’s best to diversify your investments and know your audience.

If you keep different creative friends for different creative choices, you’re more likely to feel encouraged, but if you bring up ideas with people you know will arbitrarily shoot them down, you’re setting yourself up for failure. And don’t cut someone out just because they feel constraining — sometimes, they might be amenable to compromise, and their counterargument could be a helpful tool in finding gaps in your ideas, and ultimately, bolstering your own enterprise.

Where to find creatives

There isn’t some secret meeting place or underground club where creative people can secretly be found. It’s a misnomer that you have to be an artist to be creative, as creativity can be found in business, science, and math as well. The most important thing is to find out in what arena you wish to be creative and find a place where people who value similar things tend to gather.

If you do try to join a club, coalition, or host a Meetup for like-minded individuals, Medium says, “don’t just show up. You have to contribute to be a part of it.” While attending events is fun, volunteering can often cause one to feel more “united with the club,” and form “deeper relationships with many of the members.”

By Sara London

Sourced from LADDERS

In News

8 creative ways to add flair to your Instagram stories

April 12, 2021 No Comments

By Sandra Gutierrez G

Thinking outside the box can get you those sweet likes.

o one would blame you for thinking Instagram’s customization options for Stories are somewhat limited. You can add text, a GIF, draw something, and plug in a tune. But when used in creative ways, these tools are more than enough to create stories that’ll capture your followers’ attention.

Periods can become polka dots or squares to compose a trendy, geometric background for your pictures. Dashes can turn into lines, GIFs can create flashy effects, and the right colours can disguise the zillion hashtags you used to ensure your post is noticed.

There’s a plethora of possibilities. These are just a few to get you started.

Keep those hashtags hidden

If you want your posts to go beyond your tight-knit group of friends, you need to make them more social. There’s no official guidebook on exactly how to do this, but users have picked up a few things after years of experimenting. The main takeaway is that the more social elements you add to your story, the more traction it’ll gain in general searches. This includes mentions, location tags, and, of course, hashtags.

The more of these labels, the better, but nothing is less aesthetically pleasing than a bunch of words you can barely read. The solution is simple: hide them. The algorithm will pick them up even if people can’t see them. This works for mentions too, and there are three ways to do it.

Drag them beyond the margins

Your Instagram stories have some space beyond the margins of your screen; it’s not much, but it’s a great spot to hide things.

1. Use the text tool to type all the hashtags you need. If you’re using too many, consider doing it in batches.

2. Using your index finger and thumb, shrink the text pieces as small as you can.

3. Drag the text to the right or left until they’re no longer noticeable. Repeat if you have more text you need to hide.

Hide them behind your post

If you’re sharing a post from your feed or timeline, you can paste that on top of the hashtags to hide them away.

1. Choose a post you want to add to your story and use the paper plane icon to share it. Tap Add to your story on the dialog that pops up from the bottom of the screen.

2. Use the text tool to type the hashtags you want to use. You can do this multiple times if you want.

3. If necessary, adjust the size of the text with your thumb and index finger to make sure it’s smaller than the picture of the post you’re sharing.

4. Drag the text on top of the post and then tap the post to bring it to the front. Your hashtags will no longer be visible.

Camouflage your hashtags

No one will see your hashtags if they’re in the same colour as your background.

1. Choose a post you want to add to your story and use the paper plane icon to share it. Tap Add to your story on the dialog that pops up from the bottom of the screen.

2. Select the drawing tool (the squiggly line at the top of your screen) and choose a colour.

3. Press on any space not covered by the post you’re sharing to set a background colour. To finish, tap the check mark in the top right corner of the screen.

4. Select the text tool and type your hashtags.

5. Tap on the colour wheel at the top of the screen and select the same colour you used for your background colour. If you need to, use the eyedropper tool in the bottom left corner of the screen to select the exact shade. Tap the check mark in the top right corner to finish.

6. Drag your hashtags into the space around the post you’re sharing. If necessary, use your index finger and thumb to modify the size of the text.

Hide the music player sticker

You have many options when you use a Spotify sticker on an Instagram story. Tap it once, and you’ll see the song’s cover art. Tap it again and again, and you’ll see the lyrics displayed in different ways. The default is a white label sticker that, no matter how much you try minimizing it, most of the time looks like an eyesore. Plus, the artist and name of the song are already listed under your username, so there’s no need for it if you want your followers to know what song you’re playing. You can simply stash it beyond the edge of the screen—noticing a trend?

1. First, add a music sticker. Keep the default display option and figure out the exact snippet of the song you want to feature on your story. Tap the check mark in the top right corner to finish.

2. Then use your thumbs to flip the sticker to a vertical position. You’ll see a yellow dotted guideline appear to make sure it’s perfectly parallel to the sides of your screen.

3. Use your thumbs to shrink it as much as possible.

4. Drag the sticker to the side of your screen. If you still see a thin white line, move it up and down to hide it completely.

Create a flashing effect using GIF stickers

8 creative ways to add flair to your Instagram stories — Some glittery fun.

With this trick, you’ll turn your Instagram stories into a flashing sign to catch your followers’ attention. You’ll need to perfect your free-hand drawing and writing skills, but if you’re already an enthusiast, there’s a lot you can do with this technique.

[Related: Make your own Instagram filters]

1. Open Instagram and tap the plus sign at the top of the screen. Then tap Story at the bottom.

2. Tap the shutter button (it doesn’t matter what kind of pic you took) and then touch the sticker tool (it’s the third one from the right at the top of the screen). There, tap the GIF option and search for something flashy. Words like “flash” and “glitter” yield strobe-rrific results. Keep in mind that bright, flashing effects can provoke discomfort, headaches, or even seizures in some people.

3. Using your thumb and index finger, enlarge the GIF until the flashy or animated part covers the entire screen.

4. Hit the download button (looks like a downward arrow) on the top of your screen to save the story to your device.

5. Tap the X button in the top left corner of the screen to close the story editor and choose Discard on the popup prompt.

6. You’ll be redirected back to the camera view of the Instagram stories editor. There, tap the Gallery button in the bottom left corner of the screen and select the story you just saved.

7. Open the drawing options, choose a colour, and press anywhere on the screen to paint over the video.

8. Choose the eraser tool (at the top of your screen, third from the right) and use it as a brush to delete the top layer of colour you just created. As you write or draw, you’ll reveal the GIF underneath, and the finished product will start flashing before you.

