If you’re a brand you might think your agency is doing a lousy job of keeping up with trends in digital marketing. If you’re an agency you might think your brands aren’t truly committing to digital marketing. And if you’re traditional media, you’re loving the whole thing. This year’s survey from marketing services firm RSW/US says brands remain, for the most part, almost frozen with confusion about digital marketing. And while agencies are figuring it out, they’re not doing so hot a job educating brands. The result, 34% of marketers will increase spending on traditional media this year, which VentureBeat points out means at least 66% will hold spending on traditional media steady, while only 19% of agencies plan increases in traditional media. RSW/US president Mark Sneider says agency clients may feel they haven’t seen enough seamless integration as these shiny objects were chased.

 

We can argue until we’re blue about whether or not we’re moving into a post-SEO world, but for now, those Google search results pages remain critical to the discovery of, well, everything that can be discovered. Mediative did a graphic that shows what on those pages people are looking at and clicking on. Searchers used to look at the top result, reading almost the full title, before moving on. Now we do a much quicker, vertical scan, checking out MAYBE the first 3-4 words of results. Mediative’s Rebecca Maynes says over 80% of click are happening above the 4^th organic listing, so you’ve got to be there. 80% look at the Knowledge Graph result if it’s relevant. The carousel at the top gets 12.5% of clicks. The top 4 organic results get 63% of the clicks. And sponsored results get 9.9%. Not on the first page at all? Then you’re what we call dead. Only 1% clicks to see the Next Page.

 

Here’s a Twitter fantasy for you if you’re a brand. Thousands of enthused users of your product are out there tweeting about you, and you get to gather up those tweets and use them for your marketing purposes…with the tweeter’s full permission. The poorly kept secret is that Twitter is setting just such a system up. The secret got out because a sneak peek was given at CES in Vegas where some people were allegedly sober and remembered it. Twitter would build a “brand enthusiast gallery” where tweets mentioning brands are gathered. Brands can shop from that for tweets they want to use, preferably ones that don’t say your product suuucks. Twitter DM’s the author asking for permission, you create the ad unit if they say yes, and you spread it on Twitter. Of course Martin Blanc points out on Bidness Etc. that system could be gamed since anyone and any company can put up a profile that looks like a real person.

 

BuzzFeed’s in trooooouble. At least their UK version is. At issue is this whole thing about how advertisers and the publishers who love them are required to make clear what’s paid-for editorial, or advertorial, and what isn’t. Which is awkward because the whole underlying point of native advertising is sneaking brand content in by making it look, taste, feel, and be as valuable as the content around it. Paul Sawers writes that a complaint to the UK’s ad industry regulator, the ASA, about the article “14 Laundry Fails We’ve All Experienced” from a brand called Dylon said the ad wasn’t obviously identifiable despite some text at the bottom and the terminology “Brand Publisher.” The ASA said yeah, that phrase doesn’t cut it, and by the time people see the text at the bottom they’ve consumed the article. BuzzFeed UK said hey, you hadn’t ruled on that before so we just went by US rules. See where this is headed? That’s right, having to compensate for inconsistent standards depending on which country version of a publication an advertorial surfaces on. I have a headache just thinking about it.

 

I like stories where I get to say ominously things like “for the first time ever!” So here I go, for the first time ever, digital display ad spending in 2016 will pass search ad spending in the US. eMarketer’s “US Digital Display Advertising Trends” report says most digital ad spending will go to video, sponsorships, rich media and “banners and other.” Banners and other, what’s that? That includes different kinds of native advertising and social ads, and “banners and other” is where most of the display ad dollars will go. Video’s going to get 1.5% more dough than it did last year because you guys want that in-stream video ad inventory. Of the money going to display-based formats in the US this year, 77.5% will be spent to reach individuals on mobile. Lastly, eMarketer points out investments must be made in things like cross-device capabilities, and programmatic, and ad viewability and fraud have to be dealt with.

 

Mark Schaefer of Business 2 Community went to a conference! That by itself isn’t the news story, although I’m sure Mark is a very important man. It was at Columbia University’s Journalism school about the future of tech & digital, and Mark came away with 5 things businesses need to do to catch up to what publishers have learned. Here are 3 of them. 1) We’re not in the publishing business, we’re in the fashion business. Huh? His point is the fashion industry keeps showing something new to make people come back again and again, every season. 2) Approach new platforms urgently. He gave the example of how the brilliant PBS documentary show Frontline was getting nowhere with younger crowds…until they did mini-docs on Snapchat. And 3) Do at-a-glance storytelling, especially during the day. People “lean in” to content during the day and “lean back” at night, so do short bits in the day and longer stories at night. In other words, it’s not about the best time of day to publish we keep talking about, it’s about publishing different ways at different times.

 

Wired’s Charley Locke pointed out last summer podcasts are mostly made by white guys for other white guys, and that it had more of a diversity problem than a discovery problem. I don’t know, that discovery problem is pretty large, but I am a white dude so… Well Quartz’ Josh Morgan studied 1,470 podcasts from iTunes US, dug up photos of the hosts to see what gender and color they were. 85% of American podcasts he looked at in this way had at least one white host. 18% of podcasts had a non-white host. That’s actually in line with other media. But when you look at the top podcasts, 8 of the top 10 were hosted by a white dude at the time of the Wired article. So they’ve got the bulk of podcast listeners, which marketers like, and they like them to be more affluent, so Josh thinks that just keeps fostering more, new podcasts aimed at whites. I could try to sound black, but that would be racist.

 

Ever wonder what kind of content to make, as in what format? The answer is all of them then see which works best. But Content Standard’s Emma Siemasko lists some key ones for 2016. Video rules, YouTube gets over a billion unique visitors monthly. Podcasting, steady growth since 2008. Content for mobile. Mobile search traffic has passed PCs. Better imagery, fast and easy should yield to thoughtful and creative. And long-form posts are probably worth a try; serpIQ found the top-rated posts were usually over 2,000 words, so Emma thinks Google, along with liking mobile content, also likes deeper, more in depth content.

 

Poor sound. Everyone talks about visual and video, and so few people talk about sound. But sound is one of the very few senses we have and at least 50% of a media experience. But Google is serious about how sound is handled in its Cardboard virtual reality experiences. PM Nathan Martz says Cardboard SDKs are meant to make it easier for VR content creators to make us really believe we are where we aren’t. That requires spatial audio. That takes care of subtle things you might not think about but that make a difference. Like if something passes you left to right, the time should be right for when you hear it in each ear. Or conversations should have different sound qualities depending on what type of VR room or environment you’re in. Sorry, not in. Drew Olanoff says Google is doing this to give creators the control they need to make sound come from any direction and sound right. Or left.

 

I hate talking about things that are getting articles written about how everybody’s talking about it. But here I go anyway because it’s so bizarre that a new mobile messaging app could be getting any attention at all. But Peach was created by Vine’s founder, Dom Hofmann. And people seem to like it even though there’s nothing there we don’t see on Slack, Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook. It lets you blow someone a kiss, so there’s that. And fans talk about how mega-easy it is to get started on it because it uses “magic words,” you type a word for what you want to do or share and there it is. Lulu Chang reports for Digital Trends accounts not from, but about celebrities are all over it, and the app crashed right out of the gate because the interest in it was so huge. I tell you this story mostly just to scare you that there might be yet another platform you have to play on as a marketer. But it’ll be okay because I’ll blow you a kiss.

 

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