With Black Friday and Christmas on their way there is plenty to keep marketers’ minds distracted. But come the new year the problem of ad blocking is going to be more prevalent than ever.
I caught up with Forbes’ European managing director, Charles Yardley, to find out how the publisher moved toward a native content revenue model and why it chose to go down that route.
Audiences for brands grew by 20% in Q4 2013 and brand tweets that included pictures and content links generated the most engagement.
During Q4 2013, the top 100 brands according to Interbrand averaged 210 engagements per tweet when they added a picture link.
This comes from the latest research by Simply Measured, analysing the Twitter activity of brands listed in the Interbrand 100, compared with the Forbes 100 Best Small Companies in America.
Here’s a look at the research along with some recommendations for brands on how to increase their engagement.
When it comes to digital publishing sales, it seems like many publishers are questioning whether the product they have — the standard banner ad — is what they should be selling.
Last month I wrote that 2013 would be the year of “premium programmatic,” where LUMA map companies who make their living in real time bidding turn towards the guaranteed space, where 80% of digital marketing dollars are being spent.
My recent experience at Digiday Exchange Summit convinced me that this meme continues — with an important distinction: “Premium programmatic” is not about bidding on quality inventory through exchanges. Rather, it’s about using technology to enable premium guaranteed buys at scale.
The Huffington Post UK is launching branded blogs at the start of next year, mirroring a service already offered by its US counterpart and Forbes.
The US version of Huffington Post already offers brands the chance to blog, providing a new form of advertising to clients like BMW.
With media companies thinning out their newsrooms, struggling to stem revenue losses and worrying about the plausibility of subsisting on dwindling ad revenue online, there’s been a lot of talk over the past few months about charging for content.
The free versus paid debate was at the forefront of discussion on the first day of ad:tech in New York this week. Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP, showed his cards early in the day, opening the event with a talk where he put his money with Rupert Murdoch when it comes to making customers pay for media content online:
“In order to make traditional models viable… you have to plumb where people are willing to pay for content.”
Sorrell seems bullish on consumers paying varying rates for content of varying quality, and despite predicting a winnowing of content suppliers online, is confident that media brands will need to charge to sustain the quality of their content. It’s a theory that found root later in the day as well.
There are plenty of reasons why newspaper and magazine publishers are seeing their advertising revenue decline, but one major sticking point for them is the existence of ad networks. Publishers remain convinced that sending their unsold inventory to third parties to sell online is pushing the general value of their online ads down. There may be some truth to this.
But until publishers figure out how to sell all of their inventory in-house, networks will continue to serve a purpose — and irritate media moguls.
This month The Online Publishers Association (OPA) put out a study (which I wrote about here)
that tried again to discount the value of ad networks, saying that ads sold
through ad brokers are significantly less effective than those sold
directly through publishers.
And today, Jim Spanfeller, the outgoing CEO of Forbes.com (and treasurer of OPA), took to PaidContent in attempts to banish the notion of remnant advertising from the lexicon.
Should that happen? Maybe. But not for the reasons he thinks.
The general consensus seems to be that the Great Recession will end sooner than later and, even if we’ve got some permanent scars, most of us in Internet Land will get back to business as usual.
But what if that’s not the case? What if online publishers should be preparing for a protracted period of little to no growth in online ad spend?
Twitter, the microblogging service that has captured the hearts and minds of some of the internet’s most prominent bloggers and the media, doesn’t get much love in Europe.
This according to a Forbes article entitled “Twitter Not Loved In Europe” which was published yesterday.