The greatest thing in the world is the way advertisers can super narrow target campaigns on Facebook, right?  It’s so “greatest” that the narrower the targeting, the more of a premium Facebook places on that ad product.  Well hold the phone, actually hold the toothpaste.  The Wall Street Journal’s Sharon Terlep reports Procter & Gamble, who spends more than anybody, says they just don’t think it’s that effective for them and they’re backing away from it.  Am we on the Bizarro planet?  Nope.  Think about it.  As Ace Metrix’s Peter Daboll says, “If you could run an ad and reach a million people or run a targeted ad to reach 5,000, you have to have pretty impressive returns on that 5,000 to make it worth it.”  P&G’s CMO Marc Pritchard says they took Facebook targeting too far.  But they, and others, will still use narrow targeting when it makes sense.  But if you’re big, you gotta market big.

 

It’s quite the existential crisis when you email someone then never hear back from them.  Why that could rattle a guy’s self-esteem.  As marketers maybe we shouldn’t take offense, because Return Path says only 79% of legitimate commercial emails ever even make it to their recipient.  The rest go to spam folders or get blocked.  I guess the good news is, that rate isn’t any worse than 2015.  But it’s not any better either.  eContent reports that the US experienced inbox placement 6 points lower than the average.  Things are much brighter email-wise in Australia and the UK.  They had the highest inbox successes at 90 and 88%.

 

You know what you do, but what else could you be doing in the content marketing space?  Dawn Papandrea talked to some thought leaders and wrote about 4 uncommon roles that might need filling.  They are Social Journalist; traditional journalists who know how to do content with brand context and know social distribution.  Crowd Developer; to run a super focus group of passionate customers that can guide brands.  Lisa Bialecki at Rust-Oleum Group says, “We want to use a crowd to help us make better, more relevant products.”  Growth Hacker/Data Scientist; somebody who can look at different data and recommend what to do based on it.  And Visual Storyteller, a master or mastress of SlideShare, video, infographics, and whatever else comes like VR and AR.

 

Haven’t you always wanted to be able to encourage people to share your content by rewarding them in some way?  Twitter’s hooking you up.  They’ve got this new ad format, called Conversational Ads, that will let you do that.  Of course all this in Beta, but NetImperative says brands like Coke, Marvel, AMC and Axe body spray (you can never put enough of that on you know) are trying it out.  There’s a call to action button in the ad that gives the user a pre-written tweet from the brand the user can then personalize to share.  That’s when the gated content goodies come out.  What this is all about is getting more engagement at no extra cost because organic posts are being generated.  Twitter’s claiming 34% engagement lift so far in the beta.

 

More evidence that those podcast listeners are the kind of people advertisers want to reach.  the7stars agency did a survey of 2,000 people in the UK and discovered why they listen and where and how they generally felt about it.  Helen Leggatt writes that most thought podcasts are a nice change of pace from listening to music.  Almost as many said they listen to expand their knowledge.  That’s why you listen to this one, right genius?  You might assume most listening happens in the car or at the gym, but 95% listened at home.  And 73% consider it time well spent.  Almost two-thirds don’t mind ads in podcasts at all, which dovetails nicely with what Hernan Lopez & the peoples at Wondery found: podcast listeners found ads to be less intrusive there than in other digital formats.

 

Facebook has an interesting approach to ad blocking.  Well, they’ve got an approach, we’ll have to see how interesting it is.  If you think you’re Clever McCleverson and have ad blocking software, it’s not going to work for you anymore when you’re on Facebook on desktop.  Instead, VP Ads and Business Platform Andrew Bosworth says it’s going to be power to the people.  They’ll start showing ads whether you’ve got ad blocking or not, but…they’re going to let us have more input into the ads that we see.  They found out the top reason people use ad blockers is that ads are disruptive.  They figure if they’re around your interests, they’re not.  SocialTimes reports you can now go in and get rid of interests in your ad preferences so you’ll never see ads based on those interests again.  So what if I liked Caitlyn Jenner’s page?  I don’t want any more ads for man-size panties.  You can block specific businesses and organizations too.

 

So how is LinkedIn doing…really?  They’re okay, with a bit of a caveat.  Q2 earnings were $933M, that’s more than I made.  And they have 450M members, nothing to snort at.  However, out of that 450M, only 106M, just 25% of them, go on the platform at least monthly.  No wonder nobody ever answers my messages there.  VentureBeat writes that the overall number of users is up, up 18% from last year.  But that regular monthly users number is flat.  Really flat.  Been flat since Q2 of 2015, having seemingly topped out at that 25% area.  Apparently there’s not enough to do there for people who aren’t actively seeking jobs, or workers.  Sure enough LinkedIn’s Talent Solutions bring in the most dough, followed by their marketing solutions and premium subscriptions.

 

I might mysteriously disappear after I tell you this story.  See, the Olympics are going on.  You are watching right?  Because if you aren’t, you’re killing NBC.  Anyway, people pay a lot of money for Olympic sponsorships and that means the International Olympic Committee and the US Olympic Committee do not want us mentioning the Olympics in social or content marketing if we aren’t sponsors.  Armando Roggio runs down what we can’t do.  Use words or phrases like Olympic, Olympian, Paralympic, Rio 2016, Road to Rio, or similar.  Use the word Olympic in other words, like podcastolympics.  Use any Olympic words in hashtags like #TeamUSA.  Use any Olympic logos or photos taken at the Olympics.  Name Olympic athletes, even to wish them luck.  Describe Olympic results or say who won a medal.  If you’ve already done that, you might better go into hiding.

 

Keep the follows coming @mikestiles.