While nurturing talent and developing your team is crucial for organizational success, the hardest part is knowing where to begin. Fortunately, we’ve got the perfect place to start! Read this article to learn about six areas of leadership that you may have overlooked.
Without a hierarchy of compliance responsibilities activated in your organization, it’s easy to miss governance holes in marketing content production, communications, and approval processes.
In this checklist, we break down how compliance impacts your entire marketing team, including top regulatory concerns for:
Continue reading “Checklist of Compliance Responsibilities for Every Marketing Role”
Grocery stores played a starring role in the pandemic, meeting shoppers’ needs for essentials while supporting new hobbies and habits. But even as sales surged, profits didn’t always follow suit.
With an end to the pandemic insight, intrepid grocers are eager to entice shoppers back to the physical store for additional opportunities to “upsell” customers and foster enduring relationships that will lead to long-term success. But what does a successful strategy for securing more margin look like? In this article, you’ll learn the three things industry leaders say you should be doing to capture a larger share of customers’ wallets and reach new customers:
Continue reading “Rethinking Brick-And-Mortar Grocery for 2021”
It’s one of their most popular podcasts and seems to resonate with a non-traditional audience — non-bankers and younger folks (like me!). The subscription will also take Odd Lots beyond podcasts and into daily blogs, weekly newsletters, and oddly, show transcripts (seems to be a bit of demand for those). There’s plenty of upside opportunity — 75% of its listeners aren’t Bloomberg subscribers yet.
We’re running a reader revenue mini-series with Jane Mahoney of Private Media in Australia. It’s every week on Splice Pink. A Splice podcast
These would be spread across digital local and regional mastheads. This couldn’t be more different from where News Corp Australia was this time last year when it closed 100 print publications and cut up to 1,000 jobs.
All done through an army of fake accounts retweeting Chinese diplomats and state media.
Korean companies have been seeking a bigger footprint in the U.S. as Korean soft power reaches a global scale.
Amazingly, someone thinks they can still squeeze more juice out of those properties without actually transforming them. That new lemon squeezer is Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm (yes, it’ll all end in tears). Honestly, the businesses weren’t all that bad. It generated $7 billion in revenue last year — and yet was sold off at under 1x revenue. It was a costly adventure for Verizon with an implied 34% drop in the value of the businesses it acquired from 2015. Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg said the media assets have potential but required “full investment and the right resources” — obviously not the kind of work that a telco would do. I can’t see a PE firm doing that either.
The company is currently owned by Hong Kong-based Integrated Whale Media Investments.
“These partnerships have been made possible by the introduction of the Media Bargaining Code,” said Seven CEO James Warburton. I still call it extortion. It didn’t say how much money it was able to squeeze out of the platforms.
It wants to help IP development as well as monetisation.
This is a maternity backfill to support Facebook Journalism Project’s initiatives across the Asia Pacific.
These are meant for university students, journalists, and fact checkers across Asia, covering seven languages: English, Bahasa Indonesia, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, and Thai.
You’ll translate and edit short- and long-form research pieces produced by the company’s analysts.
The role is based in Beijing. Chinese language skills are an “advantage” though not required.
The ABC had 51% female voices, with three-quarters of the 48 participating editorial teams achieving 50:50 or better. How about a challenge on racial representation too?
“Their policies mean that women are left to be first responders to the growing levels of violence against them.” The report surveyed 901 women from 125 countries and features in-depth case studies of Carole Cadwalladr and our friend Maria Ressa.
But it also called on FB to review this suspension in six months. On the surface, it looks like a half-assed response, but going deeper, you’ll see the OB scolding Facebook for its ad-hoc ban on Trump, saying it is “not appropriate for Facebook to impose the indeterminate and standardless penalty of indefinite suspension.” Elegant legal phrasing there. In doing so, the OB managed to skirt the question at hand: Is it fair to block a politician from using the world’s most powerful privately run platform, and at what cost? Tune in six months from now for the answer.
“Not only has Substack stopped being software hiding in the background for people to build their own brand, but being on Substack has for some become a tacit sign of being a partisan in the culture wars, not least because it’s a lot easier to build a devoted and paying following by stressing that you’re giving readers something the mainstream won’t.”