Use characters as design elements

When a platform only gives you basic tools, you have to get creative. And that’s exactly what Instagram users all over the world have done by turning characters such as dashes, periods, and other punctuation marks into design elements.

Unfortunately, this is a technique that you may not be able to take full advantage of on Android. If you have an iPhone, though, the possibilities are endless, and the results will mainly depend on how you use them. For now, this is how you start.

Add lines and blocks to your Instagram story

1. Open the text tool and select your font. The one you choose will depend on what you want to do. Type a period and see if it’s a circle or a square, and choose the style that best aligns with your idea. If you want to make a line, type a hyphen or a dash.

2. Tap the check mark button in the top right corner to exit the tool.

3. Use your thumbs to make the text as big as you want it to be. This is where the waters of possibility separate depending on what phone you have. When trying to enlarge these elements, Android users will hit a relatively small size limit. This limitation keeps characters looking like characters instead of geometric shapes, defeating the purpose of this technique. As an alternative, Android users can use the highlight function when typing (the third button at the top of your screen; it looks like an A with sparkles) to make characters bigger.

4. Drag and position the element where you want it and change the colour if you’d like.

Superimpose text to give it volume

Plain text is boring. 3D text is way cooler.

1. Use the text tool and type what you want to say. Tap the check mark button in the upper right corner to finish.

2. Repeat Step 1 as many times as necessary.

3. Use your thumbs to enlarge all pieces of text and make sure they are the exact same size. A great way to help you do this is to use Instagram’s automatic guidelines that appear when you centre the text.

4. Change the colours of the text as you like. You can do a rainbow or a gradient of colours. If you want them to match a photo or post, use the eyedropper tool.

5. Align your text to create a volume effect. This requires some practice, but you can start by placing them on top of each other and moving the upper layers of text slightly to the right or left. The piece of text on the very top should be the farthest away from the one on the bottom. Don’t despair if it takes a long time to achieve the desired effect, but we recommend you don’t try to align 20 layers of text on your first try. Start small.

Add pictures to your Instagram story straight from your phone

Stickers and GIFs are fun, but you can paste your own pics, too. If you’re promoting a post with multiple photos, this is a great way to display them in all their glory.

1. Select the photo you want to use from your device. Tap the Share button and choose Copy. If you don’t see it, this is because it’s not possible with some versions of Android. All iPhone users can use this feature.

If you have stock Android, you’ll only be able to do this by using a browser to copy images directly from the web, as Google’s operating system doesn’t allow you to copy an image as a sharing option. If you want to do this, you can go to Google Images or directly to the website featuring the photo you want to use, press on it to select it, and tap Copy.

2. In the Instagram story editor, open the text tool and paste the photo as if it were text. Now you have a sticker you can drag and resize as you please.

By Sandra Gutierrez G

Sourced from Popular Science

In News

4 Ways to Revive Your Website When Organic Traffic Drops

April 9, 2021 No Comments

By Jack Shepler

One of the most important ROIs that marketers track is organic traffic numbers. Apart from sales and conversion rates, this number ultimately defines how well you are connecting with your target audience.

This number will often fluctuate quite a bit throughout the year. For instance, during the busy season (like the holidays), organic traffic numbers may spike. Some companies also experience slower periods where their products or services are not needed as much.

A general rule of thumb is to keep your organic traffic numbers growing by at least 10% year over year.

If your growth rate has been declining or remaining stagnant, it is a sign to act.

Thankfully, growing organic traffic is something that marketers can do – and do quickly – if they use the right strategies.

Here are four things you can do to help grow online traffic and reach wider audiences if your numbers have dropped recently.

1. Ramp up your external link content

If the organic traffic numbers on your website have been dwindling or your rankings have slipped, focus on building external links. Publishing more content on your website may not always help you to drive traffic – but building links can.

Inbound links and the linking domain authority make up nearly 28% of ranking factors for organic search results on Google. By building up your presence on other authoritative sites, you could boost your own site’s ranking while also driving traffic through those links.

To increase your external links, consider pitching content ideas to other related blogs in exchange for outbound links. Contact blogs that reach similar audiences like you and see if they are accepting guest posts. This can also be a great opportunity to give your company or marketing writer better credibility and establish thought leadership.

2. Hunt down new keyword opportunities

Keyword trends are changing all the time. The COVID-19 pandemic is a perfect example of how hundreds of new keyword opportunities can appear over a short period.

For instance, take a look at some of the phrases that exploded in growth from February to April of 2020:

Image Source

Who would have thought that phrases like how to cut your hair, make bread, or find cute sweatpants would be in the top searches on Google?

While these searches may not be totally relevant to the keywords you tend to target, it is a good time to re-evaluate your keyword lists frequently. There could be ways to incorporate SEO-optimized content or even update your current copy with new keywords.

You can also take this as an opportunity to refine your current targeted keyword list and see if there are some lower-ranking phrases you can start to target. Narrow down your niche content by finding specific search phrases that are relevant, but not highly popular.

If you’re using a keyword research tool like Ahrefs or Ubersuggest, your best bet is usually to go for keywords with a Difficulty of less than 30, and a search volume of more than 100 hits/month.

Remember, these might not be at the top of the list in terms of search volume; however, if the competition is low, it could be worth pursuing.

3. Give new social trends a try

It should come as no shock that the use of social media is at an all-time high. According to recent research from We Are Social, the number of people actively using social media grew by 10% in 2020 – and is expected to continue to rise.

It’s no secret that social media is a major marketing tool. But, you must pay attention to how and why people are using it.

The same study concluded that the average person spends nearly 7 hours a day online. The majority of this time is split between chat apps and social networks – as well as watching videos, shopping, and playing games.

So, in addition to staying connected with friends and family, most people used social media for distraction. This means that it is not effective to create content solely to convert customers with obvious promotions.

Instead, focus on creating content that captures your audience’s attention and gets them familiar with your brand. Pay attention to the shift in platform usage as well. Video streaming has exploded in recent years, so you may want to expand into additional networks like TikTok or YouTube to engage.

For instance, the San Diego Zoo has been jumping on popular trends and engaging with followers. When the zoo was closed to visitors during COVID-19, this outlet allowed people to stay engaged through viral TikTok trend videos. It also kept the zoo at the forefront of people’s minds, which likely drove in donations and excitement for its re-opening.

