Now, there are two ways to explain this coincidence. 1) Henry is currently a popular name for boys, so the advertisers looked at a baby name list and decided to put Henry on their ads. 2) Facebook and Instagram tracked my online behavior and created tailored ads to increase clicks and conversions.

And the correct explanation is option 2 — targeted advertising!

While this level of personalization may seem creepy and invasive, it can actually make the shopping experience more convenient, especially for people with a son named Henry. And for that, I thank Meta Ads.

But is targeted advertising always this effective?

As many times as I’ve had a smooth shopping experience after clicking on targeted ads, I’ve also been served wonky ads that made me think, “Why in the world did this company target me?”

Before we can conclusively determine the effectiveness of targeted advertising, let’s define what it is.

What is targeted advertising?

Targeted advertising is a form of online advertising that specifically caters to a particular audience based on its characteristics, interests, or behaviors. This allows businesses to reach potential customers who are interested in their products or services.

However, audiences aren’t defined by just one characteristic, which is why advertisers can use different types of targeting to reach their intended audience.

Demographic targeting — Targeting based on factors like age, gender, income, and education.

Geographic targeting — Targeting based on location, such as city, state, or country.

Behavioral targeting — Targeting based on a user’s online behavior, such as browsing history, search history, or purchase history.

Psychographic targeting — Targeting based on personality traits, values, and lifestyles.

Businesses love targeted website advertising because it allows them to deliver more relevant ads, effectively allocate their advertising budget, improve their ROI, and enhance the customer experience. Yep, even though targeted ads can feel like an invasion of privacy, personalized promotions actually improve customer satisfaction.

How can targeted advertising be used for content marketing?

Targeted advertising can be a powerful tool to maximize the impact and reach of your content marketing strategy. Essentially, content marketing provides the substance, while targeted advertising ensures the substance reaches the right audience. Together, they create a more effective and impactful marketing strategy.

But you have to make sure your targeting and content strategy work hand-in-hand to ensure a seamless experience for your customers. First, design ads that encourage users to click through to specific landing pages — blog posts, product pages, customer review pages, etc. Make sure your targeted ads on social media and search engines perfectly align with your landing page content, and visitors will be more likely to become customers.

This approach is all about creating consistency throughout the entire customer journey and can be used to promote high-performing content, retarget website visitors, promote a content series, support social media campaigns, and generate leads.

Is targeted advertising effective?

Here’s the big question: Do ads actually work? To answer that question, we need to look at the numbers:

In 2023, the value of global digital marketing reached $366 billion, and that number is expected to grow at a rate of 13.6% every year for the next decade. In fact, the majority of CMOs in the United States and Europe are planning to increase their budgets for social media marketing, online videos, and influencer marketing in addition to the 9.1% of total revenue spent in 2023.

The reason CMOs are willing to pour more money into digital and targeted advertising is because marketing data collection and analysis is getting more sophisticated every day, leading to more effective ad spend and higher ROI.

Targeted online advertising is only as effective as the advertiser. To create effective targeted advertising campaigns that reach the right audience, generate leads, and drive sales, businesses need to:

• Gather relevant data
• Analyze the data to identify trends
• Clearly define their target audience
• Develop targeted ads that resonate with their audience
• Select appropriate channels for their ads
• Test and optimize
• And monitor ad performance

Yes, you have to complete all these steps to ensure successful targeted advertising campaigns. And there are a lot of brands who are willing to do it right. And since I just got an “A deal picked just for you” alert on my phone from Amazon, let’s talk about how Amazon uses targeted ads to grow their business:

Amazon’s targeted advertising success

Amazon is a prime example of a company that has effectively leveraged targeted advertising to drive significant growth and revenue. Their targeted advertising strategies have been particularly successful in:

Personalized recommendations

Amazon uses a sophisticated algorithm to analyze customer purchase history, browsing behavior, and product reviews to provide highly personalized product recommendations. These targeted recommendations have led to a significant increase in sales, because customers are more likely to purchase products that align with their interests.

Retargeted campaigns

Amazon uses retargeting campaigns to engage customers with abandoned carts. By reminding customers of their abandoned carts and offering incentives, Amazon successfully increases conversion rates.

Lookalike audiences

Amazon expands its reach by creating lookalike audiences based on its high-value customers. By targeting users with similar characteristics, Amazon is able to acquire new customers who are more likely to complete purchases.

Dynamic product ads (DPAs)

DPAs allow Amazon to target specific products to users who have shown interest in similar items or categories. This targeted approach ensures customers see relevant products, increasing the likelihood of clicks and conversions.

What are the challenges and limitations of targeted advertising?

While targeted advertising offers many benefits, there are some potential challenges and limitations that business owners and marketers should be aware of.

Ethical concerns

Let’s be honest — data collection is creepy. “There is definitely a ‘creepy line’ for targeted advertisements,” says technologist and writer Robert Quinlivan. “We’re being slowly conditioned to accept privacy invasions as inevitable, but people are still creeped out by the ‘surprise’ factor.”

The collection and use of personal data for targeted advertising raises privacy concerns among consumers. The more personal the data (think sex, health, and finances), the less comfortable people are about others knowing it. For this reason, we now have stricter data privacy regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA, which have made the targeted advertising process more complex.

Ad fraud

Ad fraud occurs when bad actors put out bots — automated, fake users — to click on ads many times. These extra, fraudulent clicks fool companies into thinking their ads are working and puts more money in the pockets of advertising firms.

According to Imperva’s 2024 Bad Bot Report, “almost 50% of internet traffic comes from non-human sources. Bad bots, in particular, now comprise nearly one-third of all traffic.” What’s even scarier is that Bad Bots can now mimic human behavior, making it difficult to detect and prevent fraudulent clicks.

If you notice sudden traffic spikes, high bounce rates, or near-nonexistent session duration, reach out to your ad provider. You can also implement fraud prevention tools to ensure your clicks are coming from humans.

Over-targeting and ad fatigue

Over-targeting occurs when a business excessively targets a specific audience segment to the point where it becomes intrusive or irrelevant. This can lead to ad fatigue, a phenomenon where consumers become so overwhelmed by repeated exposure to the same ads that they tune them out. Excessive targeting can also lead to negative brand perception if consumers think a brand is spammy or intrusive.

You can prevent over-targeting and ad fatigue by focusing on multiple audiences and limiting your ad frequency. Also, be sure to track campaign performance to identify signs of ad fatigue, so you can make the necessary adjustments to ensure the best customer experience possible.

In short, targeted advertising is complex, and it’s not going anywhere. Yes, new regulations may make data collection more difficult, but targeted advertising has proven to effectively reach specific audiences, increase sales, maximize the impact of content marketing, and improve the customer experience. So, as you create your own targeted advertising campaigns, just remember: don’t be creepy.

Ask the Content Strategist: FAQs about targeted advertising

What are the ethical concerns related to targeted advertising?

Targeted advertising relies on the collection and use of personal data, which can be seen as an invasion of privacy. And consumers may not be fully aware of how their data is collected and used for targeted advertising, creating a lack of trust among consumers. This problem becomes worse when businesses share personal data with third-party advertisers, which often happens.

How can businesses effectively measure the ROI of targeted advertising campaigns?

Here are the key metrics businesses should track and analyze to determine the effectiveness of their targeted advertising campaigns: click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, cost per acquisition (CPA), return on ad spend (ROAS), brand awareness and recall, and customer lifetime value (CLTV).

What are some future trends or developments in targeted advertising?

Targeted advertising is a rapidly evolving field with several promising trends, like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, to help predict future customer behavior and preferences. Businesses will also need to adopt more privacy-focused approaches to data collection, so users can have greater control over their personal data.

For more insights on content strategy, subscribe to The Content Strategist. 

The post Targeted Advertising: Does it Actually Work? appeared first on Contently.

As the film progresses, we hear about the history of the Lakota people. We see images of their impoverished reservation juxtaposed with joy-filled dances and rich cultural traditions. And at the same time, we’re drawn in by how the CRYP is helping many others like Genevieve work towards a stronger future for their people. It’s no wonder the film has amassed over 4.7 million YouTube views—it’s both beautifully shot and emotionally affecting.

It’s also an extremely effective example of brand storytelling, as it was produced not by a gritty independent film studio but by the financial services platform Square.

On first viewing, that might sound like an overstatement; Square isn’t directly mentioned in the film, and we only see it being passively used at Genevieve’s job. The focus isn’t on the product, but on the CRYP’s mission to empower Lakota youth with job and internship experiences that help them strengthen their community. That’s a noble aim, but how can a piece of content that is not directly about a brand be one of the best examples of brand storytelling?

Stories lead to a “branding moment”

The neuromarketing company Neuro-Insight can help us understand why this works so well. They’ve used neuroscience technology to look at what’s happening in people’s brains while they watch ads and TV shows. What makes Neuro-Insight unique is their proprietary technology called Steady State Topography (SST), which pinpoints how likely someone is to remember an ad. They call this long-term memory encoding.

As humans, our brains are built for stories. Whenever we watch something, our brain assumes there must be a story and tries to make sense of the narrative. This is particularly true when we’re introduced to a compelling character off the bat—like Genevieve, a young woman in the midst of coming of age and making a difference in her underserved community.

We see the Square product in action when Genevieve tells us how this opportunity to earn her own money gives her a sense of independence. To others, her job may be just a boring internship, but taking advantage of this opportunity is her triumph. And Square is one of the on-the-job tools that will give her the tech experience she needs while also simplifying a core business function for her employer.

Neuro-Insight calls this a “branding moment”—when our brain finally understands the story and memory encoding peaks. If your brand’s logo or product appears at that moment, people are much more likely to remember it.

Stories make messages memorable

Of course, not all the best brand storytelling examples take on such sensitive subject matter. The viral Cadbury “Gorilla” advertisement—wherein a gorilla drums along to Peter Gabriel’s “In The Air Tonight,” and no chocolate is consumed—is downright silly. However, per Neuro-Insight’s analysis, it ranked in the top 1 percent for long-term memory encoding. There’s a key lesson here for anyone who wants to tell a story that’ll make people remember their company: A big old bar of Cadbury chocolate appears at the end of this perplexing but engaging scene, and it stuck in people’s brains. And the next time they were checking out at the supermarket and saw that Cadbury chocolate by the cashier, they were more likely to subconsciously notice it, have a positive association, and buy it. Just like that, the ad increased sales by 10 percent.

Another killer example of storytelling advertisements is the “Mean Streets” video from Adobe. There’s a strong story that hooks you off the bat—a frazzled middle-aged guy meeting a dealer to seemingly buy drugs, but it turns out he’s buying clicks. He gets arrested, and we don’t really know what on earth we’re watching until the very end, when we realize it’s an ad for Adobe Marketing Cloud.

Stories can be used in a variety of formats

Not all effective brand storytelling has to be a high-production video, of course—feel free to breathe a sigh of relief. Intel is a great example of brand-centering stories about client impact stories through their social media content. Take this quick interview with Mary Beth Chalk, the co-founder and CCO of BeeKeeper AI. Mary uses her personal story of being diagnosed with cancer to demonstrate just how crucial AI services will be for the future of healthcare and personal privacy.

And as with the other examples in this list, Intel is not at the center of the story. At the end of the video, Mary lists which of Intel’s services are crucial for BeeKeeper AI to function—then we see Intel’s logo, and that’s that.

What makes these stories stick

There are a few things each of these examples of brand storytelling do really well:

• Prioritize the brand, not the product: Until the branding moment, they prioritize the story over selling the brand. As Heather Andrew, Neuro-Insight’s former UK CEO, explained: “This is highly effective from the brain’s point of view because our brains often reject overt selling messages, while brand cues like colors, shapes, and sounds can get in ‘under the radar.’”
• Focus on real people (or animals!) experiencing real emotion. The presence of people increased emotional intensity by 133 percent in a study of social ads.
• Introduce a compelling narrative right away. Branded content with an early story arc is 58 percent more likely to be viewed past 3 seconds.

The next time you scroll through your feeds, look out for branding moments. Which pieces of content do it well? Which don’t? Then, get inspired, and tell a brand story that people will remember.

Ask the Content Strategist: FAQs about brand storytelling

What role does authenticity play in these successful brand storytelling examples?

Authenticity is crucial in brand storytelling, as consumers value genuine connections and narratives that resonate with their own experiences. Brands, like these, that convey sincerity and honesty in their storytelling are more likely to build trust and loyalty with their audience.