It acquired Scroll, a media startup that gives you an ad-free experience on select media sites while charging you a fee for it (that gets split with the publishers). Twitter is on track to building out a premium subscription service, where presumably paid subs will be able to read articles ad-free, as well as get access to newsletters (through Twitter’s recent acquisition of Revue).
Twitter says that it will “bring the core elements of Nuzzel directly to Twitter over time.”
If you have 600 or more followers, you can start hosting your own audio space. New features are also available — multiple co-hosts, paid sessions, and scheduling reminders.
Participants will get a $5K-a-month stipend for three months, and some hardware and creative support to get started. And if it’s really good, Clubhouse will sign some of them for a longer term.
YouTube launched a $100 million fund to pay people to make YouTube Shorts. TikTok and Snapchat have been doing something similar.
This is something that Twitter started doing a year ago. The little nudge is helpful — unless of course you’ve already read the article somewhere else and that little bit of tech is trying to guilt-shame you for being irresponsible.
Well, not really; it’s only in the U.S. for now. You can sense the anxiety — Clubhouse’s download numbers have plummeted now that every other platform has started rolling out live audio rooms. Speed matters when everyone’s copying you.
The provincial Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection said Facebook’s plans to modify WhatsApp’s terms of service are illegal under Europe’s data privacy laws.
Attorneys general from 44 U.S. states and territories have written to Mark Zuckerberg urging him to drop his plans.
What about an NFT? In the 1950s, the San Francisco Chronicle hid a wooden box of ‘treasure’ in the city, causing readers to dig holes around the city in search of a $1,000 prize. (Due to random hole-digging being illegal, this isn’t much of a thing any longer.) In the 1880s, the Chronicle offered pistols as an annual subscription giveaway prize. (Also possibly illegal due to random holes in people.) But the Chronicle has moved on to a different sort of treasure: the ubiquitous NFT, which they’re offering specific to a page called Best Bay Area Views Guide. “The buyer gets the NFT and the power to remove the paywall on the page, making the guide to some of the region’s top outdoor spots free for everyone, forever.” I love the idea that readers of a media org can support the community in this way. (Does it have to be an NFT, though? What if I just want to sponsor an article because, well, 1. it makes people feel good, 2. it makes me feel good, and 3. the media org makes well-earned revenue. It’s like paying taxes to support kids going to school — even if you don’t have kids. Everybody wins. Also known as: we’re in this media thing together. What do you think? Would something like this be workable in your community?
Now — bizarrely — you can get the album. “Although the seven tracks, which each run to half an hour in length, are different in their granular details, essentially they were made by Lego pieces being poured out of tubs, sifted through and clicked together.” I’m listening to a track called Wild as the Wind as I write this, and it has what sounds like crickets in the background, but the main sound is masses and masses of what are clearly tiny Lego bricks being poured gratuitously in undulating waves. It’s all weirdly soothing (and I’m not an ASMR fan, although I do like white noise when I sleep). The other tracks are called Built For Two, The Waterfall (literally a steady 30-minute wall of sound of the demolition of a construction site made entirely of Lego), Searching for the One (Brick), It All Clicks, Big Hearted Bricks, and the vaguely ominous-sounding The Night Builder. I suspect the follow-up album will be a thrash metal version of people screaming in pain after stepping on a brick that damn Night Builder left on the floor.
“Startups are also delivering non-commerce core services through WhatsApp, at times using its chat function without actually chatting.” So many products-within-a-product:
See, the point here isn’t that it should be another WeChat-esque super-app. The most inventive use of it is something I’m calling WhatsHack. “This is a story of innovation—what tech disruption with human-centric design looks like when it doesn’t break the wheel of people’s behaviour, but rather rolls with it. Even if it means making the best [use] of a technology in a way it was not intended to be used.” Hack WhatsApp. Help people. Profit. Win.
We’ve seen newsletters. Slack channels. Slide decks (Quartz does those). Would you buy a spreadsheet? It’s a thing. Gumroad, a popular online marketplace, has seen “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in sales for spreadsheet products. Better Sheets sells for a one-time fee of $49. Newsletter OS, with Notion spreadsheets and templates, also sells for $49. (The maker also has another product called Podcast OS.) Spread the World, an Airtable of hundreds of startup links, sells for…you guessed it…$49. It’s a simple, solid idea: “Every project starts in Google Sheets.”
