Staying on top of the latest visual marketing design trends is essential for building an enduring brand, telling engaging stories, and emotionally connecting with customers. With that lofty objective in mind, here are a few of the top visual marketing trends that will continue to drive decision-making for marketers and designers.

2024 Visual Marketing Design Trends You Need to Know About

1. Nostalgia Marketing Visuals

Life in the 2020s can be pretty hectic, so it’s no surprise there’s an increasing craving for comfort and nostalgia in strategic visuals that resonate deeply with people. This trend is not merely about revisiting the past but fostering a sense of connection and reassurance amid change. Brands infuse memories and warmth into their present visuals to offer that comfort.

Vintage aesthetics and warm color palettes are more than just retro; they embody timelessness and authenticity, offering solace in the impersonal digital era. These elements, from soothing amber and sepia to earthy tones, create a comforting sense of familiarity, transforming the past into a welcoming home.

Familiar imagery acts as a bridge between the past and present, not solely for nostalgia’s sake but to communicate universality, durability, and trust. By weaving these images into their marketing, brands forge deeper emotional connections, ensuring their messages are not only seen but profoundly felt.

Example: Burger King Revives Its Iconic Logo

A few years have passed since Burger King revealed the retro redesign of its instantly recognizable logo, but in retrospect, the celebrated revival was on the leading edge of nostalgic visual marketing trends. Ditching the cartoonish logo and stylings used since the company’s 1999 rebrand, the new brand identity leans hard into the warm palettes and comforting aesthetics of a timeless past.

Image by Burger King

2. AI-Generated Imagery

As we venture further into the 21st century, the realms of artificial intelligence (AI) continue to expand, now revolutionizing how marketers create strategic visuals. The rise of AI-powered tools in the marketing sphere marks a significant shift, opening up a world where the creation of stunning, compelling imagery is not only faster but also more personalized and innovative than ever before.

AI-generated content transcends merely meeting the demand for new visuals; it revolutionizes creative production by quickly generating high-quality, detailed images. This shift reduces what once took hours to minutes without compromising quality, ensuring outputs meet or exceed expectations with precision.

Personalization is another benefit of AI, enabling content to be customized to individual preferences or demographics. This allows for visuals that deeply resonate with various audience segments, significantly enhancing engagement and fostering a closer connection to the brand.

Example: Coca-Cola Looks Ahead to the Year 3000

Coca-Cola has become a leading brand when it comes to leveraging the power of AI for their present and future visual marketing efforts. The company has not only used AI to create multiple iterations of classic Coke ad campaigns with the “Create Real Magic” platform, but it even launched a brand new soda called Y3000 that was created through collaboration between humans and AI.

Image by Coca-Cola

3. Human-Centered Design

Human-centered design prioritizes the user’s needs, experiences, and well-being above all else, ensuring that every visual marketing design decision is made with the end user in mind. It’s a philosophy that champions empathy, accessibility, and inclusivity, aiming to create strategic visual content that is both engaging and deeply resonant with a broad audience.

Human-centered design ensures visuals are aesthetically pleasing, navigable, and understandable for all, including those with differing abilities. This involves considerations like color contrast for visual impairments, text alternatives for images, and easy-to-navigate interactive elements for users with limited mobility.

Inclusivity broadens this approach, making sure visuals represent the diversity of the target audience, including various cultures, ethnicities, genders, ages, and body types. Embracing diversity in visuals helps brands build a sense of belonging and connection, showing appreciation and understanding of our diverse world.

Example: Airbnb Puts Customers at the Heart of the Story

Airbnb has long been a trailblazer when it comes to human-centric marketing. From a visual marketing design standpoint, the company’s website offers a simple, intuitive interface that allows people to find their perfect destination quickly. The real stars, however, are the high-quality photos that help visitors picture themselves in those destinations, which is why Airbnb provides every listing with access to a professional photographer rather than relying on user-generated photos.

Image by Airbnb

4. Maximalist Visual Marketing Design

Maximalism, a vibrant and bold trend, contrasts sharply with recent minimalist design philosophies, celebrating sensory richness and immersive experiences. It champions a vibrant, layered, and textured design approach, encouraging an embrace of abundance over restraint.

Characterized by vibrant colors, intricate patterns, and rich textures, maximalist design defies “less is more,” opting instead for statement-making chaos and complexity. This method aims to create lively, dynamic spaces and experiences bursting with personality.

In visual marketing, maximalism enables brands to capture attention in a crowded space, offering memorable and eye-catching content. It communicates luxury, creativity, and boldness, engaging consumers emotionally with its exuberant design.

Example: Pepsi Goes Big and Bold

When Pepsi made the decision to update its logo in 2023, the company eschewed minimalist trends in favor of a big, bold design that’s impossible to ignore. The new branding puts the company’s name front and center while also adopting a strong, all-caps typeface that’s impossible to ignore. As the first change to the company’s look in 14 years, it’s a strong shift that conveys Pepsi’s confidence in its future.

Image by Pepsi

5. Minimalism Design Aesthetic

Just because maximalism is growing in popularity doesn’t mean minimalism isn’t still going strong! Minimalist design focuses on clean lines, white space, and simplicity, offering a calming alternative to the complexity of maximalism.

More than an aesthetic choice, minimalism conveys a brand’s essence with precision and restraint. It emphasizes quality and value through careful selection and detail, ensuring every element has a purpose. By projecting confidence and thoughtfulness, this approach often resonates with consumers on a deeper level.

Minimalism brings calm and focus, with its clean aesthetics reducing cognitive overload and enhancing message clarity. This simplicity improves user experience, from website navigation to product interaction, making minimalism not just a design choice but a strategic one for clear, impactful communication.

Example: Western Union Opts for Standout Simplicity

Western Union may be one of the oldest companies around, but its new branding is anything but stale. Casting aside the busy, often cluttered aesthetic of its previous logos, the company debuted a clean, simple design in 2023 that’s both familiar and strikingly fresh. The versatile branding accomplishes the daunting task of making an over-170-year-old company feel vibrant and relevant for customers of all ages.

Image by Western Union

Staying abreast of visual marketing design trends is no longer optional for today’s marketers. The digital landscape is constantly evolving to shape consumer perceptions and preferences, so understanding and integrating these changes into content is essential for building strategies that grab and hold the viewer’s attention. By keeping a pulse on the latest visual marketing trends, marketers can craft campaigns that forge deeper connections with their audience, ensuring their messages are not just seen but truly felt.

Ask The Content Strategist: FAQs about visual marketing design trends

Q: How do I effectively track and adapt to rapidly changing visual marketing trends to ensure my content remains fresh and engaging?

You can stay current with visual trends by consistently monitoring design publications, social media, and industry leaders, and by using analytics to gauge audience engagement with different visual styles.

Q: What are the specific challenges or pitfalls I might face when trying to incorporate AI-generated imagery into campaigns, and how should they be addressed?

The main challenges include ensuring AI-generated imagery aligns with your brand identity and navigating ethical concerns around authenticity. You can address these issues through clear brand guidelines and transparency with audiences.

Q: Regarding human-centered design, how do I measure the effectiveness of promoting accessibility and inclusivity within my marketing visuals?

You can assess the impact of human-centered design by soliciting feedback from users with diverse needs and analyzing engagement metrics to see how accessibility improvements affect user experience.

Q: If I’m interested in adopting a maximalist design strategy, what considerations should I keep in mind to ensure my marketing visuals are impactful without being overwhelming?

When embracing maximalism, you should always make sure your design maintains a cohesive narrative and balances boldness with clarity to avoid overwhelming your audience.

Q: With the continued relevance of minimalism alongside the rise of maximalism, how can I decide which approach best aligns with my brand’s identity and audience preferences?

You should consider your brand’s core values and audience demographics when choosing between minimalism and maximalism. If the answer isn’t immediately clear, you can leverage A/B testing to determine which approach resonates more effectively.

Subscribe to The Content Strategist newsletter to find out how successful marketers are leveraging the latest visual trends in their campaigns and their future visual marketing plans.

The post Top 5 Visual Marketing Design Trends Shaping Marketing Strategies appeared first on Contently.

It’s a word with high stakes, and it signals a strong emotional response. Even when we use it somewhat flippantly (I love that movie … I love the way my butt looks in those jeans … I love this chili recipe), it implies something important: intimacy.

A new study from MBLM shows exactly how important intimacy can be not just in life, but also business—especially in emotionally fraught times. MBLM’s Brand Intimacy COVID Update, released in late September as a followup to its 2020 study, reveals how 100 brands across 10 industries have fared over the past year of the pandemic in creating (or maintaining) intimacy with their customers in the U.S.

And it provides some fascinating insights for marketers who want to build a brand that people, well, love.

Brand intimacy on the rise

MBLM found that brand intimacy is up significantly across all industries since the pandemic began, and that makes sense. Since March 2020, we’ve become reliant on brands at a whole new level—turning to TV and movies for comfort, cars for escape, online retailers for supplies (and therapy), and nearly all forms of technology for a link to the outside world.

We’ve always done those things. Now we just do them much more.

The way we interact with brands these days is, by nature, intimate. Still, some brands are better at creating that intimacy than others.

MBLM surveyed over 3,000 consumers to understand the strength of their connection with different brands. Each brand was then scored on a Brand Intimacy Quotient, “a composite measure that reflects the intensity of the relationship between consumers and brands as well as the prevalence (usage and emotional connection) with the brand” that runs from 0-100.

The top four most successful industries listed in MBLM’s study, in order of ranking, are Media & Entertainment, Automotive, Retail, and Tech & Telecom.

Amongst Tech, Apple reigns supreme

Perhaps predictably, the tech brand that came out on top was Apple, which held its position from the original study last year.

While the average Brand Intimacy Quotient across all industries was 38.3, the Tech & Telecom industry outperformed an average of 45.6—fourth highest amongst all industries, and up 7 percent from last year.

Samsung and Google were tied as the second-most beloved tech brand, with a score of 54.6. Samsung is actually up 7 points from 2020, which is the biggest jump for any brand in the industry.

And then there’s Apple, with a Brand Intimacy Quotient of 73.7. Now that’s love.

It’s unsurprising that Apple’s brand intimacy is so high, considering the near-fanatic loyalty of its customers. Apple has some of the most effective marketing out there, and that held true during the pandemic.

Coincidentally, when broken down by gender, Apple is also the only of the brands to appear in the top five ranking for both men and women.

How language generates intimacy

Getting back to the subject of love, what makes these brands so successful at making us go gaga for them?

One big factor: language.

As part of MBLM’s study, the company analyzed language used on the websites and social media accounts of four leading tech brands—Apple, Google, Samsung, and Microsoft. The results show clear messaging strategies for each brand, unified by a common theme: specifically addressing the concerns their targeted audiences experienced in 2021.

Speaking (or, in this case, writing) to your target audience’s concerns is marketing 101. But in the pandemic, brands have to not only meet customers where they are in their lives and careers, but also in relation to global events.

In 2020, communications from these same four leading brands revolved around words such as “continue,” “free,” and “soon”—language aimed at comforting a customer base living through “unprecedented” times, filled with uncertainty and financial pressure. Messaging promoted sentiments of hope, in addition to special offers such as free deliveries or discounted rates.

This year, communications are still pandemic-oriented, but now the focus is on actively facing both continued and emerging crises, combating misinformation, and getting people back to work. Fittingly, popular words from these brands in 2021 include “misinformation/misleading,” “work,” and, simply, “crisis.”

The takeaway here is that it pays to dig deep with your audience. Intimacy—or, dare we say it, love—is one of the most powerful predictors of loyalty we have, be it with our partners or products. And sometimes, the only way to achieve it is to get emotional.

The post These Are the Brands People Love the Most, According to a New Brand Intimacy Report appeared first on Contently.

With the rise of podcasts and audio storytelling, this isn’t altogether surprising, and smart speakers mean a rise in audio advertising. But this rise is shaping up differently than the traditional radio ads many of us tune out in the car. So what are early-adopters doing? And what do marketers need to be aware of before proceeding full steam ahead?

Educational content

Smart speakers are a way for both B2C and B2B companies to get information across to their listener. Purina’s “Ask Purina” feature encourages consumers to ask Alexa what type of dog breed is right for them. Instead of dishing out a traditional Purina ad about ingredients and dietary benefits, Ask Purina is fun, informative, and a more personalized experience. It’ll also relay beneficial or fun canine facts (Why do dogs lick people? To show that they accept your role as the pack leader). Once the user adopts a breed that their smart speaker recommended, the idea, of course, is that they’ll feel loyal to the brand of dog food that brought dear Fido into their lives.

Motivational career advice

Alexa’s Marketing School by Neil Patel and Eric Siu gives marketers who own smart speakers 10 pieces of actionable advice each morning. (For example, make sure you blog consistently to hold your audience’s attention, but don’t try to publish at a rate that you can’t keep up with.) It’s simple, sure, but it gives the audience a different way to interact with you in space that’s not as saturated as marketing blogs. Also, content that is specialized and engaging will perform better than generic audio ads, no matter how catchy the tagline might be.

Remove sales friction

The Smart Audio Report by NPR and Edison research found that sixty-one percent of smart speaker owners think of their speaker as someone to talk to, rather than just a technological thing that exists in their house. (Her was clearly ahead of its time.)

Since so many consumers take purchasing recommendations from friends and influencers more seriously than brands, might a seemingly personal relationship with a smart speaker help influence shopping decisions? The Smart Audio Report certainly thinks so. According to the data, 57 percent of users have ordered something through their speaker, however, 65 percent of those buyers say they only meant to put the item in their cart to review later.

This is true across a variety of industries: Domino’s has streamlined its ordering process by offering a smart speaker plugin that lets you order your favorite Domino’s pepperoni and green pepper combo with a simple, “Alexa, order a pizza.” Of course, Amazon is primarily a shopping site, so they’ve made purchasing Amazon products via an Echo virtually seamless. Customers can ask Alexa to order something new or reorder a previously purchased product with a single command. Afterward, Alexa confirms the brand, quantity, and price, and complete the purchase with a single “yes” from the user. For brands worried about shopping cart abandonment, this lack of sales friction could be huge.

Wider reach

One of the biggest impacts of smart speakers is how they make audio a social activity again. Thanks to earbuds and headphones, and how easy it is to multitask while listening to a podcast, listening to audio has been a fairly isolated activity during the past decade. Smart speakers change that. Forty four percent of owners claim their speakers help them spend more time with the other people in their house, and sixty-six percent use the speaker to entertain family and friends by asking it questions and interacting with it.

Additionally, families actively engage with Alexa or Echo, as opposed to the passivity of putting on a movie or background music. So when done right, branded stories could reach a larger number of people. Most importantly, those listeners will associate the branded content they hear with a positive social experience.

Ethical questions

As some brands have already realized, smart speakers offer a novel way to talk to prospective customers. Burger King rolled out a fifteen-second TV ad that intentionally connected to viewers’ Google Homes to tell them more about the Whopper once the commercial ended.

