Daily Candy No Longer Sweet

You can’t read a media brand by its cover. For instance, Daily Candy looks like an incredibly healthy site. But its owner, NBC Universal, is not pleased with the numbers.

So displeased are the suits that they decided to pull the plug on Daily Candy and Television Without Pity.

According to Variety, Comcast bought DailyCandy in 2008 for $125 million from investment firm Pilot Group. Since then, Comcast acquired NBCU — with female-focused networks like Bravo and Oxygen — but the hoped-for synergies with DailyCandy never materialized.

Kara Swisher thinks there may be a lesson here.

Beware! While there may be a perceived boom in content online recently and interest in investing in it, not all of the players get to survive.

Nor should all the players survive. Although in a more perfect world, purveyors of high quality content will have a decided edge.

In the real world though, quality is not always a determining factor. Financial success requires that you provide content—be it good, bad or ugly—to an interested audience that is willing and able to support the media enterprise directly via subscription or indirectly by being open to sponsored messages.

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Seven Steps To A More Agile Agency

Editor’s note: Please welcome Nathan Archambault of AKQA in NYC to AdPulp. An earlier version of this article appeared on Maybe I’m Gravy.

The old advertising agency model, the one where Madison Avenue agencies took their sweet and expensive time, isn’t working anymore.

It’s time for a forced retirement.

Sorry, old model. The nature of the business has changed. Client relationships have splintered and the traditional methods by which agencies profited are shrinking or disappearing. Clients want more effective work and they want it faster and cheaper.

Agencies are left with a clear choice: become more nimble, flexible and cost-effective or fade away. As Jeff Goodby recently admitted, we’re past the time for quick fixes.

It’s time to build a more agile agency. Here are a few things agency leaders can do.

Reduce logistics.

Today’s agency doesn’t need the same departments that were once a centerpiece to the creative offering. Goodby folded project management into account management and scaled back in-house production, opting to work with more outside vendors. Other agencies have eliminated the studio department, instead leaving final design responsibilities to creative instead of to a separate department.

Ask your agency: What departments are redundant, outdated or inefficient?

Operate like a newsroom.

It’s time for agencies to get out of the meeting business and get into the making business. The old model has too much overhead, too much process and too many barriers getting in the way of the work. An agency should feel like a living organism with the sole goal of producing great work, and nothing else should matter or get in the way. Oreo operated like a newsroom during last year’s Super Bowl and we all know how that turned out.

oreo-super-bowl-tweet

Ask your agency: What can we do to get out of the way of the work?

Replace perfection with experimentation.

In the past, clients demanded perfection and the agencies that delivered it thrived. These days, experimentation returns more on investment. Google launches everything in beta and future updates are expected and (mostly) welcome. The important thing today is getting your product, service or campaign idea to market. Once people have access to it, you can gather feedback, revise and repeat. This is what successful startups like Instagram, Foursquare and Path do and it works pretty well for them.

Ask your agency: What can we make today and worry about making better tomorrow?

Hire doers, not thinkers.

Agencies used to be able to hire creative teams to sit around and think up big ideas. But teams that lack the craft to build the ideas they come up with aren’t pulling their weight today. They’re requiring the agency to hire someone else to execute and bring the vision to life. The jig is up, big thinkers: Being clever and having good taste is no longer a job. That’s why side projects are the new main course – they’re the work of a doer.

Ask your agency: Who actually makes things around here?

Cast for talent.

Interpersonal relationships and unique skills matter more than staffing plans. The need may be for an ACD-level copywriter, but it’s important to be open to creative solutions when filling this or any position. An agile agency wants to find people with the right mindset, regardless of whether or how they fit into a particular department or job title. With the right people in place, an agency can cast for projects, not staff for them.

Ask your agency: Are we hiring the best people first and determining their role later?

Deconstruct the process.

It doesn’t make sense to implement the same process for every project. These days, unlike when advertising was mostly made of TV and print, each project is different from the last. Michael Lebowitz, Founder and CEO of Big Spaceship, gives his teams a framework instead of a process. This allows each team, each operating as mini-agenices, to bubble up a unique process that leads to more unique work.

Ask your agency: Are we finding new paths to the end goal of creativity?

Integrate every department.