How can companies determine the most effective storytelling strategies for their brand?

Understanding the target audience, conducting market research, and analyzing past successful campaigns can help companies tailor their content marketing storytelling approach to resonate with their audience and achieve their brand objectives.

Are there any ethical considerations to keep in mind when using brand storytelling?

To maintain credibility and trust with their audience, brands should be mindful of cultural sensitivities, avoid exploiting sensitive topics for marketing purposes, and ensure transparency in their storytelling efforts. Additionally, respecting the privacy and consent of individuals featured in brand stories is essential to upholding ethical standards.

For more brand storytelling examples worth reading, subscribe to The Content Strategist and follow us on Instagram.

The post ‘Branding Moments’: Brand Storytelling Examples To Get Your Message Across appeared first on Contently.

Since then, comments and questions have been the content metric I secretly value over likes and shares and views. Did I make people think about things differently? Did I spark enough curiosity to make someone want to learn more?

By that measure, our webinar on the science of storytelling a few weeks ago was a big success. By the time we got to the Q&A, there were nearly 100 questions in the chat. I answered as many as I could live, but I also wanted to give the best of the rest some love in a content mailbag. Let’s dive in.

Should we change anything about our storytelling because of the COVID-19 situation?

-Anthony

Over the past month, the phrase I’ve come to loathe the most is “business as usual.” Nothing about our current situation is usual. Our work and personal lives have changed in very real ways.

As marketers, our top priority right now should be helping our audience overcome the challenges they face. If we do that, we’ll build trust, nurture leads, and have a strong pipeline when the economic landscape shifts. To steal a line from Hootsuite, we need to “do good or make people feel good.”

For most brands, doing good means taking action in the fight against Coronavirus. For example, we’re raising funds for emergency grants for freelance creatives in need.

The easiest way to make people feel good is to create high-quality content that educates and entertains them. As a marketer, think of yourself as in public service. If you’re in finance, help people take advantage of every financial program available to them right now. If you’re in healthcare, follow GE’s lead and share important innovations that can help fight the disease. If you’re in marketing or technology, help people figure out how to work more effectively together.

However, don’t just create coronavirus content for the sake of it. In other words, don’t be this brand.

Bottom line: Everything that’s going on right now should prompt us to reevaluate the stories we tell and ensure that we’re prioritizing the ones that’ll help people the most.

What is your opinion on sending email content regarding the current situation?

-Ryan

Email remains the best way to reach your audience with stories and build a connection. When done well, it amplifies your traffic across all other organic channels. Coronavirus doesn’t make that any less true.

But we do have to be extra careful about the amount of emails we’re sending right now. This is what my inbox looked like for most of March:

Apparently, I have a lot of friends at Via. I also have a second family—the sweetgreen family, and they would like to take care of me during this unusual time. And Target considers me a “guest” because …. yeah, I guess I did get drunk and fall asleep in the camping section that one time in college.

We all get too many emails from brands, in part because it’s one of the toughest things for companies to manage. Product is sending a survey, the content team is sending a newsletter, customer marketing is sending a product update, and the sales team is reaching out with a special expansion proposal. And that’s when everything is normal. In times like this, our instinct is to do more, more, more. We try to drown our business anxiety in hyperactivity.

At Contently, we definitely sent a few too many emails to some folks after the crisis hit. Last month, we quickly spun up new virtual events to address challenges our audience were facing, like remote content collaboration and making the case for content marketing. These events had a ton of sign-ups, but in the course of promoting them, we ended up sending too many emails to people who were already signed up for our weekly newsletters. Once we realized this, we vetted our lists and reduced our email frequency.

In other words: Keep sending helpful content to your audience, but audit your email comms and ensure that people aren’t on overlapping campaigns. Even your most engaged contacts shouldn’t hear from you more than twice a week.

What if I am writing for tech savvy audience? Does it still make sense to write at a 4th grade level?

-Anna

You’ve talked about white papers at the beginning and the “level” at which they should be written—does that apply to brands across the board? We are in institutional asset management and continuously struggle with the “tone” and “level.” Senior management is pushing for academic level and the marketing team is pushing for something lower?

-Herbert

After my last webinar, I got a lot of questions about our research on content fluency. Should all brands really strive to write at an elementary or middle school level? Even B2B brands in niche industries?

The answer: Yes.

Complexity doesn’t equal authority. Whether you’re writing about institutional finance or pharmaceuticals or email marketing, you should make your writing clear and enjoyable to read. Doing so leads to a huge competitive advantage. If you’re the only one in your industry who does that well, people will turn to you first. You’ll earn their loyalty.

Now, your content may require some technical industry jargon. If that raises your reading level, that’s okay. But a lot of jargon can often be simplified into basic terms, so try to keep it to a minimum.

How relevant do you see content marketing being for B2B companies, and which kinds of content would you recommend?

-Herbert

In many ways, content marketing is more important for B2B companies than B2C companies. I wrote about why a couple years go:

People only want to read and watch content about their passions, and those things tend to fall into two camps:

A) Content that helps people enjoy their personal passions, like sports, gaming, wellness, fitness, cooking, travel, health, and, in my case, bouncy castles and large water slides.

B) Content that makes people better at their jobs, where they spend most of their days. These people desperately need to improve if they want to retire before they’re 85 years old and Boca Raton is somewhere under the Atlantic Ocean.

If you’re a B2C brand, you’re likely playing in the first camp. And the competition for attention there is fierce. If you want to stand out, you need to drop someone from space or tell truly unique stories—like Marriott or Dollar Shave Club—to stand out.

If you’re B2B, you still need to create content that stands out, but there’s much less competition. Condé Nast isn’t about to launch a magazine to help content marketers measure ROI. Meredith won’t start a new pub to help healthcare executives navigate the complex regulatory landscape. As a B2B brand, you likely have knowledge and expertise people crave.

This is a topic I’m weirdly passionate about. I even made a video about it!

Obviously every audience is different, but in general, what types of media and placements are most effective for storytelling, particularly for B2B on a small budget?

-Justin

There’s no universal rule here. You should reach your audience on the channels where they’re most engaged.

Our two biggest traffic sources are search and email. Search helps us reach thousands of new people who subscribe to our weekly newsletter. Then that weekly newsletter keeps them coming back. We’re a B2B startup with a pretty small budget, too, so we’re very deliberate about which keywords we target, focusing on terms like “content audit” that bring in readers likely to subscribe.

After that, LinkedIn is our biggest social channel. We have two new LinkedIn newsletters, The Storytelling Edge and The Content Report, that are growing by about 500 subscribers per week. We try to repurpose content as much as possible, so after a few days or a week, we repost our LinkedIn newsletter to our blog, reaching our audience in two places.

The biggest key is to tailor your content to the channel. On Twitter, threads work super well; often, we’ll summarize the contents of an entire article on Twitter, especially if it’s data-heavy, so our audience doesn’t have to click out of the feed.

We're aiming to raise $50,000 in emergency grants for the @freelancersu's Freelancers Relief Fund to help freelancers facing economic hardship during #COVID19. Here's why 1/https://t.co/PV6Rwsn7tb

— Contently (@contently) April 7, 2020

On Facebook, native video is king. Once you figure out where your audience spends their time, study that channel to figure out what works best. Short “NowThis” style social video and animated explainers work really well here, and they’re much less expensive to produce than live-action shoots.

How can I express the value of emotion in advertising to a leadership team that is highly focused on price-based messaging?

-Christine

Every brand needs to find the right balance of short-term sales activation with long-term brand building. The problem is that most organizations invest much more in the former than the latter.

Leading marketing researchers Les Binet and Peter Field have found that the ideal split of resources is 60/40 in favor of long-term brand building. (My ex-colleague, Guissepe Caltabiano, has a great breakdown on it here.)

While price-based offers will deliver an immediate short-term boost, those gains mostly disappear after six months. Brand building efforts, however, deliver compounding returns over time and a long-term uplift in sales. You can still use short-term sales activations to get over the finish line in any given quarter, but brand building is the key to long-term success.

Unfortunately, we’re drawn to short-term sales activations because:

1. They’re easy to measure. You send an offer, people click and buy, and you can measure the ROI.

2. The immediate results make our brains feel good.

But it’s not a great long-term strategy. Ask your leadership team: Do they only care about boosting sales for the next 3-6 months? Or do they want to build a brand that lasts?

What tips do you have about formatting copy? For instance, do bullets kill storytelling?

-Eric

Some thoughts here:

• Bullets are a great way to break down complex information and make it easier for our brains to absorb information. Bullets, lists, and images are a great way to keep people’s attention and cater to visual learners because it mixes up the monotony of long text blocks.
• However, don’t begin an article with bullets. That’s snoozetown. Start with a relatable story or anecdote that invites your audience in.
• Lastly, make formatting choices with intention. I tend to use shorter paragraphs to cater to mobile readers. I also almost always use H2s or bolded questions to break a piece up so it’s easier for people to digest. When in doubt, copy the formatting choices from others that you enjoy the most. And never make a bullet as long as this one. Honestly, it’s just getting out of hand.

Joe Lazauskas is Contently’s former head of marketing and co-author of The Storytelling Edge. Ask us your most pressing content strategy questions here.

The post Ask a Content Strategist: Answers to Your 7 Biggest Content Questions appeared first on Contently.

I experienced just one “You Matter Day” during my time at Ogilvy, when I was a strategist on the IKEA account. A few days earlier, our team released a national commercial we’d worked on for months. The public deemed it racist, and IKEA decided to immediately pull it from air. Thus on “You Matter Day,” I mattered for a greater purpose: scrubbing the ad’s existence from the internet.

IKEA and Ogilvy are both large corporations filled with many smart people. From the first creative briefs to production of the final commercial, we went through rounds of focus groups, concept testing, collaborative meetings, and edits. In deciding to pull the problematic ad, IKEA’s head of U.S. marketing voiced that if a single person could feel offended by the commercial, that was one too many. I agreed with her stance and personally felt the ad was offensive. How did I, or anyone else on the Ogilvy or IKEA teams, fail to prevent this?

From experience, the answer lies in the political hierarchy and siloed nature of agency life. I was a strategic planner on the IKEA account, teamed up with a senior planner and strategy director. The three of us formed one-third of the IKEA account at Ogilvy, alongside five dedicated members of account management and three art directors and copywriters in the creative department. Much like the U.S. government, our three branches were meant to check and balance each other. Much like the U.S. government, that never happened.

Breaking bureaucracy

Ogilvy and IKEA often clashed on ideas and executions. Since the client pays the bills, this meant our team had to figure out where we went wrong. Strategy would blame creative for going off-brief. Creative would blame strategy for writing a bad brief that all but forced them to ad-lib. The senior members of each Ogilvy department were engaged in a constant race to pass the buck, with junior members caught in the crosshairs and nodding along when called upon.

When an agency pitches a client to make a national ad campaign, there is no guarantee the client will approve any of the creative concepts. Fortunately, IKEA bought one of our ideas. It focused on the kitchen and the changing archetype of the American family. Gone are the cookie-cutter days of mom, dad, two kids, and a dog. Modern families more closely resemble the TV show—an amalgam of cousins, friends, and neighbors sitting around the table as one unit.

Our commercial played on this theme, with a mom calling upstairs for everyone to come down for dinner. Only instead of two or three names, she calls down a dozen people—her kids, her kids’ friends, and other members of their extended family. The script was funny; bodies pile out of bedrooms like clowns stuffed in a tiny car. The concept performed well in focus groups, so we moved to filming and production, some of the final steps before an ad goes to air.

In casting the commercial, Ogilvy chose a middle-aged Latina woman to play the mother. When the first cut arrived at the office, I had two initial thoughts:

1. This captures the concept well.

2. This makes me feel uncomfortable. People may find this culturally insensitive and suggest that IKEA thinks Latino families birth more children.

But when an ad sells and moves through the full process, you better have a good reason to derail the train, cost the agency money, and risk alienating every senior manager. In retrospect, I think this is why I didn’t say anything, even as I cringed watching the actress call everyone for dinner.

That’s no excuse for my lack of action. I wish I had seen the forest for the trees and spoken up while I could. For those still in the agency business, I really hope they feel empowered to do the right thing, even if it pisses off the powers that be. Agencies need to break down the walls that separate internal departments and implement initiatives that create a flatter organization.

