Behind those millions of searches, clicks, saves, and sign-ups are real signals that show exactly what audiences care about and how they engage. For example, retail sites saw a 693% surge in traffic tied to AI-powered shopping assistants and chatbots this year. That kind of growth suggests shoppers are becoming more comfortable letting AI do the comparison shopping for them. Buy now, pay later also became an even more popular option, implying that shoppers were looking for ways to make bigger purchases feel manageable.

January is your opportunity to harness those insights or let them languish. This guide looks back at what worked during the holidays and how to use those insights to plan more effectively for 2026 and beyond.

What People Searched for in December (and Why It Matters Now)

December queries are shaped by the year people just lived through. Sometimes, they signal indulgence; other times, restraint.

Google’s Holiday 100 trends, for instance, made a few patterns clear. In 2025, search interest clustered around practical gift categories: things like movie projectors, weighted vests, kids’ scooters, and backpacks. At scale, that mix suggests steady demand for items that solve everyday needs and feel worth the spend.

In addition to category interest shifts, broader consumer behavior illuminated how people actually made decisions across the season:

• AI-driven sales in the U.S. topped $3 billion on Black Friday alone
• Conversion rates from AI referrals outpaced traditional social channels by a wide margin
• Value-seeking and sharply price-conscious shoppers favored smaller-ticket gifts
• A majority of consumers said rising prices would influence their holiday spending, especially among younger generations facing tighter budgets

Taken together, these signals point to shoppers who were deliberate, price-aware, and increasingly influenced by tools that helped them feel confident about their choices.

In terms of actionable insights here that can carry over to 2026, focus on what reduced friction for people when decisions got complicated. Look at Google Trends and see how searches like “budget gifts” stack up against “luxury gifts” in your market. Then pull last Q4’s Search Console data to see what actually brought people in, not just what you assumed would. Saves on social and interactions with short-form or AI-generated clips tend to spike when people are narrowing choices.

The throughline: Context beats cleverness. When money feels tight, “under $25 gifts” will outperform premium roundups almost every time. For 2026 content planning purposes, marketers should prioritize formats that answer real questions and make next steps obvious.

Where Specificity Wins

Holiday SEO moved fast. January is when you can finally see what held up in search and what didn’t. Rankings have settled, traffic has normalized, and it’s clearer which pages earned their visibility versus which ones were buried.

Looking back, many Q4 search wins came from specificity. Gift-giving phrases, problem-driven queries, and local intent tended to outperform broad holiday terms. Pages that spoke directly to last-minute or highly specific needs earned traction, while generic “Christmas” pages faced steeper competition and more mixed intent.

Long-tail targeting is likely to become even more useful as more discovery happens through conversational queries, whether people type them, speak them, or ask an assistant. In many categories, those behaviors create whitespace brands can capture with clearer, more specific pages.

There’s a particular opportunity with voice search that most businesses are still missing, as we can see below:

Before deciding what to update or reuse next year, check how competitive your keywords were and whether your site was realistically positioned to rank. SEO checkers are useful for validating where effort paid off and where it probably never had a chance.

A post-holiday SEO review usually surfaces takeaways like:

• Holiday URLs that performed well are worth keeping live and updating each season
• Structured data helped certain pages stand out in crowded results
• Updated pages outperformed brand-new ones
• Page speed and simple layouts mattered during high-intent searches
• Basic accessibility improvements supported engagement

Use what December showed you to make cleaner, more realistic SEO decisions going forward.

Building a Content Calendar That Works in January

If December reveals which content holds up under pressure, January is the time to translate those signals into structure. Use the month to reset your publishing rhythm around the pieces that consistently supported real decisions.

A few best practices:

• Publish anchor content early so it can build momentum over time (guides, evergreen explainers, core resources).
• Create decision-support content that aligns with key moments when people are choosing quickly.
• Craft audience-specific pieces tailored to distinct segments instead of broad, one-size-fits-all topics.
• Make space for short-cycle content that moves from idea to publish quickly during spikes.
• Focus on low-friction formats that reduce cognitive load and help people progress without extra steps.

Leaving roughly 20% of the schedule open creates space to respond to demand as it appears, while keeping the rest of the plan stable.

Turning Holiday Insights Into Your Next Plan

The holiday season has passed, and what remains is the record: what people clicked, saved, returned to, and ignored when their attention was stretched thin.

Start with what you already know. Pull the last two years of Q4 data and identify five things that consistently worked. Build around those wins. Add one new experiment to keep learning and to give yourself room to improve.

Momentum comes from simple steps taken in order. Choose one tactic from this guide and implement it today. Tomorrow, choose another. Progress stacks quickly when the next step is always clear.

Audiences respond to clarity. Content that helps them decide, solve something practical, or move forward with less friction earns trust over time. Keep doing that consistently, and your strategy keeps paying dividends, season after season.

Ready to see which stories actually move people through the funnel? Contently’s platform surfaces performance signals across search, social, and conversions — all in one place. See how it works.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):

What’s the biggest lesson marketers should take from the 2025 holiday season?

That audiences reward clarity. Content that helps people compare options, feel confident, and move forward tends to outperform splashy, generic pieces — especially when budgets feel tight.

What metrics matter most when analyzing post-holiday performance?

Look beyond traffic. Prioritize assisted conversions, time on key decision pages, return visits, saves, and email sign-ups. These signals reveal which pieces reduced friction and moved people closer to a decision.

What should I prioritize in January when planning my calendar?

Build around what worked. Anchor evergreen guides early, schedule decision-support content around key moments, leave ~20% of your calendar open for flexibility, and use short-cycle formats when urgency spikes.

The post What’s Working in Content for 2026? What the Holiday Season Taught Us appeared first on Contently.

Every year, the shockingly low number of marketers who have a documented content strategy has been the most troubling stat in the robust report. I always expect to see a dramatic rise, but it usually lingers around 33 percent. It finally jumped a bit this year—to 37 percent for B2B marketers and 40 percent for B2C marketers.

But that’s still pitifully low.

Two-thirds of content marketers are straight-up sabotaging their efforts by failing to create a documented content strategy. They simply don’t bother to outline their target audience, voice, style, and goals. If I could fix one problem in the content marketing industry, it might be this. And that’s because it’s so crucial to everything we do, especially if you want to evangelize your content efforts within your own company.

Why we’re obsessed with documented content strategies

I lead our content strategy team at Contently. One big change we made over the past year is ensuring that every new client has a documented content strategy in place. Some clients have a robust, documented strategy already, but for those that do not, we create a detailed content plan for free. That’s because we truly believe that a documented content strategy is critical to success. Not having one is a recipe for disaster.

It’s just logical. For starters, if you don’t have a documented content strategy, there’s a good chance you don’t have a clear sense of your goals. And without goals to hit, it is impossible to know whether you’re successful or not. Right now, this is an epidemic within the content marketing industry. According to CMI’s report, 60 percent of B2C marketers and 59 percent of B2B marketers are not clear on what an effective content marketing program looks like.

This is ridiculous, and it needs to improve.

Overcoming your fear of a documented content strategy

I have a simple theory for why marketers struggle to document their content strategy: It’s scary and daunting. Some people may not know what a content strategy is supposed to look like.

We bake content strategy directly into our platform, but anyone can create a reasonably successful strategy by focusing on 10 key components:

Content Mission: The purpose of your content.

Goals: The clear objectives you’d like content to achieve for your organization.

KPIs: How you’ll measure those goals and the benchmarks you’d like to reach.

Tone and Style: A clear, detailed description of what your content should sound like, with examples.

Target Audience: Who you’re trying to reach.

Content Topics: The subjects you’ll cover.

Content Formats: The different types of content you’d like to create. Text, video, infographics, shortform video, etc.

Tagging Structure: A system for tagging content so you can track what’s working and optimize over time.

Content Allocation: How much content you’ll create each month, and how you’ll divvy up your budget between each topic and format. (ex. below)

The process is relatively straightforward, but it forces you to think critically about your content marketing program, pursue some data-driven research [note]We use a set of internal and external tools[/note], and ask tough questions.

As a company, we’ve come to believe in content plans so much that we baked them right into our software so any contributor working on a project can see it. A lack of planning is the biggest reason that content marketing programs fail. We’re excited to be part of the solution.

Content marketing is still a young industry, but it’s heading in the right direction. CMI’s report revealed that 62 percent of B2B marketers and 63 percent of B2C marketers thought their content marketing programs were more successful this year than last. Imagine how much higher that number could be next year if everyone just sits the hell down and plans ahead.

The post Marketers Are Sabotaging Their Content Programs appeared first on Contently.

Turns out, I’m not the only person upset about that last one. According to data from an August 2016 report by Nielsen and Newlio, over half of people fed a pre-roll video will skip it—and that’s just one of the popular avoidance tactics.

Perhaps even more telling is that 20 percent of users will close the video altogether. They’d rather not watch at all if they have to see an ad first. Smaller percentages allow the pre-roll to run while either muting it or finding another diversion until the ad concludes.

Despite the data, none of this is to say brands can’t craft short videos that entice viewers to pay attention. In 2015, Geico produced a pre-roll campaign dubbed “Unskippable,” in which the ads seem to end after a few seconds, only to then continue with all sorts of entertaining mischief. The creative application of the medium was lauded throughout the industry, earning Geico and the Martin Agency a Cannes Lions Grand Prix as well as Ad Age’s first-ever “Campaign of the Year” award.

Of course, it can also be beneficial to avoid pre-roll altogether. Why intentionally interrupt someone’s experience when you can distribute your own content on YouTube? If a majority of viewers skip a video because they want to watch something else, then brands should try to make that “something else.” By creating content that users actually want to see, companies can build an audience of willing viewers, rather than subjecting people to unsolicited ads.

Ideally, brands moving forward will devise other innovative methods that take advantage of the forced exposure, or invest their video dollars elsewhere. Though if they stick with pre-roll, at least provide an option to skip after five seconds. Philadelphia sports are enough of a disappointment.

The post Here’s How People Avoid Watching Pre-Roll Videos appeared first on Contently.

Of those 11, I opened about half, only clicking through on one. For brands, consumer apathy toward marketing emails has become a big challenge without a clear solution. Considering the sheer volume of these emails, it’s harder than ever to entice customer engagement that goes beyond simply opening a message.

To see how email effectiveness differs by industry, Yes Lifecycle Marketing, a Chicago-based marketing firm, analyzed 7 billion emails sent on its Yesmail360 platform during Q3 2016.

These figures give us a more nuanced understanding of which categories motivate consumers to click through and why. (Just to clarify, click-to-open rate is the percentage of opened emails that were clicked.) The industries highlighted in green represent areas that had disproportionately lower click-to-open rates.

Some of the figures are intuitive. Financial services, for instance, achieves by far the highest open rate at over 30 percent, which makes sense since emails likely pertain to important financial information such as account balances and fraud warnings. But these emails often don’t come with further calls to action, hence the large gap in engagement. This lack of a CTA helps explain the gap in the technology sector as well.

Emails related to hospitality/travel and retail/wholesale generate solid open rates because consumers can be genuinely interested in the advertising. (Tell me you wouldn’t peek at an email offering a trip to Hawaii or a Rolex.) But since these promoted products “are aspirational rather than frequent purchases,” consumers are more likely to window shop, as opposed to clicking through and splurging on the spot.

For brands looking to increase email engagement, it’s crucial to ensure messages “are relevant, timely, and personalized.” Follow up with price alerts and holiday deals for those subscribers reading about that Hawaiian vacation. Convert window shoppers into buyers by sending out emails on a Friday (the day of highest engagement) so that people will purchase on Saturday (the day of highest conversion.) With careful targeting and thoughtful timing, you can improve your open and CTO rates regardless of industry barriers.

The post How Do Your Email Engagement Rates Stack Up Against Your Competitors? appeared first on Contently.

Turns out Peloton executives had the same idea.

Last month, the at-home fitness brand took the number one spot on the Crain’s New York Business 2016 Fast50, a list of the fastest-growing companies in New York. With a staggering two-year growth rate of 2,829,405 percent, the business is on track to increase its revenue by a factor of five this year.

Founder and CEO John Foley describes Peloton as a software, hardware, and content company. A former engineer and competitive cyclist, Foley started Peloton in 2012 because he and his wife couldn’t find the time to go to the gym but felt existing at-home workouts fell short. Capitalizing on the growth of spin classes, he paired indoor cycling with progressive technology and high-energy rides that users could access at their convenience. Customers buy the bike and then take group fitness classes delivered over video.

Peloton, which now has 20 national retail stores, currently streams 12 hours of content every day from its Chelsea cycling and production studio. “It’s like a Netflix library, but for fitness classes,” Foley said. Users can live stream the subscription-based classes or watch them on demand. Touchscreen tablets on the bikes allow riders to monitor their performance and get immediate feedback from instructors.

Those instructors, a group of elite athletes and cycling experts, are at the center of the Peloton experience. They provide motivation and support, responsibilities that come with lucrative rewards. According to Inc. magazine, some Peloton instructors earn a six-figure salary for teaching between 10 and 15 classes a week.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that Peloton built its marketing strategy around its indispensable employees.

“Celebrity matters so much in this world,” Foley said. “Think about Williams-Sonoma selling a new blender from [chef] Mario Batali. Batali is all over social media. It’s effectively a co-branded sponsorship between two brands. The same goes for the New England Patriots and Tom Brady. For us, the other brand is our celebrity instructors. We try to have a balance between both.”

Social media is the marketing channel of choice for showcasing Peloton instructors. Peloton’s in-house marketers work with its internal creative, photography, and videography teams to develop content for all major social networks. On Instagram and Facebook, Peloton uploads one to three posts per day. The company blog, Cadence, gets new content two to four times per week. On Snapchat (@pelotoncycle), which is currently a priority for the brand, Peloton posts several clips of its instructors each day, along with images from special events and photo shoots.

“They have big personalities, and we like when they come out.”

The idea is to familiarize riders with the instructors and their unique personalities while also building up excitement for the classes and offering a behind-the-scenes look at the Peloton world. The channels are connected, taking riders on a content journey that helps them understand the brand’s ethos.

“A lot of what we do is focused on telling the Peloton story on different outlets,” said Carolyn Tisch Blodgett, VP of brand marketing, “and really using our instructors as brand ambassadors as the voices of Peloton.”