Google was less than thrilled about the hack. Since Google Home syncs with Wikipedia, people started editing the Wikipedia page for the Whopper to say its ingredients included a “medium-sized child” and poison. Smart speaker owners can avoid this sort of rogue advertising by setting their speaker to only respond to their voice, but the potential for brands to take advantage of the technology without paying to advertise is ethically questionable, to say the least. The fact that Burger King banked on so many households having a Google Home shouldn’t be lost on advertisers.

While Burger King’s stunt garnered attention and got people talking, the overall negative press probably wasn’t worth it. For brands looking to invest in educational content, however, there’s still an opportunity worth taking. Thirty percent of speaker owners say the device is replacing time they otherwise would spend with the TV, a percentage far too high for advertisers to ignore. Even though it’s an unusual image, we may not be that far away from a world where people spend nights gathered around Alexa, listening to what you have to say.

The post Smart Speakers Are The Latest Content Channel You Should Care About appeared first on Contently.

After years of swift technological development disrupted marketing to its core, CMOs and their teams are now responsible for a bevy of critical company functions: optimizing the sales process, improving customer experience, and marketing the product across a complex array of channels. Meanwhile, CEOs understand that technology allows for accurate tracking of marketing dollars spent, creating immense pressure on CMOs to perform.

Now, another technological breakthrough is on the horizon: artificial intelligence (AI). According to many experts, AI has the potential to be the most revolutionary technology since computing itself—and marketing is first in line for disruption.

Should marketing leaders panic or celebrate? It depends on who you ask.

The artificial intelligence hype machine

2016 was a big year for artificial intelligence.

Google’s AlphaGo program defeated the world champion in the complex game of Go, a landmark in AI development. Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all made significant investments in AI. Wired proclaimed that the world’s biggest tech companies are “remaking themselves around the technology.” In marketing, Salesforce and Adobe announced new intelligence programs, called Einstein and Sensai, respectively. We’re in the midst of an AI arms race.

“I’m astounded in how AI is going to transform every industry,” said Leslie Fine, VP of product at martech giant Salesforce. “Companies today face an imperative to integrate AI into their products and services, or risk becoming less competitive with companies who are applying AI to improve customer experiences and make more intelligent business decisions.”

But what is AI exactly? And how does it apply to marketing? The answers aren’t as simple as you might think.

Everyone seems to have a different definition for AI. Typically, though, it’s an umbrella term that refers to software that carries out tasks that would normally require human intuition. Think recommendations on Netflix, Google Translate, software powering self-driving cars, and even GPS map services such as Waze.

Marketers tend to apply the term to a variety of processes such as automation, machine learning, and optimization. But that has led to a muddled understanding of the technology. And martech vendors aren’t exactly taking steps to clear up the confusion. As AI takes its place as the industry’s buzzword du jour, companies everywhere are hoping to ride the hype.

Henry Schuck, CEO of DiscoverOrg, a sales and marketing intelligence solution, believes that Salesforce’s Einstein announcement in 2016 was mostly a rebranding of what the company formally called “predictive lead scoring.” According to him, the new terminology has led to a hysteria of “rebranding” from companies desperate to keep up.

Sameer Patel, CEO of the B2C smart automation software company Kahuna, worries this widespread adoption could have real consequences. “There’s just a lot taking old technology, plastering AI on it, putting a nice gloss on it, and saying, ‘Hey, great, I’m AI,'” he said. “No, you’re not. It’s going to give AI a bad name, ultimately, because the results won’t come out.”

Unfortunately, there is no authority that defines what exactly is and isn’t AI, and companies will likely use the term’s loose definition to hype their own products or undercut competitors. AI’s definition will always be broad—what really matters is what the technology can do.

The rise of AI

Jon Epstein—CMO at Sentient, one of the most-funded independent AI firms in the world—believes AI will be more revolutionary than the internet.

But artificial intelligence has been around for years. The difference is that recent technological innovations have propelled its rise to the front of the marketing hype train. As Scott Brinker, founding editor of ChiefMartec, wrote last year, “The horsepower and data to efficiently run AI algorithms is now within reach of everyone.”

AI is already visible in a number of marketing disciplines. Ad tech companies use AI to power programmatic ad exchanges, automatically optimizing ad campaigns that once required intense menial labor. Marketing automation software, such as Marketo, also takes care of tasks that once required hours of labor, such as sending nurture emails or qualifying leads.

“Any part of the marketing world where a marketer has to read data and make decisions based on that data will be affected by AI in one way or another in the near future,” Schuck said.

“With any AI, they are really only as good as the data that goes into them.”

While machine learning and automation tools can simplify marketing processes, many of today’s AI companies are also focused on how technology can improve customer experience. Sentient, for example, uses its “distributed AI platform,” which runs on an incredible network of 2 million CPUs and 5,000 GPUs (the horsepower in a computer), to help retail clients optimize the customer experience. One of its two marketing products, Sentient Ascend, does A/B testing in real time at massive scale.

“Normally when you’re testing … it’s pretty slow and painstaking.” Epstein explained. “Instead, using a different type of algorithm, you can test ten, twenty, thirty changes at a time, and it solves not only what changes to make, but what combination of them to achieve the highest level of response.”

To visualize this, think of testing colors and fonts on a lead form, the centerpiece of many marketing tool kits. Epstein told me that after one company used Sentient to test 380,000 form designs, its lead form conversion rate increased by 45 percent.

“The fact that you can pick up that kind of gain from what you would think of as tweaks, it’s pretty profound,” Epstein said. “We think there’s a lot of money being left on the table.”

At Kahuna, which serves mostly B2C clients, Patel values AI for the way it can help customize customer experience, using machine learning and signals to optimize for individual needs. Some companies are already showing that this customer-focused approach works.

“If you look at how quickly you can call for an Uber or pick a movie on Netflix, our tolerance and our attention span right now as consumers is wildly, wildly, wildly shorter than it used to be,” Patel said. “You’re dealing with a world where they’re expecting that you know who they are, you can understand their needs, and you can fulfill them in real time.”

From teen to neo-Nazi

While it’s easy to get caught up in the hype, AI still comes with issues. These software products rely on integrated and accurate data collection systems, but not every company has the digital infrastructure in place to take advantage of such advanced technology. Since martech is a young space, many marketers still use poorly integrated systems that lack oversight.

“With any AI, they are really only as good as the data that goes into them,” Schuck said.

In 2016, Microsoft built a Twitter bot called Tay meant to resemble a teenage girl that could communicate with users. In less than 24 hours, the bot tweeted messages like “Hitler was right I hate the Jews,” and “I fucking hate feminists and they should all die and burn in hell.”

Since the bot was programmed to take signals from users, internet trolls overwhelmed it with offensive messages and quickly turned Tay into a neo-Nazi bot. The controversy was an embarrassing example of AI’s potential to spiral out of control.

AI also dregs up criticisms often leveled at the adtech industry: namely, the reliance on over-personalization. Privacy concerns about too much targeting could lead to an “uncanny valley,” where customers are creeped out by AI’s abilities to predict their wants and needs.

However, most marketers remain confident the value outweighs these concerns. “I feel like we’re getting to a place where, as long you’re not messing with the user’s trust, people want personalization,” Patel said. “I think we’re moving from being okay with that to actually expecting that.”

The ghost in the machine

So here’s the big question: Where does artificial intelligence leave the marketer? Technology has already reshaped blue-collar industries, eliminating the need for jobs. Won’t automated systems threaten to destroy traditional marketing roles as well?

AI proponents concede that technology will replace some roles, but they believe AI has the potential to create just as many new jobs. Plus, they argue, software could free up marketers to focus on creative, strategic work rather than day-to-day processes.

“Ninety-five percent of the people who came to marketing did not come to this data-driven world. They came for the soft side of marketing. ” Patel said. “Because of AI, you can be that creative person you always wanted to be. You now have systems that don’t require you to become a mathematician.”

“Because of AI you can be that creative person that you always wanted to be.”

Perhaps there’s a compromise in the future. Patel and Schuck both expect a new breed of marketer to emerge—someone part data scientist, part creative, who can work directly with AI systems.

“AI will significantly simplify the user experience for many of the martech tools that marketers use, as well as automate a tremendous amount of the ‘manual’ labor associated with marketing programs today,” Brinker added. “It’s unlikely that we’ll be lounging around while robots feed us grapes.”

Currently, Sentient is working on building an “AI that writes AI,” a holy grail that could exponentially accelerate the sophistication of existing software. What happens if a competitor gets its hands on such technology while your company cannot? As AI develops, marketers will have to adapt quickly, and some of them may not be prepared.

“We’re at the very beginning of something,” Epstein said. “Seeing what our own technology can do, the stuff we’re doing research on—we ain’t seen anything yet.”

The post Marketing’s Artificial Intelligence Revolution Is Here appeared first on Contently.

The early response to Podcasts was also rough, but Apple’s decision to separate it from the standard music functionality eventually had a huge impact. Listening to a podcast soon became its own activity, different from listening to a song. And Podcasts came equipped with its own features like genre filters, a “top charts” section, and curated lists.

As with any rapidly growing space, the podcasting arena has seen an energetic crowd of new players rush in ready to experiment and capitalize. Apple still provides for 65 percent of podcast listeners, as John Herrman detailed in a New York Times article from May, but there’s some tension mounting. Ad revenue increased by 48 percent last year, and some podcasters are beginning to pressure Apple to update its infrastructure and offer more robust metrics to gauge success. Others, meanwhile, worry that asking for too much data could ruin the beauty of a simple medium.

Listen up

“Apple built this village ten years ago,” Matt Lieber, a co-founder of Gimlet Media, told Herrman. “There’s really interesting things in the village, and interesting characters. But the village now has the population of a city, and when a village becomes a city, you need new infrastructure.”

As of today, new distributors like Spotify, Sticher, Google Play, Audible, and Overcast have stepped into the ring. New networks like Gimlet, Radiotopia, and Panopoly have their own diverse podcast portfolios.

In the Times article, titled “Podcasts Surge, but Producers Fear Apple Isn’t Listening,” Herrman details a list of growing gripes among industry leaders, chief among them primitive analytics. For its developers who build apps, Apple offers detailed analytics software, and until it abandoned the initiative this summer, iAd software to help with monetization. But Apple gives podcasters one simple number: total downloads.

“When a village becomes a city, you need new infrastructure.”

Downloads can be a crude metric that doesn’t necessarily provide accurate data on total listens—the metric that matters most to advertisers. Unlike apps that must be used live, podcasts can be pulled from the app and listened to offline as an MP3. There’s no way to tell if someone listened to a full episode.

“It’s like downloading a picture,” Gimlet Media’s chief of staff, Chris Giliberti, told me. “No one has any idea how many times you’ve viewed it. It’s proprietary. It lives locally on your phone.”

The gray area between downloads and listens makes it difficult to court bigger advertisers.

“Knowing how many and how long people listen for would be useful,” Max Linsky, co-founder of the Longform podcast, said. “That’s one kind of analytics. That’s just basically getting to what I think would be a sort of obvious standard. And I think Apple is going to supply that.”

Some podcasters want to push for more sophisticated data. “We want to understand where they’re listening. Who they are. What their demo is. What platform and device they’re using. What other shows they’re listening to,” said Jason Hoch, chief content officer at How Stuff Works. “I want that expected level of sophistication and detail around analytics like we’re getting on other platforms.”

How Stuff Works produces 12 podcasts, six of which generate more than a million monthly downloads each. It’s a prime example of a publisher that wants to access more data as it continues to thrive so it can make bigger deals with bigger sponsors. Listeners typically hear ads from niche brands because, as Newsonomics author Ken Doctor wrote on Nieman Lab, the biggest players have “only stuck a toe into podcast advertising.”

“Part of what’s holding them back from coming into this space is that in most cases, [ad buys] are coming out of digital budgets, and it’s a really tough sell if the advertisers are not getting in exchange a certain richness in the data that they’re used to,” Giliberti said. “If you want the sponsors that are going to … support really ambitious journalism that has the potential to create wide cultural and societal impact, and you believe that podcasting is a good medium for that, you have to be rooting for the data that allows you to build a business case.”

Hear this

Giliberti’s argument makes sense in theory, but it may not be as simple as more data leads to more money, which leads to better content.

There’s already a lot of great content out there. The risk, according to Overcast founder Marco Arment, is that the data economy will “destroy another medium.” Arment points out that more data from Apple could actually hurt independent podcasters and force everyone to operate inside its walls. Better data may also lead to a new philosophy that values quantity and virality over quality.

“I think it really just comes down to knowing … how happy your sponsors are when they hand you that check,” Aaron Mahnke, creator of the nonfiction horror history podcast Lore, said. “If they get enough leads or sign-ups, or people use enough coupon codes to justify that expense, they’ll come back and justify the expense again. I don’t think we need to provide incredibly in-depth demographics for sponsors, because the show itself is a demographic.”

If last month’s iOS 10 release is any indication of Apple’s vision, it seems to be sticking with an old-school approach. There was no update to the podcasting app. In fact, a new feature now allows you to delete the native app if you want.

Perhaps it comes down to economics. Apple doesn’t really generate revenue from podcasts. Apple might simply lack an incentive to throw more resources at a feature that still dominates the market and gives podcasters enough to get by. (Apple, to its credit, already operates 29 editorial teams that localize podcasting content for 155 countries.)

Apple still dominates the market by a huge margin, but its share of listeners did decrease by five percentage points last year. As competitors join the fray, there could be more dips in the future.

There are subtle signs the company may be thinking ahead. A patent filed by Apple in early 2014 details dynamic ad-insertion software that could help podcasters streamline their pre-, mid-, and post-roll ad, and even monetize their backlogs with constantly refreshing ads. Whether that patent will ever become product is still unclear. At the very least, nobody cares about Apple Maps anymore, right?

The post Will Podcasters Abandon Apple? appeared first on Contently.

The New Yorker: Pete Wells Has His Knives Out

Selected by Noah Waldman, editorial intern

I hate that I’m writing these words, but critics are the proto-influencers. Before we went to Rotten Tomatoes to find out whether a film was objectively good or bad according to the internet hivemind, we’d pick up the most recent issue of The New Yorker in our mom’s therapist’s waiting room and flip to Richard Brody’s review of a movie that was playing in two theaters in all of New York. I assume this experience is universal.

But it seems that as my access to Richard Brody’s opinions has increased—now you can just go to The New Yorker’s website instead of taking the F to 75th Avenue and walking a couple blocks to where my mom went to therapy—his influence has decreased.

Now, it doesn’t matter if Richard Brody liked Suicide Squad—it’s gonna make hundreds of millions of dollars anyway. Yet while it seems that every other critics’ cultural cache has been subsumed by the aggregate opinions of random people boiled down to number between 0 and 100, The New York Times’s leading food critic Pete Wells remains an almost singular arbiter of good taste.