Addressing diversity issues

Pepsi famously made a similar gaffe two years ago with a commercial starring supermodel Kendall Jenner. The ad depicts Jenner joining a protest rally and walking to the front lines, confronting a white police officer on duty. She hands him a Pepsi, and he breaks into a smile. The brand surely thought it was being woke. Instead, this problematic ad seems to imply that Kendall Jenner can cure racial and political unrest with soda. The backlash was immediate and severe. Pepsi pulled the ad after one day.

Beyond structural issues within ad agencies, a glaring hole in these two cases was a lack of diversity. Agencies tend to exist on the coasts, staffed with largely white, affluent, liberal employees who create ads for the whole country even though they only make up a small slice of the American pie.

Starting in 2015, the #OscarsSoWhite movement shined a light on lack of diversity within the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a failure on the Academy’s part to nominate people of color. Prominent black actors and directors, including Will Smith and Spike Lee, skipped the ceremony in 2016, the second straight year that all 20 lead and supporting actor nominations were white. In response, the Academy unanimously voted a week after the 2016 nominations to double its number of female and minority members by 2020.

I think a comparable approach could go a long way to helping fix the ad world. We need to implement programs that boost minority interviews and hires. Most importantly, this has to be done at a senior level. That way, groups that are misrepresented can take a stand to confront these problems from within.

According to a 2019 survey by Adobe/CMO.com, “sixty-six percent of African-Americans said they feel their ethnic identity is often portrayed stereotypically [in advertising], a sentiment shared by 53% of Latino/Hispanic Americans.” It’s crucial that multiple members of every race, creed, color, gender, or religion pictured in an ad can view it and offer opinions before any campaign is released.

If we can’t trust agencies to fix themselves, an industry-wide initiative would be beneficial. Independent ad review boards should be constructed and ideally, all ad agencies would see the immense value (and optics) of joining. Money talks in advertising and often leads to bad decisions. Setting up a third-party review step could help eliminate the financial incentive agencies face to proceed with problematic ads that cost months of time and thousands of dollars.

It’s time for a change. Ad agencies need to unite for a “You Matter Day” that honors every person impacted by their work, not just some.

The post How Problematic Ads Get Approved (And Ways We Can Prevent Them) appeared first on Contently.

It’s easy enough to recall legitimately funny marketing campaigns. NBA on ESPN nailed its RV series. “Shaq playing Scrabble” is still one of my favorite commercials ever. And I do find myself amused by OKCupid’s winking “DTF” ads on the subway. But breaking content down into its small parts and analyzing what laughter does for a brand’s voice is a much more complex affair.

Enter Dr. James Barry, a humorist, professor at Nova Southeastern University, and co-author of the research paper “A typological examination of effective humor for content marketing.” While teaching a course on social media humor, he realized he had inadvertently gathered a sizable sample of online branded content while looking for content to show his students. From there, he narrowed the focus to study brands as they attempt to be funny.

Barry told me that infusing content with humor has a lot of potential for B2C and B2B companies alike, provided that they avoid re-inventing the wheel. “Seriously, humor works very well in B2B spaces,” he said. “As long as the creator knows exactly what type of humor strategy they’re using. Why wouldn’t CEOs want to be entertained? They’re just like anyone else.”

Though content marketers tend to categorize brands by their target audience, the data Barry collected led to a new set of classifications. “The difference between an individual making a joke and a brand making a joke is that the individual’s only aim is to entertain,” he said. “A brand has to entertain and connect the joke to their brand image. They’re using laughter to leverage brand familiarity.”

According to Barry, brands fall into three categories when it comes to humor in content marketing: red, yellow, and white industries. He recently spoke to me about why B2B brands should be funny, how to start using humor if you’ve never done it before, and when companies can go too far.

So what makes a brand red, yellow, or white? How can I tell which brands belong where, and which have the easiest time using humor?

Red industry stories are highly emotional, and using humor can come off as offensive. These are the brands asking their audience to make high-stakes decisions on luxury items like a Lexus or a diamond necklace. Maybe their audience is researching a high-cost vacation over time or they’re imagining these products being present in intimate family moments. Content in this space usually reaches for an inspirational feel. These are the tear-jerker commercials, and people don’t appreciate feeling surprised by humor.

Yellow industry content is often boring without humor. The stakes involved with a purchase are much lower. If your brand offers snack foods or beer or candy, it’s almost mandatory that you use humor in some way. Everyone is doing it, and many are doing it well.

White industries is where B2B comes in. These brands have to try to tell technical, complicated stories about their products, and they’re usually selling us a version of something we need anyway. Insurance companies, non-luxury appliances, anything that’s just a tool in your daily life. The process of purchasing these products is still really involved and there are a lot of little steps, just like a red industry product, but no one wants to hear you go on and on about a white industry product at length. That’s where humor can really help.

So humor in B2B content marketing is actually a good idea?

Yes. If simplification and audience engagement is the goal of your content, you could do worse than trying to entertain. The key is using humor right off the bat, and white industry audiences especially love self-deprecating, insider humor. Something like, “Boy, isn’t it crazy what Facebook makes us do now?” or “Most of us don’t actually know how QR codes work, right?” is going to kill. People don’t just love funny content—they love the sensation of thinking, “Hey, I have that problem too!”

If you make a joke like that early on, maybe in the first piece of content your audience sees, you’ve made yourself into an authority. You know the industry so well that you can joke about it.

Does that mean humor works best as a top-funnel technique?

Our brains respond to anything novel. In order to make that psychological experience happen, yes, it’s best to use humor to grab an audience early on in your relationship with them. All your competitors are using the same language and data to market themselves, so you have the element of surprise.

What you don’t want to do is say, “Hold on, folks, mid-way through this clip you’re going to get a surprise!” People don’t want that suspense in comic content. It works best if it’s part of your initial move, and then if it’s integrated fully into your brand messaging from there on.

What if you can’t joke about what you’re selling?

There are still a few ways to use humor, especially if your audience isn’t expecting it, but the risk of offending or alienating your audience is higher here. I’ll use insurance as an example. Before Geico introduced the “So easy a caveman could do it” slogan, insurance companies tended to avoid humor completely. People couldn’t even imagine how to make something like that funny, so all the content was Allstate’s “Are you in good hands?” or State Farm’s “Like a good neighbor” shtick.

It went deeper too. No one thought insurance companies specializing in, say, care for cancer patients could use humor, but then out of nowhere came Aflac with the duck. It trickled down from there, and Progressive came on board by introducing Flo.

But those are ad campaigns, which is a different beast than content marketing, no?

Content marketing actually has unique advantages when it comes to branded humor. Back when a TV commercial was the only viable form of content, a brand could make a joke and it only had to land once or a handful of discrete times. In content marketing, serial is the standard.

In content marketing, serial is the standard.

The fact that we’re all constantly fielding messages online means that a brand can complicate a joke once they’ve got your attention, and they can reference it as part of their story. It’s not just about getting a single laugh anymore—you want your audience to feel like an insider because they already understand the bit you’re doing. They’ve been with you for a while.

Let’s say I run a brand that has never used humor in content marketing before. How do I start?

First, there are pros and cons to trying this out. Let’s start with the pros. Our world is filled with so much noise, and your brand has billions of potential followers on social media. We considered all the content that reaches viral metrics, and about two-thirds of that work gets there because it’s funny. The other third of content that goes viral is reaching for awe-inspiring, breath-taking, astonishing. The numbers show that using humor—or even just a light-hearted tone occasionally—is the only surefire way to stand out in a crowd.

The con, obviously, is a joke falling flat, but that’s not even the worst-case scenario. Everyone’s heard a bad joke. We just tend to forget them and move on. What you really don’t want to do is offend someone with a stab at humor. That’s the kind of thing that sticks around.

Is it worth the risk? How do you make sure your brand’s humor isn’t offensive?

By not trying to reinvent the wheel. At no point in creating funny content should you be trying to do something no brand has ever done before. There are 10 types of humor as I’ve defined them in my research, and the two most dangerous types for brands are:

1. Pointing out differences and stereotyping

2. Outrageous interruptions

The first type, whether it’s parodying social norms or roasting someone, is going to play worse in homogenous populations. Americans, to some degree, are used to having differences pointed out. But in cultures abroad that value uniformity of thought, that’s going to read as offensive.

The second type does very well online, but no one necessarily wants to see it coming from a brand they trust. Incongruity humor, extreme irony, an unexpected surprise, gross exaggerations that capture your attention … these are all very effective attention-grabbers, but they’re risky for brands. Crazy images like people suddenly screaming, throwing fits, maybe authority figures bursting out into dance, that stuff is only going to play well in the yellow industry, and even then, it’s not a guarantee.

So you’ll know right away if you make a mistake?

Yes, and it’s difficult to recover from offending someone. You can see companies recasting their video strategies for content that will live on YouTube, as opposed to TV ads. The comment section is extremely important, and the last thing you want is a video that has more downvotes than upvotes.

The user comment phenomenon is a positive, though, because people tend to discuss your content amongst themselves. To a degree, that’s brand reinforcement. If an audience member doesn’t necessarily get the joke you’re making, they can always just scroll down and learn the context from commenters, which can actually help you in the long-run. We’ve never had such immediate feedback from our audiences, so it will shape what we make next.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

The post When to Use Humor in Content Marketing appeared first on Contently.

Even though I gave up full-time journalism years ago when I went from overseeing a news site to running editorial and content strategy for Contently, I’ve always held on to that journalist perspective. When people said marketers should think more like journalists, I translated that as “marketers should think more like me.” (I’m a little egotistical.)

But after a few months of therapy and the chance to learn from a very smart CMO, I realized I was missing the point. The goal of marketers thinking more like journalists isn’t so that everyone would think like me; it’s so they’d have the benefit of both perspectives. In that ideal world, they’d grasp how the best practices and pragmatism of marketing can complement great reporting and storytelling. Then, great stories could fuel engagement on every marketing channel.

I’ve spent the past year trying to up my marketing fluency. As a result, I came to this year’s Content Marketing World with a much different perspective and left the conference with some fresh questions about the future of our industry.

Since everyone does “takeaway” pieces from Content Marketing World, I wanted to take a slightly different route and work through some red flags on my mind as I fly back to Contently HQ in New York.

1. Content marketing remains obsessed with audience building. But that’s only half the battle.

Content Marketing Institute founder Joe Pulizzi opened the conference by giving the audience a sneak peak at one big stat from the company’s annual research report, due out later this fall: Nine out of 10 people who rate themselves as successful content marketers are focused on building an audience.

That’s pretty intuitive, right? You’re not going to be very successful at content marketing if you’re not building a dedicated audience that you can nurture through the funnel.

What worries me, though, is the rest of the conference seemed stuck on that one note. Build an audience. Build an audience. Build an audience. Unfortunately, building an audience is just one part of the funnel (the top). As content marketers, our attitude tends to look like this:

But content marketing will never reach its full potential if we don’t move beyond audience growth and focus on how great content can fuel every touchpoint in the buyer’s journey.

If we want to see true investment in great content within companies, content needs to be accountable to more than just top-of-funnel audience building and results. Content needs to be the connective thread that ultimately points to tangible business impact like sales and retention. To accomplish this, we need to map content to each stage of the funnel and track how content consumption impacts buyer and customer behavior.

2. We’re still framing everything as content vs. advertising, but that’s a false dichotomy.

It’s really easy to frame content vs. advertising as a Star Wars paradigm. The Light Side against the Dark Side. Good vs. Evil. Most talks I attended at CMW included that message in some way. (Mine included.)

Robert Rose—co-author of Killing Marketing with Joe Pulizzi—spoke about the need for brands to build their own audiences and ditch the gatekeepers of audience attention. To prove his point, Rose highlighted the incredible ad fraud scandals of the past year from the big four tech giants of Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. He noted how many marketers keep paying for a poor product—ads seen for one second, bot impressions.

These are great points. But the problem is content doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Unless you already have a huge audience, you still need to use the pipes of these advertising ecosystems to target buyers and attract new audiences. You still need to market your content because it’s not just going to magically perform organically. It’s very hard to scale content marketing without paid social and search distribution.

Even if you’re like us and you’ve spent years building an audience of hundreds of thousands of monthly readers and subscribers, you still want to attract new folks into your funnel. Content marketers need the advertising ecosystems that we like to trash.

