editor, Author at Mediastreet

In News

Making the Case for Video Content Marketing – 5 Reasons to Get Visual!

June 14, 2018 No Comments

Are you leveraging video content marketing to scale your digital marketing business? Are you interested in learning powerful tips you can apply today to improve your video marketing campaign and grow your business?

If you answered yes to the above questions, then please, make sure to read the entire article for the best tips that will help you boost your video marketing campaign!

The Whys and Wherefores of Video Content Marketing

But before we go further down this article, let’s find out why you really do need video content marketing to grow your business.

Why use video content marketing? There are fascinating benefits of using video marketing in your digital marketing campaigns. In fact, studies show that…

Visual content is a phenomenal way to share information, because the brain processes visual data 60,000 times faster than text content.

Video marketing is one of the visual content marketing strategies that engage users – and keep them coming back for more. But why?

It’s because videos increase your ability to retain information.

For example, after watching videos, three days later you can retain, on average, 65% of the information, as opposed to 10% of the same information that you only heard.

Videos offer your target market a background view of what’s happening behind the scenes with your brand, and help you better connect and build trust with that audience.

Email subject lines using the word video can increase the CTR (click-through rate) by 65%, with a 19% increase in the email open-rate.

5 Video Content Marketing Tips You’ll Want to Use Now

Now that you know why video marketing is important to your digital marketing campaign, let’s consider some amazing steps you can apply today to boost your video marketing strategy.

1. Leverage User-Generated Content (UGC)

It’s a great idea for you to create videos (in-house videos) to communicate your brand message with your target audience, as it will help you create brand awareness, etc.

However, did you know that it’s even better for you to leverage user-generated content and create compelling videos?

Yes, it’s true! And that’s because the user-generated video has more force – it conveys authenticity.

Research shows that brands who created a blend of official brand videos and user-generated video content saw a 28% increase in engagement.

Furthermore, user-generated content videos perform better on YouTube, with 10X more views than other brand video content types!

The reason is that as people, we tend to trust recommendations from others. As a result, user-generated content (UGC) video offers you a platform to humanize your brand message and tell your story accordingly.

2. Optimize Your Videos for SEO

Optimizing your videos for SEO is amazing, in that it will help you improve the visibility of your video marketing campaign, and boost your search rankings as well.

Hence, it’s important that you make sure to create video content that’s relevant to your target market – videos that help and solve their problems – videos that add value for them.

Relevancy increases clicks, engagement, shares, and so on, and these factors will greatly enhance your SEO.

Consequently, try to find the best keywords for your video marketing campaign – keywords your competitors are using to rank high on SERPs.

Use your seed keyword in the title and description. Add tags and meta-tags to boost your chances of ranking high on SERPs.

3. Create Short Videos

The length of your video plays a crucial role in the success of your video marketing strategy. Gone are the days when longer videos won the battle on social media. Now, people have a lower attention span, which calls for the need to create shorter videos.

But understand there are still some brand messages that may require a lengthy video to be able to emphasize and convey the main points properly.

In this case, you can create a video series – part 1, part 2, and part 3, as the case may be. The point here is to make sure your video is very brief, approximately 60 seconds in length, or at least less than that.

However, there’s much controversy regarding the optimal length of videos – especially YouTube videos – to attract more clicks, engagement, and generate leads.

Please check out HubSpot’s report on the optimal length of videos for each major social media platform, including YouTube.

4. Promote Your Videos Across Channels

When you’re done creating your video, you must publish it on your blog or website. But is that the end of it? Not really – You need not let your video sit on your blog or website without proper promotion. You have to promote it sparingly across all marketing channels to increase visibility.

Promoting your video content across various marketing channels will help you:

Drive more traffic
Improve clicks
Increase engagement
Get more sales, etc.

Therefore, share your videos across channels such as these:

All major social media sites
Use them in your email marketing strategies
Use them on your landing pages

For instance, a study shows that video content that’s added to a landing page can significantly boost conversion – by up to 80%.

As a result, make sure to promote your videos on all marketing channels to improve your video marketing campaign.

5. Create Interactive Videos

Just as user-generated video content can generate more views, increase shares, and so on, interactive video has the capability to boost website traffic and engagement as well.

As the name indicates, interactive videos offer your target audience the opportunity to respond to and leave feedback about your video content – which in many cases might be about your product and services.

With interactive videos, you offer your audience an avenue to interact and better connect with your brand.

The best way to create an interactive video for your video marketing campaign is to host the contest.

Contests can generate much engagement and leads, and when the contest is about your product and services where the best video will receive a prize, the response and engagement will definitely increase. This will surely help you improve your video marketing campaign.

Keep Up with the Competition – And Surpass It with Video Content Marketing

In a world of digital marketing where technology has taken over the landscape, the challenge to keep up with the competition has become even more intense. And with new challenges coming up, as a video marketer you must contend with these challenges in order to reap the benefits of your video marketing campaign.

Therefore, having a well-defined video marketing strategy (or framework) to work with will surely strengthen that video marketing campaign.

The steps in this article are simple, practical ways that will enable you to define your video marketing efforts and grow your business. From short videos to UGC, to using interactive videos and contests, make sure to apply these tips as you go forward in your video marketing strategy, then see where it takes your brand!

By Moss Clement

Moss Clement is a blogger and freelance writer who delivers high-quality content via writing services such as: blog post writing, article writing, ghost writing, etc.

Sourced from Rocks Digital

In News

Brave’s AI blocks ads better than today’s browser plug-ins, company says

June 13, 2018 No Comments

By Stephen Shankland

Perhaps computers will replace the humans who spot ads.

Brave has developed AI technology called AdGraph that outperforms conventional ad-blocking technology, the browser startup said Friday.

“We can train supervised machine learning models to automatically block ads and trackers,” researchers from Brave and four universities said in a research paper. “We found that AdGraph replicates the behavior of popular crowdsourced filter lists with an 97.7 percent accuracy. In addition, AdGraph is able to detect a significant number of ads and tracker which are missed by popular crowdsourced filter lists.”

