#you could explore the other multitudes of media that have been made to share pieces of the story

[woolandcoffee]

I feel like perhaps the people who are concerned that the Japanese perspective is not included in a movie about the people who worked on the Manhattan Project could do with a gentle reminder that Japan has a thriving film industry with multiple movies literally about the Japanese perspective on the making and use of the atom bomb. Just in case they didn't know.

[soft-and-certain]

That Unwanted Animal: An Analysis of Feeling Trapped

This is a theory I haven’t seen anywhere yet (after a cursory, surface-level check through the tags) and I feel like it’s worth sharing. I’ll be going pretty much line by line, which means this’ll be long. Trigger warning for discussion of toxic relationships, and their emotional and physical aspects.

So many of the posts I’ve seen about That Unwanted Animal focus on the raw sexual energy and feral quality of the song, which is definitely worth talking about - I mean, have you heard Madeleine Hyland’s voice? It’s a wonder I don’t drop dead because my heart ceases beating. But the first time I listened to it, my mind took me in quite a different direction. To me, it tells the story of a person trapped in an emotionally draining - possibly even abusive - relationship.

The song opens quietly, but it has an undercurrent of frantic energy behind it. Her whispering vocals carry this along, almost sounding like she doesn’t want to be heard, at least at first. 

You try so loud to love me, I cannot seem to hear ‘Cause you, you touch, my skin peels off like paint But beneath all of our panting, there’s this noise I cannot shake Can’t you hear the scratching, there’s something at the door

No matter how satisfying physical love can be, it  won’t replace the feeling that comes with communication and intimacy. Her lover seems to be unaware of her discomfort, the disconnect between them. Perhaps she is good at hiding her feelings, or he is just oblivious. He could also be ignoring it, which would add a whole other layer of unease.

And as you grip me like an animal that you’re about to spear “Be good to me,” I whisper. And you say, “What?” And I say, “Nothing, dear”

This line hits particularly hard. Not being able to voice your needs, desires, and concerns in a relationship (regardless of the type of relationship) is terrifying, and is one of the reasons for the anxiety that I felt the first time I listened to the song. 

The fact that he “grips her like an animal” is also indicative of the situation. Perhaps the first thought of many would be passion, but that is definitely not what came across for me. 

While we’re at it, let’s talk about her tone as she says this. Across the album, she proves that her voice can convey a multitude of emotions; here, to me, she almost sounds afraid.

Can’t you hear it? It can hear you It wants me to Throw the plate at the wall

Now she’s reached her breaking point. She’s finally had enough, and all that bottled up emotion has to let itself out. Shit’s about to get real. (Let’s have a moment of silence for the absolute power in her voice during the break. My gay heart.)

I’m the paper cut that kills you, I’m the priest that you ignored I’m the touch you crave, I’m the plans that you made, but fuck all your plans I’m bored And can’t you hear that scratching? I ask your eyes

Her lover truly loves her, planned his life around her, but she wants nothing to do with his plans anymore. Maybe she never did in the first place, or she’s only just realized that what she wants and what he wants out of life is very different. Their relationship has stagnated, and she’s begging him to realize what he’s doing to her. Can’t he hear that scratching? Can’t he see how she feels?

I’ve got knuckle burn from typing all these lines into your chest And as the belt from your buckle is tightening  I make shipwrecks out of my dress And the door below it splinters, and the creature creeps inside

Ah, emotional labor. In a healthy relationship, this labor would be performed equally by both parties in a give-and-take situation. Sadly, as happens so many times in real life, that does not seem to be the case here. The creature - her unexpressed frustration, anger, and discomfort - has finally been realized.

And we fall into each other, the scratching grows so loud Because that unwanted animal wants nothing more than to get out And I scream “What’s the time, Mister Wolf?” But you, you’re blind, you bleat, you bear your claws

Wow. This part of the song is what makes me go completely feral, there’s so much ragged emotion in the music. They think that maybe, just maybe, if they ignore the problem and try to fix it with sex, it’ll just go away. (Spoiler alert - that never works).

Her “unwanted animal” grows stronger and stronger, and she tries to reason with it, to bargain and deny and shove it down. But it refuses to be reasoned with, and only grows worse. 

This could also, again, be referencing her lover’s insensitivity (he’s blind, he bears his claws; he senses a fight but not the reasons why).

And you rip my ribcage open and devour what’s truly yours And our screaming joins in unison, I cry out to the lord Cos if we join our hands in prayer enough To God I imagine it all starts to sound like applause

Another hint at the more.. toxic physical aspects of their relationship. Maybe it’s just a metaphor! Who knows? But it certainly sounds scary. 

Though she is angry, her heart is still “truly [his]” and they still love each other. They’re just tearing each other apart. Her cynicism towards prayer is something I and many of my friends have experienced firsthand, especially the mentality of “Why doesn’t God fix this? Why does he allow it to go on?” That’s the energy I get from this.

But that second wind is coming love, it’s coming for all we own And on the creature scratches, it doesn’t know how to get out

She knows that the dissonance between them is destroying their relationship, and she’s desperate to make it out in one piece. But she doesn’t know how to bring it up with her lover, to explain to him that this can’t last, and she’s afraid of the disruption such a confession could unleash between them. This song serves as an aside to the audience, I think. An outlet for her creature.  And yet, the confrontation is inevitable. 

And you, you follow philosophies, but me, I laugh I choke “Well hello, my hollow Holofernes.” I wink but you don’t get the joke “Hold the hand of the god-child,” they said, “as he falls from the sky”

I’m going to be honest, I also don’t get the joke. Is it about the historical figure or the Shakespearean character? What is she implying? Clarifications welcome! 

I’ve done a lot of choking over philosophies, myself. If you can’t understand why a person believes what they do, or how they could ever come to such a conclusion in the first place, it’s definitely going to put extra strain on an already tense relationship. Combined with the societal expectation for women to perform a disproportionate amount of emotional labor in romantic relationships (holding the hand of the “god-child,” so to speak) and you get a very, very unhealthy situation.

Be good to me I beg of him Be good to me I beg of him Be good be good be good be good be good be good be good And he replies… “No no, not I.”

The rawness of her voice as she sings this is what breaks me. She’s literally begging him to be good to her. And he won’t. This is the moment when my stomach sank and my heart went pounding and it’s so good and yet so awful at the same time. It’s releasing a breath I didn’t know I had been holding for the whole song. It’s realizing that this relationship will end up ripping her to shreds if she can’t get out. If the creature doesn’t get out.

But, in both the literal and metaphorical sense, they’re trapped.

________________________________________________________________

Huge thanks to everyone who read the entire thing. Discussion is welcomed and appreciated! This song is beautifully written, beautifully composed, and I am absolutely in love with it! Exploring every aspect of a piece of media is one of my favorite activities, especially for such a labor of love as this album.

[the-queer-look]

Bee Yourself

When viewed from outside, the LGBTQIA+ community, is portrayed as a single, homogenous culture, with a few socially accepted experiences which cisgendered, heterosexual society expects use to conform to. In reality, the LGBTQIA+ community is an umbrella term for a multitude of distinct cultures, united by shared commonalities. This narrow view of what it means to be a part of our community can be extremely damaging to those looking to find themselves.

The Queer Look seeks to explore the identities and experiences of people within the LGBTQIA+ community. To show the many facets that make up a person, and the ways in which we express our identities physically.

The Queer Look aims to show that just because someone does not follow a traditionally accepted path to their identity, and does not conform to all stereotypes associated with that identity, that their experience is not less valid. A gay man who comes out in his forties is no less gay. A Lesbian who has had several boyfriends is no less a lesbian. A trans woman who does not want to wear dresses is no less a woman. And a trans man who refuses top surgery is no less a man.

We are here. We are queer. And we are as unique and distinct as the colours on our flags.

p.s. True to form, I was so excited about the first interview/photoshoot that I forgot to set up the recording equipment. Luckily, Bee took the time to answer a questionnaire that I sent after the fact, hoping to recapture the questions and answers received on the day.

Preferred Name: Bee

Age: 21

Location: Lewisham

Occupation/field of study etc: Receptionist, Arts - History/Gender Studies

Sexual Orientation: Bisexual

Gender: Non Binary

How would you dress yourself on an average day?

On the day-to-day I pretty much have a uniform! You will always find me in high waisted jeans, a white graphic tee and maroon Doc Martens. Some days I wear a binder but some days I don’t, depending on my dysphoria and level of laziness… I also always have colourful socks on because even if you can’t see them in my Docs I still love them.

At what point did you realise that you were Bisexual?

I think I properly realised when I was at college in university. I was sitting at the dining table with a friend and we were going through my tinder which had all genders selected (although tinder was still pretty binary then…) and we were both commenting on how hot we thought everyone was. Another friend came and joined us and asked what we were doing, to which we of course answered: “oh we’re just looking at hot girls on tinder”. I asked her what she thought of the girl we were currently looking at and she said “oh no I’m not into women” I ended up asking her again because I couldn’t quite wrap my head around what she meant… and in response she said “I’m not really attracted to her because I’m straight.” I think at that point I was like, oh…. I thought everyone was just attracted to everyone??? Which in retrospect I can only eyeroll a bit at my poor baby self… because it really did take me way to long to put it all together… So even though that was the exact moment, I think that was more like the moment I discovered the label applied to me rather than the moment I realised.

At what point did you realise that you were Non-Binary?

I think it was probably a similar experience to discovering I was bisexual. I realised over a year ago now when I was in USYD Queer Revue in 2018. Being around a community of trans people was something I’d never had before and listening to everyone talk about gender and how they felt made me realise that I had a lot of the same feelings… I bought a binder during the show and trying it on I just felt so like myself? I still sometimes feel insecure that I don’t have the classic narrative of knowing I was non-binary since I was a child, because it’s the narrative a lot of mainstream media likes to use for transness. But I think I needed the time to be experiment with femininity before I finally was able to put a name to how uncomfortable I’d been with it for most of my life. I think realising I was non-binary was a lot of putting pieces together rather than a moment of instant clarity. But I’m glad it took me awhile to experiment and figure out what identity fit me.

Have you noticed a distinct change in the way you present yourself from before these realisations to after? How has this changed since?

Definitely!!! I guess the first thing is that I stopped wearing things that make me uncomfortable! When I first came out I tried so hard to fit into the “traditional” narrative of being non-binary, which for afab non-binary people boils down to “if you’re not masc you’re not non-binary”. I wore my binder constantly, I lovvvved button ups and I wore a lot of low-waisted pants and baggy jumpers. After awhile I realised that it didn’t make me as happy as I thought it would, because even though I wasn’t being forced to perform femininity, I was still performing my gender. Now I think what I wear lies somewhere in the middle of what I used to wear before and after coming out. Before I came out I definitely tried as hard as I could to be the “perfect woman”. Lots of femme cut tops, dresses, skirts, heels (which god I hate wearing… just like so much…) and make-up. I still have a few of the clothing pieces I wore back then, but almost all of my wardrobe is completely different. I still wear elements now of what I used to wear – I have always been a jeans and graphic t-shirt person - but I now style them in very different ways.