3. We still don’t know who is supposed to own content.

When Contently CMO Kelly Wenzel and I were conducting an interview about our latest product release at Content Marketing World, someone asked us a great question: Which department owns content marketing inside most organizations? Where should it live?

The truth is it varies greatly. Sometimes content lives under comms. Sometimes digital. Sometimes brand. Sometimes social. I’ve even seen it live under community outreach, alongside volunteer programs.

Kelly suggested that the priorities of the organization should determine where it lives. In a brand-driven organization, for instance, the brand team should own content. In an organization driving toward digital transformation, it should live under digital. But this lack of internal clarity can lead to some Game of Thrones style fighting over who has creative control and gets to hold the budget, resulting in disconnected, dysfunctional content operations.

So many marketers that I talk to crave an industry standard—a model they can bring to their CMO and say, “THIS is how things are supposed to be.” While there were several sessions at Content Marketing World that explained how to build a team (hire writers, editors, videographers, etc.), none really tackled this giant question. That’s because we don’t have one. But that needs to change before winter comes.

The post 3 Problems That’ll Keep Me Up at Night After Content Marketing World appeared first on Contently.

But now, the company is facing a backlash that threatens to undermine what Mark Zuckerberg called “a historic opportunity.”

Free Basics, the recent rebranding of what was previously known as Internet.org, is Zuckerberg’s pet project; the service promises to “connect the globe” by providing free, basic Internet access through a Facebook-controlled platform. Zuckerberg has taken every Free Basics setback personally, often responding via Facebook posts and videos to defend the initiative. His simmering frustrations toward those questioning the company’s motives have sometimes boiled over.

In December, the tech baron penned an op-ed in The Times of India, railing against the government’s skepticism of the project. In it, his tone reached levels of condescension and incredulity that surprised analysts: “There’s no valid basis for denying people the choice to use Free Basics,” he wrote. “Who could possibly be against this?”

Well, it appears India is against this.

On February 8, India’s regulators blocked Free Basics, citing violations of net neutrality. It was a major setback for Zuckerberg, who had made India his primary focus. With a population of 1.2 billion people and relatively small 20 percent Internet penetration rate, India was an ideal target for Free Basics, as well as a potentially massive market for Facebook’s ad business.

But India isn’t the only country threatening Facebook’s international plan. Today, France’s privacy regulatory body CNIL released a notice stating that Facebook “violates [users] fundamental rights and interests, including their right to respect for private life.” CNIL took aim at Facebook’s targeted ad business in particular, claiming that the network collects personal data without properly “informing” or “obtaining the consent” of users.

Considering that Facebook’s entire business model is dependent on its ability to target users based on personal data, this could be a crushing blow for Facebook’s business in France. It could also create a domino effect in Europe, which has become increasingly suspicious of the tech giant’s data collection practices.

Facebook is already a global network—83.6 percent of active users are outside of America and Canada, according to the company’s internal statistics. But Facebook isn’t everywhere. The social network is already effectively blocked from China, the world’s largest market, and a major slowdown in Europe, India, and other international markets could hamstring the company’s international ambitions considerably.

Zuckerberg has shown restraint responding to these latest setbacks, but make no mistake—this is a big deal for him and an even bigger deal for Facebook’s future.

The post Is Facebook’s International Growth in Danger? 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.

In case you’re at work and can’t watch the video, here’s the basic gist: A skinny man trains in musty gyms for a boxing match, but it turns out he’s the sexy round card holder instead of the boxer.

The twist ending forces viewers to challenge the way that they think about gender roles. The surprise that viewers feel in the last few seconds has made the ad go viral—”You Can Make It” has already been viewed over 1.4 million times in less than a month.

With gender so frequently in the news these days, companies are realizing that it can be smart to create content that caters to a variety of audiences.

Here are five more campaigns forward-thinking enough to tell stories that fall outside of traditional gender roles—and reap the rewards in the process.

1. Sport England: “This Girl Can”

Sport England, an organization that funds projects that encourage movement, recently conducted a study that revealed that U.K. women are exercising less because they are intimidated by sports and ashamed of their bodies. The “This Girl Can” campaign features women of all ages and body types.

Apologies in advance: You’re going to have “Get Ur Freak On” stuck in your head for the rest of the day.

“This Girl Can”‘s website is a fantastic example of how a campaign can carry over from commercials into online content. The site features the story of each woman shown in the commercial, and lets users submit stories about how they started getting active. There’s even a list of sports women can try out, including information like how much they cost, what equipment is required, and how many calories are typically burned in an hour.

Publications like the Guardian have criticized this campaign for infantilizing grown women by calling them girls, and suggesting that women should only exercise so that they can feel sexy. Fair objections, but, at the very least, this campaign is shining a spotlight on bodies of all types, and saying that they’re all capable of moving in a variety of ways. Now who wants to sign up for some roller derby?

2. Whisper: “Touch the Pickle”

It is pretty much completely taboo to talk about menstruation in India. Because of this, there are still many myths that surround the topic. It’s commonly believed that if an “impure” woman—i.e., a woman on her period—touches a jar of pickles, the pickles will rot.

Whisper Sanitary Napkins decided to bust that myth once and for all.

This campaign aims to break all sorts of menstruation rules in India. For example, women on their period aren’t supposed to run, play, or, in some cases, even go outside. But here, the main character does all of those things with a smile on her face.

According to AdAge, more than 2.9 million women pledged to “touch the pickle jar” after seeing this ad, and Whisper’s share of voice grew from 21 percent to 91 percent in its category. Plus, BBDO India won a Cannes Glass Lion for the campaign.

I, for one, am never going to look at pickles the same way again.

3. Pantene: “Labels Against Women”

The Philippines branch of Pantene, a hair products company, was experiencing a disconnect from its female audience. In an attempt to reestablish this connection, Pantene researchers decided to figure out what it was like to be a woman in the workplace. According to the resulting case study video, the researchers found that 70 percent of men said that women needed to downplay their personality in order to be successful in the workplace. And 58 percent of women agreed!

Clearly, Pantene had stumbled upon a major insight about their customers. But rather than getting bogged down in the negativity that women experience at their jobs, the company decided to lift their consumer up. This video is the result.

By the time the P&G case study video was released, the “Labels Against Women” ad had garnered 31 million impressions. If earned media is included, the video had over 200 million impressions. Clearly, this ad—which was created with a Filipino audience in mind—had a far more wide-reaching audience than originally intended. Pantene even won a Cannes Bronze Cyber Lion in 2014 for the spot.

As is to be expected, this ad has its critics. After all, the commercial is saying that women shouldn’t care about labels—but also that they should buy Pantene. That’s a bit of contradiction. But at least Pantene isn’t trying to sell their product by using negative stereotypes of women. Baby steps, everyone.

4. #ILookLikeAnEngineer

The #ILookLikeAnEngineer campaign all started with Isis Wenger, an engineer at tech company OneLogin. After she was featured in an advertisement for OneLogin, people began questioning if she actually worked for the company on social media. As Wegner shared in a Medium post, there were plenty of sexist comments:

Via Wegner’s Medium post.

Understandably, Isis was shocked. She was an engineer, and was surprised that anyone could think that all engineers look the same. As a result, she started the #ILookLikeAnEngineer campaign on Twitter. Within days, it had gone viral.

https://twitter.com/intelopensource/status/646117681255481344

https://twitter.com/VicUniWgtn/status/651193896894992384

What's a #ManhattanCollege engineer look like? Here's your answer. #ILookLikeAnEngineer #girlpower #likeagirl #STEM https://t.co/35dcrgPogR

— Manhattan University (@ManhattanEdu) September 29, 2015

Last week, domain provider Rightside made an undisclosed donation to #ILookLikeAnEngineer to help fund the display of billboards in the Bay Area. Hopefully, this campaign will continue to promote the message that anyone can be an engineer, regardless of what they look like.

5. Airtel

This ad is probably the most controversial of the bunch, and it comes from Indian network provider Airtel. According to this report by the nonprofit Catalyst, Indian women only represent 32 percent of the country’s work force, and earn only 62 percent pay for every rupee that a man earns for equal work.

In the ad, a female boss tells an employee that he has to stay late to finish a project. By the end of the spot, you realize that he’s not just working for her—he’s also her husband.

A lot of people aren’t happy about “Boss TVC.” If you can stomach some serious sexism and spelling mistakes, I dare you to read the comments section of the YouTube video.

Despite some of the criticisms that these commercials have faced, it’s clear that advertisers are starting to realize how important their position towards female equality is for the public image of their company. While these ads aren’t perfect, at least we’re starting to move away from the time when someone thought it was a good idea to depict a woman as a headless set of breasts.

The post 5 Ad Campaigns That Shatter Gender Stereotypes appeared first on Contently.

With its reputation diminished, Esquire has decided to commemorate the publication of its thousandth issue by turning its 82-year archive of back issues into a new searchable subscription site called Esquire Classic. The move is not only a smart way to remind readers of the history behind the name, but it also opens up a low-risk revenue stream.

For us, however, the launch was a chance to explore thousands of vintage print advertisements. We took the opportunity to report on how content marketing has changed over the last century and what marketers can learn from these classic campaigns.

1. Show, don’t tell

This spread from September 1933 for the Talon Slide Fastener makes the product desirable without ever going into detail about how it actually works. The inset on the right, for example, describes how the product is “absolutely invisible” and “eliminates ugliness,” but it never gets bogged down in technicalities that are probably self-explanatory. Given the ad’s elegant design and the fluid writing style, the consumer doesn’t need to understand exactly how the fastener works in order to want it.

2. Cater to context

By November 1945, World War II had been over for two months, and as the United States ended rationing on the homefront, advertising started to pick up again. This ad for Pacific Mills emphasizes a transition back to peacetime and specifically reaches out to those welcoming back returning military personnel. It capitalizes on a very specific point in time and demonstrates an awareness of consumer needs that won’t last long.

3. Emphasize the consumer benefit

This text-heavy advertorial from March 1957 for the American Recording Society leads with an offer of a free record and keeps the tone consistent throughout. Every section goes into detail about a different consumer benefit, from the original collectible record to a membership deal with additional freebies to the option to cancel at any point. The body copy is as concise as a piece of news and never distracts the reader from the offer.

4. Let your audience participate

Reader participation turns messaging into a dialogue rather than a monologue. This Prince Gardner ad from June 1963 invites the reader to conduct a side-by-side comparison, pointing out product attributes—invisible stitching, extra pockets, an anchored bill divider—using clear visuals. Prince Garner makes it easy to see why its products are better than what the readers already have.

5. Don’t be afraid to take risks

Originally created in 1959, the “Think Small” campaign for Volkswagen took an industry based on luxury and reimagined it through the lens of simplicity and minimalism. While muscle cars and vehicles built for growing families previously dominated auto sales, Volkswagen turned the Beetle’s size and form into selling points in print ads that made the most of white space and scaled-down visuals, turning those perceived deficiencies into consumer benefits. The copy across a series of print ads points out that the Beetle is a smart economic choice with an advanced engine that doesn’t need frequent oil changes or repairs. This was a calculated risk that paid off and changed advertising history.

6. Sell a story

Every product has a unique story, but the challenge is figuring out how to tell it in away that’s compelling. This January 1976 ad for Bell & Howell Schools’ learn-at-home program is based on a fictional student discovering a passion for electronics, which earns him the respect of his peers. The reader is then offered a chance to participate in their program and embark on a similar adventure. By drawing the reader into the narrative, this ad takes a fairly bland service and frames it as a way for the reader to become popular.

7. Don’t be afraid to go under the hood

This January 1976 ad for the Mercedes-Benz 450CE doesn’t shy away from technical specifications that would go right over the heads of most people. But the brand balances these complexities with visuals and subheaders that make the info a bit easier to digest. (Think of it as a listicle that predates BuzzFeed by about 40 years.) The overall feel of the ad speaks to the quality, inside and out, and engineering expertise to be reckoned with. Whether or not the reader remembers the specifics, the broader message still gets across.

8. Make ’em laugh

A little genuine humor can be worth more than a lot of dry copy. This Waterman ad from December 1988 sticks with the reader. Like a good joke, most of the anticipation is in the setup, and the solid payoff means that reader won’t feel like they wasted time looking at this page. For a product like a pen, which isn’t exactly sexy, humor erases some of the formality and masks the marketing angle so that a punchline can turn into a payoff.

