But with the dizzying pace of new AI-powered tools released almost weekly, marketers can have a hard time deciding how to integrate AI into their content strategies.

Let’s explore the latest AI-driven technologies and their impact on the content landscape, as well as discuss how businesses can stay ahead by leveraging these tools effectively.

Generative AI and How It’s Changing Content Strategy

Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that focuses on creating new content, data, or information based on existing patterns or structures. Essentially, it involves training machine learning models, such as neural networks, on vast amounts of data to learn underlying patterns, relationships, and structures.

Once trained, these models can generate new, original output in various forms, such as text, images, music, or even design elements.

According to a Botco.ai report, more than 50 percent of marketers use AI for text, audio, and video creation, with email copy being the tactic most often created using chat AI tools.

ChatGPT, for example, is an advanced generative AI model that can understand context, answer questions, and produce high-quality content. This technology has the potential to revolutionize many industries by automating creative tasks, enhancing human creativity, and generating novel solutions to complex problems. Chat AI is reshaping content strategies as it brings new possibilities and opportunities to the table. Here’s how it’s making an impact:

• Scale content creation: Generative AI can help automate the content creation process, generating drafts or ideas for articles, social media posts, or ad copy, saving time and effort for content strategists.
• Personalization: By analyzing user behavior and preferences, generative AI can create personalized content, tailoring the messaging and format to suit individual users’ needs and interests, thus increasing engagement and conversion rates.
• Enhanced creativity: Generative AI can generate novel ideas, combinations, or formats that humans might not think of, pushing the boundaries of content strategies and inspiring content creators to think outside the box.
• Improved SEO: AI-driven tools can optimize content for search engines, ensuring content uses the right keywords, structures, and formats, making it easier for audiences to discover the content organically.
• Experimentation and iteration: AI-driven content strategies can quickly test and iterate on different content variations, learning what works best and continuously refining the approach.

By embracing AI tools within the content process, strategists can enhance their workflows, stay ahead of the competition, and deliver more engaging, relevant, and innovative content to their audiences.

AI & Google’s Algorithm: What You Need to Know About SERP & SEO

Google has integrated AI into its search algorithms with RankBrain, an AI-driven component that helps process search queries. This development has impacted SEO strategies significantly, putting an emphasis on high-quality, relevant content.

For example, content that effectively answers user queries and provides valuable information is more likely to rank higher in search results. The focus on user experience and engagement has also increased, with factors like page load speed and mobile-friendliness playing a crucial role. SEO professionals must now adapt to the ever-evolving AI-driven algorithms to ensure their content ranks well and stays ahead of the competition.

In fact, in May 2023, Google announced that it’s introducing generative AI into its search platform, aiming to transform information organization and answer complex questions more efficiently.

Accessible through Search Labs, the new Search Generative Experience will improve the search experience by understanding topics faster, uncovering new insights, and simplifying tasks. The AI-powered snapshots will provide key information with links for deeper exploration, and a conversational mode will allow users to ask follow-up questions with context carried over.

For content strategists, this development emphasizes how important it is to feature a wide range of voices and sources while highlighting web content to ensure their work remains relevant and accessible in the new era of search.

Brands Creating Effective AI-Powered Content Strategies

Deadpool actor and co-owner of Mint Mobile, Ryan Reynolds, submitted a prompt to ChatGPT to generate ad copy that included a joke and a swear word and also mentioned Mint Mobile’s holiday promotion. Reynolds then read the AI-generated script on camera, describing it as both “eerie” and “mildly terrifying.”

This innovative use of AI for commercial scripting is part of Mint Mobile’s ongoing efforts to stand out as a budget-friendly option and a challenger in the wireless industry. This ad also underlines the potential of AI tools like ChatGPT in automating creative work and streamlining marketing processes.

This year Patrón Tequila unveiled an innovative way to celebrate National Margarita Day through a partnership with global superstar Becky G. The brand introduced an AI-powered tool named the Patrón Dream Margarita generator, which lets users craft their dream margarita. By responding to prompts about location, flavor, and garnish, the AI tool generates personalized art pieces depicting their ideal margarita, which can then be shared on social media.

Users who shared their creations on Twitter or Instagram Stories could win tickets to a Becky G. concert in New York City, along with other benefits. This move underscores Patrón’s commitment to exploring emerging technologies and engaging with virtual communities in novel ways.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid When Implementing Chat AI Into Your Content Strategy

We all know the popular Spider-Man adage, “With great power comes great responsibility,” and that’s certainly the case when using AI. While generative AI technology is seeing explosive growth, it’s still in its infancy. Here are five common pitfalls to avoid when implementing these AI technologies:

1. Relying Solely on AI-Generated Content

It’s important to maintain a balance between human and AI-generated content to ensure authenticity and relatability. For example, while AI-generated content is efficient, it may lack the nuance and creativity that a human writer can bring to the table.

2. Not Fact-Checking AI Outputs

ChatGPT itself acknowledges that the information it generates can include inaccurate or even made-up information. It’s imperative to ensure you have a thorough fact-checking step in your content process.

3. Ignoring Content Optimization

Make sure to optimize your content for both users and search engines, taking into account factors like readability, keyword usage, and metadata.

4. Not Redirecting Time Savings Back Into Content

There’s no doubt that leveraging AI tools accelerates content production. But it’s a mistake not to invest that saved time into other areas in your content strategy to maintain high-quality standards.

5. Don’t Overlook AI Ethics

Be mindful of potential biases in the AI algorithms and the need for transparency when utilizing AI in your content strategy. This includes acknowledging the use of AI-generated content when appropriate and ensuring that output is accurate and reliable.

As we move forward into the future of AI-driven content creation, it’s crucial for businesses to continue exploring new ways to harness the power of AI and stay informed about the latest advancements in the field. This includes keeping an eye on new AI models and platforms that can help improve content quality, as well as understanding how AI technologies are shaping user behavior and expectations.

Subscribe to The Content Strategist newsletter to stay in the loop about advances in AI content strategy and digital transformation.

The post Revolutionizing Content Strategies: The Impact of Generative and Chat AI on Modern Marketing appeared first on Contently.

I was high on the grind myself recently, fresh out of Uberflip’s stellar Conex conference and sitting in Cleveland for Content Marketing World, typing so fast my laptop was (almost) billowing smoke. Imagine my surprise when one speaker after another looked into the audience, all of us vibrating with energy, our travel coffee mugs plastered with stickers that said “Get Shit Done,” and told us explicitly to slow down.

Slow down? Were they serious? You should have heard the crowd laughing. Marketers don’t slow down. We ideate, pitch, publish, and analyze, and then we shove all our data into a Rube Goldberg machine marked “Optimize” so we can do it again. If a sales team’s motto is Always Be Closing, the marketing team’s motto is Always Be Creating.

That’s the problem.

When a content program demands that every stakeholder has her nose to the grindstone, things inevitably spin out of control. It’s really hard to keep scaling while ensuring every piece of content adheres to your key objectives and centralized brand voice. At Conex, Jay Baer from Convince&Convert called the grind “random acts of content,” and he practically pleaded with the audience to opt out.

Baer wasn’t alone. Slowing down was the hot topic most marketing conference speakers explored this year. At Content Marketing World, OrbitMedia’s Andy Crestodina told the crowd that old blog posts with broken links and images will drag your site down faster into the abyss than your shiny new blog posts can keep it afloat. MarketingProfs chief content officer Ann Handley told me marketers need to take things off their to-do lists before they add more tasks. And at Conex, Neil Patel told us that his team only publishes one blog post a week. “But here’s the thing,” he said, arching that ubiquitous eyebrow. “We update 90 old blog posts per month.”

Has overproduction landed you in content chaos?

We’ve written quite a bit about the dangers of content production without a central strategy. The ugly truth is that a lot of programs start with content marketing priorities that make sense—when things get tough, deadlines pile up, and leads need to be generated, however, those strategies are the first thing to get thrown out the window. You may recognize this as “back burner syndrome,” or that familiar set-up when your boss asks you to check into something … but only after you’ve completed the other 25 things on your list.

Content chaos can feel like a pervasive anxiety, and it’s contagious. If you don’t have workflows mapped out, or if you don’t have templates, every new project is a free-for-all. Chaos is what keeps blog posts in editing hell for weeks at a time, but it’s also what burns out young writers and makes them lose faith in company leadership.

So, if you’re not sure who’s responsible for what or can’t figure out who approved this off-topic video, you may be in content chaos. And you may need to slow way, way down.

What do content marketers recommend other than “slow down”?

You can put away the stress ball. Ann Handley, Jay Baer, and Neil Patel aren’t telling you to stop working completely. They’re just asking you to de-emphasize your content output, the way the industry asked us all to de-emphasize clicks a couple years ago. There are more important—and frankly, more interesting—pursuits

Instead of giving priority to every new piece of content, Baer suggests looking at your brand’s output the way a TV studio views programming. “Not every show on AMC is The Walking Dead, right?” he told a crowd in Toronto. “And yes, most of us watched Game of Thrones every Sunday, but HBO has 23 other hours in the day to run programming. Some of the stuff your brand publishes will be Game of Thrones, and some of it will be 30-minute documentaries. And some of it will be reruns, and some of it will be old classic movies the network has licensed.” That means you’re supposed to put together some of your content with minimal effort, because not everything is going to draw a huge audience. It’s okay to publish more when you have the time, but you shouldn’t sweat bullets to get out 25 original tweets a day while working on your 2020 plan.

Baer also described his methods for cleaning up old content. The general consensus is that auditing and updating is far, far more important than ideating and publishing. He calls it the R.O.T. audit, and it goes like this:

• Redundant content from your archive should be deleted or merged with other articles. Even if two posts aren’t exactly identical, each piece of content should address subject matter with a fresh angle.
• Obsolete content should be updated with the newest company missives, stances on industry topics, and housekeeping information. If a prospect finds your website via search, they’re going to take information your bloggers used in 2015 as gospel, so make sure it’s still right.
• Trivial content that no longer honors the brand should be deleted. If that web series from years ago was bad, just get rid of it. If a potential customer finds something of yours online, they’re going to assume it’s still a reflection of your brand’s mission.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B1HQF1ZJgnt/

Is updating old blog posts enough? What else can I do?

I know your heart is starting to race again. You’re a marketer, so you hear “slow down” and you think, “Okay, great. I slowed down. I can check that off my list, and now I’m going to slowly do 100 other things before lunch.”

Though Neil Patel agreed with Baer on the value of updating old work, he had even more specific instructions for content marketers looking to do less and think more. “Push your best content pieces to Tumblr and Medium and LinkedIn, in addition to publishing on your homepage,” he said. “Google doesn’t penalize identical content this way, and it’s social-bound publishers are series of channels that are often ignored. Encourage your writers to post entire blog posts to their LinkedIns and link back to the originals.”

Once you fold other publication methods into your distribution, you can also translate your entire archive into “at least two other languages,” Patel said. He recommends choosing languages spoken in nations with high GDPs. This multilingual expansion has been a key part of his blog’s insane growth over the last few years.

How do I tell my boss I need to slow down?

According to Ann Handley, content marketers feel overwhelmed when they become involved in too many tiny projects. If you’re the sole copy (or editorial) person on your team, you may find that your colleagues want your eyes on every single piece of written content that goes out the door. While flattering, that kind of expectation isn’t tenable.

Do what you can to train your colleagues ahead of time on small assets. Your design team, for instance, should have some guidelines on putting started copy together so your edit team isn’t stuck fixing the same errors every week. Your legal team should understand the decisions you’re making, and you should be able to anticipate their comments. “Don’t let everything on your plate feel like it’s of equal importance,” Handley said, “and prioritize the campaigns you know (from data) are useful to, and appreciated by, consumers.”

Of course, if you sell this recalibration effort to your boss as “working smarter, not harder,” it’ll sound a lot better than “I’m doing less.” Marketing leaders aren’t asking everyone to cease production in 2020, we’re just hoping to make fewer errors, experience fewer headaches, and focus on projects that speak directly to customers. Anything else is just noise.

The post Better vs. New: How Content Marketers Can Reset Their Priorities appeared first on Contently.

Videos shorter than 14 seconds can often feel irreverent, disturbing, or evocative, simply because they don’t offer any context. One of my favorites is this clip of a Greek Orthodox baptism ceremony (which looks pretty intense for the baby), cut with audio from The Big Lebowski.

Why is this such a great video haiku? It begins with action (baby being dunked in holy water), and within just a few seconds, the conceit of the joke is obvious. The baby is Lebowski, and the priest is interrogating him. By the time you’ve realized what’s happening and you begin to laugh, the video’s over. This short runtime encourages a replay, and it’s exactly the kind of weird dissonance that would inspire me to share in a group text.

Now, I’m not telling marketers to start putting Coen brothers audio on weird clips they find online, but I am asking you to borrow a few tactics. Video, whether from Reddit meme-lords or media companies, is the backbone of the internet. You shouldn’t forge ahead into video production without analyzing what the greats have done before you.

Here are 10 tips for video marketers, straight from movie studios, pop stars, mainstream publishers, and media companies.