Sandiegozoo-Rhinos-Original-Sound-Alec-Towsend

Image Source

When traffic numbers or conversions are starting to dwindle, it may be a good time to launch a YouTube channel or focus on more interactive content creation. It’s also a great time to consider testing a rebrand if you want to launch a new “aesthetic” for your social media presence!

4. Consider podcasts

Consider expanding your content library even further by trying content mediums like podcasts or live streams. Overall, podcast listenership has risen by 29% since 2019. Moreover, niche topics are favored among subscribers as the majority of people turn to podcasts for education or entertainment.

Once again, this is a great way to target niche keywords, audiences, and build awareness about the topics your business specializes in. It is highly recommended that you focus on current topics; 60% of podcast listeners use this content to stay up to date.

Listening-Podcast-In-The-United-States-February2019

Image Source

Now could be a good time to launch your own if you feel so inclined!

Consider reaching out to other podcasts and pitch them an idea for an interesting collaboration or a reason why you or someone on your team should be featured on their show. Podcasters are always looking for ideas for their next episode.

Not ready for podcasting or want to test the waters before diving in? Other options could be trying your hand at hosting or participating in webinars or social media live streams.

Conclusion

Marketers must be able to adapt and pounce on new opportunities to stay relevant. If your organic traffic numbers have been decreasing lately, it is a sign that your strategies need an update.

The best way to grow your organic traffic numbers is by understanding how to attract customers in the current climate. Now is the perfect time to expand and change – and these are just a few ways you can do it.

What are some other marketing strategies that you have used to grow this year?

By Jack Shepler

Guest author: Jack Shepler is a Marketing and Search Engine Optimization expert. He founded Ayokay, award-winning marketing, and web design firm in Indianapolis, Indiana that has built brands and increased sales for businesses since 2011. He uses his decades of experience to educate through the Ayokay blog and through public speaking. You can follow him on LinkedIn.

Sourced from Jeff Bullas

In News

These are the ‘most invasive’ iPhone apps — what to do

April 9, 2021 No Comments

By Paul Wagenseil

Which apps share the most personal data?

Ever wonder how much of your personal data your favorite iPhone apps use or give away? Thanks to a new study, you can quickly find out — and it may not be a surprise that Instagram and Facebook are among the “worst.”

Among the other “most invasive” apps (we’ll get back to that designation in a bit) are LinkedIn, GrubHub, Uber, Uber Eats, a Swedish shopping app called Klarna and a British train-ticket app called Trainline.

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Among the “least” invasive were Microsoft Teams, Netflix, Signal, Telegram, Zoom and app-of-the-moment Clubhouse. None of them collected any data for marketing or advertising purposes for use by themselves or by third parties.

Swiss cloud-storage service pCloud generated these lists by checking out the App Privacy disclosures in the App Store, which Apple began to require in December 2020.

Specifically, pCloud counted how many times an app used personal data for in-house advertising or marketing, or for third-party advertising.

Apple lists the types of data disclosed by apps into 14 categories: Browsing History, Contact Info, Contacts, Diagnostics, Financial Info, Health and Fitness, Identifiers, Location, Purchases, Search History, Sensitive Info, Usage Data, User Content and Other Data.

The worst offenders

The Instagram app, said pCloud, shares 11 out of these 14 categories, or 79%, with third parties for purposes of selling ads. It uses 12 out of 14, or 86%, for its own advertising and marketing.

Instagram’s corporate stablemate Facebook matches that 86% score with its own app regarding in-house advertising and marketing, and comes in at No. 2 in the third-party sharing rankings with a 57% (8 out of 14) score.

A list of the iPhone apps that share the most personal data with third-party advertisers. — (Image credit: pCloud)

The specific categories pCloud listed didn’t quite match up with what we can see in the U.S. version of the App Store — perhaps European privacy rules are creating different results on the other side of the Atlantic.

LinkedIn and Uber Eats shared third place among the apps that shared the most personal data with third parties, scoring 50% each. Just behind them were Trainline, YouTube and YouTube Music with 43% (6 out of 14) apiece.

A list of the iPhone apps that use the most personal data for their own marketing and advertising. — (Image credit: pCloud)

Among apps that used the most personal data for their own marketing, third place went to Klarna and Grubhub, with 64% (9 out of 14) each; behind those were Uber and Uber Eats, with 57% each.

Even pCloud’s own iPhone app was not blameless. The service didn’t analyze it, but we looked it up in the App Store. The Pcloud app uses four categories of personal data — purchases, contact info, identifiers and usage data — for its own purposes.

That results in an invasiveness scores of 29% for in-house marketing and advertising, enough to place among Lyft, ESPN, Grindr and others. (The pCloud app shared no data with third parties.)

The pCloud blog post also contained a third ranking called “How much data each app is tracking overall.” Instagram and Facebook topped that as well, followed by Uber Eats, Trainline and eBay.

iPhone apps ranked by overall invasiveness. — (Image credit: pCloud)

However, pCloud didn’t explain how it got the numbers for that chart, and we couldn’t figure out how. (Instagram scores 67%, less than the average of its other two scores.) We’ve asked pCloud about this, as well as how it determined which apps to analyze, and will update this story when we receive a reply.

How bad is this, and what can I do about it?

Now back to the designation of “invasive.” It’s hard to put clear definitions on privacy issues, because what seems invasive to one person might be completely fine to another person.

For example, I don’t really mind if third parties see what else I may have purchased on Instagram, but it does bother me that Instagram shared my financial information, contact info, contacts and search and browsing histories. You may feel differently.

You also have to bear in mind that these rankings are based entirely on what app developers have chosen to share with Apple. Apps that don’t fully disclose such information may be kicked out of the App Store, but that doesn’t mean they’re all being honest.

We already know that thousands of iPhone apps leak personal information from their back-end cloud servers. It’s a safe bet that many iPhone apps have privacy-leaking errors in their code that they’re not aware of.

Unfortunately, we’ll likely never know how many do because unlike Android, Apple doesn’t let you take apart and check any app’s code for errors or suspicious behavior.

The silver lining is that you can control much of what apps collect and share about you. When you first open an app, it will ask you for several permissions, which you can grant, deny, or grant only while the app is in use. (The third option is probably best.)

