Podcasting is awesome, at least in my experience it is.  But there are some problems surfacing as everyone tries to figure out the best business models for monetizing them.  Now me, I’m so smart I don’t have ads or monetize at all so I got nothin.  But one issue is how do you make an ad that’s inserted into a podcast relevant for people who don’t discover it until much, much later?  How do you make ads evergreen?  Well, you don’t.  You have to be able to switch them out, even in your archived episodes.  Slate’s podcast biz Panoply thinks they’ve figured it out.  They’re launching Megaphone, which used to be Audiometric when they first bought the technology from a couple of Aussie brothers last summer.  Podcasters have ad challenges.  Jeremy Barr writes it can do one-click ad insertion, geo-targeting to specific podcast consumers, and A/B testing.  And yes, Panoply Chief Content Officer Andy Bowers says it’ll put new ads in back episodes.  Director of product Joel Withrow says they’re trying to give advertisers live access to a podcast campaigns progress report as soon as Q2, which will facilitate metrics beyond just download totals.

 

I can’t see what your face is doing while you listen to this podcast but if I could, I’d probably get a better idea of what you really think about it.  The BBC feels the same way, so they had their Storyworks content marketing arm test consumers’ “subconscious reactions” to content on BBC.com using facial coding and recognition.   Sarah Homewood writes in AdNews faces were recorded every second and coded into 6 emotions: sadness, puzzlement, happiness, fear, rejection and surprise.  Sounds like that Disney movie “Inside Out” to me.  BBC Worldwide’s SVP Alistair McEwan thinks there hasn’t been enough evidence to show if people really enjoy content marketing so this face thing is good.  Okay what’d they learn?  63% think content-led marketing is an innovative way for advertisers to reach people.  And 64% are happy to read content-led marketing if it’s clear which brand it’s from and if it’s clearly labeled.  Unless these people are so good at lying their faces can lie.

 

I hesitate to say this considering that some of you brands are still debating whether or not it’s worth it to create blog posts on a regular basis, but there’s a whole new medium shaping up now, and that, of course, is virtual reality.  Samsung makes the Gear VR headset so it’s become clear to them now they have to also make sure really cool content gets made for it.  So they’re opening a VR studio in NY to do just that.  Well Richard Trenholm reports that actually they’re putting it inside some existing office space of theirs where some marketing functions are.  Samsung USA’s CMO Marc Mathieu says that’ll work because marketing will be right there to promote what gets made.  The announcement was made at Sundance, which worked out all nice and tidy because they also announced a year-long partnership with the Sundance Institute to foster creative talent.

 

Okay, nobody’s saying a company shouldn’t try to make money.  But sometimes you can get so eager to do that, well, your customers can’t help but notice.  Instagram isn’t trying to be sneaky, they said back in June they were going to serve up more ads.  In August they put out an ads API so 3^rd parties could sell ads for them.  So just how many more ads have been added?  Kurt Wagner writes that it’s kinda hard to tell since Facebook doesn’t break out the Instagram numbers.  But one of Instagram’s ad partners, Brand Networks, let a little bit of the cat out of the bag.  They alone served up 50M ad impressions in August, then 100M in September, then 670M in December.  If you left your abacus at home, that’s a 13x increase in 5 months.  Now what I would have thought is that this explosion of ad inventory would drive down value.  I’d be wrong.  Cost per thousand stayed about the same.  More ads, same price.  You people must REALLY love Instagram.

 

What are we content marketers always saying?  Great content will increase brand affinity, deepen relationships and make customers more loyal.  But why are people so loyal to the brands they get attached to?  Why am I a Coke guy who gets genuinely upset when restaurants sell Pepsi products?  Matthew Foster reports that International telecom provider Toll Free Forwarding surveyed US consumers and 75% of them think you brands could be doing a much better job of winning and holding their loyalty, and here’s how you can.  Have values and be an accountable corporate citizen.  Be available on social for great customer service.  Tap into nostalgia, if your brand has a long history, use it.  Build trust with useful expertise.  And the #1 loyalty driver cited by respondents, treat customers right and special with discounts and offers.  If they feel they’re getting a deal for their loyalty, why go anywhere else?

 

Um, anybody know what’s going on over at Twitter?  Several senior executives are making use of the exit door at the same time.  That includes SVP of Product Kevin Weil, SVP of Engineering Alex Roetter, VP of Global Media Katie Stanton, and VP of Human Resources Brian “Skip” Schipper.  Stanton and Weil said it’s so they can spend more time with their families.  Ah but wait, we’re not done.  Vine chief Jason Toff is also leaving.  He’s headed over to Google to work on their new virtual reality stuff.  So there’s all that, plus rumors Jack Dorsey will be dealing with turnover in the board of directors next quarter, plus rumors of a sale based on the fact the stock price recently sank well under the offering price.

 

Skyword did a study, as it is wont to do, this time about content marketing staffing at enterprise companies.  Ayaz Nanji reports the results.  27% of said companies developed a global content strategy last year, and a lot of them now have at least one employee who does nothing but oversee content creation.  1/3 of them put an editorial manager in the marketing department, and 28% have what they call a content marketer.  Most on staff content marketing leaders got hired between 2012 and 2014, and 82% of those lucky folk came from a media background.  And no, binge watching Netflix does not count as a media background.  Anything going on outside of marketing departments?  Uh, yeah.  2% say almost all employees at their company produce some kind of content.  I bet they’re counting PowerPoints.

 

Platforms platforms, who doesn’t love a platform?  Investors sure like them because business video platform Vidyard just scored a $35M round of funding bringing their total to $60.7M.  But since it’s so uncouth to talk about money, we’ll talk about what they plan to do with it.  Stewart Rogers talked to cofounder Michael Litt, who says to keep the growth going, it’ll go to marketing, sales, and customer experience.  Also he says phooey on vanity metrics.  He didn’t say phooey but his point is you’ve got to go beyond tracking clicks and downloads.  They try to get to intent data and turn it into actionable insights.  And by the way, video now makes up 64% of all Internet traffic and Cisco thinks it’ll be 80% by 2019.

 

I’m going to try to get you to do something at the end of this podcast.  That’s called a call to action.  And lucky me, Danielle Bilbruck just wrote some of the more tried and tested ones for Kapost.  “Reserve your spot now—space is limited!” can stop people from not pre-ordering.  “Download our eBook for more information” is fine but that gated info better be really good.  “Claim your offer while supplies last!” again creates a sense of limitation and urgency, as does “Use your discount before it expires!”  “For more tips, join our email list” promises additional value, that you better deliver on.  And “To see the rest of our blog, visit our website” is a good ol’ tease tactic where you show them maybe the first paragraph.

 

Ad bots are the traffic that never really was, and they hurt everybody because legitimacy, accuracy, it all goes out the window.  Rande Price reports what is actually good news, fraud overall hasn’t really changed much since last year but when you take into consideration that digital ad spend should grow 15%, the total loss to advertisers could go up to $7.2B this year.  That’s what the Association of National Advertisers says.  And some things were more vulnerable to ad fraud than others, like the higher the cost-per-thousand impressions, the more vulnerable to fraud traffic.  Programmatic ad buys, especially video, had more bots than average.  Programmatic buys with Hispanics as the target were almost twice as likely to pull bot traffic.  And those getting traffic through 3rd parties were exposed to a higher level of sophisticated bots.  ANA advice for marketers includes maybe state in insertion orders you won’t pay for fraudulent impressions.

 

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