A new app called Tagly got launched at SXSW.  And that happened because of how Facebook started treating brands.  After brands built pages, built audiences and help keep those fans on Facebook, the deal got flipped on them.  Now their content would not be allowed to compete based on how good that content was.  Organic reach hit the floor and Facebook became pay to play if you were a business instead of a person.  Mark Alhermizi built Tagly to be a place specifically for brands’ content and the people that want to see it.  Liz Bacelar writes that Brian Boland of​ Facebook Ads Product Marketing says users can be hit with around​ 15,000 stories when they log on.  You’re trying to get visibility in all of that.  Mark says, “Instead of wasted impressions, consumers pick categories they actively want to follow.  This gives all brands in the platform access to targeted engagement and 100% organic reach”.

 

Thank goodness Tom Edwards of Epsilon was at the 23^rd edition of SXSW Interactive because that means we didn’t have to find a hotel room or chase down a pedicab.  He gives us the hot 5 topics that dominated the big show.  Like virtual reality, which is not longer a curiosity, it was really at the forefront with virtual football, VR storytelling and Cinematic VR.  Social media giving way to social messaging as people want more intimate sharing and narrowcast networks.  AI and emotive robotics, you know, the ones that “get us” and know how we feel about thing (they know how much we’re afraid of them).  Dark social, which is sharing that’s right now analytically invisible.  Radium One says 59% of all online sharing is in the dark and 72% of sharing is just copying and pasting URLs into email or text.  And of course, the Internet of Things.

 

The global consumer media spend is going to hit $2.01T in 2019 according to the newest stuff from PQ Media, you know, their annual Global Media Intellicast Series.  If they’re right, that’s double what it was in 2009.  Here’s how they define things.  Digital media and technology is media you get over the Internet on wireless and digital.  Traditional media and technology is that which was originally developed in analog.  Who’s the world’s biggest consumer media content & tech market?  The US of course and it also leads in per-capita user spend at $1,160.  However, while that spending went up 6.8% in 2015, that’s a bit slower than the 7.8% growth it had in 2014.  Apparently, spending on long in the tooth Internet media like PCs and broadband slowed down.

 

We’re so proud of ourselves, the way we do targeting.  You know who’s not impressed?  Our targets.  And it’s not just that they feel that way, they’re showing it by not being responsive to our whiz bang marketing efforts.  Yahoo, Audience Theory and Ipsos numbers tell us Millennials are probably your best friend because they’re most likely to interact with ads that target them: 37% would click, 34% are more likely to buy from brands that target them.  But Kimberlee Morrison writes they still aren’t happy.  34% say advertisers don’t really recognize their generation.  Seriously, is it even possible to recognize Millennials enough?   As for Baby Boomers, you’re not sweeping them off their feet.  Only 23% even click ads.  The lesson, gotta move past demographics and personalize based on interests, which marketers struggle with.

 

It is so super rare that you hear any bad news about Instagram, so how could I not tell you when it happens?  Quintly studied the platform and out of their numbers, as Quintly’s Julian Gottke said, “Most surprising was the distinct drop in the interaction rate.”  The average interactions per post are about 40% lower than before.  Stewart Rogers points out yeah, you could make the argument it’s because Instagram is maturing, but he thinks it’s got something to do with the changes it’s made over the past year; changes that made advertisers happy but maybe not so much users.  60-second ads, carousel ads, ads served up once every 5-6 photos, in fact brand post frequency has gone up 116%.  Stewart’s research shows 6 out of 10 users are unhappy about all that.  So not only is interaction going down, follower growth is slowing.

 

Time to announce another brand content studio.  This time the USA Today Network.  They’re calling theirs GET Creative, and it wants to connect people with ad partners locally and nationally no matter what the media.  Gannett’s VP of branded content Kelly Andresen will lead its efforts to come up with original stories to put on USA Today Network’s platforms.  Kelly says, “With the flagship USA Today and our 92 local properties, we’re poised to have an extremely strong impact for our partners.”  GET also plans to use real-time data to help max out reader engagement.  And it’ll buddy buddy with local and national media properties so marketers can deliver content all kinds of communities.

 

Publishers publish.  So who’s most successful at it on social?  Tania Yuki of Shareablee reports US publishers got 1.5B total social actions in February.  Most, 707M, were on Instagram, 702M from Facebook, and 61M from Twitter.  Overall the top publishers were National Geographic, Tasty by BuzzFeed where you watch someone else make delicious things quickly, Bleacher Report, E! Online, BuzzFeed Food – which saw the highest growth of the 10, BuzzFeed, Complex, Tip Hero, Billboard, and National Geographic Travel.  AskMen saw the most growth of all publishers at 597%.  So what kind of content is clicking?  For BuzzFeed Food it was some chocolate ball video recipe.  And Billboard killed on Instagram around Taylor Swift’s Grammies.

 

If you’ve had it right up to your limit with people stealing your intellectual property, I feel your pain.  Scarface, The Brady Bunch, the Constitution…all my ideas.  The issue is it takes a lot of time and money to really protect yourself and register everything you make with the Library of Congress.  And that’s what you’ve got to do if you really think someone is going to steal from you and you’re really going to want to sue them.  So here’s Nathan Lands with his startup Blockai.  Drag and drop and your work is registered and you get a certificate!  Will that certificate really protect you?  Who knows?  It’s never been tried in court.  But Anthony Ha writes that Blockai uses blockchain to create proof you did something in a public database, which Nathan says is better than nothing.  Fun fact, he learned from a personal survey only 10% of SF area artists are registering their work.  They don’t really believe in themselves.

 

It’s already not that easy for a lot of us to sell our bosses and organizations on doing content marketing, because they’ve got an easy out.  All they have to do is lean back in their chair and say “show me how this is going to move the needle on our Tier 1 business goals.”  Well you need metrics to do that.  And to get metrics around content you have to, I know you’re way ahead of me, DO content.  But Fairfax’s Managing Director for Content Marketing, Simon Smith says we better figure out our industry’s measurements and measurement tools.  In his humble opinion, you can’t measure content marketing like you do digital ads, saying, “As an industry we’ve got to create some benchmarks.  We’ve got to say, ‘This is what good content looks like, this is what brands should aspire to do with their content.’”  Simon says, see what I did there, brands are “obsessed” with their owned channels, the appetite to create content is unreal, and they’re starting to realize they should own an audience instead of always be trying to reach one.

 

Woe is LivingSocial.  You may have gotten an email or two from that company, right?  Well they’re going to lay off another 280 employees.  That’s 160 of theirs plus 120 that’ll go jobless when they’re customer services place in Tucson shuts down.  They’ll outsource to a company in Jersey for that now.  Ingrid Lunden reminds us in her report they just laid off 200 in October.  So here’s CEO Gautam Thakar’s task; try to stabilize the daily deal biz they’re in so they can’t shift to what they want to do now, card-linked offers for verticals, starting with restaurants.  They tested this in Atlanta and it worked okay.  Customers use payment card details to reserve an offer at establishment that gets redeemed when they go and use that same payment card.  Their competitor Groupon, however, has NO problem with the daily deal business model and are super sticking to it, rolling out a refurbished merchants platform that includes a new iPad app that helps them make, promote and redeem deals.

 

That’s it.  Follows are so validating @mikestiles.