Ad-blocking browser extensions like Adblock Plus today typically use manually maintained filter lists such as Easylist to determine what’s an ad and what’s not. Brave’s AdGraph approach instead uses artificial intelligence, trained on real-world websites, so it can spot ads and trackers even before a human has reported them.

Ad blocking is a major threat to internet services whose growth has largely been fueled by free services supported by ads. But online ads — which can be annoying and intrusive, slow down computers and phones, and even deliver malware — are in trouble.

About 615 million people use ad blockers on computers and mobile devices, according to PageFair, a company that seeks to help website publishers evade the blockers to reclaim revenue that otherwise would be lost. And Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is making life harder for companies to harvest your personal data.

Brave AdGraph analyzes websites to try to identify what elements are ads or behavior trackers.

Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET

Brave, co-founded by former Mozilla leader Brendan Eich, blocks web ads and the behavior-tracking software that often accompany them. The company wants to restart the online ad industry with ads that are personalized but that don’t leak your private data out of the browser itself. To make that approach effective, Brave must have an effective system for blocking conventional ads and ad trackers.

AdGraph isn’t built into Brave, but the company has plans to do so, it said in a blog post Friday.

It works by examining how websites load, scrutinizing HTTP communications with web servers and the JavaScript and HTML instructions out of which websites are constructed. “Combining information across the different layers of the web stack allows us to capture telltale signs of ads and trackers,” the paper said.

Brave isn’t alone in the approach. Apple already uses some AI technology called intelligent tracking prevention to try to block ad trackers.

Eyeo, maker of the widely used AdBlock Plus extension, declined to comment for this story.

In addition to competing well with conventional ad-blocking technology, AdGraph better resists website publisher tweaks that easily throw ad blockers off the scent, the researchers said.

“Researchers have shown that randomization techniques, where publishers constantly mutate their web content, can easily defeat signatures used by ad blockers,” the paper said. AdGraph isn’t as easily fooled, though.

“AdGraph’s resistance to those obfuscation attempts by publishers and advertisers represents an important technical advancement in the rapidly escalating ad blocking arms race,” Brave said.

By Stephen Shankland

Sourced from c/net

In News

Good Email Design Really Does Make a Difference

June 13, 2018 No Comments

By Christina Crawley.

Email is as important as ever. While it’s not part of the latest generation of shiny digital marketing tools, it is still very much one of the most effective. Ahead of any social media handle, the email inbox remains the most coveted digital possession, being checked and refreshed at all hours of the day.

From cold business solicitations to newsletter subscriptions, I see many companies and organizations – especially those in the social good sector – that miss conversion opportunities by not following basic email design norms. To ensure that the emails you are sending to your target audience are effective – i.e., they are noticed, opened, read and acted upon – design must take a front seat. No, this isn’t about fancy, shiny templates. It’s about following structural design best practices so that your email grabs people’s attention, even before they’ve opened it.

To improve open rates, click-through rates and, ultimately, increased engagement with your brand, the following items need your attention as you build your email marketing content.

Strong Email Subject Lines

Just as we all sift out the junk and flyers in our paper mailboxes, email subject lines determine in large part whether a message is even worth the time it takes to open. Be compelling, but also be clear. Focus on your value proposition and show your readers what to expect when they open your email – whether that’s a discount toward their next purchase or to learn about your organization’s latest research findings.

Relevant Preview Text

This is probably my biggest pet peeve, mainly because it’s easy to do well but is often overlooked. Preview text is content from within the email that you can see before you have opened it. It appears both on desktop and on mobile and is the next clue (after the subject line) for someone to know whether they should open your email or not. Don’t waste that space with automatic text such as, “This email may include images. To view in your browser, click here.” Jump on the opportunity to take another stab at grabbing their attention and relaying the objective of your ask.

Well-Structured Content

If you’ve gotten as far as getting your email opened, that’s great. It’s now more important than ever to keep your audience’s attention and interest. Avoid long, text-heavy emails that require so much scrolling that people forget what they were hoping to get out of them. As a follow-up from your subject line, clearly state your message, and be as brief as possible. You only have a couple seconds of their time. Long emails with lots and lots of text are not an effective way to communicate your message or inspire your readers to act.

Clear Calls To Action

Once you’ve mastered the art of catching someone’s attention and getting them to take those ten to fifteen seconds to read your email, make that next step as easy and obvious as possible: Use a clear call to action (CTA). Your email should ideally have only one of these. Too many emails try to do it all in one, e.g., wanting someone to register for an event and also read an interesting white paper. Once they’ve clicked out of your email, the chances are very small that they will come back for that second CTA. So focus on one, and make it easy for them to complete with a reasonably sized button. When in doubt, take the Goldilocks approach on the size question: Not too big (you’ll just annoy people), not too small (you don’t want them to miss it), but just right so they see it, understand it and click through.

The above items make up the fundamental pieces of your email. As a next step, A/B testing will help you optimize your approach – from testing the placement of your CTA buttons to the callouts you use to lure your audience in – as will your email analytics. No matter what, make sure you are covering your bases. From there you can then focus on optimizing your content to reach even more people.

By Christina Crawley

Director of marketing at Forum One, leading global marketing and outreach to the world’s most influential nonprofits and foundations.

Sourced from Forbes

In News

We are all trapped in the “Feed”

June 13, 2018 No Comments

By Om Malik

Every afternoon, during lunch, I open up YouTube, and I find myself marveling at the sheer dumbness of its recommendations. Despite having all this viewing data of mine, world’s second most popular search engine is dumb as a brick. It shows me propaganda channels from two ends of the political spectrum. It surfaces some inane celebrity videos. It dredges up the worst material for me — considering I usually like watch science videos, long conversations and interviews, and photography-focused educational videos.