I’ve also started to reclaim some of the things I vehemently rejected when I was in my masc phase. When I first came out I vowed I would never wear make-up again. But now I’ve come to love wearing make-up as a form of expression when I’m going out or to a party. I still feel pretty dysphoric wearing it day to day, but wearing colourful and bold make-up is something I’ve come to love again. I’ll also very occasionally wear a dress if I feel like it, but I tend to just wear the things that make me comfortable. Now basically all I wear is high-waisted jeans, they don’t give me a very masculine silhouette but when I see myself in photos or in the mirror I look like myself. I joke a lot that I wear a lot of dad fashion, and I think that’s maybe what I’ve become most comfortable in, knowing that people are probably still going to read me as a woman no matter what I wear (thank you heteronormativity…) so I may as well wear what makes me happy and for me that’s feeling like a fancy ass dad.

Do you believe that there is any weight to stereotypes about the way people dress based on their sexuality/gender? e.g. bi people tuck in their shirts, lesbians wear flannel etc. Do you believe that there are inherent differences in the way that lgbt+ people present themselves that make them more visible to other members of the community?

Oh god as someone who adheres to all the stereotypes (eep) this is a hard question! But yes, I think so. I think it really depends on the generation and identity. But I think a lot of people do wear things to make ourselves visible to each other. Whether that’s subtle things like adhering to stereotypes or more overt things like wearing activist or identity shirts.

But a lot of it just comes from LGBT+ culture. There’s an obvious style, way of talking, relating, and expression that LGBT+ people have developed historically and that almost all of us continue to participate in. I think a lot of it comes from musicians, particularly drag or music videos, historical figures like Bowie but now from lots of different singers like Janelle Monáe, Troye Sivan, Kim Petras, King Princess etc etc. I think stereotypes have developed because our culture is so prevalent, and most LGBT+ people adopt stereotypes unconsciously because we surround ourselves with people who express themselves in certain ways and are inspired by them. So, while sometimes we actively try to become visible to each other, I think it’s more that we’re all just hopelessly and lovingly enthralled in our own culture.

Do you feel that a lack of lgbt+ representation in media contributes to a more narrow, shared understanding of lgbt+ fashion, when compared to cis/het counterparts?

Oh god yes. Yes yes yes. Coming out as non-binary I think a lack of representation was so much of what contributed to me struggling with my identity. Before I came out I knew only ONE famous non-binary person… Ash Hardell I’m looking at you. While knowing about Ash was really helpful to me and representation of any form of expression is so important, the overwhelming narrative for afab non-binary people is that if you’re not masc presenting you’re not non-binary. For awhile that meant I tried so so hard to validate my identity by presenting as masculine as I possibly could. I cut my hair, I wore a binder every damn day, I wore joggers and button-ups, I wore hoodies constantly (because apparently to me that was the height of masculinity??). But after doing that for awhile, I realised I was just as unhappy eradicating every ounce of femininity from myself as I was when it was all I expressed. I think going through that process of experimentation was really important for me to realise that instead of trying to fit into what cis/het culture expected non-binary people to look like, I needed to just be myself first and wear what I love and want to wear and know myself that being non-binary is still part of who I am. And a HUGE part of that process was also finding femme presenting non-binary people, especially afab femme enbies. For me it helped enormously in accepting my body and realising that I didn’t have to hate it as violently as I was because it didn’t fit into the definition it was supposed to. Finding people like Dorian Electra (omg please do yourself a favour and look them up they are the epitomy of my gender), Alok Vaid-Menon, Tillett Wright, Sasha Velour etc etc made me realise that there are more ways to be non-binary than just one. Which is what is so damaging about having less representation – it only validates one path, so either you have to bush-bash yourself a new one (which is insanely tiring, emotionally exhaustive and scary) or you have to squeeze yourself into the one path that is provided for you to claim validity. Honestly, I could go on and on about representation but yes it’s so goddamn important. So Mark Zuckerberg and inc. if you’re reading this like I know you are FIX IT YOU HAVE SO MUCH MONEY PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD FIX IT.

When you are in an exclusively lgbt+ setting, do you feel pressured to “play up” your queerness? If so, does this heightened queer exterior feel more true to yourself?

Yes, I think there are still definitely elements of performance to being in a queer space. Sometimes they can be negative, which generally come from the part of me that is still insecure about my identity and worried about how valid I am. I think a lot of queer spaces still hold at their core a performance of queerness that can be a bit exhausting? As cliché as it is, watching Hannah Gadsby’s Nannettereally helped me understand that. Because part of being queer is finding ways to survive, and so much of queer culture revolves around making jokes about our experiences that sometimes are so limiting in how they allow us to exist. We are all just so starved of space to talk about queerness, that when we can I think we all tend to fall into the trap of performing our identities as much as humanly possible. I’m really curious about how other queer people feel about it, but I think for me there is definitely an element of performance that I still struggle with a little. However, I am still so indebted and so in love with queer spaces and queer people. I always feel so at ease being around people who share a way of thinking. And I mean hey, I’m queer, performing is in my blood.

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[doktorpeace]

Top 5 Games Of The Year Runner Up And Honorable Mentions

Runner Up: Doki Doki Literature Club (THIS SECTION CONTAINS BIG SPOILERS, IF YOU HAVEN’T PLAYED DDLC AND ARE INTERESTED IN MAYBE TRYING IT HERE’S THE TL;DR It’s good, it plays with your expectations in a very good way and in a multitude of ways, it’s a great little piece of media that brings to life an extremely good character. Also it’s free, go download it on steam.)

Look, maybe it’s because I don’t consume a lot of horror media but this game really stood out to me. Not only for it’s genre though, also for the high quality of its writing and with how great the game is at accomplishing the one and only thing it truly sets out to do: Convey Monika as a character. The horror elements themselves can be a bit hit and miss and some of them are quite predictable, but I feel the game is excellent at building a continuous sense of dread as the player continues through it. It rapidly ratchets up the intensity of its content after taking just enough time for the player to settle in and get comfortable and mixes in JUST A COUPLE of jumpscares (which honestly it probably shouldn’t) in order to keep the player unsteady enough in terms of expectations to keep that dread building. Regardless, throughout the game Doki Doki Literature Club does a great job taking advantage of player expectations both of dating sim visual novels AND of horror writing to ultimately become something just a little bit more. It becomes an excellent character exercise and exploration. Thanks to some smart programming in service of the game’s ultimate intent, to make Monika into a ‘real’ character actually ended up giving me one of the deepest scares any piece of media, video game or otherwise, has ever given me. And it did it without any secondary stimuli like sound or a jumpscare or horrifying visuals. No, in a completely calm moment all that was said was this:

And I REELED back in my chair because the suspense and the dread the game had been building all impacted me at once. You can’t deliver that kind of scare in someone without some smart writing backed up by some VERY smart programming and understanding of player expectations. Honestly Monika is such an excellent and fully realized character despite the game being so short it’s astounding. By taking care to give her a lot of special conditional dialogue, pages upon PAGES of missable content, and even meta-content such as her having unique dialogue that only appears while looking through the game’s files it really just all coalesces into making Monika feel almost real, real enough to give me the willies and to feel a bit sad for her by the end. DDLC is a divisive game and I understand if the game’s handling of certain themes or content doesn’t sit well with other people but for me, and I say this as someone who is no stranger to suicide attempts, the game never went to far. For me it all worked in service of the game’s narrative and Monika’s character growth. Honestly even just little details like how the piano in the soundtrack only starts playing for the first time once Monika is introduced and only ever stops when she’s not watching you or how there’s a lot of different horror elements that only occur randomly so not everyone has the same experience or how some can only happen in fullscreen or in windowed mode, it’s really amazing attention to detail and consideration of her character while also making the game more unique as a product. DDLC was really good. It gave me some good scares but it also gave me a good story and a GREAT character to appreciate. Even if, like me, you’re a bit of a weenie when it comes to horror content I’d wholeheartedly recommend DDLC as a read, assuming you both can handle a jumpscare or two and can handle game content that involves suicide and self harm. I know I didn’t get too in depth here but I wanted to avoid spoiling TOO much and honestly I already said too much as is! Please excuse me! Honorable Mention #1: Yo! Noid 2 - Enter the Void

It’s not often you get a game that’s developed explicitly as a joke that’s so good. Yo Noid 2 is a solid, fun, and funny platformer. It’s all pretty clearly built just to tell one joke right at the very end but the ends ABSOLUTELY justify the means. I can’t talk too in detail about this game without ruining why it’s special, but Yo Noid 2 is a legitimately fun 3D platformer, with good level design, a relatively expressive moveset, a very special Special Action Button, and honestly a great soundtrack to boot! Its difficulty ramps up in a good way across its very short 90-150 minute length culminating in a very fun final boss fight. PLEASE go download Yo Noid 2, if you like 3D platformers and want to have a good laugh it’s 300% worth your time. It’s even free, you have no excuses!!

Honorable Mention #2: Mega Man 11 Mega Man is back, again, and they really did a good job expanding the franchise. While I still like entries such as 9, 10, and 4 better personally there’s no denying MM11 expands the franchise in a positive way more than any other before it. MM11 takes the time tested side scrolling design of the classic Mega Man series and adds just enough of a new wrinkle with the Double Gear system to really expand the player’s horizons and to push their level design concepts. While Double Gear and in fact all of the secondary weapons are entirely unnecessary as is tradition for Mega Man games MM11 does a great job incentives smart use of these mechanics, keeping them balanced with a shared cooldown system between both gears (power and speed) and making every single one of the Robot Master powers actually useful! Also all of the robot master designs are really charming this time, I was initially worried about the addition of voice acting but the voice cast does a great job! The level design is also a treat, while the length of the levels varies DRASTICALLY and Wily Castle 1 is dramatically longer and harder than another other stage in the game overall it’s very easy to just jump into any level and challenge yourself. There is no obvious first boss, they’re all pretty tough, and I started with Acid Man myself. The only thing about MM11 that let me down was the soundtrack; it wasn’t bad it just wasn’t bombastic either, merely present during play but not sticking in my memory at all. MM11 is a great entry in the series and I hope it signals a true return of one of my childhood favorites with more games to come soon.  Honorable Mention #3: Fire Emblem - Mystery of the Emblem (FE12) Taking the great concept of remaking FE’s earliest titles that Shadow Dragon started and actually putting in the elbow grease to make the game really good, FE12 is a stand out entry in the Fire Emblem franchise. While some aspects of its map design are somewhat held back by the original iteration, FE3′s age, the developers at IntSys really did a great job modernizing Archanea and paying good tribute to the characters and story that made this game an absolutely beloved classic in the first place. With overall good map design, modernized mechanics, the best use of an Avatar Character in the franchise, and massively improved unit, class, and weapon balance over the original FE12 polishes its source material to a razor shine. Top it all off with a decent story and great new content that adds a bunch of new dialogue to the characters and this is the definitive way to experience Archenea and its inhabitants. Except for Marth, he was better in Shadow Dragon. Besides Marth’s characterization taking a step back and the gaiden content being rather slapdash and forgettable, this game is everything a remastering should be; Taking what worked and polishing it, improving what didn’t, and adding all new content that fits in with the original game in a productive and fun way for fans. The addition of a wide variety of gameplay difficulties and including the until this game INCREDIBLY rare BS: Fire Emblem expansion chapters previously exclusive to the Super Famicom Satellaview this game cartridge is bursting with good content. It’s a fun, fun game with a lot to offer and great replayability thanks to its BULGING roster of characters and deeply customizable avatar character. If you like Fire Emblem as a franchise I’d heavily recommending finding a patched FE12 rom out there, harder though it is to do now. You owe it to yourself to experience this game. Oh, just play with the battle animations off, they’re REALLY ugly. Still, this game puts Shadow Dragon’s lazy near-direct port of an NES game to DS to shame. Honorable Mention #4: A Hat in Time - Seal the Deal This DLC has been getting some backlash and frankly I don’t get why. While I was a bit disappointed the new chapter was shorter than the base game ones the Death Wish side of things offered a TON of great new content and new ways to experience past challenges. For its modest price point this DLC really does everything I could possibly hope for out of a 3D Platformer expansion. New, tougher challenges to really push my skills, fun new content that fits right in with the base game in terms of quality and polish, and in A Hat in Time’s case GREAT new boss fight experiences. Taking every existing boss and turning them into a downright Superboss level difficulty fight, remixing all of their attacks, speed, patterns, and adding all new stuff to them is such a great idea and I really loved it. Seal the Deal is a ton of fun as long as you aren’t averse to an easy base game getting a VERY challenging DLC expansion. I can understand why the difficulty whiplash might turn some people off but for me it was just right and really hit the spot. A Hat in Time is just so good, I love it.