9. Play with form

Even in this Lands’ End ad from November 1994, you can see how marketers were having fun with the self-promotional angle of advertorials. Here, the brand anthropomorphizes attache cases, turning them into characters in the narrative. It’s is a creative risk that could potentially make the brand seem immature, but the copy’s conversational tone helps balance this out by emphasizing the bag’s high-quality construction and reasonable price. Working in silly satire isn’t easy, but those that can pull it off will immediately stand out.

10. Explore possibilities

This July 2001 ad from Apple’s “Think Different” campaign demonstrates how the iBook is more than just a computer by listing its other uses: video editing, personal organization, photo storage, and so on. It sells a lifestyle, not a product. This type of exploration encourages the reader to think about how one product can impact every phase of life, which increases the likelihood that a consumer will relate to it on some level.

11. Don’t be afraid of the reach

This minimalist ad for the Lincoln MKS from August 2008 doesn’t provide any explanation for its tagline, “Starships don’t need keys.” This leaves readers to consider the connection on their own, associating one car with the cutting-edge technology of space travel, regardless of whether it’s accurate. The power of suggestion can be just as compelling—if not more so—than a direct approach.

12. Less can be more

This World Wildlife Fund ad from February 2012 is short and to the point. It doesn’t need any defense or any explanation beyond the tagline, and the visual only serves to reinforce that. Sometimes the most memorable way to send a message is to be as direct as possible. Print advertising over the last 80 years has significantly changed in tone and style, but the point remains the same: Make your message count.

The post 12 Things Marketers Can Learn From the Esquire Archives appeared first on Contently.

Agencies vs. Publishers vs. Tech: Who Owns the Future of Content Marketing?

As the content marketing world explodes, there’s more jousting for power going on than at a Medieval Times (more boozing too, at least judging from SXSW). Contently co-founder Shane Snow breaks it all down:

The Hopi Indians had a proverb: “Those who tell the stories rule the world.”

Modern technologists have a similarly sweeping observation, noted by investor Marc Andreessen: “Software is eating the world.” In other words, old industries will eventually be revolutionized by software.

Given the annual billions now pouring into content marketing—where businesses publish content instead of buying advertisements—it’s clear that the market agrees with both statements.

The question on marketing leaders’ minds is no longer: Will content marketing revolutionize the ad and publishing industry?

Instead, it’s: Who will rule, and who will get eaten?

Read it.

5 B2B Brands That Rock Instagram

I’m going to be honest: When Aaron Taube pitched me this story, I was skeptical. B2B companies and Instagram always seemed to me like a painfully awful fit. But in this roundup, he—and these five companies—proved me wrong. Read it.

BuzzFeed Is About to Get $250 Million Because Digital Media Is the New Hollywood

BuzzFeed is reportedly on the verge of raising $250 million from Comcast/NBCUniversal, and it’s about a whole lot more than listicles…

This deal marks the culmination of a new way of thinking about media companies: Not as publishers as they were during the print age and the first two decades of the web, but as something much closer to the digital media equivalent of Hollywood studios—creating content that is distributed and hosted on large channels outside of their control.

Read it.

Predictions: What’s the Endgame for BuzzFeed, Vice, Vox, and the Rest of Our Favorite Media Companies?

Will Facebook destroy BuzzFeed? Will Gawker survive the Hulk Hogan suit? Are we just two years away from Rupert Murdoch hunting down ISIS in a new Vice series after he buys the edgy media empire? Our baseless speculations will reveal these answers and more! Read it.

Quiz: How Much Do You Know About the History of Advertising?

Full disclosure: I got a 2/10. Statistically, I should have done better if I just picked answers at random.

If you beat me, please feel free to mock me on Twitter @joelazauskas.

The post Content Catchup: Crazy Media Predictions, Best of B2B Instagram, and More Must-Reads appeared first on Contently.

But trust me, the emotional roller coaster is worth it. While all of these commercials are undoubtedly different, they all have valuable lessons to teach advertisers. What are they, you say? Glad you asked:

1) Snickers: “Brady Bunch”

Lesson: Don’t underestimate the power of nostalgia… and ridiculous humor.

As Don Draper says in the classic “Carousel” episode of Mad Men: “In Greek, nostalgia literally means ‘the pain from an old wound.’ It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.” While this quote is undoubtedly poignant and true, it fails to mention the equally alluring power of batshit absurdity. Probably because the word “batshit” would have totally ruined that scene. But I digress.

This Snickers commercial combines nostalgia and absurdist humor in a fantastic way. It turns out that if you turn the hulking Danny Trejo into Marcia from The Brady Bunch, people will remember it. In fact, they’ll call it one of the best commercials of the year. Kudos to the brave soul who had the courage to even say this concept aloud in a boardroom. They deserve a raise.

If you’ve got some extra time, check out how Snickers brought this idea to life. It’s worth a watch:

2) Adobe Photoshop: “Dream On”

Lesson: Great storytelling is an inherently visual medium.

Photoshop is so popular that it barely needs advertising. However, it can be easy to forget that it’s used for more than just ridiculously mutating magazine cover models. This ad is compelling because it highlights the almost limitless capabilities of Photoshop, but has no narration whatsoever. Viewers understand the power of Adobe’s software just by seeing what it can create.

3) Always: “Like A Girl”

Lesson: Get on the right side of key social issues.

Appealing to the struggles that your consumers face will always put you in the right light. For example, Cannes started awarding the Glass Lion to work that addresses issues of gender prejudice. While Always was nominated for this award, the winner was BBDO India and Proctor & Gamble India’s “Touch the Pickle” campaign. The ads for the sanitary napkin Whisper aimed to get rid of the shame that is still attached to menstruation in India.

In other words, the time has finally come for socially-conscious companies to be rewarded for tackling big issues. Is your business taking on any big topics? If not, you might want to consider what social issues your brand feels strongly about and take action. For more examples, check out this round-up.

4) Budweiser: “Lost Dog”

Lesson: Everyone loves a story about cute animals.

Especially if there are two of them. And they’re different species. And they’re best friends. D’AW LOOK AT THAT PUPPY’S FACE.

Sorry, sorry, I got a little carried away there. It’s important to remember that, while cuteness is effective for grabbing attention, it’s not necessarily a great strategy for building your brand in the long run. As Darren Bailes, executive creative director for VCCP, said in an interview with Campaign: “Using animals for their cuteness won’t work for long. It’s shallow and people move on from it very quickly… People are used to seeing real and complex stories on TV. Why should they demand any less of the advertising?”

This Budweiser ad is so memorable because sure, there are aw-inducing fluffy things, but there are more complex elements as well. “Lost Dog” involves one of the seven classic story types—journey and return. Viewers are familiar with this kind of story structure, which is designed to tug on heartstrings.

Oh, and a great hashtag for your campaign doesn’t hurt, either. As #bestbuds shows, the most obvious hashtag is usually the best one. The Budweiser puppy even has its own Twitter account! Although it’s apparently only for Twitter users 21+, according to the puppy’s profile picture. Which is really weird because he’s 13 at most in dog years.

(Although like most 13-year-olds, he got bored of Twitter and stopped using it after a week.)

5) Nissan: “With Dad”

Lesson: What we just said about cute animals. But with babies.

Just like cute animals, babies are only one aspect of a memorable ad. Their big-eyed, drooly adorableness needs to be combined with a story in order to truly grab an audience. Nissan succeeds in creating this one-two punch in “With Dad.” The ad falls into one of the classic seven story types—a quest not only for a father to raise his son, but for that child to grow into his father’s figurative racing shoes. Excuse me while I reconsider letting my future children drag race.

6) Gatorade: “Made in New York”

Lesson: Again, people love nostalgia.

Really, I can’t overemphasize the power of nostalgia. By showing New York City over the years, as well as the journey of one of its biggest sports heroes, “Made in New York” is a nostalgia Narnia. Plus, Sinatra is in the background. How can you not feel a little pang in your heart? Just from looking at the attention that this campaign received, as well as the wild success of other advertisements like Coca-Cola’s “Kissed By” series, it becomes clear that your company might want to consider a blast from the past.

The post 6 Storytelling Lessons From the Emmy Nominees for Outstanding Commercial appeared first on Contently.

The popular online community is known for being completely controlled by what its users want— free of corporate influence. In fact, the site is called “the front page of the Internet” because it’s constantly being updated by redditors with the most popular content across the web.

As an incentive for not shilling self-promotional, low-quality spam, reddit users get “karma,” or points for their comments and links that are upvoted. As a result, it’s pretty hard for a company to promote itself on reddit without sparking a huge backlash from the online community.

However, some brands have been savvy enough to promote themselves on reddit without invoking the wrath of the Interwebs. How? By giving audiences good content. Since most of the content on reddit is generated by users rather than brands, it begs the question: How can a company get noticed on the site? Here, we look at how five companies have managed to rule reddit.

1. Adam & Eve

Warning: This Live Q&A from April of last year on reddit is not safe for work. Yet if you know what kind of company Adam & Eve is—a purveyor of sex toys and everything that comes along with them—you shouldn’t be surprised.

The marketers at Adam & Eve thought of a truly genius way to get reddit users talking without pushing their brand too heavily. The company’s sexologist, Dr. Kat, logged in and candidly answered reddit user’s questions about sex. The Q&A was so popular the doctor even went back on the platform to give more advice a few months later.

Adam & Eve’s company name is barely noticeable throughout the Q&A, save for the “[sponsored link]” tag that appears next to Dr. Kat’s username in the transcript, and the title of the event itself: Q&A here TODAY with Dr. Kat, Staff Sexologist at AdamandEve.com.

Instead of promoting toys, Adam & Eve made the wise decision to give reddit users the valuable resource of a sex health professional. This kind of marketing shows how companies can be sensitive to their users’ needs and tailor the content accordingly.

2. Ikea

Sometimes your company doesn’t have to do anything in order to get on reddit. If you create funny content, the Internet can do the work for you. For example, Ikea once published a print ad offering a free crib to any babies born exactly nine months after February 14, 2013:

Image via Adweek

The ad has over 1,000 comments and almost 2 million views on reddit, proving that the key to reddit success is encouraging users to fornicate. Unless, of course, you’re posted up in the Oval Office.

3. President Obama

Reddit’s AMA (Ask Me Anything) feature might be the perfect option for your company if you have a famous figurehead. But regardless of who that figurehead is, that person can’t compete with the President of the United States. In 2012, the POTUS used reddit to host a half hour virtual Q&A. According to The Washington Post, the traffic was so heavy that reddit had to shut down temporarily.

However, other people who are less famous than the leader of the free world have still hosted successful AMAs on reddit. As Fortune noted, tech leaders like Brian Krzanich from Intel, Emmet Shear from Twitch, and Jeremy Stoppleman from Yelp have all held very popular AMAs. While opening yourself up to questions from the Internet can obviously be risky, it also proves that you are willing to confront sensitive topics without hiding behind the walls of the press release.

4. Glamour Magazine

To promote Anna Kendrick being on its cover, Glamour Magazine recently had the star recite some gems of water-induced wisdom from the subreddit “Shower Thoughts.” For example: “They should announce a sequel to Groundhog Day, and then just re-release the original.” Hard-hitting stuff, I know.

Kendrick even threw some philosophical musings of her own into the mix: “Does a frozen yogurt headache burn less calories than an ice cream headache?” Check out the full video below:

As Adweek notes, this kind of quirky, Internet-friendly video is out of character for Glamour. Yet it’s fast becoming one of the publication’s most popular videos. The lesson? Brands should try and take themselves a little less seriously. Everyone loves a good laugh— and viewers will be more likely to share a video they think is funny.

5. Nissan

Nissan hosted a thread on reddit in 2014 which asked users, “If you could have one thing from Amazon, what would it be?” According to Digiday, the company then proceeded to actually buy some of the items that users listed, from 4,500 lady bugs to 30 months of reddit gold, the company’s premium membership. All of this gift-buying was done to promote Nissan’s new car, the Versa Note.

Then, things escalated quickly. Amazon drove around a large package until it was spotted by a redditor who created the thread “What’s the largest item you can have shipped from Amazon? Because I think my neighbor just got it.”