1. Create video you’d actually want to see

We often counsel brands to value customer experience over intuition. However, before you start creating a video strategy, you should still take some time to prioritize yourself and your team. When you’re brainstorming, try to think of videos you would actually watch if they came from somewhere else.

Allow yourself to get a little weird too. This is the internet, after all. If you’re into something, odds are you’re not alone. W Magazine took a chance with its ASMR Interview series, and by challenging celebrity guests to create beloved cult content, the video team found a few unexpected gems. Rapper Cardi B, it turns out, is a fantastic ASMRtist, as evidence by her W ASMR video, which has almost 25 million views. If someone on W’s team hadn’t already been an ASMR fan, they wouldn’t have known to pitch the series.

2. Make different cuts for different social platforms

It’s a good rule of thumb to avoid uploading long videos to social channels. People scrolling through feeds aren’t likely to stop and watch something 10 minutes long. If it looks good, they’ll either click through to your site or save it for later.

Use social to drive readers to your site. Post flashy images or “sizzle reels” from your video product and encourage those curious to hit the “link in bio,” if you’re on Instagram. You can put the link right in the post on Twitter or Facebook.

Chopping up video in different forms for social distribution is a strategy used by modern pop stars and movie studios alike. You can see how Taylor Swift’s social media team prepped for the release of her 2019 single “You Need to Calm Down.” Before dropping her music video, Swift posted eight still shots, one short clip, and one GIF from the video to her Instagram. Her team also evidently distributed this text-based clip to all the guest stars in the music video, and they each posted it to their feeds in the hours leading up to the release.

My friend @TaylorSwift13 asked me to be in her new music video, “You Need To Calm Down.” It premieres tomorrow! Now I need to calm down. pic.twitter.com/NQFMY0e12q

— The Ellen Show (@TheEllenShow) June 16, 2019

If you’re launching a video campaign that your team is especially proud of, borrow a page out of Taylor Swift’s book (as bedazzled as it is) and get your stakeholders involved in promotion. Hand them the assets they’ll need, and produce these assets by chopping up your primary video.

3. Action and dialogue in the first three seconds

Although you should make video with your target audience in mind, you can’t create video hoping that every viewer gives you undivided attention. Your target audience won’t be settling into a home theater with a beer and no extra devices, ready to focus solely on what you’ve made. Realistically, they’re watching on their phone on the subway, or they’re scrolling on their office desktop while picking at a salad.

For this reason, you don’t want to start off with a company logo or some unnecessary filler. Viewers are supposed to care about the story in the video more than the source. You can simply drag that logo to the end of the video and leave it there.

The first few seconds of any video are prime real estate. Just look at how all movie studios now place five seconds of flashy action before every trailer on YouTube. It’s like a mini trailer for a trailer, which is a condemnation of our shrinking attention spans, but don’t think about it too long. It’s just the reality of the internet now, and your brand needs to create accordingly.

4. Give your video series time to take off

There’s an understanding among publishers of comic books and serialized novels that stories with several installments can take time to ramp up. That’s especially true in TV, where shows, even ones with significant hype, build up a viewership over time thanks to word of mouth.

You can see the lasting effect in this graph depicting Game of Thrones viewership:

When you’re creating episodic video in a series, you want to wait until the third installment to figure out your ROI. Then you can decide whether you want to axe the project or green-light more episodes. In short, give people a chance to get on board.

5. Cultivate an audience by listening to what they have to say

One great example of a video campaign that addresses the audience’s desires directly is Wired’s Autocorrect Series. The conceit is simple: Celebrities answer the most popular questions about themselves that people type into Google. That’s it.

It’s a genius formula: Beloved celebrity + exclusive on-camera interview + only the questions average people want answered. It works because Wired values search data over editorial opinion.

When you’re in the drawing board stage, be conscious of digital habits. Make note of the angles and styles that give you pause. Keep in mind, even if you’re working for a B2B brand, your target audience is ultimately people. They may be watching your videos about software or business solutions, but they still need to be entertained.

6. Showcase your best on-camera talent, not your execs

Although GQ certainly has a robust team of editorial strategists, writers, and hosts, the men’s lifestyle publication often outsources its video content to hosts who can explain things with optimum charisma and insight.

GQ could have had its film editor or pop culture reporters break down actor Jon Hamm’s career on camera, but that video would never have gotten as much traction as the alternative. In GQ’s popular video series, actors and creators comment on their own resumes and portfolios, which makes for a far more interesting trip down memory lane than a critic’s round-up.

7. Figure out what your competitors are doing and do it better

It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and every dog knows how to use Final Cut Pro. To get ahead, check out the multimedia offerings of your competitors and one-up them.

them, a queer publication from Conde Nast, nabbed the drag makeover series idea from Logo, the queer television network. When the drag queen reality competition series RuPaul’s Drag Race was originally airing on Logo (it later moved to Vh1 for Season 6), Logo had a complementary web series called “Drag Makeup Tutorial.” In that series, contestants from Drag Race take viewers step by step through their face-painting process. The videos were loosely based on YouTube’s popular make-up tutorial trend.

Conde Nast did Logo one better when it launched “Drag Me,” a video series in which Drag Race contestants make-over other celebrities using their signature styles. This way, viewers get to see their favorite contestants in drag as they show off their make-up skills. They get the bonus of seeing more celebrities undergo the drag transformation. It’s a pretty clear improvement on the original.

8. Optimize for mobile and use closed captions

NowThis, one of the most successful social video production companies, understands the value of catering to mobile viewers. Most of the company’s snippet-long videos are set to stock music, and they loop original footage alongside stock and archival clips.

Ideally, you’d watch the videos with the volume on to digest all the info. However, they’re designed to be accessible even if you’re scrolling on your phone with no headphones too. Every brand that distributes content on social media should take note.

Thousands of Swiss women walked out of their jobs and into the streets to demand equal pay (In partnership with @TIMESUPNOW #TIMESUP) pic.twitter.com/MAV3KBGe8l

— NowThis Impact (@nowthisimpact) June 17, 2019

9. Stick to ideas that inspire strong emotions

The Dodo, owned by Group Nine Media, is another video production company that specializes in social feeds. The Dodo team produces videos about animals, including wildlife, domesticated farm animals, animal rights, and everything related to pets.

https://www.instagram.com/p/By0tqR0FzXb/

Their content is optimized to be as emotionally resonant as possible. Most videos feel like someone chemically engineered them to make you feel giddy or furious. When it comes to The Dodo and emotional stories, there is no in-between.

10. Carve out a space for exclusivity

In addition to on-camera interviews and music explainers, Pitchfork sends reporters to sold-out concerts and posts the stylized footage on its YouTube channel. The publisher knows its audience. If you’re a regular Pitchfork reader, you’re probably into under-appreciated bands who aren’t playing arenas yet, which means you’re a great candidate to watch concert footage.

By securing the rights to concert footage and uploading it, Pitchfork makes itself into an exclusive destination for visuals that would otherwise require travel, ticket money, and the strain of standing in a crowded mosh-pit for four hours. In this way, they’re providing viewers with new value that’s difficult to access, which builds trust and commands authority.

The post 10 Video Tactics That Marketers Should Borrow From Media Companies appeared first on Contently.

As content marketing, product placement, and art blur together, there’s a space opening up for brands to make something unexpected. Provided, of course, it doesn’t come off like “My Journey to Self-Love, Sponsored by the J.M. Smucker Company and its Major Subsidiaries.”

Apple’s shifting relationship with product placement is s a microcosm of what’s happening in the industry. For years, the tech company quietly made deals to seed images of iPhones and Macbooks in popular television, but Fox has been running a message at the end of TV episodes featuring Apple products that cites “promotional consideration sponsored by Apple.” Now that Apple is developing its own TV shows, its executives are reportedly “squeamish” over the ways products will appear in programming.

Now that brands are creating their own content, many don’t need to pay for placement. In 2015, a movie about a toy brand (supported by that toy brand) was nominated for an Academy Award. The Lego Movie did not end up winning Best Original Song, but Lonely Island performed “Everything is Awesome” alongside several dancing, life-size mini figs. There wasn’t a huge to-do about The Lego Movie being an extremely successful bout of content marketing, partially because consumers aren’t always aware of corporate interests, and partially because the movie was just so damn good.

https://vimeo.com/318074749

We’re seeing even greater strides toward brands making content that’s recognized by prestigious, mainstream institutions. This spring, a documentary about a gay choir produced by the home-share platform AirBnB premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. What’s more, an original off-Broadway musical from Skittles was rumored to be in line for a Tony nomination, though it was eventually snubbed.

So, when will the first piece of content from a brand win mainstream accolades from a prestigious institution?

Who decides which content is prestigious?

It’s conceivable for a brand to produce a popular piece of art, and it’s possible for a brand to create good quality art. Consumers decide if something is popular. As long as the content is entertaining, the source isn’t as important.

Unfortunately for brands, defining prestige is up to the artists, critics, and influencers in the creative industry—you know, the folks who cringe when they hear the word “brand.” However, as that old guard tries to protect an outdated definition of prestige—being resistant to streaming networks and web series, for example—modern audiences are showing more flexibility.

Most modern audiences understand that entertainment is a business. Look no furhter than the widespread discussion on social media that erupted when Disney bought Fox. Any big Star Wars or Marvel fan knows their favorite characters are as much data points on a Disney spreadsheet as they are beloved heroes. You could argue that concepts like The Avengers or the Jedi, proliferated as they are across TV, social media, merchandising, comics, amusement parks, and video games, are just brands.

But that still leaves the lingering question: When will the first piece of prestigious branded content hit the scene? Using film as an example, I’ve mocked up a Venn diagram to explain where popularity, quality, and prestige intersect. Notice there’s nothing in the center—my best guess was Black Panther, but I welcome suggestions. Singin’ in the Rain is another possibility.

If a movie is popular with the masses and of pretty good quality, it’s usually not considered high art. See action comedies, superhero movies, and Star Wars. Meanwhile, if a movie is of good quality and considered prestigious, it probably didn’t blow the doors off the box office or earn mainstream appeal. See quiet indies, experimental art films, and period dramas. Finally, if a movie is popular with the masses and the Academy without actually being good quality, it is what one might call “Oscar bait.” Examples include The King’s Speech, Bohemian Rhapsody, Green Book, Argo, The Blind Side, and the definitive installment, Crash.

A brand could aim to make Oscar or Emmy bait content, but they could also try and create an irreverent, cult-beloved piece of art—the Skittles musical was an earnest attempt at that.

Rethinking the ROI of prestige

Charming the critics and art snobs of the world with content marketing isn’t an impossible feat; it’s just unprecedented. For marketers, achieving prestige isn’t a necessary objective, given that everything in their industry needs to hinge on measurable ROI. There is no measurable ROI for prestige or cultural impact or artistic clout—that’s kind of the point.

But what if a content marketing team hit the zeitgeist with a great piece of art at exactly the right time? It would have to exist purely for brand awareness, and the art itself couldn’t have any messaging about the brand—all the promotion and brand association would have to be implied. And it’s alright to imagine a marketing team developing a great film or TV pilot or novel—so many popular pieces of media are the product of fifteen songwriters or eight screenwriters, a gang of producers, and a director.

We may very well see a truly prestigious piece of content marketing in the next decade, whether that means it’s accepted into a film festival or wins a highbrow creative award. If a brand has any shot at creating art (as opposed to just marketing), it’ll be an argument for the melding of those two ideas. We know that popular franchises, characters, and creative projects can turn into brands, so why not the other way around?

The post When Will Content Marketing Count as Prestige Art? appeared first on Contently.

Chatbots are not a new invention, and in 2018, they’re everywhere. There are chatbot boyfriends, therapists, and a even a chatbot politician running for office in New Zealand, hoping to represent the country in 2020.

For businesses, chatbots open up a world of customer service possibilities. They help customers leave feedback, schedule appointments, and order products quicker. Some bots already live in messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, and while they might not offer as much conversation as SmarterChild, they can help you book a cab or order your favorite Starbucks drink. Evocreative predicts that 85 percent of customer interactions will be managed by chatbots by 2020. This stat strikes me as a little high, but I don’t discount the larger implication here: The way we experience customer service is changing rapidly.

What’s spurred the branded chatbot takeover? Mutual benefits for brands and customers. Retale recently surveyed U.S. millennial adult consumers, and 70 percent said they had a positive experience with chatbots in the past. And almost half of all U.S. consumers said they’d prefer to handle customer service interactions via some sort of messenger.

In many cases, companies will implement partial chatbot experiences. Sephora, for example, rolled out a chatbot last summer that can handle the beginning of a customer interaction on its own. People can schedule appointments or leave feedback through the bot, but it has to connect users to a human representative if it can’t address a customer’s questions.

Personally, I’m embracing the rise of the bots. Email and phone-based customer service interactions are often frustrating and full of terrible elevator music. I’m at least curious to see if bots can actually offer streamlined solutions to these woes. I also secretly hope that one day I’ll come across SmarterChild again, just to see another philosophical musing at the end of our interaction.

The post The Chatbot Revolution is Here appeared first on Contently.

