SOCIAL: Reddit as a marketing option has upside and downside, but a couple of brands are making intelligent risks. Thinking differently like this can give you a less expensive testing ground and new scale.
MORE … Getting out ahead of technology is also a way to get early adoption on the next market move. And the market will move. It’s digital.
MORE … The use of private messaging apps to be truly social with opinions and recommendations is now outpacing regular social for such things.
MORE … Look away from digital for a moment and you become a relic. Get up to speed on social.
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EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES: The four key technologies to pay attention to according to a SmartBrief report include: Voice Search, Blockchain, AI and Augmented Reality. Short term, voice search is the place to spend your time. High adoption and low barrier to entry combine for a great playing field in 2019. AI and machine learning are already in play, although how much is actual and how much is buzzword demands investigation. Augmented and virtual reality is cool but held back by costs and effective uses. Blockchain is more behind the scenes but coming.
MORE … Speaking of blockchain, it’s not always the best answer to today’s problems and hasn’t yet resulted in much substance.
MORE … Maybe blockchain isn’t ready for marketing yet.
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… A new acronym to figure out: CMP (consent-management platform). If the European Union is the leading vendor for this, a lot of people are going to be upset. Looks like another tool to throw on the already expensive stack.
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CHATBOTS: Conversational advertising stands firmly on the leading edge portion of the spectrum, but once built, it doesn’t take a great deal of time to maintain. Plus, chatbots heavily fuel organic traffic and sales.
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VIDEO: YouTube is selecting and evaluating its content to compete with traditional TV, judging content on production quality and likelihood it would be viewed on a TV and other quality measures.
MORE … TV has an average viewability of 71% according to one report.
MORE … On the mobile ad front, video and animation are heralded as the way to break out.
MORE … A video view is not the same across all platforms. Google/YouTube counts only after 30 seconds. Facebook/Instagram offers up 3 seconds. LinkedIn is 1 second. Pinterest, Reddit, SnapChat and Twitter adopt the MRC direction of 50% in-view for 2 seconds. Before you pour all video engagements to Google, test completion rates across each of these.
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CONTENT MARKETING: Content is king but our eminence has become rather lazy. Content marketing is an overused buzzword that allows marketers to sound trendy but not always be effective. Teach, lead or inform with content. It takes more work than posting a blog or podcast and waiting for things to happen.
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MOBILE MESSAGING: Did you know that What’s App is the only messaging tool that offers a farmer emoji with reference to corn? The others: veggies (Google/Samsung), wheat (Google/Microsoft/emojidex) and generic with pitchfork (Twitter/Facebook/EmojiOne).
MORE … 65 percent of brands have no formal plan and 61 percent of marketers don’t even use SMS, yet, if used responsibly, it outpaces all other digital offerings for response and engagement.
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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: AI can go any direction its programming allows. That has some skittish. In a pre-emptive strike, Google created an ethics panel for its AI programming.
MORE … And then cancelled it yesterday.
MORE ... Coming out of the Adobe Summit this month was an agreeable gem. Make your intelligence artificial and your insights human.
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… Understanding of what AI really is and can do is still lagging. But, this chart shows where executives expect the greatest impact early.