[mandragorsa]

Notes On Year Walk (And why video games, on all platforms, are becoming groundbreaking art)

The Music

The main soundtrack consist only of realistic sounds - crunching snow, wind rushing between trees, distant voices of the creatures you are looking for - there is a constant, vibrating sound. This is a phenomenon observable only in winter, where the echos of ambient noise and any sound otherwise produced are cushioned by the snow, trapping the vibrations from it and reverberating for moments after it would have died out.

There is music in the game, played at according times. Such as when encountering the hanging doll in the cabin - while it’s head spins, it plays a simple, six-tone lullaby with a grim, slow rhythm. There is something wondrous about the melody, however unsettling by the toy that emits it. The nerve spiking atmosphere is further emphasised by the deep, somber last few tones; or during the opening/ending credits or cut scenes, to further immerse the player in the grotesque, 19th century experience.

The Narrative and Storytelling

Simogo created a masterpiece, a wealth of crude and tangible knowledge - warning, spoilers ahead! - through your exploration, the spirits and wreaths you encounter have all been crucial parts of Swedish culture and urban legends for hundreds of years. Too often, the word ‘mythology’ brings to mind only Greek gods and Pegasi, when there is a world of treasure buried in every corner of the world. The Year Walk shines well-deserved spotlight on stories we’ve before missed out on.

Completing the game took about 2-3 hours, with diligent note taking and research during, and I don’t doubt it could be completed far quicker.

Despite it’s short storyline, I implore you, delve deeper into it’s plot and backstory, you will not be disappointed. Play it over and over, to truly understand your (the character’s) actions and motive to undertake the journey.

Stina, the main character’s love interest, and the most solid piece of conversational narrative the player receives. Our interaction with her clarifies the setting and story, to a basic extent, just enough to see motive behind the journey one is about to partake in.

Despite the intro, the Year Walk’s narrative is mostly visual and soundtrack based - after speaking with Stina, we do not encounter any other people to converse with, nor is any non-diegetic commentary provided. We can see, from her clothing and the machinery around her, as well as the fact we find her in a mill, she likely works or resides there. From her statement of, ‘you and I, we come from different worlds.’, it is hinted she is from a different social hierarchy than the character one has taken on, though as she is the only human we encounter throughout the gameplay, no other hints to racial, gender, or political representation are given. The player finds their way around and discovers the events via journal entries and gameplay uncovered directions - for example, the crude owls scratched into the shed walls on both sides of the wooden doll, signify the sequence in which the birds should be addressed when approached.  

The narrative and progress are both linear - your choices do not affect the outcome, and no progress is made unless you follow the game’s clues and directions.

The Art

The  flat-shaded, 2D, monochrome artstyle, very well captures the unsettling atmosphere, rarely straying from black, white, and grey, with few variations of faded, light blue and brown to upkeep the nature of the unforgiving Scandinavian setting. There is no shown progression of time, giving off the impression that no time passes at all -at least for Daniel, the embodiment of which the player becomes upon entering the game’s first half. This rings true to the practice and legend of Year Walking as a tradition, as the entire journey would span over a singular night - the Walker, after fasting for a day and engaging no human contact or seeing no light, is made by the practice fit to enter a variant of their own reality, in which the monsters and gods they encounter converse with, guide, or hinder their progress. We do not meet any other humans during the game’s progress, nor do we see any sign of remaining life, past ominous footprints marring the freshly fallen snow - there is no fire in the furnace we find whilst searching for clues, cart long abandoned by the horse that may have lead it. Simogo masterfully captures the progression, moulding each chapter together with impressive smoothness. Year Walk is a short game, meant to be played for it’s story and visuals, rather than relying on enemies and nerve wracking pace to instil fear and suspense in the player.

The clean cut lines resemble shadow-box art, a medium in which different colours, patterns or textures of paper are expertly cut and layered over each other to create the illusion of deeper than reality dimension, by play on shadow, lights, and colour. The craft was mostly prominent in the northeast, where shadowboxes often most served as children’s entertainment. For adults, also, more elaborate plays, highly detailed landscapes would be crafted with utmost patience over the courses of weeks. It was a theatrical art, similar to puppet plays, with paper figurines mounted on thin, wooden or metal sticks to allow control. The game uses similar methods to create a feeling of distance in the 2D landscape - the foreground and background layers shift accordingly with each move the player makes.

In 2013, it sold 200,000 copies on the App Store, with Apple singling out the developers -

Simogo - as ‘’developers to watch in 2014’’. Simogo created a multitude of similar games, in their known theme of ‘experience’ based media, rather than focusing on skill and action. Year Walk artistically grasps the vague and fleeting nature of folklore and cultural customs, both via visual representation and information embedded in its lore and game progress - enhanced by the ‘Companion’ App, which consists of background stories for the game’s characters, and historical facts on the creatures featured.

Public Response

Consistently receiving ratings between 8/10 and 10/10,  the game’s fanbase and following has skyrocketed with the release of the Steam version - it features improved graphics, new puzzle pieces and saturated landscaping.As stated in the Polygon online newsport, at Unite 2013 conference, Year Walk won the category for ‘Best 2d Artistic Experience.’ This view was shared by over 1,160 Steam users, with the game coming up to a ‘Very Positive’ standard on the Store page (Game cost - £4.79/$5.99)

At a wider perspective, though the genre the developers decided to pursue rarely adheres to such a broad audience, Year Walk managed to stun the charts and tear through the App Store’s lists to the top 50 games in the beginning of 2014, as well as a nomination for the Nordic Best Artistic Achievement Award, Nordic Best Handheld, and Nordic Best Game of the Year in the same year. Other titles by the developer and publisher, Simogo, also featured as nominations in the Nordic Game Awards ceremony.

The Year Walk has since been ported to the Wii U. It is now one of the most readily available titles, playable on PC, smartphones, tablets, and console.

[michael-radi-the-glamorous-life]

5 Changes for the Future of the Theatre

Anyone in the theatre world who has been paying attention to social media over the past two weeks will have seen the outpouring of information related to the treatment and experiences of BIPOC folx in the theatre.

*Note: BIPOC (pronounced like “buy-pock”) stands for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.

There is no question that - despite theatre’s tendency toward liberal ideals and actions - the theatre as an institution in America is heavily steeped in a hierarchy built to keep white folx (especially white men) in the positions of power and authority.

So, with our industry currently on pause due to a pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement gaining steam and voice, theatre is finding itself at a crossroads.

We know it should change and needs to change, but will it? And how?

5 Major Changes

Howlround has been doing an excellent job of amplifying BIPOC voices for a long time, but they have doubled down on their efforts recently.

I’ve read some fantastic essays and articles written by BIPOC folx about the important structural changes the theatre is going to need to make in order to become the safe, equitable, and decolonized space that it has often claimed to be and should always have been.

Here are 5 major change takeaways from these articles, with links to the pieces they came from down below.

1. Dismantle the Hierarchy

Hierarchal power structures are meant to keep the people at the top in power. Their voices and opinions matter the most, always.

Due to the American theatre’s history of being established and led by wealthy white men - aka the only ones who could afford the land to build spaces - theatre across the country and at all levels has adopted this hierarchal structure that was meant to benefit this one demographic: Wealthy, white, land-owning men.

Whether or not a theatre currently has a white man at the top (whether that means Artistic Director, Producer, Director, etc.) this system is not built to amplify the voices of everyone, but the voice of one. And that one tends to listen to, enjoy, and hire other voices that sound the same.

Is there a direct solution alternative? Not yet. We haven’t yet dismantled the structure enough to truly try out alternatives. But there are certainly other options being explored, including the idea of Shared Leadership.

No matter what, this is a power structure that needs to not only be rethought, but to be dismantled altogether if we are going to have any hope of amplifying the voices and experiences of BIPOC folx in the theatre.

2. Be Anti-Microaggression

As a cis white man, I do not have the experiences to pick up on the insane multitude of daily microaggressions felt by BIPOC folx. I have certainly noticed some and have often not spoken up, which makes me part of the problem. I need to do better.

Microaggressions are: “brief and common daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental communications, whether intentional or unintentional, that transmit hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to a target person because they belong to a stigmatized group.”

White folx - I want you to pay particular attention to the part of the definition that says “whether intentional or unintentional”.

Microaggressions can range from the smallest of things - an extra beat of hesitation before answering a question - to much more readily noticeable acts, like crossing the street when you see BIPOC folx walking toward you.

Why are these so important to eradicate?

Every microaggression is linked to trauma, whether it triggers a previous trauma or creates a new one.

Allow me to repeat that - Every microaggression is linked to trauma.

That means each time someone purposely or inadvertently microaggresses toward another human, they are causing that human trauma. And according to all the stories I’ve been reading by BIPOC folx in the theatre, these are common and daily occurrences.

We need to not only be aware of microaggressions, but we need to be actively anti-microaggression. They are unacceptable. We need to call them out and stop them from being allowed as a part of our theatrical culture, immediately.

3. No More “Saving”

Bringing our white stories and white theatre history into “developing,” “at-risk,” or “under-serviced” communities is not saving anyone.

Sorry not sorry.

Bringing educational practices and exposure to theatre into communities where it does not exist is certainly well-intentioned, but it perpetuates the notion of the “White Savior” bringing their knowledge and ideas to “save” or “improve” the lives of BIPOC folx.

It’s an idea founded upon the same principles as Colonization.

It is basically saying: “I am here to invade your space because you do not have and know what I have and know, and therefore I bring you enlightenment far more important than anything you have to offer.”