His dying words were, “Trust no one.”

The murdered officer, codenamed “Deep Throat,” was actually a fictional character in the Season 1 finale of the television show The X-Files. (He was based on a real informant with the same codename who helped reporters break the Watergate scandal.) As a 10-year-old when this episode premiered, I was appropriately devastated.

Deep Throat’s fictional assassination by his own government came at a historic time in America. Fox launched The X-Files when faith in the American government had dropped to an all-time low. In fact, it came at a time when American faith in all institutions was at a low after falling steadily since the 1970s.

That trend, which X-Files captured in its decade of paranoid television, has continued until today, save for a brief climb in the late ’90s during the economic boom and a spike after 9/11. Per Pew Research’s annual survey, which asks people about their level of trust in government to do the right thing “most of the time,” here’s a snapshot of public confidence in the U.S. government over the decades:

By another measure, the Edelman Trust Barometer, which measures trust that various organizations and people will do the right thing on a scale of 0–100, three-quarters of governments around the world are distrusted by their citizens:

But it’s not just government. According to Gallup’s survey about public confidence in various institutions, administered every year since 1958, we’re losing trust in just about everything.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy argues that institutions have a social purpose and transcend individuals by creating norms and rules that people can count on. Basically, institutions are the building blocks of society. If we lose trust in an institution, dysfunction will follow until that institution is replaced by something else that can govern our behavior and make life predictable.

As a journalist and the founder of a company that helps businesses publish information, these charts are particularly vexing. (As of 2016, only 20 percent of Americans trust newspapers, per Gallup.) Distrust in the press threatens society. Democracy needs information to expose corruption and keep people informed. And distrust is certainly bad for business, bad for the economy, and so on.

There are surely bad actors in both the business and media worlds who don’t deserve our trust. But there are plenty of good actors, too. Knowing which of these to trust is more difficult than ever. And for those of us with a stake in our own institutions, gaining trust is more paramount than ever.

A Brief History Of (Losing) Trust

In 1977, political scientist Ronald Inglehart proposed that people lose trust in authorities and organizations as they become wealthier and less concerned with basic survival.

This theory may explain some of the general decline, but even the wealthiest people still trust some things—the power grid, capitalism, their therapists. The rest of us probably trust some brands. (I put my faith in Starbucks to not poison me no matter where I am in the world.) In many cases, it’s good to be skeptical. But when we look at the history of our most important institutions, there’s a simpler explanation for why we lose faith, even for institutions that helped us out in the past.

Before the industrial revolution, most societies put their trust in religious institutions. Yet over the years, fewer and fewer people have trusted religion. This resulted in the splintering of religious sects—protesting the religion that betrayed your trust by forming a new religion—which eventually led to more people abandoning religion entirely.

Then we generally believed in democratic governments. But trust in that institution eroded as well. We became more cynical that the democratic process was truly working.

As faith in government rose and fell, we turned to business for a bit until that deteriorated. Certain industries, however, managed to keep our trust even as the general business world lost it. These included banks, healthcare, education, charities, and the mass media. They were seen as more noble, more “in it” for the good of society. We now distrust all of those too; it just took a while longer. (See the charts above!)

Losing trust in an institution (or an individual) stems from betrayal: When we feel lied to, taken advantage of. In the case of all the institutions I mentioned above, the loss of trust boils down to one thing: greed.

The pattern here is pretty simple. Religious leaders broke laws, misused funds, and showed that what a church said didn’t square with reality. Political leaders made decisions based on money rather than the good of the people. Financial companies got rich at the expense of poorer people and the economy at large. Media companies tricked people with misinformation or sketchy information meant to increase attention and revenue. I could go on a lot longer.

Fortunately, both science and history show us how we can get trust back once more.

How We Can Build Trust Again

This year, eight professors from U.S. universities published a study in the journal PLOSone that offers some instructive insights on institutional trust. The professors decided to send 185 college students updates about a couple of government agencies they knew very little about: Nebraska state water regulators.

Every three months for a year and a half, students received news about the regulators. Compared to a control group, respondents who got the updates reported having more trust in the water agencies even though their overall trust of the government didn’t improve.

The conclusion from the study is simple yet important: Information and transparency build trust. The more we learn about what’s really going on inside an organization, the more favorably we judge it compared to whatever category it fits in.

However, the study also found that people who were pretty skeptical about everything in life didn’t report a big boost in trust in the water agencies just from learning more about them. Overcoming this general mistrust takes a little more.

According to Paul Zak, Claremont University neuroscientist and author of Trust Factor, we need to develop an emotional connection to regain trust or form a trusting connection with a person or institution. We can do this by engaging in activities that release the chemical Oxytocin in our brains—the neuro-mechanism by which ancient humans decided that other humans were safe enough to work with and trust. The behaviors that induce Oxytocin production include hugs, acts of kindness, and—get ready for it—telling emotional stories. (See Dr. Zak’s TED talk about Oxytocin here; it’s great!)

According to the Edelman Trust Barometer study, three-quarters of people believe that “a company can take specific actions that both increase profits and improve the economic and social conditions in the community where it operates.” We think companies are capable of doing business without betraying people.

What all this research tells us is if organizations are not just transparent about what they do, but forthcoming about how and why they are doing it, they’ll build trust—even in industries that have lost credibility.

We built our trust in all of our institutions, from religion to banks to newspapers, based on the stories they told us. Now let’s start telling more of them. Let’s start telling true ones.

The post Why Major Institutions Lost Public Trust, and How They Can Gain It Back appeared first on Contently.

Its high-quality branded documentary series, like “Two-a-Days” for Russell Athletics, integrate well into Vox’s portfolio of sites. Most notably, the work feels true to the brand, and not like a cheap play for impressions and clicks.

This summer at Cannes, I sat down with Armando Turco, GM of Vox Creative, to talk about setting content marketing goals, measuring engagement, and the future of social media. Check out the interview below, which was created as part of our Accountable Innovation Series in partnership with Magnet Media, an industry-leading global strategic studio.

Transcript:

Joe Lazauskas: Welcome to Accountable Innovation at Cannes. I’m Joe Lazauskas, and I’m here with Armando Turco, the general manager for Vox Creative, which has been creating some really cool branded content lately. We’re going to put you in the hot seat, ask five rapid-fire questions.

Armando Turco: Cool, let’s do it.

Lazauskas: You ready?

Turco: Yep. Let’s go for it.

Lazauskas: Alright, let’s start. What is the biggest key to creating branded content that actually performs?

Turco: Wow. What we see often is clients sort of stopping, forgetting to stop, and asking themselves: What is this thing expected to do? So we’ve been much more disciplined lately about really orienting our content efforts around KPIs and having a very strict communication strategy that still allows room for testing but is always mapping back to a particular communication task—which seems like the simplest thing in the world to ask for, but often is overlooked, especially when you’re trying to generate so much content at great volume and at scale.

Lazauskas: What three KPIs do you find yourself using the most?

Turco: I’m asked that question by a lot of clients, like, “What do you think we should be measuring?” and my first response is always, “What are you trying to achieve?”

We find that branded content, in particular, and especially the kind of branded content that Vox Creative is creating, is deeply engaging and so it functions quite well at the top of the funnel, to be driving relevance and to be creating credibility for brands that are looking to establish roots in a particular realm of culture, or at least amplify their voice in a really interesting, engaging way. So I would say engagement and a particular depth of engagement, so we’re looking really closely at the amount of time that people are spending with content. I think we live in a world where three seconds is considered to be a benchmark, and we’re trying to hold ourselves at Vox to a much higher standard than that, especially when you consider that a lot of our video content, and a lot of the content that we produce in text, is engaging people for much longer than that.

Lazauskas: Snapchat or Instagram?

Turco: Instagram.

Lazauskas: Rosé or frosé?

Turco: Rosé.

Lazauskas: What’s one thing that you’ve seen here that gets you really excited?

Turco: I think convergence. It sounds a little bit cliché. It’s one of the reasons why I left the creative agency world and came over to a content studio and a publisher—to see how different capabilities and a convergence of data, audio, and great content, creativity, quality, scale, distribution, are all coming together in a really interesting way, whereas before they used to be quite verticalized and siloed. I’ve worked on teams where you have a client who has six different agencies—in fact, you want to ask me what I think marketers are doing wrong, is just fracturing and fragmenting all of their marketing efforts across so many different suppliers, when, in fact, there are a few simple solutions where you can converge, and all of those things can work in support of each other in a very real-time way.

Lazauskas: All right. Less frosé, more convergence.

Turco: That’s the theme of the conversation.

The post How to Create Content That Actually Performs, According to the GM of Vox Creative appeared first on Contently.

Both of them are wrong.

Over time, social networks start to develop their own reputations based on generalizations about who uses each network and what they tend to share. LinkedIn is tailored for the wealthy professional. Twitter serves witty media figures. Even if these interpretations have some truth to them, it’s hard to back them up or refute them. Look no further than Facebook, which has become a homebase for conspiracy theorists, great aunts, politically active friends from college, and over 2 billion people in between. At this point, users can portray Facebook any way that suits them.

But are these stereotypes really accurate?

Using Newswhip, a new social media monitoring platform, I was able to analyze the top-performing links since September 1 across four major social networks: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. My goal was to dig deep and examine if our general preconceptions about social media networks were correct.

Does one political party dominate Facebook? Is Twitter a media echo chamber? Has LinkedIn become the best place for thought leadership? And is Pinterest really free of any controversial content? Read on to find out.

Facebook: Do liberal or conservative outlets reign supreme?

Plenty of people get their news from social media. According to Pew research, 45 percent of all U.S. adults do so via Facebook. The issue, though, is how one defines “news.” While both sides of the aisle continue to be upset about bias and favoritism, Newswhip data suggests content from conservative media outlets is more popular on Facebook than content from liberal outfits.

Since September 1, thirteen stories generated at least 1 million Facebook interactions; five came from conservative sites, one came from a liberal site, and the remainder lacked any overt political affiliation.

Facebook has no systemic bias against Trump or conservative content. It’s also clear that Facebook isn’t surfacing all ideas with equal weight, contrary to what Zuckerberg implied in his post last month. This may not be intentional, but the platform’s algorithm and user demographics have allowed fringe right-wing sites like Conservative Tribune and American Military News to go viral over established news outlets.

As TechCrunch writer Natasha Lomas points out, “Facebook’s business benefits from increased user engagement, and made-up stories that play to people’s prejudices and/or contain wild, socially divisive claims have been shown to be able to clock up far more Facebook views than factual reports of actual news.”

Takeaway: All users should be wary of filter bubbles. But judging by this data, the biggest filter bubbles are shaded red.

Twitter: Is it really a media echo chamber?

Until I looked in Newswhip to see which stories generated the most tweets, I had never heard of the Korean boy band BTS. Secretly, though, they’re the biggest thing on Twitter right now. Of the top eight links with the most shares on Twitter, five are about BTS. The top result, which has received almost 400,000 tweets, is just a link to the group’s album on Apple Music. I’m no K-pop scholar, so I’ll leave the BTS analysis to someone more qualified. But from a social media lens, the unusual results can tell us a lot about Twitter: The platform has a deep identity crisis.

Twitter has always struggled to find its niche. While all other major social networks constantly grow, Twitter actually lost 2 million active users earlier this summer. After the announcement, Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser wrote, “We’re not overly concerned by this trend, as we have always believed Twitter to be a niche platform.”

Niche is the key word there. Twitter is definitely a place where media professionals can pat themselves on the back while complaining about the death of journalism. It’s where high-quality stories from major publications like The Atlantic, the BBC, and The New York Times regularly take off. But the platform has also been co-opted by trolls, bots, propaganda machines, and the guy in the Oval Office.

These forces are all competing for a finite amount of attention among the 150 million or so daily active users. As a result, a number of different communities have emerged. If you have something interesting to say to a particular community, then there’s potential here. It’s just hard to pinpoint which niches are primed to grow, which is why there’s room for K-pop sensations to thrive. And GoFundMe pages. And a GIF of a Google Doodle.

Takeaway: Twitter has become a niche platform, which limits the ability of brands and publishers to go viral if their content doesn’t fall under certain categories or focus on certain topics.

LinkedIn: The true home for thought leadership?

LinkedIn has always had the potential to be a powerful content-sharing platform, but it’s never been able to compete with Facebook. It’s currently the social platform best known for thought leadership, which still counts for something. As the go-to center for professional advice and commentary, LinkedIn has reserves of evergreen content that attract a high-earning audience.

Per Newswhip, the top-performing stories have close to 50,000 shares. Some offer a lot of tips and tricks for the workplace. You can get insights about job interviews and life goals. There’s also an emphasis on hearing from executives, which presumably can give you a roadmap for how to be a successful leader. (There’s a little news mixed in, like this Forbes piece about Michael Dell’s hurricane Harvey relief fund, which was shared over 43,000 times.)

This level of engagement puts LinkedIn well below Facebook and somewhat behind Twitter and Pinterest. The way the platform functions has led to an unusual dilemma. All users have the option of publishing content natively, which could cannibalize the impact of an external article or video link. Richard Branson, for instance, posts some of his musings directly to LinkedIn but links to others published on the Virgin website. Bill Gates does the same thing, alternating between LinkedIn and his personal blog. You get the sense that influencers aren’t sure when to share natively and when to link to an external website.