The different stages of any given project shouldn’t feel like a baton pass. The brief can’t spend weeks with strategy before being handed off to the creative department, and later to production. AKQA CCO Rei Inamoto believes that agencies need to combine strategy, storytelling and software in order to build emotional and useful connections with people. This means that creative, strategy and technology work together from the start, making each team more invested at every stage of the process.

Ask your agency: Is each team member a stakeholder from the beginning?

Maybe you’re not in a position to change the way your agency operates. But there is something you can do: you can join an agency that believes in the game-changing power of agility.

In this agile age, one thing is for certain: the inflexible will be left behind.

Previously on AdPulp: The Google To Adlandia: Be Lean And Agile Like Us, And You’ll Be Rich Like Us

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Find Your Inner Producer — Make Great Things Happen

Ideas are a dime a dozen. Talented people have great ideas all the time. It’s the ability to act on the ideas and turn them into tangible works of art and/or commerce that separates the pros from the All Pros.

This is one reason the meme “Every company is a media company” makes sense. Media companies and entertainment companies know how to run with an idea. They’re producers, and that’s what brands and their agencies need to be, as well.

According to Variety, ad agencies have long worked to produce various pieces of video content, even full-blown TV programs, but the growth of video platforms has heightened demand for those services.

“The agency model is evolving,” said Jon Hamm, chief creative and innovation officer of Momentum Worldwide. These days, Momentum has five or six programs in advanced stages of development. One series, “Full Circle,” created and written by playwright Neil LaBute debuted last month on DirecTV.

“The rise of digital media as a significant platform of engagement for brands and consumers is creating much more opportunity, and also creating a much greater need for content,” said Peter Tortorici, chief executive of GroupM Entertainment.

It would be logical to deduce that “a much greater need for content” also means a much greater need for content providers, also known as brand storytellers. The thing is, brands are not always clear about where to turn to bring their brand stories to life.

Do brands call on their ad-making buddies at the agency? Do they hire highly skilled but under-employed journalists? Or do brands work directly with a production company? All three options are viable, but I also see a greater need for hybrids with roots and capabilities in all three worlds.

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For Modern Brands, Social Media Marketing Is A Shared Responsibility

Hats off to David Zaleski at iMedia Connection for capturing a serious topic in a humorous way.

Zaleski says at the end of his video lashing that there’s no need for social media managers. I wouldn’t go that far, but statistics do point to a downward trend. According to newly released stats from career site Indeed.com, growth in positions with the title “social media manager” slowed to 50% in the past year, a dramatic decline from recent years, when triple and even quadruple digit growth was commonplace.

Ryan Holmes, CEO of HootSuite, believes the decline in social media managers indicates a sea change in the way that social media itself is used within organizations. Once the exclusive domain of digital gurus, Twitter, Facebook, and other tools are gradually becoming everyone’s responsibility.

To my mind, everyone’s responsibility means a shared responsibility. Brands do in fact need agency partners who live and breathe digital media to develop a strategic framework and help guide the discussion online. Brands also need people inside the company to step up and field customer requests when they come in via social, and to help deliver “real news” from inside the company.

Social is about real people and real voices — when a skilled staffer or team of staffers takes on social media marketing responsibilities, the authentic voice that comes through is impossible to fake or replicate and that’s worth a lot.

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Search Advertising Is Digital’s Big Dog

I don’t always look at bar graphs, but when I do…

I look at bar graphs from Marketing Pilgrim depicting digital ad spending, which is up 18 percent over last year’s first-half revenues of $17 billion, according to IAB.

Advertising-Format-Share-First-Half-2013

What story does this bar graph tell?

One big story is how little brand advertising there is in the digital camp. Digital is dominated by search advertising. The rest of the digital ad pie is split between display, video, mobile, classifieds and various lead generation activities.

No question, display ads are improving in quality, and publishers are finding better ways to feature them on the page today. But of all the categories in digital advertising, video is the most brand-focused medium. A brand can offer commercials, episodic content, consumer-generated content and much more in video.

Another big story is how mobile continues to experience a massive rise in spending. Mobile is the fastest growing of all digital advertising types.

The opportunities for brands to grow their digital advertising capabilities (and see greater returns) is enormous. The opportunity for agencies to get digital right and make good money doing so is also at hand.

