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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People are racing around, on their mobiles, mobile has a smaller viewport, so you might make the assumption that you should stick to publishing shorter content when mobile is the target.  But not so fast.  Pew Research, James L. Knight Foundation and Parse.ly found people spend almost twice as much time with long-form stories on mobile than short ones.  And longer stories attract readers about as much as shorter stories.  But Rande Price writes how users find the story, time of day, and topic matters.  Content consumption mostly happens in the morning and late at night.  Long form articles do best when discovered through internal links, then comes direct or email links, external sites, search, then social.  Lastly, people who read long-form articles are more likely to look at several articles on the site.

You’re out there doing what you thought you were supposed to do, pushing relevant, targeted content to the peoples.  But your problem just might be those peoples, because a Rapt Media study says their trust in pushed content is going down, they’re keeping brands that push too hard at arm’s length, and they like discovering content on their own thank you very much.  Laurie Fullerton reports in The Drum the rejection rate for online ads is 43% and 95% are doing something to not get ads.  I’m not terribly interested in depressing you but here come some more numbers; 67% think brands are pushing too much stuff, and 55% don’t think it’s interesting or relevant.  Verdict: while it’s cool content marketing is happening, the public’s impression is we’re just putting out a lot of crap they don’t care about.  Yay us.  But there is a reward if we get the quality of content right, 63% would feel better about a brand if it did ever give them content they liked.

Hey, my job is to just bring you the news, I’ll let you decide whether it’s good or bad after you hear it.  You know how on Soundcloud you can follow along the wavelength of the audio track and see the reactions people have to what they’re hearing along the way?  TechCrunch says Facebook Live has something like that for recorded versions of live streams.  Because they know at what point in the broadcast the most engagement happened, they can put a reaction graph up that basically points to the most interesting parts of the video.  So people would have the option to just skip over what you, the video artist, intended them to see and just glance at highlights.  It’s really not the planned experience.  Also, if this catches on videos will start to be made differently, intentionally loaded with big grabby moments.  No visible spikes and people might skip the whole thing.

You’re a brand.  You spend a lot of time, money and effort building up an audience of fans on Facebook.  You get them to willingly Like your page and ask to see updates from you.  Then Facebook says hold on, thanks for helping bring all those users to Facebook but we’re not going to let most of your own fans see your posts.  We’re not going to let your content compete on its own merits either.  We’re going to choke off organic reach and make you pay for access to your own followers.  What do brands do when a platform treats them that badly?  Use it MORE of course!  A Quintly study shows post frequency on it by brands in 2015 went up 36%.  SocialTimes reports it was up 14% on Instagram and down 2% on Twitter.  The secret to engagement appears to be stay small.  Engagement was tops on all 3 networks for brands with 1,000 or fewer followers.

Maybe your job is to get people to fork over their hard earned dollars to a well meaning charity and use content to do it.  If so, you should know what kind of content has the exact opposite effect on people and makes them clutch their debit cards ever so tightly.  Abila and Finn Partners surveyed United States Americans who donated to at least one non profit in the last year, and 72% of them said poor content affects their decision.  What do they mean by poor content?  The highest number, over a third say that would be vague content.  Sometimes overly-clever comes out vague.  Next at 25% comes content about programs they have no interest in.  That’s followed very closely at 24% by boring content.  Did you know even charitable people don’t like to be bored out of their skulls?  It’s true!  eMarketer reports their favorite way to get content is in short, self-contained emails.

I’m going to sling 3 words your way and see if your heart starts racing with excitement, or if you burst out laughing.  Paying for podcasts.  Which reaction did you have?  Benjamin Snyder reports that one Swedish company, Acast, isn’t laughing.  They’re trying out a subscription model for podcasts so that if people really like and value a show, they can express that like by supporting it with moolah, which is Swedish for money.  Also, this gives podcasters the freedom to not mess with advertising if they don’t want to, and let the quality of the show make or break it financially.  Will any podcasters want to do this?  15 of them are signing up for it at launch.  Acast CEO Mans Ulvestam says they’re also going to let current podcasts sell bonus content.  I know it all sounds crazy but hey, the Swedes gave us Abba.

Okay babies, put on your hotel robes, open up a bottle of wine and tell Echo to play Marvin Gaye because I’m about to talk about the sexiest part of content marketing there is, the topic that gets everyone’s heart racing.  Translation.  Yeah I told you it was gonna be hot.  Translation platform smarting Smartling has acquired VerbalizeIt because its business is translating audio, video, and other multimedia.  Econtent says Smartling’s second acquisition of the year gets it hundreds of VerbalizeIt’s customers.  So apparently this media translation tool is so awesome the investors on “Shark Tank” were fighting over it, and now it’ll be integrated into Smartling’s platform and founders Ryan Frankel and Kunal Sarda will stick around and take leadership positions.  As unsexy as you might find it, having translated captions and transcripts adds a ton of juice in terms of search and accessibility.

We all know the new mission in life is to completely eliminate the written word and no longer require writing of any kind, and Facebook is playing around with yet another way to eliminate combinations of letters that convey messages.  You know how you can include an image when commenting on someone else’s post?  Well in some test countries you can include a video.  Venturebeat reports over 100M hours of video are watched on Facebook as it is, so clearly users like doing that.  All you do, if you’re one of the people getting the test, is tap the camera icon, and when you reply with a video it behaves just like other videos on Facebook, they won’t play by themselves…kinda like I was in college.

Music labels are starting to think about stuff other than and beyond music because, you know, they want to survive and stuff.  Warner Music UK is now jammin’ with something called The Firepit.  Billboard’s Georg Szalai says it’s a creative content division and “innovation center” in London that’s already got some projects in the pipeline like online and TV formats, live and campaign content, feature-length projects, and digital artist specials.  CEO Max Lousada said, “It’s not enough for people to hear our artists’ music or see the content they create, we want them to watch, engage, react and connect.  Placing the creative process at the heart of the organization will give us a dynamic space in which we can pioneer rich, immersive experiences for fans and unlock new promotional and commercial opportunities for our artists.”  That was a long quote.  The Firepit will be led by Stefan Demetriou who’s done stuff like produce a 4K Ed Sheeran concert film.  He’s friends with Taylor Swift ohmygod ohmygod!

If I said I was going to tell you about Marsbot, what would you think that is?  I would have guessed it’s a mechanical dog to keep the first Mars colonists from going stark raving mad, but I’d have been wrong.  Marsbot is a standalone app launched by Foursquare.  And what it does is text you a recommendation for places you can eat or drink, wait a minute cause here’s the interesting part, without you asking it to.  Maybe it will tell you where you can get a drink on Mars.  Ken Yeung writes it uses where you are and your travel patterns to suggest stuff.  But you have to help it at first by letting it know if you’re a gluten hater, your favorite cuisines, any ethnic foods that put you right in the bathroom…then it can tell you where to go.  Foursquare doesn’t sound enormously confident with it right now, Product Manager Marissa Chacko said, “It’ll take time for Marsbot to learn about you and for us to refine how it all works.  No one said inventing the future would be easy.”

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