All social networks want to prioritize native content since it keeps users engaged inside their walls. But when Facebook ramped up Instant Articles, it did so with a monetization model. In addition to selling ads, Facebook made it clear that news publishers were the intended users of Instant Articles. On LinkedIn, individuals just publish native blog posts.

For now, there’s arguably more upside for influencer posts than articles from media companies. Publications like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN use LinkedIn to distribute their content, but they mostly include links related to business news, the economy, and personal finance. Compare that to Facebook or Twitter, where the same publications can post everything they create and generate higher engagement. Until that dynamic changes, LinkedIn will continue to be a more powerful tool for thought leadership than for typical content distribution.

Takeaway: LinkedIn is a great platform for established influencers to communicate with an audience. But media companies and brands may have better luck elsewhere if traffic and engagement are their top goals.

Pinterest: Is it the only social network free of controversy?

In September, Pinterest officially crossed the 200 million monthly users mark–a nice milestone for a social platform that has seen consistent growth in mobile searches and international users. Pinterest now boasts a bigger user base than Twitter and LinkedIn. What’s really remarkable about these upward trends is Pinterest has been able to drive increased engagement while avoiding almost all controversial content.

The top pins of September and early October include links to student awards, tips on painting your kitchen, and lots of recipes for everything from red velvet cheesecake to cinnamon sugar pumpkin bread. Eleven pieces of content had at least 40,000 pins, and 27 links had at least 25,000 pins.

If there’s any nit to pick here, it’s that Pinterest is a home for content that looks and sounds the same. It’s confined to a few main categories without much variance. For example, a lot of the successful food bloggers use a similar tone to introduce their recipes. Same goes for the high-quality photography and short videos of their food. So it’s hard to tell what makes one recipe get more engagement over another. As a result, it might be harder for a newcomer to thrive on Pinterest over the sites that already have a loyal audience.

But in a polarized social media landscape, Pinterest has emerged as a safe space, where recipes for pumpkin bread and apple pie doughnuts can overpower any slanted coverage of the NFL’s national anthem protests.

Takeaway: Even if you know what you’re going to get, it’s nice that there’s a place you can go online to look at hot cakes instead of hot takes.

The post Does Facebook Have a Liberal or Conservative Bias? And Answers to Other Big Social Media Questions appeared first on Contently.

“People tend to think about content marketing or branded content as longform advertising,” Seetharaman, the global managing director of marketing solutions, told me. “You really have to look from the outside in. What problem are you trying to help somebody solve and do you have a right to play? Do you have a real answer for that problem? If you can’t deliver on that promise, you have no right to play there for a brand.”

At the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity this summer, I sat down with Seetharaman to talk about the best B2B content brands, Snapchat vs. Instagram, and the vanity metrics to avoid. Check out the full interview below, which was created as part of our Accountable Innovation Series in partnership with Magnet Media, an industry-leading global strategic studio.

Transcript

Joe Lazauskas: Welcome to Accountable Innovation at Cannes. I’m Joe Lazauskas, Contently’s editor-in-chief, and I am here with Mina Seetharaman, the head of global marketing solutions for The Economist, which is one of the more impressive job titles I’ve gotten to say this week. Thank you so much for joining us here in the Index Exchange Suite.

Mina Seetharaman: There are definitely worse places to be than here with this view, I’ve got to tell you.

Joe: I know, and we haven’t even gotten any frosé yet, which is going to be our treat for getting through this interview.

Mina: Alright, I’m looking forward to it.

Joe: So we’ve got you in the hot seat, ask some questions about content marketing, about where you see the industry going. Are you ready?

Mina: Sure.

Joe: Alright. Who’s the best brand at creating content?

Mina: I work mostly with B2B brands. My two favorites are GE, not just because they were a client, but also because they’re willing to experiment on different platforms for lots of audiences and not afraid to just throw away things that don’t work and keep experimenting. And IBM because they have to traverse a lot of audiences at the C suite but also in the everyday population, and I think they do a good job of picking the right content for the right audience.

Joe: Two of my favorite too, GE Reports is incredible.

Mina: Yeah, that’s really good.

Joe: And still got to shout out my boy Tomas Kellner who runs that. Snapchat or Instagram?

Mina: I’m not terribly visual, I’m going to go with Snapchat, and I think it’s because a lot of publishers are doing interesting things on that platform. I think the key thing with any of the platforms is to figure out the best way to use your content and adapt it for that platform and really understanding it. And I think we’ve seen some great engagement with The Economist Discover.

Joe: What do you think is the key to creating branded content that actually maps back to delivering real business results and not just vanity metrics?

Mina: I think one of the big issues is that—and this is partly because we look at traditional metrics for a lot of things when we should maybe be thinking about the right way of measuring things—is people tend to think about content marketing or branded content as longform advertising. You really have to look from the outside in, so especially in the business space, what problem are you trying to help somebody solve and do you have a right to play? Do you have a real answer for that problem? If you can’t deliver on the promise that you’re making, you have no right to play there for a brand. I think that if you understand what your audience needs, promise them something that you can actually deliver on, and then really deliver it, I think you’ll see performance go up significantly.

Joe: And thinking about how you measure that impact, what are your three go-to marketing metrics?

Mina: So unfortunately, I think a lot of clients come to us wanting reach, and I always say that reach only matters if you’re reaching the right people and think of it as a really relative metric. If you have a very niche audience, you might not care about 100,000 views, and you might want the right 50 people to sign a one million dollar check. And then finally, am I helping to move the needle on some business metric. One of the trends that we’re seeing a lot at our panel this week, at Wake Up The Economist, is the idea that a CMO has to care about the business first and marketing second. And I think that we sometimes forget that in the marketing space. So remembering that we have to move the needle on the business is a key metric.

Joe: And now last question, hard-hitting one, we’ve got two days left here. What are the odds that we get a tweet from Trump about Cannes?

Mina: Unfortunately, I think they’re a lot higher than I would like, but I’m really hoping that that’s maybe around the 2 percent mark, but he’s surprised me before, so who knows what’ll happen.

The post The Best B2B Content, According to The Economist’s Top Content Marketer appeared first on Contently.

Whenever my friends used to say this, the recommendation at the end of the sentence would be a restaurant or bar or TV show. Now, it’s a podcast. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. Over the last decade, audio storytelling—one of our oldest mediums—has seen an unprecedented explosion in popularity. And it’s a trend that brands can’t ignore—especially after GE’s podcast, The Message, reached the branded content singularity by becoming the most popular podcast in the iTunes store.

This summer, I sat down at the Cannes Lions Creativity Festival with Hernan Lopez, CEO and Founder of Wondery, an upstart podcast network backed by Fox with big visions for the future of storytelling. Check out the clip below, which was created for our Accountable Innovation Series in partnership with Magnet Media, an industry-leading global strategic studio.

Transcript:

Joe Lazauskas: Hi everyone and welcome to Accountable Innovation. I’m Joe Lazauskas, the editor-in-chief of Contently, and I’m here with Hernan Lopez, the CEO and founder of Wondery, the podcast company that’s taking Cannes by storm.

Hernan, thank you so much for being here with me.

Hernan Lopez: Thank you so much. What a great set-up.

Joe: Yeah, this is not too bad. You had your keynote yesterday, the first keynote in Cannes history in pitch blackness. How was that? Was it weird? Did people freak out? Start yelling out, “where are things?”

Hernan: No. People were very much into it. Obviously, we couldn’t completely turn the lights off for security, so what we did instead is we gave people eye masks. And I should say what’s the premise of it. Because we are all about audio storytelling and the power of sound and the emotional power of sound, I wanted people to experience sound without any visual distraction.

Joe: It’s really interesting approach and it makes me wonder… podcasts have clearly blown up over the last few years, but are podcasts the medium that we’re going to see really dominate audio-based storytelling moving forward or do you see another evolution coming?

Hernan: I’d make a parallel with what happened in television. If you look at television before TiVo and before Netflix, before television on demand, we had those shows like the procedurals and the sitcoms. Some people could watch one episode and miss the next one. And then after TiVo and Netflix came, it’s when the golden age of television started with shows like The Sopranos, and Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones, those shows that you had to watch in a sequence from beginning to end.

The same thing is happening now with podcasts and audio storytelling. If you look at audio storytelling before podcasts, it was all about radio–Howard Stern, talk radio, they’re the kind of shows that you can join in progress and leave at any point. Then podcasting comes in and what’s next: Serial. Serialized storytelling on demand is the future of audio storytelling. That’s where we are.

Joe: Do you think there’ll be any evolution in terms of, say, VR, like using that to create more audio-based experiences, almost like the keynote that you had yesterday?

Hernan: I said yesterday that the most advanced form of VR is your imagination, powered by sound. One thing people don’t often realize is sound travels faster. It’s received by the brain before all other senses, which is why there’s an advantage to understanding how sound has a power to affect your emotions.

Joe: What are some of your favorite branded podcasts and what do you think makes for a good brand activation with audio-based storytelling?

Hernan: I think you have to start with content that, first, gives value to the consumer. Among podcasts that are not done by Wondery, Open for Business by Gimlet Media for eBay is a really good example. It’s a podcast that tells entrepreneurs how to start a business and what to look for.

And then we’re now doing one for Busch Beer, it’s called Heritage Road. It’s launching in two weeks and I think it’s a very interesting experiment because we’re going after NASCAR listeners, who are not necessarily among the biggest consumers of podcasts.

Joe: Well, Hernan, thank you so much for being here with us. Really appreciate it and hope you enjoy the rest of your Cannes experience.

The post Wondery’s Founder Explains How Audio Storytelling Could Be the New TV appeared first on Contently.

That’s one of the toughest questions for marketers to answer, and one I heard repeatedly at both Content Marketing World and Cannes this summer. When I asked Ann Marinovich, SVP of Content Strategy and Partnerships at Forbes, at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, she was adamant that one of the best things any marketer can do is have a firm understanding of who, exactly, looks at your content.

To hear more of Ann’s insights, watch the short clip below, which was created for our Accountable Innovation Series in partnership with Magnet Media, an industry-leading global strategic studio.

Full Transcript:

Joe Lazauskas: Hi, and welcome to Accountable Innovation at Cannes. I’m Joe Lazauskas, the editor-in-chief at Contently. I am joined by Ann Marinovich, the SVP of content partnerships at Forbes. Ann, thanks for being here.

Ann Marinovich: Thanks, Joe, this is great.

Joe: Yeah, cheers.

Ann: Rosé all day.

Joe: Rosé all day. We have you in the hot seat, which is both figurative and a little bit literal because it’s about 90 degrees outside here. Are you ready?

Ann: Ready. Let’s go.

Joe: A big focus here at Cannes has been programmatic going native. Do you think this a good idea or a slippery slope?

Ann: I think it’s a good idea if it’s used in a larger media mix and distribution plan of content. I think there’s a place for a lot of different types of content distribution for content. Where I think programmatic native is really interesting is this concept of intimacy at scale. Native content is really about creating that relationship with a target audience through storytelling. If you can find those people through programmatic channels… that’s a great way of connecting with people.

Joe: What are your three go-to content marketing metrics?

Ann: I actually would bucket my favorite metrics for evaluating ROI in a couple of different ways. The first, which I think is so important, is around quality.

I think what we’ve seen in the industry over the last couple of years is the performance metric for native content was always pageviews, but pageviews don’t really matter if you’re not reaching the right people. Really understanding who is consuming the content—if you’re an enterprise technology company, it’s more important to reach 5,000 IT decision-makers who actually are in market to buy your product versus 500,000 stay-at-home moms who are never going to be purchasing your product. Making sure that you understand who you’re reaching, that it’s the people that are actually going to be in market for your product, I think is the most important metric.

Then second is engagement. I love looking at things like engage time, scroll depth–how deep into an article people are reading–scroll velocity, and really making sure that people are not just skimming an article but they’re engaged with it, they’re hearing your message. Actually, that’s two. But those are my favorites.

Joe: Those are some of our favorites, as well. Who’s your favorite brand creating content today?

Ann: That is probably a $50 million question, right? I think that so many brands are creating amazing content. It really depends what industry that you’re in and what your campaign and your objectives are. To me, what has been the amazing shift since we launched BrandVoice seven years ago is now marketers are really thinking about a content strategy. That’s what I think every marketer who is actually looking holistically at their organization–where the content stories are and how that all fits together–are doing, I think, a great job.

Joe: Yacht party or street party?

Ann: Yacht party. You can have a street party anywhere, but only in Cannes can you have an amazing yacht party.

Joe: Or rosé this good. Thanks so much for joining us.

The post Forbes’ Branded Content Chief Reveals Her Go-to Content Marketing Metrics appeared first on Contently.

To illustrate just how much digital activity takes place every minute, Lori Lewis and Chadd Callahan created an eye-popping graphic. Their wheel demonstrates how hard it can be to keep up with everything going on across the dozens of major platforms that we turn to on a daily basis.