YouTube, assumes that like its billion-plus audience I might be pleased with the lowest common denominator. And why pick on YouTube. It is the general state of the Internet. Another service which should now be able to understand the qualitative merits of a piece of information is Instagram. Instead of trying to surface new, exciting and artistic, it manages to surface the more predictable photos. If I like a few watch photos, it surfaces pictures of watches in my feed, even when they are not a primary interest. The algorithms lack a depth of understanding and context, despite knowing so much.

No matter where I go on the Internet, I feel like I am trapped in the “feed,” held down by algorithms that are like axes trying to make bespoke shirts out of silk. And no one illustrates it better than Facebook and Twitter, two more services that should know better, but they don’t. Fake news, unintelligent information and radically dumb statements are getting more attention than what matters. The likes, retweets, re-posts are nothing more than steroids for noise. Even when you are sarcastic in your retweets or re-shares, the system has the understanding of a one-year-old monkey baby: it is a vote on popularity.

Thumbs down, a feature that should have more adoption and utility, doesn’t work, because it doesn’t bring the dopamine rush of the like. I mean, to dislike something, you have to think. As a result, with every day that passes, the noise increases. What is essential, remains buried in the background, looking, seeking and praying for attention.

There are many reasons why feeds are closing in on us — the primary being that most of these companies have created systems that are mostly one size fits all solution, designed to serve the broadest set of users. Then they are layered with personalization algorithms that are rudimentary.

Whether it is Facebook or Twitter, they need to create a lowest common denominator, which keeps people hooked on their services. The more they are hooked, more opportunities to show them advertising and thus make more money. The entire system is designed to micro-dose us with dopamine, rewarding every action with another hit.

On top of that, there are fiscal pressures on algorithms. After all, those who encode these algorithms are human — flawed as you and me. They take orders from those who tell them to make these algorithms to bring in as much revenue as possible — to keep growing and keeping the Wall Street happy.

Whether we like or not, for now, advertising is the only accepted currency of the web. The modern Internet, thanks to the duopoly of Facebook and Google, has become an advertising-monetized attention economy. The core tenet of this philosophy: “most” attention is “more” valuable.

It is no different than the old media — most prominent magazines (Vogue, People, Time) got the highest CPM. Whatever was the biggest TV network got a premium for its audience size. And the biggest audience translates into the highest possible chance of return on advertising dollars – and as a result, it is hardly surprising that big spending ad-companies keeping going back to the big two.

Lost in the mists of Internet time, is the fact that it was Wired magazine’s HotWired came up with the idea of using banners for advertising. Wired was looking for something simple and expedient — something the advertising industry would be able to grok. In the old media world, more reach you had, more you could charge. You could argue that the “ad-banner” was Internet’s first deadly sin. As the web grew, no one searched for better ways to pay for information on the Internet. Instead, folks spent most of their creative energies to increase advertising dollars and built a big ecosystem around it. And Google and Facebook have created the best ad-delivery platforms, more significant than any TV network or magazine in the past.

Like old media before, today’s platforms at the core were designed to focus on the “most” and not the best. For instance, Google’s page rank system rewarded pages with most links. More popular you were, more you were rewarded. It is now forgotten, but search engine optimization (SEO) and manipulation was a way to get on the front page of Google. Since Google’s front page was the oil well of attention, no one was surprised when headlines were written for the attention of Google crawler.

Many have forgotten, but services like Digg helped popularize the idea of what I call intellectual spam. Headlines, followed by vapid content, meant to attract the likes. Against such a backdrop, a decade ago, we all assumed that the rise of the personal web, shaped by individual data would result in signals that will help us dampen the noise. We thought that our systems would get smarter, learning from our behavior, and we would be able to separate signal from noise. And this would allow us to focus our attention on the meaningful and essential.

Unfortunately, the reality of capitalism and turned that dream into a big giant popularity contest, shaped by crude tools – likes, hearts, retweets, and re-shares. We have created systems that boost noise and weaken signals. Every time I tune into news and all I see is noise rising to the top. Whether it is YouTube or Instagram — all you see are memes that are candy-colored candy, mean to keep us hooked.

The question then is who will save us from the feed? It has to be someone whose principal business is not monetizing their customers by selling their data and advertising. For now, I think Apple is one of the companies which can do something about this. Apple News is a credible application, but it needs to embrace the web and become more open. But I will take what I can get – at least it is not showing me some dumb videos and articles that only make my doctors richer!

Photo by Priscillia du Preez, via Unsplash

By Om Malik

Sourced from OM

In News

It’s Time For Agencies To Leverage The Power Of Voice

June 12, 2018 No Comments

By Taylor Bennett

Imagine landing on a brand’s website and, instead of scrolling through pages of content digging for information, you have the ability to ask it anything you want to know. The site responds with audible answers or text, takes you where you want to go and provides a 100% interactive experience. Now imagine the site speaks in the voice of the brand, adding elements that create an emotional connection. Humor, sincerity, knowledge — whatever the brand personality is, the site will speak it.

This scenario is no longer just a figment of our imaginations. According to the Pew Research Center, digital voice assistants are used by 46% of Americans. And it’s safe to say that, by now, we have all at least had an interaction with voice or artificial intelligence technology. How is this evolution impacting the ability of agencies to develop brands and communicate them on behalf of their clients?

Taking Brand Personification A Step Further

IBM, Microsoft, Amazon and smaller technology partners recognize the importance of brand personification — in addition to giving their bots custom names, each voice bot has a personality. Today, these tech companies are enabling commercial marketing agencies to gain access to the tools to distinctly personify their clients’ brands through voice. Why? Based on my experience, personifying a brand and giving it human qualities will facilitate a better connection with the company — ultimately leading to a dialogue and the creation of a loyal relationship.

With this in mind, agencies are coupling their expertise in building brands from the inside out (connecting with a company’s values, goals and customers) with experts in the field of technology to present not only how brands should be communicated but how the brand can actually communicate.