My contention is digital is so much more than direct marketing and data analysis. Just because you can measure it, is not reason enough to make measurement the principle yardstick of success.

Digital advertising, like any great advertising has to do more than inform and perform. For brands to be built, digital advertising also must move people emotionally. There’s no metric to measure love, but love is real and getting people to love your brand is the ultimate result of any marketing effort.

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Mediacaddy Puts A Third Screen Right At The Bar

I spent the past weekend visiting friends in Atlanta, and revisiting familiar haunts. So while taking in a little college football at a sports bar on Saturday, I saw a new (to me, at least) form of distraction: A rotating slide show screen housed in a napkin/straw dispenser, courtesy of a company called Mediacaddy.

I’m not exactly sure how the system works, although slides seem to get semi-updated throughout the day with news tidbits, weather reports, and of course…advertising. Admittedly, the ads aren’t quite there yet:

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With 5 Mediacaddys on the bar, I’ll admit I got a bit curious. Mediacaddy is, after all, simply the latest form of interruptive marketing, a modern-day approach to the table tent. But it’s quite in-your-face, so clever POP ad concepts could push sales for the right liquid brand (or taxi service). It’s also a reminder that, in this day of multiple screens to distract the tavern-goer, there’s always room for one more. And there’s always a startup willing to take old-school advertising and slip it into new packages.

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Ad Blogs Are Anachronisms. Long Live Ad Blogs.

It was nearly nine years ago that Shawn and I said what the hell, let’s give this ad blog thing a run for the money. We’ve learned a lot about the industry, ourselves and about building a micro-media brand along the way, and we continue to marvel at the accelerated pace of change in marketing and communications.

No doubt some of the changes are for the best. Frederic Filloux, writing in The Guardian, notes “we are witnessing the emergence of a new breed of smaller, digital-only outlets that are closing the gap, quality-wise, with legacy media.”

Meanwhile, legacy media companies struggle to maintain relevance in a rapidly changing mediascape. Take the watering down of Forbes, an historic media brand, with what is now a murky sea of contributor-generated content.

Legacy media brands are working to find their place in the market today. Paywalls are going up and paywalls are coming down. Editorial lines are being crossed, and tacky advertising intrusions and sponsored content are now commonplace. It’s no wonder a title like Forbes loses its center and its way.

At AdPulp, I feel like we are continually finding our way. This is part of AdPulp’s charm for me and why it remains an interesting project to work on every day. There have been times when I thought of retiring from the site, but I always come back for more. It’s not for the adoring fans and buckets of money. I wish I could say it was. The truth is AdPulp is something I enjoy doing/making.

Naturally, I consider this project and our team to be part of “the new breed of smaller, digital-only outlets that are closing the gap, quality-wise, with legacy media.” I think we along with Adrants, Adland, Adverblog and The Denver Egotist network constitute a whole new layer or block of media — we’re all practitioners who publish “industry insider” trade journals, exclusively online. Does our product stand up against legacy media’s reporting? You be the judge, but on a good day, I’d say it does. But it’s not necessarily the right question to ask of us. Ad bloggers are free to editorialize, whereas real reporters are encouraged to explore all sides of an issue.

I think readers enjoy both the rigor of journalism and the freewheeling nature of micro-media and we attempt to provide a degree of both.

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Digital Disruption Adds Complexity To The Job of Keeping Things Simple

Are you a change agent? If you work in advertising today, there is no doubt.

According to The Wall Street Journal, a recent Adobe survey found that 76% of marketers think marketing has changed more in the past two years than in the past 50.

Needless to say, digital is the great disruptor. Clearly, there is much opportunity in this turbulent media atmosphere — new agencies with new specialties are being born. On the other hand, there is much chagrin.

Sometimes I miss the days when I had a print ad and a radio spot, said Carlos Figueiredo, a creative director at Publicis Kaplan Thaler. He said it feels like there are “a billion” ad options today.

I know how Figueiredo feels. We want to uphold not just tradition, but craft, and radio and print are great vehicles for it. Also, traditional media tends to deliver desired results.