Image via Digiday

Yep, Amazon had just delivered an actual Nissan to someone’s front door. According to Digiday, other subreddits about Nissan and Amazon popped up after the image above became popular on the site. All of this content was created by reddit users, not by advertisers from either company. As Kyle Luhr, a senior digital strategist at TBWA\Chiat\Day who worked on the Nissan campaign, said in an interview with Digiday, “We had a plan for it, but were honestly surprised by how big it got.”

While companies can plan for months to create the “perfect” reddit campaign, it’s clear that the online community holds the ultimate power. And that’s how they want it. Yet if your company makes it onto the front page of the Internet, you will be known as a brand that can leverage very entertaining content to connect with consumers.

Still not convinced that reddit can be a great tool to promote yourself? Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Barack: “By the way, if you want to know what I think about this whole reddit experience – NOT BAD!”

The post 5 Brands That Rock Reddit (And What You Can Learn From Them) appeared first on Contently.

While YouTube’s advertising is best known for its skippable pre-roll ads, the platform offers myriad ways for brands to get their video content out there. Lucky for us, WhoIsHostingThis has detailed everything a beginner needs to know in the shiny infographic below.

For example, brands can position their videos in-slate (where viewers are given the option of choosing between three ads before watching a long video) or in-search (where a video is provided as a suggested search result). And best of all, they can choose to only pay when viewers choose to watch the ad.

The infographic cites some impressive numbers that should convert those who still think of YouTube as a hub for fuzzy cell phone videos. Did you know that YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine after Google? Or that it attracts over 1 billion unique users each month, and reaches more US adults than any cable network? And for those looking for ROI, consider this: Businesses that use YouTube ads see a 20 percent increase in website traffic, and 43 percent of brands’ new customers buy something they saw in a YouTube ad.

Check out all of those seductive stats in the infographic below.

The post Infographic: The Beginner’s Guide to YouTube Advertising appeared first on Contently.

And experiment it did. Throughout 2014, Heineken released a slew of creative marketing campaigns into the advertising world. Yet all of them had the same goal—to differentiate Heineken from the rest of the beer market.

What Heineken Did

“If you look at the category, there is a large proportion of work that really depicts beer drinkers as a bunch of thoughtless idiots,” said Eric Quennoy, creative director at Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam. “So from the outset, we were very determined to portray beer drinkers in a positive light. We made a strategic decision to elevate the brand by elevating the drinker.”

Heineken was specifically targeted by Cannes because of its five-part campaign “Cities of the World.” The ads show different types of men navigating urban environments. Notably, they are all a far cry from your average Joe. Instead, they’re as cool and put together as James Bond. “The City” is one the campaign’s most popular ads, and it’s easy to see why: The spot is cinematic, entertaining, and happens to have some sexy women wielding knives.

Heineken furthered the adventures of its charming mystery man by placing him on a cruise ship. The catch? This time, the character slowly morphs from person to person. Rather than casting one actor, Wieden+Kennedy made the smart decision to use 20. You’ll need to watch the ad a couple of times to catch the changes:

If you wish you could see the casting sessions for all of those handsome men, you’re in luck. Heineken posted all of them on YouTube. Unsurprisingly, they’re absolutely hilarious. Here’s my favorite:

Part of the genius of this campaign is that no one is completely sure whether these auditions are fake or not. Either way, they make for fantastic marketing.

According to Thomas, Heineken “represents what brands are really looking for—creativity that amplifies their message and increases the power of what they create.” A perfect example of this kind of marketing is Heineken’s “15 Second Premiere” contest. In short, the brewer crowd-sourced a movie idea via Twitter. The winner would be made into a 15-second film. After hundreds of submissions, the best tweet was clear:

Behold, evil Abe Lincoln:

Over-the-top credits aside, this idea is still glorious.

How to Become the Next Heineken

Heineken is such a successful marketer because the company is willing to try new things and interact with its consumers. “They take small ideas and experiment with them,” Thomas said. “Of course, that doesn’t have to be expensive.” While your company might not have the budget to make a film about Robot Abe Lincoln, you can still engage with your clients via social media. Consumers appreciate original ideas, whether they’re on Vine or Instagram.

I asked Eric Quennoy about Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam’s formula for creating such amazing campaigns. “It was nothing more than a lot of hard work,” he said. “That means countless rounds of presentations and writing hundreds of scripts. You have to go through a long and arduous process in order to get to the good stuff.”

This is advice that all companies looking to improve their marketing should follow. After all, Heineken’s gross revenue for the first half of this year was up 4.6 percent. And the brewer has won 41 Lions at Cannes, including the 2013 Grand Prix for Creative Effectiveness. In order to emulate that success, companies simply need to up their creative game. Of course, this also means letting agencies do what they do best—coming up with original ideas. “So many clients try and interfere too much,” Thomas said. In other words, give your creatives some breathing room.

Quennoy agreed. While a variety of elements are needed to create an award-winning campaign with an agency, one remains constant: “A very brave client who is ready and willing to hold hands with you as you jump off the cliff together.”

The post What You Can Learn From the Best Marketer of the Year appeared first on Contently.

Comedy duo Tim and Eric are famous for making completely bizarre, borderline uncomfortable videos. One of their channel’s recent uploads is a ten-minute clip of the two comedians staring blankly at the camera. Yep. That’s it. And it has over 200,000 views.

With such a strange sense of humor, you’d think that major companies would steer clear of Tim and Eric to represent their products. Yet within the past year, both GE and Old Spice have hired the comedians to create videos for them. Totino’s Pizza Rolls is now following suit and creating an entire campaign around Tim and Eric’s outlandish aesthetic.

The trippiest brand video you’ve ever seen

Totino’s challenged Tim and Eric to use pizza rolls in as many ways as possible. What the two did with the prompt is trippy, to say the least. The screenshot below—sorry for the nightmares—is enough to give you the essence of the ad, but it’s worth watching the whole thing. It’s psychedelic and weird. It makes you squirm. And for some reason, you’ll want to share it with all of your friends—at least if you’re a college student like me.

A lot of brands would have run away from something like this as fast as they could, but the risk that Totino’s took in commissioning such an off-the-walls video is already paying off. The company’s partnership with Tim and Eric has already been covered by the A.V. Club and Adweek. BuzzFeed even made a listicle about the most awesome parts of the commercial—that’s when you know Totino’s has the millennial market covered. Soon feminine pizza bags, pizza chess boards, and pizza Valentines will be flying off the shelves.

ClickHole for pizza roll lovers

Totino’s didn’t stop the weird train at their TV spots. Instead, they went on to create a whole website that expands the wonderfully confusing world of the Totino Boy.

Totino’s Living page is an homage to everything that a hungry, bored college kid could ever want. Truth be told, articles like “TV Headband of the Future” seem to be a less than subtle nod to the legalization of a certain green substance.

The site even includes ClickHole-style articles like “16 Signs You ARE a Pizza!” and mock pizza-inspired banner ads:

Totino’s is throwing the idea of a traditional website out the window. They’d rather create a world that is all about “hot snacks and cool times” and has a dress code of “PJs and that one t-shirt you got at camp.”

Clearly, the snack company understands that their product isn’t viewed as high class. They are fully aware that pizza rolls don’t have the cache of a kale salad with lemon juice. Totino’s isn’t trying to alter its brand image by offering gluten-free or low-fat pizza rolls. Instead, they’re posting pictures of cats with pizza faces.

As Hard Rock Joe says in the Tim and Eric video: “You can keep your corporate B.S. I’m into punk pizza rolls!”

The post And the Trippiest Marketing Campaign Ideas Goes to: Totino’s Pizza Rolls appeared first on Contently.

So how do brands grab the attention of jaded consumers? The answer is simple: They make fun of themselves. When brands poke fun at their flaws, consumers view them as down-to-earth and relatable; it’s the same phenomenon that makes Jennifer Lawrence so popular.

Without further ado, here are some examples of companies that get serious cool points with millennials by being a little self-deprecating:

1. Internet Explorer

Microsoft had the cojones to admit that their browser, Internet Explorer, was considered an ancient artifact by most 18–34-year-olds. So, they made a smart move and paired up with Onion Labs in order to bring that audience back to their side:

This commercial is so funny because it has a certain truth to it. We all have a friend who rails against Internet Explorer and probably forcibly removed it from someone’s computer at some point. (Or you may be that person yourself.) Internet Explorer acknowledges their uncool status here and flips the joke to make fun of the people who love to hate them. The fact that there’s a cat in a police outfit doesn’t hurt, either.

2. Tide

In 2012, The Onion published an article that completely lampooned sponsored content, titled “Hey, Everybody! This Cool New Tide Detergent Video Is Blowing Up All Over The Internet!” You would think that the publicity would cause Tide’s PR person to have a Nicholas Cage-style freakout. (If you need a good laugh, definitely click that link.)

Instead, Tide decided to take the criticism in stride and released a response video to The Onion. Check it out:

This video is so smart because it allied Tide with The Onion; a standard press response would have made them feel like the bland corporation who doesn’t get the joke. Consumers seem to agree that the company made a good choice. Check out some of the YouTube comments:

Brands_Twitter

Any brand would be happy with that response—assuming half of those commenters don’t work for Tide’s PR agency.

3. The Muppets, “Sequel Song”

In Hollywood, it’s well known that ardent fans of a certain movie will always complain that its sequel isn’t as good. The creators of Muppets Most Wanted, the Muppets sequel, decided to address the issue before anyone else could. Better yet, they did it with music. And Tina Fey:

Hopefully this adorable video will shut up any icy-hearted demon who was going to complain about there being more Muppets in the world. But let’s be real. We need Kermit and Miss Piggy more than they need us.

Bonus: Here’s a Muppets promo in partnership with the Toyota Highlander that features Rowlf and Rizzo hitting on unsuspecting girls at a drive-through in ridiculous fashion (“Do you date dogs?”). Those puppets definitely know how to have fun.

4. PornHub

PornHub_ContentMarketing

Let’s be honest—if you run America’s most popular porn site, you need to have a sense of humor about your line of work. The same goes for the company’s creative director. But how can someone make ads for porn in public places? It’s a challenge. However, PornHub had an ingenious solution. They turned the job application process for their next creative director into a competition. The finalists can be found here—and yes, it’s safe to open that link at work.

5. Dissolve, “This Is a Generic Brand Video”

Clearly, there’s a trend of companies riffing on satirical websites here. This hilarious parody of brand videos is inspired by an article written for McSweeney’s, “This Is a Generic Brand Video.”

Dissolve, a stock footage company, took the narrative from McSweeney’s and synced it up to their own videos. The result had me cracking up in the office like a crazy person. Before I saw this commercial, I had absolutely no idea what Dissolve was. But by the time the narrator said, “What about an ethnic old man whose wrinkled smile represents the happiness and wisdom of the poor?” I just had to Google what geniuses were behind this masterpiece. Now I, a supposedly “ad-agnostic” millennial, am a fan of the company. Mission accomplished, Dissolve. Mission accomplished.

What’s the deal with The Content Strategist? At Contently, storytelling is the only marketing we do, and it works wonders. It could for you, too. Learn more.

The post 5 Examples of Humorous Content Marketing appeared first on Contently.

According to research compiled by The Terri & Sandy Solution, women are responsible for 85 percent of all consumer purchases, which arms them with roughly 7 trillion dollars of buying power. At the same time, however, 91 percent of women say that advertisers “don’t understand them.”

Why aren’t the people making purchases being targeted by advertisers and marketers?

When it comes to household spending, women are in charge of 73 percent of the money. Ninety-one percent of new home purchases are influenced or made by women, and 93 percent of groceries, 94 percent of interior decorating, and 92 percent of holiday trips are controlled by women.

The disconnect comes, arguably, from a misunderstanding of modern gender roles. Women make over 50 percent of purchases in “traditional ‘male’ categories,” according to Inc.: They are the ones overwhelmingly buying new cars (65 percent), consumer electronics (55), computers (66), healthcare (80), home improvement goods (50), and sports apparel (80).

Despite such numbers showing that women’s purchases are extensive and diverse, none of this should be a big surprise. According to Inc., “Women earn more higher-education degrees than men and start new businesses at a faster rate. Women’s earning power is growing faster than men’s. And women now make up more than half of Twitter users and Facebook subscribers.”

Yet across verticals, women are feeling misunderstood by marketers. According to the Terri & Sandy report: 59 percent of women feel misunderstood by food marketers; 66 percent feel misunderstood by health care marketers; and 74 percent feel misunderstood by investment marketers.