You can also go into your iPhone’s Settings app to fine-tune what an app collects about you, but the process isn’t as clear as it is when you first open an app.

Feature Image Credit: easy camera/Shutterstock

By Paul Wagenseil

Sourced from tom’s guide

In News

Yes, Podcast Listenership Is Still on the Rise

April 9, 2021 No Comments

By Nicholas Quah

If you’re a longtime Hot Pod reader, you probably know that I hold Edison Research’s annual Infinite Dial study in high regard. The survey-based study of digital media usage has been the longest-running measure of podcast audiences going back to the medium’s earliest days, and as a result, the story they’re able to tell is the one I consider the most reliable.

That said, I didn’t spend as much time covering last year’s edition of the study for what should be obvious reasons by now: It was released at around the same moment that the United States began its descent into the COVID-19 pandemic. Leafing through the report at the time, it didn’t make much sense to me to allocate much attention to the year that had come before when what lay ahead felt so deeply unpredictable.

I don’t need to tell you that a lot has happened over the last twelve months. From a purely podcast standpoint, the wave of lockdowns that began last spring — then ebbed, then flowed, then splayed out into a messy patchwork system — resulted in some initial declines in listenership as the morning commute went away, along with a significant restructuring of work processes and mild consternation over whether there’ll still be a podcast business on the other side of the pandemic.

Eventually, though, podcast consumption rebounded as its structural advantages within the context of pandemic conditions came into sharper view. The medium lent well to remote-production workflows, which in turn attracted more participation from creators and celebrity talent and media companies, which in turn led to the creation of more podcasts and greater recruitment of their respective followings into the medium. Listening behaviors as a whole ended up adapting, moving away from the morning commute and towards more afternoon consumption. The case began to be made that podcasting, more so than many other new media infrastructures, was uniquely suited to meeting the moment. But the question was: To what extent?

The 2021 edition of the Infinite Dial study, published last week, gave an answer: to a considerable extent.

Let’s break the report’s podcast-specific findings out. To begin with, the study recorded gains in the major audience sizing metrics:

➽ 41% of the total U.S. population over the age of twelve, or an estimated 116 million Americans, can now be considered monthly podcast listeners, up from 37% the year before.

➽ 28% of the total U.S. population, or an estimated 80 million Americans, can now be considered habitual weekly podcast listeners, up from 24% the year before.

➽ Meanwhile, podcast familiarity — that is, the extent to which Americans are aware of the medium — continued to grow, present among 78% of the total U.S. population, or an estimated 222 million Americans, up from 75% the year before.

The American podcast audience was also found to have grown more diverse from a gender and ethnicity standpoint, with the study arguing that it has drifted towards a composition that more closely reflects the American population. (One specific finding that leapt out: There were exceptional gains among Hispanic listeners over the past year in particular.)

The report also found that the American podcast audience has deepened their engagement with the medium more generally. This is represented in the finding that weekly U.S. podcast listeners now average eight podcasts per week — typically interpreted as “podcast episodes” — up from six podcasts per week.

A quick note on some methodological progression here: This year’s report also includes a new “average podcast shows in the last week” measure, made distinct from a “podcasts per week” metric. The specific finding on that front: Weekly U.S. podcast listeners averaged 5.1 podcast shows in the last week.

Let’s pause on this beat for a second, because there’s a vast universe of analytical angles baked into this one data point. On a gut level, that feels like a small average number of shows per active podcast consumer especially when held up against an ever-expanding podcast ecosystem, with new shows launching just about every week (or day, or hour). At any rate, it’s worth introducing some level of complexity to that feeling: Not all shows possess a regular weekly publishing cadence, not all shows should be built to compete for everybody’s regular listening slots, and not all niches are adequately covered in the current spread of what’s available. In my mind, there’s room to grow in all directions, and besides, I’d be curious for this ratio of average consumption per user to average production of whole medium to be weighed against other media, whether it’s books, video games, or even the ever-increasing preponderance of products distributed over streaming video services.

Anyway, as always, I highly recommend you go through the report in full, if only to get a better sense of the change over time. But before we move on, I wanted to flag a few other things from other parts of the report.

It should be clear by now that the podcast ecosystem is being fundamentally stitched into other media systems, whether we’re talking about the medium’s competition for listening time against other audio formats (like audiobooks) or how it’s being increasingly absorbed by competition between the large audio streaming platforms.

To that end, here are some of the relevant findings that I’m tucking away in the back of my head:

➽ The report argues that “Spotify has solidified its spot as the largest single-source for online audio, and has played a role in the growth of podcasting (especially with younger listeners).” The platform leads in all the important measures, with Pandora consistently coming in second place.

➽ Audiobook listening seems to be flattening back out. After a spike in the 2019 study (50% of the total U.S. population, up from 44% the year before), that measure now hovers at 45% and 46% of the total U.S. population over the past two studies.

➽ Some interesting findings within the context of in-car media consumption. Of course, the broader point to consider is the fact that folks are driving less during the pandemic, but it’s still interesting to see that AM/FM radio has dropped to 75% of population from 81% of population in the “audio sources currently ever used in the car” measure and that half of the total U.S. population engages in online audio listening in the car through a cell phone, up from 45% of the population the year before.

Finally, shout-out to the new survey questions on Twitch live streaming in there. I know I’ve been watching a hell of a lot more random streams since the pandemic began.

Selected Notes

➽ In case you missed it, I spent two weeks reporting out a feature for Vulture that looked into what happened with Reply All, Gimlet Media, and the union push that took place in the lead up to the podcast company’s acquisition by Spotify in early 2019. That piece dropped last Wednesday.

➽ And as it turns out, I wasn’t the only one poking around. The New York Times and The American Prospect also published pieces on the same day, with the former containing specifics on just how much money various key figures in the Gimlet story made off the sale to Spotify.

➽ Coincidentally, later in the week, the Gimlet Union would secure its first contract with Spotify after two years of bargaining, announcing the deal over its Twitter account early Friday morning. The Ringer Union also secured its own first contract a day later. Parcast, the third content division within Spotify that’s formed a union, is still in the bargaining process.

➽ Entercom, the broadcast radio company that acquired Cadence13 and Pineapple Street, is moving to acquire podcast advertising marketplace startup Podcorn, the Wall Street Journal reports. The deal will value Podcorn at $22.5 million.

