Mom always told me, “Moron, never compare yourself to others because we were all meant to be different.”  So in that spirit let me help you compare yourself to other corporate content marketing operations.  Curata research says 43% of companies plan on increasing the staff they have working on content marketing this year.  87% have a content marketing team and the majority, 68% have 1-3 people on it.  21% have 4-6.  42% say there’s an executive in charge of content marketing but that number will go up by 2017.  21% call that person a content marketing director or manager.  Almost the same amount call them the Chief Content Officer.  Now, if you’re a writer or producer and no one is calling you, this next thing will make you mad.  41% say the most important skill-set that’s missing from their team is content creation.  After that comes a content marketing lead at 21.2%, then way behind that at 8.8% is a tie between content promotion and data oriented skills.  Maybe recruiters don’t know how to look for content creators.

 

Silly bosses, always wanting content marketing to be effective.  Can’t they just let us do it because it’s fun?  The answer is no.  It’s not seen as art, or performance, and if someone is caught having fun, it’s usually taken as a sign something is happening outside of corporate policy.  Well maybe everyone can be a little happy because an Ascend2 report says 89% of marketers think content marketing’s effectiveness is on the up, going up, headed upward.  But effective at what?  CMO Todd Lebo says the top goals right now are increasing lead gen, improving customer engagement, and a bit behind those two is increasing brand awareness.  The 3 biggest barriers are lack of an effective strategy and lack of content creation resources (tied at 48%), then budget constraints at an almost tie of 47%.  Many companies still expect content to be free and magically come out of thin air, like, you know, toddlers might expect.

 

Where are you?  What are you looking for?  Bam, we found you and now here’s an ad on your phone to go buy something nearby.  BIA/Kelsey says location-targeted mobile ad spending on stuff like that should grow 24.6% from 2015 to 2020, hitting $29.5B.  Virtual Strategy Magazine reports that it looks like search will keep beating the daylights out of the other ad formats, BUT…nothing stays the same forever.  Its share is actually expected to drop from 57% in 2016 to 42% in 2020.  BIA/Kelsey VP of Content Michael Boland says, “Several market factors are bearing down on the mobile ad marketplace—from Google’s moves to adapt to an app-based world, to the media consumption habits of Millennials.”  What’s one of the fastest growing mobile ad formats?  Native social, like Facebook’s news feed ads or Snapchat Stories.

 

Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and Skyword; these are the names you think of when you think of the world’s greatest inventors.  Okay, Skyword might not belong with those other two, but the content marketing platform did get a patent for something called PeopleRank.  It’s a way for you to measure how much influence somebody has in a certain community or on a certain topic or group of topics.  Finding influencers is step one of an influencer marketing strategy y’know.  PeopleRank is the 4th patent for Skyword and the 2nd in 6 months.  Next they might invent a blender that plays the Cars song “Shake it Up” when it runs.  Please be aware that if you love to steal ideas, Skyword has protection for this PeopleRank thing to at least 2032.

 

Kicking it up a notch, that’s what The Financial Times is doing with their branded content production.  The Guardian didn’t report how much they paid for it but they went out and kicked some tires and decided to drive home with Alpha Grid.  That’s a company that’s been making branded content for all kind of media platforms as well as events.  The whole operation is going to be in a new studio that was launched in September, and Financial Times tech, media and telecoms editor Ravi Mattu will run it as editorial director.  What about Alpha Grid founder and managing director Roslyn Shaw?  Don’t worry, she’ll be alright.  She’ll stay in her current role and be the Financial Times’ Executive Creative Director.  Why all this notch up kicking?  The company says since they introduced paid posts on their site, they’ve seen a 30% lift in revenue from its Branded Content operation.

 

If you’re a user of Facebook Instant Articles you’ll want to lean in and hear all this because SocialTimes tells us you’ve got some new options.  You’ve got support for marketer logos at the top of Instant articles.  The style editor has been updated so you can have new color, text and spacing features.  Publishers can add customized bylines and kickers.  And there’s a real-time preview tool, because who wants to wait 4 weeks to preview your article edits?  When can you have these things?  Instant Articles’ Product Manager tells you eager beavs the custom bylines and kickers are ready to go.  Adding marketer logos happens later this month, and when you get it, you can identify a product, brand or sponsor in the article and their logo will automatically get pulled in from their Facebook page.  The style editor updates will be here “in the coming weeks.”

 

If you’ve been spending your time uploading videos of Three Dog Night singing “Joy to the World” to Vimeo, you’re really creating a lot of problems.  The company had to go to court, actually they’ve been in court since 2009, trying to prove they shouldn’t be held liable for copyrighted pre-1972 music users uploaded to their platform.  Well the latest verdict, from the US appeals court, has said no, they can’t be held responsible.  Reuters reports that reverses earlier court rulings that favored Capitol Records and Sony, who also tried to say that since Vimeo employees saw the copyrighted uploaded material, the company is guilty of ripping off Three Dog Night and their friends like John Denver and The Osmonds.  The new ruling says no, you can’t expect a platform like that to be able to monitor every single upload.  All of this was about just 199 videos.

 

Don’t you dare have a technology platform that doesn’t offer live streaming video.  Everybody’s doing it and offering it and Tumblr is now no exception.  Except they’re doing it a little differently.  They’re not interested in hosting all this video, just being the discovery and distribution outlet for it.  Here’s what that means.  Users will actually do the shooting on other services like YouTube and Kanvas, but they’ll link those apps to Tumblr and streams will play in Tumblr’s video player.  And your followers will get notified.  And the post will have a badge showing which video app you used.  Save the replay of a live video on the video app, and it’ll stay on Tumblr as a regular video post.  Sarah Perez reports Tumblr’s working with 15 media partners for some live streaming content.  No ads yet, but count on that to change.

 

Who wants $50M dollars?  Come and get it!  Actually you can only come and get it if you’re an established content creator who’s good at live streaming.  David Cohen reports there had been some scuttlebutt that Facebook as paying a pretty penny for Facebook Live content, and now the WSJ confirmed it.  Their reporters Steven Perlberg and Deepa Seetharaman saw proof of 140 deals with media companies, publishers and celebrities, like Vox Media, Tastemade, Mashable, Kevin Hart, Gordon Ramsay, and Deepak Chopra.  The 3 highest paid Facebook Livers are BuzzFeed, The New York Times and CNN.  Facebook VP Justin Osofsky said the partners were picked if they had a live video track record and could make and test different kinds of live programming.

 

It’s kind of an apples and oranges comparison, but if you’re out there trying to prove radio’s worth as a medium, the latest Pew State of the News Media study is going to help you say it’s better than podcasting.  Michael Balderston writes that 21% of Americans 12+ have listened to a podcast in the past month and 36% have ever listened to a podcast.  But, when you look at overall audio consumption and who has the bigger share, radio gives podcasting a lot of static, pun intended.  2% of audio listening goes to podcasts while 54% is spent on AM/FM radio.  Why it’s as if radio has had an 89-year head start before the survey was taken!  Nonetheless, 49% of Americans know about podcasting, 6,000 hosted shows were added from 2014 to 2015, and there were 3.3B download requests in 2015.

 

That’s it.  Help me impress my friends, follow me @mikestiles.