Ads Require ‘More Creativity And Nuance’

“If there’s one item that’s completely changed the game with paid search, it’s how consumer privacy expectations are shifting ad targeting,” NP Digital’s Paid Media Fast Forward report says. “From industry leaders to smaller players, advertisers don’t have as much flexibility when creating hyper-specific targeting for campaigns.”

The report points to the moving away from third-party cookies as well as privacy changes as reasons that ads require “more creativity and nuance than ever before.”

 

Research Reveals More Consumers Will Share All Types of Personal Information With Brands This Year

Of the 15 different types of information Airship tracked year-over-year, email addresses are the most freely shared at 86% of respondents. This year, “interests relevant to a brand” (78%) displaced “name” as the second most shared information.

 

2023 State of Video Technology

Over 8 out of 10 (81%) of people want more video content from brands, but 70% of consumers say they rarely or never receive video from brands. That’s down from 74% last year, meaning brands are using video more for digital communications — but not nearly enough.

 

The Revenue Narrative: B2B Marketers Are Taking A Dollar-Based Approach

It shouldn’t be that hard for B2B executives to wrap their minds around the idea of revenue marketing: Simply, it means focusing on revenue as the ultimate goal. Of course, it also calls for alignment of marketing with revenue goals, integration of sales and marketing … But 97% say they can define it, according to the 2023 Revenue Marketing B2B Benchmark Report, a study by Demand Spring.

Reader Regularity Makes Biggest Impact On Subscriptions, Revenue

It’s not often that a publishing study seems to flip all established logic.

And yet, here we are, with a better way of measuring a news site’s success.

Data from more than a hundred news outlets was collected by the Medill Subscriber Engagement Index from Northwestern University to see what made an impact on subscriptions and revenues. The most important factors weren’t the typically relied upon page-views or time spent on the site, but rather reader regularity.

 

The Economic Potential Of Generative AI: The Next Productivity Frontier

Generative AI’s impact on productivity could add trillions of dollars in value to the global economy. Our latest research estimates that generative AI could add the equivalent of $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion annually across the 63 use cases we analyzed—by comparison, the United Kingdom’s entire GDP in 2021 was $3.1 trillion. This would increase the impact of all artificial intelligence by 15 to 40 percent. This estimate would roughly double if we include the impact of embedding generative AI into software that is currently used for other tasks beyond those use cases.

 

65% Of CTV Advertisers Upping Spend In 2023, By Average 23%

A new survey of agency and brand marketers involved in decision-making for connected TV/OTT advertising finds 65% indicating that they’ll increase spending in those media this year, by an average 23%. 

 

Organic Search Drove 36% Of Overall Website Traffic For 6 Key Industries

From social to email, paid, video and organic marketing, marketers are tasked with staying on top of a growing number of channels that drive traffic, but organic search remains the most cost-effective and impactful channel in the long term, according to the findings. On average, organic search produced 36% of overall website traffic for the six key industries that Conductor analyzed for Organic Industry Benchmarks, an overview of organic SEO traffic and search engine-result page trends across industry websites in 2023.

Good News, Bot News — Google Testing AI Tool That Writes News Stories

Google has its own game-changing AI tool in store, and they’re showing it off directly to the publishers. That’s the word at least from The New York Times, one of a number of news organizations to whom Google reportedly pitched an AI product capable of taking in current-event data and generating news stories. The article’s anonymous sources said The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal’s owner News Corp were amongst the organizations who saw demonstrations of the tool, known internally as Genesis.

 

Five Reasons Threads Could Still Go The Distance

One week later, Threads’ engagement is down — but the prize is still there for the taking.

 

Twitter Begins Its Transition To ‘X’ After Changing Its Iconic Bird Logo

Unlike when Dogecoin’s Shiba Inu briefly replaced it, it seems Twitter’s longstanding bird logo is genuinely having its last curtain call. Elon Musk and Twitter (or should we say X?) CEO Linda Yaccarino announced that the company was rebranding as “X” and projected the new emblem onto the company’s San Francisco headquarters. 

