Ben Young
Ben Young
January 25, 2019

One big thing
Marie Kondo is having her cultural moment, I read the book a few years ago – and subsequently went on a rampage through the house and my belongings ha. From a marketers perspective, it’s also a process worth doing, reviewing all the tools, systems, processes, partners and looking to simplify. In a world of growing spend, we’ve added more, simplifying helps everyone focus on the end result – better business outcomes. IF you haven’t caught it yet on Netflix, do check it out, or get the book here.

Notable stories this week

  • P&G is shifting most of its media business to Carat. Related, P&G has saved $1b in ad costs over four years.
  • BuzzFeed to lay off 15% off staff to help realign investments, in its march towards profitability.
  • Joshua Carroll shines the light on the challenges in implementing guidelines for sponsored content. In this case church and state are separated but the paid content is specifically a response to negative news – causing conflict. Give it a read.
  • Outbrain’s best native of 2018. And The Telegraph’s studio Spark shares their top work.
  • The myth of being time-poor. Thoroughly enjoyed this.
  • 37Signals ditches Medium to go back to the open web.
  • Bing will now power all of Yahoo Search Ads.
  • InPowered brings GDPR-compliant content amplification.
  • [Long read] From The New Yorker, does journalism have a future?
  • Sharethrough joins The Trade Desk’s unified ID solution.

Deals/M&A

  • BeesWax raises $15m at a $77m pre-money valuation.
  • Vox acquired the open-source publishing platform Coral Project. Publishers have had a crack at licensing their stack to mixed success in the past. What makes this different is, that paired with Concert, it brings tools to help generate revenue to the table.
  • Cision buys TrendKite for $225m.

Campaign of the week

    • I liked this campaign with Visa down under called Urban Survivalist, can Ronny Chieng survive 24 hours with no money.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjiFEwrzHls

Smartest commentary

Datapoints of note

  • Sixty percent of CMOs will to cut their marketing analytics departments by 50% by 2023, due to a “failure to realize promised improvements”.
  • Audiences are predicted to watch 20% fewer minutes of video ads per day, leading brands to embrace short-form video ads.

Events

That’s it, Happy Friday.

-Ben

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