This profile on the most powerful man in food doesn’t just explore how he feels about his awesome critical responsibilities, but invites us to spend some nights dining with him ourselves. He compares his negative reviews to a bullet in a gun—and here we get to find out more about the man pulling the trigger.

Bloomberg: Will Amazon Kill FedEx?

Selected by Jordan Teicher, senior editor

I love the bookstore, but I’m not always faithful. I enjoy going to the independent store a few blocks from my place and do it as much as I can, but Amazon is too attractive with its prices and shipping. It’s too smart. It knows how to do everything in the most efficient way possible. It gives me what I want without any hassle. Prime is basically an aphrodisiac to consumers. And soon, while we’re all too busy being seduced, it’s going to take over the world.

The only real roadblock in its way is shipping. But that could be changing, thanks to some covert operations that should scare UPS and FedEx. This Bloomberg article goes into those operations and makes a case for why one of the world’s most powerful businesses is ready to get more powerful.

Here’s a sneak preview: “‘It’s just one giant math exercise,” Deutsche Bank wrote, adding that Amazon has ‘hundreds of Ph.D. mathematicians’ who spend their days optimizing logistics.”

Dystopia, here we come.

Wired: Google’s Clever Plan to Stop Aspiring ISIS Recruits

Selected by Nico Willson, editorial intern

Whoever thought that targeted advertising could prevent the recruiting efforts of extremist groups?

Google’s incubator, Jigsaw (previously known as Google Ideas), is working on a program that targets aspiring ISIS recruits, redirecting and reeducating them. It places advertising alongside results for any keywords and phrases that Google has determined recruits might be searching.

Videos and clips include testimonials from former recruits and imams denouncing ISIS’s corruption of Islam, as well as clips from inside ISIS strongholds (which are not so heavenly as ISIS describes). It’s not the be-all, end-all solution, and Google doesn’t claim it is, but it’s a step in the right direction in counteracting the online propaganda of extremist groups.

The Atlantic: Why Are So Many of Today’s Logos Wordless?

Selected by Yardain Amron, editorial intern

Brands are increasingly embracing minimalism, stripping down their logos to the bare essentials. MasterCard, McDonalds, Starbucks, Shell—all have embraced the power of symbol and either demoted or vanquished their names from their logos. Why?

This Atlantic story economically lays out a number of impetuses for the trend, including streamlining design, the effectiveness of symbol over word in a globalized world, and paradoxically, a growing skepticism of global corporations. Ironically, cutting a brand’s name can help a corporation rebrand: a rebrand by debranding.

Vanity Fair: Burritto-Delievering Google Drones Are Headed to College

Selected by Ann Fabens-Lassen, communications manager

The dream of every stoner at Virginia Tech is about to come true: Google drones will soon start delivering Chipotle to their school. My initial feeling was a sense of frustration at all the dumb things we use technology for. I kind of share the sentiment of whoever made this meme.

But the fact of the matter is the brands that have money to sponsor this type of thing (Chipotle) and the tech giants with money to spend on experimental projects (Google) often end up driving huge innovations and overcoming regulations. In fact, the article explains that this is the “most significant F.A.A.-approved trials of drone-delivery technology yet conducted in the United States.”

If this goes well, we could see a huge change in how retailers market and deliver goods, which will hopefully mean more drone use for things that will positively impact society.

The Guardian: Mark Zuckerberg accused of abusing power after Facebook deletes ‘napalm girl’ post

Selected by Dillon Baker, associate editor

Today in how not to do communications, we have this all-time bad statement from Facebook HQ: “While we recognize that this photo is iconic, it’s difficult to create a distinction between allowing a photograph of a nude child in one instance and not others.”

While it’s true that, from an algorithm’s perspective, this is indeed difficult, it also undermines Facebook’s longstanding attempt to convince us that algorithms are better than humans at content curation. Anyone with editorial experience—or half a brain, really—could easily identify this seminal photograph by Nick Ut as decidedly not child pornography. Algorithms, on the other hand, are culturally dumb, despite the years of work and millions of dollars that have been poured into Facebook’s censorship system.

It’s a bad look just weeks after Facebook fired its editorial team and put the algorithm (and engineers, apparently) in charge. In combination with today’s other Facebook scandal—that its Trending section promoted a 9/11 conspiracy article—one has to wonder if Facebook is regretting its decision.

Stratechery: Beyond the iPhone

Selected by Kristen Poli, content strategy associate

Ben Thompson’s analysis of the recent press around the new iPhone 7 posits that Apple users may be on the precipice of ending the honeymoon phase of our collective relationship with the iconic tech company.

It’s not that anything is wrong with the new iPhone 7—but there isn’t anything really compelling about it, either. Apple CEO Tim Cook seems to be relying on all of the perks that come with being an iPhone user (read: access to exclusive albums on Apple Music, iOS-only Nintendo games) without offering major innovations of the product itself. It’s like having a significant other who is kind of boring, but has a really good record collection.

However, Thompson optimistically asserts that some of these seemingly underwhelming features are likely laying the groundwork for major changes, like virtual-reality cameras and voice-only wireless computing.

The post ‘Beyond the iPhone,’ And 6 Other Stories You Should Read appeared first on Contently.

But the one that auto-played in my Instagram feed a few nights ago was strangely depressing. It only got more depressing the more I thought about it.

The video opens with an attractive bowl of panang curry.

But then the camera zooms out. It’s not a bowl of panang curry, but a picture of a bowl of panang curry on an iPad. A hand holds a digital stylus and scribbles “PANANG CURRY” and “DAY 5: IN BANGKOK.”

Then it zooms out some more, revealing that picture of a bowl of curry is right in front of its real-life counterpart. Except the photographer isn’t eating the food—he’s painstakingly recording it for social media.

That’s when it hit me: Apple thinks that I’m the type of person who goes to Thailand and spends 30 minutes recording my food before I eat it. Apple thinks I’m that guy. And that a new way to share food porn will compel me to spend $800. Apple spent money to target me based on this belief.

The strange part is that you can’t find this ad anywhere online. It’s not posted on one of Apple’s Instagram accounts or the company’s YouTube channel. (Which is why I couldn’t embed the video.) You can’t link to the ad or search for it in any way. In marketing circles, this is known as a dark post, but it’s really more like a ghost. We can’t find it, but it can find us.

Ghost content isn’t unique to Instagram. Most major social networks—Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram—feature these dark posts that slip across the web. They pop into our feeds and reveal a lot about our digital lives.

These dark posts are strange. Usually, we expect digital content to have a permanent home on the web. We can find it, share it. We can post it in our group chat and ask our friends in a panic, “Is this what Apple really thinks of me?!” (Note: This may only happen when most of your friends work in media.)

But we’re increasingly inundated with digital content that doesn’t have a home. Brands are pumping more and more money into social media advertising. They’ll spend nearly $33 billion this year, per eMarketer’s estimates, and over $50 billion by 2018. Often, that money is going to promoted content rather than direct response ads—not only because organic reach has fallen for brands across social networks (primarily Facebook and Instagram), but also because brands are creating more content than ever.

In other words, prepare to be spooked.

The post Ghost Social: The Curious Case of the iPad Pro Ad appeared first on Contently.

On Tuesday, Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym of the Federal District Court for the District of Central California ordered Apple to build special software that would bypass the security features on the iPhone 5c of Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the two San Bernardino shooters.

Apple has decided to oppose the order. In an 1,100-word customer letter published on Apple’s website early this morning, CEO Tim Cook explains in detail how Apple has complied with the FBI’s investigation so far, and why building a backdoor would put the security of every iPhone at risk:

When the FBI has requested data that’s in our possession, we have provided it. Apple complies with valid subpoenas and search warrants, as we have in the San Bernardino case. We have also made Apple engineers available to advise the FBI, and we’ve offered our best ideas on a number of investigative options at their disposal.

We have great respect for the professionals at the FBI, and we believe their intentions are good. Up to this point, we have done everything that is both within our power and within the law to help them. But now the U.S. government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create. They have asked us to build a backdoor to the iPhone.

Specifically, the FBI wants us to make a new version of the iPhone operating system, circumventing several important security features, and install it on an iPhone recovered during the investigation. In the wrong hands, this software — which does not exist today — would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone’s physical possession.

The FBI may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a backdoor. And while the government may argue that its use would be limited to this case, there is no way to guarantee such control.

The letter successfully communicates why this is a deeply troubling idea. “In the physical world, it would be the equivalent of a master key, capable of opening hundreds of millions of locks,” Cook writes, “from restaurants and banks to stores and homes. No reasonable person would find that acceptable.”

In essence, the iOS backdoor software would make it possible for someone to unlock an iPhone by using a computer to plug in millions of passcode combinations. Cook’s letter explains this clearly, as well as the larger legal implications of the FBI using the All Writs Act of 1789 to force the company’s hand:

The implications of the government’s demands are chilling. If the government can use the All Writs Act to make it easier to unlock your iPhone, it would have the power to reach into anyone’s device to capture their data. The government could extend this breach of privacy and demand that Apple build surveillance software to intercept your messages, access your health records or financial data, track your location, or even access your phone’s microphone or camera without your knowledge.

Whether you personally agree with Apple’s stance or not, it’s hard to deny that the letter is well-executed. Cook communicates his opposition clearly and concisely, and in terms that the average consumer can understand.

It’s also a moment that captures the dynamics of modern media and PR. Just five years ago, Apple would have likely fed these talking points through a like-minded reporter in order to reach a mass audience. But in 2016, the best move is to publish your message directly to the people—like Amazon did by responding on Medium to the New York Times‘s exposé on the company— eliminating any risk that the message is altered along the way. The media will cover the letter anyway, as the Times did this morning. It’s too important of a story not to.

As of writing, Cook’s letter has been shared over 28,000 times in the first 10 hours, according to BuzzSumo’s software, with momentum only building.

And yes, there’s a marketing benefit here as well. Increasingly, one of Apple’s biggest competitive differentiators from Google is its stance on privacy—a point Cook has made again and again. This letter was yet another opportunity to cement that in the minds of consumers.

Usually, the common logic is that content marketing should shy away from news. In this case, it is the news. And from the looks of it, this story is far from over.

Update: Edward Snowden calls on Google to follow Cook’s lead.

This is the most important tech case in a decade. Silence means @google picked a side, but it's not the public's. https://t.co/mi5irJcr25

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) February 17, 2016

The post Apple Takes on the Government With Content appeared first on Contently.

As Google said during the (largely unrelated) court case that revealed the news, “Both Apple and Google have always treated this information as extremely confidential.”

But why? For one, it confirms the hidden collusion that many have suspected from the Big Tech Companies (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon). More importantly, it demonstrates the weak position Google finds itself in—and the powerful one Apple maintains.

Google’s business is largely based on digital advertising—search ads and a vast ad network make up the majority of its revenue—all of which is driven by data collected by its platforms of Chrome, Gmail, Android, YouTube, and, of course, Google Search.

Apple, on the other hand, is a hardware business. iPhone, iPad, and Mac sales make up the majority of its revenue. It’s why Apple can strong-arm Google into paying $1 billion in exchange for keeping the search bar on its hardware.

As a result of this advantage, Apple is starting to move away from what many consider a fundamental part of the Internet: advertising.

An Apple luxury

Google has an ad problem. As you read this, the company has over 1,000 employees dedicated to fighting bad ads. That’s a massive amount of manpower for a tech company, but it makes sense given that Google relies on a healthy advertising ecosystem.

Apple, meanwhile, just abandoned its failed ad business, iAds, which began back in 2010. Now, with no ad business holding Apple back, the company has the potential to do something radical: phase out advertising on its platforms altogether.

It would be a big bet, one reliant on the premise that the demand for a great user experience will outweigh potential profits from advertising and tracking. But given Apple’s devoted target customers, the move would make a lot of sense.

This radical philosophy is what differentiates Netflix in the streaming space, and it appears Apple is moving in a similar direction. Phasing out ads is a luxury afforded by Apple’s hardware business model, as well as a direct attack on Google’s data-dependent ad business.

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook hasn’t hidden his contempt for advertising and tracking technology.

“I’m speaking to you from Silicon Valley, where some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information. They’re gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that’s wrong. And it’s not the kind of company that Apple wants to be.”

As Ad Age points out, Apple is not always the knight in shining armor when it comes to anti-data collection—many iPhone features, such as location tracking, have been monetized by the company.

But Apple is certainly the most conscientious of the Big Tech Companies when it comes to privacy. The hardware features safeguards that let users keep MAC addresses[note]Similar to IP addresses.[/note] private, turn off cookies as a default setting, and, most recently, block ads on Safari.

Due to the rapid rise of adblocking, digital advertisers are increasingly finding themselves at odds with the very users they hope to reach. And now, the largest company in the world may be making a push for an Internet experience completely free of ads.

The post Why Apple Is Abandoning Its Ad Business appeared first on Contently.

Since we typically don’t break news on TCS, a lot of our story ideas come from understanding how the worlds of content marketing, media, advertising, journalism, and pop culture fit together. We’re constantly sharing links in our team’s Slack channel, links that spark debates, impact what we write on TCS, and shape how we think about content marketing as a whole.

Every Friday, we’ll be rounding up the best (somewhat relevant) articles we’ve read that week, with a quick summary on why we felt compelled to share them.

This week we got a little dark.

Joe and Dillon dive into the confusing, anxiety-ridden mishmash of tech, media, and content; Sam shares an amazing but depressing piece of creative writing about Disneyland and contemporary culture with one of the best headlines we’ve ever seen; Shane recommends a fantastic (and kind of gross) piece of gummy bear journalism; and Ann takes a look at Apple’s continuing assault on advertising. Luckily, we have Jordan and George Saunders to cheer us up at the end with some great writing advice.

Enjoy.

The Awl: Extremely Public Relations

Selected by Joe Lazauskas, director of editorial

Did you miss the delightful round two of the battle royale between Amazon and The New York Times this week? 64 days after The Times published a scathing expose of Amazon’s brutal workplace, the tech giant responded with a Medium post by PR head John Carney refuting the report and accusing The Times of bad journalism—because, you know, why not remind everyone of the worst press you’ve gotten in years?

The Times quickly fired back with an open letter to Carney, again on Medium, and we had ourselves a battle.

And then there was John Hermann, our media-reporter man crush here at Contently, who saw it as representative of something bigger: the brewing press vs. tech war. Tech knows it doesn’t need the media to tell its story anymore, while the press is fearful of a world where tech controls all, and this is only going to get more vicious:

There’s blood in the water. Tech knows it’s winning. It no longer seems unreasonable to suggest that the press, as it exists today, could be demolished and replaced with something very different. Tech will become bolder in its denouncements of the preexisting press; the press will return the favor, maybe. Or just clown itself to an early grave! For the time being, the market favors one outcome; the networks through which it will come to pass resemble this market; the means of production blah blah, attention, something. Every dispute over the particulars of a news story, or the way it is distributed, eventually arrives here, in this big enormous mess.