 

Study: Digital Marketing Works Better

A new survey by a British trade publication shows that 86.7% of brand-side marketers believe that digital channels are an effective tool for building brands, compared to 80.1% who think the same of offline media. The poll, based on interviews with 1,300 marketers, challenges the belief that digital is more effective for boosting short-term results. More than a third (38.3%) of B2B marketers say digital is “very effective” at building brands, compared with 34.9% of B2C marketers who believe the same.

Let Them Talk: The Best AI Tools For All Publishing Departments

After a quarter-century in publishing, I can very easily imagine how these conflicted in-house conversations about ChatGPT and AI tools have been going. 

But because I have the added benefit of years focused on technological tools that help publishers, you’ll have to forgive me for being nothing but ecstatic about the potential here. 

I truly believe this language-model technology and AI as a whole will be as essential a resource as any reference book or software package a publisher currently relies on. Once you spend time learning its limitations and preparing for its promise, it’s easy to see how revolutionary this tool can be for each and every publishing department. The commitment to AI’s independent strengths will ultimately be as essential as the separation of church and state.

In this blog, I wanted to highlight both the larger and smaller revolutions that AI can bring to the daily to-do lists of publishing teams. 

 

California Bill Requiring Big Tech To Pay For News Placed On Hold Until 2024

A California bill that would force tech companies such as Facebook and Google to pay publishers for news content has been put on hold in the Legislature until 2024. The California Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, sponsored by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), would direct digital advertising giants to pay news outlets a “journalism usage fee” when they sell advertising alongside news content. The bill would require publishers to invest 70% of those funds in preserving journalism jobs in California.

 

Global Study Finds Ads With Lower Carbon Emissions Are Tied To Higher Attention And Engagement

The study analyzed over one billion impressions across 55 countries through live campaign tracking and further stress-tested findings by using AI-based, predictive eye tracking on approximately 350 display ads that appeared on 100 U.S. websites. The resulting analysis proved that a spot that was in view for 10 seconds produced 64 percent less carbon emissions than a spot with a five-second, in-view time. This correlation between in-view time and carbon emissions is likely related to total ad load on each page, as the more ads that load, the greater the emissions generated. 

 

Marketing Meter: Brands Have Trouble Measuring ROI Across Channels

Most marketers expect their budgets to increase this year. Sixty-four percent say they anticipate budget increases, according to Nielsen’s 2023 Annual Marketing Report, a study released Tuesday. But will they know if they are getting what they’re paying for? Only 54% are confident they can measure ROI across digital channels, although not necessarily for individual ones.

Programmatic Advertising ‘Rife with Waste’ … But Also Potential Billions in Efficiency Gains

The Magazine Manager blog has covered the basics to bringing programmatic advertising to your sales teams. What we haven’t done is break down how programmatic advertising plays out in the wider $88 billion global market. The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) is taking a shot, releasing what it’s calling a “first look” of a larger study on open web programmatic advertising and analyzing 21 participating advertisers and their $123 million in ad spend and 35.5 billion impressions between September 2022 and January 2023.

Unfortunately, the findings aren’t all rosy.

South Carolina Newspapers Evolve A New Paradigm To Survive

In South Carolina in 2020, ten local newspapers folded their print editions, and those that remain are often shoestring operations. But some papers are bucking the trend, either by hiring staff, or collaborating with other papers to expand their coverage and investigate corruption in local governments. And readers are supporting them for providing news they can’t get anywhere else.

A.I. To Top Tech Spending At Many Companies: CNBC Survey

Companies across the economy say artificial intelligence will be their top spending priority over the next year, according to the latest CNBC Technology Executive Council survey.

Global Ad Market Keeps Growing Thanks To Counter-Cyclical Verticals And Retail Media

The summer update of MAGNA’s “Global Ad Forecast” predicts media owners advertising revenues will reach $842 billion this year, +4.6% growth vs. 2022 ($805bn).