Yahoo Sports – Sports News, Scores, Rumors, Fantasy Games, and more

Someday, we may in fact bring craft to digital advertising. Media companies, brand marketers and possibly consumers with no ad blockers in place will be grateful. Because for all the talk about innovation and change, when it comes to display advertising, most of what’s out there continues to be an embarrassment.

Of course, display ads represent just one aspect of digital advertising. There are many more creative expressions of brand advertising in digital, including serial video content, mobile utility and the building of brand sites and microsites. Nevertheless, sometimes you just want to make a radio spot.

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How To Become A Social Media Automaton In Three Simple Steps

How much good advice is simply too much good advice?

On its own, one post is benign. Taken as a stack though, Tweets dipped in advice begin to degrade the experience of Twitter.

Here, allow me to stack a few for you:

How about now? Have you had enough “how to” advice for one day?

Okay, I hear you. But here’s one more piece of good advice.

What advice do you have to offer the advice givers?

I offer advice myself, so I’m not removed from the problem at all. I’m right in the middle of it, and that’s my problem.

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BuzzFeed Is Making A Nourishing Meal From Its Giant Menu of Info Snacks

BuzzFeed
Jonah Peretti, Founder and CEO of BuzzFeed, kindly outlined his media company’s plan for the coming year. He also opted to share the memo on LinkedIn, “so future BuzzFeed employees could read it too.”

His seventh main point in the plan concerns Advertising on BuzzFeed.

Part of being a great business, is being a ‘must buy’ for advertisers who have many options. This means giving advertisers the full advantage of our scale, our data, our creative team, our social and mobile reach, and our technology platform… In the coming years we will expand BuzzFeed University to train brands and agencies in the ‘BuzzFeed way’, we will launch a branded video studio in LA to compliment our creative team in NYC, we will grow our partnerships with Facebook and Twitter to expand buys beyond BuzzFeed, and we will develop our social homepages product to power social advertising across the web. We have the ability to solve our clients biggest challenges with a unique combination of technology, content, scale, and expertise.

CEOs do get juiced on their own talking points, I understand that. And hey, if AdPulp was raking in the BuzzFeed cash pile, I might be the one issuing talking points. Regardless, let me ask you are you prepared to attend BuzzFeed University and learn the BuzzFeed way?

Hey, I can hear you groaning from here. But ad people have been notoriously slow on the digital uptake. Given how much money this reluctance to be disrupted has cost the industry, and how dumb it makes traditional ad people look, perhaps now is the time to listen to Professor Peretti. What do you think?

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Make A Mag: Content’s Role In Driving Luxury Vacation Bookings

Which audiences respond best to content marketing? It’s a large question with different answers for each industry.

Recently, I had the opportunity to explore the topic by looking closely at how luxury resort destinations use content to create interest and drive four- and five-digit bookings.

TCS_contently

It’s summertime and the living is easy. Time to load the crossover SUV and point it in the direction of the nearest beach, lake or mountain range. Hot dogs on the grill, cold beer in the can and Kanye on the battery-powered boom box!What do you think?

Or, if you prefer, grass-fed burgers and estate pinor noir on a shaded hillside in Burgundy. You know, a special place where you can sing your own songs of freedom.

According to a recent survey by American Express, American travelers plan to spend an average of $1145 per person on their summer vacations this year. That’s enough for a lot of encased meats and domestic beer. But the truth is affluent vacation travelers — people with a quest for adventure, unforgettable experiences, and serious bragging rights – are driving that average higher. They’re much more likely to vacation, and much more likely to travel internationally. But for marketers looking to reach them with branded content, they can be enigmatic.

Please visit The Content Strategist for the full read.

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The Oregonian Is A Valuable Brand Asset, But Its New York Owners Have Other Ideas

The newspaper business fascinates me. Like advertising, it’s a place for rogues. And like advertising the industry is rapidly morphing into something hardly recognizable to its senior practitioners.

Change is natural, of course, but change is not always good. According to Columbia Journalism Review, “The Oregonian is about to get Newhouse’d.”

The Times Picayune company yielded to NOLA Media Group (and Advance Central Services). The Plain Dealer shifted focus to digital, cut publication/delivery, and added Northeast Ohio Media Group. Advance’s Alabama papers became Alabama Media Group. All more or less followed the same template: gutted newsrooms, reduced publication, and a turn to the hamster-wheel model of digital journalism.