So why is the marketing industry running into these problems? Why are marketers not creating messaging and content that makes women feel understood?

According to Anna Shaw, a director at Smart Design, companies make assumptions about women’s buying habits based on outdated assumptions about the gender—or, rather, assumptions that were never true in the first place. “They’re interpreting women as a smaller, softer human,” Shaw told Inc. With that attitude, it’s no wonder tech companies think that splashing pink or daisies onto a product will be enough to attract women to it. (Hint: It doesn’t. Pink “women’s” products feel condescending, and women aren’t looking at color in their products. They’re looking at price and functionality.)

The lesson here is that brands should smarten up about women. Women are viewing ads, reading and watching content, and making the purchase decisions. And what brands think are “men’s” products are, in reality, anybody’s products. But brands aren’t selling them that way. Perhaps part of the reason is that only 3 percent of advertising agency creative directors are women, according to She-conomy. There’s undoubtedly a top-down problem with conception and design.

But the central problem lies in understanding the realm of possibility—realizing the nuances and expansive definition of who women and men are in America. The heart of the matter is that brands, marketers, and advertisers all need to be in conversation with women about what they buy, what they respond to, and what will encourage them to be loyal to a brand. And it’s not just one-size-fits-all. Not sure if your product is appealing or if your strategy is effective? Just ask the people with the power to buy.

What’s the deal with The Content Strategist? At Contently, storytelling is the only marketing we do, and it works wonders. It could for you, too. Learn more.

The post Study: 91 Percent of Women Feel Misunderstood by Advertisers appeared first on Contently.

But implementing responsive design isn’t an easy process, and while many developers and publishers are still struggling to adapt their content to different layouts, there are emerging technologies that they can leverage in order to give consumers seamless, customized content experiences.

1. Adaptive delivery

According to Akamai, 57 percent of users give up on retail webpages that take more than 3 seconds to load. With attention growing scarcer every day, many users no longer have the patience for slow websites. And responsive web designs can just make this issue worse.

Typically, a site using responsive web design takes longer to load because it’s backed by different codes for mobile, desktop, tablet, and other potential devices. In contrast, a mobile site would only have the code for mobile, and a legacy desktop site typically only has code for desktop layouts. Previously, the only solution to create shorter load times involved an approach to design and development known as progressive enhancement.

Fortunately, new technology is emerging that works around this barrier. Adaptive delivery detects the type of incoming device and loads different batches of HTML and CSS, and only loads the assets (e.g., images) that are required for that specific device. In order to reduce load times, you no longer need to get a complete website overhaul, and can keep that desktop website you’ve likely invested a good deal of resources into.

2. Simpler emails

While responsive design is crucial for web publishers, it’s not necessarily the best solution for email marketing. Granted, a good portion of users are opening mail on their mobile devices (approximately half), but tests have shown that responsive design wasn’t responsible for increased clicks or conversions.

That’s not to say your mail shouldn’t fit the reader’s screen, though. Responsive design isn’t the only solution for this. Instead, go back to the basics: Simplify your mail template by making sure your width is no larger than 600 pixels, and make sure your buttons and links can be clicked by cursors and thumbs alike.

It could also be important to start collecting information on what devices each of these users open your emails on. For example, if 9 of 10 previous emails were opened on a user’s iPhone, you can bet that they’re likely going to open it there again—which means you can present the kind of information that they’re likely to consume when they’re on the go.

3. Advertisers attracting their own audiences

Advertisers have historically lagged behind publishers online. “The ad industry has not fully come down the pipe yet in terms of responsively designed ads that will particularly work to the same level of monetization on any device—there is a lag there,” said CNN International Digital VP Peter Bale in a keynote speech at Mobile World Congress.

Bale believes that there’s still a great amount of work to be done with sponsored editorial content; a few publishers sense this pain point and have already started helping publishers design content using responsive web technology. For example, have a look at what Complex Media did with Converse.

Once brands start applying this technology to their own platforms, they will be able to start collecting data as well. This will give them insights into how users interact with their devices and the brand’s content.

4. Sensor splendor

As more sensors are integrated into new pieces of hardware, brands can use them to better understand the environments in which users are accessing their websites. For example, if you know a user is accelerating and decelerating at the speed of a bus (using something like Project Tango), and it’s 8:30 a.m., you can determine that they are commuting and looking for content to fill their time. You can serve up content like breaking news to satiate their curiosity, or inspiring stories to uplift their spirits before they show up at their office. This is a part of the impending arrival of the Internet of Things.

Moreover, instead of just using screen size as the determining variable, you can also set up CSS media queries to tailor content according to these other points of data. This means instead of just designing for responsive web, brands can finally focus more on the task and context of the user.

5. A New role: responsive design analyst

With all of the variations across platforms that responsive design can provide, brands will need analysts to manage these changes. Companies have already begun hiring responsive design analysts, and this will likely become an important job for many organizations. In roles similar to mobile editors or emerging platforms editors, these analysts will be the user advocates that figure out the balance between information and responsiveness.

He or she will also support mobile editors and emerging platform editors by helping brands choose between responsive web design or adaptive delivery, understand what progressive enhancement is, and coordinate content choreography. He or she will also help streamline information architecture and content re-organization efforts.

Closing thoughts

Responsive design calls for a new focus on design that will require many changes, from exploring new hardware and software right down to the actual roles and responsibilities in organizations. However, this also opens up the possibilities of connecting with audiences in a much deeper way than we’d ever known, and collecting the data that will be crucial to brand and business success.

Contently arms brands with the tools and talent to become great content creators. Learn more.

The post 5 Responsive Design Trends That Will Revolutionize Your Business appeared first on Contently.

This article first appeared on Visually.

What can your advertising do in 10 seconds? Well, you might think it’s not likely to become viral content. But after a study from the University of Hamburg and the University of Hannover proved that over 50 percent of Internet users stay on a webpage for less than 10 seconds, advertisers have focused on micro-content: clever, persuasive, and concise messages to target an audience with barely-there attention spans.

Micro-content should play a big role in your content strategy. We recently told you how to create micro-content time- and cost-efficiently, using your existing visual assets—be it infographics, videos, presentations or interactive web experiences.

Here, we give you five smart tips on making the most of that micro-content:

1. On Social Media, Embrace Images and Keep Posts Short

The numbers don’t lie—including an image or video in social media posts can do wonders for your engagement rates. Tweets with image links are twice as engaging as those without and Facebook posts with photos account for 93 percent of the most engaging posts on the platform.

Keep tweets and Facebook posts down to a sentence or two at most: click-through rates on Twitter peak between 120 and 130 characters, and Facebook posts with less than 70 characters garner the most likes. Couple images with sentence-long quips for maximum social media engagement.

2. Make it Stackable

With so many media options available, from TVs and laptops to smartphones and tablets, consumers are often engaging with multiple platforms at the same time. Millward Brown’s recent AdReaction study found that more than 40 percent of 16–45 year old multiscreen consumers in the U.S. use devices simultaneously. You can hone in on this audience by crafting stackable content that meshes well with other platforms and encourages sharing. Stackable content examples include gaming apps with short but addictive gameplay mechanisms such as dots, short-form videos from Vine and Instagram, and immersive second screen experiences like The Walking Dead’s Story Sync app.

3. Don’t Skimp on the Copywriting

AMC’s Mad Men shows the power of Madison Avenue copywriters during the 1960s, and today the art of copywriting is anything but antiquated. In the digital age, creating an attention-grabbing headline or first sentence can make or break any blog post, article, or tweet. Buffer co-founder Leo Widrich’s blog post on headline copywriting is a must-read for anyone looking to fine-tune their wordsmith skills.

4. Play to Your Platform and Audience

Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are the leading social media platforms, but posting the same message the same way on all three is simply asking to be ignored. Each platform skews to a different user base, and each platform posts content differently. Instagram is centered around photos and videos rather than text, Twitter has a exact character limit, and Facebook posts can cleanly combine a user’s comment with an image, title, and description of the link that is being shared.

Before you share any content on these or any other platforms, be sure to go through this simple three-step checklist:

1. Figure out which platforms are best for getting your message across.
2. Recognize the strengths and weaknesses of each platform.
3. Customize your content to fit each platform’s strength.

Here is how Visually recently shared the same content on Facebook:

And on Twitter:

5. Make the Connection

Micro-content is only as powerful as the connection that it makes back to the brand or advertiser. Content marketing does not exist in a bubble, and micro-content is hardly an exception. With every blog, social media post, app download, or micro video, there must be a call to action or larger connection back to the brand. Think of micro-content as the first minute of a sitcom before the theme song–compelling enough to draw you in for the next half hour, but not too informational as to give away the entire episode’s plot.

More on viral content marketing:

The Psychology of Viral Content

5 Ways Content Goes Viral

The post 5 Secrets for Making Viral Content: Go Micro appeared first on Contently.

For those contemplating Tumblr’s value to brands, that reblog rate is an incredible stat to ponder. After all, if the average Promoted Tweet was being retweeted 10,000 times, Twitter would plaster SXSW with the stat. If the average sponsored post on Facebook was shared 10,000 times, Mark Zuckerberg would brag about it on every I-80 billboard from New York to Silicon Valley. (Instead, they don’t reveal the average share rate of their sponsored content at all.)

So why is sponsored content on Tumblr shared so much?

1. Tumblr understands the importance of quality, sponsored content

Even when you take into account the considerable distribution juice Tumblr is giving its advertisers’ sponsored posts, 10,000 reblogs is incredibly impressive. And it comes, in part, as the result of Tumblr’s understanding that the challenge is to create ads that are as “compelling and as beautiful as the art projects and poetry and other things that you see posted there,” as Mayer said yesterday. Tumblr has strict creative guidelines for its sponsored posts, and a submission approval process to ensure that the posts will resonate with the Tumblr community. Bad content gets stopped in its tracks.

This hand-crafted approach to sponsored content keeps Tumblr from reaping the mass, programmatic ad dollars like Facebook and Twitter do, but it also keeps the Tumblr experience rich—both in terms of the quality of the content, and the value of each visit. Among social platforms, Tumblr has the second-highest revenue per visit, despite the fact that its user base doesn’t have an incredible amount of purchasing power.

via Social Fresh

2. Bigger brands with higher content budgets tend to advertise on Tumblr

It isn’t quite fair to compare the average share rate of sponsored posts on Tumblr to the average share rate on Facebook or Tumblr, since campaigns on Tumblr tend to come from bigger brands that have the budget to create great content and distribute it far and wide.

Twitter and Facebook, on the other hand, are filled with small brands pushing display ads in sheep’s clothing that you’d never share. Ever. Stuff like this:

Crowded with plenty of unsharable sponsored posts, Twitter and Facebook will never be able to tout a 10,000-share rate like Tumblr.

3. Tumblr gives brands the tools to tell much better stories

The content that you can create on Tumblr is simply incredible; when Mayer called Tumblr “such an amazing canvas for storytelling,” she was right. You can simply create much more compelling, native content on Tumblr than you can on any other social media platform (save for Medium, which hasn’t opened its gates to brands yet).

In fact, considering the rich multimedia content that brands can create on Tumblr, it probably makes more sense to compare the platform’s sponsored posts to the ones you see on Mashable and BuzzFeed—two publications that have helped brands create sponsored content that gets shared more than their regular editorial (with some help from paid distribution, of course).

The common formula?

Storytelling tools to create quality content + editorial oversight = sponsored content gold.

What’s the deal with The Content Strategist? At Contently, storytelling is the only marketing we do, and it works wonders. It could for you, too. Learn more.

The post The Average Sponsored Post on Tumblr Gets Reblogged 10,000 Times. Here’s Why appeared first on Contently.

Rosen, a renowned NYU journalism professor and author of the PressThink blog, sparked a lively debate with the tweet. Things got particularly scrappy with Jeff Jarvis.

To Rosen, whether native advertising succeeds or fails hinges on quality; for a piece of brand publishing to even be properly native to a publication, it has to be just as worth reading as the editorial that surrounds it. A leading voice in the public journalism movement, Rosen sat down with the Strategist in his first interview on native advertising to discuss why he supports brands creating informative, high-quality content.

Jay Rosen on native advertising and content marketing

Professor Jay Rosen

What is your take on what’s called native advertising and sponsored content?

There’s only one thing. I started thinking about this a few years ago when Lewis Dworkin of Forbes explained BrandVoice to me.