 

Did Google Violate Its Own Terms and Mislead Advertisers?

Existing where we are at the intersections of publishing, technology, advertising, and marketing, we’ve consulted and linked to a fair share of Google blog entries and explainer articles.

Hard to remember a time when that text was a defensive one.

Thanks to a relatively bombshell Wall Street Journal article that highlights an extensive Adalytics.io report about advertisers potentially being misled for years by Google and its video-ad placements, Google has been caught on its backfoot. And while Google is quick to categorize them as “extremely inaccurate claims,” that these violations may have affected government agencies, Fortune 500 companies, publishers, and small businesses alike will surely capture more attention as numbers continue to be crunched, scrutinized, and questioned.

 

How Live Blogging Serves As A Critical Communications Tool For Newsrooms

Technologies such as live blogs have emerged as a critical communications tool to cover the world’s most pressing events — from the novel coronavirus pandemic to the war in Ukraine and even global elections. Live blogs have the toolkit journalists need to keep consumers updated on the latest events in an engaging, digestible, and authentic format. 

 

Perspectives from the Global Entertainment & Media Outlook 2023–2027

For the entertainment and media industries, 2022 marked an important inflection point. Total global entertainment and media (E&M) revenue rose 5.4% in 2022, to US$2.32 trillion. That represents a sharp deceleration from the 10.6% growth rate in 2021, when economies and industries globally were starting to rebound from the upheaval caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

U.S. Ad Index Expands For First Time In 11 Months In May

The U.S. Ad Market Tracker rose 2.5% in May — the first expansion in 11 months. The expansion compares with the year-ago period that was only up modestly and is the best May since Standard Media Index began tracking it. The growth is the first material sign that the U.S. ad marketplace is pulling out of a recession that began in July 2022, based on the SMI data, which is derived from a pool of actual ad spending processed by the major agency holding companies and independent media services agencies.

Friends In AI Places? Publishers And Tech Companies Discussing Content Deal

Financial Times is reporting that it and other publishers such as News Corp, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Axel Springer are in early negotiations with leading tech companies to “strike landmark deals over the use of news content to train artificial intelligence technology.” Sources are saying tech companies like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Adobe could pay media organizations a subscription-like fee to use their content with their AI products, something that would, in Financial Times’ words, “set the blueprint for news organizations in their dealings with generative AI companies worldwide.”

 

The Importance Of Editors In The Age Of (Highly Unreliable) AI

Germany’s best-selling newspaper, Bild, is reportedly adopting artificial intelligence (AI) to replace certain editorial roles, in an effort to cut costs. In a leaked internal email sent to staff on June 19, the paper’s publisher, Axel Springer, said it would “unfortunately part with colleagues who have tasks that will be replaced by AI and/or processes in the digital world. The functions of editorial directors, page editors, proofreaders, secretaries, and photo editors will no longer exist as they do today.”

 

Can You Spot An Email Written By A Robot? The AI Email Test

In the past few months, AI language tools have taken the world by storm. The likes of ChatGPT, launched in November last year, and Google Bard, launched this March, have been used by everyone. From University students asking AI to write their academic essays, to email marketing platforms using AI to craft smart, undetectable marketing communications. But is AI-generated marketing actually undetectable? To find out, we surveyed 510 Brits to see if they could spot the difference between brand marketing emails written by AI and those written by an actual human copywriter. 

 

The Irate Customer: People Are Unhappy With The Service They’re Getting

Marketers should be alarmed by the findings in CCW Digital’s 2023 Annual Consumer Preferences Survey. Of the consumers polled, only 4% feel the customer experience has improved in the past year. And 57% say it has gotten worse.