➽ CAA is promoting Josh Lindgren as the head of its podcast department. My impression is that this is merely formalizing what Lindgren has already been doing since he joined the talent agency in the summer of 2018. Lindgren’s clients include NPR’s Ari Shapiro, iHeartMedia’s Stuff You Should Know, Jane Marie and Dann Galluci’s Little Everywhere, Maximum Fun, and the Futuro Media Group, among others. Here’s the Variety write-up.

➽ Apple Podcasts is apparently shifting away from “Subscribe” to “Follow,” Podnews found last week. The thinking being — or at least it’s thought to be — that the word “Subscribe” is generally associated with media products that aren’t free.

➽ Keep your eyes peeled on this. From Insider: “Amazon’s ad boss, Alan Moss, told advertisers that the e-commerce giant plans to roll out ads in podcasts.” How and through what means, exactly, remains unclear, but I imagine there’s quite a bit of runway between the Amazon Music platform and the possibility of podcast ad tech-related acquisitions in the months ahead.

➽ Shout-out to the crew over Nieman Lab, who’ve been syndicating RQ1, a new monthly newsletter going over the latest academic research around journalism. A recent issue covered Gabriela Perdomo and Philippe Rodrigues-Rouleau’s paper, “Transparency as Metajournalistic Performance: The New York Times’ Caliphate Podcast and New Ways to Claim Journalistic Authority,” which takes a scalpel to the performance of transparency in Caliphate specifically, but in narrative audio more generally. Really worth the time.

➽ I think this may very well qualify as a first. From the New York Times: “‘Nobody Wants to Be There, Dude’: How a Juror’s Podcast Led to an Appeal.” To fill in the blanks a little bit, the juror is a standup comedian and the podcast has a following of like… a hundred people.

➽ From TechCrunch: “Apple discontinues original HomePod, will focus on mini.”

Feature Image Credit: Eddy Tang/Getty Images/EyeEm

By Nicholas Quah

Sourced from VULTURE

In News

Live Stream Commerce: The Future Social Trend for Ecommerce

April 8, 2021 No Comments

By Tom Beck

Live commerce means using live stream video broadcast on the internet to sell products to viewers. Sellers can live stream on social media, specialist live stream sites or their own eCommerce website, and they often draft in the help of influencers to advertise the product.

Estimates put the market size of live eCommerce at US$60 billion in 2019, with China being the biggest market and the rest of Southeast Asia not far behind. Forrester even predicts that live stream commerce in China will reach US$100 billion by 2023, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 45.7%.

Today, we will explore how live stream eCommerce works, why the live commerce market size is increasing, what challenges live commerce faces to widespread adoption and what the future holds.

How Does Live Commerce Work?

Live shopping is the natural evolution on the internet of home shopping TV channels like QVC and Home Shopping Network. Instead of pre-recorded sales pitches, live stream shopping relies on real-time video delivery. Oftentimes, the brand will approach a famous and popular social media influencer before the live stream event to get them to sell the product for them. Products commonly sold on live stream include cosmetics, clothing and footwear, but also sometimes food and high-end alcoholic beverages.

In China, for instance, where live commerce is most widespread and advanced, the influencers are known as Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs). According to an assessment by Forbes, they work for around 4 hours straight, advertising an average of 12 heavily discounted products every hour, while viewers and buyers can comment and call in to interact with them and ask for more details about the products. Many live streaming shows also include musical elements and celebrity guests to attract more people to watch, so it becomes about more than just shopping, but a whole entertainment experience.

Li Jiaqi, the Lipstick King, is a popular live streaming influencer in China

Where Can I Watch a Live Stream?

Delivery methods for live stream commerce include:

- Social media. When this is delivered on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and WeChat, streaming eCommerce is an aspect of social commerce.

Ecommerce websites. Live commerce videos are streamed directly on the retailer’s eCommerce website.
Ecommerce marketplaces. Well-known marketplaces such as with Amazon Live and Taobao have their own live streaming capabilities.
Live stream websites. Retailers can harness the video technology of specialist live streaming platform services and live commerce apps like TalkShopLive and Brandlive.
Real-life events. It’s also possible to organise a live-streamed commerce action at a physical event as Nordic fashion brand Boozt did at the Stockholm Fashion Week 2021.

Why Is Live Stream Commerce Becoming More Popular?

Live commerce is a relatively recent digital shopping experience that is enabled by emerging new online video technology. According to the Gartner Hype Cycle for Digital Commerce 2020, live commerce is near the peak of the first wave of expectation and experimentation, and will take another two years to reach the plateau of widespread adoption by the general public.

Live commerce is increasing in popularity for 4 main reasons:

- COVID-19. The Coronavirus pandemic, as well as accelerating the trend towards online shopping by up to ten years, has also made us more comfortable using video call services like Zoom for business and to connect with friends and family. It’s not a huge jump from there to buying from video.

People want personalisation. Live streaming commerce has a more personal feeling than TV shopping thanks to the interactive nature of the comments section on a live stream and the instant reaction the hosts of these videos can give to viewers. It brings back the feeling of buying from a real person as we did in days gone by from sales assistants in store, helping to enhance the customer experience by bringing human warmth back into the impersonal and efficient world of next-day delivery. The desire for a personal, human touch is also partly the product of the fear and isolation of living in a world of lockdown and social distancing in 2020-21.
Influencers are cool. People who are into Instagram, TikTok and Twitter want to see their favourite social media celebrities. With influencer marketing, brands tap into this fandom and offer influencers vast sums of money to promote their products, not just on their profiles and in their stories, but in live selling events and sometimes even online auctions.
Digital commerce technology is more powerful. None of this would be possible without the increasing trend towards smarter and more accessible technology into customer-facing internet applications. While not all live streaming eCommerce takes place on social media, this is especially true of payment gateways being integrated into social networks like Facebook and YouTube, combining the two forces of live video and digital shopping.