He first explained the contributors section to Forbes in which people with domain expertise are able to become Forbes writers and post what they think is good and Forbes gives them a lot of data. And thousands of contributors are now in this network. And then he explained that they wanted to take the next step in monetizing that network by allowing companies to become contributors for a fee. And then he said that they would just have to compete against everything else Forbes publishes: to get links and shares and move up and spread via social media.

That, I thought, is an idea.

Because if they were going to compete, their articles had to be good and worth reading. If brands just publish press releases, that’s not going to work. It produces a test. Brands now have to produce material actually worth reading and compete with everything else on the web. It undercuts typical PR, the hype of advertising and the type of dramatically inflated claims you see in advertising. That just won’t work.

In which ways do “sponsored content” and native advertising change the media business?

Serious journalism always has been and is subsidized by something. Every subsidy system has traps and we have to continuously examine them.

People keep saying: “There’s nothing new about this.” But this is a kind of ad that can compete with the best material out there. That is different from advertorials.

The biggest challenge for companies is they don’t have people who can do that, and they aren’t used to doing it, either.

What do you think about companies hiring journalists to work in-house and discover stories?

A promising perspective is that they’re letting people who know about stuff talk more freely—engineers or scientists, highly-skilled people.

It reminds me of Robert Scoble. I got interested in him when he was a blogger for Microsoft, paid by Microsoft. He helped teach the company that it had to respond to things and be more open—part of the online conversation. And he wasn’t perfect. And it wasn’t like he could say anything. He was always an employee.

You emphasize the importance of being forthcoming with your biases and point of view. You talk about how the reader trust is gained with transparency. What can brands and advertisers learn from this?

I think if the advertisers are smart they will insist on clear differentiation because that insists on the quality being good, maybe better. When you see advertisers blur the lines, that could be interpreted as lack of confidence in their own material.

Think about Sunday morning political talk shows: For Boeing it’s about associating themselves with communal values that go way beyond the responsibilities of Boeing. So there’s still a large amount of mystification because large companies want to associate themselves with non-business values.

But if the Dvorkin BrandVoice test is real and actually works, then it is smarter for companies to address us with their actual priorities. So it just should be extremely clear what is paid for. Everything that tries to trick the reader is bullshit from my POV.

Then can sponsored content coexist with journalism about the same companies? Say, at The New York Times or WSJ?

We have Dell speaking in a paid post in The New York Times and then we have the technology writers at The New York Times who still have to cover Dell. And I don’t think there’s anything new about that situation.

In other words, it’s not any different than reporters covering advertisers in The New York Times. Sometimes it happens well, sometimes it doesn’t. The pressure would be the same.

Who are the people asking questions of these companies that they don’t want to answer? We shouldn’t expect sponsored content or anything like it to meet that. The duty of the journalist, who does not have a relationship to Dell, in asking questions about Dell is the same.

So it’s not so much whether Dell needs The New York Times to announce something or share information. If they want to share on their channels, they can do that. It’s more that The New York Times still has a lot of muscle and power and influence. So when it covers Dell, that matters to Dell.

The media has undergone so many shifts just in the last few years. Where does native advertising fit in?

There’s a new balance of power. It’s clear advertisers have more power relative to the newsrooms because there are so many more ways to reach people. There’s a search for a new balance of power that both sides can live with.

Whenever I try to understand advertisers, especially newspaper or magazine advertising, I always start with this famous line from John Wanamaker in a previous century: 50 percent of advertising money is wasted but no one can tell me which 50 percent.

That situation began to seem like the natural order of things to people in the ads and publishing business, even though it was simply an uncured defect in the delivery system. Google, among others, started to make progress on that defect. That’s what the Google ad revolution is all about. As it becomes more efficient, it becomes cheaper and as the cost to produce inventory falls, that produces downwards pressure again.

So those things have shifted the balance of power. The whole “sponsored content” struggle is a search for a new equilibrium.

The post ‘Ads That Can Compete With the Best Material Out There’: An Interview With Jay Rosen on the Future of Native appeared first on Contently.

On Wednesday, we found ourselves at The Times Center in Midtown. Dozens of agencies and brand-publishing startups lined the walls of the underground Times Center Hall, looking for their next great client, partnership, or hire. At the head of the room panels of seasoned executives shared their wisdom over a chorus of chatter.

We bounced between panels and peppered some of the industry’s brightest minds with questions, soliciting their prognostications on the future of brand publishing.

Here is a roundup of some of the things that we heard…

On Creating Content

Kevin Doohan, Executive Vice President of Marketing at Machinima – “Marketers understand brands, and so they understand content… The challenge is how do you create a piece of content that is its own brand and its own business.”

Jay Russell, Executive Creative Director at GSD&M – “Talent is everywhere…Twenty-three year olds can produce entire films now. There’s so much talent out there. But if you hire someone with passion, then you’ve found something special.”

Rock Scaglione, Account Executive at Touchstorm – “Brand publishers need to step outside of their comfort zones…It’s inspiring to see all these young companies in the same room, to know that we’re not alone.”

Raghu Kodige, Chief Product Officer at Alphonso – “A lot has changed since last year…There are a lot of new companies here today. It’s good to learn about them and know that one another exist.”

On Technology

Ashley Swartz, CEO at Furious Minds – “Brands need currency to interact with technology, and interactivity provides that currency.”

Jeff Minsky, Director at OMD Ignition – “Advertising is becoming more about technology. The challenge will be getting the creative community to create using a new canvas.”

Adrian Vasquez De Velasco, Co-Founder of Total Cinema 360 – “The effect that emerging technologies have on brand content are substantial. Immersive storytelling will change how brands engage consumers.”

On Experimentation

Emma Nemtin, Marketing Director at Hubba – “What excites us is to see major brands doing fresh things with content. They’re discovering what works through experimentation.”

Eric Hadley, SVP of Sales Strategy & Marketing at The Weather Channel – “We as a group of content creators need to challenge marketers to continue to progress and create engaging content.”

The post Wednesday At Ad Week: “We Are <br>The Future Of Brand Content” appeared first on Contently.

Meet Vortex, a browser extension that allows users to take control of their data and cookies by creating fake or altered Internet identities through something that looks like a simple fish-catching game. Companies that then serve ads based on behavioral targeting end up serving them to the wrong people — it’s the digital equivalent of, say, the Improv Everywhere stunt in which a team of pranksters dressed up as Best Buy employees swarmed into one of the big-box retailers, confusing customers and actual employees alike.

But unlike the creator of most ad-blockers, Vortex’s mastermind, Rachel Law, isn’t anti-retargeting; she says that she’s just a supporter of user control who opposes the misuse of data.

“I think targeting is harmful when confidential information, such as your medical issues or criminal records, is used against you as a form of price discrimination. Retailers should not be able to discriminate based on health history, whether or not you’ve committed a crime before, your sexual preferences or history, etc., because this is private information pertaining to an individual,” Law told AdAge.

[Vortex is] the digital equivalent of, say, the Improv Everywhere stunt in which a team of pranksters dressed up as Best Buy employees swarmed into one of the big-box retailers, confusing customers and actual employees alike.

Vortex is unlikely to go so far as to kill ad targeting—it asks far too much of its users to catch on with more than a select group, but it brings up important questions about retargeting that should concern content marketers.

It’s true that retargeting remains a bit of a lawless practice, self-regulated by the industry that relies upon it, but it’s also become crucial to the effectiveness of the digital economy. When retargeting is misused—through discriminatory data, excessive stalking, or non-anonymous CRM matches—it threatens everybody, even the publishers, retailers, marketers and brands that are trying to do it honestly.

Content marketers should pay close attention, because retargeting is about to play a much bigger role in the distribution of branded content. Facebook’s advertising platform, FBX, is rolling out the ability to retarget users with Sponsored Stories in the Facebook News Feed based on their site and search activity. That means that if someone visits an electronics retail site and leaves a PS Vita in his or her cart without converting, that retailer could immediately retarget that user on Facebook with a video showing all the incredible things that the PS Vita can do, compelling them to convert. Or, if the user searches for PS Vita on Google, he or she could be retargeted with the same video and a special offer to help spur a purchase. You can see how this capability would be powerful for almost anyone selling anything online.

These retargeted Page Post Ads will be truly social ads, too. They’ll be able to be liked, shared and increase a brand page’s audience. They look to be a colossal game-changer for branded content distribution, allowing brands to deliver optimal content to the right people in a place they’re sure to pay attention—the Facebook News Feed. And it’s likely that Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and other social networks will end up following a similar model.

That will only happen, though, if public outrage over retargeting remains low. Retargeters should consider Law’s smart and measured stance and get their practices in line. Branded content distribution may depend on it.

“I like to imagine in the future targeted advertising becomes a targeted choice for both advertisers and users,” Law said to AdAge. “For instance, if a user decides to go shoe-shopping for summer, he or she could equip their browser with the cookies most associated and aligned with shopping, shoes and summer…users can choose what kind of advertisements they want to see.”

The post Digital Anarchy: This Browser Extension Could Reshape Ad Targeting appeared first on Contently.

“It’s no surprise, as there are signs that many of the mobile giants, including Google and Apple, have saturated the Western world,” Veremis says. “Instead, the next one billion users for these companies could very well come from emerging markets, where smartphone use is in its nascent stage and a heavy reliance on feature phone devices still exist.”

Looking at the way that mobile marketers like Veremis have been addressing emerging markets can reveal some lessons for the marketing world at large. Here are a few.

Growth in technology opens doors for brand marketers

A recent McKinsey report from Richard Dobbs, Jaana Remes, and Fabian Schaer points out that urbanization is “shifting the world’s economic balance towards the east and south at unprecedented speed and scale.”

By 2025, there will be a “four-billion-strong” global consumer class — a population that has quadrupled in size since 1990.  To ride this growth wave, brands need to look beyond the low hanging fruit of immediate sales opportunities and focus on courting emerging markets in an engaging, personally relevant, and substantive way.

In emerging markets, consumers may be in the beginning stages of forming their opinions on products and services that are now commonplace in the western world.

Veremis explains, “Emerging market users are very different than those in the West; their desire to use smartphones is driven by more basic services.” Yet availability is growing fast, and consumers in emerging markets are more than sufficiently connected. They’re tapped in, and often know what to expect next based on what they’ve seen unfold in brands’ primary markets in terms of products and technologies.

Conversations guide brand relationships

Social networks are staples in emerging market cultures, where populations tend to live in close proximity to friends and family. These consumers are also reading local media outlets, watching local television, and listening to local radio. They rely on peer networks to decide where to shop, what products to buy, and what brands to trust.

“Word of mouth plays a more central role in the decision journeys of emerging-market consumers than for those in developed markets,” explains a McKinsey report by Yuval Atsmon, Jean-Frederic Kuentz, and Jeongmin Seong.

A core strategy for marketers to build brand awareness is to personally join these conversations. Banner ads, flyers, and advertorials are half-hearted outreach attempts that are likely to miss the mark.

Atsmon, Kuenz, and Seong point out, “Spending heavily on advertising alone is not sufficient to ensure consideration.”

Customer engagement through open dialogue, social referrals, and storytelling is crucial.

Finding the right points of connection is key

Marketing to emerging markets is not as simple as running content through a translation tool. Marketers need to develop a unique and compelling value proposition for each group that they’re targeting.

“This can also involve localizing content with specific cultural references, whether these are references to places, current affairs, celebrities, TV shows, or culturally relevant jokes,” wrote Christian Arno for Search Engine Journal.

Dobbs, Remes, and Schaer, for instance, encourage marketers to evaluate emerging markets from a city-specific rather than a country-centric lens.

“Product adoption rates often are tied to local preferences that can vary across different cities within the same country,” they explain.

Emerging Markets Can Be Local, Too

Understanding emerging markets isn’t just the domain of companies working across international boarders. More locally-focused marketers can take a look for new customers in their own backyards.

Emerging markets for new brands, mobile technology, and digital media aren’t necessarily overseas. They could be right around the block in a neighboring retirement community. They’re war vets, homemakers, small business owners, rural dwellers, and consumers who just happen to be new to a brand or technology. Publicly available data sets including the Census Bureau’s American FactFinder database can help add perspective.

Emerging markets are brimming with growth potential and energy. Most marketers have heard this already. But fewer of them are anticipating the needs of these new potential customers before the customers start looking.

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