Such a great idea. “Keep up with the multi-billion dollar video gaming universe, from the hottest games to the most interesting studios and players.” I have a serious case of sour grapes because this is something we’ve been thinking about doing at Splice for a while now.
You’ve had 15 years as Microsoft’s default font, and it’s been quite the ride. Apart from the fact that you squabble with my Mac devices when I open people’s PowerPoints, I have nothing against you personally. But it looks like your bae Microsoft is done with you. (This bit from their breakup text is revealing: “Calibri has been the default font for all things Microsoft since 2007, when it stepped in to replace Times New Roman across Microsoft Office. It has served us all well, but we believe it’s time to evolve.”) Even your parent, designer Luc de Groot, says “It’s a relief” and that he designed you in “quite a hurry.” Harsh. They’re crowdsourcing the hunt for their next swipe-right, and the shortlist is in. They’re called Tenorite, Bierstadt, Skeena, Seaford, and Grandview. Like you, they’re all sans-serif, geometric, and humanist; clearly, Microsoft has a type.
This is the first update to the icons since the ‘90s. Those are the ones that appear in that scary System32/shell.dll library (you know the one I mean) for hibernation mode, networking, memory, floppy drives, and the like. A quick look at the before and after screens in the story indicate that, so far, the updated icons aren’t quite the “sweeping visual rejuvenation of Windows” that the company is calling this, but perhaps there’s more to come.
This user tries to “find ways to incorporate data-driven design elements to create a more compatible user-centered child experience.” Until then, it looks like the High-pitched Screaming bug will persist.
The point is to make them convert: what do you want your web page to do? Make a sale? Turn readers into subscribers? Subscribers into paying customers? These tips from someone who has audited a few landing pages in his life are full of solid advice you could probably implement right now. Some of my faves are
“Guy who invented the clock: there will be 12 numbers on it
Friend: so the day will be divided into 12 segments?
Inventor: no, 24
Friend: so will the day start at 1
Inventor: the day will start at the 12, which is at night
Friend:
Inventor: the 6 means 30”
I’ve audited 500+ websites over the past 6 years.
Here are 17 learnings to help your landing page convert:
— Blake Emal 👋 (@heyblake) May 4, 2021
“Vibes are a medium for feeling, the kind of abstract understanding that comes before words put a name to experience.” Yup — ambience. But on social media, we mean an “audiovisual eloquence”, or a “sympathetic resonance between a person and her environment”. When Nathan Apodaca sailed wildly — but so smoothly — down the road on his skateboard chugging cranberry juice to Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Dreams’, that was vibe. More than 12 million people thought that was vibe. This reflection on the nature and provenance of vibe in the New Yorker is wonderful because it defines that abstract, elusive, untrackable quality that we connect with on our social media. Vibe is back, and is the most difficult user experience to design. “In some ways, the rise of digital life allowed for a vibe revival.” You can collect and curate them and share them, and most important of all, the internet — and TikTok — makes it possible to participate in them.
That’s right: this is your chance to revisit the UX design of your distant youth with path-breaking clunkers such as the Apple Lisa office System 1 from 1983, Visicorp Visi On, and the crazy world of Windows 95. Such a great visual thread.
How user interface evolved for the past 40 years ✨
Visual Thread 🧵
— Victor (@vponamariov) April 23, 2021
A History of Arab Graphic Design is about the people, events, and communities that shaped design in the Arab world, and I really want it. It wasn’t a simple project for the authors Bahia Shehab and Haytham Nawar to build out. “In the Arab world, archiving is a hurdle for several reasons.” One of those reasons is that designers “are fleeing wars, civil unrest, invasions, and colonialism. They are too busy and preoccupied to worry about the legacy of their own work.” Interestingly, the book doesn’t pretend to be a comprehensive study, mainly because the ‘Arab world’ is about 420 million people across multiple cultures and histories. “in Morocco and Algeria for instance, Arabic is “almost eradicated” because of French colonialism.” That said, the book doesn’t limit its scope to the geography of the Arab world, so there’s a whole chapter on the designers of the diaspora. The thumbnails and images look incredibly rich and complex and multilayered, and I can’t wait to get my hands on this thing. “Designers and calligraphers are the shapers of collective memories, and that’s very important.”