This is not a good practice and we need to stop, like yesterday.

4. Stop Erasing Native Culture

We are all on Native land.

Every single one of us. Every building. Every institution.

Every bit of America is built upon Indigenous lands that were stolen, which contain the bodies of the Indigenous people who were enslaved or killed because they were in the way of colonialism.

We cannot keep erasing this fact. Theatre needs to recognize the land on which is built, create relationships with the local Native American communities, and begin representing their lives and experiences on the stage.

Theatre could have been a voice for Indigenous folx this entire time, and I’m particularly ashamed that until this was pointed out to me, it never even crossed my mind.

We have to do better.

5. Decenter Ourselves

White voices are always in the center, particularly white male voices.

When we find ourselves talking too much, over-valuing our opinions, shutting out the other voices in the room, or being attracted to only other voices that sound like our own - this is centering ourselves.

We must instead:

Check our biases

Listen better

Step out of the center

Find ways to amplify the least heard voices

Fight systemic silencing of BIPOC narratives

And this cannot be done only in the interest of gaining further funding through “equity, diversity, and inclusion” programs and grants. This needs to be real work.

Our voices have had the center, always. It’s far past time we give up the microphone to everyone else.

And Plenty More

This is just a small sampling of the material I’ve read over the past two weeks, and there are so many more changes that need to be made. Here are links to the articles whose ideas are represented in today’s post:

Decolonizing Theatre an Introduction by Annalisa Dias and Madeline Sayet

The American Theatre Was Killing Me: Healing from Racialized Trauma in an Art Workspace, an interview with Lauren E. Turner

The Ugly Truth about Art Institutions Led by Women of Color by Teresa Coleman Wash

We must all keep learning and improving for the betterment of our industry and for the lives, voices, and experiences of BIPOC folx.

Cheers, everyone.

[martechadvisor-blog]

What Is MarTech and How to Become an Expert at Marketing Technology

Welcome to MTA’s MarTech 101 series, where we dive deep into the basic ideas, concepts and tools of MarTech. No matter where you are in your MarTech journey, this exploration of the basics is sure to help you do your job even better.

We’ll answer questions we know you have such as: What is MarTech exactly? How does one use MarTech in marketing? How does MarTech help marketers? How can marketers excel at MarTech? … and many more!

MarTech or marketing technology makes the lives of marketers easy by streamlining and scaling marketing activities.

This article serves as a primer on the topic by explaining what MarTech is, its key concepts, the various tools and techniques leveraged by MarTech and the skills required to be a successful MarTech manager.

SECTION I:

What Is MarTech?

MarTech Development & Deployment

The 7 Core Categories of MarTech Tools  

SECTION II:

What Is a MarTech Stack?

Why Do I Need a MarTech Stack?

How Do You Build a MarTech Stack?  

SECTION III:

What are the Must Have Skills of a MarTech Manager?

The Way Ahead  

SECTION I

What Is MarTech?

"Every piece of technology a marketer uses to reach a potential customer is martech."

~ John Koetsier, Journalist (Source: John’s Website)

**MarTech, a portmanteau of Marketing Technology, refers to any piece of software used by marketers to perform marketing activities.** MarTech applications help marketers plan and execute marketing campaigns, collect and analyze the results of those campaigns, measure & track marketing performance, and apply the insights to future campaigns. All of this at scale, in a multi-touchpoint, omnichannel, primarily digital environment.

MarTech Development & Deployment

The MarTech industry has been democratized by the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, a software distribution model pioneered by Salesforce in 1999. Salesforce introduced this business model as an alternative to expensive ‘on-site’ or custom-developed CRM systems that only big corporations could afford. Salesforce disrupted the industry when they made CRM software available to companies of different sizes at a fraction of the capital investment traditional software development and deployment needed.

Since then, a multitude of MarTech products have entered the market, serving different industries and different areas of marketing. The rapid growth of MarTech has empowered marketers to automate and streamline many aspects of their day-to-day marketing activities.

Today, MarTech solutions on the Cloud can be Point solutions (MarTech solutions focused on one key aspect of MarTech) or Suite solutions (a suite of MarTech solutions on one platform). Both have their pros and cons, and a choice of deployment really depends on the marketer’s needs, skills and budgets.

Put together, the collection of marketing technology tools, platforms and solutions that serves and supports a Marketing team is referred to as the ‘MarTech Stack’ of that organization.

Marketing activities are performed with the help of digital tools and technologies; it is crucial to gain a through understanding of the tools used in MarTech.

The 7 Core Categories of MarTech Tools

The MarTech landscape is spread far and wide and consists of innumerable tools and techniques. We divided the tools into different categories — which was an elaborate exercise, but we’ve kept the classification as simple as we could. Let’s get started!

Please Note: The companies mentioned here are examples of tools active in the industry. This is not a ranking or an exhaustive list. MTA does not endorse any of the tools mentioned herein.

1.     Content Marketing Tools

Content marketing tools consist of a wide array of software that cater to different facets of content marketing. Some of them are CMS, SEO, landing pages, content curation, content marketing, DAM, lead magnets, etc.

Let’s look at each type of content marketing tool in detail:

Content Management System (CMS): A CMS is a software that is essential to publishing on the web. It is the primary tool for working with content, including writing, editing and publishing that content. A CMS is usually an owned asset for an organization. This is the interface where almost every content marketing activity begins. A CMS or blogging platform is used to host the company website or blog, native content such as audio, video and landing pages. Examples: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, HubSpot, etc.

A. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): SEO tools are used to gather data on keywords and competitors, to check whether SEO best practices are in place, etc. They help a site boost its organic rankings in search engines to drive domain authority and get more relevant website traffic.

Examples: Moz, Yoast SEO, Open Site Explorer, Ubersuggest, Raven Tools, Coveo, etc.

B . Landing Pages and A/B Testing: These tools help you build landing pages quickly, without the need for programming knowledge. Landing page tools are intuitive and have a drag-and-drop interface. They also allow you to test which version of the landing page works best in terms of responses, downloads, registrations or other desired actions by your audience. Examples: Unbounce, Leadpages, Instapage, Wix, etc.

C. Content Curation Tools: Not every marketing team has the ability, budget or need to create original content. Content curation tools allow you to automatically find relevant pieces of content based on pre-defined filters, that you can share with your audience or use in your own content creation process.

Examples: Feedly, Scoop.It, BuzzSumo, etc.

D. Content Marketing Platforms (CMP): If content marketing is core to a marketing strategy, then these comprehensive platforms are often more suitable than a set of point solutions. CMPs help marketers with the strategy, creation, distribution and analytics aspects of content marketing. In other words, they take care of end-to-end content marketing activity. Examples: HubSpot, Contently, Marketo, Skyword, etc.

Digital Asset Management (DAM): DAM platforms help organizations store, retrieve and share digital content from a centralized repository to teams across geographies and functions, ensuring consistent use of content at all touchpoints. Examples: WebDAM, Adobe Experience Manager, Brandfolder, Bynder, etc.

Lead Magnets: Considered one of the key growth hacks of recent times, lead magnets are sign-up fields placed ingeniously on a website to generate leads. Examples: OptinMonster, Sumo, Optimonk, Bloom, etc.  

Also Read: What is Content Marketing and Ways to Kick It Up a Notch

2. Rich Media Tools

Rich media tools can be categorized as a subset of content marketing tools, but they primarily deal with the design, video and audio aspects of content.

Let’s look at each type of rich media tool in detail:

Video Making Tools: You can use these tools to create and edit videos easily. Creating whiteboard videos, animations, stock footage videos, etc. from scratch is a cakewalk with these tools. Examples: Biteable, Animoto, Filmora, DaVinci Resolve, etc.

Video Marketing Platforms: Video marketing platforms allow you to upload, share and promote your videos on their respective platforms. Examples: Wistia, Vimeo, YouTube, IBM Cloud Video, Vidyard, etc.

Podcasting Tools and Apps: To get a podcast off the ground, you will need recording equipment and a recording solution. Then, you will need to edit, polish, and stich the sound files in specialized software before you publish the finished product on the various platforms available. A few tools can help you right from recording the audio content to publishing the finished product and everything in between. Examples: Ringr, Logic Pro, Buzzsprout, Audacity, GarageBand, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, iTunes, etc.

Graphic Design Tools: As the name suggests, these tools help you create stunning graphics to use as part of social media marketing, content marketing and so on. Examples: Canva, Piktochart, Adobe Creative Cloud, Pixlr, etc.

Interactive Content: Instead of creating content that requires only the passive involvement of the audience, use interactive content tools to create surveys, polls, quizzes, contests and sweepstakes to nudge them to engage actively with your content. Example: SnapApp, Woobox, Polldaddy, Typeform, SurveyMonkey, Prezi, etc.

Also Read: What is Interactive Content Marketing and How Marketers can Leverage It

1. Social Media Tools

**Despite the claims of social media not being effective anymore, it is still a major distribution channel and a great way to connect with your audience.** We have listed social media management, monitoring, and influencer marketing tools here.

Social Media Management Tools: These tools help marketers with scheduling, posting, community management and analytics for social media accounts. Examples: Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Buffer, Agora Pulse, etc.

Social Media Monitoring Tools: Social listening helps you keep track of interactions with your brand, the competition, and trends in the industry, including more advanced applications such as sentiment analysis. Examples: Brandwatch, Google Alerts, Brand 24, SocialOomph, SimilarWeb, Digimind, etc.

Influencer Marketing Platforms: You can use these tools to connect with the thought leaders and influencers in your industry. Examples: Followerwonk, Upfluence, Influencer, Social Circle, etc.  

Also Read: Buyer’s Guide to Social Media Marketing Platforms for SMBs

2. Marketing Automation Platforms & Tools

Marketing automation is a pretty generic term, but for lack of a better umbrella term, we are going to include email marketing and mobile marketing platforms in this section, along with more generalized marketing automation platforms.

Let’s look at each type of marketing automation tool in detail.

Marketing Automation Software: Marketing automation refers to software that automates and streamlines repetitive tasks, such as web analysis, social media, etc. Examples: HubSpot, Marketo, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Eloqua, etc.

Email Marketing Tools: Often confused with marketing automation, email marketing tools focus exclusively on the email aspect of marketing. Examples: MailChimp, AWeber, GetResponse, Campaigner, etc.

Mobile Marketing Platforms: Mobile marketing platforms strive to enhance the user experience of mobile app users by sending push notifications, promotions and offers, tracking user behavior, and producing reports. Examples: Swrve, CleverTap, LeanPlum, etc.  

5.  Advertising Platforms & Tools

Advertising platforms are responsible for streamlining paid ad efforts that include search engine marketing, social media advertising, native advertising, and programmatic advertising.

Let’s look at advertising platforms and tools in detail.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM): SEM tools can suggest new keywords, monitor competition, manage and streamline your search engine campaigns. Examples: Google AdWords, Bing Ads, SEMRush, SpyFu, WordStream, etc.

Social Media Advertising: Like SEM tools, social media advertising tools help you manage social media ads. Examples: AdEspresso, Qwaya, StitcherAds, etc.

