With millennial expectations of advertising increasing and the rise of ad-blocking, the value exchange between brand and consumer is now more important than ever.
Depending on which definition you read as what constitutes a millennial, I am one. Apparently.
Here are the most eye-catching digital marketing stats from APAC in April.
This month’s topics include WeChat, video advertising, Indian ecommerce, Chinese digital agencies and much more.
More stats are available in Econsultancy’s Internet Statistics Compendium.
At the beginning of 2016 things are much rosier at The New York Times than they were two years ago.
Though print is still suffering, there seems to be a greater degree of parity between the incumbent’s digital know-how and that of new online-only upstarts.
The paywall is bearing fruit, social media platforms court its content and Google is trying to shine a light on longer form journalism.
The paper has shown itself again to be a restless experimenter across digital platforms and with new digital technology.
When it comes to content marketing it isn’t just a case of “build it and they will come”.
You can invest as much as you want in the most amazing piece of engaging, interactive, content… but if you don’t do any promotion, it’ll sit on your site like a fallen oak gathering moss.
With ad blockers here to stay, publishers and advertisers have rushed to develop new ways of reaching consumers online.
One of the fastest-growing alternatives to traditional digital advertising is native advertising.
Some publishers now earn significant percentages of their revenue from native ads, and there’s no evidence that interest in and adoption of native ads will wane any time soon.
If anything, growth in the use of native ads will only accelerate in 2016.
It’s almost the end of the year and it’s safe to say the massive C-word isn’t going away any time soon.
That’s right, I’m talking about content.
Programmatic advertising continued to creep into the generalist marketer’s consciousness in 2015.
If you’re interested, we recently wrote up a handy digest of some of 2015’s programmatic trends.
But enough of looking backwards, let’s look in the crystal ball and ask ‘What’s in store for 2016?’
For publishers, few topics are as pressing as the rise of ad blockers.
And for good reason: ad blockers are disrupting publishers’ ability to monetize their content through the model that was largely responsible for fueling the rise of online publishing in the first place.
On 30th November 2015 The Sun paywall will come crumbling down.
It’s fairly obvious why Rebekah Brooks made the decision; publishers are nothing without the reach of social media and this U-turn perhaps proves that subscription models need to be flexible, balanced carefully with (increasingly native) advertising revenue.
Pageviews are the oxygen that keeps every revenue flame burning. But rather than me harping on about advertising and social media, I thought I’d tell the story of The Sun paywall in statistics alone. Here we go…
My view on ad-blocking has always been pretty hostile.
I can’t understand why the same people who seem to value the web the most are the most likely to not want to make some kind of contribution to it.
Value this content, network or platform? Either pay for it directly or accept that you will have to make some other trade-off.
There are many articles out there defining what native advertising is and what it should look like.
There are native formats (simply in-stream ads, like expanding video), sponsored content (shaped by the publisher), content syndication (related content promoted through platforms such as Outbrain) and advertorials (often written by the advertiser).
There are blurred lines between some of these formats but what they have in common is a terribly misleading descriptor. This sort of advertising is anything but native, it is invasive, lurid, and can only survive as such.
Ad blocking isn’t new, but thanks to grim statistics that make it clear consumers are only getting more aggressive in trying to thwart online ads, some in the industry are starting to worry.
Really worry.