The Challenges Facing Live Commerce

Despite these drivers of audio-visuals in digital commerce, it will still take years for shopping online by live broadcast to become mainstream. Some of the hurdles that have to be overcome are:

- Consumer readiness. For shoppers used to browsing through product lists and comparing customer reviews as their main form of retail activity, watching live stream videos can seem like an exhausting and time-consuming chore. Having a firm idea of what you want to buy and searching for it directly seems like a much more efficient means of shopping, although it lacks some important aspect of product discovery that live streaming provides. Brands will have to convince shoppers of the benefits of live stream shopping before they try it for the first time, yet alone continue to use it regularly.
- Choice paralysis. Once live commerce does gain a foothold in the wider world of social commerce and eCommerce, it will face that dreaded anathema of all eCommerce merchants: choice paralysis. If there are thousands of options to choose from when it comes to shopping via live stream, potential customers are just as likely to choose none of them as they are the best one.
- Customer loyalty. Getting them ‘in the door’, so to speak, is just the beginning. The greater challenge for brands marketing and selling products via live video broadcasts is customer retention. Special discounts and coupons for return customers are just one way of ensuring repeat purchases, but the market will need to innovate new means of bringing people back again for more live streams in the future.
- Cost of setup. As if these kinds of discounts weren’t enough, products normally sell for a heavily discounted price on live shopping streams anyway. It’s an expensive investment to set up a live stream shopping experience, and to get a reasonable ROI merchants will need to find ways to offset these costs.

“Organizations need to have a strategy to upsell from a few loss-leading products so they can justify the investment.”
[Sandy Shen, Gartner]

Willingness to prepare. Not only is it expensive to run a commerce live stream, but it takes a lot of planning resources too. Merchants need to be prepared to invest time, and not just money, into scene preparation, brand awareness and advertising the event to make it a success because if you’re not going to do it well, you might as well not do it at all.
Lack of technological integration. While it’s true that the technology for live streaming is improving on Facebook, Amazon and other eCommerce staples, it’s still not well integrated with the experience that people expect of online commerce. Until social media platforms and eCommerce marketplaces can pull together their tech ambitions with the human experiential factor, live social commerce will not take off.

What Is the Future of Live Commerce?

Live streaming shopping content on social media is set to become more meaningful and entertaining

It’s important to note here that in live commerce, as in almost all other eCommerce trends, Chinese shopping habits and technological capabilities are at least 3 years ahead of the rest of the world. Digital payments via the Chinese service provider WePay were available on eCommerce websites and social media platforms long before PayPal was linked to Facebook; shopping on mobile devices, mCommerce, first grew in popularity in China before it did in the West. For an idea of what the future will hold for live streaming commerce, look to the East.

As pointed out by The China Guys, the Chinese experience indicates that the future of live commerce includes:

Use by older target markets. There will be greater adoption of live commerce by more audience segments than just young people in the 18-35 bracket, but older shoppers over 35 years old too.
Rich video content. Content will strive to be funnier and more meaningful, designed to make consumers feel like they are receiving a more rounded shopping and entertainment experience instead of just a callously calculated sales pitch.
More micro-influencers. In order to deliver the most useful and informative content to viewers, brands will rely less on big-name influencers and instead seek out niche experts to attract consumers in their particular field, be it gaming, fine wines or self-help books.
Expansion into different verticals. Live streaming will extend to more sectors than just eCommerce sales, but will include health advice and medical consultations, too, as Baidu is planning to do with its live streaming service, Haokan. Think of an industry – any industry, from finance to engineering to government procedures – and chances are its products and services are able to be offered via live video and/or social media.

By Tom Beck

Sourced from smartosc

In News

Google antitrust suit takes aim at Chrome’s Privacy Sandbox

April 8, 2021 No Comments

By Adi Robertson and Russell Brandom

‘Google is trying to hide its true intentions behind a pretext of privacy,’ say prosecutors

State antitrust watchdogs are targeting Google’s plans to phase out third-party tracking cookies, building on a major lawsuit filed last year. The group of 15 attorneys general, led by Texas, updated its complaint about Google yesterday to include a more detailed case against the search giant, including new claims about Google’s strategic use of the Chrome browser. In particular, the new complaint takes aim at recent privacy updates to Chrome, which could better protect users’ personal data while also entrenching Google’s market position.

Filed in December, the Texas complaint is one of three ongoing antitrust cases against Google. That same month, the Colorado attorney general led a group alleging that the company stifled competition by manipulating search results. A separate case from the Department of Justice is focused on Google’s dominance of the web search marketplace and associated ad business.

Privacy vs. antitrust

Like the original Texas complaint, Tuesday’s updated filing primarily focuses on Google’s technology for targeting ads across the web. The attorneys general argue that Google used its power in search, streaming video, and other markets to stamp out independent advertising platforms, forcing small businesses and media outlets to use its system.

But in the updated complaint, the states apply this argument to Google’s “Privacy Sandbox” — a tool that’s supposed to replace invasive third-party tracking cookies with a more limited system devised by Google.

“Google’s new scheme is, in essence, to wall off the entire portion of the internet that consumers access through Google’s Chrome browser,” the complaint reads. Blocking cookies might broadly be a good thing — other browsers like Firefox and Safari have already done it. But Chrome dominates the browser market, and it’s part of a much larger Google product suite. The suit argues that Google’s plans would require advertisers to use it as a middleman and would make Google’s own advertising system far more attractive.

For years, Google has been gradually scaling back its use of tracking cookies, announcing earlier this month that it will not establish an alternate system for tracking users on the web. But critics of the company — including the Electronic Frontier Foundation — have criticized those efforts as self-serving. Now, state regulators seem to be adopting those criticisms and putting new legal pressure on Google’s efforts to block tracking in Chrome.

“Google is trying to hide its true intentions behind a pretext of privacy,” the suit continues. With Privacy Sandbox, “Google does not actually put a stop to user profiling or targeted advertising — it puts Google’s Chrome browser at the centre of tracking and targeting.”

Reached for comment, Google said the new allegations rested on a misunderstanding of Chrome’s privacy features. “Attorney General Paxton’s latest claims mischaracterize many aspects of our business, including the steps we are taking with the Privacy Sandbox initiative to protect people’s privacy as they browse the web,” a Google representative said. “These efforts have been welcomed by privacy advocates, advertisers and our own rivals as a step forward in preserving user privacy and protecting free content. We will strongly defend ourselves from AG Paxton’s baseless claims in court.”

Update 1:50PM ET: Added statement from Google.

Feature Image Credit: Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

By Adi Robertson and Russell Brandom

Sourced from The Verge

In News

How VW’s polarizing ‘Voltswagen’ prank went over with everyday consumers

April 8, 2021 No Comments

By E.J. Schultz.