For example, after welcoming new instructor Ally Love, the company posted a Q&A with her on Cadence. Riders could watch a minute-long YouTube interview in which she explains her motivation for joining Peloton, tells the inspiring story of her road to fitness, and shares her musical preferences so that riders know what to expect from her classes.

On Instagram, where Peloton has 34,000 followers, the brand shared photos of Love including a group shot of its instructors taken after her “debut ride.” Many Peloton instructors have their own hashtags to help riders find their content (e.g. #LoveSquad).

https://www.instagram.com/p/BL9cNQUgFf1/

They also have their own Facebook fan pages, which Peloton’s marketing team oversees. “They have big personalities, and we like when they come out.” Foley said. “But we have close to one hundred and eighty-four thousand global members now, so we have to give [our instructors] some assistance with managing their online presence.”

That assistance includes setting up Snapchat and Instagram takeovers as well as instructor-led Google Hangouts, all of which let the rider community interact directly and ask questions, as one would in a SoulCycle class.

While instructor related content is essential, Peloton also invests in educational content that is mainly intended to help riders reach their fitness goals.

On YouTube, riders can find a collection of videos including workouts, healthy recipes, and motivational messages.

On Twitter, the company promotes its seasonal scenic rides, encouraging users to “cycle through New England fall colors” and “climb the Canadian mountains.”

Cycle through New England fall colors, climb the Canadian mountains and tour the Alps in our 5 new scenic rides now on-demand. #ridepeloton pic.twitter.com/4WIXDnYafm

— Peloton (@onepeloton) October 31, 2016

In October, the company dipped its toes into Facebook Live for the first time with “Beyond the Ride: Yoga.” Streamed from its studio, the event, also available through Peloton’s iPhone and iPad app, garnered close to 9,000 views within two weeks.

“We’re trying to be creative with new forms of media that fall somewhere between earned media and more traditional marketing,” Foley said. Other media investments include Facebook ads, retargeting, search engine marketing, email marketing, TV, and print.

Every company has an opportunity to market its employees, but because of its unique business model, Peloton has to rely on that tactic more than others. And now because of that commitment to content, nearly 200,000 customers are happy to come along for the ride.

The post How Content Made Peloton the Fastest-Growing Company in New York appeared first on Contently.

Of course, CMI loves playing up that stat because the organization can help you build a strategy. But it is legitimately a problem for marketers—or anyone in business, really—to pursue an initiative without a documented strategy. Otherwise, you’re just shooting in the dark, not knowing if what you’re doing actually works.

CMI’s latest study, which was sponsored by the creative collaboration company Hightail, suggests that marketers are finally getting better at content strategy. Below, you’ll find out why, in addition to five other major takeaways from CMI’s reports on B2B and B2C marketing.

1. Marketers are getting better at documenting content strategy

Both B2B and B2C marketers got better at documenting their strategies this past year. In 2016’s study, 37 percent had a documented strategy, versus 40 percent this year. B2B marketers, meanwhile, improved from 32 percent last year to 37 percent this year.

In both cases, it’s still stupefying that the numbers aren’t higher. As CMI pointed out in last year’s study, more than 50 percent of the most effective marketers have documented strategies. 70 percent (for B2C) and 72 percent (for B2B) said strategy was a factor in improving their success in the past year. Creating one has no downsides yet plenty of benefits.

So what exactly are marketers including in their strategies? The number one element was “a plan to operate content marketing as an ongoing business process, not simply a campaign.”

Overall, marketers seem to find their strategies effective. Nobody said their strategies were “not at all effective,” while more than 80 percent said their strategies were either “moderately effective” or “very effective.”

That’s a testament to how useful strategies are to a content marketing program—now, the question is if the more than half of content marketers without a documented strategy will see the light.

2. Social is the most popular type of content

As mobile usage explodes and the mobile web stagnates, social media has become the best place to reach customers. Not surprisingly, companies are using more social media content than ever.

In general, marketers are planning on creating more content: Only 2 percent said they were expecting to produce less, and 73 (for B2C) and 70 percent (for B2B) said they were planning on creating more compared to last year.

3. But email is king

For B2C marketers, Facebook and email take the top spot when it comes to content distribution. 89 percent of marketers said they use the channels for their content, 26 percent above the closest channel, Twitter.

B2B marketers put email at the top for usage, at 93 percent, followed closely by LinkedIn, at 89 percent.

In terms of pure importance, however, email blasts its competitors out of the water. As the charts above show, no other channel comes close to email’s importance as a distribution channel. That makes sense since email is one of the few channels that provides a loyal, recurring audience that you own. Also, it doesn’t hurt that customer email addresses are key for a variety of martech tools, such as CRMs.

4. Content software is underused

Data collection and analysis are at the heart of digital marketing, which is why analytics tools are the go-to resources for most marketers. Implementing a content marketing program without any analytics software would be like taking a class without any feedback—it would be impossible to know if you’re successful.

However, analytics aside, it’s somewhat amazing how many content marketers don’t use critical tools such as email platforms, calendars, and CMSs. Perhaps they’re sending out email manually, or using a physical calendar tacked to the wall? CMSs are required to publish content, so the fact that only about half of marketers are using them is difficult to square.

No matter the explanation, it’s obvious that software is a big area of improvement for content marketers.

5. Promoted posts are booming

Across B2B and B2C, promoted posts saw big leaps in usage, particularly for B2C, which jumped from 52 percent last year to an incredible 89 percent this year.

Social promotion also took the top spot for effectiveness according to B2C marketers, while B2B marketers put it four percentage points behind search engine marketing (SEM). It’s safe to assume that much of these gains are a result of recent targeting improvements introduced by Facebook, LinkedIn, and their ilk.

6. Brand awareness and website traffic are still top goals

Even though some marketers are obsessed with finding one-to-one ROI, plenty of others still want brand awareness more than anything. Even B2B marketers, whose ultimate goal is always direct sales, named brand awareness a key content marketing goal.

So how are marketers tracking these goals? Website traffic, mainly: 73 percent of B2C marketers named it their top metric, versus 78 percent for B2B. Website traffic was also named the main metric for providing “truly measurable results of content marketing efforts” by both B2C and B2B marketers.

That’s somewhat surprising because website traffic can be unsophisticated and lean on the side of vanity. For B2B marketers, one would think lead generation would be tops (though “sales” and “sales lead quality” did take second and third).

Perhaps the biggest takeaway of all, however, is that a significant portion of marketers don’t measure ROI at all: 25 percent of B2C marketers and 28 percent of B2B marketers aren’t tracking ROI. It’s baffling that B2B marketers measure ROI less than B2C marketers, considering how much easier it is (and considering that lead generation was named the most-used metric).

It’s obvious from the report that—despite certain improvements—content marketers still have plenty of room to grow.

[Correction: An earlier version of this article used data from CMI’s report that was released last year. All figures have been updated to reflect data from this year’s report.]

The post The 6 Most Important Takeaways From CMI’s Annual Study appeared first on Contently.

The next day, my feeds were full of the expected noise. Liberals were patting each other on the back as they pointed out Trump’s hypocrisies. Conservatives scraped together rationalizations wherever they could find them. And then the brands came.

Brands were always going to newsjack the election season, but 2016 is the really the first presidential election that they’re doing so all over the internet with branded content. As Melissa Lafsky Wall pointed out in a timely article from last week, that’s not inherently bad.

In fact, as some of the best branded content from this month showed, some brands have done it just right.

Bisquick: “Pancakes vs. Waffles”

Pancakes are the common man's breakfast, no special equipment needed. Make America Pancakes Again! #VotePancakes pic.twitter.com/GZAgBYcels

— Bisquick (@Bisquick) September 26, 2016

Denny’s, which happens to be America’s new breakfast of champions, was surprisingly silent last month as political coverage ramped up. Bisquick stepped in to fill the void.

The “Pancakes vs. Waffles” campaign is full of parody negative campaign ads and the requisite “Make America Pancakes Again” slogan. It’s something that easily could’ve titled too much toward corny, but the humor feels absurd enough to work. (Bonus points for the Belgian waffles joke.)

Bisquick joined Twitter less than three months ago—probably to jump into the election conversation—and it’s already emerging as a candidate that can rival Denny’s. We’ll see if that rivalry can last beyond November.

Funny or Die & Rock the Vote: “Katy Perry Votes Naked”

Getting celebrities to poke fun at themselves while also making them look good is almost a guaranteed win for brands, even if you hire Rob Lowe. So when Katy Perry spoke about civic engagement while naked in a Funny or Die video from last week, you knew it would get millions of views and help spread the word.

Voting isn’t the sexiest topic, and attempts to persuade millennials to get to the polls can easily come off as condescending. But this clip smartly stripped away the dogmatism. It also earned some added relevance once alleged sex tapes became part of the political conversation.

So, yes, while this is an advertising stunt, it’s one that has the potential to be really effective.

Nextview: “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to New York City Tech”

As Tim Devane writes in his introductory post on Nextview Ventures’s blog:

“NYC Tech is bursting at the seams with nightly networking events at floors and floors of co-working spaces. We do not suffer a lack of tech activities. At the same time, the perception of our ecosystem as an insider’s game can often be self-fulfilling and self-perpetuating – creating a walled garden that can’t be breached.”

Nextview’s latest piece of content could break down those walls. “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to New York City Tech” includes an interactive map, podcasts, workshops, a list of conferences, and more.

This is the kind of free comprehensive resource that can get long-tail traffic for years. It’s also a perfect example of how to cut through all the noise out there with an asset that can help people while also raising brand awareness.

Gatorade: “Burn It to Earn It”

Gatorade has moved past its reputation as a drink that turns your sweat into neon radioactive fluid. (If your sweat comes out in “colored hues,” go see a doctor. Seriously. You might have chromhidrosis.) But it’s still the go-to sports drink for athletes who sweat normally.

The company’s latest campaign consists of a series of videos in which pro athletes J.J. Watt, Bryce Harper, and Karl-Anthony Towns dominate and destroy civilians who are drinking Gatorade without being active. Anytime superstar players mess with regular people, the audience gets to witness some beautiful schadenfreude. And J.J. Watt going for a strip sack on some dude holding a Gatorade bottle is truly beautiful.

Merriam-Webster: Election 2016

He was trying for braggadocio. #debatenight #debates https://t.co/kX2W3xEROR https://t.co/11JTCLer3w

— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) September 27, 2016

Politics ultimately comes down to language. There are speeches, debates, op-eds, tweets, retweets, and more speeches. Most of our time is spent parsing what’s been said, but occasionally we dig deeper to analyze how things are said.

While the first presidential debate was full of empty promises and vague declarations, Merriam-Webster took to Twitter to give constituents some insights on word choice and linguistic trends.

As an editor, I love this stuff. It’s clear that others do too since the dictionary company is tracking spikes in searches on its site. MW even dedicated a section of its blog to words trending during the election and has published posts with sharp analysis. Turns out “bigly” is a word, but that Trump was really trying to say “big league.” Either way, according to the MW editors, his usage was incorrect.

That, my friends, is how to get earned media coverage. Everyone from The New York Times to The Hollywood Reporter to Town & Country (?) wrote about the language trends. While major news outlets stretch every and any angle to squeeze out more political coverage, Merriam-Webster found a way to own the conversation in a unique way. Once the next debate rolls around, the dictionary will already have an audience wanting more.

The post The Best Branded Content of September: Election Season appeared first on Contently.

What he didn’t have to worry about, however, were compliance and approvals, plugging a brand message into his content, or getting in trouble for experimenting on a new platform. All he had to do is tell a great story. And he did, across several platforms.

That’s a big reason why GE Reports has become one of the most successful examples of content marketing. The blog has hundreds of thousands of devoted readers, its stories regularly go viral on Reddit and in the press, and coverage of it ultimately ties back to the GE brand.

On Tuesday, I hosted an Adweek webinar with Kellner to find out more about his content strategy as GE Reports’s editor-in-chief. (Watch it here.) Here are the five keys that Kellner revealed.

(Full disclosure: GE Ventures is a Contently client.)

1. It’s all about the “transaction of content”

Many marketers create content without fully considering their audience, taking their time and attention for granted. Not GE.

“You need to pay people something for their attention,” Kellner said. “You need to give them something of value. Something they want to know or use somehow.”

For example, GE Reports published a story about a revolutionary indoor farm in Japan powered by LED lights made by GE. The indoor farm grew lettuce two and a half times faster than a conventional farm and cut waste from 50 percent to 10 percent. Compared to the average farm, it was 100 times more productive per square foot.

When all was said and done, over a million people read the story on GE Reports.

A GE Reports reader posted the story to Reddit, where it was quickly upvoted by the site’s community. “It soon made it to the top of the front page of the internet,” Kellner said.

Going viral is tough to predict, but GE’s success isn’t by accident. The company gave its audience something of value—a story about a technology that could help solve world hunger—and was rewarded. When all was said and done, over a million people read the story.

2. You need to retire the press release

For the past few years, Kellner has been touting one of my favorite messages in content marketing: You need to retire the press release. Reporters are numb to whatever comes over the wire. But a great story catches their attention.

Take this story about a 150-pound steam turbine developed by an engineer at GE Global Research. It’s strong enough to power a small town, but even more amazingly, it runs on carbon dioxide. A press release about this technology might have slipped by reporters, but instead, GE Reports wrote a compelling news story about the subject. The also story went viral on Reddit, reaching the third spot on the homepage.

After the viral boost, the article drove roughly 300,000 views to GE’s blog and was picked up everywhere from Scientific American to Popular Mechanics to publications in China.

“You want to raise awareness for the brand. You can go directly to your audience but also to journalists,” Kellner told me. “Normally, you’d spend hours and hours going to lunch with reporters. But this is much more effective.”

3. You don’t have to break the bank to find your story

GE Reports is a surprisingly lean operation, considering the depth and breadth of stories it produces. Kellner explained that content marketing isn’t something you have to throw a ton of money at if you have your eyes and ears open for a good story.

For instance, Kellner spotted a Gizmodo story about a kid who built an entire Boeing 777 airplane out of manila envelopes. The detail was incredible. Kellner realized that GE builds the 777’s engine, making it the perfect story for GE Reports.

“No one had sat down with him and talked to him about the whole process,” Kellner said. “We got access to him and did a Q&A with him. There are enthusiasts [for your brand]. Look at what other people are doing and use it to your advantage.”