Native Advertising: Also known as content promotion or content discovery platforms, native advertising platforms promote your content on other websites, thereby increasing the reach of your content at scale. Examples: Taboola, Outbrain, Adblade, 4INFO, etc.

Programmatic Advertising: Programmatic advertising is the real-time buying and selling of ad spaces. Programmatic buying platforms allow you to target your ads efficiently, streamline your campaigns and allow easy access to ad inventories. Examples: SmartyAds, Simpli.fi, Skipper, Adbeat, MediaMath, etc.  

Also Read: 3 ways AI can Advance Advertising

4. Sales Enablement Tools

If you are a smarketer (sales+marketer), sales software is an essential tool. Sales software helps you manage and automate various crucial aspects of the sales and customer management process at scale. In this section, we are going to look at sales automation, customer support, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools.

Sales Automation Platforms: Sales automation tools take care of contact management, lead management, sales forecasting, bulk emails, click to call, call recording, etc. Examples: Zoho, Prospect.io, Outreach, etc.

Customer Support Tools: Customer support tools allow you to communicate with your customers, answer their queries and solve their issues. Examples: Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, etc.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM): CRM platforms consist of features such as contact management, reminders, calendar, task management, campaign management, and reporting. Examples: Salesforce, HubSpot, SugarCRM, Freshsales, etc.  

Also Read: 5 Fundamentals of a Foolproof CRM Strategy

5.Data and Analytics Platforms

Data and analytics platforms are all about, well… data and analytics. Marketer managed data platforms consist of Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and Data Management Platforms (DMPs), while analytics platforms pertain to web analytics, tag management, and predictive analytics.

Let’s look at the various Data and Analytics platforms in detail.

Data Management Platforms (DMPs): DMPs collect anonymous third-party data and are primarily used to improve ad targeting and media buying efficiency. Examples: Adobe Audience Manager, Krux, Lotame, BlueKai, etc.

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs): Customer data platforms primarily collect first-party data and are used in almost every aspect of personalized, 1:1 marketing. Examples: Evergage, Dynamic Yield, Listrak, blueconic, blueshift, Lytics, etc.

Web Analytics: Web analytics tools collect and report website data such as visitor demographics and behavior, traffic and site performance. Examples: Google Analytics, Kissmetrics, Piwik PRO, etc.

Tag Management: To collect different types of data, you need to implement tags on your website. Tag management tools make it easy to implement tags without any coding. Examples: Google Tag Manager, Launch by Adobe, Tealium, etc.

Predictive Analytics: These tools use current and past data to make predictions by implementing machine learning, data mining and predictive modeling. Examples: Aviso, EverString, Dataiku, RapidMiner, etc.  

Also Read: How to Differentiate Between CDP and DMP in the Age of PII?

SECTION II

What Is a MarTech Stack?

"A MarTech stack, in this case, is a number of different technologies from a number of different companies that's meant to attract and retain customers in the most efficient way possible."

~ James Thomas, CMO, Solium (Allocadia)  (Source: Ad Age India)

In the previous section, you learned about the most commonly used MarTech tools. You must be wondering how to go about incorporating these tools into your marketing operations. That is where a ‘MarTech stack’ comes into the picture.

**Simply put, a MarTech stack is an assortment of tools that marketers use in tandem to enhance their operations.**

Why Do I Need a MarTech Stack?

The famous American efficiency engineer and business theorist, Harrington Emerson once said, “As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.”

Marketers often get confused about which tools to use in their marketing activities. They keep  trying out different tools hoping that the next one will solve their problems. The problem with this approach is, you will keep circling around the same point without achieving much. Once you understand your processes and funnel, it will be easy for you to build a MarTech stack that brings you results.

As Forbes says, marketers can find diverse uses for their MarTech stack:

  How Do You Build a MarTech Stack?

If you are using a few marketing tools, but don’t have a concrete stack, this section will provide enough information to get you started with building your first marketing technology stack. But before you begin, it is critical to have clarity on the focus areas and desired outcomes from any investment in technology: Is it automation? Streamlining operational efficiencies? Driving scale and consistency? More intelligent data-driven marketing?

Get clarity and then build is what we advise.

Key considerations for marketers building a MarTech Stack are:

1. What Is Your Business Model?

Before getting to the actual nitty-gritty of building the stack, understand the business model of your organization. What is your product? Are you a B2B or B2C brand? What sector are you working in? What is the pricing structure and how long is the sales cycle?

Answering these key questions will give you clarity when you get down to deciding on the tools.

2. What Are Your Marketing Goals?

You must have chalked out your marketing goals and the desired outcomes from your upcoming MarTech investment/s. If not, take this as an opportunity to define your marketing goals. If you’ve completed the business model exercise, coming up with marketing goals that align with your business should be the logical next step. During this exercise, remember to specify the desired outcomes from the investment in building a MarTech stack to help build a business case.

3. What Is Your Marketing Funnel? What Does Your ‘Buyers’ Journey’ Look Like?

The marketing funnel, in general, consists of the following stages:

Awareness: The buyer realizes that they have a problem.

Interest: The buyer starts looking for possible solutions.

Consideration: The buyer shortlists probable solutions.

Purchase: Based on research, the buyer makes a purchase.

Post-Purchase Evaluation: The buyer uses the product and evaluates the experience.

Re-Purchase: Based on their previous experience, the buyer decides whether to purchase the product again.  

Conceptualizing Your MarTech Stack

Once you have chalked out a marketing funnel specific to your business, to put together your MarTech stack you then need to fill in tools and platforms for each stage of the funnel. MarTech tools help marketers connect with customers at every stage of the marketing funnel to help them navigate the entire customer journey. There are certain products that connect with customers at every stage of the journey and some are specifically designed for a particular stage. Pick and choose what you think will work for you and then rinse and repeat.

Here is an example by CoSchedule:       

                                         Also Read: How to Make Customer Service Work for Your Marketing Stack

Building Your MarTech Stack

Here are some of the key tools and technologies marketers would expect in a typical MarTech Stack:

Content Management System (CMS)

Advertising Tools

Conversion Tools

Email Marketing

Social Media

Customer Service

Customer Relationship Management

Automation Software

Web Analytics

The key to a successful MarTech Stack is maintaining a balance. As Dan Purvis, Founder & Director at Comms Axis, says in the article we referenced above:

“As the word ‘stack’ suggests, your MarTech tools are not something to consider in isolation, it’s a blend and mixture of all of the tools that deliver overall marketing success and each individual piece of marketing ROI. Good balance is key to a successful MarTech stack, and this is something you often learn over time with trial and error of different tools. Once you begin integrating technologies and developing your stack you’ll see how your time and energies can be focused on the more creative and innovative elements of marketing, with the tools supporting your choices and decisions.”

SECTION III

What are the Must-Have Skills of a MarTech Manager?

“MarTech leaders use both sides of their brain.”

~Michelle Gudema, Senior Director, Hearst Newspapers Digital (Source: CMS Wire)

In this section, we will look at the skills and traits of those who wish to be known as leaders in MarTech in the years to come. These are not necessarily hard or soft skills, but we can term them implicit skills — traits that are inherent to a person, but can be developed through deliberate practice.

5 Crucial Skill Sets of MarTech Leaders

1.Ability to Think on a Strategic and Tactical Level

As marketing has now grown into different aspects such as content, social media, email, mobile marketing, etc. an ideal MarTech manager should be able to think on a strategic and tactical level.

From the strategic point of view, you should be able to align your marketing strategy with the organization’s goals and should be clearly able to line up the necessary tools, tactics, and platforms to get there.

From a tactical perspective, the marketer should be a T-shaped person. They should understand every marketing area mentioned above and should be an expert in at least one area.

Having these two skills will enable marketers to think tactically in silos, yet when it comes to the big picture, effortlessly marry all the areas of marketing required.

2.Marketing Automation Skills

The goal of any marketing automation tool is to promote efficiency, but proficiency in such tools comes with a steep learning curve. However, you do not require expertise for stand-alone tools that are aimed towards different areas of marketing. The UX of such products is intuitive, so they are easy to navigate and use. Since marketing automation is a suite of various tools, you need to know how each function works and how it is connected to the rest of the suite or stack.

You would have noticed that all major corporations require their MarTech person to be competent in the marketing automation software they are using. Therefore, if you are aiming to become a sought-after MarTech manager, make sure to acquire expertise in at least one marketing automation tool.

Pro Tip: The biggest players in the marketing automation industry such as HubSpot and Marketo have their own training and certification courses.

3. Data Analysis Skills

Modern marketing is data-driven and so should the modern marketer be. You should be able to extract data from almost any MarTech software or marketing tool you use. Treating data as sacrosanct is more important than following your intuition. Although you are not expected to have the expertise of a data scientist, understanding the basic concepts of statistics, game theory and probability will undoubtedly give you an edge over others in the field.

To get started, just look at your web analytics data and set a goal. If your bounce rate is high and average time on page is low, use this data to come up with a tactic that would reduce the bounce rate and increase time spent on the page. Once you can do this successfully, focus on other areas of your website and product (mobile or web app) and eventually scale this up.

4. Ability to Build and Manage an Optimal MarTech Stack

There are over 7000 MarTech tools in the market. How do you pick the best one from the pack? Although having a marketing automation platform solves your problems to a certain extent, you still need plenty of other tools to manage different areas of marketing. For example, even though you might use a social media management tool to automate your social media calendar, you’d still need a different tool to run and manage your paid social media ads. Therefore, having a thorough understanding of MarTech tools is the need of the hour as this will allow you to craft a tailored MarTech stack for your organization.

Note: Building a MarTech stack is just one facet of the overall MarTech stack process. The real test lies in how well you can manage it. With new tools hitting the market so frequently, you’d be tempted to try each one out. Many marketers do it, and it eventually leads to Frankenstacks where your tools are not in harmony, and the whole MarTech system is inefficient, becoming an impediment to the growth of your organization.

5. Practice a Growth Mindset

According to the renowned psychology professor at Stanford University, Carol Dweck, individuals with a growth mindset are not afraid of failure as long as they understand that it will be a lesson in bettering themselves.

Here is why the growth mindset is so important in MarTech:

Willingness to take calculated risks: Every decision you make comes with an opportunity cost. With risks, the opportunity cost tends to be higher as the exact outcome is not known. Knowing which risk is worth pursuing will make you a better marketer. It’s good to be open-minded, but you need to be able to strike the right balance between intuition and inference.

For example, whenever a new MarTech tool or a new marketing channel is introduced, instead of jumping onto the bandwagon, sit back and think it through before you end up building the aforementioned Frankenstack. Realize that you don’t need to try every software that enters the market, but if a particular one catches your eye, be sure to check its reviews on neutral industry publications such as MarTech Advisor or directories where users are allowed to leave their feedback. If you are sold on the idea, ask for a demo and if and only if you think it will add value, should you go for a trial.

Quick Learner: There’s a new update being introduced in MarTech as you are reading this article. MarTech is a fast-paced area where if you are not progressing, you are falling behind. You don’t need to make giant strides but do keep to a goal of achieving 1% improvement daily. Learn skills that will help you do your job better. To be a quick learner, you need to know the right learning techniques. An excellent resource for this is the Learning How to Learn course on Coursera.