The difference is that, instead of developing copy and content intended to be read or seen (on websites, billboards, brochures, etc.), agencies are crafting conversational content by anticipating what the viewer or listener will want to know or see. The beauty of voice technology is that it learns from each interaction and becomes smarter and more resourceful, ultimately developing content on its own. As a result, customers begin to understand who the brand is instead of what the brand is, and agencies can formulate even more effective marketing strategies and values around it.

Time To Get On Board

Like all technology, voice is growing at a rapid pace — and I believe it’s a must-have technology in the new digital age of branding. In October 2017, our company MESH, along with software development firm Not Rocket Science (NRS), announced the creation of Branded BotsTM, artificial intelligence (AI) applications for businesses and consumers. Our bot solutions provide a natural language interface between a business and its customers, an interface that not only provides an efficient and knowledgeable presence to represent the business but also operates within the framework of the existing brand personality. The bot technology allows us to continue to develop streamlined external communications for customers, giving them data and information on the company with a dose of the brand’s personality. By building back-end intelligence, essentially, a virtual person is created — providing a consistent channel from which to get information.

Global companies are getting on board with this idea. In fact, Publicis Groupe announced a partnership with Microsoft for Marcel and in January 2018, JPMorgan Chase announced a partnership with VaynerMedia as the institution’s agency of record for voice.

For brands and marketers looking to incorporate voice in their engagement strategy, consider the preferred effect it should have on the business — from internal benefits, such as streamlining operations through software integration, to augmentation of the workforce. For example, the bot MESH is developing for our agency focuses on software integration and operations, linking together our project management, time tracking and CRM systems. Voice can also be impactful externally, enhancing consumers’ encounters with a brand, sharing information and updates with a dose of personality.

After the effect of voice is determined, a marketer needs to determine how audiences will interact with voice technology, with most interacting similarly to how they interact with Alexa Skills in their home. They will search for answers and updates, however, the engagement and content provided will be centered around the brand and the products, and the industry and services of the organization.

Lastly, a brand must determine where voice will be most effective — which is centered around a consumer or business-to-business (B2B) client developing a deeper engagement and relationship with the brand. The bot acts as a consultant to the customer, with content that is not created to sell, but instead to inform, educate and give a glimpse of the brand personality through the tone of the voice. Additionally, marketers today are (and should be) analyzing all brand engagement, which is especially helpful for voice technology as it can learn through interaction, analyze itself and fill in the blanks to information it might not have had but will need in the future.

Voice and AI are more than new media — they are media that brands and agencies alike must leverage to not only be successful but also relevant in the years to come.

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock

By Taylor Bennett

CEO and Chief Creative Director at MESH, a 15+ year award winning creative and strategic agency serving Fortune 500’s to smart start ups.

Sourced from Forbes

In News

Why The Guardian believes its app can convert avid readers into paying subscribers

June 12, 2018 No Comments

By Ian Burrell

The Guardian is developing a two-tier digital model aimed at driving thousands of its most avid readers who currently do not pay for its journalism towards an enhanced and increasingly distinct service for which they will pay a monthly fee.

The strategy, set out to The Drum by Caspar Llewellyn Smith, editor of The Guardian’s digital platforms, will enable the publisher to continue its tradition of open publishing, and will rely on offering a superior user experience, rather than putting any content behind a paywall.

The plan is focused on The Guardian’s premium app, which costs £5.99 per month ($6.99 in the US). The platform introduced two new features last week, ‘Live’ and ‘Discover’, offering new ways to consume the title’s news stories and its longer reads. Neither service – regarded internally as The Guardian’s equivalent to Twitter and Instagram – is currently available to users of the free Guardian app.

The Guardian will re-position the premium app in September with the introduction of a range of new features. This will be backed by a marketing campaign aimed at transitioning more of the Guardian’s global audience of 150 million monthly browsers to paying users.

“In the autumn we will be thinking about how we get people to move from being just web users into the app and then maybe moving them on to becoming premium app users,” says Llewellyn Smith. As part of the strategy, a live sports feed will be introduced in the premium app in time for next month’s World Cup.

He says that less than 10% of the Guardian’s 2.7 million app users are currently paying for the premier service. “With the app, frankly the big metric is how many people are going to start paying for it,” he explains.

A changing product

In time, The Guardian’s paid app service and its website could look quite different.

“It depends on how much money it makes,” says Llewellyn Smith. “Does the app begin to develop a slightly different identity from the website and the two start to serve slightly different audiences? Hitherto they have been essentially the same thing. [Is] this is an audience that we know better and are there some bits of our journalism that they might be more interested in than the general reader of the website?”

Since mid-January when it relaunched its print paper in tabloid format, The Guardian has been focusing hard on its app audience, which engages with content on average 2.1 times a day, compared to 1.3 for mobile web readers. Almost half the app audience is in the UK (41%), with 14% in the US, 7% in Australia and 38% in the rest of the world.

The strategy dovetails with the Guardian’s donations policy, introduced in dire financial straits in 2016, whereby it requests financial help from readers in support of its open publishing model; a ploy which, The Drum revealed, has seen 800,000 donors, subscribers and members hand over cash.

Llewellyn Smith says that number has grown “significantly” in the past seven months. Campaigning investigative stories on the data firm Cambridge Analytica and the scandalous treatment of children of the Windrush immigrants, and in-depth coverage of the gender pay gap in British business, have delivered spikes in donations.

“The pleasing news for Guardian journalists is that the journalism that we feel proudest of and feel that we are here to produce is the stuff that motivates people to pay,” he says.

Supporters, not members

Guardian News and Media, which publishes The Guardian and The Observer, reported losses of £19m for the year to the end of March 2018, meaning it is ahead of its targets to break even by next April. The company has not been in the black since 1998 but Llewellyn Smith, who is also The Guardian’s head of culture, looks forward to the day when it has profits to reinvest in journalism.

