If I had to get a bunch of people drunk and arguing about one topic, I think that topic might be ad blocking.  Is it fair?  Is it empowering?  Is it good or bad?  Sending us in right or wrong directions?  Johnny Ryan of PageFair and Digital Content Next talked about it and came out with some ways marketers should deal with the ad blocking risk.  Users should be able to reject or complain about ads to marketers in real time so brands can get better at the experience and be forced into better creative.  Publishers should offer fewer but better ads that complement the experience instead of disrupting it.  And there should be relevant targeting using volunteered user data, but the user should get something of value in exchange for volunteering it.  Publishers should teach marketers engaged consumers and trusted publishers will pay the big dividends.  Attention metrics should play a bigger role.  And overall, it’d be nice if publishers and advertisers agreed to an industry standard maximum page load time.  Hey, a user experience fan can dream can’t he?

 

It’s time for one of my favorite features on the ol’ Content Marketing Quickie…make listeners feel really good about themselves and their future prospects.  Demand for talent has outstripped supply.  Lin Pophal writes in eContent that if you’re a digital marketing talent, demand for you is WAY outstripping supply and it’s only going to get worse, or better depending on who you are.  A 2015 Creative Group study showed 58% of executives think it’s really hard to find creative pros.  Highest demand goes to content marketing and creative/art direction.  And VP Ester Frey says user interface specialists, mobile app developers, and data analytics pros are in especially high demand, saying, “Companies that haven’t spent money on that in the past are going to have to be competitive and relevant.”  Tim Bourgeois with East Coast Catalyst adds people who can move comfortably among creative, technology, and senior management functions are solid gold unicorns.  He says, “It’s a great time to be a talented digital marketer and a terrible time to be a marketing organization or agency.”

 

Guess what the preferred medium by consumers is if they have to get exposed to a digital ad.  Go on, guess.  Did you say podcasts?  Because that’s the answer Wondery found for US consumers age 18-49.  Wait wait, it gets better.  David Kirkpatrick writes in MarketingDive two thirds reported taking an action after hearing a podcast ad.  Wondery’s Hernan Lopez keeps reporting that a third of people plan on consuming more podcasts in the next 6 months, even though they’re already listening to at least one a month.  What else makes those podcasts listeners so attractive to marketers?  A college education, $100,000+ in income, and early adopters of a lot of different products.  comScore’s Andrew Lipsman thinks podcasts are booming because of mobile and a lot of good content, saying, “Not only do podcasts over-index on reaching some of the most valuable and hardest-to-reach audiences, they also put consumers in a mindset that’s favorable to ad receptivity.”

 

The granddaddy organization in all of content marketing, arguably – but please don’t argue, is Joe Pulizzi’s Content Marketing Institute.  It, like many of the companies it’s covered over the years, has now been acquired.  UBM is the tops B2B events organizer in the US and Asia and they are CMI’s new owners.  Joe says absolutely nothing is going to change, in fact everyone at CMI is going to keep their jobs and you’ll see their smiling faces at Content Marketing World in September.  And he says he deeply believes UBM has the same passion for what’s going on in Content Marketing as he does.  But it is a booming community and UBM is needed to accommodate the boom.  CMI and Content Marketing World will be under UBM’s technology events group.  Joe says they always imagined selling CMI at some point, and this was the right time and the right acquirer.

 

We keep hearing about how the marketing dollars are moving from advertising to content marketing but will we one day see a world free of traditional advertising like Vice Media’s Shane Smith has sometimes predicted?  Actually he said there’s a blood bath in digital media coming within the year.  Well GumGum’s Jon Stubley tells Mumbrella don’t count on it, because while content marketing is awesome, for every Red Bull, there’s a brand that’s not so “right” to generate an earthshaking content stream.  Other reasons it won’t happen is it takes a lot of resources to do right.  It is NOT true that if you build it they will come.  Then there’s my big soapbox: the content has to actually be good, and that’s really, really, really hard.  It’s hard for artists, so the odds of a brand stumbling into content greatness is slimmy mcslimmerson.  Finding true entertainers and journalists isn’t easy and frankly, most brands aren’t even seriously looking for them.  That said, Jon says change is coming, but it won’t be ad-free change.