Ad Age-Harris Poll shows VW did not help itself, but it did not hurt itself, either

Feature Image Credit: Stefanie Loos/Bloomberg

By E.J. Schultz.

E.J. Schultz is the Assistant Managing Editor, Marketing at Ad Age and covers beverage, automotive and sports marketing. He is a former reporter for McClatchy newspapers, including the Fresno Bee, where he covered business and state government and politics, and the Island Packet in South Carolina. He has won awards from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, the Jesse H. Neal Awards, the Association of Capitol Reporters and Editors, the California Newspaper Publishers Association, the South Carolina Press Association and Investigative Reporters and Editors. A native of Cincinnati, Schultz has an economics degree from Xavier University and a masters in journalism from Northwestern University.

Sourced from AdAge

In News

Gartner: Top 10 data and analytics technology trends for 2021

April 7, 2021 No Comments

By n.f. mendoza

The pandemic forced D&A leaders to step up research and analysis to respond effectively to change and uncertainty, the firm says.

While much of the loudest buzz surrounding the impact of COVID-19 was focused on the dramatic shift from on premises to remote work, the pandemic further affected every aspect of the enterprise, which includes data and analytics technology. The uncertainty of what the tech industry would face forced D&A leadership to quickly find tools and processes — and put them in place — so they could identify key trends and prioritize to the company’s best advantage, said Rita Sallam, research vice president at Gartner, in the company’s recently released information.

Gartner has now identified 10 trends as “mission-critical investments that accelerate capabilities to anticipate, shift and respond.” It recommended that D&A leaders review these trends and consider and apply as necessary. Following is a summary from Gartner of the trends:

Trend 1: Smarter, responsible, scalable AI

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are key factors. Businesses must apply new techniques for smarter, less data-hungry, ethically responsible and more resilient AI solutions. When smarter, more responsible, scalable AI is applied, organizations will be able to “leverage learning algorithms and interpretable systems into shorter time to value and higher business impact,” Gartner’s report said.

Trend 2: Composable data and analytics

Composable data and analytics leverages components from multiple data, analytics and AI solutions to quickly build flexible and user-friendly intelligent applications to help D&A leaders make the correlation between the discovered insights to actions they must execute. Open, containerized analytics architectures make analytics capabilities more composable.

Public or private, data is unquestionably moving to the cloud and composable data, rendering analytics “a more agile way to build analytics applications enabled by cloud marketplaces and low-code and no-code solutions.”

Trend 3: Data fabric is the foundation

D&A leaders use data fabric to help address “higher levels of diversity, distribution, scale and complexity in their organizations’ data assets,” as a result of increased digitization and “more emancipated” consumers.

Data fabric applies analytics in order to constantly monitor data pipelines; data fabric “uses continuous analytics of data assets to support the design, deployment and utilization of diverse data to reduce time for integration by 30%, deployment by 30% and maintenance by 70%.”

Trend 4: From big to small and wide data

Using historical data for ML and AI models was rendered irrelevant, once changes based on the pandemic had an extreme effect on business. D&A leaders need a greater variety of data for better situational awareness because human and AI decision making grows more complex and demanding.

Therefore, D&A leaders need to choose analytical techniques that can use available data more effectively and they can with more insight that now requires less data.

“Small and wide data approaches provide robust analytics and AI, while reducing organizations’ large data set dependency,” Sallam said in a press release. “Using wide data, organizations attain a richer, more complete situational awareness or 360-degree view, enabling them to apply analytics for better decision making.”

Trend 5: XOps

DataOps, MLOps, ModelOps and PlatformOps, which comprise XOps, are necessary to achieve efficiencies and economies of scale through DevOps and using best practices of reliability, reusability and repeatability. This also reduces duplication of technology and processes and enabling automation.

Operationalization must be addressed initially and not as an afterthought because the latter is why most analytics and AI projects fail. The report said, “If D&A leaders operationalize at scale using XOps, they will enable the reproducibility, traceability, integrity and integrability of analytics and AI assets.”

Trend 6: Engineering decision intelligence

D&A leaders can make engineering decisions more accurate, repeatable, transparent and traceable, as decisions grow more automated and augmented. Gartner refers to “engineering decision intelligence,” which applies to a series of decisions of business processes as well as grouped emergent decisions and consequences.

Trend 7: Data and analytics as a core business function

D&A is now making the shift into a core business function, rather than a secondary activity. D&A now is a shared business asset aligned to business results. Gartner noted that D&A silos break down because of better collaboration between central and federated D&A teams.

Trend 8: Graph relates everything

Graphs form the foundation of most modern data and analytics capabilities and are reliant on the foundation to find relationships between people, places, things, events and locations across a wide variety of data assets. D&A leaders rely on graphs as quick answers to complex business questions, which require contextual awareness and an understanding of the nature of connections and strengths across multiple entities.

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Gartner predicts that by 2025, graph technologies will be used in 80% of data and analytics innovations, up from 10% in 2021, facilitating rapid decision making across the organization.

Trend 9: The rise of the augmented consumer

Today, most business users use predefined dashboards and manual data exploration, but this can lead to incorrect conclusions and flawed decisions and actions. Time spent in predefined dashboards will progressively be replaced when users’ needs can be delivered with automated, conversational, mobile and dynamically generated insights customized through a predefined dashboard.

“This will shift the analytical power to the information consumer, the augmented consumer, giving them capabilities previously only available to analysts and citizen data scientists,” Sallam said.

Trend 10: Data and analytics at the edge

Support for data, analytics and other technologies are found in edge computing environments, closer to assets in the physical world and outside IT’s purview. Gartner predicts that by 2023, over 50% of the primary responsibility of data and analytics leaders will comprise data created, managed and analyzed in edge environments.

Gartner concluded: “D&A leaders can use this trend to enable greater data management flexibility, speed, governance, and resilience. A diversity of use cases is driving the interest in edge capabilities for D&A, ranging from supporting real-time event analytics to enabling autonomous behavior of things.”

Gartner Data and analytics summit

Gartner analysts offer more analysis on data and analytics trends at the Gartner Data & Analytics Summits 2021, taking place virtually May 4-6 in the Americas, May 18-20 in EMEA, June 8-9 in APAC, June 23-24 in India, and July 12-13 in Japan. Follow news and updates from the conferences on Twitter using #GartnerDA.

This article was originally published on TechRepublic.