For instance, the collective internet watches 4.1 million YouTube videos every minute, and users post over 46,200 images on Instagram (which must include an absurd amount of brunch photos on Sunday). And if you’re curious about something and head over to Google, you’ll contribute to over 3.5 million searches, which translates to more than 5 billion queries every day.

For marketers, this chart is a good reminder that nobody wants to be bombarded with senseless advertisements, promotional emails, and generic LinkedIn messages. People just don’t have time for a subpar experience with so much digital activity going on around them. You have to produce breakthrough content that provides unique value. And as these platforms continue to grow, the competition for attention will only increase.

So how can content creators win this battle of attention? A strategy is a good place to start—that way you can pinpoint what your audience wants and where they want it. Having a strong voice will always be important, but you’ll have to tweak that voice from platform to platform to maximize your reach. So before you send that carefully crafted email newsletter for thousands to see, think about whether your approach stands out–otherwise you’re just falling in line with the other 156 million people filling up inboxes that minute.

The post Every Minute, the Internet Goes Through an Incredible Amount of Content appeared first on Contently.

Instead, the threat may come from a familiar set of names. Google, Apple, and other tech giants have targeted ad tech for disruption. And when they set their sites on a target, they rarely miss.

Why native ad blockers are such a big deal

Earlier this month, Google and Apple both announced they’d be launching native blockers for their browsers (Chrome and Safari, respectively).

Apple’s blocker, called Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP), uses machine learning techniques to block tracking scripts used by most websites. Basically, the browser automatically purges cookies from websites you don’t use—meaning after a month of inactivity, sites can’t use that data for re-targeting programs and other behavioral/identify-dependent advertising.

The result is that users are only tracked by websites they actually use. Some cookies are legitimately useful—such as ones that remember your preferences—so it makes sense that Apple would only shutter cookies from sites you rarely or never visit. But it also means ad exchanges have much less data to work with from Safari users. So far, the blocker is only on the desktop version of Safari, though many have hypothesized (myself included) that Apple is moving towards positioning its products as premium, private, and mostly ad tech-free environments.

Google’s blocker goes much further. On the surface, that’s surprising. Unlike Apple, which makes the majority of its revenue from hardware, Google is—at its core—an ad tech company. Around 90 percent of its 2015 revenues came from selling advertising across its various ad tech products such as DoubleClick and AdWords.

So why would Google—who, along with Facebook—account for more than 85 percent of digital ad growth, introduce an ad blocker that comes automatically installed on the most popular browser in America?

The most important thing to understand is that Google’s ad blocker is not really an ad blocker. According to the tech giant, it’s a “filter”. It’s function, they say, is not to block all ads: It’s to block “bad ads”. So what are “bad ads”? Well, they’re whatever Google says they are.

Technically, the company says they will follow the standards set by the trade group Coalition for Better Ads. Yet, Google and Facebook—not surprisingly—are founding members. Fordham Law scholar Mark Patterson told Vox that the group is basically a “cartel orchestrated by Google.”

The result is that Google can set standards for digital advertising that align with their best interests. That equates to a better experience for Chrome users, which Google likely hopes will drive more adoption of Chrome. It also squashes ad tech companies that can’t or don’t meet these standards, driving more ad buyers to Google’s “approved” advertising.

There’s nothing technically illegal about what the company is doing, unless you want to bring up anti-trust laws. And the result—more privacy and a better user experience—means that any sort of customer backlash is unlikely.

Lessons to learn

Advertisers and ad tech vendors alike should take two lessons from Google and Apple’s moves.

First, vertical competition is very real, and should be taken seriously. Major platforms like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook can use their huge scale to pivot and dominate almost any industry.

Second, and more importantly, is that digital advertising is becoming increasingly content-based and targeted. Rather than disruptive advertising like banner ads and pop-ups, Google and Facebook are pushing a more friendly, personalized version of digital advertising. On Facebook, ads run just as any other content does on the News Feed. And on Google, Google AdWords ads link back to content meant to provide some sort of value.

The scary thing for ad tech companies deeply invested in the banner world is that there won’t be backlash against Google and Facebook and Apple for a very consumer-centric reason: it’s what people prefer. And the tech giants are more than happy to give it to them.

The post How Google and Apple Are Using ‘Privacy’ to Kill Ad Tech appeared first on Contently.

Bloomberg: Mom-and-Pop Joints Are Trouncing America’s Big Restaurant Chains

Selected by Dillon Baker, tech editor

I love secret tech stories. What seems like a dry business report on the decline of big restaurant chains is actually a fascinating look at how the internet is shaping the economy.

Before the internet, and especially before smartphones, finding a good restaurant was difficult. You could get a recommendation from a local, buy a guidebook, or just guess until you found a favorite spot. Now, people are turning to crowd-sourced review sites like Yelp and Google for advice on where to eat. As a result, ubiquitous chains, which once thrived off of comfort and familiarity, are being overtaken by local restaurants with great reviews.

It’s a trend that’s happening across industries. Gamers are increasingly buying small, independent games with great reviews on Steam. Amazon has brought down major publishers’ cartel when it comes to books. The internet has done many negative things, but we shouldn’t ignore how it has supported the rise of localism and independent creators.

Wired: The Internet Defines ‘Covfefe’

Selected by Erin Nelson, marketing editor

It’d been a long time since I laughed out loud while reading the news on my commute. That was until last week, when I read Wired’s coverage of what the internet made out of the most recent Twitter extravaganza now known as #covfefe.

Here, Angela Watercutter describes how a tweet by President Trump that read “Despite be negative press covfefe” turned into an experiment of what the internet could do with a (presumable) typo. The answer was an onslaught of memes and internet ragging that ranged from a new definition on Urban Dictionary to a Eurotrain ad that adopted the phrase “Fancy a covfefe?” My personal favorites are a screenshot from Merriam Webster of suggested words and Nespresso-inspired meme of a thirsty George Clooney, ready to tackle the day after a cup of covfefe.

For Watercutter, a deep dive into Twitter banter is a hilarious exercise. At the same time, it represents the unprecedented ability of social media to turn nothing into something—an aspiring singer into a star, a reality TV celebrity into president—the possibilities are endless. If “covfefe” wasn’t a word before, it certainly is now… as real as the power of the man who typed it.

The Ringer: Woebot Is Therapy Inside a Chatbot*

Selected by Joe Lazauskas, editor-in-chief

*I’m cheating because this was published in June, but then again, Jordan isn’t getting this column out until the 6th, so who is he to judge?

This story is about Woebot, a new invention that combines my two favorite things: cheap therapy and chatbots. I had The Content Strategist on the chatbot train as early as 2014—a time, fittingly, when I was also paying $10 per week to go to a student therapist the same age as me. His name was Yakov, and he was trained in the same discipline as Woebot: behavioral therapy.

While I doubt Woebot can compare to my boy Yakov, I do see why it could work. Behavioral therapy largely involves asking the patient to consider the actions in his/her own life and come up with actionable strategies to improve it. It’s not rocket science, and I can definitely imagine Woebot and it’s decision-tree AI doing the trick.

Since I’m totally incapable of any sort of work-life balance, this also made me think of B2B applications. What if we built our own version of Woebot, but for marketing problems? It’s an exciting idea, but maybe a little bit dangerous. As Contently’s head of content strategy, I’ll probably just end up replacing myself.

The Atlantic: How Pixar Lost Its Way

Selected by Brian Maehl, talent development manager

In this story, Christopher Orr examines the quality of Pixar films since the film studio was acquired by Disney back in 2006. Thanks to the mouse house’s cashgrab, he argues, Pixar has descended down a path of sequels that fail to capture its old magic.

This struck a nerve. The fun fact on my business card proudly proclaims “I’m a Pixar encyclopedia.” Not only can I rattle off every film, its director, and year of release (I know what you’re thinking but I do, in fact, have a girlfriend), but I’ve probably read every piece of literature about Pixar’s approach to storytelling and company culture. And while I’m sure Disney loves greenlighting sequels to classics, I think the quality issue runs deeper.

During Pixar’s “golden age,” films like Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, and Wall-E were directed by some of the company’s earliest employees—several of whom were mentored by co-founder and storytelling god John Lasseter. Since 2011, however, only two of these directors (Andrew Stanton and Pete Docter) helmed Pixar films. I don’t think this is a coincidence.

What I’m suggesting is that Pixar has a talent development problem, not a corporate direction problem. The studio prides itself on trusting directors to make personal films, which means those in charge operate with an awful lot of autonomy. The recent films that Orr finds lackluster might simply be in the wrong hands, not the wrong studio.

The New Yorker: Go Ahead, Interrupt My Day

Selected by Jordan Teicher, managing editor

Wouldn’t it be great if you could get through work without the constant interruptions? No email, no Slack, no coworker tapping you on the shoulder. Just pure productivity. Writing that almost makes me laugh.

Today, pure productivity is a pipe dream. That’s not to say people are unproductive. They’re getting a lot done—answering emails, going to meetings, getting feedback. I held off on downloading the Slack mobile app as long as I could, keeping my chats just on a laptop, but I eventually caved in to make sure I could address any pressing issues before they turned into problems. But it often feels like technology has made us capable of doing a lot of things simultaneously instead of completing a few things at the highest ability.

FlowLight may be able to change that. A computer science professor from British Columbia and a few of his doctoral students came up with an office product that signals your availability to colleagues based on desk lights that change colors. The lights take their cue from an algorithm that measures keyboard and mouse activity: “Red (busy), pulsing red (super busy), yellow (wishing you were busier), and green (checking Facebook).”

This kind of solution isn’t perfect. If bosses were to track productivity through the device, it could “trigger a red-light arms race” But it’s telling that kind of invention exists. Professionals would probably admit they’re overconnected and too available. And sometimes, to get stuff done, you have to find a way to shut out the world.

The post Chatbot Therapists, and 4 Other Stories We Loved in May appeared first on Contently.

Let’s play a little game. Can you guess what year this lede is from?

“There’s no doubt that online video marketing is on the rise. Numerous studies and statistics prove that video works. In fact, Forrester Research found that videos were 50 times more likely to receive an organic first page ranking than traditional text pages. That’s a pretty impressive stat!”

How about this one?

“You’d have to be living under a rock with the Geico guy not to notice that videos are taking over the online marketing world. Every marketing and SEO blog is talking about online video marketing and every third company exec you talk to is planning to shift marketing dollars to an online video campaign.”

If you guessed 2010 and 2012, respectively, you’d be right. But if I told you they were from 2016 and 2017, would you blink? Video has been the talk of the marketing world for years. But could it finally break through over the next five years as a regular marketing tactic?

There’s no doubting that video is a big part of the internet’s future. By 2019, video is expected to account for 80 percent of all web traffic. Facebook—which accounts for a huge portion of mobile traffic—has said it will be “all video” in five years. A recent Contently survey showed that, in the next five years, senior marketers plan to invest in video more than any other type of content.

Even though advertisers have been talking up digital video for almost a decade, it seems that their spending is finally catching up. According to the IAB, media buyers are spending 67 percent more on video marketing than they did in 2015. In total, video makes up 56 percent of digital budgets.

In spite of this push for video, widespread adoption is still very much in progress. According to the Content Marketing Institute, only 60 percent of B2B and B2C marketers use video (compared to 83 percent and 85 percent for social media content, respectively).

For any marketer that has tried to make video a bigger part of their content strategy, they know the hard truths of the medium: it’s complicated, expensive, and difficult to measure. While the interest is there, the ability to execute consistently isn’t.

That said, there are new formats that have made video a bit easier. Shortform videos like motion graphics optimized for social have gotten more traction as cheaper investments. When it comes to live video, the lower standards for quality have made it easier for marketers to experiment. And emerging technology platforms like brightcove and Vidyard are trying to make the creation, management, and measurement of video more cost-effective.

But it’s worth asking if all this desire to invest will ever translate to meaningful content, or if video will remain nothing more than a glossy pipe dream for most marketing teams. If video is still “on the rise” in 2020, we’ll have our answer.

The post Survey: Marketers Want More Video. What Else Is New? appeared first on Contently.

The New Yorker: #Vanlife, the Bohemian Social-Media Movement

Selected by Erin Nelson, marketing editor

In “#VanLife, The Bohemian Social Movement,” Rachel Monroe chronicles the rise of #VanLife, the millennial phenomenon whereby twenty and thirtysomethings quit their jobs and make a living by curating sponsored social media images of their experience on the road. In the story, Monroe becomes a character in one #VanLife journey, traveling with a young couple and their dog through Southern California.

As I read Monroe’s opening passages about Emily King and Corey Smith, the central couple in the story, I felt a strong sense of envy. #VanLife—traveling to beautiful locations with my partner and dog in the comfort of a VW home—sounded like a pretty good gig. Yet as Monroe paints a picture of living in a cramped space that takes on the smells of the humans, animals, and trash it hosts, I started to feel the claustrophobia of that lifestyle choice.