The Guardian’s Scott Trust ownership structure has meant it has always been unique in news publishing but its reader relationship model is increasingly distinct from that of rivals. While the concept of ‘membership’ is taking hold in the news industry, Llewellyn Smith says The Guardian, which once embraced that terminology, is now “retiring that language around membership” in preference for using the word ‘supporter’.

While publishers with paywalls market their subscription offerings as transactions that give exclusive access, there is an altruistic element in The Guardian’s pitch to supporters. “We are just thinking how can we make those super loyal readers love the product even more, but clearly we are at the same time saying to them that by paying you are helping to keep the rest of it free for other people,” he says.

Readers can be ‘supporters’ by making recurring donations or buying the paper, but signing up for the premium app will be marketed as “the best way you can read the Guardian”, he explains, while adding that all forms of financial backing from users are welcome.

Digital focus

The Guardian’s app strategy is helped by its continued focus on digital innovation, aided by its new £42m GMG Ventures venture capital project, which in turn is supported from the paper’s endowment fund. Investments have been made in ten startups, including those developing technology tools for journalism in areas such as block chain, artificial intelligence and big data. Some of these startups are working outside of media but have valuable specialisms ranging from customer experience expertise to online learning and recruitment innovation, including diversity concepts.

GMG Ventures, says Llewellyn Smith, has enabled The Guardian to appraise itself of latest insights in areas such as text to voice technology and the use of augmented reality, even at a time when the wider business has been heavily cutting costs. “We are seeing some incredibly interesting companies and it’s helping expose people like me and the digital teams to huge amounts of innovation.”

Some of this learning will appear in the paid app.

Llewellyn Smith says the premium app is but one piece of the Guardian’s “bigger jigsaw”. Its website home page remains “an incredibly powerful tool for us”, he says.

The Guardian is becoming less reliant on social media and has substantially changed its relationship with Facebook, which now accounts for less than 5% of the title’s digital traffic, a number that is continuing to fall following the paper’s abandonment of Facebook’s Instant Articles service last April.

The distancing from Facebook follows a stinging 2016 essay from Guardian editor-in-chief Katharine Viner, headlined ‘How Technology Disrupted the Truth’. In the op-ed, she outlined Facebook’s power over news and “the panic” among publishers over changes to its algorithm.

Llewellyn Smith reveals that The Guardian has now scrapped the Facebook Messenger-based Guardian Chatbot project it launched in November 2016 when the social platform was promoting chatbots as the new big thing. “We’re constantly trying things out,” he says. “After running it since late 2016 we made the decision to close our chatbot to focus more on engaging readers on our own platforms but we’ll continue to experiment in this area in line with our readers’ changing habits.”

With The Guardian still needing to spend with caution, he must identify technology that improves user experience rather than embracing fads. “We have got to be absolutely focused on the task in hand: trying to get to the point of break-even,” he says. “I’m much more interested in finding different ways of telling stories in the service of our readers than plucking the latest thing out of the air and saying everyone is talking about this.”

The Guardian has built a new in-house investigations tool, which is currently being deployed in several editorial projects. It experimented with virtual reality in the film ‘6×9’, which graphically demonstrated life in solitary confinement in the US prison system.

One week into the new changes to the paid app, Llewellyn Smith is “pretty pleased” with the initial response. Live is a rolling feed of every breaking news story as it happens. Discover is a deeper dive into pieces of analysis, reportage and indulgences such food recipes.

“The numbers of people using those two screens [Live and Discover] are pretty healthy,” he says. “Where we go next with them is interesting and I think maybe that click through on the Discover screen could be higher and that [could be] the area where you might think about some light degree of personalisation.”

It’s another indication of the Guardian’s digital audience splitting into two groups.

Much has been written about the bubble effect of social media algorithms and Llewellyn Smith says the Guardian would be “very hesitant” about personalising news content. But some users might appreciate a filtering out of sports content, or a more bespoke recipe service in their Discover feed.

“Maybe you only look at the vegetarian recipes because you are a good Guardian person, or – if you are a real Guardian reader – only the vegan ones, so we stop showing you Nigel Slater’s meat feast,” he jokes. “There are low levels of personalisation around features journalism that will be interesting to explore.”

Some Guardian stereotypes are real. When the paid app’s new Twitter-style Live feed was unveiled internally one admonishing member of the technology desk warned that the product could have an addictive quality and that the Guardian had criticised tech companies for seeking such user dependency. “It completely floored me,” says Llewellyn Smith. “I’d like to think that people would become addicted to The Guardian’s journalism.

“It’s only at The Guardian you would have got that question.”

By Ian Burrell

Covering the most powerful media companies to the smartest startups, former Independent media editor Ian Burrell examines the fraught problem of how news is funded today. Follow Ian @iburrell.

Sourced from THEDRUM

In Uncategorized

Here’s how advertisers can navigate their way out of the programmatic maze

June 11, 2018 No Comments

By Ronan Shields

Marketers willing to undergo the complex process of taking their online ad spend in-house must prepare to unravel the complex web of contractual relationships, but potentially stand to benefit their wider operation’s financial health.

That’s the conclusion of a recent report by programmatic consultancy Labmatik which notes that the current in-house movement has been driven by a quest for improved operational efficiencies through decisions made outside of a marketing department.

“Too many programmatic marketers are suffering from unaccounted working media inefficiency, suboptimal operating models, and lack management systems to capture the purported benefits,” reads a note.

“Given the billions spent on programmatic ads, we hypothesized by asking: What do these nagging shortcomings cost the shareholders of big budget advertisers?”

In particular tier-one advertisers stand to gain from such audits, with Labmatik’s study using several big-spending advertisers such as Coca-Cola, General Motors plus Procter & Gamble as potential models for the success of such an exercise.