Tech now firmly controls the pipes through which we’re fed content; the press knows they need to fight back on myriad fronts. Hermann evaluates all the fascinating possibilities in this deep take, and it’s a must-read for anyone who works in this weird content-tech wonderworld.

Digiday: Now Apple Is Warning People About Clicking Ads

Selected by Ann Fabens-Lassen, communications manager

In the latest news on Apple’s complete indifference to what advertisers think, Digiday is reporting one of the biggest attacks on ads by the company yet. Apple has already allowed for mobile adblockers on the latest version of Safari; now, in the unlikely event that a person actually clicks on an ad in its new News app, Apple has a pop-up that warns you that you’re leaving News and makes you click again to go to the ad. Basically, it’s the kiss of death for banner ads already attracting little to no clicks (or touches, in this case).

What’s interesting to me is that publishers love Apple News, partly because they get 70 percent to 100 percent of ad revenue (depending on whether they run the ads themselves or let Apple take over). I wonder how far Apple will be able to push before brands aren’t willing to advertise on the platform at all. It’ll also be interesting to see how the Google equivalent of Apple News/Facebook Instant Articles handles advertising, considering that the company is much more dependent on ad revenue.

The New York Times Lab: The Future of News Is Not an Article

Selected by Dillon Baker, associate editor

When The New York Times released the interactive feature Snow Fall in 2012, many saw it as the next step in journalism. GIFs, embedded video, interactive charts! Pretty! But the revolution hasn’t really come.

While most feature articles nowadays at big news organizations like Bloomberg or this incredible feature by The Intercept on Drone Warfare make use of innovative formatting similar to Snow Fall, these kind of pieces are still the exception rather than the rule. And it looks like The New York Times is shifting their attention to a new vision of digital news.

Interestingly, this reimagining of news in the digital era is uncannily similar to what Vox.com is already trying to do[note]In fact, the article mentions the rise of “explainer journalism”, Vox’s signature style, without mentioning Vox explicitly.[/note]—constantly updating, living articles on big topics are Vox’s “card stacks“, and the idea of a CMS with news “particles” for journalists to easily organize and access previous reporting sounds very similar to the capabilities of Vox Media’s famed Chrous platform.

The problem, as Vox editor-in-chief Erza Klein laid out in a previous article about Facebook Instant Articles, is that the move to publishing native content on social networks blocks this kind of innovation:

But innovation will slow. The case for massive editorial investment that only benefits the on-platform readership will weaken. The big publishers — at least those that sell scale to advertisers rather than subscriptions to a loyal audience — will become like wire services that operate across many platforms. And like the wire services of today, that will make them absolutely essential, but it will also keep them from being as experimental as was possible when they controlled their own platforms.

The New York Times mentions native publishing on Facebook briefly at the beginning of the article, but goes on to detail their vision without really addressing the elephant in the room. Any sort of explanation as to why Klein’s (seemingly prescient) idea of news as a wire service to social media platforms won’t happen isn’t given, which makes it difficult to take anything that comes after seriously. Perhaps, frighteningly, there is no explanation to give.[note]John Hermann of The Awl goes in depth on this issue as well, if you’re interested.[/note]

Vice: Sugarless Gummy Bears Are Not Safe for Humans

Selected by Shane Snow, cofounder and CCO

This is an oldie but a goodie… about goodies. I reread it this week after our Operations Manager sent a company email about Haribo Gummy Bears. We need more of this kind of brave, plucky-writer-in-the-middle-of-the-action reporting in today’s journalism.

Twitter and email have turned us all into antisocial reporter weenies. Journalism used to be about LOITERING. Hanging out in police offices, war zones. Dangling from the fire escape by your foot to get the shot of the gang fight. Journalism is about eating the diarrhea gummy bears, not taking ViralNova’s word for it!

Matter: Burning Down the Mouse

Selected by Sam Slaughter, VP of content

I really enjoyed this Heather Havrilesky essay about taking her kids to Disneyland. It speaks to how our entire lives have been Disney and Facebook-ified into this weird and public display of forced happiness and entertainment. Or, as she puts it:

We’re all plugged into a shiny, down-home, buoyant, authentic-seeming global simulacrum, one that not only doesn’t belong to us, but bleeds us of our sanity, our money, and our privacy and sells it off to the highest bidder.

The New Yorker: My Writing Education: A Time Line

Selected by Jordan Teicher, senior editor

To me, the best writing advice doesn’t feel like advice. Instead of spoon-feeding tips and tricks to the reader in this essay, George Saunders embeds takeaways in vignettes about his struggles and brief triumphs as an MFA student and, later, a technical writer for various companies, before he became a prolific author.

Reading the article didn’t make me want to write like Saunders; it made me want to think like him when approaching my work, which is much more useful. Saunders had teachers who helped him see that he needed to patiently find his own voice—even if he had to wait over a decade to do so. Anyone with a creative job will appreciate the candor in this story about what it takes to make a living telling stories.

The post What We’re Reading: The Weird Future of News, Our Disneyfied Lives, and Apple’s War on Ads appeared first on Contently.

Since we typically don’t break news on TCS, a lot of our story ideas come from understanding how the worlds of content marketing, media, advertising, journalism, and pop culture fit together. We’re constantly sharing links in our team’s Slack channel, links that spark debates, impact what we write on TCS, and shape how we think about content marketing as a whole.

Below, you’ll find articles covering everything from the new Steve Jobs film to Tom Wolfe’s strange career path to (three!) articles about Facebook. We hope you get as much out of them as we did.

Vanity Fair: How Tom Wolfe Became Tom Wolfe

Selected by Sam Slaughter, VP of content

It’s cool and kind of inspiring to see how one of my favorite journalists got started. I love how he was totally directionless and had no idea what he wanted to do until his early thirties, and then basically had his career take off after one panic-stricken evening of writer’s block.

It’s a good lesson in working hard, but also knowing when to recognize and embrace serendipity. Make sure you read the anecdote at the end about how he got invited to the Black Panther party at Leonard Bernstein’s that launched his career. And if nothing else, Wolfe is the best example of how rocking white suits all the time is awesome.

The Hollywood Reporter: A Widow’s Threats, High-Powered Spats and the Sony Hack: The Strange Saga of ‘Steve Jobs’

Selected by Jordan Teicher, senior editor

Even though Apple seems to hate the idea of the upcoming Steve Jobs film, the movie is essentially a piece of branded content. Apple played no part in the film’s production, but judging by trailers and early reviews, it’s still going to seduce consumers on behalf of the company. Consider it high-quality promotion for the genius culture. And it turns out that the backstory about getting the production off the ground might be more dramatic than the movie itself.

This article, which goes over the intense struggle that the film’s creators had to overcome just to get it made, isn’t the type of piece that’s going to be nominated for a National Magazine Award, but I think it’s an important look at how brands wind up regretting safe choices. Not only did Apple unnecessarily distance itself from Steve Jobs, but Sony regretfully ended up passing on the project because of spats about costs, egos, and talent.

Let it be a cautionary tale to marketers and decision makers everywhere.

Ad Age: Is It Content or Is It Advertising?

Selected by Dillon Baker, associate editor

This piece addresses one of the biggest questions rattling around my brain since I started at Contently a year ago, which is: What the hell is this whole content marketing thing anyway?

That may seem like a weird question for me to ask, but I’m confident that few people (if anyone!) can answer it definitively. And if they do have an answer, that itself is suspicious. Because after five or so years of content marketing officially being “a thing,” everyone still seems to define it in their own way. Is it advertising? Is it brand publishing? Is it just anything that resembles editorial but is actually marketing? What kind of content marketing isn’t advertising? These are surprisingly hard questions to answer.

All I know, in spite of the confusion, is that the term “content marketing” isn’t going anywhere.

Wired: Facebook Messenger: Inside Zuckerberg’s App for Everything

Selected by Joe Lazauskas, director of editorial

If you care about media, technology, or just what the Internet is going to be like in five years, this Wired profile on Facebook Messenger is a must-read.

As I explained on TV earlier this week (SHAMELESS PLUG), chat apps are everything outside the Western world: They’re how people communicate, consume media, shop, order food, bank, etc. They’re actually a super convenient way to structure the web. Chat apps haven’t taken off in the West just yet, but that’s quickly changing.

This piece does a great job of revealing Facebook’s plans for the future and how the Messenger platform could supplant mobile operating systems and app ecosystems as we know them. Get ready for Emperor Zuckerberg.

Esquire: Mark Zuckerberg Will Not Share This Story on Facebook

Selected by Shane Snow, CCO and co-founder

Tom Junod writes the best profiles of any magazine writer out there. His profile of Elon Musk a couple of years ago was awesome. This time, he deconstructs Mark Zuckerberg entirely from conversations with him on Facebook. It’s a clever bit of writing, but also a fascinating analysis of one of the most powerful—and, it turns out, boring—people in modern media.

The Atlantic: Raiders of the Lost Web

Selected by Jessica Black, marketing manager

Turns out everything on the web is fleeting. Which is good news when it comes to high school prom photos, bad news if you’re a journalist who has spent months researching a Pulitzer Prize-winning story only to watch it evaporate from space and time. Trigger warning: Do not read if the idea of your life’s work disappearing from existence upsets you.

BuzzFeed: The Personal Assistant That Will Help Facebook Eat the Internet

Selected by Esme Cribb, editorial intern

Facebook’s human-supported and supervised virtual personal assistant M is part of the Messenger “ecosystem.” It’s not just trying to change how you use the Internet—it’s trying to make the transition between interaction and instruction seamless.

Also, this tweet embedded in the piece nearly Turing’d me.

Facebook's M is some next level shit. Check this out: pic.twitter.com/DANwkjzTV9

— Alex Kantrowitz (@Kantrowitz) October 15, 2015

We’ll see you next Friday with a fresh batch of stories.

The post What We’re Reading: Lord Zuckerberg, How to Define Content, and the Origin of Tom Wolfe appeared first on Contently.

The move comes at a delicate time for the company, which is still reeling from a highly publicized user rebellion that shut down much of the site and resulted in the resignation of former CEO Ellen Pao[note]A separate Wired article deemed this episode an “epic meltdown.”[/note]. Much of the public anger was a result of small-scale attempts to reel in what had become an unruly and often vehement community of groups that, despite their relatively small size, had come to define the site’s reputation as a place for the worst kind of online hatred. Between reprehensible subreddits like r/rapingwomen and r/coontown—which have since been banned—and an intimidating user interface, the site was scaring off new users and advertisers alike.

In comes Upvoted, which will explicitly distill the best parts of Reddit—incredible stories, discussions, and creativity that often end up aggregated on sites like BuzzFeed and Gawker—into an editorial venture meant to make advertisers and users feel comfortable.

Launched today, Upvoted features a variety of stories and formats. Take this article about how people spent their last day before a suicide attempt, or, for a less heavy example, this piece on what would happen if a black hole formed in your pocket. There’s even a weekly feature showcasing the art of popular user Shitty_WaterColour.

There seems to be only one prerequisite to publishing: Reddit users must influence every single piece of content. Sometimes, the editorial team will simply add an introduction and then copy in existing text; other times, they will interview outside sources to answer a user’s question user; and in some cases, they just present a Reddit thread in a journalistic style. Experimentation seems to be the name of the game so far.

Reddit and the rapidly changing content landscape

Despite the surprise debut, the website has been a long time coming. Reddit has produced a podcast, also named “Upvoted,” since January, and had launched a weekly newsletter in April. And for months, employees had been talking about their pivot to content. Alexis Ohanian, Reddit’s co-founder, discussed the company’s changing posturing this June with AdExchanger:

The majority of content on Reddit became stuff users were creating themselves, not just linking to. That was a huge shift, and in response to that, especially over the last six months, we have been trying to build as many tools as possible for publishers, who clearly love our content, [using tools like] “embeds,” but also enabling new ways for us to reach our current users and new users wherever they want, whether that’s video or audio. We have this unfair advantage because we are as much a technology company as we are a media company, and we want to take advantage of it.

That last line is especially true: Reddit, along with other social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat, is as much a media company as it is a technology company. The difference here is that Reddit is among the first to launch its own editorial venture—but it’s not the first.

Tumblr, which shares a resemblance with Reddit—including NSFW sections, a dedication to free expression, and a confusing interface—launched Storyboard back in 2012 to help package and share all of the unique content published on the platform, hiring seasoned journalists to make it work. In other words, Storyboard was very similar to Upvoted, except that Storyboard mostly published on partner sites like The Daily Beast, Time, and New York magazine[note]A move that is pretty much unthinkable now that social media has come to dominate distribution in the media industry.[/note].

The problem? Storyboard was shuttered after only a year due to poor results. This insightful Pando article attributes the failure in part to the odd relationship between social media and editorial—they may seem similar on the surface, but quality editorial can often run counter to social media’s core competencies of openness and sharing.

Reddit will have to keep all of these factors in mind as Upvoted matures.

What this means for brands

Like other social media companies, Reddit wants to host native content. In fact, Ohanian explained that publishers came to them with that exact request:

After Facebook announced the New York Times/BuzzFeed Instant Articles thing, we started getting inbound from people saying, “We want to publish articles directly on Reddit.” We had honestly not thought about it, but it’s given us the confidence to start exploring it from a product standpoint.

Whether Reddit is still considering creating such a product is under wraps, but it wouldn’t be surprising to see a product similar to Instant Articles in Reddit’s near future. Upvoted is just the latest example of how content distribution, and the Internet itself, continues to rapidly evolve.

Soon, media companies will publish their content directly on every major social media network. They already do it on Snapchat Discover; Facebook Instant Articles is still in testing but should be released soon; Twitter is making similar moves; Apple has Apple News; and LinkedIn and Medium already suck up much of the content that would traditionally come from blogs.

Behind all these moves toward proprietary publishing are attempts to consolidate power and user attention, which, in turn, will bring in more advertiser money[note]Reddit intends to run only native advertising on Upvoted.[/note]. Upvoted won’t have any separation between editorial and advertorial creation, making Reddit the latest in a long line of media publishers to break down this traditional barrier. The company has also discussed creating video campaigns for brands that could live on Reddit and the wider Internet much like a a traditional ad agency would, which parallels Facebook’s Anthology initiative.

Reddit’s power play also highlights one of the big draws of proprietary publishing over an open web: more control over the content itself. Facebook, for example, has never been a place for free speech, which is one reason marketers love it. Similarly, Upvoted will provide a more sterile, controlled arena for Reddit to woo advertisers. The fact that the site features no comments or upvoting (despite the name) is particularly telling of just how much control Reddit wants.

Overall, Upvoted is a sign of the times more than anything—and a signal that Reddit has entered an increasingly heated arms race to control where and how content is seen and distributed. Make no mistake, the war for content is only getting started.

The post Reddit Takes on Gawker, BuzzFeed With Upvoted appeared first on Contently.