Now Portland’s Willamette Week reports that The Oregonian’s holding company has filed to trademark the name Oregonian Media Group.

The Newhouse family owns Condé Nast — publisher of Vanity Fair, Vogue, Wired and many other top shelf magazines. The family is also in the newspaper business. In 1950, Advance Publications founder S. I. Newhouse purchased The Oregonian for $5.6 million.

Like all newspaper owners today, the Newhouse family is scrambling for answers to tough economic problems. Their failure to find them is becoming a real problem for the company, and its newsroom staffers.

Oddly, for a company leaning towards digital (over print), Advance’s corporate site looks like something right out of 1994. I don’t see this as a minimalist approach, I see it as lazy and uncaring.

Advance Publications Inc.

Regardless, what the hell is Advance’s leadership doing to its newspapers brands? Advance is taking historic newspaper brands — which “belong” the the city, as much as anyone — and corporatizing them in a weak bow to digital. The strategy is flawed in so many ways. For instance, The Oregonian is one of the most recognizable and powerful brands in the state, along with Nike, Intel, The Ducks and so on. Yet, to read “the paper” online, you must go to OregonLive.com.

I’m not against sub-brands or offshoots, but the digital version of The Oregonian, from a brand perspective, is The Oregonian, not Oregon Live. And “Oregon Live” as a two-word combo packs no punch. It’s lightweight, frivolous. The Oregonian, by comparison (like the other legendary newspapers owned by the Newhouse family) has history, believability and the community on its side.

[UPDATE 10:48 a.m.] Here’s the official announcement, just released from The Oregonian: The Oregonian will continue to be published daily and sold at outlets in the Portland metropolitan area and elsewhere in the state and southwestern Washington. Home delivery will be Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday, and include the Saturday edition as a bonus.

Previously on AdPulp: Will The Newspaper Industry Save Itself By Reinventing Online Advertising?

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Sports Leagues Find Paying Viewers On YouTube

People love sports and will pay good money to watch sports on TV, at a pay-per-view event, on their iPad or mobile handset and so on. Hence, this craptastic TV ad from DISH:

Time shifting is about consumer empowerment, so I am all for it. But “the Hoppah”? What are we, a nation of bunnies?

According to Time, people who want to view their sport on their schedule are increasingly paying to watch games on YouTube. Willow TV–a cable channel focused on cricket–has a live-streaming package hosted on YouTube that costs $14.99 per month. And YouTube is brokering deals with leagues as varied as PGA Golf Academy and the Badminton World Federation.

YouTube’s user base, now more than 1 billion strong, is massive and global in reach — and not all its users can be reached on television. According to Nielsen data from March, YouTube reached more Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 than any cable channel, including ESPN.

Previously on AdPulp: What Happens When You Cross Schoolhouse Rock With ze frank

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Google’s PRISM-Driven Doublespeak Needlessly Misleading

Some things are still scared, but your privacy on corporate-owned communications networks is not, and never has been.

PRISM slide crop

This fact of digital life has been evident for years, but the recent revelation that the National Security Agency is working closely with leading tech companies, makes it crystal clear–anything you write, say, record, transfer etc. is subject to inspection by a federal employee tasked with keeping America secure from terror attacks.

Tech companies could stand tall and say yes, we help keep America safe from terror. But they’ve chosen to deny their involvement instead.

This is what The Google has to say for itself:

We have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government—or any other government—direct access to our servers. Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday.

Thankfully, Foreign Policy breaks down the geek’s coded language for us.

According to Chris Soghoian, a tech expert and privacy researcher at the American Civil Liberties Union, the phrase “direct access” connotes a very specific form of access in the IT-world: unrestricted, unfettered access to information stored on Google servers. In order to run a system such as PRISM, Soghoian explains, such access would not be required, and Google’s denial that it provided “direct access” does not necessarily imply that the company is denying having participated in the program.

A similar logic applies to Google’s denial that it set up a “back door.” According to Soghoian, the phrase “back door” is a term of art that describes a way to access a system that is neither known by the system’s owner nor documented. By denying that it set up a back door, Google is not denying that it worked with the NSA to set up a system through which the agency could access the company’s data.

Yes, the company that vows to “do no evil,” not only engages in domestic spying on its users, it uses doublespeak to cloak its activities and protect its brand value.