4. Go beyond the blog

GE Reports is one of the more popular brand blogs you’ll find, but Kellner knows that it’s just the beginning.

“You don’t want to just have a website,” he said. “It’s a storage room. You want to have these assets like a Lego block that you can break up and use on different channels. Periscope, Snapchat, Facebook Live.”

GE has been one of the first brands on most social platforms, including Instagram, Periscope, and Snapchat. That willingness to experiment is driven from the top down by CMO Linda Boff. As she told me earlier this year, “Sometimes you scrape your knee and a platform goes away, but I’d say it’s a greater risk not to be there trying it, because in this world you don’t know what’s going to necessarily take off.”

Kellner was in an airplane over Lake Michigan because he was flying 500 miles with Brad Mottier, who runs GE Aviation’s business and general aviation edition. Rather than just taking pictures and writing a blog post, Kellner juggled between his DSLR camera, the GE Reports Periscope account, and the GE Snapchat account. He engaged tens of thousands of people in real time.

As much as Kellner loves cutting-edge live-streaming platforms, he also gives a big shoutout to the most “old-school of digital platforms.”

“For us, it’s also about email,” he said. “We email our newsletter to 20,000 people every day, and we really see it set off that wave of traffic.”

5. Build a culture of content, and tap your employees for stories

When I interviewed Kellner two years ago, he talked about how the tenets of journalism had helped him build relationships and find stories throughout the company.

“It’s basically just old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting,” he said. “You have to go to the factories. You have to develop sources. You have to go to the labs and see what those guys are doing. It didn’t happen overnight for me. It took me a while to develop my network of sources and to figure out who’s working on what.”

Kellner has expanded that network by taking off his reporter hat at times and putting on his tweed professor’s jacket. He travels to GE offices around the world giving writing workshops to employees. Often, they turn around and pitch him stories.

One story, for instance, was about St. Helena, the remote island where Napoleon died in exile. Alaynah Boyd, a GE communications specialist who attended one of the workshops, pitched Kellner on a story about how GE was helping open up the first airport on the island.

The story didn’t come across as self-promotional. The angle focused on the business and history. Only one sentence mentioned GE. That focus on the story, and not the the brand, is Kellner’s greatest secret to success.

“Content can’t always be about you,” Kellner said, “and the outcomes shouldn’t be self-serving to your brand.

Images via GE Reports.

The post 5 Reasons GE’s Content Goes Viral on Reddit (and Everywhere Else) appeared first on Contently.

Video games have consistently out-earned Hollywood. Most people probably have at least one gaming app on their phone. And “gamification” is a term that’s been used so much in reference to UX design that it’s become blasé.

In fact, over the past few years, you could track changes in media by following trends in gaming culture. For better or worse, gamers have led the charge into new types of content, from live streaming to virtual reality, changing how audiences interact with the media they consume.

Influencer marketing

While gamers can’t take credit for making YouTube an internet behemoth, they’ve certainly done their best to colonize it. In August 2015, YouTube launched YouTube Gaming, a separate platform just for gaming content. Why? Because excluding Vevo and YouTube Spotlight, which are channels curated by YouTube itself, seven of the site’s 15 most popular channels are related to gaming.

The biggest YouTuber is PewDiePie, who has run the site’s most popular channel for almost three consecutive years. His claim to fame is the “Let’s Play,” which is a video of someone playing a game with commentary over the visuals. PewDiePie wasn’t the first person to post a Let’s Play, but he is the most popular. He’s done a lot not only to publicize the medium, but also to promote the games he plays.

Many smaller, independent games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Five Nights at Freddy’s owe much of their success to influencers like PewDiePie giving the games free publicity. Once gaming companies noticed that let’s players were getting millions of subscribers, the Let’s Play medium became a lucrative form of promotion. A video game publisher could give an early copy of a game and some payola to an influencer in exchange for positive publicity.

Players with big audiences, like PewDiePie, suddenly found themselves on the forefront of influencer marketing. Last year, PewDiePie allegedly made $12 million. However, a few users, like Ohmwrecker, Boogie2988, and PewDiePie, have been accused of unsavory advertising practices when it comes to marketing games for big-name publishers like Warner Bros. Maybe Mr. Pie and the Kardashians could have a nice sit-down and discuss disclosure.

But disclosure issues aside, gaming was one of the first truly lucrative avenues for digital influencers before Instagram and Snapchat came along, showing everyone else they, too, could become internet millionaires.

Live streaming

As popular as the Let’s Play is on YouTube, it’s arguably more popular on live-streaming platforms. The influencers began to record their gameplay and commentary live, giving them a greater means of interaction with an audience. The Let’s Play became one step closer to the experience of watching a friend play a game on the couch.

When players started streaming, they did so on services like livestream.com, ustream, or Justin.tv. Eventually, other companies to see the value. In June 2011, Justin.tv launched Twitch.tv, which Amazon eventually acquired for $970 million in 2014.

Today, live streaming is everywhere on social media. Products like Periscope and Facebook Live—both launched in 2015—made live streaming something that influencers and publishers outside of gaming could do as well.

Facebook really wants people to watch Live. It’s paid content creators over $50 million to use the platform, though many are still trying to find ways to fit the medium as well as Let’s Play.

Still, thanks to the publicity behind Facebook Live, live streaming appears to have wormed its way into mainstream digital culture, for both lighter fare and legitimate news. BuzzFeed blew up a watermelon and Chewbacca Mom became a thing. On a more serious note, the police shooting of Philando Castile was broadcast live on Facebook. A few months ago, ABC News showed viewers a 24-hour stream of the political conventions.

The most natural fit, thus far, seems to be sports, which also owes a debt to gaming. The 2015 League of Legends World Championships on Twitch had over twice the viewership of the NBA Finals or World Series.

Now, Twitter is spending millions of dollars per game to stream Thursday Night Football. Yahoo lets users watch MLB games live. Periscope experimented with streaming commentary during this year’s U.S. Open. And the NBA offers free streams on its website.

Virtual reality and augmented reality

Virtual and augmented reality have been heralded as technologies that could impact everything from movies to travel to real estate. But both were pioneered mainly as platforms for video games before investors adopted them in other industries.

The Oculus Rift began as a gaming peripheral on Kickstarter in August 2012 and initially raised over $2 million before Facebook bought it for $2 billion two years later. Following the success of Oculus, Google, Sony, Samsung, and HTC have all developed their own VR headsets. Meanwhile, gamers with a Nintendo 3DS could have played with the system’s built-in AR games back in 2011. That was three years before Snapchat would introduce filters, and five years before Nintendo would once again blow up the augmented reality space with Pokémon Go.

So, as content creators look for the next big thing, they might want to keep an eye on gaming. Gaming’s reliance on new technology as a means of digital interaction has helped it to break ground in new media already. As society craves more digital innovation, it’s a trend that’s unlikely to slow down.

The post 3 Gaming Trends About to Take Over the Media World appeared first on Contently.

After a string of product launches that deviated from its core product, LEGO was stretched thin. In 1998, it lost money for the first time. The iconic toy company struggled to compete for the attention of children enraptured by video games.

With the consumer internet coming into full swing, the brand seemed destined to become a nostalgic remnant of times past. But then it didn’t. When Jørgen Vig Knudstorp stepped in as CEO in 2004, the company refocused on its core product—the LEGO brick—and rocketed into the digital age. It became the most popular brand on YouTube and released a movie that made nearly $500 million worldwide. The company’s profits grew 31 percent last year.

Image via Socialbakers

At the dmexco conference in Cologne, Germany, LEGO CMO Julie Goldin sat down for a fireside chat in front of a packed audience to reveal how her company has become one of the world’s most popular content creators.

(Full Disclosure: LEGO is a Contently client.)

Focus on your audience above all else

To kick off the chat, Goldin held up a small toy brick and spoke at length about the key factor that drives everything LEGO does, from its content to its product: imagination.

“Six of these bricks can make up nine hundred and fifty million different combinations,” she said. “By building with LEGO, a kid, a child, anyone who touches it has a world of possibilities. And we know that when kids build, it builds so much of their skills. Imagination, creativity, problem solving. We are very clear about this mission, and when we innovate, we start with that core experience.”

For LEGO, pursuing that mission has led to a slew of experiences that fan the flames of its customers’ imaginations—a TV show, popular YouTube videos, a groundbreaking feature film, games, and apps.

“Just because they bought us last year doesn’t mean they’ll buy us this year,” Goldin said. “We’re always thinking about what we can create.”

LEGO also eagerly encourages and amplifies user-generated content from fans. The company, which calls certain supporters AFOLs (Adult Fans of LEGO), considers these people some of their greatest allies. LEGO seeks out those who create the best content and turns them into certified creators for the brand.

“We focus a lot on this community,” Goldin said. “They’re very important to us. They generate a lot of content. They’re massive advocates for us.”

Don’t operate in silos

Content teams are often siloed within the marketing department, but not at LEGO. The company believes in an agile and integrated approach.

“When we have a product or idea, the whole team comes together. We’re not that linear. We don’t start with a product then move to advertising then move to content,” Goldin explained. “We bring everybody together in the same room, and they start working on: What are the right choices within the three-sixty? That model then dictates what’s the right content for us to leverage.”

The best data comes from being in a room with your customer

At an ad-tech conference obsessed with data, Goldin was one voice advocating for a balanced strategy that incorporated more traditional marketing tactics.

“There are a lot of different tools available to us to see how different aspects of our marketing mix are working,” she said. “But when it comes to understanding kids, the best way to capture data is to get them in the room and give them some products to play with. Or put them in front of a TV set because that’s the best way to see what kids actually like. We really balance looking at big data and connecting it back to the true insight about who the kid is and what’s interesting to them.”

For LEGO, this is partly out of necessity, given the EU’s regulations on tracking the behavior of children online. But the philosophy still speaks to LEGO’s intimate and customer-first approach.

As Goldin put it, “What always has to be at the heart of everything is: What are the most relevant and engaging ways to connect with your audience?”

The post 3 Keys to Great Content Marketing, According to LEGO CMO Julia Goldin appeared first on Contently.

In the past, the company took an average of six weeks to ideate, produce, and release a piece of content. It was a torturously slow process, especially in a digital arena that values speed. Today, it has cut its creative process down to a mere 72 hours. It was, no pun intended, an amazing turnaround.

So how did the massive financial institution do it?

In a highly regulated industry like finance, the creative process—including approval—can often lead to suffocating bottlenecks that ruin the effectiveness of content marketing. Barclays decided that the only way to fix the issues plaguing its content operation was to completely rehaul the way its digital team functioned. So the company changed from having a marketing team to having a newsroom.

Barclays UK now has an editorial board that meets every Tuesday morning. No longer do people work on a lengthy campaign basis, signing off multiple times before content goes live. Now, it’s a day-to-day operation.

Meetings that actually work

Each Barclays editorial meeting has a clear objective: The 12-person team debates three to five story ideas before agreeing to produce at least one piece of content by the weekend.

“We have to be very clear on the roles of different people in each particular session,” Mark Brayton, Barclays UK’s content marketing director, said. “Some people will have the opportunity to share their opinion, some will have voting rights, and some will be there to make the ultimate call. Defining roles upfront is key.”

Employees also take turns filling the editor-in-chief role. This person ensures that the team reaches a decision during the meeting and has ultimate sign-off power. Once everyone selects an idea to pursue, the output team is entrusted to produce the content without the hassle of multiple meetings and approvers.

Additionally, the compliance team is now involved from the very start, which is a key adjustment compared to the old process. “We explained that we wanted to bring the compliance team on the journey, and that our output needed to be as fully compliant and meticulous as it has ever been,” Brayton said. “Having those guys there at the genesis of the content idea, rather than just before sign-off, has revolutionized the time spent.”

A data-driven team

The newsroom began its revamped content operations by focusing purely on Barclays’s retail customer base, a demographic the organization knew very well. The change in focus worked so well that even Brayton was a little surprised.

“I probably underestimated the power of using data as our creative muse,” he said. “The sheer impact it has had on—not only engagement—but also on the way the organization thinks, has been both impressive and really positive.”

One of the first examples of the customer data in action was for the Mortgage Market Review (MMR), new mortgage rules implemented in the UK in 2014 that fundamentally changed the way people assess real estate affordability.

“There was quite a lot of sensationalism, particularly in the tabloid press, around what MMR meant in the marketplace,” Brayton said. “There were stories suggesting that lenders would start asking people about their diet, for example, as part of their lending criteria. It quickly became apparent from our search data, social listening data, and calls to our centers that customers were asking questions about it.”

The editorial board saw an opportunity to take the lead and dispel any myths.

“We bought this data into the Tuesday morning meeting, debated the key findings, and talked about what information was available already,” Brayton said. “In the same session we commissioned a video to be shot the next day and distributed it across our owned, earned, and colleague channels.”

The entire process took 72 hours.

Keeping a finger on the pulse

In July 2015, Barclays saw another clear opportunity to make its mark. The interim UK budget was the biggest financial news story of the week, as people expected the government to introduce policies that tied to the promises made by the Conservatives during the general election.

“It could [have been] a very radical budget that had far-reaching consequences for many Barclays customers,” Liz Stephenson, marketing communications manager at Barclays UK, explained.

Within 24 hours of the budget speech, Barclays had published two articles, one for its core customer base and one for its more affluent “premier” customers.

“The articles specifically addressed customer interests and concerns by listening on social media to public reaction to the budget, and angling the articles accordingly,” Stephenson said.

Making history

Arguably the biggest opportunity for Barclays to test the effectiveness of its newsroom approach was in the aftermath of this June’s historic EU referendum, a vote that had a profound effect on the finances of Barclays UK customers. The company felt it had a duty to help its customers understand the implications—and people wanted information fast.

In just one week, the newsroom created 18 pieces of content in the wake of the Brexit vote. Detailed explainers like “Could the government’s new Help to Buy: ISA help you save?” offered insight and advice on new initiatives, while multiple videos were created for different customer segments, each designed to provide reassurance and an initial response to the most pressing concerns.

“The aims of the content were to increase brand trust and customer engagement,” Stephenson said. According to Barclays, the average time spent with Brexit content was 4 minutes and 16 seconds.

Evergreen content is important to just about every digital publication, but with a more agile creative process, Barclays UK has the flexibility in place to make sure all of its content is relevant to its audience before news gets stale.