In a report foreword, Ari Paparo, Beeswax, chief executive officer, discusses how the wastage in the programmatic landscape is “being arbitraged out” as the market now enters “the transparency era”.

“It isn’t easy work. Driving out inefficiencies from your programmatic supply chain will probably take as much time as improving bid strategies, but both outcomes add value together,” he notes.

Tom Triscari, Labmatik, managing partner, says although the process of auditing a media supply chain is not without its pain points to ensure that their ad spend goes on actual working media, as opposed to otherwise anonymous third-parties, is a big win-win (see chart).

“Working media, for most large advertisers, is likely lower than most marketers know, have been told or want to believe,” he notes. “The second is because fixing the problem areas is easier than most marketers know, have been told or want to believe.”

The report reads: “We believe when advertisers convert their current supply chain into a unique proprietary system, they can deliver material incremental value to shareholders.”

In the study, Labmatik outlines a technique called “programmatic resource planning” as a means of better accounting for how their media budgets are allocated (see chart below).

As marketers embark on such a project, they also need to embark on a project of “programmatic cost accounting” it is also important to establish baseline measurements in order to calculate potential future savings. For this to be done successfully, it is important to decide which breakpoint to deploy and communicate to their stakeholders. These include:

Media budget
Available media budget (AMB)
Working media before arbitrage, supply and quality costs (WMBASQ)
Working media before supply and quality Costs (WMBSQ)
Working media before quality costs (WMBQ)
Fully-loaded working media (FLWM)

From here marketers should ask themselves some key questions, namely: how do I grow my spend, and how much by?

“From a pure programmatic accounting perspective, which is such an important subject matter for marketers and finance chiefs to understand together, the question becomes: Today I get some amount of reach or conversions with low working media,” says Triscari.

“If I manage to increase my working media by fixing my programmatic supply chain, I can now buy the same reach or conversions as before but with less media budget. What should I do with the cash difference? Keep spending the same as before or put the savings on the bottom line or somewhere in between?”

From here there are a number of potential operations models advertisers can choose to pursue (see chart).

After programmatic working media has been baselined, and the marketer has set a future working media goal aligned to an appropriate operating model, real cash savings can be calculated and captured. However, it is critical to note an important distinction between working media gains and real cash savings.

“For example, it is one thing to grow working media efficiency but still spend the same ad budget as before. It is another to treat the new efficiency as a way to reduce ad budget and pocket the surplus value creation,” reads the report.

The report goes on to document how advertisers can model their savings over a five-year period, and how that could potentially affect a large corporation’s bottom line.

The report contains an epilogue penned by Andrew Altersohn, AdFin, chief executive officer, it reads: “The path to improvement is through financial discipline and supply chain management.

“Marketers must now think like supply chain managers and assess the financial cost and benefits of each player, partner, tool, and technology.”

For a full free copy of Labmatik’s report click here

Feature Image: Successfully auditing a programmatic supply chain can result in tangible cost benefits for large corporations. / Pixabay

By Ronan Shields

Sourced from THEDRUM

In News

4 Top Small Business Dashboards That Will Help You Succeed

June 11, 2018 No Comments

By Lilach Bullock

As an SME, you need all the help you can get. The resources available to you are never enough, and time is limited, so you need to be able to make the most out of each of your resources.

In this post, I’m going to share four top small business dashboards that will help you succeed.

It’s a great era for small businesses – while it’s true that the competition is fiercer than ever, because there are more opportunities than ever, it’s also true that we now have access to an incredible array of business tools – from accounting to marketing and anything else in between.

These are now more accessible than ever, some are even completely free, and each is designed to help you save time, improve your results, be more productive, and perform all kinds of tasks that you can’t do yourself.

So as a small business owner, I believe it’s very important to future success to focus some time on finding the right tools for your business, on trying to identify what types of tools are needed and then trying to find the right solutions based on these needs.

Because otherwise, you’re most likely going to lose time and resources unnecessarily – but most importantly, you’re going to lose opportunities. Opportunities which your competitors might be on to.

Check out these tools.

9 Spokes

9 Spokes is not just a (free) business dashboard, it’s also a great way to discover new useful business tools.

The concept is very straightforward – the tool enables you to connect all of your business tools so that you can track them all in one dashboard.

You’ll be able to track pretty much any business data that you’re interested in, such as:

Your employees and their schedule
Your accounting: anything from how much cash you currently have on hand, what you owe and to whom, and how much you owe in taxes
Your website analytics
Your social media ROI, analytics, and engagement
An overview of your sales and profits
Your products and inventory information

And these are just a few – depending on what tools you use, and what data matters to you, you can customize your dashboard to your liking, with tools from nine different categories:

And this is where it gets even more exciting, because apart from using 9 Spokes as a business dashboard, it also gives you access to a huge library of business tools within these nine categories, all of which can be connected to your dashboard.

But what’s really great about 9 Spokes, in my opinion, is that you get to build your dashboard just as you want. You can use the tools you trust, and find new ones that can help, and completely make it your own, while still getting a complete overview of your entire business.

As for integrations, there are various different apps and tools that can be connected, in all nine categories (mentioned earlier). There’s a range of well-known options here, including Shopify, MailChimp, any major social network, Google Analytics, the Office 365 suite, and many, many others.

Cyfe

Cyfe is another business dashboard which enables you to monitor pretty much anything regarding your business, with a big focus on analytics.

Within Cyfe’s dashboard, you’re able to monitor almost anything that has to do with your business – for example, see, at a glance, how many new app downloads there have been, who has mentioned you on social media, how your clients are faring online, how much traffic your website is getting, and much, much more.

It’s a highly powerful tool, and one that delivers business intelligence and monitors data and activity in a variety of categories, like sales and finance, project management, social media and other marketing strategies, web analytics, and client information.

To get even more out of your business dashboard, you can set up goals for yourself so you can evaluate your success more effectively, and find out where you need to focus so you can improve and grow as a business.

