It appears that the publishers who signed on to Facebook Instant Articles are happy with it for the most part. It gets them a lot of discovery and good user experiences because their content is read right there on Facebook. But some brought up the fact that yoo hoo, we can monetize better on our own sites. Facebook’s response: yeah but because of that monetization, your sites can be…unpleasant. But big social blue is doing some things to make publishers even happier. Mark Glaser reports in Mediashift it raised the limit from one ad per 500 words in a story to one ad per 350 words. Publishers can now serve ads specifically for Instant Articles and include links back to their sites or sponsored content. They still can’t use rich media ads though.

 

Carlos Abler of 3M Global eTransformation talked about how a 6-week program of personalized content actually reduced smoking in young adults. For those of you not aware, it’s really hard to get someone to stop smoking. So what can that teach us about how to do personalized content marketing that’s that powerful? Karen Ronning pointed out tips from Carlos’ experience, including consider your content a product valuable in its own right. Make your CTA a win-win for you and the audience. Let your audience customize the content in fun ways. Think like a researcher; test content, measure, and modify. Build a team of experts – none of this one poor schmuck handling every aspect of content marketing. And include sales people in your strategy, especially when the audience needs guidance.

 

A Marketwired survey says content marketing is going to remain a red-hot topic through 2016. The Advertising Specialty Institute reports 79% of the marketing and PR pros Marketwired surveyed already have a content marketing program in place, and 64% plan to use it more this year. Marketwired’s Sanjay Kulkarni says, “It’s clear relevant, quality content is increasingly important to telling brand stories, boosting customer affinity and driving qualified leads for the sales team.” The top 3 kinds of content being used are blog posts at 55%, photos at 29, then news releases at 24. More than ever, 77% expect to measure content results. Sure there’s engagement and reach, but more want to also see click-through rates, lead-gen, brand awareness and influence.

 

If you believe your customers want to be literally surrounded by your content marketing, you’ve probably started thinking about virtual reality. Jack Nicas and Deepa Seetharaman write in the WSJ 2016 might be a big year for it. Manufacturers are rolling out higher end headsets with mind blowing experiences, and content creators have started making content for them; courtside views of NBA games and you’ve got to believe you’ll soon be able to sit 3rd row for the Elvis: Aloha from Hawaii concert. You can see him forget his own lyrics as if he were still alive! But were humans meant to operate in virtual realities? It’s been known to make people nauseous because the images don’t keep up with head movement, which the inner ear doesn’t like. There’s also eyestrain and headaches. But aside from that, the experiences are getting so real some are suggesting controls on content. Alex Schwartz of Owlchemy Labs calls scares in VR “borderline immoral.”

 

Are you doing anything worth livestreaming? Periscope CEO Kayvon Beykpour tells AdWeek’s Lauren Johnson over 10 million users watching 40 years’ worth of video daily isn’t enough. They want to be a bigger media and marketing platform this year. He says they aren’t dogmatic about Periscope just being on your phone, they’re open to connecting to cameras on other devices. And while they aren’t going to add ads & monetization anytime soon, brands are streaming good content. Like BMW launched a car that way. What’s he excited about? The map. You can zoom into a city and see what’s streaming live there. That’s how Kayvon saw hundreds of broadcasts from Paris after the tragic events there.

 

Oh you just love yourself don’t you? Come on, you think you are so freaking awesome. Well turns out that’s good for content marketers. A recent study reported on Castleford shows that people will actually spend more money when they’re narcissistic. Narcissistic means you…oh you know what it means because you’re perfect. But because narcissists are chiefly concerned about how they present themselves, they’ll justify spending extra on options and add-ons when they buy something. How do you get them feeling narcissistic? You prove you know who they are and you let them customize what they’re buying. You have to act like you love them as much as they love themselves. Researchers proved new car buyers could be put into a narcissistic state of mind just by changing a marketing tagline.

 

My buddy Steve Olenski rounded up 7 Quotes From 7 CMOs About Building a Modern Marketing Organization. I’ll give you two. Here’s one on consumer insights from PayPal’s Patrick Adams. “I think in an ideal state there’s a dedicated consumer insights team, but a team that doesn’t work in its own little silo. A team that’s interactive not only with the marketing team but also the product team, as well as with others who touch the customer technology.” And Dun & Bradstreet’s Rishi Dave said this about content development: “We have a dedicated team focused on content strategy and creating the content supply chain. Do we have the content already? How do we create new content? Who creates the content? What format does that content take? Then, how do we work with the appropriate teams to get that content in market?” Rishi asks a lot of questions.

 

Locowise has been studying Facebook pages for 8 months, and if you’re one of the few believers left that thinks you can get anything going organically on Facebook, December numbers won’t help your case. The month had the lowest organic page like growth and lowest organic post engagement rate since the study started. Organic page like growth was, whoo hooo, 0.14%. The post engagement rate dropped 24.2% since May to 5.01% of users reached. Videos got the best reach and images got the most engagement. David Cohen reports on SocialTimes 42.15% of pages studied used Facebook advertising in December, and it’s a good thing because that accounted for 30.18% of their total reach. Want to live and die by the quality of your content? Good luck with that on Facebook. Locowise says creating amazing content probably won’t get you where you want to be by itself.

 

It’s a problem when content can’t keep up with technology. That’s Sony’s problem. Here they go and launch cool 4K TV’s but there’s not really enough 4K content out there to make it worth buying. Not content to wait on the networks to catch up, Sony’s launching their own a 4K video streaming service in the US this year with their own Sony content. “Ultra” will give you images with 4x the resolution of regular high-def. No aging news anchor who’s starting to wrinkle will be safe anymore. Martyn Williams reports in ComputerWorld that Ultra will be served up over fast Internet connections so pay TV service providers won’t be necessary. All this has happened before y’know. Few people wanted a TV until Milton Berle’s show gave them a reason to want one.

 

Turns out you can mark it as sponsored content all you want, but generally, consumers can’t tell online native ads from the editorial content. Research was done at my alma mater of the University of Georgia’s journalism school in two parts. In part one, subjects read online content featuring two stories: one editorial and one that was a native ad. Only 7% identified the content as advertising. Part two included eye-tracking to figure out the best position for the sponsored content disclosure labels. With that, more, but still a small 17% identified the advertising articles. However they were 7x more likely to spot the advertising if the disclosure used words like “advertising” or “sponsored content” as opposed to the less obvious “brand voice” or “presented by.” Go dawgs.

 

That’s it. Hear the podcast at brandcontentstudios.com.