What Publishers Are Prioritizing To Expand Their Audiences in 2023

Echobox recently released its Publishing Trends Report 2023, summarizing the “challenging year” that was 2022 but also looking optimistically ahead, particularly at how those circumstances have “driven innovation at an astonishing pace.” And whether they know it or not, savvy publishers may already be utilizing the most-forward thinking innovation in audience development.

 

Young People Are Abandoning News Sites: New Research Reveals Scale Of Challenge To Media

Not only is consumption of traditional television news and print formats continuing to decline at a relentless rate, but online websites are also struggling to engage news users, despite the tumultuous times in which we live.

 

Marketing App Sprawl is Wasting Time and Money. Here’s How to Fix It

Marketers rely on software or applications for just about everything—managing campaigns, analyzing data, and connecting with their target audiences. In fact, 67% of SMB marketers plan to invest more in tech in 2023.

 

61% of Workers Embrace Generative AI, but Lack Trusted Data and Security Skills

Generative AI is dominating the news cycle — and with good reason — as companies embrace opportunities to boost productivity and improve customer experiences in a myriad of ways. But amid this innovation lurks a new risk for enterprises: How can they keep trusted data secure?

What’s Your Mix Of Six? Alternative Revenue Streams In Digital Publishing

Nowadays, no single revenue stream is enough to sustain, let alone grow, a digital publication. Instead, online publishers are relying on a combination of revenue streams to ensure they can bring in sufficient capital.

 

Best Times to Post on Social Media in 2023

The internet never sleeps so the best time to post on social media seems like it’s at every hour of the day. We’re going to demystify this myth so your social team can plan, prioritize and create a successful social media marketing strategy.

 

Why CMOs Need To Learn The Language Of The Boardroom

Marketers and boardrooms have never operated in perfect harmony — and while businesses continue to view marketing as a ‘sunken cost’ rather than a valuable investment this will continue. Recent research carried out across Fortune 500 companies found that the tenure of the average CMO is currently only half that of the average CEO, pointing to an increasing dichotomy between marketing departments and boardrooms.

 

59% Of Gen Z, 49% Of Millennials Will Give A Brand 3 Chances Before Abandoning It

Strike three and you’re out. Sounds like the rules of baseball filtered into ecommerce and brand loyalty — mainly because great products alone are not enough to keep customers loyal. It takes products and great customer service. Consumers’ patience runs thin, with 59% of Gen Z and 49% of Millennials saying they will give a brand a third chance before abandoning it.

The 5 Myths of Digital Flatplanning, and How To Overcome Resistance

It takes all types to put a publication together, and those who work on the production side are often some of the most project-focused, systematic people around. Ask anyone on staff and all would agree that effective production managers and assistants are underappreciated, overworked, and, perhaps most of all, complete control freaks.

The resistance that some production managers have in opening up their flatplans to the rest of the company is widespread. And after 20-plus years in publishing, I do know how to address the rationalizations given for that resistance. 

These are easily dispelled myths that can be addressed head-on for the better of the publication, the people who make it, and the process overall.

 

California Assembly Ignores Meta’s Threat, Votes To Pass The Journalism Preservation Act

One day after Facebook parent company Meta threatened to remove news content from its platforms if Assembly Bill 886 becomes law, the California Assembly voted 46-6 to advance the bill to the State Senate. “I’m not interested in a debate between Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg,” said bill author Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, in support of her legislation. “…Free press is in our Constitution, and it is at risk right now.”

 

Apple Vision Pro is Apple’s New $3,499 AR Headset

Apple has announced an augmented reality headset called Apple Vision Pro that “seamlessly” blends the real and digital world. “It’s the first Apple product you look through, and not at,” CEO Tim Cook said of the device, which looks like a pair of ski goggles. 

 

The Roar Of GDPR: The Impact On Marketers And Their Tech Stacks

Marketers wondering how a national privacy law might affect them should look at Europe. Five years in, companies seem to have accepted GDPR, judging by a new study from  Piwik PRO. For instance, 82.6% of respondents agree that brands can adhere to privacy laws and effectively market their products — up from 63% last year.