Zoho One

Zoho One is a great tool for connecting all of your employees under one dashboard – but more importantly, it’s also a tool where you can connect all of your important business data: sales, marketing, accounting, CRM and customer support, HR, and more.

The platform has over 40 different integrated apps which you can leverage for your business, as well as 40+ apps that you can use on your mobile device for decisions on the go.

And not only is it a business dashboard for monitoring your data and analytics, but it can also be used to take action and run your business. For example, you can manage your email marketing campaigns, take surveys, build lead generation flows and customer engagement forms, and collaborate with your various teams on different projects, among others.

Geckoboard

Geckoboard is built for teams who use all kinds of different tools to manage their business. The platform helps connect these apps, enabling you to view all of your important data in one place, and you can even build dashboards depending on each persons’ needs, so everyone can focus on the data, tasks, and objectives that matter to them most.

For example, you can create a dashboard for the CEO with a focus on revenue and revenue growth, a dashboard for salespeople and their managers where you can track revenue, conversion rates, and an overview of the sales reps’ activity, and so on. There are numerous possibilities for almost anyone on your team.

In terms of integrations, Geckoboard can pull information and data from over 60 different apps and tools in all kinds of categories, including Instagram, Twitter, and other popular social networks for your social media marketing, Salesforce for sales and finance, Mailchimp for email marketing, and Google Analytics for, of course, web analytics.

Conclusion

Business dashboards can be extremely valuable tools because they enable you to see the entire status of your business at one glance, which then helps you grow your small business faster.

Hopefully these tools get you thinking about the potential for your business, and provide assistance in choosing which is right for you.

By Lilach Bullock

Follow Lilach Bullock on Twitter

Sourced from Social Media Today

In News

The designer’s guide to using images more effectively

June 11, 2018 No Comments

By Nick Carson

Get more from imagery in your design work with our essential advice, covering graphic design, web design, apps and more…

Images are an integral part of the design process, and when it comes to selecting them and using them in a project, it’s important to make the right choices: one of them speaks 1,000 words, after all.

So whether you’re art directing an on-location photoshoot for a glamorous ad campaign, or searching a stock image library for the perfect visual asset for an email newsletter, you should still apply a discerning eye and not settle.

While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach, there are a few key dos and don’ts for using images in your design projects – and some hard and fast rules for using them for different purposes, from catching attention to making the hard sell.

Read on for our essential guide to using images more effectively in your design work. We will continue to add to this collection with more tips and advice each month…

01. How to use images in graphic design

5 ways to create better brand imagery
Five brands that have mastered the art of creating powerful brand imagery, and what you can learn from them. Featuring First Direct, Aizone, London Symphony Orchestra, Apprenticeships and D&AD.

Use images more effectively in editorial design
Improve your editorial design work with these expert tips, which include: letting the content lead the design, using photography more creatively, telling stories with illustration, not being afraid to go big, and cropping images in a dynamic way.

5 reasons to use photography in your designs
Why you should choose photography for your next design project: you’re looking for realism, you’re showing something specific, you want wow factor, you need a visual metaphor, or you have the budget to do it properly.

5 reasons to use illustration in your designs
Why you should choose illustration for your next design project: you want to express something abstract, the subject is too ambitious to photograph, you want to tell a story, you have some data to visualise, or a particular style is required.

02. How to use images in digital design

Use imagery more effectively in app design
Select the perfect visual assets for more engaging, user-friendly apps. Advice includes optimising for HD screens, making savvy use of animation, paring back to basics, keeping all UI elements consistent and designing with touch in mind.

How to create a killer social media campaign
Five pro tips to use images more effectively in branded social posts, including: tailoring images to different platforms, having a clear goal in mind, considering why people will share it, picking images that tell a story, and designing for short attention spans.

Use images more effectively in digital ad campaigns
Pick the perfect assets to create engaging online ads. Advice includes knowing your ad formats, picking a single message, choosing one killer image, cropping images more dynamically, and emphasising the call to action.

Use images more effectively in web design
Pick the perfect visual assets for any frontend design task: source the perfect hero image, consider different crop sizes and ratios, curate assets for an online shop, choose images for UI elements and icons, and find editorial images for pages.

03. How to source the best images

4 tasks that stock imagery makes easier
Make your stock assets work harder, and your life easier, on common tasks such as sourcing supplementary photography for a brochure, adding depth and texture to your artwork, and developing UI elements for a digital design.

5 stock image uses you may not have thought of
Pro designers do use stock libraries – and in clever ways, too. These include social media campaigns; moodboards and presentations; mockups, wireframes and prototypes; email newsletters; and just for general inspiration.

Find unusual images for your design projects
Stuck for a visual idea? Here are some places that can help, including stock image libraries, The British Library, SpaceX, Jay Mantri, Realistic Shots, Life of Pix and PicJumbo.

By Nick Carson

Sourced from CREATIVE BLOQ

In News

Every Business Has an Origin Story: A Lesson in Branding

June 8, 2018 No Comments

By Michael Ventura

“We’ve lost our way.”

I’ve heard this from clients countless times. And it’s no wonder people are saying this: today’s businesses have to evolve very quickly because employees rarely stay in one job for their whole careers and technology is growing so fast that it’s a constant battle to keep up with the next new thing. The stress can be overwhelming. I went through it myself at a time before Sub Rosa was what it is today.

Often the best way we inspire our clients for the future is when we connect them to the most indigenous part of themselves, to understanding why they were founded and why they are still here.

We help them reconnect by exploring their:

• Origin story: How it all began.

• Language: Your shared lexicon.

• Traditions: How you engage your community and acknowledge milestones.

• Purpose: Your reason for being.

Think about it: these are the building blocks of every thriving community. Whether in a tribe, a religion, or a corporation, these four building blocks are what provide meaning and create the connective tissue that forms a lasting foundation from which to grow.