What’s more, Monroe details the way “lifestyle” images are a carefully contrived representative of the type of bohemian life many millennials and middle-aged hippies lust after. In reality, King and Smith spend hours curating images and analyzing engagement analytics to appease the very sponsors that support their journey. It’s capitalism through the lens of those who reject it, told from a gilded cage on wheels.

The New York Times: How YouTube’s Shifting Algorithms Hurt Independent Media

Selected by Dillon Baker, technology editor

As advertisers use Google’s recent controversies to leverage better prices and better placements, YouTubers are suffering. Many—some with controversial content, some without—have taken major hits to their revenue as advertisers pull out and YouTube’s algorithm demonetizes videos with little explanation.

I have no doubt that many of those hurt by this produce content I don’t agree with or would support. But it’s one more step towards an internet controlled by the whims of sensitive brands and detached algorithms, rather than people. Some will survive thanks to services like Patreon, but as Amanda Hess writes, “it puts the wild, independent internet in danger of becoming more boring than TV.”

BuzzFeed: Mark Zuckerberg’s Makeover Is a Political Campaign Without the Politics

Selected by Brian Maehl, talent development manager

Photographed in a hard hat next to factory workers. Sitting at a table surrounded by police officers to discuss how to better connect with a community. In 2017, the parallels between running for office and running a tech company are awfully blurry.

Much has been said about the political undertones of Mark Zuckerberg’s public appearances of late but, in the words of Nitasha Tiku at Buzzfeed, “Zuckerberg’s listening tour is less a presidential gambit than a focus group with Facebook users.”

While there’s clearly a motive to project Facebook in a more positive light, Tiku suggests that Zuckerberg’s own curiosity is the fuel for this campaigning. He’s simply looking to better understand the world, and informing Facebook’s direction is one of the many bonuses.

While skepticism will likely follow the head of such a dominant company, much worse has been written about the executive’s intentions. Public perception of him seems to be coming a long way since The Social Network days—calculated or not.

The Ringer: Are Chat-Fiction Apps the New YA Novels?

Selected by Jordan Teicher, managing editor

Print is supposed to be dying. Novels are supposed to be on the decline. Hyperbole aside, both of those statements are probably true to an extent. But as anyone from Contently will tell you, storytelling is on the rise. The only difference seems to be how we’re telling the stories.

Last month, Alyssa Bereznak took a look at an unusual (and successful) type of content: chat fiction. Think of it as the millennial version of an epistolary novel—the narrative slowly unwinding through text conversations. Since 2014, Hooked, a chat-fiction app, has been downloaded more than 10 million times. Last month, the app generated more than $500,000 in subscription revenue. It may not be for everyone, but as book sales decline and kids spend more time reading online, this model could become the future of fiction.

In other words, we can keep lamenting the death of the way things used to be, or we can be proactive and find innovative ways to carry along the history of storytelling.

Business Insider: The evidence is piling up — Silicon Valley is being destroyed

Selected by Joe Lazauskas, editor-in-chief

I remember when I was 23 and went to my first New York tech Meetup. The year was 2010. Taio Cruz topped the Billboard charts. And everyone still thought of the New York tech scene as this scrappy, tight-knit community of underdogs fighting for a new, exciting world—as opposed to: Kind of like the finance industry, but with jeans!

Now, innovation is stagnating. Not inside the world’s biggest tech companies, but in the tech industry at large. You see this in obvious places—like social networking, where we’ve permanently settled into an era where the big six of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest dominate, and a serious new player hasn’t entered the market in years. But it’s also affecting other areas. Martech startups have little chance in a battle against established giants like Adobe and Oracle. Mobile advertising startups haven’t chipped away at the 85 percent of the industry Facebook and Google control.

In this piece, Matt Stoller does his best Bernie Sanders impression and makes his case for a bold move: Break them up.

The post The Destruction of Silicon Valley, and 4 Other Stories We Loved in April appeared first on Contently.

While less destructive, their constant fixation on the small screens doesn’t make mom and dad any happier. According to a Think with Google study conducted by Ipsos, my cousins’ behavior is par for the teenage course.

The fact that 71 percent of 13-17 year-old smartphone users spend more than three hours a day watching mobile video is mind-boggling. But really, their habits might not be so different from the excessive viewing of previous generations; they’ve just switched the medium from cable TV to streaming services. A poll by Defy Media found that consumers aged 13-24 watch 12.1 hours of video per week on YouTube and other free online sources, and another 8.8 hours on paid-subscription platforms like Netflix. Television, at 8.2 hours per week, now sits in third.

“While millennials were mobile pioneers, teens are mobile natives,” Google writes in the study. Unlike previous generations that had to learn how to use new digital products later in life, advanced technology has been embedded in teenagers’ lives since birth. Today’s teens receive cell phones at 12. Those in the 18-24 segment reported first getting a phone at 16, and 25-34 year-olds said they had to wait until they were 20.

This tech acumen pervades the rest of their lives as well. Not only did half of the teens surveyed admit to spending over three hours a day on messaging apps, but they’re choosing to text in place of face-to-face interaction. Thirty-eight percent favor texting as their primary means of communication, while only 15 percent prefer talking in-person. While it’s easy to assume convenience is a contributing factor, proximity doesn’t always matter. Three in 10 acknowledge that they text people who are physically close to them.

Older generations may take such behavior as antisocial and impolite, but teens don’t mean it that way. They’re just communicating in the manner they know best. Next time I find my cousins buried in their phones, I’ll know better. If I want to hear about how school is going, I’ll send a group chat.

The post Teenagers Can’t Get Enough Mobile Video appeared first on Contently.

Virtual reality isn’t just for big budgets. Hardware is becoming more accessible, and there are new opportunities for small businesses to create VR content. While there still is a whole lot of tinkering, more and more brands, organizations, and technology companies are figuring out what works, what doesn’t, and what consumers actually want.

Facebook is one company that is placing huge bets on virtual reality, from new content formats that you experience in your News Feed to socialized VR experiences where you interact and “hang out” with your friends. Facebook and Zuckerberg show no signs of stopping their push into new VR territories.

Now, not everyone has the same power and resources that Facebook does, but that doesn’t mean virtual reality hardware and VR content are completely unattainable. It’s actually becoming more and more frictionless for small businesses to enter the world of VR. Headsets and cameras are not as expensive as they once were, and there are even devices that attach to mobile phones to create 360-degree videos.

If you’re new to VR, or just want to learn some of the latest trends and best practices from virtual reality experts, below are five clips from this year’s Social Media Week conference in New York.

1. “Content” and “experience” are blending in VR

Rori DuBoff (Managing Director, Content Innovation, Accenture Interactive)

2. You can’t shoot VR content like traditional video

John Pattyson (Executive Producer, Immersive Media)

3. Strive to transport the user into the story

Megan Summers (Global Head of Production, Facebook)

4. “Sound” in VR tells users where to look

Jason Beauregard (Head of Studio, VaynerMedia)

5. Everyone involved needs to understand the power of VR

Sydney Levin (Executive Producer, New York Times T Brand Studio)

The post 5 Experts Share Their Top Advice for Creating VR Content appeared first on Contently.

In Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Sign of Four, Sherlock Holmes says one of his most iconic witticisms, “I never guess. It is a shocking habit—destructive to the logical faculty.” Luckily for Holmes, he never worked in marketing. The famous detective may have had brilliant deductive powers, but even he would’ve struggled to make sense of today’s digital video landscape. (Although he definitely would’ve been a YouTube star.)

With a blog post, you know what to look for: readers. If you’re a little more advanced, maybe you focus on the time users spend on a page. But with video, the metrics are crude; every platform has a different definition for how much time counts as a view. That inconsistency forces publishers to guess what’s working, what’s not, and what’s just flat-out illogical.

That’s a problem because, as we’re reminded every other week, digital video is not only the future of marketing, but the internet at large. Cisco estimates that video “will be 82 percent of all consumer internet traffic by 2020.” Facebook VP Nicola Mendelsohn predicted that the social network would be “all video” by 2021. And in 2016, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) found that digital video ad spend increased by 85 percent over the previous two years.

As everyone rides the video boom, marketers have used bigger ad budgets to produce more experimental work. Geico, for instance, won a Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions festival in 2015 for a five-second pre-roll ad in which the narrator says, “You can’t skip this ad, because it’s already over.” Other brands have broken the third wall and included calls-to-action in their pre-roll. The German automaker Opel even used the “Skip” button as part of one clip, showing a car driving over it.

But no matter how creative brands get, ambiguous measurement tactics may be preventing the reality from matching the hype.

“In TV, we know how brand advertising works. You see a commercial. It has music behind it. There’s a little mini-story behind it. It’s always fifteen or thirty seconds long. It always takes up your entire TV screen,” said Jonah Goodhart, co-founder and CEO of Moat, an analytics company aiming to help people evaluate digital video performance. “But how does that work in digital? Is it a static banner ad? A full-page takeover? Does it matter if you can see or hear it all?”

They’re all important questions. Now we’re finally starting to get some answers.

Get a clue

When Moat was founded in 2010, viewability was just starting to become a big issue. Since then, the growth of video platforms like YouTube and social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat have turned the issue into a digital free-for-all.

For all content besides ads, YouTube counts a view when a video plays for about 30 seconds. On Facebook and Instagram, it’s three seconds. Snapchat starts the clock as soon as something loads.

For ads, the equation is different. In 2014, the Media Rating Council (MRC) instituted a formal standard for what qualifies as a view: At least 50 percent of the video ad must be on someone’s screen for a minimum of two consecutive seconds. Many platforms have adopted this definition for their advertising businesses. (It’s worth noting, though, that Facebook still sells ads based on two options: impressions or 10-second views.)

Despite the universal threshold, only 66 percent of video ads, excluding YouTube, were viewable last year, per Google’s 2016 “State of Play” report. Additionally, in an email to The Wall Street Journal, MRC CEO George Ivie clarified that the two-second views “represent a minimum standard for the ‘opportunity to see’ the ad, they’re not about whether the ad was in fact actually seen or whether the ad’s message was actually received by the user.”

Autoplay and video player sizes complicate matters even more. For example, Facebook videos start playing automatically in a small window without sound when visible in a News Feed. Users have to click on a YouTube link to start watching, but the video player is larger. On Snapchat, the video may autoplay, but it’s the only thing in view.

“You would never design the system the way it is now if you could start from scratch.”

“I think it makes advertisers’ lives much, much easier if there is a standard,” said Tony Haile, founder and former CEO of the analytics firm Chartbeat. “However, in an ideal world, the advertisers should pick the metrics that best match the goals of their campaign… If you’re going for a two-second view but the first two seconds of a video ad make no mention of your brand whatsoever, you can have a highly successful campaign by the metrics, which does absolutely nothing for you.”

But what if a universal metric could do all that?

In late 2016, Moat unveiled the Moat Video Score, which incorporates how long someone watches a video, how long someone listens to it, and how much of the clip is visible on the screen. The metric consolidates the information into a rating between zero and 100, giving publishers and advertisers an easy way to measure complex insights. It also helps marketers translate results from different platforms. If a user watches a 30-second YouTube ad all the way through, in full-screen mode, and with the sound on, that gets scored a 100. But if someone watches that same ad on Facebook for 15 seconds and doesn’t turn on the sound, it would be less than 25, depending on how much real estate the video player took up on screen.

“What we try to do is connect our inputs to outputs, to business outcomes, so we can understand that when somebody is exposed to a certain type of ad on a certain site for a higher duration, that leads to higher ad recall,” Goodhart said. “We’ve connected our data with offline sales, as an example, for some of the CPG companies in the world so that we can understand what metrics are actually driving brand sales.”

Addressing all of these factors at once should change the conversation for the better. But overhauling the status quo won’t happen immediately, because not everyone is going to be thrilled with Moat’s movement.

Case closed?

For years, the video market was a cash factory marred by fraudulent traffic and ineffective programmatic ad exchanges. Money keeps pouring into it, but a 2016 eMarketer report showed that more than 70 percent of brand marketers are still concerned about viewability, click fraud, and bot traffic.

According to Jason Kint, CEO of the media trade organization Digital Content Next, a deluge of ad technology made it harder for advertisers to see where their investments were going. “You would never design the system the way it is now if you could start from scratch,” he said. “It was all built with the noble pursuit of more automation and efficiency. But we’ve got … a lot of opacity, and the mystery is causing a lot of people … to bring home great margins at the expense of trust in the marketplace.”

Perhaps the most high-profile case of misinformed measurement occurred last fall, when Facebook revealed it had been showing inflated stats for its “average duration of video viewed” metric to publishers and advertisers for two years. The mistake didn’t impact costs, but it did undermine some of the hype surrounding video. A setback like that gives publishers and advertisers a reason to question the accuracy of other data that gauges video efficacy.

With the current system, those trust issues will likely never go away. However, Moat and some other organizations like Digital Content Next believe there is a solution that could propel video forward: attention time.

“There is a lot of excitement to get more into an ecosystem where time is the unit of transaction,” Goodhart said.

Such a move would let buyers and sellers capture the true value of video. Brands would only pay for the total duration of how long users watch their ads. Publishers and platforms that sell ad space wouldn’t have to peddle cheap impressions. Plus, there’d be no more debate on what should qualify as a view, regardless of whether it’s zero seconds, two seconds, or some other yardstick.

