You have a choice, 30 minutes of traditional commercials or brand content.  Which would you rather have put in front of you?  BuzzFeed thinks it’s the latter.  That’s why they hired an executive creative producer and that’s why they’re working with American Express and NBC to make just such a trade out around Leap Day.  Tim Baysinger reports in AdWeek BuzzFeed made social content that’s on BuzzFeed and the NBC shows’ digital platforms, including over-the-top apps.  What kind of content are we talking about?  A little documentary on a winner from The Voice, fan theories about Blindspot, and Kathie Lee and Hoda do something, probably taste test wine.  AMEX’s VP Global Media Joe Bihlmier seems happy with it.  He says, “We’re partnering with NBCUniversal in this first-of-its-kind campaign to provide viewers with relevant, exciting content to reinforce our message: American Express gives you more.”

 

As we build out our content marketing organizations, corporations are starting to come to grips with a hard, cold, truth.  One they’ve been slow to accept frankly.  Many have wanted to deal only with strategy and tech, but orgs now have to care about finding, getting and keeping creative people.  And wow, we’re different animals.  Ian Mills of Magicdust tells us what to do to make creatives happy.  Orgs with senior micro-management, unreal deadlines and budgets, and creative stifling is a non-starter.  Think more about health related perks like quick workout areas, relaxing collaboration areas, letting them work however they work best, OPTIONAL team building events, and training & development so they can get somewhere.

 

There are still some challenges to podcasting success, but what are some of the ways the top producer in the biz is approaching those challenges?  I’m talking about New York’s public radio station WNYC.  They jumped in eeearly, 2004.  Ricardo Bilton reports problem 1; most podcast listening is on somebody else’s platform.  WNYC is teaming up with other podcast companies to make one platform.  Problem 2; the Web is visual, not audio-oriented.  Chief Digital Officer Thomas Hjelm says WNYC is putting static images on episodes, uploaded to social as video.  Problem 3; no standardized measurement.  WNYC put out guidelines to make metrics more consistent.  Chief Content Officer Dean Cappello says they’re also operating like Hollywood, where a few big-budget hits fund the riskier niche podcasts.

 

In the old days, and if you don’t know what those looked like, watch Grease or something.  In the old days you would go to this big field, park your car, hang a speaker on your window and watch a movie through your windshield.  They were called drive-ins.  Now we’re talking about how you can watch a movie in your car, while it’s moving, and while you’re in the driver’s seat.  Lindsay Friedman writes in Entrepreneur that Ford has filed a patent for an “autonomous vehicle entertainment system.”  When the car’s self-driving, everyone can watch hit movies like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies on flat-panel displays.  If, God forbid, you actually need to be in control of the car, the screen goes up into the car’s roof while the movie keeps playing on other screens for passengers in the back.  The point of telling you all this is, the car will soon be another place for captive video audiences.

 

How’s that employee advocacy going for you?  Are your people sharing your company news on their social channels?  Krzysztof Kazibut, GM of Bambu by Sprout Social gives us 6 things that could be getting in the way.  4 of them are 1: counting too much on incentives.  You’ll train them to expect it and you probably won’t be able to keep it up.  2: forgetting to curate content.  All your company content isn’t relevant…shocker I know.  So target messages to the right employees at the right time.  They don’t really owe you anything.  3: not letting employees write their own messages.  Yes, some companies actually do that.  And 4: not promoting the program.  They do okay when it launches but then kinda drop it.

 

If WordPress is your publishing tool of choice, getting into Facebook Instant Articles is about to get a whole lot easier.  If you remember, Facebook said last month Instant Articles will be available to all publishers April 12.  But that wasn’t the only announcement it had up its sleeve.   There’s going to be a free plugin for WordPress.  After shaking it down with a little group of publishers, Chris Ackermann & pals decided it’s ready.  So if you use standard WordPress templates you can activate the plugin as is or customize it.  David Cohen goes on to report the plugin is open source and can spot images in articles and render it for perfect showcasing in Instant Articles, you know, instantly.  It’ll also handle social, interactive graphic, and auto-play video embeds.  Fun fact!  WordPress powers over 25% of sites on the Interwebs these days.

 

Now it’s time for me to tell you about how important mobile is.  You probably really need me for that.  But Yesmail put out a report for Q4 of last year, and it’s got something to say about the Tinder, spelled with an I, relationship between mobile and email.  Douglas Karr interprets it as brands are making a big mistake not making sure the guest trip from opening an email to conversion looks and works good on mobile.  The benefits of responsive design are pretty well known by now so the mobile experience is a good’n, but the survey shows only 17% of marketers make sure all their emails are responsive.  And to make mobile matters worse, people are getting more used to buying stuff over mobile.  In fact, the average order value is going up faster than desktop, and while desktop click-to-open went down 29% in the last 2 years, mobile clicking to open went up 26% over the same time.

 

If you’ve got good brand content, where’s it going to be more influential at driving a purchase, mobile or desktop?  Mode Media commissioned a Nielsen survey that gives us the answer.  It’s mobile, 24% to 19%.  Apparently being able to reach people and give ‘em a good nudge right there while they’re on the spot gives mobile the edge.  People thought branded stories were interesting, exciting, and natural, while only 34% found them excessive and 31% thought they were forced.  People are spending about two and a half minutes with branded stories, that’s 8x more than with traditional rich media advertising.  21% were more likely to buy brands they were exposed to, but for less established brands it was even higher at 41%.  ¾ said they’re likely to view more sponsored stories, and 63% would share them.  Conagra’s Media Marketing Director Heather Dumford says, “We see great opportunity in reaching our consumers with better content that does not disrupt their experience but enhances it.”

 

Pinterest wants to be your ad machine.  So if you’re a small or medium business, you’re getting some new ad management tools that used to only be available to partners.  Matthew Lynley reports it gives you bulk-editing campaigns, closer monitoring of campaign success, and lets you buy ads with credit cards.  Monetization Product Manager Nipoon Malhotra says you’re also getting some new ad targeting tools; more interests to target against (420 of them, did you know there was so much for you to be interested in?), and keyword targeting.  In fact, you can do customer database targeting, creating profiles to advertise against your existing database.  That’s a lot of cool stuff but my favorite part is Pinterest has dedicated teams that have nothing to do other than make sure the quality of ads doesn’t suck.  That’s what I want to do, I want to be on a non-suck team.

 

Facebook bought Masquerade so you can make videos of yourself with a monkey face superimposed over you.  I don’t know how you’ve made it this long without being able to do that.  It works on Android and iOS.  Masquerade is certainly excited about this because it’s going to remain a standalone app but it will now get exposed to Facebook’s user base.  And that’s a lot of potential monkeys.  But Paul Sawers writes it’s not all about silliness, Masquerade’s co-founder Eugene Nevgen says it can be used for bidness, applied to videoconferencing and live video customer service.  Maybe customers want to be helped by Ironman.  Masquerade also says they’ve got pros working on stuff like face detection and tracking and facial expression recognition.  Are you smiling about that?  I can’t recognize what you’re doing.

 

That’s it.  Follows @mikestiles are always cherished.