Proof you need to be thinking more about mobile and less about desktop just keeps coming in.  This time it’s Polar’s State of Branded Content Benchmarks and Insights report.  They get paid more for long titles.  What do you want to talk about, click through rate for branded content?  It’s significantly better on smartphones than on desktop or tablet.  How about Average Time Spent?  Tobi Elkin writes on smartphones it’s 63% higher than desktop at an average of 119 seconds.  Financial publishers had the highest time spent at 323 seconds while lifestyle, news and travel had the weakest.  Polar CEO Kunal Gupta says this shows publishers should focus on mobile-first in design and experience, as well as native advertising.  Fun fact!  Australians spend the most time reading branded content, then comes the British with Americans 3^rd.

 

Can you imagine a world in which advertising is not needed to support the creation of content?  The hairs on the back of your neck just went up either because you love or dread that idea.  But Adblock Plus and Flattr are trying to figure it out with Flattr Plus.  Emil Protalinski tell us it’s a way users can automatically financially reward the content they consume most.  The “Plus” in Flattr plus is that unlike now, users don’t have to manually hit a button on content to contribute.  You set a monthly budget and Flattr Plus divvies it up based on what you engage with.  Two caveats; publishers only get rewarded if they’ve signed up for the program, though it’s free to sign up.  And Flattr Plus is still trying to figure out exactly how to define “engagement.”  It will eventually be integrated into Adblock Plus at which time, the ad industry would be eliminated from the equation.

 

User generated content.  Ooo just hearing those words gets brands so excited.  Not only to have people give enough of a damn about your brand so much that they’ll talk about you, but to have other people doing content for you…for free!  What could go wrong?  Well as it turns out, a lot.  Never mind that not all user content is good, a lot of it is just wrong.  Vivoom says 6.6% of user-made videos were found by the brand being mentioned to be “problematic.”  What’s that mean?  How about profanity, hate speech and nudity?  People who are mostly 25-54 are doing that and more women are doing it than men, 56 to 44%.  A lot is rejected because it’s just way too off brand.  That mostly happens in the CPG sector.  Many others are playing fast and loose with copyright violations, especially in the finance vertical.  And 8% get rejected because oopsie, didn’t get permission from the people in the video to be in it.  That happens a lot in fashion for some reason.

 

Are you still doing banner ads?  It’s okay if you are, it’s a basic international human right to run banner ads.  But one publisher, The Daily Beast, is telling the marketing world they moved away from banners and toward content marketing and they aren’t sorry one least little bit.  President Mike Dyer…yes I know Obama’s still President, Mike’s the Daily Beast President…says, “When you put your monetization needs above your readers, you risk driving them away.  Banner ads are designed to interrupt the consumption of content the reader was there for.”  He adds that pop ups are a horrid frustration and Facebook Instant Articles is right there to welcome turned-off readers.  Bill Carmody writes content marketing though, is a different animal for the Beast that ads real value.  Dyer says, “Our stories by and for brands perform as well as our editorial.”

 

Well, what’s Pandora going to do now?  John Paul Titlow has a very in-depth article out about some changes they’re making and why.  Pandora put personalized Internet radio on the map but hasn’t been too profitable thanks largely to the music industry licenses they have to pay.  The Spotifys of the world don’t have to pay that since their core business is on demand music.  So here CEO Tim Westergren sits with over 80M users thinking about what to make of it so big revenue is possible.  It bought Rdio to get into on-demand, Pandora’s chief product officer says that’s coming late this year.  But it also bought concert ticket seller Ticketfly.  And they bought analytics company Next Big Sound.  That adds up, maybe, if all goes as planned, to Pandora being a one stop shop for music listening, using data to offer sales of music you’ll probably like, selling and buying show tickets, maybe even selling merch via ecommerce.  Or they may sell the whole company, they haven’t ruled that out.

 

Hannah Chapple saw an article in AdAge about how companies are investing big time in content marketing, despite some challenges they’re having, particularly the challenge of how to produce content that engages the people they want to engage.  Hannah lays out two reasons that might be happening.  First, and you know this just as much as I do, there’s a tanker full of content coming at you every day.  The only way content gets your attention is if it timely, relevant, and is about what you’re interested in at the moment.  Well the problem is a lot marketers don’t even know what their customers are interested in.  They know demographics, but when it comes to tapping into their customers’ passions, they largely guessing.  Problem two is measurement.  Vanity metrics can easily be manipulated, and Hannah says the new standard should be measuring the value of your audience and who’s in it, preferably ideal buyers.

 

In my day we sat down with the JCPenney catalogue and circled the toys we wanted for Christmas.  Today, which is still my day even though I sometimes say boy, this just wasn’t my day, Shop Your Way launched an iOS photo-sharing and shopping app called Fount.  Brandy Shaul writes that you can look at photos and videos and buy products you see in them, right in the app.  Talk about impulse purchases.  Okay, I’ll talk about them.  It works because if there’s something available for sale in the photo, users can tag it and it’ll search for that product or one like it.  From then on it’ll be beside the photo when people view it.  They can then in turn tap it to learn more about it or buy it…all in the app.  But wait there’s more!  Buy an item and it earns you points in the Shop Your Way rewards program.  And if somebody buys something you tagged, you get points if they buy that too.

 

I’m young, I’m hip, I’m cool and I’m an independent video maker.  Well one of those 4 things is true anyway.  Indy filmmakers want to make money too, and they’ve been using things like VHX, a little NY startup, to sell content to the fans they’ve gathered up.  That’s fine but, did you know about VHX?  Have you heard of Vimeo?  Good because Vimeo just bought VHX and now these indy content makers can get access to the Vimeo crowd.  Vimeo CEO Kerry Trainor says, “Online video is expanding from a few, mainstream subscription services into a flourishing world of interest-based streaming channels, much like the evolution from broadcast to cable television.”  Ben Popper writes in The Verge VHX has been busy, making mobile apps and getting clients on the new Apple TV.  Vimeo plans to let creators keep more of the money, and it’ll give them info on the people who buy their stuff.

 

What does the phrase “watch TV” even mean anymore?  Watch cable?  Watch dish?  Watch the Internet on the TV?  Don’t turn the TV on at all and just stare at a black screen?  Leichtman Research Group found that there are now more connected TV devices in US households than pay TV set-top boxes.  The mean number is 2.1 to 1.8, so not really sure cable and dish is the future.  65% of homes have at least one Internet connected TV, whether that’s through a smart TV, game system, Blu-ray player or something like Roku.  It was 44% in 2013.  The news isn’t all bad for the old school guys, 83% of households with a connected TV get a pay TV service anyway, so they haven’t cut the cord.  Now, guess how many TV sets in the US are HDTV.  79%.  21% are getting the picture cut off on either side of the screen or the picture is stretched like Silly Putty.

 

Many of you use Adobe AEM, which is redundant because the A in AEM stands for Adobe, as your Content Management System.  So the more powerful it gets, the bigger cheesy grin you probably get.  So I’m happy to tell you they bought Livefyre, which will now be a part of AEM and spread across the whole Adobe Marketing Cloud.  Livefyre lets you look all over social media for mentions of your brand.  This helps you make sure people aren’t bashing the daylights out of you without you even knowing about it, and it lets you include user generated content in your content efforts.  Stephanie Condon reports Adobe and Livefyre have actually been working together since September.

 

That’s it.  I live on Twitter @mikestiles.