“The question is whether we’re trying to figure out effectiveness or we’re trying to figure out existence,” Goodhart added.

Some publishers have started inching in the direction of effectiveness. The Economist and the Financial Times now sell ads based on attention. And a few years ago, Digital Content Next ran a small study of media companies including the likes of Condé Nast, ESPN, and The New York Times, which found that 80 percent were “interested in transacting on the basis of time.”

While the major players involved may not kill off the impression tomorrow, at least there’s some evidence we’re headed toward a healthier video ecosystem. After its metrics controversy, Facebook even agreed to let the MRC audit its data reporting.

“That doesn’t mean they are going to standardize the same metrics as other people, but it shows a certain amount of movement toward common ground,” Haile said. “The thing with all of this is we’re still in the early days. People are trying to work out what works. It’ll be interesting to watch.”

The post Video Measurement Is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It appeared first on Contently.

One touchdown pass and many incompletions later, I re-entered reality with ambivalence. The game was fun, but unnatural. Due to the motion sensors’ limitations, it felt like I was throwing darts, not a football. Still, despite its flaws, the potential was exciting.

Whenever you read about virtual reality, that word—“potential”—comes up a lot. Companies are clearly enthused about where the VR industry is headed. Some agencies are so excited by VR’s potential that they are covering the costs for brands interested in creating VR content, according to Digiday.

But at this stage of virtual reality’s evolution, is the technology a smart choice for brands looking for an immediate return on investment? Maybe not.

VR’s soft arrival

Jeremy Bailenson, a professor of communication at Stanford and the founder and director of Virtual Human Interaction Lab, is not among those expecting VR to transform branded entertainment overnight. At the most basic level, the cost renders it a luxury many brands can’t afford.

“Movies only have to account for the small window of space where you point the camera,” Bailenson told Slate. “Video games are not infinite. But VR has to work from any distance, any angle, all the time, so the cost of making content is astronomical.”

Unlike traditional storytelling formats with a single narrative for the audience to follow, VR puts the viewer in control. The immersive experience allows you to take in multiple arcs at the same time, which makes the job of the producer that much harder.

“It’s a fundamental shift in how stories are told,” said Ji Lee, creative lead at Facebook, during a VaynerMedia-hosted Social Media Week presentation. “You’re swapping linear for 360-degree, spherical, multidimensional storytelling. And the user has a new role as participant.”

In Lee’s mind, there are two major hurdles currently holding back virtual reality: scalability and content. Despite mainstream devices like the Samsung Gear VR and Oculus Rift, the technology still lacks widespread adoption. And even for customers who can afford VR, the library of content is limited. Plus, much of what exists so far makes for a great initial viewing experience, but loses its “wow” factor thereafter.

“When the iPhone first came out, there was a lot of utility to the apps. You’d go back and use them over and over,” said Zoey Taylor, business development at Framestore VR Studio. “With VR, you might put on a headset and use it for ten minutes in the morning, but people need a reason for repeated usage throughout the day.”

Even with multiple narratives at play, you’re not going to watch the same VR piece ad nauseum. And worse, much of the public isn’t yet able to appreciate the wonders of VR at all.

“In the early days, people could read reviews, but they couldn’t experience it themselves,” said Christine Cattano, global head of VR, executive producer at Framestore. “The press would cover it, there would be good buzz, but in terms of the larger population, they couldn’t actually know if it was good or bad. VR was being viewed in a vacuum.”

It’s tough for brands to swallow the costs of production knowing very few consumers will actually enjoy the end product. Only 6 percent of Americans were forecasted to own a VR headset in 2016, according to market research firm Strategy Analytics. And 93 percent of those in that small fraction owned cheaper smartphone models. While those numbers will improve this year, scale approaching any other mainstream media format remains years away.

But could there be an advantage in beating the pack—and reaping the rewards of the investment later?

Building for the future

Despite his hesitations, Bailenson believes VR does have some worthwhile applications in the present, though he limits those use cases to four categories. In the aforementioned Slate article, he describes those categories as follows:

• “Expensive: If it would cost a lot to do something in real life, like visit the statue of David in Florence, Italy, it might make sense to do it virtually.”
• “Dangerous: Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro might be the adventure of a lifetime, but it could also be your last. Several people die on its slopes every year.”
• “Impossible: You can’t travel back in time, grow a third arm, or experience life as a person of a different race or gender. But VR can give you a surprisingly visceral taste of what it would be like if you could.”
• “Rare: You could go whale-watching a dozen times without seeing a humpback breach right next to your boat. Or you could do it once in VR.”

For Framestore, early client investments in virtual reality have led to encouraging results. A mobile VR driving experience created for Volvo generated 28,000 app downloads and over 50,000 inquiries for more information, impressive totals even without a correlating dollar figure. Though sometimes, VR and ROI require a long-term mindset.

“When we first started working in VR, there were three goals for ROI: generating PR buzz, shifting a user’s perception of the tech, and being the first mover in the space,” said Cattano. “None of those have really changed, but I do think it’s a mistake to look for an immediate fiscal return on an investment into innovation. It’s more about, ‘How do I prep myself for this field in the future so in five years we’re not playing catch-up when it’s a more ubiquitous medium?'”

Case in point: “The Field Trip to Mars,” a one-off school bus built for Lockheed Martin to figuratively transport those on board to the Red Planet. The actual experience was limited to attendees at the USA Science & Engineering Festival, but the virtual field trip generated huge levels of worldwide press coverage and earned media. Framestore estimates that a year later, it still receives “15-20 inquires a day” about repurposing the idea.

“If you ask the question on behalf of the client, was it worth it for those 30 or so direct eyeballs, absolutely it was,” Taylor said. “While you can’t track the worth the way you would in traditional mediums we’re more used to, you have to open your mind a bit to the value of creating a bespoke experience for your consumer.”

Brands like Wayfair, an e-commerce company that sells home furnishings, are already starting to build a library of 3D scans of their products for anticipated future uses in the AR and VR realms. But is that the right move? On the one hand, a smart investment now can pay big dividends down the road. On the other, the “VR has potential one day” prediction is just that—a prediction. Since there is so little content out there, it’s difficult to know if what seems like quality VR content today might be outdated tomorrow.

“There are no true barometers for quality at the moment,” Taylor said. “It’s tough to recognize ‘high quality’ VR. People can see the potential, but they don’t have enough knowledge or comparisons yet to know what ‘good’ and ‘bad’ VR look like.”

Part of that quality conversation is ensuring that projects actually make sense for the VR treatment. Even those in the industry admit it’s not always the right tool for the job.

“We’ll sometimes, to the detriment of winning work, decide not to repurpose material just for the sake of virtual [reality],” Cattano said. “We try to encourage the conversation to hit the right points: How will this tech provide value for you? How will it solve a business problem?”

At the end of the day, that mindset is what Cattano believes is most important in determining if virtual reality is a smart use of budget. The answer varies depending on the specific task at hand, and whether VR provides value a cheaper medium simply can’t offer.

“We’re maturing into a place where we can look at it and say, ‘How does VR solve this problem uniquely?'” she said. “It has to be through the lens of what problem you’re solving rather than the ROI you’re generating, because ultimately, using VR to solve a specific problem is your ROI.”

The post Are Brands Wasting Their Money on Virtual Reality? appeared first on Contently.

“They weren’t just there to meet me,” Dunham explained on a panel during She Runs It’s “2017 What’s Hot in Media” conference. “They were there to connect with each other. We wanted to tap into that.”

Just about every new media company wants to start a blog that can serve as a central hub for content. The blog facilitates movement between the site and social channels, and is ripe for ad space. What’s striking about Lenny Letter is the way the newsletter format has been able to foster such deep and loyal readership.

Lenny Letter works as follows: Friday newsletters feature interviews. The Tuesday newsletter is filled with personal essays, short stories, poetry, and even branded content. The emails cover a range of political, cultural, and professional topics with the same brazen creativity that has come to define Girls.

From the beginning, the Lenny team has interviewed dozens of other women artists, controversial professionals, and politicians about their work and experience combatting gender bias in male-dominated industries. In Lenny Letter’s inaugural edition, Dunham interviewed Hillary Clinton about her civic involvement in the 1960s, swimming illegally in the Wellesley campus pool, and gutting salmon in Alaska. The team later released a video clip from the interview where Dunham and Clinton discuss campus assault.

The key was to develop what Dunham described as a “snark-free space,” where women could safely share their ideas and commenters “didn’t have the opportunity to become their worst selves.”

“A lot of women feel really powerless right now.”

“The ‘no comments’ feature was very much by design,” Konner said. “There is also something very intimate about [that medium].”

The small team of editors work with writers and designers from all fields, many of whom have never been published or were burned by social backlash. “These women are excited to share because they have been so profoundly bruised on the internet,” Dunham said.

Feminist publications like Jezebel or Bust are known for daily hot takes, but on the panel, Konner was quick to joke that Lenny is more of a “frigid take.” Lenny’s email format has allowed space for its editors to invest in longform stories and other opportunities for fiction and poetry. The average story takes three weeks to produce, and most pieces remain evergreen.

According to Lenny’s editors, high-quality email content has inspired an intensely engaged audience. As of last summer, there were over 500,000 subscribers, and the average open rate flirted with 70 percent. “Engagement is so deep that if you don’t open for awhile we’ll unsubscribe you,” Konner said. “Engagement is the top thing we care about.”

As it turns out, it’s also the thing that attracts advertising dollars.

Lenny doesn’t discriminate (against advertisers)

In October 2015, Dunham and Konner partnered with Hearst to launch a traditional website for Lenny that could complement the newsletter (and provide a permanent space for native and display ads). At the time of the deal, Hearst Global Digital Media President Troy Young told Ad Age its distribution agreement would showcase Lenny content on its other properties—Cosmopolitan, Elle, Marie Claire—treating Lenny (as an entity) like a syndicated columnist. “It’s almost like a modern day Dear Abby,” Young said at the time.

On the panel, Dunham referenced a short story written by Alice Sola Kim to show just how creative Lenny has gotten with branded content. Kim’s story was sponsored by General Electric, and Lenny’s editorial team worked with GE to bring some of its research into the final version.

“We got to do this with a brand in a really thoughtful and cohesive way,” Dunham said. “We get to work with super smart editors and are as proud of this as anything that we’ve run.”

Like with the GE short story, Lenny Letter has full editorial discretion over branded content, which means editors have relied on their own network of contributors. This comes back to the original safe-space approach, which the editors feel is critical in the current political climate.

“A lot of women feel really powerless right now,” Dunham said.

Through Lenny Letter’s email, its online site, and the April 2016 deal with Random House to start a publishing imprint, the publication remains a way for women with traditionally marginalized voices to hold a megaphone in the media.

The question will be if Lenny Letter can uphold its feminist values in the face of future corporate deals. What if, for example, a CPG company works with Lenny to craft a beautiful novella, but doesn’t offer women and men equal pay? What happens if an energy corporation sponsors elegant environmental poetry but has a restrictive maternity leave policy?

For now, Dunham and her team are happy to supply a place for women to speak freely. After joyously sipping ginger ale, Dunham released her signature giggle: “I just feel lucky we don’t have a very high snack bar and Ping-Pong threshold.”

The post How Lenny Letter Turned an Unorthodox Media Model Into a Safe Place for Women appeared first on Contently.

The Ringer: Measuring the Impact of Uber’s Many Controversies

Selected by Brian Maehl, talent development manager

If Uber CEO Travis Kalanick made a deal with the devil to create an invincible tech company, 2017 is the year the devil reminded Kalanick just who he’s dealing with. In this story, The Ringer’s Victor Luckerson dives into Uber’s scandal-plagued first quarter—from its broken HR department, to sexual harassment allegations. In the words of Luckerson, “Uber is not doomed, but it’s certainly more vulnerable than it was a couple of months ago.”

Uber may be a mess, but I struggle with the word “vulnerability” when it refers to troubled tech companies. Facebook’s failure to get ahead of fake news raised ethical concerns last year. Amazon’s culture was torn apart (or, you know, revealed) by some fantastic New York Times reporting in 2015. Snapchat was scrutinized after letters from CEO Evan Spiegel’s fraternity surfaced online in 2014. Yet they’re all doing just fine. While these missteps may not be as big of a deal as Uber’s chaos, they still have a serious impact on customer perception.

The monopolistic tendencies of Silicon Valley companies mean customers have few alternatives if they want to opt for a competitor. There’s such a long leash that ethical allegations become footnotes in their histories, rather than causes for their descent.