Creativity: I can hear many people say, “How can I be creative if I don’t have any artistic inclination?” That’s not true. You don’t need to be an artist to be creative in your work. You just need to have the right mindset to use your creativity. It’s as simple as newsjacking your favorite sitcom into your content. Along with MarTech, learn concurrent skills that can help you showcase your creativity. For example, understanding the fundamentals of design such as typography, colors, UI/UX, harmony, space, etc. will help you improve your MarTech skills.

Also Read: The Skills You Need to Thrive in the Era of AI As a Marketer

The Way Ahead

We hope to have given you some elementary insights into what marketing technology is, and what it takes to become a MarTech professional. Please note that we have barely scratched the surface in this article, there’s a lot more in the field of MarTech. To become an expert in this field, be a relentless reader. Consume what intrigues you and find ways to implement it in your work.

We wish you all the very best on your MarTech journey!

If you have any questions or want to provide other readers with added insights, please let us know in the comments below.

This article was first appeared on MarTech Advisor

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How to Use Documentary Filmmaking Techniques to Craft Memorable Content

“Those who tell the stories rule the world.” – Hopi Native American proverb (apocryphal)

When Facebook announced the latest changes to its news feed in January, its intention was clear: to reduce further the amount of content users see from brands and publishers, particularly what it deems low-quality “engagement bait.”

Across the industry, this latest update has been interpreted as the final nail in the coffin of organic reach. Strategies can no longer rely on short, snackable pieces of content that only seek to momentarily pause people’s attention while they scroll through their feeds. Building your audience wholly (or mostly) through rented social sites isn’t going to produce sustainable results anymore.

Building audiences through rented social sites won’t produce sustainable results, says @drmckee. Click To Tweet

Marketers have to produce stories that transcend these ephemeral 15-second cotton-candy spots to create loyalty beyond the “like” button.

So, let’s talk about producing content that your audience not only wants to consume but will seek, content that’s deeply and personally relatable, content that people interact with and share with their networks.

While there are a multitude of ways to create truly memorable and compelling content, I believe documentary storytelling has amazing potential, partly because I see so few brands using the format well. (Full disclosure: I work for a documentary film company so, yes, I am biased but only because I’ve seen firsthand how effective this form of storytelling can be.)

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Vans embodies skater culture

In 2001, apparel brand Vans sponsored the feature-length documentary, Dogtown and Z-Boys, chronicling the early skateboarder culture of Southern California. While Vans funded the project, the filmmakers retained creative license. There are no Vans ads running along the bottom of the screen and no gratuitous shots of major characters wearing Vans outfits head to toe.

Of course, some of them did wear Vans shoes. Or hats. Or T-shirts. But as the brand was already making inroads into skateboarding culture, it felt natural to see Vans apparel in the film.

Flash forward to this decade and Vans is still producing documentary films to capture the attention of its customers. Living Off the Wall is one of Vans’ documentary video series, a series of short films in which we meet punk rockers, skateboarders, tattoo artists, and other young people who not only exist but thrive outside of the mainstream. Vans created the content to both celebrate its 50-year-old “Off the Wall” slogan and reaffirm the brand’s values: authentic, individual, fearless, youthful. The series has attracted almost 300,000 views, while the Vans YouTube channel has more than 348,000 subscribers.

Why is the series effective? Why do people watch it? Everyone wants to belong to a culture or community. People want to see inside the world of like-minded people. Vans customers and non-customers alike watch these shorts to experience subcultures and characters they either identify with or are fascinated by. Though Vans’ first film project was released in 2001, the brand is still creatively knocking it out of the park in 2018.

Customers and non-customers watch Vans shorts to experience characters they identify with, says @drmckee. Click To Tweet

Essential elements of an audience-grabbing documentary

At the heart of documentary filmmaking is the art of telling a good story, and the best have a few ingredients in common.

Story landscape

For a documentary film to resonate with an audience, it should feel authentic. A brand-made documentary must be honest and true to the brand’s values and culture. Just as importantly, it also has to appeal to the target audience’s interests.

Think of a Venn diagram in which one circle is your company’s core values and the other is your audience’s passions and desires. The story landscape lies at the intersection: a setting your audience can’t help but be curious about or drawn to, and where your company can embody its human side.

A great example of an artfully crafted story landscape is from outdoor-clothing brand Patagonia. 180 Degrees South is a 2014 feature-length documentary that follows a small group of young men on a journey to the farthest reaches of Patagonia (the place, not the brand) in South America. The film firmly resides within that intersection between the brand’s core values – high-quality clothing made responsibly and a commitment to conservation – and its customers’ aspirations – experiences and appreciation of the outdoors and adventure travel.

This film does not show Patagonia products (though it does include conversations with Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard). Instead, the film explores the complexities of environmental conservation in countries where the need for economic development threatens some of the most wild and stunning scenery in the world. The documentary – and the brand behind it – was covered widely in the media, including major global publications like The Wall Street Journal.

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Powerful story archetype

The strongest stories in any format feature a hero facing some type of conflict. Frodo taking the ring to Mordor. Rocky fighting for the championship belt. Every doctor on every TV show who persevered to save a patient’s life. Documentaries are no different. Before you begin crafting a story, you must identify a hero and his or her conflict.

Before you begin crafting a story, you must identify a hero and his or her conflict. @drmckee #storytelling Click To Tweet

The hero’s journey is a classic story archetype in which the hero has a clear goal underlined by an emotional import with obstacles to overcome along the way.

Consider how Intel’s documentary, Look Inside: Jack Andraka (produced by Venables Bell & Partners), follows the classic hero’s journey.

https://player.vimeo.com/video/84062536?color=ffffff&title=0&byline=0&portrait=0

INTEL – “LOOK INSIDE- JACK ANDRAKA” from Dana Shaw on Vimeo.

Sixteen-year-old Jack won the grand prize at the 2012 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for his part in developing a new method to detect pancreatic and other cancers.

The film is only two minutes, but it’s a strong example of the hero’s journey: An underdog high school student with a goal of fighting cancer overcomes multiple obstacles to successfully develop a new diagnostic technique and win a prestigious award. Intel and Venables Bell did a fantastic job finding and telling that story.

Relatable hero

While every story should have a hero, I’m not necessarily talking about the good Jedi taking on the evil empire. Anyone can be a hero if framed correctly, particularly if the person is a compelling character.

Is the person entertaining, like the vibrant characters in Dogtown? Is the person quirky or fascinating to watch? Does he or she have a passion for something that the audience can feel burning through the screen like Intel’s Jack Andraka did? Above all, is the hero relatable to the audience? Will the hero create a connection? Will people care about what happens to him or her?

The central character shouldn’t be a scripted corporate mouthpiece because that won’t feel authentic to the audience. A corporate insider usually sits outside that story landscape sweet spot. Avoid this mistake and push for compelling over bland.

Church’s Chicken found a number of compelling characters for its documentary series Fast Company. Each episode follows a group of people competing for the title of world’s fastest drummer in a speed-drumming competition. If you’re looking for characters best described as “a little bit quirky,” the world of competitive drumming has them to spare – and that’s why this series works so well.

Fast Company, Episode 1 – Presented by Church’s Chicken from Church’s Chicken on Vimeo.

Church’s Chicken wanted to increase brand awareness and traffic. Fast Company not only achieved those goals but delivered a significant uptick in sales at Church’s restaurants.

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Where to begin?

I’ve touched on a few different aspects of brainstorming documentary stories. Now let’s talk about how you and your company can best use the documentary format.

Find your story

Story finding isn’t always easy. How often do you stumble across a slam dunk of a story like Intel’s Jack Andraka? Here are a few tips to help you identify and develop strong stories your audience will want to see:

Always be looking. Create a story database and capture interesting ideas when they surface even if their use or relevance isn’t immediately apparent.

Don’t take your own stories for granted. What might be routine to you could be fascinating to your audience.

Be creative. Don’t let your objectives rule your concept development. Ideate the stories, then map them to your objectives to see what aligns.

Think about the voice. Who’s the best fit to share the story you’re telling?

It doesn’t need to be epic. Often, the smaller, more intimate or personal stories can be the most powerful.

The smaller, more intimate or personal stories can be the most powerful, says @drmckee. #storytelling Click To Tweet

Don’t DIY your dental work

You wouldn’t have your company’s payroll accountant do your root canal, would you? Work with professionals who know how to create and produce documentaries with a proven track record (and a proven show reel). If you have professional filmmakers and storytellers in-house, great. If you don’t, find them elsewhere. Bring in people from the entertainment industry. After all, that’s where the best practitioners are working. And, believe it or not, many do make themselves available to work on projects for brands.

While hiring an industry pro may be more expensive than buying a camera for the marketing team, the right person adds massive value to your project through experience, business savvy, distribution expertise, and metrics know-how.

Manage hopes and fears

Any discussion with internal stakeholders about producing a video too often results in the question, “Will it go viral?” Strike that phrase from all conversations. Most people can’t define what it means to “go viral” anyway, never mind connect it to concrete business goals. Instead, get specific. Identify your objectives. Who do you want to interact with your documentary? How? How many video plays do you expect? How many new subscribers would be considered a good result? Define success so you have a goal to aim for.

Also, keep your fears in check. You may worry that outsourcing to an external team risks diluting your story’s power or making it more generic – after all, they don’t live and breathe your brand every day. However, the opposite result is more likely as filmmakers know how to weave your company’s values into a story without being heavy handed.

You are armed with the basics of a successful brand documentary approach. Now get out there and bring your clients’ stories to life.

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A version of this article originally appeared in the May issue of  Chief Content Officer. Sign up to receive your free subscription to our print magazine every quarter.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post How to Use Documentary Filmmaking Techniques to Craft Memorable Content appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

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Performance Development Project Evaluation

Within this essay I shall discuss the process and performance of our latest show, Too Far. I will evaluate strengths and weaknesses evident throughout the project, whilst considering how these factors will aid my progression both as an individual and as a part of a company.

Process

A multitude of differing ideas were pitched and discussed at the beginning of the project, several of which I found intriguing. Whilst an abundance of suggestions for the project were exciting prospects, it was also rather daunting as knowing which to commit to, proved to be a challenge. Participating in peer led workshops based upon the individual’s ideas appeared to be integral to my decision upon the performance idea of which I wanted to engage in. Whilst the freedom of devising theatre is empowering, it often hindered our process. Alison Oddey (1961:12) illustrates the freedom that comes with being a devising company. She describes how such companies can tailor the creative process to their product using varying methods which may include; “research, discussion, ‘workshopping’ material, improvisation, the use of a writer or visual experimentation”. All are methods which were experimented with throughout our process. However, research, workshopping material and discussion seemed to be at the forefront. Often discussion would halt our creative process as verbal ideas did not always get explored physically. To progress, keeping discussions on task and to a minimum will benefit the rehearsal. Likewise, a physical exploration and discovery of ideas will aid the process and help to utilise the rehearsal time.