“It is about constantly optimizing the approach,” Brayton said. “We will continue to look at how we adapt and change our content strategy, content plans, and content pillars to ensure we bring it to life.”

The post How Barclays Cut Its Publishing Process From 6 Weeks to 3 Days appeared first on Contently.

Artsy has become the world’s largest online database of contemporary art, allowing users to browse artwork, access artist biographies, research art shows, connect with galleries, and even bid on pieces. Since the company was founded in 2009, its goal has been to break down the exclusivity barrier of the $64 billion art industry. What better way to do that than through the internet?

“In the art world, there comes a lot of doubt online,” said Marina Cashdan, Artsy’s editorial director. The industry is still dominated by traditional print magazines, and much of the allure comes from a perceived insider status. The internet changes all of that.

At the core of Artsy’s strategy is original content.

“When I came on in 2011, there was practically no writing on the site, no words, mostly images,” Cashdan said. The early content focused on short introductory summaries about an artist’s career, influences, previous shows, and exhibits. These bios now number over 9,000 and have been regularly picked up by galleries, museums, and auction houses. “That’s really where we started to define our voice. The art world has a tendency to be very esoteric and elitist in terms of the writing style.”

Artsy’s mission statement is simple: Make all the world’s art accessible to anyone with an internet connection. The platform is powered by the Art Genome Project, Artsy’s classification system. Each artwork is mapped by certain characteristics (known as “genes”) which can then form a connection to other artists, artworks, and movements. This commitment to digital is what sets the company apart from the rest of the art world.

A photo posted by Artsy (@artsy) on Sep 2, 2016 at 2:41pm PDT

“We’re really lucky to be a part of a very robust tech company,” said Alexander Forbes, Artsy’s deputy editor. “I’d be pretty confident in saying that we’re the only art publication with an in-house custom content management system, built exactly to our needs.”

Around 2013, the content team began experimenting. At first, they tried user-generated content in the hope of driving greater engagement. “I think we were too young to really support that,” Cashdan said. “Then we started writing pieces that were really pure editorial, like show reviews.”

Initially, Artsy’s coverage included writing about some of its gallery partners. Although Cashdan was adamant that partners did not have any say in what was published, the conflict of interest still clouded the site’s editorial direction.

“As a startup, we went down that path,” Cashdan said. “At some point, I started to say this doesn’t work. We can’t go down that pay-for-play route. We are just starting to become a voice in this community—let’s revert.”

In early 2015, Forbes came on as deputy editor, and Matt Domino joined as managing editor. The editorial team grew to eight. Cashdan believes the decision to become editorially independent is behind the publication’s 400 percent growth in the last year. Artsy currently gets 550,000 readers per month, with the audience spending about two and a half minutes per visit. The U.S. is the site’s biggest source of traffic, followed by the UK.

“Another goal of ours is to make sure we’re not so deep in the art bubble and try to bring out global topics,” Cashdan said. “These last quarters I have stories in Vietnam, in Ghana. As we grow, we would like to have a more global editorial team.”

Last year, Artsy began experimenting with sponsored content, starting with a series of educational short films about the Venice Biennale, one of the biggest global art events, in partnership with the financial services company UBS.

“We’re being very thoughtful and careful about sponsored content,” Cashdan said. “It’s very much about finding brands who are already invested in the arts; supporting the art; and, instead of selling a product, telling the stories we mutually want to tell.”

The editorial team has now increased to 13—including two interns—with about 20 freelance contributors. They publish two or three stories a day and plan on increasing the output later this year.

“In the last six months, for the first time we are getting the exclusives, the stories with major artists that I’m sure others are going after,” Cashdan said. “They’re doing it because they are happy with the pieces that we’re producing. It feels good.”

Artsy now focuses a lot of its effort on evergreen content. “It’s such an important part of what we do and what a lot of smart publishers out there are doing,” Forbes said. “You’re not just running after clicks every month, you’re building up the database.”

Articles range from the the educational (“The 100 Most Expensive Artists at Auction“) and lighthearted (“Could This Piece of Wearable Art Help You Live Longer?“), to what you would expect from an art history thesis (“Rediscovering the Radical Feminism of the Neo Naturists“), without the verbosity, of course. The tone, at once intelligent and straightforward, reveals a lot about who Artsy is after: both seasoned art collectors and newcomers, curious and wanting to learn.

“So much of the art world is totally inaccessible to a wider audience,” Forbes said. “It’s our job to help open that up.”

Little by little, that world is opening up. Look no further than one current live auction: “San Francisco Cinematheque: Benefit Auction 2016.” You can research all of the art and artists directly on the platform, find articles about relevant topics, and start a thread with a specialist who can offer help and expertise. Bidding closes at midnight on September 11. And if you want an Ed Ruscha estimated at $4,500, you can get it right from your phone, no auction paddle required.

The post The Art of Content: How Artsy Brought a $64 Billion Industry Into the Digital Age appeared first on Contently.

As part of its ethos, Coca-Cola is committed to promoting a “one-brand” strategy that speaks to people around the globe. In a January 2016 press release, the company revealed its official “Taste the Feeling” initiative, which promised to tell product-focused stories that “reflect both the functional and emotional aspects of the Coca-Cola experience.”

Yet while the international storytelling machine is dedicated to stories about the human experience, its digital magazine, Journey, has done so with a strategy reminiscent of the first recycling campaigns: Think global, act local.

(Full disclosure: Coca-Cola is a Contently client.)

The journey from global to local

Coca-Cola successfully launched Journey in the U.S. at the end of 2012. In 2013, the publication attracted 13.1 million viewers and published over 1,200 articles that drew an impressive average attention time of 4 minutes and 40 seconds per story. It was only natural to expand this success abroad.

In March of 2014, the beverage company held its first ever JourneyOn publishing summit. Since that year, Coca-Cola has hosted annual conferences bringing together editorial leads from Journey publications around the world.

Today, Journey is active in over 25 countries, each with its own individual flair. What you read in Germany is, quite intentionally, different than what you read in the United Kingdom or Turkey. For Coca-Cola, localization is about more than just translation services—it’s the ability to tell culturally relevant stories that incorporate specific data, challenges, and interviews.

Coca-Cola doesn’t just translate popular American articles and hope for retweets from France. Publications in every country highlight topics, events, and news important to that region. When American content is incorporated into international blogs, it is carefully translated to fit within the context of local interest. And while themes can run global—such as health and sustainability—stories unfold through a local lens.

In the UK, Coca-Cola’s ParkLives program encouraged people to participate in free activities from Zumba to donkey grooming at nearby parks. The programs led to a consistent stream of compelling stories about individuals who accomplished personal feats, such as Melissa, who discovered that Nordic walking was actually pretty fun, and Sue, who used outdoor running as a way to build confidence and spend more time with her grandson.

According to Matthew Hepburn, editor-in-chief of Great Britain and Ireland, ParkLives has helped improve the wellbeing of local communities and been a rich source for content.

“We get loads of case studies from different people,” Hepburn said. “We get to see how ParkLives has given them a reason to get outdoors and changed their lives.”

In Ireland, Coke Zero bike-sharing inspired content on city programs from Galway to Cork. In the Middle East, Arabia Journey has covered the 3.2.1 Move! program, which brings physical education and games (like potato-sack racing) to kids in Turkey, Iraq, and Pakistan.

Of course, not all content is about community sports. In Germany, Journey posts focus on human interest angles and influencer collaboration. One of the site’s most prominent articles last year was a profile on Ihab Sukkaruya, a Syrian refugee who became a Coca-Cola intern and then an apprentice in Berlin. The bedrock stories are balanced by lighter fare, like a quick-hitter on how to take better Christmas photos, that performs well on social.

For Journey Arabia, content inspiration comes largely from current events, since the target audience is looking for news. Journey Arabia uses social listening to stay in tune with public opinion on stories impacting the Arab world and connects them to product events and announcements.

“What we do is think of our news agenda for stories that are topical—anything that relates to an announcement that we’re making in the region or a campaign that’s launching,” said Miriam Farshoukh, the public affairs and communications manager for Journey in the Middle East. “We listen to conversations that are happening on social media.”

Whether pushing a global initiative or covering a local event, the outcome from Abu Dhabi to Manchester remains the same: Journey stories are powerful because of the local context that speaks to so many different audiences.

The different flavors of autonomy

For Jay Moye, editor-in-chief of Journey in the U.S., Coca-Cola has been able to scale Journey’s success because of this editorial autonomy. Each publication plans its own editorial calendar, sources its own talent, and has a system to measure success.

For Hepburn, Moye’s counterpart in the UK, this difference in content mimics the rationale behind the production process. “We have different revenues and profit streams, different bottlers and products,” he explained. “It’s completely different markets, as well as a completely different political environment.”

In the U.S., for example, Moye sources 75 percent of his freelancers from the Contently talent network, where local journalists and bloggers create their own beat within Journey guidelines. In the UK, Hepburn works with the PR team to find local bloggers, as well as British content agency, Sticky Content, part of the Press Association, that provides editorial and video content on a weekly basis. In Germany, editor-in-chief Leane Zaborowski deals with a network of established bloggers.

“We always try to think the distribution and to find good ways to grow distribution and the impact of the content,” Zaborowski said.

Talent decisions reflect the needs of the target audience. For publications like Journey Arabia, which speaks to both the diverse UAE and more homogenized places like Jordan and Lebanon, creating a unified content calendar can be a challenge. In the end, the team steers away from country-specific content, choosing instead to find the sweet spot between regional and international stories.

“For us it’s about maintaining that balance,” Farshoukh said. “We’re quite focused on what content really works for the Arab world and for the Middle East, but also [want to] maintain a global view and global stories.” In the future, Farshoukh plans to integrate a more granular geo-localization strategy to also target smaller communities.

Despite this focus on editorial independence between international branches, Coca-Cola’s strong internal communication—including its company-wide intranet called Connect—makes it easy to share stories across publications.

“It’s a real circle, a big synergy,” Hepburn said. “It’s a really good way of saving money, and it’s cost- and time-efficient.”

The power of perception

Coca-Cola’s global content efforts have hit a few bumps along the way. One campaign, which featured light-skinned teens delivering Coke bottles to indigenous people from a small town outside of Oaxaca, Mexico, was criticized for promoting a colonial message, insensitive to the high rates of obesity and diabetes those communities face.

Yet when Coca-Cola gets it right, the brand has the ambition to tap into the hearts, minds, and pocketbooks of the brand’s target markets. “There’s the umbrella objective to increase brand love,” Hepburn said. “And brand love can help increase sales.”

“We want to drive the corporate trust of the company,” Zaborowski added. “We want people to understand our company, to humanize the company and the people and faces that work here, and to tell the stories that we have fantastic projects around sustainability and community engagement.”

Local initiatives target interests through a familiar lens, working genuinely to empower communities and increase their daily activity. There is no single recipe for Journey’s success, which is likely the reason it has been well received in such varied environments. Weaving together Coca-Cola’s global content tapestry are Journey’s editors, who are deeply committed to storytelling.

Whether in Brighton, Berlin, or Baghdad, the editors have found there is a similar group whose perception is most valuable: the ones with purchasing power.

“Moms and dads are the gatekeepers of the weekly shop,” Hepburn said. “If we can give them more information that helps them make informed decisions, it will help them during their purchase.”

The post How Coca-Cola Turned Its Digital Publication Into a Global Phenomenon appeared first on Contently.

Now, thanks to 4G and the ubiquity of Wi-Fi, using a smartphone as a portable internet platform makes much more sense. As a result, data-intensive apps like Uber and Tinder are possible and popular. So are chat and social apps.

Though smartphones were the portal to all this change, we wouldn’t be where we are now without the spread of 4G and Wi-Fi. The same will be true of the internet of 2020, which is when industry experts predict that 5G will become initially available to businesses and consumers.

5G will be a massive upgrade if it’s as good as promised. For one, it will be fast: about 10 times as fast as 4G. Most importantly, it will be everywhere—and in everything—through the Internet of Things (IoT). Cars (particularly driverless cars), houses, and everyday devices are all being built to communicate with one another. This means users will have the opportunity to “optimize” their daily lives by allowing their devices to sync. Plus, it means even more data for marketers.

The future of 5G, via Orange

Matt Goddard, the CEO of R2integrated, writes in Adweek’s SocialTimes how he sees advertising and the IoT evolving together with 5G, using the example of a smart refrigerator:

Offer the consumer ways to repurchase goods and introduce an ad network for food brands. Maybe you partner with a grocery delivery service and show a “Reorder” button on the fridge’s touchscreen; maybe you push inventory warnings to a smartphone app that automatically adds items to a grocery list; perhaps the fridge tells the smart TV to run milk ads on its streaming service. If the consumer buys milk at the grocery store using her mobile wallet, the wallet tells the TV to not run milk ads later that day.

Exactly how many connected “things” will be in use by 2020 is debated, but it will be a significant increase from today. Of course, that number should only increase even more when 5G is introduced. It’s no surprise that Goddard calls the IoT a “marketing gold mine.”

“If it computes, it must connect. Otherwise it might as well be a brick.”

At last year’s Intel Developer Forum, Aicha Evans, the general manager of Intel’s communications and devices group, made bold declarations for the IoT. According to Motherboard, she said that around 50 billion “things” will become connected by 2020. “If it computes, it must connect. Otherwise it might as well be a brick.”

Thanks to 5G, the mobile internet will be much faster globally by 2020.

Live streaming should evolve with 5G as well, since mobile streaming will be much faster and stable. At the moment, live streaming is a massive drain on data and not particularly high-quality.

With 5G, live streaming should become a lot like what watching mobile video is now: ubiquitous and easy. And considering how much giants like Facebook, Twitter, and traditional TV networks are investing in the format, it’s safe to say that live streaming—with the help of 5G—will be a major content format of the future.

Of course, there are some issues. While 5G will be much faster, that doesn’t mean that people with capped data plans will be able to use all that speed anymore than they already do. Unless that changes, live streaming will be easy, but still a big data drain.

The effects of 5G, like the mobile networks before it, aren’t entirely predictable. But it’s impossible to doubt that, once the structure for a much faster mobile web is in place, it will reshape what’s possible on mobile—and, in turn, our everyday lives.

This is an excerpt from “Media 2020: The Marketer’s Guide to the Future of the Internet.”

The post How the 5G Revolution Will Transform Marketing appeared first on Contently.