As users or consumers of these networks, we have few places to turn. The connected networks we know as the Internet is a classic monopoly, conceived by the military and managed by their corporate contractors. Yet, we think of it as the peoples’ media. Why? Are too bedazzled by the promise of riches to pay attention to the facts? Or just lost in another cute cat video?

For me personally, I return time and again to the importance of media literacy. If we are not able or willing to turn away from the machine, we need to know how to live with it and work with it. And this means knowing what it is, how it works, who owns which piece and so on. Media literacy is also of the essence when flithy-rich corporate entities, and the government, use language to intentionally mislead people.

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@GaryVee Delegates Amplifies His Social Media Voice Via A “Content Person”

Gary Vaynerchuk became a video star and disruptive force in the wine industry care of his success with Wine Library TV. But he gave that up and has been busy building his social media marketing agency Vayner Media–taking it from 30 to 250 “young people.”

Doing so, has meant the continual emptying (and refilling) of his proverbial bucket. In other words, @GaryVee like most managers, needs to move things off his plate so he can concentrate on the big objectives in front of him.

scale one to one

Unlike most managers though, Vaynerchuk is compelled to create content and to interact with thousands of people online. He calls it scaling one-to-one. But scaling one-to-one is a high wire act with no net to catch you when you fall, and you will fall down repeatedly without a workable answer.

According to Forbes, Vaynerchuk has assigned the challenge of capturing his fast-moving thought stream to a staffer, who presumably shadows his boss throughout the day.

Why is Vaynerchuk doing this, and opening himself up to claims of narcissism? “Content is the cost of entry to relevance in today’s society,” he says. He also predicts the rise of thousands of “content people” who will speak for busy executives in social channels. I suppose the new role is something like a speech writer, but for the always-on 21st century media environment.

I am a fan of Vaynerchuk’s, but there’s something about outsourcing one’s personal story and daily interactions that I don’t like. For brands, yes — hire a whole team of content people, a.k.a. writers, photographers, videographers and designers. But for individuals invested in their personal brand, I’m not so sure.

Vaynerchuk admits he’s not a writer, and that he needs help conveying his pearls of MarCom wisdom in text. No harm there. My concern is that this isn’t a solution for scaling one-to-one that many people will chose to employ. And that leaves the challenge unmet. So, how do you scale one-to-one and remain authentic?

Update, 8 June 2013: The real Gary Vaynerchuk showed up here, and on Twitter to explain his moves in greater detail. I appreciate his willingness to engage — after all, that’s what a pro does.

Previous on AdPulp: Is Content Marketing Giving You A Furrowed Brow? Take An Aspirin And Call Me In the Morning

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Optimize Your Content To Support Marketing and Drive Sales

Few bloggers keep me, or anyone else, interested for long. When one does it is worth noting.

Geoff Livingston writes beautifully about marketing, and content marketing in particular, which is not easy to do.

Geoff_Livingston

Given the level of noise in the sector at the moment, I appreciate his insights and skilled delivery all the more. Here’s a recent clip:

Marketing is not the final product. Yet for some reason we treat it like a stand alone offering in our marketing conversations online. It’s frustrating to hear conversations about companies modeling after Red Bull, and then watch hundreds try to become a media company. Much of the resulting customer-centric content is created haphazardly with a blind eye to customer-brand relationship.

If I hear Livingston correctly, he’s saying don’t get lost in online engagement, as it may or may not be a brand-building activity. Duly noted!

In related news, Matt Kumin, founder and CEO of PublishThis suggests, “Developing an editorial voice is akin to building a brand.” Kumin also says you are what you eat, that “the content and sources that a company consumes define it as well as any outbound marketing or message that is communicated.”

Two lessons from Kumin’s piece: 1) Careful what you curate and 2) Seek out and digest highly nourishing media. The main takeaway from Livingston’s piece is concentrate on relationships with customers and then use media judiciously to support and/or enhance the brand experience.

Photo credit: Flickr user, technotheory

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Geri Hirsch’s Fashion Blog A Gateway To Bigger Things

People become bloggers on a whim. Yet, sometimes one’s whim is more like a bolt of inspiration. Such is the case for fashion blogger turned media entrepreneur, Geri Hirsch.