What a coincidence — me too!
Today, ten years ago, @SCMPNews started to publish full-back pages infographics. Here you go, almost three hundred graphics. #INFOGRAPHIC #HongKong #newsdesign @SCMPgraphics pic.twitter.com/w4YyaA1135
— Adolfo Arranz (@adolfux) March 12, 2021
This is a great way to make sure your text is readable against backgrounds in combinations that may not have enough contrast. Now if only somebody could make a Diversitymeter that will tell you whether your website has enough diversity and representation.
I’m…impressed. But there is hope: I’ve just discovered Authory. Sorry if this sounds markety — I’m not being paid to promote them or anything — but this thing automatically imports and backs up your articles, can turn your readers into subscribers, and will give you social media insights. But its second-best feature is that it will automatically update your page when you publish a new story. Best feature of all? They have an endorsement from the NYT star journo David Pogue.
GPay can now be used to send money from the U.S. to India and Singapore. An easy way to help you pay your freelancers on time.
Authory is worth checking out — it imports all your previous work across publishers, and it’ll also add your new articles wherever they’re published.
Content marketing can be exhausting. How much content is enough? The key to keeping a steady flow of messaging and engaging over multiple channels is repurposing your content. Your audience consumes content on multiple platforms so your marketing efforts need to be there too. Fortunately evergreen content, short edits from long-form videos and infographics for detailed reports are some of the ways to extend the life of your content.
Repurposing content essentially sends out the same message, which creates the mere exposure effect. Put simply, the more you hear or see something the more you like it. There’s also the rule of seven, which states that consumers need to be exposed to a marketing message seven times before committing to a purchase.
If you want to increase your brand’s exposure you need more marketing assets. This is something that takes time and resources. Many marketers claim to spend between 10 and 20 hours a week producing visual content while B2B marketers estimate it takes 60 hours a month to produce just four assets. Compare this to an author who picked up 20,000 subscribers in six months by simply uploading old blog posts on Medium.
Probably not, but there are some signs of regulation. Last week Facebook’s Oversight Board (journalists, lawyers and activists appointed by the platform) upheld the social media’s ban of Trump. Trump responded by calling the major social media sites corrupt. It’s a view shared by many on the right who accuse the platforms of bias against their side despite right leaning pages accounting for 45% of interactions on Facebook last year.
While US tech firms are attempting self-regulation, in China the Government is stepping in. Last week 11 tech firms were fined for failing to get regulatory approval for past acquisitions or joint-venture deals. This comes after Alibaba was fined a record S$3.69 billion for violating the same antitrust laws. Clearly, Beijing doesn’t want big tech getting too big.
China’s Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) – aimed to tighten rules around how personal data is collected – is another attempt to curb the power of big tech. Data privacy has become a global issue and the regulation moves by Beijing could be seen as a way to compete with the US (which have no data privacy laws) and become a tech superpower.
If you want people to pay attention to your message, they need to care about it. People only care about things they have some sort of emotional attachment to. (Sorry to be so blunt.) This is why emotional content is so important in marketing. Put simply, emotional content is more likely to be shared, engaged with, feel authentic and encourage action by the audience.
You’d expect humans to act rationally but we don’t. Emotions get the better of us, even when it comes to marketing. A study by the UK-based Institute of Practitioners in Advertising found that purely emotional marketing performed twice as well as rational based messaging (31% v 16%). Humans are emotional creatures first.
Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as happy messages will be shared and sad ones won’t. A study by the Harvard Business Review found that activating emotions — ones that fire you up — are more likely to encourage a consumer reaction. Depending on your brand, this could involve good and bad emotions. Excitement and inspiration can be just as effective as disgust when it comes to tapping into activating emotions.
It may come as a surprise but consumers are willing to pay for content. It’s not just streaming services either. Traditional media outlets like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian have built a reasonable subscription-based audience. Most news outlets haven’t been able to attract such a large audience and are increasingly looking at e-commerce aka publisher commerce content for revenue.
The Reuters Institute conducted a survey to understand what motivated people to pay for content, specifically news. Generally, the reasons were distinctive and unique content, the convenience of access, value and benefit to society. If the content feels important and useful to the consumer, they’re willing to pay.