The Best Branded Content of August 2015

August is a weird month. While researching my best of branded content column, I found essentially nothing but branded content for bros. It was like Google and Facebook found out I went through a Fireball period last winter[note] In my defense… Who am I kidding, I have no defense. [/note] and retargeted me appropriately. But eventually, I found some great work targeted at non-bros as well that will hopefully inspire you to #crushit during the insane stretch run to Christmas. Read it.

7 Things CMOs Need to Know About the New Instagram Ads

For over a year, Instagram has kept their advertising platform limited to a select group of brands, but it’s about to blow up now, writes Amanda Walgrove:

To bring these new advertisers on board, Instagram launched its long-anticipated API to allow brands to run their own campaigns. Though the API is currently open only to select partners, the platform plans to open the API to anyone—just like on Instagram’s parent company, Facebook.

Previously, Instagram worked closely with a group of hand-picked businesses (and used a traditional sales team) for advertising.

Along with this development, the photo-sharing app rolled out new features like “Buy” and “Learn More” buttons and hyper-targeting. According to Instagram’s blog, the company hopes its evolving ad format will serve common advertiser goals like generating awareness, website visits, offline sales, sign-ups, product buys, and app downloads.

Read it.

Apple Is Going Hollywood. What Does That Mean for Marketers?

Apple is going Hollywood, and it has big implications for the ad world, writes Amanda Walgrove:

According to Variety, Apple is looking to get into original programming with a goal to “create development and production divisions that would churn out long-form content to stream.”

Though nothing has been officially announced, it appears Apple is set to compete against Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and Amazon in the race to create the best new video content. Presumably, Apple’s move will also be an attempt to edge out Google and Facebook in monopolizing the time people spend online.

So, if Apple introduces a live TV service delivered via Internet next year, as is expected, what will this mean for marketers?

Read it.

The New Model: How Net-a-Porter Keeps the Fashion Industry on Its Heels

With the launch of a print mag whose circulation rivals Vogue, a fashion social network, and a growing online hub, Net-a-Porter is taking over high fashion with content:

Though Porter was far from the first branded print magazine—that honor belongs to John Deere’s The Furrow, way back in 1895—it was perhaps the most ambitious one ever created when its 282-page debut issue hit the stands in February 2014. Yeomans topped the masthead as editor-in-chief, and Gisele Bündchen graced the cover; 400,000 issues were distributed across 60 countries for $9.99 each—four dollars more thanVogue.

Net-a-Porter distributed the magazine with the kind of precision usually associated with digital content. The company, as Macleod explained, was “targeting an international high-net-worth woman who is difficult to target because she is always on the move, traveling over 10 times a year.” To figure out how to do that in print, marketers turned to the treasure trove of data Net-a-Porter had compiled since it started.

Read it.

These Bears Are Having Way More Fun Than You

This has nothing to do with content marketing; it’s just a sign that you should go enjoy your long weekend. (And that nothing we ever create will be as amazing as this GIF.) We’ll see you Monday.

The post Content Catchup: Apple Goes Hollywood, Porter Trumps Vogue, and More Must-Reads appeared first on Contently.

According to Variety, Apple is looking to get into original programming with a goal to “create development and production divisions that would churn out long-form content to stream.”

Though nothing has been officially announced, it appears Apple is set to compete against Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and Amazon in the race to create the best new video content. Presumably, Apple’s move will also be an attempt to edge out Google and Facebook in monopolizing the time people spend online.

So, if Apple introduces a live TV service delivered via Internet next year, as is expected, what will this mean for marketers?

For one, it would provide marketers with new opportunities to advertise to consumers who are streaming video content. And that’s a strategy marketers want to be using.

According to eMarketer’s massive State of Video report, people are now spending more time with digital video than they are with any other digital platform, including Facebook. In fact, time spent watching traditional TV has been decreasing since 2012, while time spent watching digital video has more than tripled since 2011.

This shift is due in part to cord-cutting and the proliferation of connected TVs like Apple TV and Roku. Not only are these devices providing new ways for viewers to watch original programming, but they’re also offering content from existing cable channels. Networks like HBO, Showtime, ESPN, and CNN are starting to offer Internet subscription services as a response to dropping viewership on traditional cable TV.

Naturally, Apple is also trying to curry favor with these TV networks. According to Bloomberg Business, the company is in talks with CBS Corp. and 21st Century Fox Inc. to buy the rights to distribute their programming via Apple TV.

Still, perhaps the biggest kicker of this potential development is that Apple already owns the device we’re watching a lot of these shows on—iPhones, iPads, MacBooks, and Apple TVs. As a result, the company would not only control our favorite devices to stream content on, but also the some of the content itself.

It’s no coincidence that, according to BuzzFeed, the Apple TV box-top device is expected to be getting its first big design overhaul since 2012 for Apple’s upcoming event September 9 in anticipation of this move to original programming. The next-generation connected TV is rumored to have a slimmer build, a new remote with touch-pad capabilities, an improved OS with Siri voice control, and a compatible App Store with a software kit for developers. Some even believe that the new Apple TV has the potential to disrupt the gaming market, which has become extremely lucrative in the past decade and surpassed all other major entertainment formats in terms of consumer spending.

With an updated Apple TV and rumors of original programming, by 2016 Apple could control our online media experience in a way no company ever has before. Not only do Hulu and Amazon need to can keep an eye out, but marketers should stay on their toes as well.

Apple is good at setting trends and shaking up our online culture. They should be expected to approach new advertising opportunities in the same way.

The post Apple Is Going Hollywood. What Does That Mean for Marketers? appeared first on Contently.

Did This Viral Employee Rant Help or Hurt Amazon’s PR Crisis?

This weekend, The New York Times released a viral exposé of Amazon’s insanely demanding work culture. What might have been most interesting, writes Natalie Burg, is the PR response that followed:

Before the weekend was out, an Amazon employee had—according to himself—taken his own initiative to respond, point by point, to the entire story, leveling serious allegations against the journalists’ ethics along the way.

While there’s no evidence Amazon had any part in creating the post, there’s no doubt it was as impactful a PR response as they could have asked for. After all, traditional press releases in crisis situations are usually written off as company spin not to be taken at face value. Employee Nick Ciubotariu’s defense, on the other hand, reads as organic and sincere, while the content’s emotional heft and timing (it was a boilerplate share for anyone hoping to defend Amazon or cast doubt on the Times) helped it go viral—something I’m pretty sure no press release has ever done.

Read it.

Google and Apple Are in a War for the Future of Search

We’ve ultimately assumed that Google is the permanent winner of the search wars. Bing’s challenge proved relatively futile. Yahoo has been losing search share for years. But out of nowhere, Apple is presenting a threat, betting that they can win the search game in a new, mobile-focused arena. Read it.

The Digital Media Boom, in One Chart

It’s been widely speculated that we’re hitting a ceiling in terms of how much content people can actually consume. But in actuality, that’s not the case, writes Dillon Baker:

Not surprisingly, the amount of attention given to mobile in recent months hasn’t been a mistake—mobile consumption has increased by 90 percent over the last two years. Tablets have grown at a respectable pace as well—64 percent—and shouldn’t be forgotten amidst all the mobile hype. Desktop’s 16-percent growth pales in comparison to both, but the platform is still widely used.

Read it.

How Loyal Are Your Customers? This Metric Has the Answer

Our VP of Marketing Ray Cheng is back again to drop some knowledge, and this week’s lesson is on arguably the most important loyalty metric in all the land: Return Visitor Ratio. Read it.

You’ll Think This B2B Instagram Ad Is Awful, but Then You’ll Realize It’s Genius

Finally, we get to the story of the best bad Instagram ad ever. It has everything: a magician, a programmer, and an intriguing new ad format that should be on the radar of B2B brands everywhere. Read it.

The post Content Catchup: Apple’s Big Search Play, B2B Instagram Ads, and More Must-Reads appeared first on Contently.

Apple’s opponent in the search war is, naturally, Google. Just how much of a threat does Apple pose to the search engine that enjoys 89 percent of global market share? According to various tech industry observers, Apple is either creating a “search engine to destroy Google,” “actively trying to keep users away from” Google or “likely has absolutely no interest in getting into the search market.”

Why the conflict of opinions? According to the mobile marketing specialist at MobileMoxie, Emily Grossman, there just isn’t a straightforward answer. This is no one-to-one competition; it’s not as if Apple is launching an AppleSearch.com (or iSearch.com! or iHateGoogle.com!).

“It’s kind of nuanced,” Grossman says. “It definitely seems like Apple intends to be a threat here. They’re trying to, at least for iOS users, inhibit them from using Google. They are trying to cut them off at the pass and take that search traffic for themselves.”

Apple’s ambush

Here’s how Apple intends to take some of that search traffic. First Apple swapped Google for Microsoft’s Bing last year to power searches within Siri and Spotlight, the on-device search function within iOS and OS X. Then, during this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June, Apple announced that its search functions, as Grossman describes it, are becoming “more rich and more functional.”

Though the exact details of how this will all function remain to be seen pending iOS 9’s release, it appears that when a user searches for a phrase in Safari using the forthcoming iOS 9, Spotlight (which previously had limited web search capabilities) will chime in with some search suggestions. If the user chooses a Spotlight-powered suggestion (i.e., one that shows up in the dropdown menu) before hitting enter to execute a Google-powered search (which is still the default for Safari, though this could change), they’ll reach their destination without ever interacting with Google. It’s what Grossman calls “cutting in line.”

What’s more, included within those Spotlight-powered search suggestions will be deep app content—in other words, content that exists within apps. Looking for a job listing? You could be directed to Monster.com’s app or the LinkedIn Job Search app, prompting you to either download the app or open it if it’s already on your system.

“This is very huge. For Apple, apps are a huge ecosystem,” Grossman says. “This is where they make a ton of money.”

While Google has also begun surfacing deep app content on mobile devices though Android and the main web search engine, its offering is currently more limited. Google is only indexing deep app content with web parity, meaning content that exists on a website as well. Apple will be able to surface content that only exists in apps. For app developers, this is no small distinction, with their content suddenly discoverable in much more accessible way.

This all amounts to Apple potentially undercutting major swaths of Google’s traffic, thanks to improved speed and convenience—and bringing users further into an Apple-controlled mobile ecosystem.

Apple and Google’s visions for mobile search

According to Re/code, Apple reported generating $10 billion in revenue for developers last year through the App Store, and that number is expected to double by 2018. So, while being no fan of Google may be one motivator for Apple getting into search, by and large this move seems to about cultivating its highly lucrative app ecosystem. When users are exposed to in-app content that answers their search queries, Apple is betting they’ll be more likely to download them, which will help drive profits. Apple, Grossman explains, gains the most from an app-run mobile world, whereas Google benefits the most from a web-run mobile world.

And we living in an increasingly app-based world. The fact that mobile search users in the U.S. alone are expected to almost double, to 215.8 million, between 2014 and 2019 is creating an opportunity for Apple to wedge itself between Google and at least a portion of its massive marketshare. After all, while plenty of OS X users download Chrome or Firefox onto their MacBooks, iPhone users tend to stick with Safari.

“I have a lot of very technically savvy friends who would never use Safari on a desktop,” Grossman says, “but even if they have other browsers installed on their iPhone, they will just naturally choose Safari because it’s right there in the dock.”

Research agrees. According to StatCounter, while just 10 percent of desktop searchers use Safari, the Apple browser claims 55 percent of all mobile browser usage in the U.S. And as of 2013, just 3 percent of iOS users were using Chrome—making the search functions in Safari, Spotlight, and Siri a major part of how iPhone users access the web.

“That could be pretty powerful,” Grossman says. “We might see a completely different shift in how iOS users are navigating the web because of this. Or it might completely change certain apps’ or certain website’s traffic when this rolls out.”

Should Google be worried?

But while this could matter significantly to individual app developers, it’s probably best to categorize Apple’s foray into search as a skirmish rather than a war. No matter how successful Apple may be in its endeavor, Google’s a long way from taking any serious damage.

“For Google’s bottomline business, it probably won’t have as big of an impact as one might think,” says Grossman. “It’s easy to think of this as a bigger threat if you live in an iOS-dominated world, which a lot of us do … but when we look at all of the devices that exist worldwide, Android is really dominant there.”

Because even if Apple succeeds in channeling all iOS users and OS X users (good luck!) away from Google, that’s all the market share it’ll ever get. It can’t reach users who aren’t already Apple customers—namely those on Anroid-enabled phones. Google, on the other hand, can be accessed anywhere from any device. Unless Apple plans to launch a cross-platform search solution, it’s just not capable of waging an all-out search assault.

What about users?

The final, and perhaps most important question: How will Apple’s growing search functions affect users, the innocent bystanders in all of this? In a word, subliminally. When you get an automatic suggestion while typing a search query, how many people consider which company has powered those suggestions? Users are just looking for the information, and as long as the experience is high quality, they likely won’t care who is pulling the strings. Spotlight offers them everything from web content to third-party apps to their own on-device content, which will only give users a better chance of finding what they need.

“We might end up seeing changes in consumer behavior, but they might not be aware of those changes,” says Grossman. “Apple trying to get more app results in their search tools is something a consumer might not notice, but as an app developer, you might get tons more engagement in your app.”

So while Apple’s venture into search is a big deal for Apple and a big deal for app developers, it’s unlikely to be a big deal for users. And for Google? If there is a midway point between TP-ing the Googleplex and burning it to the ground, this is it. Apple does stand a chance at stealing a significant amount of iOS traffic and even some OS X traffic from Google, but as things stand today, that’s as much as the battle can accomplish.

The post Google and Apple Are in a War for the Future of Search appeared first on Contently.

Adblock Plus, which has a user base of over 50 million, released its own browser for Android in May, citing the increasing amount of annoying and potentially dangerous malware-infested ads on mobile. Meanwhile, Apple announced the iOS 9 version of its extremely popular mobile web browser, Safari, is coming with a built-in adblocker. Adblock Plus is also working on a browser of its own for iOS 9, according to Ben Williams, communications manager at Eyeo GmbH, the company behind Adblock Plus.

That’s a big deal because according to Mary Meeker’s 2015 “Internet Trends” report, U.S. adults are now spending the majority of their time with digital media on mobile. This spells bad news for an already delicate digital advertising ecosystem.

In general, adblocking has exploded during the past couple of years, thanks in large part to browsers like Google Chrome (which allow for a hassle-free installation of adblockers) and increased awareness surrounding the product. According to adblocker monitoring company PageFair, the total monthly user base will top almost 250 million worldwide this year.

Source: Digiday

“I think for quite a long time ads began to get more and more intrusive, and that led to more adblocking,” Williams said. “And I think that your ‘normal user’ is aware of adblockers now, whereas before it was more of a fringe thing.”