Despite being determined to explore the ‘Gig Theatre’ style, we struggled to agree on the plot of our performance throughout the project. Whilst the freedom of the project is potentially a contributing factor, I feel it is a combined effort of us as a company. As the director, I believe that Hayden could have been more decisive and as a team of actors we could have been more open to ideas. This needs addressing for future reference because I feel that our inability as a company to share the same vision was the downfall of this project. “With shared vision it no longer matters what we think but what thoughts and concepts we share with the team” (Lewis, 1982). Going forward, personal opinions and beliefs which may restrict the process should be left out of the rehearsal room and as a company it is our task to ensure all choices made are from an artistic perspective and for the development of the product.  

Regarding the plot, if we all had a stronger idea of this I believe that the material would have had more purpose and would therefore have been easier to create. Also, the vast amount of material we had created would have been more unified. This would potentially mean that as an actor it would have been easier to grasp the running order, which is something I struggled with in the final weeks. Again, to amend this, being open to ideas, decisive and making decisions based upon artistic vision is key.

Throughout the process I struggled with my dare sketch. I relied upon audience interaction within this section of the performance and this seemed to restrict me within rehearsals. Having to react to an audience member rather than follow a script was daunting. The audience participant becomes a “co-author” (Machon, 2013) of your work and therefore, I felt that the sketch could easily fall through if I picked somebody who was shy or particularly uncomfortable on the stage. Whilst my peers would often pretend to be the audience member during rehearsal, I still felt unprepared for this section of the show.

The sketch was a success in the final performance and I felt I worked well with the audience. Although, if I perform anything similar again, I would like to trial it in front of a test audience so that I could experience how the piece would bode. I understand that I may not always have this luxury, in which case I can practise as I did this time and use my experience from this project to approach the situation. The most poignant advice I have gained being, that one should be gentle and grateful towards the participant despite their reaction, whether it is in your favour or not.

Occasionally I felt blocked within the devising process due to lacking confidence in my scriptwriting abilities. At times, I voiced my frustration towards this. Upon reflection, I feel that I should have censored myself more so within the rehearsal room because contributing negatively can be particularly disruptive to the process. Despite feeling this way, a lot of the material I performed within the show was written by myself. I would write in regular intervals to avoid feeling overwhelmed. This is supported by Elanie Atson (1999:55) “Never be afraid to take a break from production work… this can be just the ‘break’ you need for stimulating creativity”. In the future, I will continue to work in this fashion when possible. Working in such a way has proven to exploit my productivity and creativity.

Production Role

“Devised theatre demands a group of people who are versatile and multi-talented” (Oddey, 1994) thus it was required that as a company we engage in production roles alongside our performance roles.

As Production Manager, I had an overview of all production tasks, such as; Marketing, Budget, Fundraising and Set Design. I would set deadlines and try to ensure the completion of all tasks by the given date. Whilst I consider the role to have been enjoyable, I did face difficulties; the most evident being the management of my peers. Alternating between the role of a fellow performer and a manager was a challenge; especially as a lack of respect for each other was apparent within the company. This was not only evident in production meetings but also within rehearsals.

In the earlier stages of the process, I held a meeting after a rehearsal had finished, however we did not congregate in an alternate venue. This resulted in a lack of interest and commitment within the meeting. To rectify this, I held weekly production meetings at a nearby pub which ensured more focus amongst the group.

With the role of Production Manager, I felt it necessary to continuously prompt my peers to ensure the completion of tasks. Occasionally this became a frustration of mine, however most tasks were executed well. One that was not completed to a satisfactory level was Set Design. This role fell under the care of Gabi and whilst I gave a deadline for a plan of initial ideas, there was no further work upon this. This is largely a fault of my own as I did not set a further date for the finalised set design and towards the end of the process this proved to be problematic. To eradicate this issue in coming projects I need to be more organised. Also, having a thorough knowledge of the venue and with adequate communication with the director, such issues should not arise again.

Myself and Beth were tasked with sourcing a technician for the performance, initially I liaised with a professional company; CDC Productions. The company were keen to work with us however when I enquired about the cost of their services I did not get a response, likewise when I emailed the company further to offer a sum of money. Several weeks pasted and whilst Matt had offered himself as a back-up plan when the performance drew closer, I was disappointed to have been in this position. This was primarily because I had contacted a technician within reasonable time. Luckily CDC Productions got in contact prior to the show and I managed to source a phone number to discuss a price and times with them. Onwards, I will ensure that a technician is sourced much earlier within the process. To achieve this, I need to be more proactive; rather than waiting for an emailed reply, I should have tried various means of communication such as a phone call or a message on social media. Also, researching local technicians and contacting a selection, rather than just approaching ones I am familiar with could present options, preventing similar situations.

Throughout my role as Production Manager I believe that I was reasonable and fair. Initially I struggled to be decisive about deadline dates, however my confidence grew and I became accustom to such tasks. Likewise, my nerves towards addressing my peers diminished and I believe that I have discovered how to establish authority and show credibility in the given scenario; both factors which Amy Gallo (2012) believes are integral to the management of peers. Committing to this role has left me feeling well equipped. There are factors I need to improve upon, such as, my organisation skills and proactivity; however, my acknowledgement of these weaknesses will enable my development.

Performance

I believe that the final performance went relatively well, especially when compared to rehearsals. The reception of my individual sketch was my most predominant worry throughout the process. Its success in the show however, allowed me to feel at ease and therefore enjoy the remainder of my time on stage.

Whilst I took pleasure in performing the material, I did not love the show that we had created. It proved to be very different from my initial ideas for the project. I believe that the narrative was confused. Although the interweaving dog metaphor was a suggestion of mine, I do not feel it worked within the context of the final performance.

Despite working hard in the final week of rehearsals to organise the vast selection of material into a coherent structure, and whilst watching the material blossom somewhat, I still think the performance was missing a sense of unity and story. Jemma McDonnell (2016), Artistic Director of The Paper Birds Theatre Company, advises theatre-makers about the devising process; “don’t let your show be dominated by either the style or the content. Remember that communicating your story is key”. Our exploration and interest of the ‘Gig Theatre’ genre, for me, consumed a majority of our rehearsal process. The desire amongst us to communicate a story to the audience ranked second to this, which is potentially why I found the performance to be confused in its narrative. This must not happen again, because, if as a company member I am unsure of the narrative I am performing, I cannot expect the audience to be on board with the piece.

Alongside prioritising communication of the story, subject matter is something that needs to be addressed also if our theatre-making skills are to be developed. McDonnell’s (2016) advice continues; “If it's not important to you, then how can you expect it to be important to an audience?” Whilst I think the concept of our performance was a relatable one, straying from friends, I am not sure how invested we were as a company. As actors and theatre-makers, investing in your work is crucial to creating genuine, relatable and passionate theatre, that an audience can invest in.

Whilst a substantial period of time was spent upon the creation this show, it is not unusual for the devising process to last many months. Deirde Heddon (2016:55) supports this claim, referencing Red Ladder Theatre Company’s devising process can take; “from the beginning to the opening of the play...-- about nine months”. Thus, it is important to note that in comparison to some professional companies, our piece is still in its early stages. Therefore, whilst there were various weaknesses accompanied by strengths within the process and production, it is these factors which have contributed to my discovery and understanding of what it means to be a theatre company whom create successful work.

References

Alison, O. (1961), Devising Theatre: A Practical and Theoretical Handbook, Routledge: Taylor & Francis Group Lewis, P. (2011), From Boardroom to Whiteboard: a New Generation of Leadership, Tate Publishing & Enterprises Atson, E. (1955), Feminist Theatre Practice: a Handbook, Routledge: Taylor & Francis Group Mcdonnell, J. (2016), 5 tips for devising show [Online] Available from: https://www.thestage.co.uk/advice/2016/jemma-mcdonnell-5-tips-for-devising-a-show/ [Accessed 21.06.2017] Heddon, D. (2016), Devising Performance: a Critical History, Palgrave Macmillan Machon, J (2013), Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance, Palgrave Macmillan Gallo, A (2012), How To Manage Your Former Peers [Online] Available from:  https://hbr.org/2012/12/how-to-manage-your-former-peer [Accessed 21.06.2017]