The big social platforms realise users are willing to pay for content — they just don’t want to pay the platforms themselves. Clubhouse makes it easy for audiences to send money to their favourite creators. Meanwhile, Facebook has noticed the success of Substack and is integrating a similar feature into Pages so journalists can be paid for their work. While it may feel like the overload of content available to consumers makes them ambivalent, there are still revenue opportunities.
Podcasters will be able to mark specific episodes as “subscriber-only” content. It’ll be the U.S. market for now, with international expansion in the next few months. The magic is in its rev share — Spotify won’t be taking a cut from podcasters for the next two years, and will impose a mere 5% fee in the third year. Compare this with Apple’s plan to take a 30% cut for the first year, and halving that for the second.
We’re quickly moving away from the open — and free — format of podcasting to paywalled content.
This is great for consumers and Apple — but undermines apps that rely on tracking, eg. Facebook, Instagram, and Google. It’ll also harm small publishers who depend on targeting to get their content out to the right people. Let’s see. My hunch is that most people don’t care about privacy as much as we think.
Tim Cook thinks people will pay a premium for privacy on the web, while Mark Zuckerberg wants to keep things free by having you as the product.
You can now schedule voice chats (Telegram’s “Clubhouse”). You can also send money — the app now accepts credit card payments natively (great for tipping creators and your favourite media orgs!).
Telegram also announced standalone web access so you can use it in a browser — without having to download an app. Before you say this isn’t amazing, remember that rivals WhatsApp and Signal both require you to have the app installed on the phone to connect. Really annoying. But with no downloads or installs needed, Telegram Web is one of the safest ways for journalists to communicate, especially if you’re at risk of having your phone seized.
You can send money through PayPal, Venmo, or even Bandcamp. Yet more monetisation options for creators.
The same trend is happening in the e-commerce space. Just look at Mailchimp. What started as a newsletter business is now helping entrepreneurs build online stores.
Except there’s just too much in there. So the MPP folks have now turned it into an email newsletter course you can take.
We heard you. There’s so much in the Membership Guide (https://t.co/LadySh7gKN) that you needed a cheat sheet. So we launched a newsletter course! Each week for 13 weeks, you’ll get 1 lesson from the Guide. It starts next week, so sign up for the NL here: https://t.co/ZFkwNkt8Xz pic.twitter.com/UNPSqpY6Jx
— Membership Puzzle Project (@membershippzzle) April 28, 2021
Verizon, which made an expensive multi-billion dollar adventure into media in 2015, wants to sell off its media assets that includes Yahoo and AOL. It may fetch about $5 billion, according to the WSJ. Private equity firm Apollo Global Management is reportedly keen to pick up these hot potatoes.
Use the #FollowLocalJournalists hashtag — one good way to recognise the important work that local journalists are doing in places like Myanmar. Btw, the hashtags #FollowLocalJournalists, #WorldPressFreedomDay, #WPFD, #WPFD2021 and #PressFreedom will all activate a special emoji on Twitter.
Meedan is bringing together a panel to discuss emerging threats to journalists and press freedom.
“You will learn techniques for digging up information online, finding people and bringing back information deleted from the web.” It features translation into Hindi, Urdu, and Indonesian.
They have nearly 20 speakers (including Rishad Patel!) in a program that includes talks on how new digital experiences, products, audiences, and strategies are shaping the world of media.
The person will be required to write “accurate and attractive headlines and summaries”.
The fellowships will cover registration fees for this year’s ONA conference in June. Fellows also receive three online coaching sessions and an ONA membership.
I love that this is #1 on the list (a nod to all the fellow introverts out there): “Focusing on the screen causes wear and tear for both the journalist and the interview subject. It’s not always necessary to see each other to conduct an interview.”
Here’s a good tip: “I stopped using the phrase, ‘outlets I freelance for.’ I refer to these outlets as my clients. This has placed more control in my hands, while also building self-confidence.”
Everyone knows podcasts have been growing in popularity. Whether it’s true crime, long-form interviews, comedy, political panel discussion or storytelling everyone has a favourite. For marketers, this means new opportunities to reach consumers. For many, podcasts are uncharted territory, so what’s the most engaging tactic? We look at the different advertising formats and how to pick the right podcast for your campaign.
