Ben Young
Ben Young
February 23, 2018


It has been the week of everyone re-evaluating their platform strategies.

The hub & spoke model is tried and true, whereby you use the platforms as outposts, but always draw back to your owned assets. This is as true now, as it was 10 years ago in digital.

I did some early modeling on this (ages ago!) on whether you should provide full RSS feeds of your posts, or just the titles. The takeaway was that by distributing as far as you could, you would leverage the growth of your home domain. Social is no different.

Talking about multi-platform strategies, I had a go at enabling Nudge insights on Google Home on Thursday evening.

Get content insights from your Google Home + Nudge

Notable stories this week

  • Amazon to distribute ad supported streaming channels > is this the real Amazon play, to be the final straw in TV advertising? Playbook 1) Grow digital ads, 2) Push online video 3) Use ads to bring all the content in and additional cost down. I have blogged about this back in 2015, on a low digital CPV, the ad load wouldn’t be much over a month to pay the $10 HBO fee.
  • NY Times created nytDEMO, a team to help bring together data, product, design, technology and advertising groups to help them develop branded campaigns.
  • How Gannett is thinking about local and branded content. This is great, local supports local newsrooms and is more relevant for the audience.
  • Declining Facebook reach squeezes publishers’ branded-content business. This does make things like Outbrain’s Sphere & Polar’s publisher stack more compelling.
  • Power Rankings for social branded content via Shareablee.
  • Content marketing is about ‘return on objective’. Smart.

Campaign of the Week

  • Cunard + BBC presents ‘A Sailors Life’ – a piece which shares a unique perspective on the natural and cultural phenomena that are sea voyages. Great story, some nice imagery and includes a strong CTA.
  • Nest + Curbed is the perfect partnership. In this piece they’re talking about the most popular house types in America; what does the first Apple computer, The Brady Bunch and Breaking Bad have in common? They all took place in a “ranch house”.

Nest + Curbed is the perfect partnership. In this piece they’re talking about the most popular house types in America

Smartest commentary

  • “GDPR will drive standards up in the digital advertising industry, as brands will have to improve the relevance and quality of content, as well as their data-protection measures. With consumers in a position to withdraw consent for their data to be used for targeting, marketers will need to ensure they deliver compelling ads that are in tune with consumer needs. Otherwise, users will not choose to grant continued access.”Ally Stuart, MD EMEA, Sharethrough
  • [On the biggest threat to the industry] “Saturation of mediocrity. Sameness. It’s inevitable. Only a few studios are really doing great work. Everybody else is copying that. The danger is brands getting turned off by less-than-engaging work”.Jeff Hull, Branded Content Specialist
  • “Advertisers now regard that [ad misplacement] as ad fraud. That’s migrated to news brands with some advertisers not wanting to advertise across hard news. So part of the problem is that what once was a simple definition [of fraud], has become skewed because of all the audiences coming into play,” –Anonymous, DigiDay EU

Datapoints of note

That’s it from this week, be sure to follow me @bwagy and @giveitanudge.

Ta,

Ben

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