Despite the doom and gloom this news has brought, mobile adblocking won’t bring on the apocalypse for mobile ad spend, which is expected to increase from 2013 to 2016 by 430 percent, according to a study by eMarketer. Still, adblocking is a serious consideration for everyone in the media world, and its spread to mobile isn’t something to simply shrug off.

The media industry is split on how to address the issue. Some claim that the effect on the bottom line is negligible, or, at the very least, that adblockers are a problem advertisers and media companies simply have to accept. Others, like Google’s Larry Page, lay most of the blame at the feet of publishers and advertisers unwilling to change the disruptive ad formats that cause most users to download adblockers in the first place. A few, such as Jay Friedman, the COO of programmatic ad tech agency Goodway Group, look at it is a technology problem—tech teams on the media side simply have to fight back with their own anti-adblocking software. And a fourth faction looks at it as a legal issue where adblockers are blatantly extorting companies through “whitelist” programs, and therefore should be attacked through legal channels.

The truth probably lies in a grey area between all four. But until there’s a solution—and I’m not holding my breath waiting for one—there are a few key publishing trends that adblockers are going to continue to accelerate.

Web display ads and native ads in peril

At the center of adblockers’ crosshairs are display ads. Whether they’re interruptive or not, adblockers block display ads without prejudice—pop-ups, display ads, and pre-rolls all get the same treatment. For many on the advertising side, this shotgun-style approach to adblocking is problematic, to say the least.

“Publishers who have fixed, user-friendly banner ads and banner positions are not the problem,” says Friedman. “I firmly believe users don’t have a problem with those ads.”

He may be right—static image and text display ads had the lowest amount of people who found them completely intolerable, at 33 percent, according to Adobe’s 2014 study—but that doesn’t discount the fact that display ads, as a whole, are almost entirely ineffective. A 2014 study from eMarketer and Adform found that banner ads of all kinds have less than a .50 percent click-through rate, with traditional web banner ads bringing up the rear with a downright pathetic .12 percent CTR.

Adblockers have only multiplied banner ads’ tiny impact, driving down the continuously falling rates that media companies can charge for display. For advertisers grasping at straws with an ad format that by all accounts has little to no impact, adblockers have only served to sink the knife deeper into the side of display ads.

Native ads, often extolled as the savior of digital publishing, aren’t immune to adblockers either.

“We block all native advertising unless they’ve applied to our whitelist,” said Williams. “It’s not that difficult to block native ads.”

Even when native ads aren’t served through traditional ad units, Adblock Plus manages to hide them. For advertisers paying a premium for native ads, this is a problem—fewer pageviews and impressions will make it harder for publishers to charge a premium for the in-vogue ad format.

The outlook is particularly dire for tech, gaming, and other sites with young male audiences (adblockers’ biggest users, according to Adobe’s report), which need all the revenue they can get from native and display. This chart from another adblocker solution, Secret Media, puts adblock use at over 50 percent for gaming sites and at 35 percent for tech sites.

(As Digiday notes, it’s worth keeping in mind that both Secret Media and PageFair have an incentive to make the adblocking situation seem more dire.)

So, if adblockers are undercutting an already less than effective digital ad model, what are publishers are advertisers to do? For many, migrating away from the web might be the only answer.

In-app publishing: A potential safe haven

Since the media industry is full of obscure terms and concepts, it’s important for me to start by briefly unpacking some of the terminology I’m going to use here. When I say “web,” I’m primarily referring to Internet browsers, both on desktop or mobile. Think Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and so on. By apps and platforms, I’m talking almost exclusively about social media: Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter.

As more and more people spend time on their mobiles on apps and platforms rather than the web (software company Flurry’s research puts the breakdown at 86 percent to 14 percent in total, respectively), social media companies have been reaping the benefits. Facebook, for example, claims 17 percent of the total time spent on mobile, according to the same Flurry study, as well as an astonishing 75 percent of the global social ad spend.

This decline in web browser popularity is a shift the more perceptive media analysts have been anticipating for a while. Social media companies have been trying to consolidate “content consumption” through their platforms for years, promoting high-quality content so users keep coming back for more. And for the most part, they (mainly Facebook) have succeeded: 30 percent of adults now get their news on Facebook, per a 2014 Pew Research study.

Digital ad spending, not surprisingly, has followed user behavior. eMarketer predicts the share of global digital ad spend spent on ads on social media will increase from 9.4 percent to 16 percent in 2017, with North America leading the charge at 18.7 percent by 2017.

And social media apps aren’t satisfied with just being a hub for hyperlinks to other sites. Facebook’s new Instant Articles project is explicitly meant to compel publishers to publish their content within Facebook. In the past few months, we’ve also seen similar initiatives from tech giants to compel media companies to publish inside their own walled gardens, such as Snapchat Discover and Apple News.

So what does all this have to do with adblocking? It’s important to remember that adblockers can’t reach mobile apps—for now. As user behavior becomes increasingly mobile, these social media apps and their native content offerings should only increase in popularity. That’ll make those social media apps increasingly attractive to advertisers—and publishers, too. If publishing within social media apps delivers more ad money than publishing on the ad-blocked web, will media companies have any other choice than to publish within Facebook and Apple’s platforms?

In-app publishing could save native advertising as well. BuzzFeed has already suggested it will publish native ads through Facebook Instant Articles, and it’ll probably get better numbers than ever. And in-feed display ads, free from adblocking, should also get higher viewability and CTRs than on publisher’s sites.

Ideally, this is a win–win for publishers and advertisers. Publishers can reach larger audiences and therefore charger higher rates, while advertisers can take advantage of an adblock-free ecosystem to maximize their CPMs. Still, this could mean an incredibly dangerous transference of power to social platforms in the name of maximizing profits—a risky proposal for any media company hoping to maintain some semblance of control over their audience and brand. If publishers find themselves totally reliant on Facebook for revenue, then Facebook will hold all the cards.

But for those looking for an alternative, there’s a new business model that is gaining traction in the media world: publishers creating content agencies.

Publishers as content agencies

What’s the one thing adblockers don’t block on the web? Company publications like Amex’s OPEN Forum and Red Bull’s Red Bulletin. That’s important, because brands are starting to realize they don’t need traditional advertising to make an impact.

(Full disclosure: Amex is a Contently client.)

“Brands are asking, ‘Why should we buy media if we can create our own?'” Rebecca Lieb, VP of content marketing at analytics and integrated marketing company Teradata Applications, said in a recent article on The Content Strategist.

Of course, it’s difficult to draw a perfectly straight line between the rise of brand publishers and the rise of adblocking, but Lieb’s comment brings up a key point: If traditional web advertising is broken, as Williams and others believe it to be, why don’t brands create their own media divisions to promote themselves? Considering how cheap it is to distribute content through sponsored updates in social media apps, it’s more possible than ever for brands to build an audience for content they publish on their own.

Publishers seem to be recognizing this trend as well. A number of big-name new media companies are beginning to build divisions to create custom content for brands—much like a digital ad agency would. In other words, instead of creating native ads that only live only on the publisher’s site—and are thus susceptible to adblocking, among a sundry of other ethical issues—publishers are starting to help brands publish on their own.

Vice and The Onion, for example, recently partnered with Facebook to create video ads for clients as part of Facebook’s Anthology initiative. These ads won’t live on publisher’s sites; they’ll live on Facebook, and they’ll have the brand’s logo up front.

Vox Media, which is also a partner for Anthology, recently signed a deal with digital marketing firm DigitasLBi to license its talent and Chorus technology to brand partners creating content. Some of the work will live on Vox’s publications, but some will go directly on their company’s properties, according to Adam Schlachter, chief investment officer at DigitasLBi.

Meanwhile, BuzzFeed has been part of arguably the most famous partnership between a publisher and a brand: the “Dear Kitten” campaign for Purina. In this case, as one would expect from BuzzFeed, the distribution was shotgun style: The campaign ran under BuzzFeed’s name at times, Purina’s at others, and even had a spot during the Super Bowl.

All three of these examples demonstrate that brands are buying into the idea of creating “owned media” destinations—and publishers see the financial benefit of helping them do it well.

When I asked Williams if Adblock Plus would ever consider blocking a brand publisher’s website, he said it was unlikely since the user is voluntarily going to the site and thus is aware of the branding. For him, the lack of proper separation between editorial and advertisement is the main reason why Adblock Plus chooses to block native ads—that’s less of a worry with branded content, where the brand’s name comes first and is distributed through their own social media channels rather than the publisher’s.

Of course, creating branded content is no easy task. Smaller publishers without big budgets or piles of venture capitalist cash to build custom content studios probably won’t be able to replicate the early success of the other big media names I’ve referenced so far.

But it shouldn’t come as a surprise that brands are starting calling on publishers to create content for them, especially as publishers continue building their capabilities to do so. And for that, you can, at least in part, thank adblockers.

In a way, the potential results of these trends have always been the official goal of adblockers: fewer obnoxious ads (when content is part of a social stream without interruptive ad formats) and better separation between advertorial and editorial (when media company’s are creating content for brand’s channels rather than their own).

That’s a result anyone can get on board with—unless, of course, it brings down the media world along with it. Indeed, adblockers are pushing an already rapidly changing industry to a potential breaking point—and those who can’t adapt may not survive.

The post Why Adblockers Should Scare the Shit Out of the Media World appeared first on Contently.

With Apple hiring human editors for its News app and Facebook’s Instant Articles running in the almost entirely automated News Feed, this debate of editor versus algorithm has perhaps never been more pertinent.

But here’s a solution that may be simpler than it seems: We need both.

While it’s fun to pit minds and machines against each other, the future of media isn’t going to be dominated by companies that choose one over the other—it’s going to be driven by those that combine the efforts of editors and algorithms to anticipate reader demand and deliver to a unique audience.

But why? There’s no shortage of arguments for either side, so let’s lay out some generally agreed-upon facts.

Algorithms and data sets can provide editorial operations information they otherwise would never have, such as pinpointing which topics are bringing in traffic, when readers are tuning in, and what devices people are reading on.

Meanwhile, humans can anticipate big stories and empathize with the reader. After all, the human editor is a reader, one who responds emotionally to each story. Computers may digest information quicker, but they’re just scanning, not feeling. It’s also important not to forget that algorithms are only as efficient as the humans that create them—and are therefore prone to just as many biases and mistakes.

For these reasons, companies are mostly lauded for bringing in humans to curate their news platforms, like when Snapchat hired a CNN politics editor to serve as its head of news.

Still, we can’t throw the algorithm out with the bathwater.

Choosing humans alone to curate the news would be a big step backwards for journalism. As Matthew Yglesias wrote for Vox, “If it had actually been possible back in the day to algorithmically determine what choice of cover story was most likely to get subscribers to engage with newsstand readers to buy it, isn’t that what editors would have picked?”

Most likely, they would have. We can’t shun the progress we’ve made with data; we just have to learn how to use it best, and when humans need to intervene.

Upworthy’s recent traffic plummet, for example, teaches us a lesson on what happens when a publisher leans too hard on algorithmic magic. Editors gamed Facebook’s algorithm by packaging preexisting YouTube videos with clickbait headlines and sharing them on the social site. Facebook’s editors caught on and adjusted its algorithm to penalize sites that use clickbait, causing a dip in Upworthy’s traffic.

As entrepreneur Jason Calacanis put it, in order to succeed, we need “John Henry and the steam hammer versus the steam hammer alone.” For Upworthy, it’d grown to rely too much on a steam hammer that, in the end, it didn’t even own.

Perhaps the best example of a site that combines human editors and algorithms is Gabe Rivera’s tech news aggregator, Techmeme. Its content was curated by algorithms for three years until Rivera hired veteran tech reporter Megan McCarthy in 2008. The algorithm continued to run, with headlines moving up on the page if a blogger linked to it. McCarthy just trimmed the fat for readers.

Rivera wrote in his announcement: “Though the implicit edits conveyed via algorithm outnumber the explicit edits perhaps by 1000 to 1 or more, the impact of the human editor is nonetheless pronounced.” With an eye on Techmeme’s site, McCarthy could eliminate obsolete stories more quickly and push up potentially breaking stories before the computer even caught them.

More recently, LinkedIn started to use a multi-tiered editing system for its Pulse app. As Wired reports, human editors curate the big headlines each day and select specific stories for users based on their industries. Meanwhile, an algorithm takes into account users’ connections and company affiliations to deliver relevant news.

LinkedIn even goes so far as to tell readers who or what is curating their story. Above each piece of content, users might see “Editor’s pick,” “Trending in Internet industry,” or “Popular among employees of LinkedIn.”

As for Apple, it clearly doesn’t want to just rely on algorithms for its News app. The Apple News Editor job posting states: “[The candidate] will have great instincts for breaking news, but be equally able to recognize original, compelling stories unlikely to be identified by algorithms.” Still, Apple’s News app announcement made it clear that algorithmic software has a major part to play in its upcoming app: “The more you interact with News, the more it learns about you. As a result, the app will be able to create a personalized feed of curated articles based on your interests.”

This killer combo of human editors and data-driven news feeds is the natural evolution of media creation and curation. When you consider the fact that many of these human editors are increasingly millennials who have come to treat computers as extensions of their own brains, this isn’t too surprising. Leading tech companies that understand this are already building hybrid newsrooms to blow past competitors and appeal to new readership.

So hire your John Henrys, build your steam hammer, and start making noise.

The post Editor vs. Algorithm: Why the Future of Media Needs Both appeared first on Contently.

Let’s start with the big announcement that has many people declaring Spotify dead in the water: Apple Music.

Being perceived as second-best is often cast in a traumatic light, like being left without a lunch table in middle school (hi, Microsoft!), but it’s not the worst thing in the world. Listen, Apple was right yesterday when it declared that the music industry was a fractured mess; there are too many streaming music services competing against each other. Even before today, did anyone think that Rdio was going to be a successful business in five years? When was the last time you even thought about Rdio before reading the last sentence?

Apple Music will spark a great consolidation of streaming music platforms. Someone—probably Spotify—will emerge as the popular alternative to Apple Music, the music streaming equivalent of Microsoft or Android. And given the alternatives, that’s not so bad! Some companies will close; others will be acquired; and a couple will hold on thanks to niche support in Brooklyn and Portland after boldly integrating with transistor radios.

2. We might be seeing Apple’s best branding move to date.

Privacy was a point of emphasis at Apple WWDC, fitting neatly into the feel-good narrative of ethics in the Tim Cook era. But it was also about branding. Apple’s incredibly strict and straightforward privacy policies are becoming a marketing asset—in many ways, it’s the biggest difference between Apple and its competitors, as Cook noted in a speech for the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) last week:

“Our privacy is being attacked on multiple fronts. I’m speaking to you from Silicon Valley, where some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information. They’re gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that’s wrong. And it’s not the kind of company that Apple wants to be.”