 

Conversion Logic co-founder Alison Lohse is impressed with how much marketing technology has come along, especially the kind that deals with analytics.  What she wonders is with all that going on, why are most marketers still largely operating in the dark and making guesses and assumptions.  A survey with IDG Connect revealed the majority of marketers are using something like 6 tools, maybe more, in the quest to measure performance.  But despite that, half don’t even really trust the results they’re getting.  59% said centralization and data collection is their big problem, and 46% have a hard time getting insights they can do something about.  And how about attribution?  78% plan to use or adopt it in the next couple of years, but they can’t even agree on what attribution means.  26% will base it on statistical modeling and algorithms, and 23% will use last-click data.  What solution do most want?  They say the ideal solution is a holistic cross-channel view.

 

23 Stories, which is Condé Nast’s branded content unit, has debuted one of those 23 stories, teaming up with the oh so fashionable hoity toity Gucci to get it done.  Alexandra Steigrad tells us it’s a 4-part series inspired by Gucci’s pre-fall collection.  Each episode is a little over 2 minutes and is kind of a modern day NYC retelling of the classic Greek romance “The Legend of Orpheus and Eurydice.”  Have you ever had a rash in your Orpheus?  It’s awful!  And it’s directed by Gia Coppola, yes, the granddaughter of that Godfather director guy.  Want distribution envy?  Well here it comes.  The series will be on Vogue.com, VanityFair.com, GQ.com, NewYorker.com, WMagazine.com, Pitchfork.com and Gucci.com.  It’s very clear right there in the opening credits, produced by Gucci, so everyone should know it’s from the brand.  Gucci’s CEO says, “Digital narrative is the way Millennials in particular like to be engaged today.”

 

Since he is one, Douglas Karr got to wondering just what it is CMO’s want and expect from an agency these days, and the answer is that those expectations are rapidly changing and it’s not that easy to keep up.  He says not just change in consumer behavior, new tech and creative trends, but also how businesses perceive agencies.  Are you happy with your agency?  Did your expectations for them change over the past couple of years?  Well Douglas and company did a survey of CMO’s and asked what makes a great agency.  #1 Complete transparency.  #2 Alignment between campaign and business goals.  #3 A back and forth that allows for new ideas, constructive feedback, and open conversation.  #4 Wise tech vendor selection.  Then comes management of platforms and awareness & introduction of the best of the new technologies that come along.

 

In between listening to twenty one pilots and Swing Out Sister on Pandora, you might want to check out an ad, and Pandora’s got something new to offer marketers.  RadioWorld says it’s a mobile ad that’s more visual and interactive.  It’s right there where the album art goes, is responsive, and offers muted video that goes noisy and full screen when tapped.  Pandora partnered up with Moat to make sure you can measure listener engagement, like viewability and time spent.  Pandora’s Chris Phillips said, “We’ll be emphasizing the human need for attention on an ad, which needs to take place before meaningful interaction with brand content can happen.”  They claim that during the interactive ad pilot, engagement with the brand’s landing page for over 30 seconds doubled.

 

If you’re struggling to make 5 videos this year, or even one, try Time Inc.’s goal on for size.  They’re going for 40,000 pieces of video content in 2016.  Okay, that doesn’t sound like such an easy thing to scale, but TechCrunch’s Anthony Ha says they’re working with a NYC startup called Wochit to get’er done.  Wochit can look at the text of an article, then go find licensed media the publisher can then stitch together to represent or tell the story of that article with video.  Some of Time Inc.’s brands like People and Fortune have already tried it.  Entertainment Weekly used it to break the very serious news Ellen Pompeo is staying with Grey’s Anatomy.  Non Time Inc. brands like The New York Daily News, USA Today and AOL are also using Wochit to help them crank out the moving pictures.

 

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