Groove: How We Built an Online Course That Generated $120,679 in 5 Days

Selected by Joe Lazauskas, editor-in-chief

Some key takeaways from this piece:

• Groove, a SaaS company, built a content marketing course that generated $120K in revenue.
• By all accounts, this took months, not five days. Not sure where that came from, but it makes for a great headline. Game respect game.
• Still, I feel like an idiot for not doing this first.
• The blueprint they lay out here is really strong and easily replicable, especially if you’re, say, the editor-in-chief of a blog that’s published thousands of free content marketing resources over the past year.
• I’m an even bigger idiot if I don’t do this now.
• I’m really excited for their next installment when they reveal how they sold and marketed this course.
• After reading this post, I feel like Groove and this bird have a lot in common:

Mashable: The tricky art of marketing women’s empowerment in the era of Trump

Selected by Erin Nelson, marketing editor

The revelation that Thinx CEO Miki Agrawal was allegedly harassing her employees led to headlines like this one from the Huffington Post: “Thinx Controversy Proves You Can’t Sell Feminism.” But in this Mashable article, Rebecca Ruiz asks whether feminist messaging can actually boost business. (Full disclosure: A “Wild Feminist” bomber jacket is hanging on the back of my chair.)

Companies like Dove, which has a history of campaigns that emphasize women embracing non-patriarchal beauty standards, have pulled it off. Others, like Audi, which released a commercial about equal pay during the 2017 Super Bowl, have received flack for lacking diversity on their own boards. Ruiz finds that feminist ads from soap bars to automobiles run the risk of backlash if they patronize women with stereotypical messaging—or perpetuate an openly sexist environment. But sometimes, she argues, campaigns that show women overcoming diversity, like Motrin’s #WomenInProgress, can operate as “a vivid reminder that we can and should insist on gender equality.”

The New York Times Magazine: CNN Had a Problem. Donald Trump Solved It

Selected by Adrienne Todd, communications specialist

To say that Donald Trump has a contentious relationship with TV networks is an understatement. His first few months as president have provided plenty of fodder for late-night talk show hosts like Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers, and in turn, their critical yet funny takes on the Trump White House have helped shape their personas.

News programs, on the other hand, have struggled to find their footing. Jonathan Mahler’s article for The New York Times Magazine asserts that while Trump excels at using the media to his advantage, CNN—with Jeff Zucker leading the charge—is flipping the proverbial script, leveraging the Trump team’s penchant for chaos to hone its message and solidify its brand.

The Wall Street Journal: The Morning Download: Exxon Mobil’s Supercomputing Feat Speeds Up Reservoir Simulation Times

Selected by Dillon Baker, tech editor

Thanks to the constant hyperbole of tech marketing, I can’t help but reflexively roll my eyes when I hear words like “AI” and “big data.” But then I read articles like this one on Exxon’s use of a record-breaking super computer to run reservoir simulations, and I’m reminded that this technology is a big, big, big deal (and that may not even be enough “bigs”). Operational optimization has already revolutionized the economy (See: Amazon). Add machine learning, the IoT, and real-time optimization to that list, and things are going to get crazy.

The New Yorker: “Paging Dr. Fraud”: The Fake Publishers That Are Ruining Science

Selected by Jordan Teicher, managing editor

A year ago, nobody used the term “fake news.” That’s weird to think about now since we hear it all the time. But propaganda, spin, misinformation, and so on have existed for a long time; the internet just helped them scale. Without any barriers to entry, people can publish whatever they want. The worst part is the garbage gets to compete against information that’s considerate, creative, and trustworthy.

Perhaps we could’ve seen this coming: the same thing has been happening to science. Over the past few decades, the number of “predatory journals” that solicit academic papers without legitimate peer-review standards has “jumped into the thousands.” Sometimes, these pubs even spam writers for pitches. Not surprisingly, the motive here is money. Shady journals accept all papers sent their way, as long as you send them a check too. The cumulative effect of this nonsense has tarnished the authority of all publishers. Instead of thinking about the content, readers and contributors have to waste time trying to verify if the sources are legitimate. Sound familiar?

If science academia wasn’t safe, then the rest of us in media never stood a chance.

The Atlantic: Who Owns Your Face?

Selected by Craig Davis, editorial intern

Privacy doesn’t seem to exist in 2017. Last week, we received another reminder, in the form of a House resolution that will allow internet service providers to sell your personal browsing history. (Side note: Go clear those cookies.) And now, data collectors are going after something even more personal: your face.

Facial-recognition systems are nothing new; the tech has been a part of Facebook’s tagging feature for years. But the F.B.I. has started using its latest algorithm to collect an image database of millions of Americans, 80 percent of whom are law-abiding citizens. As Adrienne LaFrance writes in The Atlantic, the increased surveillance blurs the lines of what is and isn’t acceptable to monitor.

“Your face is yours,” she writes. “It is a defining feature of your identity… It’s entirely reasonable to wonder how companies are collecting and using images of you.” Given the ubiquity of security cameras, those wishing to stay off of the facial grid may not have the option.

The post The Tricky Art of Marketing Women’s Empowerment, and 6 Other Stories We Loved in March appeared first on Contently.

Here’s one question that keeps coming up: How does Facebook’s fake news problem impact content marketing?

For those of you who have been avoiding all things Facebook ever since Uncle Bob livestreamed his shirtless election celebration, here’s some quick background information: Political fake news spread rampantly on Facebook prior to the election. A November BuzzFeed analysis found that the top 20 fake news stories about the election cycle were shared 1.4 million times more than the top 20 real news stories about the election. At first, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed that fake news wasn’t a problem, but after weeks of intense public pressure, the social networking giant announced that it would partner with journalism outlets like ABC News and Snopes to flag fake news.

The feature finally rolled out to some users earlier this month, and was first spotted by Gizmodo:

Despite these updates, fake news isn’t going anywhere. Facebook and Google now drive the vast majority of traffic to publisher sites. Search and social algorithms incentivize the production of viral fake news stories at a faster rate than fact-checkers can keep up. There’s no silver bullet that’s going to kill the monster in our feeds. For the foreseeable future, content marketing is going to exist in a media landscape that includes fake news.

Content marketing isn’t journalism, but you still need to earn your readers’ trust.

So how does that impact the way content marketers operate? I offer these three rules for creating content in the fake news era:

Rule 1: No more unbranded microsites

For years, brands have created unbranded microsites with a tiny logo on the bottom of the homepage—or no disclosure at all. Think makeup sites backed by a cosmetic company and mortgage advice sites backed by banks. This tactic has always been sketchy, and it’s just illogical now. Because of fake news, smart consumers are looking to scrutinize the sites they read. Don’t try to trick people. Be proud of your content and put your logo front and center.

Rule 2: Acknowledge your bias

One of the things that I love about content marketing is instead of partnering with dozens of major advertisers who inevitably influence your content in some way, you only have one financial backer to appease. But you have to own that in your content. You have to acknowledge who you work for and how it affects your perspective. This is the blog of a content marketing technology company. I don’t write anything that I don’t personally believe, but working here obviously leads me to believe that content marketing technology is a solution for a lot of different challenges.

Rule 3: Practice the tenets of good reporting

Use reliable sources. Accurately attribute anything you cite. Don’t just make stuff up. Content marketing isn’t journalism, but you still need to earn your readers’ trust. That’s why we recently built a source analyzer into our text editor to measure the trustworthiness of every link our writers use.

In other words: Don’t try to BS anyone. In the fake news era, smart consumers have their BS detectors on high alert, and sketchy content marketing is destined to set them off.

The post 3 Rules for Content Marketing in the Fake News Era appeared first on Contently.

While it seems like Americans have become more open-minded on race and gender over time, it’s clear that not everyone likes to see different types of people in commercials. However, a new study suggests that the younger you are, the more receptive you’ll be to diversity in ads.

According to a September 2016 survey by Barkley and Futurecast, more than two-thirds of U.S. internet users like ads that show “real people,” not just gender stereotypes from the past. While 60 percent of Gen Z believes progressive gender norms make it easier for people to be themselves, only 52 percent of the baby boomer population feels the same way. And the majority of boomers do not like seeing ads that show diverse types of families.

This demographic split goes beyond just advertising. A July 2016 Harris Poll found that 68 percent of millennials said they prefer watching movies and TV shows with multicultural casts, and 65 percent would shop more at a retailer offering a wide selection of multicultural products. Those figures dipped to 44 and 32 percent, respectively, for respondents at least 65 years old.

“We’re seeing a more diverse and open society, especially among millennials,” Quim Gil, head brand planner at ad agency Richards/Lerma, said in an interview with eMarketer. “We know that these new, modern consumers share an endless curiosity and openness to new cultures, no matter what their skin color. They want to learn new languages and hear different opinions—they don’t want to be siloed.”

Accepting cultural differences has somehow become a polarizing topic. But as younger generations demonstrate, marketers should not view it as an optional ad tactic. Instead, they should be excited to celebrate diversity as something fundamentally American.

The post Less Than Half of Baby Boomers Like Seeing Diversity in Ads appeared first on Contently.

“I think that really saved the magazine,” said Tracy Schmidt, director of social media at Crain Communications and an independent social media consultant, who worked at Time during the change. “It was then redesigned for a weekend experience. So it was a recap of the week behind and a look at the week coming up.”

The way people interact with media and social media today affects publishing schedules. In the early days of the internet, most people accessed information at work, so publishers adjusted accordingly, posting most of their online content between nine and five. Now, though, there’s a need to be active all the time. Legacy publishers like The New York Times post breaking news pieces online before they hit print. And now many digital-first publications have weekend editors who are hired to stay ahead of everything that happens on Saturday and Sunday.

“It ultimately comes down to understanding who your users are, when they are online, and when they’re in a mindset to be interested in what you’re doing,” said Rich Gordon, professor and director of digital innovation at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. “I think that really varies widely on who’s doing the publishing.”

Inspiring and entertaining, seven days a week

The weekend publishing push isn’t just a phenomenon for traditional news outlets. Refinery29, a website for “smart, creative, and stylish women,” regularly posts new stories about beauty and lifestyle topics on Saturdays and Sundays. But that wasn’t always the case, at least until the editorial team started getting more sophisticated data on its readers.

“On all of our platforms, we’re thinking about user behavior,” said Neha Gandhi, SVP of content strategy and innovation at Refinery29. “People are online and news is breaking and people want to be entertained and inspired and informed twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.”

“The world doesn’t stop turning.”

Over the last few years, people were visiting the site regularly during work hours, but Gandhi began seeing an uptick in readership on nights and weekends. In response, Refinery29 created evening and weekend teams to produce content for those busier times.

The site now plans out stories focused on brunch recipes and beauty tips for Saturday, and shopping content for Sunday nights. There’s also a weekend staff that can react quickly to social trends and breaking news events that tie into the site’s coverage.

“The world doesn’t stop turning,” Gandhi said. “There is always news, entertainment stories, celebrities are doing things, movies are coming out, social media is potentially churning out new reactions to things, and we want to be abreast of that and part of those conversations.”

Less crowded, more distribution

In addition to keeping up with the latest news, there’s another reason why publishers have opened up their editorial calendars: competition. If everyone publishes Monday through Friday, the weekend offers websites a chance to differentiate themselves.

“It’s a little bit of a less crowded space to get people’s attention,” Gordon said. “People … are more likely to be paying attention to what’s being shared by email or social media at times other than the business day.”

Distribution plays a crucial role for the publishers vying for that attention. It’s not about just publishing new content on the weekends—editors have to consider when and how to promote content at all times. Schmidt believes publishers need to think about the “life” of a post when they’re putting it together.

“It’s a two-phase approach,” she said. “One is the initial push for a publication’s new content and that should absolutely go out on social media immediately and also go into newsletter pretty quickly, if possible. Second, [it’s about] really stretching that piece of content as far as you can.”

According to Hootsuite, one of the best times to post to Facebook is between 12 and 1 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. Crain, meanwhile, schedules content to go live 5 a.m. to 11 p.m throughout the week. Most of the site’s readers are business professionals or executives, so the only time they have to read is in the morning or late at night.

Testing instead of guessing

Not all publications need to constantly publish new content on Saturdays and Sundays. Trade publications targeting a specific industry, like B2B, for example, probably operate outside the typical news cycle, and as a result, wouldn’t gain much from weekend publishing. But the best way to find out is experimentation.

Condé Nast Traveler does not break news. Its digital output primarily consists of features. But through testing, Laura Redman, Traveler’s deputy digital director, told me the site still found a way to capitalize on current events while staying true to the luxury lifestyle pieces, travel guides, and inspirational stories that readers expect. About one-third of Condé Nast Traveler’s stories published Monday through Friday cover travel trends and news stories; the rest of the publishing schedule is reserved for feature stories.

“We did a little research and we found that our loyal readers, who usually come to us through our newsletter, are more interested in inspiration than news on weekends,” Redman said. Because of that insight, Condé Nast Traveler posts only one new featured story each weekend day.

For others, posting a few pieces of pre-planned content on Saturday and Sunday is enough to engage readers. At Crain, Schmidt has found that publishing a newsletter about the latest social media news on Sunday nights between 6 and 7:30 p.m. is very effective in getting her audience of business professionals to pay attention. During that time frame, her open rate is consistently over 50 percent. But if she delays just an hour or two, the open rates drop by 5 or 6 percent.

“The good news is this is all testable,” Gordon said. “That’s the beauty of this publishing medium. At a fairly low complexity and cost, you can try it and see what happens.”

The post Weekend Update: Should You Publish Every Day? appeared first on Contently.