Elizabeth Spiers, a veteran of the publishing world and the founding editor of Gawker, announced a new venture on July 1 that will work inside—and report on—this increasingly muddled boundary between the real and the virtual. Named The Insurrection, her firm will conduct research for clients and is developing gaze-tracking analytics tools for the virtual reality (VR) industry. Unsurprisingly, given Spiers’s background, The Insurrection will also publish a digital magazine about virtual reality: There Is Only R.

The publication’s name is a nod to Musk’s theory that we are already living a virtual reality: Since we can’t distinguish the virtual from the real, there is “only R,” or reality.

Part of Medium’s beta platform for publishers, There Is Only R is meant to cover the growing VR community for both industry insiders and the merely curious. Pieces range from light-hearted listicles (“A List of Emerging VR Sub-Genres“) to in-depth opinion columns (“How Virtual Reality Will Democratize Learning“).

Besides launching Gawker under Nick Denton in 2002, Spiers was also the founder of Breaking Media, a digital media company that included the titles Dealbreaker, a Wall Street tabloid; Above the Law, a legal tabloid; and Fashionista, a fashion tabloid. Most recently, she worked closely with mattress startup Casper on the brand’s digital publication, Van Winkle’s. There Is Only R is branded content, too, although for Spiers’s own company.

We recently caught up with Spiers at her new offices in New York to talk about her new publication, what makes good branded content, and when she thinks we’ll see widespread adoption of VR.

What was the motivation behind There Is Only R?

Before we started The Insurrection, I worked mostly in traditional and digital media. I worked recently in branded content for Van Winkle’s for Casper.

What was the last display ad campaign you loved? Nobody can answer that question, because [an answer] just doesn’t exist.

You can do branded content well, but most people don’t. They don’t have very high standards for it. If you do it well, it can be an incredibly cost-effective marketing tool—way more so than display ads and traditional ads. There was no way we weren’t going to do a content thing for our business.

What was behind the decision to use Medium as your publishing platform? What are the benefits?

I have worked on and off with Medium. I wrote a feature for Matter [a digital magazine] about utilizing Medium for publishers. I’m interested in any medium that would make publishing easier.

I’m not in the publishing business anymore per se, but I’m still interested in what new models there are and how to monetize. From a user perspective, the platform has great design. It’s great for longform. It’s very clean.

What makes branded content work? When does it work well, and when does it not?

The biggest thing brands do is try to compare a branded content effort to the quality of a display ad campaign. They’re just apples and oranges.

What was the last display ad campaign you loved? Nobody can answer that question, because [an answer] just doesn’t exist. It’s a low bar. Display ads are a minute of impression, and the best-case scenario is like, “Oh, that’s funny.” By the nature of the way they’re constructed, they’re not really going to engage anybody.

We are not competing with Bloomberg. We are competing with Spider Man Reviews Crayons.

So what does branded content have to compete with? It has to compete with anything that you can read, watch, or pay attention to during that same time period. If it’s not compelling enough, people just aren’t going to pay attention.

When I was at Breaking Media, I was editing Dealbreaker, which was supposed to be a hybrid trade publication and gossip site for Wall Street people. We would get a lot of tips from junior analysts working at banks. One day we got the same tip from four or five analysts: Spider Man Reviews Crayons.

At the edit meeting, I showed my staff that we are not competing with Bloomberg. We are competing with Spider Man Reviews Crayons. If five bankers are sending me this as a tip, we have to make something at least as compelling as this. It has to be entertaining and something that people would share with their friends.

You have written about Casper and their publication Van Winkle’s as an example of great branded content. What did they get right?

It wasn’t meant to directly sell mattresses, but to establish authority in the area of sleep. If that’s what you want to do, you have to produce content that feels academically credible, that people actually want to read.

There are really exciting things happening in VR that are far beyond the low-end stuff like 360-degree video or Pokémon Go.

One of the writers we hired was predominantly a science writer with a feel for pop culture. If they get cited on science sites, that’s a win, [and] if readers are sharing content because it’s interesting, then that’s great as well.

Let’s talk about VR. Where do you see it headed, and when will we see mass consumer adoption?

Mass adoption will happen faster than you think. There are really exciting things happening in VR that are far beyond the low-end stuff like 360-degree video or Pokémon Go. Those are gateways into more complex AR [augmented reality] and VR. Everybody has lost their damn minds over Pokémon Go, and we will see a whole host of AR games in the next few months.

You just don’t see people conjuring these dystopian fantasies that VR will be the end of civilization.

Right now, there’s a wait for wider hardware adoption. In the VR community, people tend to gravitate to Oculus or [HTC] Vive. But there’s this funny competition thing right now to get people used to the technology. For example, if you buy a Samsung Galaxy phone, [some] get a VR headset for free. The catch is that you have to really do the experience to understand the appeal.

Google did a great video for [the HTC Vive game] Tilt Brush. You get a sense from the video what the experience is kind of like. It’s not as cool obviously as being in it, but it’s enough to intrigue people. There are things like asymmetric gaming that will be huge for VR. When people look at that market, they think that, basically, if you have a full Vive setup and you’re playing and other people are watching you, that will make others go out and buy it too.

China is moving very fast in VR, as well. There are a lot of mid-market head-mounted displays coming out of China. I also think that market doesn’t have the same trepidation as the American market does about what the cultural implications of VR are. You just don’t see people conjuring these dystopian fantasies that VR will be the end of civilization.

What happened to Google Glass? Were they ahead of the game?

Google Glass is interesting. It’s not like it shut down. I think they’re finding business clients now. Somebody told me a while back that there are first responders buying Google Glass in California so that they can transmit what’s happening directly to the EMT and the doctors could know what was happening before patients came in.

It strikes me as a good, reasonable choice. But historically that’s what Microsoft’s market strategy has been: finding an enterprise use for it and figuring out consumer stuff later.

Do you think adoption is just a case of the mass consumer becoming comfortable with the technology? From my understanding, the underlying technology has existed for decades.

Virtual Boy was a VR headset that Nintendo put out in the mid-1990s. It was an abysmal failure, mostly because people got nauseated in like five seconds—the computing power just wasn’t there. It had this really slow frame-speed, which is probably the number one reason people get nauseated.

The people who did Virtual Boy, I don’t think they were off-point about what the possibilities were and what you could do with it. It was just impossible to execute at the time because the technology just wasn’t there. And now it pretty much is, and it’s really going to be there in two or three years.

You see a lot of Hollywood studios pouring money into VR, but there does seem to be some hesitation on the part of conventional content creators to make VR products. I think they’re sitting around waiting for it to get wider adoption.

So when do you think we will see mass consumer adoption?

It depends on what exactly you’re talking about. I think for immersive VR, that’ll be standard gaming technology in probably three years.

In terms of people using it for non-gaming applications, you’ll see it here and there. There are health care companies right now using VR for pain management. I think when people get used to the idea that it’s not scary gamer tech, you’ll see wider adoption.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

The post Elizabeth Spiers Reveals Why You’re Thinking About VR and Branded Content All Wrong appeared first on Contently.

Today, Chip Wilson’s yoga and fitness apparel company racks up over two billion dollars in annual revenue, largely because it’s come to embody a lifestyle. It’s the stuff of active soccer moms, meditation devotees, and women who only consume organic food and raw juices. You don’t just wear Lululemon. You are Lululemon.

The broad scope of lifestyle brands like Lululemon can present a huge content opportunity. But it can also be difficult to zero in on a mission when your brand appeals to so many different people. Marketers are left answering questions like: Who, specifically, is the target audience? What lifestyle content topics are relevant? And is anything truly off brand?

What is a lifestyle brand?

This desire to embody a brand—or, rather, to find a brand that embodies you—is the mentality that lifestyle companies hope to impart on their customers. “Lifestyle” is a broad category, describing everything from travel to DIY, parenting to single living, cooking to fashion, beauty to sportswear. Lululemon, for example, creates an active, wellness-oriented culture through athletic gear and yoga mats. Lifestyle brands like Lululemon sell their culture, not just their product.

Creating a culture-based mission

Defining a mission statement is the first stop on the path to lifestyle brand status. To get there, brands have to know their customers very well. While B2B companies need to answer the question “What service does my product provide?” lifestyle companies need to ask “What kind of unique culture will my brand embody?”

To do this, companies first need to delve deep into their customers’ psyches. What food do they eat? How do they feel about current events? What are their passions? How do they spend their free time, even when they’re not interacting with the product? In short, who are they, and what kind of person do they want to be? This isn’t news, obviously. Market research and surveys are staples of brand development. However, this knowledge of customer behavior can be used differently by a lifestyle brand: Instead of just informing product development or targeted advertising, it also informs the specific culture that the brand creates through digital and other marketing—and the mission statement that drives it.

The components of a powerful mission statement

The mission statement that guided Lululemon’s rise to success provides a strong template for brands developing their own mission. It’s a statement that guides the brand without feeling unnecessarily restrictive.

A mission statement summarizes crucial information that determines a company’s path forward, so it’s important to get it right. The statement should answer these questions:

• What does the company do or provide?
• Who is the customer?
• How does the brand address the customer’s needs?

Lululemon’s original mission statement reads: “Creating components for people to live longer, healthier, fun lives.” There are a few significant factors at play here.

For one thing, notice that Lululemon’s mission is to “create components,” not “sell gear.” There’s a big difference. “Components” might include activewear, water bottles, and yoga mats, but it might also include healthy living tips, running clubs, yoga classes, green juice recipes, detox programs, and books about meditation.

The fact that Lululemon doesn’t limit its mission to products shows that the company recognizes all the other aspects of being a lifestyle brand. The fact that it creates culture is inherent in its mission.

Think about how the company answers the question “Who is the customer?” As a fitness brand, Lululemon knows that its customers are active, wellness-oriented and health-conscious. From there, it can infer other things about them. They are probably interested in diet and nutrition, travel, self-reflection, community, holistic medicine, and events pertaining to those topics. They are generally well-educated and interested in bonus lifestyle topics such as travel and art. This informs the “components” that the company will create in order to build culture around its products.

And finally, per our mission statement guidelines, how does Lululemon address its customers needs? The answer is through the “components” that help customers “live longer, healthier, fun lives.” These components include yoga gear, classes (so customers can get involved and meet others in the community), ambassadors (so they can learn about Lululemon from someone like themselves), healthy living advice, holistic nutrition tips, wellness ideas, travel, inspirational stories, and news pertaining to active living.

Creating culture through content

Never before has there been such an inclusive and far-reaching opportunity to build a brand’s culture. Social media, email messaging, and video and blog content all support a brand’s culture. As a result, content is one of the most important aspects of a lifestyle brand’s marketing plan. Lululemon’s blog and social media topics include wellness tips, personal accounts by athletes and prominent yogis, information on trending health topics, interesting stories about art and culture, and informational how-tos about a conscious, active lifestyle.

All of these factors informed the Lululemon Manifesto, a collection of branded phrases that convey customers’ lifestyle and values. The manifesto is deeply informed by market research. It contains inspiring, uplifting messaging that appeals to Lululemon’s active, success-driven, health-oriented customers. “Do one thing a day that scares you.” “Friends are more important than money.” “Sweat once a day to regenerate your skin.” “This is not your practice life. This is all there is.”

Drawing the line

With so much room for variety, marketers are often left wondering what is truly off brand. The most direct way to tell is to ask whether or not it violates the company’s mission statement. In this way, the mission statement serves as a hard-and-fast line for deciding what will bring the brand value and what will not.

However, given the broad scope of the lifestyle space, some issues will need to be given close examination on a case-by-case basis. Let’s take the example of healthy recipes within Lululemon’s brand messaging.

Many Lululemon customers are vegetarian, a long-held tradition within the yoga community. However, other customers may go a totally different route with their diets. The recent trend of Paleo eating is popular among some fitness gurus, as are gluten-free and low-carb eating. How, then, should Lululemon handle health and wellness posts pertaining to dietary choices? Should it create a positioning statement detailing where the brand stands on matters of diet?

Probably not. Since it would risk alienating customers if it took a position, the best way to handle the issue is to not take one at all. While many wellness brands offer gluten-free and meat-free dietary advice, Lululemon has largely opted out of this content topic. The brand hasn’t published a food-related post since February 2015, when it included an interview with a popular vegetarian food blogger. Instead of including information about vegetarianism specifically, the blogger’s advice was broader. In other words, while Lululemon acknowledges that eating healthy is important to its customer, it doesn’t tell her how to do it.

Let’s compare this approach to that of Crossfit, the fitness and muscle-building program that’s inspired thousands to take up a Paleo-based eating program. The company’s mission clearly states, “Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar.” In its first two words, the statement alienates vegans and vegetarians, discouraging them from partaking in Crossfit’s fitness culture. As a result, the niche has been filled not by Crossfit itself, but by independent bloggers and bodybuilders who can capitalize on the need for veg-friendly culture within the Crossfit community. It falls to the brand itself to determine what cultural choices would be in direct violation of company values, and which are simply limiting its reach to a larger potential audience.

Living the life

Lifestyle companies have a unique opportunity to turn their own customers into walking advertisements for their brand. Through these customers, companies show people what their lives could look like if they took up the culture of the brand. Whether you like Lululemon or not, there’s no question of its relevance within the fitness world. Lululemon’s customers’ clearly identify with the company. In many ways, they structure their lifestyle around the products and digital content put forth by the brand.

Lululemon customers aren’t just consumers, they’re devotees. They themselves are the company’s best advertising tool, and that’s because they embody its culture, rather than simply wearing its product.

The post Why Brands Need a Mission to Create Great Lifestyle Content appeared first on Contently.

While the sophisticated magazine could have easily been mistaken for Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, or a premium edition of Vogue, it instead belong to Net-a-Porter, the online luxury retailer.

Porter has since grown to challenge its competitors and epitomize the movement of luxury retailers becoming publishers. But while “old school” channels like print and blog content are still crucial parts of luxury marketing, an increasing number of brands are exploring new, cutting-edge channels that allow them to engage with consumers in an intimate way.

Let’s look at three of the most popular tactics.

Influencer marketing

Research shows that adoption of influencer marketing, despite its buzz, is still relatively slow among luxury brands. While 92 percent of consumers trust recommendations from other consumers more than from branded content, a survey by Econsultancy found that 42 percent of fashion and beauty marketers currently devote less than 10 percent of their budget to influencer content.