Hirsch created a fashion blog, because i’m addicted, and ran it as a side-project. But she also used the blog’s popularity to propel herself forward. According to Ad Age, when Hirsch wanted to pivot and work fulltime on Leaf.tv — a series of DIY, style and cooking videos created with Erin Falconer — she used her influence as a blogger to appeal to investors.

Leaf worked with YouTube-funded video channel StyleHaul. One video, “How to Tie a Turban 3 Ways” garnered more than 250,000 page views. In July StyleHaul became Leaf’s lead investor.

Since forming the partnership with StyleHaul, Leaf has made branded video content for retailers The Gap and Ann Taylor. Leaf was also commissioned by Redbook and starting in June, Leaf will have a monthly column in West Coast magazine Foam, which will be accompanied by a video series.

Note to self: For maximum return on blog investment (ROBI), choose your blog’s topical categories wisely.

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Using Interactive Technology To Forward The Brand Story

Media companies certainly have a ton to gain by solving the online advertising riddle that continues to plague Adland, for they will be the direct beneficiary of client dollars invested.

According to Adweek, The New York Times’ 10-person Idea Lab is helping to reshape what it means to be a display ad.

Just as technology enables the Times to tell stories in a more visual, more interactive way, it now affords advertisers the same opportunity.

Recently, Idea Lab created an ad unit for Prudential, the insurance giant, which allows people to type in their date of birth and see the front page of the Times on the day they were born.

The New York Times_Prudential

The ad satisfies the interactivity problem straight away and that’s a big step in the right direction. Plus, if you think of the Times’ archives as a canvas and a data mine, a developer certainly has plenty to work with.

From the agency perspective, the desire for a more complex storytelling vehicle is palpable. No one wants to make banner ads that just sit there. We’re happy to now ask what kind of value these ad units can deliver, and how can they perform more like an App?

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No Need To Hide, Just Make Advertising And/Or Content Worth Showcasing

On this week’s edition of The BeanCast — the best podcast about Marketing on the air — I claim that “Native Advertising” is the dumbest term that I’ve ever heard. And it is, but even worse than the term itself is the fuzzy thinking behind it. It’s no wonder that no one even knows what it means, much less how, when or why to execute a Native campaign.

dumb_native_advertising

Rebecca Lieb an analyst for Altimeter Group, writing for iMediaConnection, says the term “Native Advertising” raises more questions than it does answers. Indeed.

My first question is, why – in The Age of Knowledge and Transparency – are we talking about hiding advertising so it appears to be something it is not? Doing so merely reinforces our industry’s processed cheese factor. It says, “Yes, we are a bunch of quacks trying to sell people a bill of goods.”

Lieb writes:

The fly in the ointment is that without a real definition of native advertising, it means anything you want it to mean. Or anything whoever’s trying to sell it to you wants it to mean. Confusion in the marketplace is not a good thing (though it can benefit certain constituents).

She goes on to say she is working to define Native Advertising and that she welcomes input. I have input. I believe Native is “a neologism for what we used to call advertorial.” Thus, I fail to see the need for it.

The need we have is to raise the bar on advertorial, and I contend it is easy to do and worth doing. The thing to realize when we talk about producing any form of brand-sponsored content is how money solves many problems. The fact is, brands have the money to invest in journalists, filmmakers and other storytellers — and smart brands like RedBull are already doing a great job of this.

On The BeanCast, host Bob Knorpp, asked what role ad agencies can play in all this. The answer is simple. Agencies play the role they always play, creating a framework for a client’s storytelling needs and managing the million details involved in creating and distributing not just ad campaigns, but media products.

Previously on AdPulp: Hello Advertorial, Nice To See You Again

The post No Need To Hide, Just Make Advertising And/Or Content Worth Showcasing appeared first on AdPulp.

Micro Spots Are Growing On Vine

What has Twitter unleashed with its new video platform, Vine?

For one, instructional video now comes in six-second bites, care of Lowe’s, BBDO New York and director/photgrapher Meagan Cignoli.

Here’s another tutorial from Lowe’s, also in six second frames meant to be digested on Twitter. And here’s a non-branded Vine from Ms. Cignoli, an artist busy exploring what the platform offers.

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