A Tradition In Denim

At a meeting with a Levi’s executive, he told us that the company had missed a major opportunity by not participating in the “premium denim boom,” and it was now suffering both reputational and financial challenges. The “premium denim boom” had occurred when a number of high-fashion brands entered the market and began selling $200-plus pairs of jeans. During that time, Levi’s had maintained its traditional price point of around $39, and as a result, its jeans had acquired a low-end reputation and were considered less chic and no longer fashionable. The company was experiencing a significant sales slump.

We had been involved in a similar conversation not too long before with Absolut Vodka, whose management felt the company had missed out on the “premium vodka boom.” Apparently this premium boom was a phenomenon in a number of sectors. In the 1980s, Absolut was a top-shelf vodka. But in the 1990s, competitive vodka brands such as Grey Goose and Ketel One came onto the market with a more premium-priced product.

Absolut, like Levi’s, had stuck to its price point and dropped to a midtier status, losing market share to the new entrants. Ultimately Absolut found a way out of this by creating its own specialty, limited-edition lines, such as Absolut Brooklyn, created in partnership with Spike Lee, and premium-crafted versions such as Absolut Elyx, which was sourced and distilled in a manner designed to compete with other premium vodkas.

Levi’s needed a strategy to help it overcome a similar challenge. They had hired Wieden + Kennedy, a wellknown and successful advertising agency, to help rejuvenate the brand. Their campaign, which would later be known as “Go forth,” was being shot by a famous fashion photographer, and it would draw on inspirational imagery and language from well-known American authors such as Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac. It would depict a new era of American nostalgia, and it was sure to capture attention. Levi’s wanted our help in turning that attention into action.

Our job was to make sure that once they had people’s attention, there would be have something to act upon and a real reason to care about the brand. This is the sort of integrated, complex challenge we love to solve, and we first began by focusing on the brand as we knew it. The company made denim and sold jeans (primarily) at a modest price point. They had once been the jeans of Marlon Brando and Steve McQueen and later the jeans of rock stars from the Rolling Stones to the Ramones. But somehow the company had lost its grip. We asked what had come before Brando and Jagger? Levi’s had begun making jeans in 1853. What had the company stood for then, and what was its origin story?

It’s fairly common knowledge that Levi Strauss & Company started out as a brand of pioneers. The men who had set out for the gold hiding in the uncharted lands of California during the famous Gold Rush of 1849 were known as the 49ers, and they had taken a big gamble, often risking life or death, to try to strike it rich. Those tough men needed tough jeans, and that’s what Levi Strauss produced. They had reinforced stitches and held up during hard work.

Over the coming decades, Levi’s rugged jeans continued to be a staple of the hardscrabble masses. Factory workers, laborers, farmers, and all manner of builders and fixers wore Levi’s as they headed out to work. They were the jeans that helped build America. We had to tell the story in a way that would ignite a newfound interest in the hearts and minds of new consumers and (hopefully) would bring back some customers the brand had lost along the way.

Panning for Gold

We asked ourselves, “Who are our modern-day pioneers?” After all, we’re not settling the West anymore, and many hard-labor jobs have since been shipped overseas. We wanted to find people who were embodying that spirit of progress and hard work and pull them into a new conversation, one that celebrated their sense of craft, of making things, of the integrity that comes from doing that kind of work well.

After a few weeks of development, we had created a program we called Levi’s Workshops and sent it off to Erik and his team. We admitted that what we were giving them was “only 75 percent of the plan.” The rest would have to be left open to serendipity. We knew we were going into the unknown, like the gold panners of the nineteenth century, and similarly we knew something about what we’d find but not everything. Like any good prospector, we knew to leave room for the unexpected. After all, you never know where you might strike it rich.

Together, our two teams became one unit. It didn’t take long for us to develop a working and speaking lingo, a kind of shorthand. When we said “pioneer,” we weren’t thinking of a grizzled old prospector chewing tobacco and swilling whiskey, we were imagining today’s artists, craftspeople, designers, teachers, and builders. When we said, “Go forth,” we knew we were looking for the spirit of adventure and discovery we wanted people to feel when they interacted with the brand. This shared language was built upon the origins of the brand, yet it was contemporized and translated for today. It drew our own teams closer together and became contagious throughout Levi’s organization.

Within months we were ready to open our first Levi’s Workshop in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District, which was chosen because the neighborhood was thriving with diversity and craft. It felt like a pioneer town for new ideas.

The programming was built on collaborations with “pioneers” from the Bay Area. Right down the street from us, the writer Dave Eggers had opened his first whimsical tutoring location (themed as a pirate shop), where volunteers taught kids the value of creative writing. We partnered with them and paired the kids’ writing with artists who created original artwork for their stories. The kids got to watch the books being printed in the shop, and they were dazzled as they flipped through a book that had come to life from their story.

We brought in Alice Waters, a pioneer of California cuisine, and designed a beautiful letterpress harvest calendar that supported the work of her charity, the Edible Schoolyard Project. She hosted a small dinner in the space and signed copies for us to sell at auction, with the proceeds benefiting her cause as well as the Levi Strauss Foundation, the company’s charitable organization.

Not only did each project bring into the workshop a compelling pioneer to help create programming, but every piece of programming was designed to reach different subcultures and niche audiences in the Bay Area with authenticity.

These new traditions we were creating for the brand were building on Levi’s legacy of engaging with powerful subcultures. From gold-panning pioneers to punks on the Bowery, Levi’s has always been the uniform of the brave and status quo challenging. We built programming for the literary community, musicians, foodies, inner-city youths, and more. If you were willing to “Go forth” and try something different, we wanted you to know that Levi’s was with you.

Our work with Levi’s showed us the value of looking back to a brand’s indigenous roots and bringing thoughtful inspiration and wisdom into the present. Admittedly not every company has a brand that is more than a hundred years old, but every business does have an origin story.

By [email protected] (Michael Ventura)

Sourced from FLIPBOARD