A May 2015 survey from Augure and Schlesinger found that marketers’ biggest challenge is finding the right influencer. For some luxury brands, the solution has been to partner with a social influencer agency.

Last year, for example, French beauty brand Guerlain worked with Style Coalition to recruit a diverse group of influencers, such as The Stripe’s Grace Atwood. Guerlain’s national makeup artist chose custom looks for each of the seven in influencers, who then created blog posts about their experience.

In addition to tapping an already established and loyal following, in influencer marketing is particularly effective at reaching millennials.

“With social media capturing the attention of the largest group of spenders since the baby boomers, it’s only a matter of time before we begin to see influencer marketing take hold as the largest spend for brands looking to reach this coveted group of shoppers,” said Daniel Saynt, CEO and chief creative officer of influencer casting agency Socialyte, which has worked with over 350 brands.

A blog post on The Strip promoting Guerlain’s products.

According to leaders at influencer agencies, it’s important to frame influencer campaigns in ways that protects the brand from any rogue influencer or celebrity who will overshadow the brand.

“A lot of luxury brands involve influencers because they’re able to drive conversations across their communities, but the result is—frequently—that the influencers become more relevant than the brand itself,” warned Luca Della Dora of We Are Social.

Snapchat and mobile streaming video

Of the most widely used mobile streaming applications, Snapchat might have the potential to generate the most positive feelings about a brand. As luxury brands search for ways to reach consumers, it’s hard to deny the benefits of tapping fast-growing mobile streaming channels. The average consumer spends close to three hours per day on his or her mobile device.

You can’t talk about streaming video without talking about Snapchat. According to a recent study conducted by the University of Michigan, consumers associate Snapchat with positive emotions—more so, even, than Facebook. Research found that users view Snapchat interactions as similar to face-to-face conversations. This creates an opportunity for brands to interact with potential customers in a more intimate and memorable way.

Virtual reality

When it comes to emerging luxury content marketing trends, David Linderman, group creative director at digital agency Huge, is most excited about the potential of virtual reality (VR), which immerses consumers in a multimedia experience that mimics the real world.

Linderman, who has worked with brands including Chanel and David Yurman, believes that VR has near-unlimited potential when it comes to conveying the quality of luxury products to consumers. “To me, it’s a relatively low-budget way of creating extremely immersive video that gives content a new kick,” he said. “With goggles on, it adds a whole new dimension [to the product].”

The VR market has been growing for years, and the introduction of a VR app by The New York Times in late 2015 has further bolstered the trend. When the app launched in November, the Times distributed more than a million Google Cardboard VR viewers to its newspaper subscribers. The head-mounted devices are used in conjunction with smartphones to view the Times’s 360-degree VR video content.

As VR becomes more mainstream, its potential for brands increases, Linderman said. “Once you get over that threshold of using it, it’s great for delivering an immersive runway experience with different angles so people can do more than passively watch [a show],” he said.

Ultimately, it’s an exciting time for luxury marketing. Digital media makes it possible for consumers to experience luxury goods in an entirely new way, getting a peek at the lifestyle luxury products represent. While luxury brand content may not be able to replace a front-row seat at a runway or simulate a Jaguar test drive, when done right it can inspire a vital bond with the brand—and even influence future purchases.

This is an excerpt from “The Marketer’s Guide to Luxury Content.”

The post 3 Cutting-Edge Content Marketing Trends From Top Luxury Brands appeared first on Contently.

As the internet’s corporate rolodex, LinkedIn gets the job done. But as a content network, it’s a missed opportunity.

Think of it this way. Getting hired is all about standing out, right? We want our résumés to resonate with employers. We write cover letters so hiring managers can get a feel for our unique voices. By extension, the posts we write and share on LinkedIn should communicate intelligence, self-awareness, skepticism, and depth. But instead we end up with a lot of fluffy “thought leadership” posts dressed in terrible stock photography. Abstract advice like “3 Steps to Finding that Work/Life Balance” or “The Truth About Authentic Leaders.”[note]What the hell is an authentic leader?[/note]

Regardless of how you feel about Facebook’s business model, you have to credit the platform for facilitating expression and creativity. It can be an echo chamber at times, but it’s also a place for entertainment and debate. Twitter even more so, where intellectual opponents (and trolls) can volley back and forth with ease. By comparison, LinkedIn is the social media equivalent of elevator music.

Perhaps that’s why, despite boasting a high-value professional audience of more than 430 million registered users, it hasn’t seriously challenged Facebook for social supremacy. According to eMarketer, LinkedIn’s ad dollars will only account for 3.4 percent of all social network revenue, while Twitter’s piece of the pie is about 10 percent. Facebook dominates, with close to 75 percent.

Further cementing that hierarchy, LinkedIn significantly trails both networks when it comes to mobile growth. In 2016, only 28 percent of LinkedIn’s digital ad revenue in the U.S. will come from mobile, compared to 90 percent for Twitter and 82 percent for Facebook.

But the wild card in the deck could be Microsoft, which bought LinkedIn for $26.2 billion last month. The move, though expensive, makes sense on the surface as a software play if Microsoft can find a way to package its Office products into LinkedIn’s services. The real value, however, could be turning LinkedIn from a giant pile of résumés into a network people actually want to be a part of.

Unlike other major social platforms, LinkedIn struggles to keep its users coming back. You create a profile, but you don’t necessarily need to check it unless you’re looking for a new job. As Christopher Mims reported in a recent Wall Street Journal article about Microsoft’s acquisition, “Only about one quarter of LinkedIn’s 400 million ‘cumulative’ users return to the site every month.”

The reductive thought leadership sets off a nasty cycle that overshadows the good work from publishers that deserves to get shared. All too often, that thoughtful journalism gets trumped by generic thought leadership. Not only are those thought leadership posts bad, but they also tend to lead to meaningless, supportive comments from people who suck up to executives and decision-makers. The suck-ups, in turn, mirror the advice content they see from established professionals with their own blandly inspirational memes and hashtags.[note]#confidence is a really bad hashtag.[/note] Some of these posts might even make Tony Robbins put up a hand up and say, “That’s enough.”

Since three-quarters of LinkedIn’s user base doesn’t check their feeds regularly, this echo chamber of empty self-help winds up suppressing the ad revenue that could come from big-name publications. Publishers don’t have an incentive to invest resources here the way they do on Facebook, be it for organic traffic or paid social.

Take The New York Times, which has 11.5 million page likes on Facebook, 29 million Twitter followers, and… 1.5 million LinkedIn followers. The Times still posts dozens of article links on LinkedIn every day, but many of them receive less than a handful of likes. There’s usually no activity in the comments section, let alone a healthy discussion. And the thumbnails are static and small. When the Times adds a financial news update, there’s no image at all, just a thumbnail of the paper’s logo. Compare that to the publication’s feeds on Facebook and Twitter, which are full of auto-play videos, high-quality visuals, and engaging summaries.

The contrast is striking.

The strange part is that LinkedIn has incredible potential. It’s probably the best place to reach professionals online. Because of its important users—and the data collected about them—LinkedIn can justify charging higher rates than other social networks for paid content distribution. Most importantly, people over 18 feel obligated to create profiles if they’re in the job market, which means the network has a consistent stream of new users every year. (According to LinkedIn, students and recent graduates are its “fastest-growing demographic.”) That inelasticity is an advantage Facebook and Twitter don’t have.

If LinkedIn is ever going to change its reputation, the Microsoft deal could serve as a perfect catalyst—new ownership flush with cash that’s hungry to compete with the biggest names in tech. There’s a definite need for a native video feature and better options for thumbnails. Tweaks to the algorithm that surface higher-quality content are also likely needed. Perhaps LinkedIn could advise (and potentially pay) publishers to create content specifically for the platform, similar to what Facebook did with its live-streaming product. At the very least, it could make high-quality posts on Pulse, the platform’s news aggregator, more visible and easier to access.

People spend so much time at work—our professional lives don’t have to be boring or sanitized. Now, we’ll just have to see if Microsoft is up to the job.

The post How Microsoft Could Turn LinkedIn Into a Legitimate Facebook Rival appeared first on Contently.

I was sure Sam was going to give me a speech about professionalism. Instead, he offered me a job as Contently’s editor-in-chief.

As a one-person editorial team, my first instinct was to go for easy wins. One of those was this “Best of Branded Content” column, which I started over two and a half years ago. No one had been rounding up the best content marketing each month, and it was easy for me to fill that need.

But now, it’s not just me here at Contently. We’ve grown from 13 employees to nearly 130, and our office is filled with brilliant people who are as obsessed with this industry as I am. So for the next few months, we’re going to try a new format: the roundup. Here’s the branded content that people across Contently fell in love with in July:

Amtrak: The National

Kieran Dahl, social media editor: This isn’t so much an analysis as a promise that Amtrak’s The National, its not-yet-in-existence “bi-monthly print magazine and digital portal,” will be very, very good. Launching in October, the magazine will be helmed by Jordan Heller, the editor-in-chief of Rhapsody, a literary and highfalutin culture magazine published by United Airlines that, befitting of its highbrow content, is only available in United’s premium cabins and lounges. (Heller is also the editor-in-chief of Hemisphere, United’s in-flight magazine that you only pick out of the seat pocket in front of you when you’re waiting to use your phone.)

With largely the same editorial minds behind The National as Rhapsody, the nature of the two publications’ content seems comparably upscale. That’s not a bad thing. We’ve previously written about Rhapsody as the standard-bearer of high-class branded content, given the caliber of its stories—deep profiles of a diverse cast of celebrities, for example—and its award-winning writers—Joyce Carol Oates, Emily St. John Mandel, and Anthony Doerr, among others.

Alex Hoyt, the executive editor of The National and senior editor of Rhapsody, told Folio magazine that The National’s first issue will feature “all kinds of stories—travel essays, reported pieces, fiction, poetry, and fine-art photography—and a range of voices from across the country.”

As if you needed further proof that train travel is simply the best…

Wild Turkey Bourbon: “Matthew McConaughey Short Film”

Dillon Baker, associate editor: Ever since the McConaissance took hold in 2014, actor Matthew McConaughey has taken his career in two interesting directions: first by working on more obscure films and cameoing in big ones, and second by diving into the ad world. His much-parodied Lincoln ads are proving to be only the beginning for this bold pioneer. Now, he’s taken up a role as “creative director” for bourbon brand Wild Turkey.

It’s an odd choice. Wild Turkey isn’t the most well-respected bourbon brand, and it was recently bought by Campari Group, an Italian beverage company. But damn it if McConaughey doesn’t sell the brand. As a spokesperson, he seems to—almost creepily—love Wild Turkey in a way other people paid to promote brands simply can’t match. It works, though, because that’s the kind of sophisticated weirdo McConaughey is.

Dove (Unilever): “My Beauty, My Say”

Erin Nelson, marketing editor: The media is full of chatter that Unilever’s $1 billion purchase of Dollar Shave Club is a sign of the disruption of everything. But Dove, one of Unilever’s star brands, released a new campaign that proves dollar razors are not the only relevant cultural conversation in Unilever’s arsenal.

We all know Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign, which was first launched in 2004 and went viral thanks to the “Evolution” (2006) and “Real Sketches” (2013) videos. The campaign encouraged women to reevaluate their own perceptions of beauty, and this month, Dove launched the next evolution. “My Beauty, My Say” challenges the media to stop criticizing the way female athletes look—a habit likely to ramp up during the upcoming Olympic Games in Rio.

To do so, Dove created three digital interactive billboards in New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto to live stream commentary about female athletes’ physical appearance. The goal is to reveal the absurd way major media outlets talk about female athletes: “huge nipples,” “built like a fire hydrant,” “frizzy hair,” to name a few choice phrases. In true Dove fashion, the branded content inspires viewers to reevaluate beauty standards, but, more importantly, it puts the media on blast. The campaign is a healthy reminder that brands can serve as an unlikely check on the abusive power of mainstream media.

Jaguar: “Feel Wimbledon”

Amanda Weatherhead, sales strategist: As an avid tennis fan and one-time aspiring touring pro, it’s been a dream of mine to play on Centre Court at Wimbledon. I’m not alone. Even the most casual tennis fan feels a degree of reverence for that court—it’s the tennis equivalent of the Vatican.

This is precisely why Jaguar’s “Feel Wimbledon” campaign represents a marketing coup. By giving fans the opportunity to step inside the fabled Centre Court at SW19, Jaguar cemented their status as a tech-savvy yet human company. While the majority of its competitors worship at the altar of engineering and technical innovation, Jaguar recognized that in order to truly build relationships with people, it had to appeal to people’s emotions.

Brand partnerships can go one of two ways: epic success (like Uber and Spotify) or major disaster (like KFC and the Susan G. Komen foundation). This one is a perfect fit. Both brands have a similar ethos and fabled legacies that are as quintessentially British as the Queen herself. To truly ensure that this campaign was an advertising tour de force, Jaguar moved the VR experience around London and gave out Google Cardboards at their dealerships, maximizing exposure. Here’s to hoping they extend the campaign to the U.S. Open so I can finally live my dreams, if only for a moment.

Rapha: “Rapha Core”

Nicolas Willson, editorial intern: I think luxury cycling brand Rapha produces some of the best branded content out there. I’ve been a follower of the brand for some years now—watching their videos, drinking coffee at the stores, but never becoming a customer of their clothing. That was until this summer, when I prepared for a cycling trip in Transylvania. After consuming Rapha’s content for years, there was only one place I was going to buy some padded shorts and cycling shirts.

The quality of Rapha’s branded content is fantastic, whether it’s the brand’s landscape photography, print magazine, or emotional short films. In this particular video, Rapha mixes rural imagery with the human stories behind cycling. The film highs the beauty of the sport: the physical challenges, the mental toughness, the outdoor elements, the camaraderie and isolation.

Rapha certainly knows their core audience is avid cyclists longing to be outdoors and they know how to pull on the emotional heart strings. Even if you’re not a cyclist, the video makes you want to get up and take on the challenge of an ascent, clad head to toe in Rapha gear.

Sonic the Hedgehog: Whatever this is

(Note: Embedding has been disabled, so go to the link above and start at 35:50.)

Noah Waldman, editorial intern: This is not a choice for “best” of branded content. This is probably the worst single piece of branded anything I have ever seen. But it’s wrong in all the right ways, a perfect train wreck of terrible execution and comedic juxtaposition between Sonic the Hedgehog and Totino’s. It’s a performance art-level display of apathy and ineptitude that is probably my favorite branded thing so far this year.