But people don’t give a crap about privacy, you say. Study after study shows that people are pretty disgusted when presented with the data practices being used by Google, Facebook, and other Silicon Valley giants. However, the vast majority of people fall into two groups: Either they don’t know what Google, Facebook, Amazon, et al. are doing (most people), or they know but are too lazy to do anything about it (me!). It takes a lot of effort to rally around an issue that most people don’t care about, but it’s easy to see a tipping point coming in the next five years when anti-privacy concerns become hip and everyone jumps on board, making Apple’s brand look even better in the process.

Of course, that’s also the point when Mark Zuckerberg will drop giant bubble-domes over Silicon Valley, New York, Austin, and Venice Beach, declaring his sovereign rule and sparking a catastrophic series of events that ends with Elon Musk saving the day in a weaponized spacesuit. And Tim Cook will be sad because everyone will forget about how much they like Apple for not selling personal data on the black market.

3. Apple News could be a big deal.

Three weeks ago, a major tech company announced The New York Times and other top pubs would start publishing content straight onto its platform and keep 100 percent of the ad revenue. Everyone freaked out; we even made this cartoon!

Cartoon by Martin Kozlowski

Yesterday, Apple announced something relatively similar: Publishers will be able to post straight to Apple News—a Flipboard-style app which will replace Newsstand—and take 100 percent of the ad revenue if they sell the ads on their own. As with Facebook Instant Articles, publishers will be able to use News to build articles natively for the app with custom fonts, multitouch gestures, and layouts. We’ll have to wait for Apple News to launch with IOS 9 in the fall, but publishers already on board include The Guardian, ESPN, The New York Times, Condé Nast, The Daily Mail, and Hearst. Initially, The New York Times will offer 33 articles a day on the app for free; if it was doing that on Facebook, I’m pretty sure all the hot takes would have literally set Midtown on fire.

Very quickly, we’re seeing a trend of publishers willing to publish on third-party platforms that will drive greater exposure and come with full control of ad revenue. The big question is how long that sweet arrangement will last—and how scorched the media landscape will look if it does.

The post Apple Takes Over the World: 3 Hot Takes From WWDC appeared first on Contently.

The Best Branded Content of April

Psychedelic short films! Sly Stallone in a bizarre Rocky parody! A performance artist hanging upside down, naked and covered in paint, narrating thoughts of death and fire! This month’s roundup of the best branded content had a bit of everything. Read it.

Power to the People: How Autodesk’s 200 Blogs Are Propelling the DIY Movement

If you’re struggling to get just one brand blog off the ground, well, prepare to feel a little insecure, writes Amanda Walgrove:

For the 20th year in a row, the nominees for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects all had one important thing in common: They each used Autodesk software.

But Autodesk is so much more than the brand of choice for the Hollywood elite. The San Fransisco-based enterprise company sees their true mission as making their 3D design, engineering, and entertainment software accessible to small business owners, entrepreneurs, and students. And while high-end software isn’t the sexiest of topics for a large audience, having users who understand how to use and talk about their products is key to Autodesk’s growth. How do they do it? With content, of course—lots of it. Read it.

Content Marketing Showdown: Apple vs. Samsung

When we decided that we wanted to start pitting the content marketing of various brands against each other, Apple and Samsung were the logical first choice. And while Apple’s marketing is the envy of the entire business world, the contest was closer than you’d think. Read it.

BuzzFeed Just Cracked the Code on How Social Content Spreads, and It’s a Big Deal

In our most popular story of the week, we looked at BuzzFeed’s incredible new social analytics technology, and what it means for the future of marketing and media:

For a while now, BuzzFeed has been the envy of the publishing world for its ability to crunch data and figure out how to create content that’s perfectly constructed to spread through the social web. Even The New York Timescouldn’t help but gush over BuzzFeed’s analytic prowess in last year’s leaked innovation report. Like a disturbingly optimistic version of Batman, the company always seem to have another advanced technological tool in its belt that makes for a unfair fight with any rivals.

On Monday, they revealed they’ve gotten their hands on the Batmobile. Read it.

Infographic: Why Your Brain Loves Infographics (And Your Readers Do Too)

An infographic about infographics. We’re so meta it hurts. My sophomore year Philosophy class would be so proud. Read it.

Go get that sunshine. We’ll see you Monday.

The post Content Catchup: BuzzFeed Cracks the Social Code, April’s Best Branded Content, and More Must-Reads appeared first on Contently.

That’s what former Apple CEO John Scully told CNET earlier this year. But despite those fighting words, the two brands are locked in a battle; while Apple holds the lead on U.S. market share by a margin of 41.7 percent to 28.6 percent, Samsung owns a similar lead in the global market. And of late, both have been launching an advertising blitz.

With the competition heating up, we had to ask: Which brand is doing a better job at content marketing? It’s a curious matchup to consider. After all, Apple takes a peculiar approach. It doesn’t have Twitter or Facebook accounts, run a blog, or produce a web series. By contemporary standards, that amounts to a pretty weak content strategy. Meanwhile, Samsung manages a number of social accounts, runs celebrity-partnered campaigns, and teams up with major apps to reach new audiences.

But you can’t deny that Scully has a point. Apple has made its products a necessity for anyone who wants to be relevant in today’s culture, dominating (and leading) the conversation about digital connectivity. Samsung has battled against its rival for cultural relevance, but how much have those efforts actually paid off?

So for our first Content Marketing Showdown, we put Scully’s words to the test by evaluating the content marketing for these two tech giants across five categories: innovation, entertainment, social savvy, consistency, and impact. Let’s see who will take the crown.

Innovation

When it comes to content marketing, the most innovative campaigns are about the consumer, not the product itself. Apple and Samsung have both accomplished this.

Apple’s “Your Verse” campaign of 2014 makes the story all about you. The campaign showcased stories of how different people were using the iPad to do amazing things, like how a hearing-impaired user travels the world with the help of translation apps and how a choreographer shapes his Bollywood routines.

Meanwhile, Samsung got artsy with user-generated content by launching its “Incredible Art Piece” campaign to promote the Galaxy Note Pen Stylus. Breaking the Guinness World Record for most artists working on the same art installation (300,000+), Samsung Mobile India invited participants to submit a digital drawing through the Incredible Art Piece microsite, Facebook app, or email.

Just last month, however, Apple launched a campaign for its new smartphone on the same day Samsung released the Galaxy S6. In other words: Game on. Apple’s World Gallery featured photos from across the globe that were taken with the iPhone 6.

When it comes down to it, some say Apple’s products are so ubiquitous the company doesn’t even have to do any content marketing. Apple creates the devices that help others create content marketing. For example, I’m writing this on a Macbook and answering emails on my iPhone. And marketers are already speculating about how brands will use the Apple Watch to reach new audiences. So maybe Apple doesn’t have to do content marketing. But just to be safe, it still does, and in the best way: by telling the stories of the people who use its products.

Winner: Apple

Entertainment

Apple may win at innovation, but when it comes to marketing, Samsung is all about entertainment. And as the company responsible for the world’s first major consumer 4K curved TVs, it should be.

Speaking of TV, Samsung made sure its product was front and center at the 2014 Academy Awards. Millions of viewers saw host Ellen DeGeneres take a selfie with numerous other A-list stars on a Samsung phone. That selfie also became the most retweeted tweet of all time.

It’s no secret that Samsung loves star power. The company partnered with Jay Z to produce commercials for his Magna Carta Holy Grail album, and teamed up with Usher for product placements in his “Looking 4 Myself” music video. Apple may have generated buzz among the music industry for acquiring Beats by Dre, but, at least according to Kanye West, that deal would have never occurred if Samsung and Jay Z hadn’t paved the way with their partnership.

Still, when it comes to video, Samsung is probably best known for its “Next Big Thing” campaign, which features ads that skewer Apple product culture, particularly the fact that Apple devotees wait in line for hours for new products. The commercials angered Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller so much that Apple sued Samsung for $2 billion in damages.

Samsung may have launched an entertainment dud when it tried to reach millennials with the “Best Future” sitcom, but Apple also creepily planted U2’s new album in everyone’s iTunes library without warning, so we’ll forgive Samsung for that one.

Winner: Samsung

Social Savvy

You can find Apple on YouTube, but that’s about the extent of the company’s official presence on major social platforms. Samsung, meanwhile, handles several YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook pages for Samsung Mobile, Samsung TV, Samsung USA, and more. The tech giant has used these accounts to promote many social campaigns like #OverToYou. For this campaign, Samsung gave its Galaxy S4s smartphone to 12 influential bloggers and YouTubers, asking them to create content and encourage their followers to do the same.

Samsung has also partnered with major apps and platforms to target users with social campaigns. Following up on its “Next Big Thing” campaign, Samsung created a Time Machine microsite on Foursquare to help recommend the “next big thing” users can discover in their travels. Time Machine also gives Foursquare users the ability to turn their check-in history into a shareable infographic. Over on Snapchat, Samsung was one of the first brands to try out the Our Story live stream feature by sponsoring content from the American Music Awards.

Needless to say, Samsung wins this round.

Winner: Samsung

Consistency

Both Apple and Samsung have had their issues with content marketing consistency, but that’s to be expected for tech companies constantly trying to innovate in an ever-changing digital landscape.

Though it’s often cited as one of the best Super Bowl commercials of all time, Apple’s “1984” ad is unrecognizable from today’s Apple brand, which is simple and sleek—just like its products. Later on, in 2001, Samsung had its own issues by trying to launch the DigitAll mag, which was short-lived and eventually repurposed as the Samsung Vision app.

Commercials and apps can come and go, but—at least today—social media platforms are constants; brands are supposed to be active and consistent on their accounts at all times. And, ultimately, that’s where Samsung’s downfall lies. There is only one Apple, and its product videos and commercials are solid and consistent enough to be known—and parodied—worldwide. But Samsung is represented by Samsung USA, Samsung Mobile, Samsung TV, Samsung UK, etc. All of these channels are most likely created to make the brand’s reach greater, but conversely, they can end up diluting the brand’s consistency.

Winner: Apple

Impact

According to CNET, Samsung spent 15 percent more than Apple on U.S. mobile marketing in 2014. But Apple still continues to outsell Samsung, even with Samsung’s new Galaxy products on the market. Evidently, the biggest budget doesn’t always make for the most effective marketing strategy. It may pay for a live-streamed Jay Z concert and exposure at the Oscars, but sometimes audiences don’t want to just be entertained. When it comes to technology suited for business, art, and everyday life, consumers want to be empowered. And that’s where Apple has succeeded the most with its content.

By appealing to our emotions with share-worthy ads like “The Song,” and highlighting the consumer’s story with campaigns like “Your Verse,” Apple appeals not just to fans of its product, but also to fellow creators. Inspiring creators and giving them the tools to keep doing what they love? That’s the gift that keeps on giving, and the most profound impact a technology company can have.

Winner: Apple

Winner: Apple, 3–2

Apple doesn’t have a typical marketing strategy, but that’s because it’s not a typical technology company. Apple may not tweet along with consumers from an official @Apple account, but it doesn’t have to—the brand is strong enough to motivate its audience to drive the cultural conversation for its products. Apple’s success proves that if you have an amazing product and launch a few key campaigns that put the consumer first, you can generate the ultimate ROI: loyalty.

The post Content Marketing Showdown: Apple vs. Samsung appeared first on Contently.

Last month, we published “The 10 Best Skillshare Classes for Freelancers” on our sister site, The Freelancer, and we figured it would only be fair—to our readers, and to Skillshare’s varied selection of classes—to dig in and find the best Skillshare classes for content marketers.

Skillshare gives anyone with Internet access the ability to learn about a specific craft and expand creative boundaries. On the platform, classes are mostly free and divided into categories such as writing, design, photography, and DIY. Most classes run between one and two hours, and all are divided into roughly 10-minute videos students can watch on their own time. For each session, participants are challenged to complete a project, share their work, and engage with a community of students and creators.

Anyone can enroll in certain classes for free and take part in discussions, but for $8 per month, users receive unlimited access to all 1,107 offerings. The site also offers scholarships and discounts for teams and organizations.

So whether you’re looking to fine-tune your social media strategy, devise an editorial calendar, or boost your productivity, there are plenty of classes to choose from. Here are 10 of the best:

1. The Modern Marketing Workshop

Seth Godin has been leading the modern marketing revolution for almost 40 years, having published over 20 books while running a must-read marketing blog. As Joe Lazauskas put it here on TCS, Godin is the godfather of modern marketing—or, at least, the type of modern marketing we all want to be doing.

Now, Godin is sharing all the stuff he learned the hard way with over 12,000 Skillshare students. In his three-hour marketing workshop, he walks students through the four building-blocks of modern marketing and provides a dictionary of more than 50 important terms. At the end of the class, participants are tasked with creating a marketing campaign for their business or favorite brand, including outlining the story they’ll use to communicate their initiative and a creating detailed calendar for executing their objective.

2. Context Is Key: Social Media Strategy in a Noisy World

Entrepreneur and public speaker Gary Vaynerchuk is one of the most enthusiastic proponents of the idea that people should do what they love and focus on doing it really, really well. He’s already sharing his insights with over 1 million Twitter followers and readers of his bestselling book, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World. Now, he’s reaching thousands of new students on Skillshare. In 23 videos, Vaynerchuk teaches his class how to sell brand stories on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and Pinterest.

3. Art of the Start: Turning Ideas Into High-Growth Businesses

Every business is unique, but there are several key aspects that all successful businesses have in common. As Guy Kawasaki writes, “Here’s a tip: Those who set out to make meaning are much more likely to succeed than those who set out to make money.”

Having advised countless brands, including Apple and Pandora, Kawasaki and Bill Reichert team up to share their decades of experience and help students organize their thoughts, bring their business concepts to the next level, and grab the attention of investors. The assignment is to create a 10-slide pitch deck for your business idea, including basic company info and an outline of your “wow” factor in 10 words or fewer.

4. Getting Started With Email Marketing

MailChimp‘s email marketing class launched just last month, and it already has almost 5,000 students. This large class size isn’t too surprising given that MailChimp has over 7 million users who send over 10 billion emails through the platform each month. Whether you’re new to email marketing or revamping your content strategy, this Skillshare class, taught by MailChimp Product Marketing Lead Allyson Van Houten, can guide you through creating an email that is consistent with your brand and provides a direct call to action.

It should be noted that MailChimp’s class is also a good example of B2B content marketing in itself. By offering a class on Skillshare, MailChimp gets exposure for its brand while providing helpful information to its audience. Don’t have time to schedule a webinar? Film a lesson on your craft, cut it up into a few sessions, and post it on Skillshare.

5. The Art of the Story: Creating Visual Narratives

As the president of Sterling Brands and co-founder of SVA’s Masters in Branding program, Debbie Millman has captained redesigns for over 200 global brands like P&G, Colgate, Nestle, and Pepsi. And over the years, there is one thing that has kept Millman inspired and grounded: her love of stories.

