There are some things about social media that just annoy you.  It’s okay, it doesn’t make you a bad person.  You’re just the best you you can be.  eMarketer reported on the reasons UK users lose trust or are turned off by a brand, and the top answer at 52% is, see if you can relate to this, brands bombarding them with posts.  Next at 39% was brands putting out content that isn’t genuine.  22% heard a negative story about the brand in the media, and the same amount got ticked off because the brand kept them waiting for an answer.  But now that brands know what clearly makes users like them less, they’ll change, right?  Oh hell no.  A different study from Headstream asked the same question a year ago and got the same answer; too many social posts.  Brands are making the same mistakes, making people think less of them, and proving once again they don’t really give a rats about what people want and like.

 

One time for Christmas I got a present and I was so excited.  I opened it and it was a woman’s negligee.  That gift wasn’t personalized and so I found it off target and irrelevant.  Okay that didn’t really happen but, personalization is the siren song that lures people to engage content, thinking it was made and sent with them in mind. But a report from Demand Metric and Seismic says while 61% of marketers say they personalize content in some way, only half say it’s meeting objectives well or very well.  Robert Springer writes the nuttiest thing analyst Jerry Rackley found was that the best results came when brands personalized 21 to 40% of their content, not all.  Turns out personalization is only as good as your data and most don’t have enough good data.

 

There are very few things I look forward to every year; the holidays, the start of football season, Tax Day because I hate myself.  But I also look forward to the big ass annual Internet Trends report from Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.  Mediashift founder Mark Glaser lifts out the parts we content marketers should particularly care about.  Google and Facebook just rule, that’s all there is to it.  They control 76% of the growth in US online advertising, so nyah.  Everybody else is at around 13%.  Only 12% of advertising right now is on mobile and that’s dumb because it’s a total disconnect from what consumers are doing.  For Millennials and Generation Z visual communication is the way.  Chewbacca woman mentioned Kohl’s twice and it was seen over 150M times in one day.  And you’ve got to be on the messaging apps.  Lastly, don’t ignore the India market.  It’s exploding.

 

What do you think is the fairest way to pay for branded content campaigns?  Think carefully about your answer, because Polar found out things are kinda changing.  For instance, around 57% of publishers use cost per thousand…still.  But cost per view is the fastest growing pricing method.  Best Media Info reports cost per thousand is used most when dealing with media agencies.  Why?  Because they’re stuck in old fashioned digital advertising land.  What makes that extra sad is brands still largely rely on agencies for their content marketing.  Pete Spande of Business Insider says, “While we initially saw most of the buying coming from media agencies, we’re seeing new clients coming from PR, communications, and in-house newsrooms.”  This research says CPM might get phased out in favor of CPV as content starts getting measured on views and engagement.  Plus, consumer publishers have started giving clients guarantees when cost is determined by views.

 

When you think about the great partners throughout history, you think Batman & Robin, Romeo & Juliet, probably mostly Ernest & Julio Gallo.  So now you can add The Atlantic and Allstate to the list.  In fact, this pairing up of a publisher and a brand should become rather common.  The Atlantic and Allstate’s love child is called The Renewal Project, a “social-first site and newsroom” telling stories about those doing good things and adding to civic innovation. Theresa Cramer lays it all out for us; there’ll be branded content, events, continue The Renewal Awards, and continue the Heartland Monitor Poll.  Here’s the interesting part, if you went to the program’s website you’d barely know it’s an Allstate thing.  You have to go to the About page to really get the branding.  Allstate’s Sanjay Gupta says, “Hope and fueling positive change is the inspiration behind this work.”  Atlantic Media Strategies is the creative agency of The Atlantic.

 

In case you weren’t sure about whether or not this whole video thing would take off, Renegade founder Drew Neisser wrote up some critical reasons to be doing it.  Did you know Facebook lets videos get over twice the reach of image posts?   That gets them 8B video views a day so they can compete with YouTube.  Facebook Live videos are placed higher in Newsfeeds when they’re live and users are spending 3x as much time watching those as regular videos.  Snapchat users spend 25-30 mins a day there watching 10B videos per day.  Millennials are video crazy; 80% consider videos when researching a purchase and 76% follow brands on YouTube.  And of course there’s mobile, which passed desktop late last year in video views.

 

Does your brand have any good ideas for people?  No?  Well go come up with one and then take a serious look at Pinterest, because people look for ideas over 2B times per month there.  2 billion!  That’s a lot of people looking for you to put a thought in their head.  Pinterest’s Naveen Gavini says their database is about 75B thanks to the over 100M users who put them there.  Now SocialTimes says doing searches on Pinterest is even faster because they made some infrastructure updates.  And when they do search, they’ll see an average 55 ideas, that’s 5x more than the text results search engines usually dish out.  And don’t forget visual search.  Since it was rolled out in November, it gets more than 130M visual idea searches a month.  So start thinking and pinning.

 

Can I ask you a simple question?  What’s branded content?  C’mon that’s supposed to be a no brainer.  But apparently it’s anything but…in fact a report from the Branded Content Marketing Association says there’s a lot of confusion about what it means.  Take me for instance.  I don’t even think it should be called branded content.  That’s so negative.  It sounds like good and free content was caught, thrown to the ground, and branded with a logo that doesn’t belong there naturally.  Branded content is a ridiculous thing to call it, it should be brand content.  Laurie Fullerton writes some think it’s an extension of their brand, reflecting and amplifying the brand’s values.  Others think it’s more holistic than that and is any manifestation associated with a brand in the eye of the beholder, meaning something like user generated content that isn’t owned or distributed by the brand.

 

Get ready for some numbers from PwC’s Annual Global Entertainment and Media Outlook Report.  It shows us what the ad revenue drivers will be in the US heading toward 2020.  First of all, media and entertainment revenue will account for 29.4% of the worldwide total, with just about everything going up, not down.  Can you go ahead and guess the one kind of media that will lose revenue?  More on that later.  Internet advertising will grow to $93.5B by 2020 and pass broadcast TV advertising in 2017.  DigitalContentNext goes on to report video on demand and over-the-top services will drive the TV and video revenue.  But regular TV ad revenue will go up too.  Radio is predicted to increase a couple of billion by 2020.  VR will lead to rising video games revenue.  Magazine revenue will go up just a fraction.  And our one and only ad revenue losing media…newspapers.  PwC thinks John Q Public will look for cheaper content bundles, streaming deals and not as many commercial interruptions.

 

If you’re going to make a podcast, why not be aware of who it is that’s listening to podcasts, and on what?  Edison loves to find out that kind of thing so they and Triton Digital phoned up a lot of people to ask them about…phone surveys.  Just kidding, they asked about podcasting.  55% of Americans 12+ are aware of the term “podcasting” and 36% have checked one out at least once.  56% of podcast fans are dudes, and 44% ladies.  They’ve got a higher median income ($63,000) than the average and are more likely to have a degree.  MarketingProfs goes on to report that for people who listen to podcasts weekly, they listen to 5 of them per week.  71% listen on their smartphone; 29% on their computer.  And as out and about as I thought podcasting would be, most, 53%, listen to them at home.

 

That’s it.  Follow my Twitter bird @mikestiles.