There’s the constant audio buzz, the complete audio cutouts that you might suspect are planned because they happen at the exact worst time, the terrible dad-dancing of the DJs, the guy in the Sonic costume doing the Macarena, the big reveal trailer being streamed twice in a row, the lead singer of Crush 40 seemingly not knowing any of the lyrics to the songs, and the puzzling break in the middle to watch someone pretending to like Totino’s pizza products.

If you don’t have time to sit through the entire three-and-a-half-hour perfect storm, Jim Sterling made a great supercut of some of the “best” moments of this glorious example of how not to live stream. Honestly, I’m quite surprised the meme-tastic Sonic Twitter feed hasn’t already mined this for content.

Old Spice: “YouLand”

Joe Lazauskas, editor-in-chief: It probably says more about me than anything that I just spent 45 minutes on a Monday night playing a video game created by Old Spice. (Or, rather, three video games.) But I’m going to be honest: It was the most enjoyable 45 minutes I’ve ever spent researching this column.

The trio of games are incredibly retro and absurd, and use a Facebook connection to put the pixelated faces of you and your friends on all the characters. You hide from your coworkers. You shoot your boss with a stapler gun. You fight construction workers while dressed at the Karate Kid. And those are just three of many, many levels.

But the game is amazing. It’s worth playing just for the start screens. I will cherish these pictures of me forever.

Simply put, my Bumble profile will never be the same.

The narrative videos that precede each level star the infamous Mustafa, and the writing is on point. The game is incredibly self-aware and never misses out on an opportunity to make fun of itself—and you for playing it.

My favorite thing, though, has to be this.

“Choose your scent. Choose your destiny. Choose your branded video game.” If that’s not advertising poetry, I don’t know what is.

The post The Best Branded Content of July: Advertising’s McConaissance Continues appeared first on Contently.

Whether your mind was blown or you found the experience disappointing, I’ve got something to tell you: You haven’t seen anything yet.

Like the first smartphones, the VR headsets we’ve seen so far are little more than stepping stones to what some are hoping will revolutionize entertainment and communication. As they stand now, Google’s Cardboard, Facebook’s Oculus, and Samsung’s Gear all provide one of the major elements of virtual reality: interactive 360-degree video. When you turn your head with an Oculus, your point of view responds in turn, allowing you to look in any direction.

“The ability to interact in an environment, especially using your hands—which is your natural method of interaction in the real world—is sort of the golden chalice of VR.”

That’s a significant change from how current screens work, but as a standalone feature, it’s far from “revolutionary.” Many in the VR industry believe the technology will only take off when there are innovations in two realms: control and content.

“The ability to interact in an environment, especially using your hands—which is your natural method of interaction in the real world—is sort of the golden chalice of VR,” said Christine Cattano, the executive producer of Framestore VR, a creative studio that specializes in creating VR experiences.

That’s the promise of three devices that have been or will be released this year: HTC Vive, Playstation VR, and Oculus Touch. HTC Vive—which comes with an $800 price tag at launch and requires a powerful PC—comes with virtual reality controllers. PlayStation VR, which only runs on Sony’s PlayStation 4 gaming console, offers controller add-ons. And Oculus Touch—Oculus’ wireless controllers—is set to launch in the second half of 2016.

At Framestore, I had the chance to experiment with HTC Vive and experience the difference virtual reality controllers can make. Until now, most virtual reality gaming has been done using a traditional video game controller, which felt like playing a normal game except with a big screen strapped on your face.

Playing with the HTC Vive felt different. The device comes packaged with trackers that scan whatever space you’re in, meaning that when you take a step in real life, you take in step in the virtual reality environment as well. Admittedly, the movement was unsettling—at no time did I take a step forward without fearing I was going to fall. Still, the psychosomatic sensation of being in a virtual environment, rather than simply watching one, felt new. Painting my name in sparkly cursive, then walking around the floating text to view it from the opposite angle, felt properly sci-fi.

The VR controllers added a distinctly futuristic element to the experience. Motion controllers have been around for some time (remember the Wii?), but VR seems like the natural partner they’ve always been missing.

While these devices are set to be released this year, they may not achieve widespread market penetration until 2020. That’s partly because of the intimidating price tag. PlayStation VR, the cheapest of the bunch, will run $400 just for the headset, assuming you already have a PS4. Without a PS4 or the controllers and camera, the price jumps to $850. Mostly, however, it’s because the content just isn’t there yet.

Cattano compares early VR content with early film, which took years to evolve into its own art form. “The first film was a train coming into a station,” she said. “Super literal, right? Seven years later, Georges Méliès is doing crazy things that could only be done on film. It took enough experimentation. It took enough wacky minds and enough balls, frankly, to do stuff that is imaginative.”

She also believes that VR will not see widespread adoption until there are non-entertainment uses for daily life, such as social media (which Facebook seems to want with Oculus). That’s often where augmented reality, or AR, comes into the picture.

Augmented reality

AR is similar to virtual reality in that it is a wearable device strapped in front of your eyes. Except in this case, the display is broadcast onto the world around you.

Christopher Mims, The Wall Street Journal’s technology columnist, recently proclaimed that AR is “the most exciting technology you’re ever likely to encounter” and “is the future, the dominant way we will interact with computers and the internet.” For Mims, and other technology analysts, AR is to VR what smartphones were to desktop computers. They’re the device that is constantly present, rather than one you use intermittently.

Facebook, for one, is making a bet that AR is the future of its communication empire. While it launched Oculus this year, Mark Zuckerberg seemed particularly excited at this year’s F8 keynote by these unnamed Facebook AR glasses.

They resemble Google Glass, the search engine giant’s 2012 failed AR experiment—but that experiment’s failure may have been more a matter of being too early to the game than anything. At least, that’s what Facebook seems to think. Zuckerberg claimed that AR could be as radical a transformation as mobile phones were: ” “A lot of the things we think about as physical objects today, like TVs, will just be one-dollar apps,” he said.

Snapchat, meanwhile, has been experimenting with a wearable AR device of their own, according to CNET. They’ve purchased glasses companies, built out a research team of AR experts, but they haven’t confirmed any of the reports. The move would make a lot of sense—as this Medium piece argues, Snapchat’s famous filters, geolocation, and illustration features are close to AR already.

But while Facebook and others think AR and VR could replace TV and perhaps even mobile phones, marketers have to be careful not to apply contemporary constructs to how they might use these futuristic devices.

“[Some advertisers] keep bringing up this vision of wearing some sort of augmented reality device and you’re walking down the street and the cool thing we’re going to do is… we’ll just serve more ads,” said Cattano. “Someone will definitely invent an ad blocker not long thereafter.”

Instead, Cattano believes that brands need to adapt to the format itself. “Essentially, VR is a user-first media,” she said. “It’s you, it’s your point of view. It’s your decisions, it’s where you choose to look. Shoving a brand message down their throat is not really the way that you want to approach this. … If it has a brand message, okay, but make sure it has value first.”

This is an excerpt from “Media 2020: The Marketer’s Guide to the Future of the Internet.”

The post When Will the VR Revolution Come for Marketers? appeared first on Contently.

Research predicts that online luxury sales will triple by 2020, indicating a heightened need for luxury brands to understand the campaign touch points that lead to online conversions and developing brand awareness.

In the case of luxury brands, where there is a large discrepancy between online influence and attributed online sales, a precise measurement process is an important part of being able to calculate accurate ROI.

Analyst Rebecca Lieb advises luxury brands to measure metrics like brand reputation, share of voice, and intent to buy when monitoring social initiatives. “[Look to] attentive listening to consumers, the content they like, and what resonates with them deserve further investment,” she said.

When online fashion and beauty retailer ASOS created a brand advocacy campaign, “Access All ASOS,” with influencer marketing platform Traackr, its goals were to engage its most social fans, inspire authentic mentions, and drive traffic to ASOS.com. The brand then tracked a number of KPIs (key performance indicators) that corresponded with these goals, including increase in social media engagement (with the hashtag #AccessAllASOS), positive brand mentions associated with “Access All ASOS,” and the increase in referral traffic during the campaign.

The results were impressive. “Access All ASOS” reached 12 million audience members on Instagram and Twitter, the number of spontaneous brand mentions rose 600 percent, and web traffic referrals increased by 800 percent. That gave ASOS the confidence to invest further in the campaign, doubling the size of its “Access All ASOS” efforts.

ASOS’s strategy represents a key feature of smart marketing programs in 2016: It focuses only on the metrics that measure to what degree the brand achieves its goals.

The importance of optimization

Assessing specific and targeted analytics allows brands to understand which pieces of content perform the strongest in different arenas. While ASOS’s “Access All ASOS” campaign ran effectively on Twitter and Instagram, the brand had to first test a wider variety of platforms before it was ready to optimize for the best-performing channels in its second round of promotion.

Content optimization means assessing analytics and planning for the next phase of creation and distribution. It not only ensures content is optimized for specific channels and demographics, but also provides the data to justify the paid promotion of certain pieces of content.

As digital media buys for luxury brands increasingly focus on social content, having a firm methodology for measuring and improving campaigns is absolutely vital. And if they put one in place, content marketing ROI won’t just be an aspirational fantasy.

This is an excerpt from “The Marketer’s Guide to Luxury Content.”

The post How Luxury Brands Should Tackle Content Marketing Attribution appeared first on Contently.

While output levels are high, so, too, is quality. Brands are pushing the envelope by experimenting with new formats and finding fresh ways to leverage the tried-and-true tactics they’ve used in the past.

Here, we look at the latest European marketing trends to examine how top brands are consistently creating world-class content marketing campaigns.

Mobile video

With more than 1 billion active mobile subscriptions in Europe, video consumption on smartphones and tablets has been steadily rising, and European audiences are among those devoting more time to mobile video. In Austria, 34 percent of consumers said they watch more mobile video now than they did a year ago. In Italy, that figure was 35 percent; in Sweden, 36; and in Denmark and Finland, 39 percent.

Other studies show that smartphones and tablets are gaining on desktops. It’s a neck-and-neck race between tablets and desktops in Germany, while nearly as many Italian consumers choose to watch videos on their tablets as on a desktop computer.

As a result of this evolution, marketers across Europe are shoring up their mobile video investments. For example, since 2013, Philips has been running a digital campaign to promote its Click & Style shaving toolkit that uses mobile interactive video to let potential customers experiment with shaving. Created by Ogilvy & Mather Düsseldorf—and using video technology from Rapt Media—the campaign, available in four languages, was touted as “the world’s first fully mobile-enabled interactive video experience.”

“Designed to Play” produced some impressive results: The average viewing time of the mobile video surpassed four minutes, and consumers engaged with the media an average of three to four times.

As Lenze Boonstra, head of the global marketing team for Philips Personal Care put it, “Given the fact that we are the first ones to launch a mobile-enabled campaign like this, I think we have delivered something promising.”

Social media-exclusive content

Brands are quickly realizing the importance of providing their social media followers with original media assets. Let’s look again at Adidas. For six months prior to its 2014 FIFA World Cup campaign, the German athletic brand and its social media agency, We Are Social, collected photos and footage of Adidas-sponsored soccer players.

This exclusive content was pushed out for the brand’s “#allin or nothing” social campaign. With 1,000 images and 160 videos at its disposal, Adidas doubled its YouTube audience, attracted over a million new fans on Facebook, and generated 2.1 million mentions on Twitter—more than any other FIFA World Cup sponsor.

Ready to rumble. #allin or nothing #WorldCup pic.twitter.com/Jtnp0zIgch

— adidas Football (@adidasfootball) June 14, 2014

“The work Adidas did during the 2014 World Cup was outstanding in terms of content planning at scale,” Della Dora said. “It created thousands of pieces of content in order to be able to react to every single crucial moment of the competition in real time on social. It was a huge success and created a real relationship between a soccer ball and the soccer enthusiasts.”

Adidas has said that it achieved record soccer-related sales amounting to 2 billion euros as a result of the campaign. Eight million jerseys and 14 million soccer balls in the Brazuca design were sold. That’s 1 million more balls than Adidas sold in 2010.

In addition to more than 1.5 million social conversations, Adidas received 5.8 million new followers across all social platforms and 917,000 #allin hashtag mentions on Twitter. And the @brazuca Twitter account grew by 603 percent, generating over 530,000 user interactions.

Brand series

Longform video, specifically the concept of the brand series, is a rapidly emerging format among marketers, who promote everything from blouses to beer with collections of high-quality videos that embody the spirit and lifestyle associated with their brands. Since 2012, Prada’s women’s-only Miu Miu label has been enlisting female filmmakers to help craft its feminine films, which together are known as The Miu Miu Women’s Tales. In addition to being available online, the short films are routinely screened at the Venice Film Festival. In keeping with the mobile video trend, they can also be viewed by way of a project-specific app.

Perrier’s five-part brand series, called Tales of the District, uses animation, narration, and its distinctive shade of green to tell the story of a man who is besotted by the hostess of fictional locale District Perrier, which followers can find on Tumblr.

Dutch brewing company Heineken, meanwhile, earned itself more than 6.5 million views for The Experiment, a three-minute original video that’s part of the ongoing global project “Enjoy Heineken Responsibly,” designed to encourage drinking in moderation. Launched in 2014 with the slogan “Dance More, Drink Slow,” the campaign has been promoted in more than 20 countries and demonstrates how a great DJ can decrease the amount that party-goers drink. Additional video content, like a behind-the-scenes look at DJ Armin van Buuren and a video offering even more insight into “the experiment,” creates an in-depth brand experience.

Inspirational storytelling

Video may be popular, but don’t let it detract from the value of longform written content. French mountaineering equipment brand Quechua uses it on its blog, Hiking on the Moon, where readers can find inspirational adventure stories of mountain-loving customers like photographer Théo Giacometti through episodic posts. With the help of articles in both English and French, photography, maps, and video, the audience can follow him through Norway’s Hardangervidda National Park, where reindeer run wild.

The Swiss beverage brand Schweeps has also covered immersive territory with the digital culture and lifestyle magazine Villa Schweppes, which features articles on music festivals, Parisian bars, and fashion trends along with cocktail recipes. DJs, designers, and mixologists designed to inspire readers to adopt the brand’s hip nightlife vibe.