By n.f. mendoza

Sourced from ZDNet

In News

10 Memorable Logos, and How They Became Iconic

April 7, 2021 No Comments

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

A logo is the graphic image of a brand. This advertising strategy has been used for many centuries as it is a way of identifying a company or a creator. Furthermore, the importance of logos lies in the fact that they are easily recognizable, even from childhood.

A logo must be able to condense, in a single image, the personality of the brand , to communicate a clear message to its audience and, above all, to become an effective tool for marketing and promoting the company. These can be made up of the name of the brand, the initials or a drawing that relates to the company, its values or its history.

We present a list of the 10 logos most remembered by our users on social networks. Take their strategies into account when designing your business:

1) NIKE

^{Image: Kristian Egelund via Unsplash}

The sports clothing and accessories company has managed to position itself in a remarkable way. The slogan “Just Do It” and the popcorn in its logo are simply unforgettable. Why a popcorn? The NIKE brand was founded in the 60s and both its name and its logo are inspired by the Greek goddess Nike, deity of victory, who had wings and was very fast. The design was created by a young student who was paid $ 35 at the time. We like it because it is simple, easy to remember, attractive and because of its relationship with the values of the company.

2) Apple

^{Image: Zhiyue Xu via Unsplash}

A bitten apple is the image of one of the most recognized and innovative companies of the 20th century. There are many theories about the origin of this logo: that it is a tribute to Alan Mathison Turing, inventor of current computing, who committed suicide with a poisoned apple; that it was the favorite fruit of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak; which is the emblem of Apple Records , the record label of The Beatles, Jobs’s favorite group; that Jobs’ adoptive father was a farmer and that he belonged to a group of farmers, or a simple reference to Isaac Newton’s apple (the first logo alluded to this character). The logo, designed by Rob Janoff, was initially rainbow and mutated to a bright gray. Many claim that the bite means knowledge or that it means that, in English, it is “bite”, which they alter to “byte”.

3) Coca-Cola

^Image: ^{Jordan Whitfield via Unsplash}

This brand is a benchmark in all advertising elements, and its logo is no exception. This only consists of white typeface on a red background (or red typeface). The logo was created by the librarian Frank Mason Robinson in 1885, who thought that two letters “C” would look attractive in any advertisement; he named the brand and added the most widely used cursive font in the United States at that time. In fact, the first design has had very few modifications throughout its history. Coca-Cola is found in more than 200 countries in the world and it is almost a fact that everyone recognizes its logo from a distance.

4) Sabritas

^{Image: mafarifi_ via Instagram}

Sabritas is one of the most loved brands in the Mexican market. The company “Sabrosas Botanitas” was acquired in the 1960s by Pepsico, formed by Pepsi and Frito-Lays, who were in charge of building the image of Sabritas, based on the popular Lays snack in the United States. This logo is said to have been created during a focus group when, in the branding process, participants were asked what this product produced for them, to which many responded with a happy face . From there, the design has been modified over the years, but it remains the main differentiator of this company that “wants to see you smile”.

5) Starbucks

^{Image: Sorin Sîrbu on Unsplash}

The logo of this chain of coffee shops is known practically worldwide and is also one of the most plagiarized. As in the case of NIKE, the origin of its name and logo has a mythological and literary basis. The name appears in the famous Herman Melville novel, “Moby Dick,” where Starbucks was the first mate on Captain Ahab’s ship. As for the logo, although many refer to it as a mermaid, it is actually a melusine, that is, a double-tailed nereid. In the beginning, the logo was designed in black ink and then it became green. This element has mutated a lot and currently (as of 2011) a close-up of this character is shown.

6) Google

^{Image: Rajeshwar Bachu via Unsplash}

When a brand is able to cover its logo, modify its colors and even omit some letters and change them for drawings, it means that it has achieved its mission. And there is no better example than Google. This is demonstrated with doodles (logos that honor certain characters or events). The first doodle appeared in 1998 and was “Burning Man.” Google also changes its colors to gray tones when a world tragedy occurs. The logo of the most important search engine in the world has undergone transformations over time; In the beginning it had an exclamation point (copied from Yahoo! ), until it reached the current one, designed by Kedar Ruth, which is based on the Catull typeface.

7) Ferrari

^{Image: Jannis Lucas via Unsplash}

The logo of this luxury car brand is one of the most famous because, in addition to its style and elegance, it has become a sign of status. Usually the image shows a black prancing horse on a yellow background with the letters S and F, “Scuderia Ferrari.” The horse was the symbol of Count Francesco Baracca, who served in the Italian air force in World War I. In 1923 Enzo Ferrari met Baracca’s mother who asked him to put the horse that her son used, as it would bring him luck. So it was. Since then, this is the Ferrari emblem to which Enzo added the color yellow to be representative of his birthplace: Modena.

Other famous logos in the automotive sector are the Mercedes-Benz star that teaches mastery on land, sea and air, and the four interlocking Audi rings that refer to the union of four Saxon brands.

8) McDonald’s

^{Image: XUNO. via Unsplash}

The golden “M” for McDonald’s is one of the most well-known symbols in the world. It began to be used in 1962 when Jim Schindler, inspired by the arches that the first establishments had, used this logo in all his restaurants. This large “M”, both for its color and its shape, has great significance: first of all, it encourages hunger and represents a safe and trustworthy place. In addition, the golden hue works for investors who see in this fast food brand a profitable option to have a business. This logo is known as “Los Arcos Dorados” .

9) Disney

^Image: ^{Valentin GIRARD via Unsplash}

Disney is synonymous with family entertainment and fun. Its original logo shows all these qualities. The logo arose from a stylization of the signature of its founder, Walter Elias Disney. However, this large corporation modifies its image according to its products. For example, for the movies, in addition to the typography, it shows the famous castle with a blue background (inspired by Neuschwanstein Castle, in Germany), while for others the unforgettable silhouette of Mickey Mouse’s ears or hand is used.

10) Nestle

^{Image: inma lesielle via Unsplash}

Nestlé is one of the largest food companies in the world, a recognition it has maintained over the years. The first logo of this company arose in 1868 with its creator Henri Nestlé, who decided to base the design on the meaning of his surname in German (little nest) and on the family emblem. It was not until 1938 that he added the name to it and little by little it was simplified and modernized to give life to the image we know today.

Feature Image Credit: Maximilian Bruck vía Unsplash

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe