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Welcome back, it’s been a rich week of news post Thanksgiving.
The thing about news is, it’s the in-between chats, the coffee chats, the catching up after work, the sly tweets. That chit chat is around VC funded pubs, finding their stability.
Timeless advice I once received, play to your strengths, what is it only you can do? I think we’ll see the pubs that win this round, leaning in to that. You know what, Buzzfeed has a great social content offering, do more of that, grow in-direct revenue – and it’s a solid property.
On a lighter note, it’s been a massive year at Nudge, and the team created a fun take on our end of year report.
Gustaf Stenlund, Marketing Manager at Nudge, will be in NYC between the 6th – 15th. Anyone who’s keen to grab a coffee can get in touch.
Notable Stories this Week
- Buzzfeed is the canary in the mine for getting a reliable measure of web + social audience. And announced a business re-org this week.
- Washington Post is now a software company, with Arc their WordPress equivalent.
- ^ A few of our clients use it and seem happy.
- Why (smart) advertisers are shifting to attention-based metrics.
- ^ Attention based is transparent. If you’re holding consumers attention you’re doing something right. Do make sure you’re measuring accurately.
- State of Digital Marketing from Luma has been updated.
- Native advertising grows up fast, shedding its rogue image. Great stuff from Rick, a hat tip to the progress the industry has made.
- [From us] We analyzed 7 million clicks to branded content, here’s what we learned.
- SnapChat talks ‘people based content’, tapping in to the relief that everyone is after from social fatigue.
- NYTimes is making all of its advertising available programmatically. Nice.
- Outbrain’s best native ads examples of 2017.
- Dazed’s redesign cut out ads and people are staying longer.
- How Monster.com organizes its content, Wow, How & Now.
- How Cooking Panda does content deals.
- How T Brand Studio is luring luxury brands to digital advertising.
- Is literature the next frontier of branded content?
Deals/M&A
- Axios raises $20 million to expand into new verticals.
- ^ Love the Axios format, simple straight forward and punchy. They’re not afraid to tell a story in the shortest way possible. Rather than fluffing it up for page views.
- ^ It’s also worthy that Evan Spiegel chose Axios to share his vision on how Snap is imagining a future where “content feeds are built on top of a human-curated supply”.
Campaign of the Week
- How technology is changing oil and gas, with GE’s Baker Hughes and Bloomberg.
- Fuelling growth, with BarclayCard & Couriers The Fast Track.
Smartest commentary
- “Doom is coming for companies that relied on an unlimited supply of VC money floating them until they cracked a nonexistent code to advertising. “ – Derek Thompson, Senior Editor, The Atlantic
- “By aggregating all brand content into a separate experience, it is essentially putting pressure on all performing content to be high quality. This will accelerate the need for brands and agencies to address media and message at the same time,” – Doug Rozen, Chief Digital Office, OMD
Datapoints of note
- 71% of the C suite reckon most branded is boring, expected and repetitive.
- 50% of senior execs said that a company’s thought leadership directly led them to aware business to a firm. Here and original.
- NY Times programmatic direct revenue double in the last 12 months.
- [From us] How consumers consumption of content changes on Thanksgiving & Black Friday.
- Average attention is 28-30% lower than norms across both days. i.e. attention is more fickle and you have to fight harder to get it.
- The highest quality distribution sources for were email, native & social.
- During Thanksgiving, peak desktop consumption was 12-1pm, Tablet 8pm-10pm, and mobile was fairly consistent from 9am through 11pm.
- On Black Friday, peak desktop usage was 9-12, tablet at 10 and mobile 8am-3pm.
- More here.
We’re also looking for an Account Associate to join the team, please pass this on to anyone you know wanting to break in to the industry.
Finally, we’re preparing our next The Best Native of 2017, please reply with any submissions. Last years is here. Our claim to fame, is it’s the most plagiarized list 😉 So please submit, as you’ll end up everywhere.
Ta,
Ben
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