Widespread influencer marketing

Last year, a Dutch startup called Influencers at Work launched Europe’s first fully automated influencer marketing service, and already, we’re starting to see major brands including Lancôme Italy and Beck’s Brewery embrace influencer campaigns.

To promote its Hypnôse Volume-à-Porter mascara, Lancôme recently partnered with social media influencers and bloggers to create a series of Facebook and Instagram videos. The campaign reportedly reached more than 5 million users and saw engagement rates as high as 2.5 percent. For Beck’s, influencers helped the beer brand promote a consumer contest with 30 social media posts, which reached 6.8 million consumers and generated 170,000 social interactions.

This is an excerpt from the e-book “State of Content Marketing: Europe.”

The post 5 Content Marketing Trends Sweeping Europe appeared first on Contently.

I’m not alone here, as the microbrewery craze is growing so quickly that, according to the Brewers Association, roughly two new breweries open every day. Besides the issue of market saturation, many breweries are experience a different type of oversaturation: names.

We officially live in a world in which nearly every single beer pun will be trademarked.

That’s right. Per The Wall Street Journal, the sharp increase in microbreweries is leaving a depleted pool for creative names for the latest brew. In the words of a Brendan Palfreyman, a beer trademark lawyer, “We’re literally running out of words in the English language that haven’t already been taken.”

I’m not too worried myself, as my hypothetical brewery will also double as a mini-golf course (with bleacher seating so patrons can watch all players come up the 18th green). But for the rest of brewers in America, well, it’s not like there’s a massive glossary of beer terms readily available for puns.

So, breweries of the world, we’re here to help.

First, below is a list of beers that I thought of, Googled, and found out that they’re already taken. (I curse the genius who already got Hoptimus Prime.)

Hoptimus Prime

Beerly Beloved

Hop on Pop

How Now Brown Ale

Hopportunity Knocks

Duck, Duck, Gose

Hop of the Morning

Baby Got Bock

Bock to the Future

I’ll Be Bock

Bock to School

Gosebusters

Hopsided

Sittin’ on Hop of the World

Now for some originals. You’re welcome in advance.

When It Grains, It Pours

There’s No Place Like Foam

Hopulus Rift

Whitewater Crafting

Skip to My Brew

An Evening in Aroma

Yours, Mine, Sours

Hopposites Attract

Froth IR(P)A

Man of the Froth

Round of Hopplause

The Yuengling Brothers

Beauty and the Yeast (see also: potential Lifetime films about hygiene)

How Brewed (the Olsen twins expand their empire)

Ain’t Too Proud to Keg

KangaBrew

The Pils Are Alive

Hoppsi-Daisy

Gose Tell It on the Mountain

The Stoutsiders

Kriek-o-dile

The post Fixing the Beer Industry’s Pun Problem appeared first on Contently.

Fast forward 70 years, and most of Mountain Dew’s original history has been painted over to attract a “younger, outdoorsy generation.” (Kids just don’t drink moonshine the way they used to.) Even the drink’s singular green color scheme has been diversified with a motley of new flavors—over 40 since the early ’90s. Many of these spinoffs were designed or selected by consumers through hype campaigns with painfully punny names, like DEWmocracy or FanDEWmonium.

The company’s latest promotion, DEWcision 2016, asks fans to vote a discontinued flavor—either Baja Blast or Pitch Black—back onto shelves permanently. It has less to do with concluding which flavor is more marketable; Mountain Dew likely chose these two specific flavors because it knew both could succeed. Rather, it’s an incredible exercise in exploiting consumers’ nostalgia and love of Mountain Dew-themed hashtags.

Also, a love of challenges. Over the past couple of months, Mountain Dew has pushed fans to complete a number of ridiculous challenges to rack up votes for their favorite flavor.

Let’s just say that things really got out of hand.

1. #DEWggroCrag

Let’s start with one of the least bizarre moments from Mountain Dew’s campaign. In June, Mountain Dew teamed up with Nickelodeon to make every millennial’s dream come true by bringing back the infamous Aggro Crag from GUTS—one of the many Nickelodeon shows from the ’90s that pitted kids in neon shirts against other kids in neon shirts in a battle to the death.

Former GUTS host Mike O’Malley even showed up to interact with the crowd and hawk DVD box sets of Yes Dear on the sly.

2. #DewTower

Perhaps the most impressive fan challenge was this #DewTower by Nancy Calvillo. The symmetry here is astounding. An architecture school should reach out with a scholarship.

Nothing’s as good as a #DewTower @MountainDew I #VotePitchBlack pic.twitter.com/Sjn5ydMBsl

— Nancy Calvillo (@nsc97471) June 21, 2016

I actually got in touch with Calvillo because her Twitter feed is drowning in Mountain Dew. On top of having competed in all the challenges, she voted for Pitch Black 100 times every day for over two weeks. She told me that though she enjoys Baja Blast, she can already get it at Taco Bell and ultimately likes “Pitch Black a bit better [because] it has the best grape flavor I have ever tasted.”

3. #DewBath

Lucas, I feel you. Because while you may have nothing better to do than make a #DewBath, I have nothing better to do than write about your #DewBath.

We have nothing better to do #DewBath #VoteBajaBlast pic.twitter.com/cRu1ezkYLI

— Lucas (@musical_lucas) June 8, 2016

Is this peak brand evangelism? I think it is.

4. #DewPong

If you squint hard enough, you can see a moral victory for Mountain Dew here. These Los Angeles lax bros in training could be chugging some Natty Ice they bought with their older brother’s ID, but instead, they’re helping Mountain Dew’s marketing team make a tough decision with a heated game of Dew pong.

It’s probably only a matter of time before Mountain Dew shoves them in a van and takes them around the country to battle other #brandevangelists. Personally, I think Nancy Calvillo could kick their butt.

.@MountainDew #DewPong in LA! #PitchBlackWon #DoTheDew pic.twitter.com/5mPHuY5SHL

— Truman (@tr_m4n) June 16, 2016

5. #DewDye

You have to admire the audacity of Mountain Dew’s marketing team, which at some point must have sat down in a meeting and said, “You know what? People probably love us enough to turn themselves into a leprechaun.” They were right!

#DEWdye #VoteBajaBlast pic.twitter.com/JYbBAXOfON

— Micheal King (@KingTaderNutz) May 16, 2016

Sadly, we’re near the end of a spectacular era in American advertising. DEWcision 2016 voting has ended, and the winner will be announced on Thursday, July 14. It’s hard to say who’s the true winner here, but really, I think it’s all of us.

The post 5 Incredible Moments From #DEWcision 2016, Which Really Got Out of Hand appeared first on Contently.

An executive at a major pharmaceutical company recently asked this question of Amanda Gutterman, VP of growth at digital media company Dose, which operates Dose.com and OMG Facts. The executive wanted to make sure his brand would appeal to teenagers, not only with an eye toward future sales, but also in order to attract top young talent.

Gutterman’s response? Be real. “Gen Z isn’t anti-corporate or anti-brand,” she said. “They just have an amazing nose for B.S.”

The pharmaceutical executive, who preferred to go unnamed, is hardly alone in his concern.

Based on new research, Goldman Sachs recently stated that “Gen Z matters more than Millennials.” These digital natives—generally classified as consumers born between 1998 and 2008—now represent 22 percent of the U.S. population, putting them right behind millennials (23 percent) and ahead of Gen X (21 percent). By 2020, they’ll make up a staggering 40 percent of all consumers.

How can brands relate to the first generation of kids who learned to swipe before they could walk? Here’s what you need to know about Gen Z to speak to them as a brand, create content that’s relevant to their lives, and steer clear of the B.S.

1. 63 percent of Gen Z want marketing from ‘real’ people

A survey conducted last year by digital agency Deep Focus found that 63 percent of Gen Z prefers to see “real” people in ads, while just 37 percent favor celebrities. And close to 70 percent are more interested in content with a “realistic ending” rather than a polished but unlikely narrative.

Swift, a creative agency based in Portland, calls Gen Z “walking ad blockers primed to avoid content that is not a trusted connection.” Winning them over matters, though, because 93 percent of parents say their Gen Z kids influence family spending decisions and household purchases.

“You don’t want to come onto a platform like Snapchat and be perceived as someone’s weird uncle trying to be cool—’Hey kids, I’m one of you, let’s play,'” Gutterman said. “That’s a trap social media managers fall into. When brands pander to this generation, that’s when they lose.”

“You don’t want to come onto a platform like Snapchat and be perceived as someone’s weird uncle trying to be cool.”

One way to avoid this is to enlist the help of social influencers, effectively putting a buffer between the marketing message and the brand.

“This generation is more likely to line up around the block at Vidcon [the annual online video conference] than stand outside a TV show taping,” said Alexa Tonner, co-founder and EVP of San Francisco-based social influencer agency Collectively.

After all, being a social influencer and being part of Gen Z is often one and the same. Gen Z is more likely than other generations to be “social creators” themselves; recent research shows about one-third of U.S. social media users between 16 and 34 are social influencers, meaning they either have a sizable following online or actively partner with brands.

2. Facebook is their most important social network

If you were asked to name the platform that occupies the most of Gen Z’s time, you might guess Snapchat. You almost certainly wouldn’t guess Facebook, which has a reputation for attracting older folks more than teens. But while Snapchat is the most-used platform for 51 percent of Gen Z, all the talk about teens and tweens shunning Facebook is largely a myth.

“Facebook is constantly innovating and bringing users all kinds of new reasons to use it.”

According to marketing agency Fluent, 67 percent of older Gen Zers regularly use Facebook, while 50 percent name the Facebook-owned Instagram—only one percentage point behind Snapchat. Facebook was also named by 26 percent of respondents as the social network they use “constantly,” compared with 23 percent for Snapchat. Nearly half of respondents said they log onto Facebook multiple times a day.

“The teens we surveyed directly actually classify Facebook as the most important social channel because it’s such a comprehensive directory of people and brands,” said Rick Albano, executive creative director at Swift. “For them, it’s like the modern-day phonebook. There’s a ton of information they don’t pay attention to—until they need it.”

Albano added that the social site’s ongoing efforts to enhance its user experience meet Gen Z’s evolving interests and needs. Over the past year, Facebook has launched customer support and content chatbots, acquired face-swapping app MSQRD, and introduced live-streaming video product Facebook Live.

“Facebook is constantly innovating and bringing users all kinds of new reasons to use it,” Albano said.

Ferrara Candy Company, which markets candy brands like Trolli that count both Gen Z and millennials among their target consumers, sees “significantly higher engagement rates” with Instagram and Snapchat, has success with Facebook’s paid promotion, and also has its sights set on Facebook Live.

“The new Facebook Live feature is something we will be leveraging in the near future to drive engagement with our Gen Z fans,” Jill Manchester, Ferrara Candy’s SVP of marketing and brand strategy, told me.

3. Gen Z wants to participate

Don’t expect Gen Z to simply sit back and watch, on Facebook or anywhere else. Based on a global study, PR and communications agency Zeno Group believes companies must give Gen Z “a job to do” and “let them be brand advocates.” Interactivity and content collaboration, therefore, are key content principles.

Collectively—which works with brands like Old Navy, Gap Factory, Zappos, and Pandora—stresses that while Gen Z is inclined to participate in the brand experience, they’ll only do it when they respect the brand. Alexa Tonner advises companies to make sure their content accurately reflects their brand image and voice, be it through humor or emotional subject matter, to ensure it doesn’t come off as forced.

“Be empowering,” she said, “not overbearing.”

With that in mind, Collectively recently helped internet radio company Pandora promote its new Thumbprint Radio feature with user-generated content.

“The campaign was all about capturing that #nofilter reaction when your favorite jam comes on, and our collaborators did just that with humor and amazing dance moves,” Collectively wrote in a case study about the campaign. In other words, it used regular people, and asked them to join in on the fun.

4. 79 percent of Gen Z is interested in VR

Gen Z loves digital video on platforms like YouTube and Facebook, to the point they’re now watching considerably more internet video than TV. The next technology to consume them, however, will be virtual reality.

According to a study conducted by Greenlight VR and online research firm Touchstone Research, 79 percent of U.S. internet users 10 to 18 are interested in VR—six percentage points more than millennials.

“It’s the ultimate empathy machine,” Gutterman said. “It does more than just entertain, it deeply educates and inspires people on an emotional level in a way that less sensory communication methods can’t.”

At the moment, the VR market is still ramping up. Oculus Rift—the flagship VR headset from Facebook-owned Oculus—was only released in March of this year, while the HTC Vive came out in April. Samsung’s Gear VR has been available since November, but Sony’s PlayStation VR won’t launch until this October, and we’re still waiting for Microsoft HoloLens, which promises augmented reality.

Still, by this past January, Google had shipped upwards of 5 million units of its inexpensive Google Cardboard headset to help build the hype. Brands that routinely target Gen Z, like Gillette and McDonald’s, are investing in VR experiences already, but another course of action for companies is to offer branded Google Cardboard headsets along with their custom VR experience. Touchstone Research and Greenlight VR’s findings show that, so far, consumers are responding favorably to this approach.

5. You have 8 seconds to engage them

It’s been said that Gen Z has “highly evolved eight-second filters” for content. But that doesn’t mean they can’t, or won’t, pay attention to worthwhile content. Collectively’s Tonner points out that this is the same generation known for watching hours of live video-game streams and 20-minute YouTube beauty tutorials through to the end.

“A lot of people are making really beautiful things deserving of that attention,” Gutterman explained. “That’s why they’re flipping. These are people with different expectations.”

Swift attempts to reach them by creating branded emojis for companies like Starbucks and an animated GIF keyboard for Hot Pockets.

Ferrara Candy produces GIF content for Twitter and Tumblr, but went with slightly longer, 60-second spots in a recent 1980s-inspired video series featuring NBA star James Harden and Trolli Sour Brite Crawlers. The videos generated more than 1.3 million views across all platforms and more than 1,500 shares on Facebook alone.

“Gen Z can tend to tune out if you don’t catch their attention immediately,” Manchester said. “We have this in mind every time we’re creating content for share-ability.”

But while animated GIFs and video can help brands grab their attention fast, they’re not necessarily enough to keep them watching.

“They are drawn to voices and personalities they identify with or aspire to,” Tonner said. “Brands that embrace that kind of voice are doing really well.”

The post 5 Things Marketers Need to Know About Gen Z appeared first on Contently.