In the age of content overload, the fact that listeners are willing to give up an hour of their day to listen to a podcast means the format and hosts are connecting. The hosts form a connection with listeners and studies have found this trust extends to brands advertising on the podcast. The ads read by the hosts appear to increase emotive engagement and stick in the listener’s memory.
Spotify understood the appeal of podcasts early on, adding them to its streaming services back in 2018. Earlier this year, they launched the Spotify Audience Network that gave marketers more control over campaign management and the ability to better target listeners. The company is also giving more power to podcasters with its subscription service, meaning episodes can be marked for subscribers only. It’s early days yet but already this medium is creating new opportunities for content creators and marketers.
The growing popularity of podcasts has seen a rise in audio influencers. You don’t have to be in front of a camera to influence, being behind a microphone can have the same effect. Social audio-chat app Clubhouse has further shone a light on audio influencers with brands and marketers looking for talent on the platform. This popularity has also led to the formation of the Audio Collective — a group of professional hosts offering support to Clubhouse creators.
Spotify understands the appeal of the audio influencer and has been spending big bucks to attract big names. Barack and Michelle Obama as well as Joe Rogan have all signed exclusive deals with Spotify to produce audio content. Even DC Comics has penned a deal. Obviously, Spotify believes these deals are worth the expense as they attract more subscribers to the streaming platform.
One sure sign you’ve hit the right note with users is when other social platforms replicate your product. LinkedIn recently joined Facebook and Twitter in launching an audio social offering. The social-employment platform hopes to differentiate its product by connecting it to a user’s professional profile. One might argue the line between social and professional is increasingly blurred these days.
Working closely with Prudential, we brought its Sustainability Report 2020 alive with simple but effective animation. #DOSustainability
JBL Audio’s Sonic Stories series mixes animation and live-action for basketballer Candace Parker to share her motivational story.
Chinese electronics group and National Geographic explain how the colour red is becoming endangered in nature. #OPPOFindX3Pro #EndangeredColour
Rolex takes to the ocean to profile scientist Michel André, a pioneer of bioacoustics — understanding nature’s health by listening to it. #Rolex #PerpetualPlanet #RolexAwards
Halo Top desserts created a video expressing everyone’s true feelings when it comes to anything sweet.
Mailchimp has collated a series of documentaries that celebrate a range of entrepreneurs – from sushi chefs to video store owners.
Porsche takes the road less travelled on its Discover the Unknown series and this stunning road trip through Hungary. #discovertheunknown
News website Vox uses cut up animation to bring alive the talking heads in its Earworm series with an episode on a Black music radio phenomenon that emerged in 1976.
Cisco enlisted Coldplay’s Chris Martin to jump on a video conference call to speak and sing to students all over the world.
Workday pinpoints the main issue with remote working.
Utilising simple but striking animation, The Library of Economic Possibility shows how its database of difficult ideas and concepts can be easily understood.
The CureGRIN Foundation pairs excellent design with a parent’s voiceover to talk about children and rare genetic conditions.
Streaming service Deezer recreates the moment when you get lost in music while Brazilian e-commerce site Magalu lets you make a purchase at that same moment.
eBay tells the story of a self-confessed sneaker freak and how he turned his passion into a side business (and also kept his marriage together).
FedEx uses Willie Nelson’s ‘Always On My Mind’ to convince us that packaging and logistics are part of nature.
Content creation is the lifeblood of any successful blog. Yet, many marketers and writers struggle with developing high-quality content consistently to meet the demands of their target audience. In fact, one study found that almost two-thirds of marketers across for-profit and non-profit organizations find it difficult to develop and implement a scalable content strategy.
If this sounds like you, it is time to start focusing on ways to keep outputting high-quality content, especially if you realize traffic growth and engagement are becoming stagnant or declining. That’s where scaling your content development comes in – producing more without compromising on quality so you keep attracting readers. How do you do that? Below are some tips to get you started.
Continue reading “7 Tips to Scale Content Development”
Developing a content marketing strategy is an essential part of your brand’s success. Without one, your chances of failure are more significant, and you risk having your efforts go to waste. Having a strategy will give you a better chance of success, but developing one will take some time, but in the end, it’ll be worth it.
Continue reading “How Do I Develop a Content Marketing Strategy?”