In this class, Millman challenges students to visualize a piece of personal writing, be it an email, text, short story, poem, or quote. The goal is clear—to translate text into a visual narrative that conveys a message. As Millman says in her introductory video, this class is for everyone from kindergartners to PhD students—which includes marketers who want to push the bounds of their own creativity.

6. Strategic Design: The Art and Science of Branding

Lippincott, a brand strategy and design firm, tapped senior partners Su Mathews Hale and Michael D’Esopo to share their process for rebranding some of the world’s biggest businesses. Using Lippincott’s work with Hyatt Place as a case study, Hale and D’Esopo offer a comprehensive look at the strategies behind naming, designing, and audience-building for brands. Keeping things in the hospitality industry, the class assignment is to rebrand Carnival Cruises with a new name, tagline, and logo that will appeal to millennials.

7. Get Stuff Done Like a Boss: Design Your Workflow and Double Your Productivity in 21 Days

Tiago Forte is a productivity coach and founder of Forte Labs, a productivity consultancy firm based in San Francisco. In this class, Forte takes the normal coaching process and condenses it for his Internet audience. With digital tools, step-by-step instructions, and interactive exercises, students of this class design and build a workflow for maximum productivity so they can spend less time scheduling and more time creating.

Forte’s productivity workshop stands out among the crowd of classes by boasting over 14,000 students, 150 discussion posts, and almost 300 published projects in the gallery. Forte also teaches a follow-up class, Design Your Habits: A Hands-On Introduction to Behavior Design.

8. Paid Traffic Fundamentals: Google Ads vs. Facebook Ads

Your content marketing budget is precious. So if you’re going to try paying for some website traffic, you want to know you’re getting the most eyeballs for your buck. And you definitely don’t want to waste money on platforms that aren’t right for your audience. To help you figure out the best strategy for your brand, Internet marketer and paid traffic connoisseur Nate Ginsburg provides an overview of the biggest paid traffic platforms: Google and Facebook.

At the end of the class, Ginsburg encourages students to pick the platform that’s best for them and then start a few campaigns with a small budget. Paid distribution can require a good deal of trial and error, as we’ve outlined in our paid content distribution 101 e-book. But you can’t figure out the perfect strategy for your brand until you start boosting some content with cash.

9. Make the Most of Instagram: Build Your Brand

Struggling to stand out among the noise of Instagram’s 300 million accounts? Photographer and filmmaker Gareth Pon takes a quick 30 minutes to offer practical advice on perfecting your Instagram profile, making sure your visual content is consistent, and cross-posting to other social networks. With over 228k followers on Instagram, Pon is the founder of the South African Instagrammers Community, earning him the title of Africa’s top Instagrammer. Students of this class are tasked with curating nine photos that represent their Instagram brands. Why nine? They’re the first photos you see on every Instagram profile, which, collectively, makes up the the first impression you give off to your audience.

10. Become a Better Blogger: Content Planning

You won’t find a much more comprehensive guide to blogging than this one. In 12 videos, content strategist Andrea Goulet Ford guides students through setting up a three-month editorial calendar for their blogs. This includes defining your audience, finding inspiration, and beating writer’s block. Students even receive access to Ford’s Google spreadsheet, which they can fill in and format to suit their individual needs.

As Ford writes in her Skillshare course description, starting a blog is easy; keeping up with it is hard. But maintaining one is worth the effort if you want to build a loyal audience.

For content marketers, Skillshare provides the perfect ecosystem for honing certain skills, and giving back by sharing your own knowledge about a certain craft. While marketing gurus like Seth Godin and Gary Vaynerchuk have already begun testing out the platform, it would be interesting to see more brands and small businesses add Skillshare to their content marketing mix.

The post The 10 Best Skillshare Classes for Content Marketers appeared first on Contently.

The launch of Marley Natural is part of a larger trend of new canna-businesses relying on branding to garner legitimacy and respect in the newly regulated marijuana market. Marijuana and Marley might seem like a pretty obvious branding marriage, but Marley Natural’s sophisticated logo is an example of how brands are attempting to overcome weed’s existing stigma while educating skeptics about the legal marijuana movement.

So far, brands like Marley Natural are veering as far as possible from your typical stoner imagery to something much more elegant and cultured. Marley Natural used the same agency that paired Starbucks with its iconic mermaid to design its subdued yet impactful logo.

With such a newly-legalized substance hitting the market, cannabis capitalists will need to be sensitive to how the consumers will, quite literally, want to hit the product. Ganjapreneurs must understand they are not just promoting their product—they’re also spokespeople for the widespread acceptance of the drug itself.

According to Marley Natural’s website, the company’s mission is to “champion Bob’s voice and his insight to help people realize the positive potential of cannabis for the mind, body, and spirit. Along the way, we want to help undo the suffering and injustice of cannabis prohibition around the world.”

Yet spreading joints for justice, or any form of marijuana advertising for that matter, already faces public adversity. A survey conducted by DrugFree.org found that out of 1603 American adults surveyed, 80 percent were against ads for weed even if it’s legalized in their hometown. It’s important to note that the study has some inherent bias: 1200 of the participants were parents of young children. Still, 70 percent of those surveyed actually favored marijuana legalization for medical purposes. This suggests that potential weed advertisements, and children’s potential exposure to them, seem to be more taboo than the drug itself.

Tech titans like Apple have been sensitive to these concerns, throwing around their weight in the weed market by vetoing or approving cannabis-related apps available on the App Store. In the past, Apple has been very finicky with how these apps brand themselves to their customers. Late last year, MassRoots, a cannabis-centered social networking site, was approved for purchase on the App Store—but only once it included geo-location software to ensure that downloaders were installing the app from one of 23 states where marijuana was medically legal.

Leafly, an app also funded by Privateer Holdings, offers reviews of strains and dispensaries for medical marijuana. The app is offered on the App Store, and may be the best example of successful weed branding. You may remember their full-spread ad in The New York Times this summer in honor of the legalization of medical marijuana in New York. It garnered a lot of attention, mostly because it was one of the first legal weed ads to run in a national newspaper. But the ad itself was quite tame, its branding largely on par with mainstream pharmaceutical ads.

For marijuana brands, gaining consumer trust also comes from educational initiatives. The Marijuana Policy Project recently launched its educational “Consume Responsibly” campaign in states where the drug is legal.

The advertisements aim to discount the stigma left by preexisting anti-drug campaigns, which, according to their website, fail to “prepare people for the scientific, socio-cultural, and legal realities of marijuana in America.”

For those who already know how to consume responsibly, cannabis companies are also beginning to offer legal weed as a product meant to be savored with sophistication—similar to wine or craft beer.

Take, for example, Marvina, the new high-end weed-of-the-month delivery service that sprouted out of San Francisco. A subscription will connect cannabis connoisseurs with dispensaries to provide top-shelf strains brought right to your door. Their packaging looks almost exactly like Birchbox, except for the products inside, of course.

Even though these pot enterprises are trying to look classy and natural and offer a product that consumers can trust, it still might take a while for the public to warm to the branding. Like other legalized drugs such as alcohol and tobacco, marketing for weed is going to be significantly more challenging than for your average consumer product due to government regulations and the potential for public backlash.

Nevertheless, as we’ve seen, venture capitalists and pot barons are itching to grow in this burgeoning industry (worth $50 billion in the U.S. alone). Focusing on education and changing marijuana’s unsavory image seems like the right start, but advertisers and marketers must tread this newly tilled territory rather softly if they hope to have long-term success.

The post For Legal Marijuana Companies, Branding Is a Slow Burn appeared first on Contently.

“It’s not a digital book or an e-book,” said IKEA’s Chief Design Guru Jörgen Eghammer.“It’s a bookbook.” You can actually feel the pages move as you swipe!

Now the team behind that viral content marketing campaign is back with a new video titled “Improve Your Private Life.” IKEA even let Apple off the hook this time, instead parodying self-help programs with Shelf Help Guru Fille Güte, who helps one unhappy couple find happiness by organizing their private lives.

The tongue-in-cheek comedy kicks off in the bedroom when the woman tells her man, “I just wish you knew what to do with your junk,” as the camera pans down to his crotch, with his clothes and papers strewn about around him. Over in the bathroom, the man steps on a sharp toy and screams “Frack!” at which point the IKEA FRÄCK mirror pops up, along with other suggested improvements for organizing the room with IKEA products. “Always believe in your shelf,” Güte advises at the end, inviting viewers to visit an accompanying interactive website, featuring Güte’s tips, and images of well-organized bedrooms and bathrooms filled with IKEA furniture.

While the new “shelf help” setup is certainly entertaining, will it be engaging enough to drive the 16 million views that the bookbook generated last year? If not, there’s always the $10,000 Apple Watch, which is just begging to be parodied. But we’re guessing IKEA is saving that for next.

The post IKEA Goes Viral By Helping You ‘Figure Out How to Use Your Junk’ appeared first on Contently.

While every year’s CES brings with it a flood of new TVs, gadgets with debatable practicality, and hyperbolic promises from every tech company imaginable, this year’s show may have revealed what many, including former WIRED editor and current senior editor at LinkedIn John C. Abell, believe to be a fundamental shift in the infrastructure of our digital world.

Much of the hype surrounds the movement towards a world where the Internet is everywhere and everything—on your wrist as a wearable smart watch, in your self-driving car, in your ceiling fan, and twisting the knife into the back of cable and traditional media in general.

Assuming the tech industry has its way (and, let’s face it, when does it not?), all of this is going to change the way we consume content. Suddenly, content won’t just be on your smartphone or on your laptop: It’s going to on your wrist, in your car, in your ceiling fan (okay, maybe not that one), and it’s going to be way, way faster.

So it follows, then, that content marketing is going to change with it. To understand the future of technology is the understand the future of content consumption and creation. And even if all of these tech trends turn into overblown hype… well, they’re still fun to think about. On that note, let’s take a look at the top three tech trends dominating the CES headlines.

The Internet of Things (IoT)

At the core of this push for an Internet-dominated, tech-driven world is the biggest, buzziest phrase to emerge from CES: the Internet of Things. Samsung has positioned itself as the vanguard, rallying the technology world to collaborate in the name of interconnectivity: “It is our job to pull together—as an industry, and across different sectors—to make true on the promise of the Internet of Things,” said CEO Boo-Keun Yoon at his keynote speech this past Monday.

But what exactly does IoT mean? In the most basic terms, it refers to the idea of a network of Internet-enabled devices that are in constant communication, sharing data to optimize our daily lives. Some examples: Your refrigerator sending notifications to your smartphone that you’re low on milk; your thermostat keeping track of your comings and goings to maximize energy efficiency; or even your toilet analyzing your excrement and sharing your vitals to help save on healthcare costs.

These all combine to create the overriding concept of a “smart home,” in which all your devices and gadgets work together in harmony to run the perfect house. Check out Qualcomm’s video demonstration for a visual reference of what our future smart homes may look like.

But it’s not just our homes that the IoT is going to affect: Cars also seem destined to radically change in our lifetime. New systems like ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance), and even fully self-driving cars, such as the Audi A7 previously linked, will take advantage of the IoT to make driving safer, easier, and generally “smarter.”

Many car and tech companies are imagining a future where your smart home and your smart car are connected, with everything optimized for maximum comfort and maximum energy and financial efficiency.

But not everyone is sold on this Jetsonian vision of our future. Though the technology needed to implement it seems to be there, such as uber-cheap computer chips and powerful wifi, there are still many legitimate concerns surrounding the IoT.

For the most part, these have to do with security and privacy. What if someone could hack into your network, disable your locks, and turn your home into a sci-fi horror house?

Equally concerning is the amount of power the IoT places into tech companies’ already massive hands. The promise of the IoT is largely based on the gathering and implementation of personal data. Does the average consumer truly want Google to know every pattern of their lives—and use it for marketing purposes?

For content marketers, though, this amount of personal data could be a boon. The previously limited concept of personalization would suddenly be much more of a reality. Companies with access to this data will hold the keys to statistics almost every marketer, and businessperson in general, would love to get their hands on. They can also use this treasure trove of data to publish the kind of sharply optimized content that the marketing and tech world has been salivating over since the dawn of the Internet—not to mention the potential for some revolutionary studies in human behavior.

Marketers have long tried to use behavioral psychology to complement their efforts, and the kind of big data on behavior provided by the IoT should create a new, very powerful tool for content creators to play with.

Despite the very real concerns of privacy and security that need to be solved, all signs seem to point to the IoT as an inevitability. The IT research agency IDC has predicted the industry will be worth $7.1 billion by 2020, and companies like Apple, Google, and Samsung are placing big bets on the IoT. It’s not a stretch to say that marketers should, too.

Wearables

Wearables aren’t anything new. Smart watches, smart wristbands… we’ve heard this song and dance before. The difference at this year’s CES is that they seem to finally be stylish, (at least according to WIRED), and, more importantly, invisible. Smart watches now just look like normal watches, and other intriguing devices such as smart jewelry, smart clothes, and smart glasses have been quickly improving in look and utility.

The all-encompassing reach of the IoT has also increased the viability of wearables. Instead of being standalone niche devices, the ultimate vision of an IoT world will place wearables as just one important piece in the larger network of connected devices. In fact, it wouldn’t be surprising to see smart watches as a kind of automatic remote control and notification hub, one that senses your body condition and changes your home or your car based on that data.

Like with other IoT-enabled devices, wearables are going to be yet another piece to add to the content puzzle. It may not be as obvious a space as a blog or a YouTube series, but there’s little doubt that marketers are going to be able to make use of the data and intimate reach of wearables.

Fitness-related companies can begin to optimize their content based on the data they receive from wearables, while others could begin to create content specifically for smart watches while taking advantage of their connection to the IoT. They will become both a platform and a data-collection tool to help bring content marketing to the next level.

TV Goes Online

One of the biggest and most immediate announcements to come from CES was Dish Network’s Sling TV, a $20 a month streaming service that seems to be the final confirmation of what many have seen coming for a long time: Folks are cutting the cable cord.

According to the Times, the service is about a fifth of the cost of your average cable package, and includes key channels such as ESPN in its offerings. ESPN has long been an impediment in many people’s desire to cut the cord, as event television such as sports are one of cable’s biggest advantages.

Combined with services like Hulu and Netflix, one could conceivably have access to a much larger network of entertainment choices than any cable package—not to mention the price cut and increase in convenience.

The move to online streaming has some obvious implications for the marketing world. TV ads will in all likelihood decrease in importance, while online content that can compete with big media’s offerings will need more funding than ever.

This is good news for brands with an established history with successful web series such as Chipotle’s “Farmed and Dangerous” or IKEA’s “Easy to Assemble.” With more and more people tuning online for their entertainment, brands that can successfully build followers with a solid web series are going to find larger and larger audiences—assuming they make the investment to compete with other online content, or, at the least, create their own niche.

All in all, this year’s CES has made it blatantly apparent that the content world—not to mention the world itself—is being more and more consolidated onto the Internet. Marketers and content creators need to keep up, or risk finding themselves left in the digital dust.

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