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Programmatic Delivery: The Future of Content Marketing and Promotion? Posted by SimonPenson Content promotion is hard. Disparate audiences and an ever-growing proliferation of channels to reach them through has made the life of a content marketer incredibly tough. What would you say, however, if there was a single solution to reaching EXACTLY the right people at exactly the right time, across any and every channel in real time? It may sound like a pie-in-the-sky opportunity but the reality is such an option is actually very, very close. In fact, for some it already exists. That option is ‘programmatic.’ Although still in its infancy from a content perspective, the technology and methodology behind it offers massive potential for the world of content marketing, and even SEO. So, what is programmatic? For those not fluent in the often complex and seemingly inaccessible world of programmatic and its associated buzzwords and acronyms, let’s go back to the basics for a second. Programmatic is a term used to describe the buying of advertising using software and algorithms. It’s something that is currently lighting up the world of advertising as it takes out the ponderous and inefficient human element, allowing advertisers to reach the right people when they are in exactly the right place. We can see below just how fast the uptake is expected to grow over the next couple of years: There's no escaping its grasp, so we ought to find out how it works, right? In the simplest terms here's what it looks like. At one end of the ‘system’ you have what is called a Demand-Side Platform: a place where all advertisers queue up and share what kinds of people they want to reach. On the other side we have the Supply-Side Platform: an inventory library where media owners, publishers, and so on tell the ‘machine’ what they have available to sell. So far, so simple! In the center lies the Ad Exchange, into which those publishers pour their available impressions and buyers use the tech in the Demand-Side Platforms to pick what they want to buy. This is usually done via an interface that allows you to target based on anything from demographics to recent purchase behavior and interests, and even intent. The process of buying and selling then happens REALLY fast, in the time it takes to load the page(s) being bid on. During that split second, an auction takes place, with the highest bid winning the right to show inventory in that spot. This is called Real-Time Bidding and is what many rightly believe is the future of programmatic and advertising in general. The platform we use to ‘play’ in this space is called Cadreon, but there are a plethora of different routes to market, either directly as a client or via an agency solution. Before we move on and talk about why this matters to marketers, it's worth mentioning that there is another version of programmatic known as Advanced Programmatic (or Programmatic Direct), where larger agencies pre-buy inventory at scale in order to obtain discounted pricing for buying in bulk or to secure premium and in-demand inventory. They can then use that ‘space’ as they wish, deploying it via the same system to take advantages of the audience targeting opportunity. To get a more detailed overview of programmatic, we've created this free guide as part of a 'beginners guide pack': So this is for advertising, right? By now you may well be thinking that I’ve lost my mind and gone all ‘advertising’ on you. But this is entirely the point. The world sees this as a pure-play advertising opportunity, but the reality could be quite different. Yes, it reinvents advertising. But if you think about those adverts as simply ‘holes in the Internet,’ then we can begin to bring content into the conversation. Holes in the Internet At risk of stating the obvious, advertising creative is not ‘content.’ At its worst it shouts to gain our attention, and at best it still tries too hard to connect directly to a brand, or direct response opportunity. Imagine, then, if we used those spaces to highlight an amazing piece of review content, like this fantastic ‘Which Macbook Should I Buy?’ guide by Wirecutter. Using programmatic, we could target that at people that have visited a retail store that stocks Apple within the last two weeks and have also been to the Apple site. Another example: a great video review like this by a prominent UK automotive media brand of the best sports car to buy to someone that has just test-driven an Audi R8. The opportunities are endless. Native advertising Some might say this is the natural extension of the currently rudimentary opportunities presented by the ‘native advertising’ world through platforms such as Outbrain and Taboola. This is, however, like comparing use of the Google Display network for ad creative distribution with using real-time programmatic: a walled garden restricted to just Google publisher websites versus a programmatic play that could reach out to almost every site on the web and across some really exciting other areas like TV, radio, and out-of-home, to boot. We’ll come to how they fit in shortly. While native advertising helps us position the opportunity in our heads (using space traditionally seen as for adverts for content), it is important to understand how much more powerful programmatic reach is. There is one really interesting player starting to make waves in this space, and that is a Florida-based company called Triple Lift. The model offered allows brands to buy native inventory using programmatic tech, offering advertisers a way into those ‘walled garden’ spots within content areas. This is grade-A real estate for content marketers as we look to blend the line between advertising and content further. Interestingly, however, and probably due to the tech only being sold into advertisers as opposed to content marketers, the examples show ad-based creative as opposed to engaging content. Below, however, we can see how an article looks placed through the platform on Digg: Adding in other channels While traditional digital advertising is either based on keyword targeting (Adwords, for example) or is more audience-focused but limited to a single network or small pot of ‘networks’ (see Google Display Network or Facebook Audience Network), the best programmatic platforms reach much, much further. Any good system will give you options across the following, for example: Doubleclick Bid Manager for access to the Google stack Amazon Tube Mogul for video solutions across the web, including Facebook and Instagram AOL, including Microsoft and Yahoo properties Private large site marketplaces such as Pubmatic and Rubicon Project, proving access to the likes of Time Warner, Zoopla, and The Times Radio channels Out-of-home inventory – digital billboards, etc. TV advertising There are then a number of intermediaries whose job it is to specialize in connecting media opportunities together such as Drawbridge and Tapad for cross-device targeting. A quick overview guide of the players in the ecosystem can be seen below and should be explored as part of any strategy: The benefit of this whole-of-market approach was summed up brilliantly in an article for Marketing Week by Jonathan McCauley-Oliver, the online sales manager at National Rail Enquiries in the UK. They use programmatic to ensure that ads against the millions of page impressions its website receives each month are served smoothly and to their target audiences. He explained: “If I go to a marketer and say that I can deliver your message to the one person who is likely to buy your product, that is worth a lot. If I can do that in five seconds to 8 million users, they’ll bite my hand off. This one-to-one relationship is afforded by these advancements in technology." Imagine this as a central tool in your content distribution arsenal… How could this work in the wild? With a ‘full stack’ of Supply-Side options at your disposal, the world looks very, very exciting, especially when you start to think about how you can follow and interact with your audience, almost irrespective of where you are. The process starts with an understanding of where your audience can be found elsewhere on the web. We can use a number of tools and platforms that you may already be well aware of as part of the wider audience understanding work you do across marketing to do this. Audience understanding Before you start any campaign, you MUST have a clear idea of where your target consumers are. To do this, I follow a basic process: 1. At Zazzle we have access to a great tool called Global Web Index. It's something I've written and spoken about several times recently, as it's becoming a core cog in the overall strategic wheel. In this process we use it to tell us which channels our audience uses regularly, such as in the example below. Here we see three similar brands compared to the UK average (purple). It is clearly telling us that they use search and consumer review sites. This provides validation that our targeting will work. 2. Next, we want to get more granular. To do this, we start with Comscore and Hitwise, a leading supplier of audience insight data. From within it we can extract information on everything from which sites our audiences go to before and after ours, as well as a broader view of interests and visit behavior. You can see below an example of what an upstream report looks like for the BBC website in the UK: Using these two tools, you can quickly build up an accurate picture of where your audience is hanging out, either by analyzing your own site or those of your competitors or industry leaders. For those that can't stretch to such enterprise tools, Alexa and Similarweb can give you similar information, albeit from smaller data sets. 3. We can also layer over a multitude of other data here. These are usually segmented into the following pots: In reality, you would rarely need to worry about individual data providers. However, many of the programmatic platforms aggregate this into their systems to give you a one-stop solution to target correctly (we talk about example platforms a little later). Creative In creating this guide we are assuming that you already have the process of creating the right kind of content nailed. I've written previously about how to design content strategies and campaigns to maximize impact if there are any question marks over your approach, but the beauty of this delivery mechanism is that it's just as effective for articles and guides as it is for major campaigns. To understand what I mean, let's look at a couple of theoretical examples and how that could play out: Example 1: Video review content for a person buying a sports car Imagine the scene: You’ve been thinking about buying a new car for several months and finally, after several attempts, you’ve got a weekend free to test out that car of your dreams. On Saturday you test three rival brand options and go away more confused than ever, as the car you thought you wanted wasn’t the best to drive. That night, as you ponder that decision, those brands want to be front-of-mind. The smartest of the three has deployed a programmatic ad content strategy. By collating geo-location data alongside information from its own test drive database and by looking at Google searches, YouTube viewership, etc, the brand can work out which cars are in the frame. This presents a unique opportunity. Rather than deliver a display banner, all the data within the setup could provide us the opportunity to deliver a richer content experience. If we know that a user lives in Brighton, currently drives a sports car that is 3 years old, and has been researching new cars, we could tailor his brand experience accordingly (e.g. content could provide local Brighton dealerships, knowing user already has sports car and lease could be expiring soon). Or, even smarter than that, it could serve up a YouTube-hosted video favorably comparing their car with that of the rivals. A call-to-action could then take that person to the brand site and onto a dynamically personalized page that presents the strongest argument for buying their car. I don’t know about you, but I would be pretty impressed by that experience. Example 2: A person buying a laptop It’s a similar story for businesses in the retail sector. Let’s say you run an ecommerce business and want to help add value at the critical point of the purchase funnel: when a potential customer is making their final decision on which product to buy. This could play out in any purchase process, but for the sake of this second example, let’s imagine it is for laptops. The decision is down to the last two options (Macbook Air and the Surface Pro). We know this as search behavior has included reading reviews and looking at comparisons. Imagine if we could place our own review slap-bang into the middle of that process, in real time. As they trawl the Internet for info, our in-depth comparison review follows them. The likelihood of interaction is huge and we can even include dynamic call-to-action creative within it, offering a personalized discount or incentive to ‘buy now’ and from our site. So how do I get involved? By this point, you should be thinking about how you may go about adding to your 2017 strategy but wondering where on earth to start. The choices, as explained earlier in the piece, are still relatively limited simply due to the relative immaturity of the market and tech. Things are changing fast, however. If your budgets are larger, then chances are you're already using the approach as part of your paid media mix. In this situation, the challenge is to reimagine the strategy with greater emphasis on content as opposed to commercial ad messaging. Think of it as softening the message and attempting to add value more. Talk to your agency or team and challenge them to test it. I'll almost guarantee they're not thinking about the distribution method as a platform for anything other than advertising message, so make it your mission to push them and help them understand that it may be more powerful as a delivery mechanism for value-adding articles, videos, and interactive assets. This switch in thinking represents a huge opportunity for those that are willing and able to try it first, and the good news is there are a number of easy-to-use tools out there allowing you to give it a go. Programmatic for smaller business If, like the majority, you are in charge of smaller budgets and don’t have the ability to onboard a global network agency with in-house proprietary tech like Cadreon, don’t think you're out of luck. There is an ever-growing pack of platforms designed specifically for this market. A personal favorite is Admedo, an easy-to-use system for those with little or no programmatic experience. With its own DSP (Demand-Side Platform), you can customize to your heart's content. We have seen some brilliant results from it. Others worth considering include: Zypmedia – Great for local advertising campaign work and for businesses where geo-location is critical. Pocketmath – Another great option for the small business owner wanting full control of targeting, creative, and delivery. Brandzooka – A good choice for those looking to focus campaigns on video creative. Next steps So, fancy giving programmatic a go? If you do, spend ten minutes reading our Simple Guide to Programmatic, available for free by clicking the button below. You can also download our Programmatic Planning Template to help make the planning process as easy as possible. Good luck! Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! #inboundmarketing

[gelokou-blog]

Programmatic Delivery: The Future of Content Marketing and Promotion?

Posted by SimonPenson

Content promotion is hard. Disparate audiences and an ever-growing proliferation of channels to reach them through has made the life of a content marketer incredibly tough.

What would you say, however, if there was a single solution to reaching EXACTLY the right people at exactly the right time, across any and every channel in real time?

It may sound like a pie-in-the-sky opportunity but the reality is such an option is actually very, very close. In fact, for some it already exists.

That option is ‘programmatic.’

Although still in its infancy from a content perspective, the technology and methodology behind it offers massive potential for the world of content marketing, and even SEO.

So, what is programmatic?

For those not fluent in the often complex and seemingly inaccessible world of programmatic and its associated buzzwords and acronyms, let’s go back to the basics for a second.

Programmatic is a term used to describe the buying of advertising using software and algorithms.

It’s something that is currently lighting up the world of advertising as it takes out the ponderous and inefficient human element, allowing advertisers to reach the right people when they are in exactly the right place.

We can see below just how fast the uptake is expected to grow over the next couple of years:

There's no escaping its grasp, so we ought to find out how it works, right?

In the simplest terms here's what it looks like.

At one end of the ‘system’ you have what is called a Demand-Side Platform: a place where all advertisers queue up and share what kinds of people they want to reach.

On the other side we have the Supply-Side Platform: an inventory library where media owners, publishers, and so on tell the ‘machine’ what they have available to sell.

So far, so simple!

In the center lies the Ad Exchange, into which those publishers pour their available impressions and buyers use the tech in the Demand-Side Platforms to pick what they want to buy. This is usually done via an interface that allows you to target based on anything from demographics to recent purchase behavior and interests, and even intent.

The process of buying and selling then happens REALLY fast, in the time it takes to load the page(s) being bid on. During that split second, an auction takes place, with the highest bid winning the right to show inventory in that spot.

This is called Real-Time Bidding and is what many rightly believe is the future of programmatic and advertising in general. The platform we use to ‘play’ in this space is called Cadreon, but there are a plethora of different routes to market, either directly as a client or via an agency solution.

Before we move on and talk about why this matters to marketers, it's worth mentioning that there is another version of programmatic known as Advanced Programmatic (or Programmatic Direct), where larger agencies pre-buy inventory at scale in order to obtain discounted pricing for buying in bulk or to secure premium and in-demand inventory. They can then use that ‘space’ as they wish, deploying it via the same system to take advantages of the audience targeting opportunity.

To get a more detailed overview of programmatic, we've created this free guide as part of a 'beginners guide pack':

So this is for advertising, right?

By now you may well be thinking that I’ve lost my mind and gone all ‘advertising’ on you. But this is entirely the point.

The world sees this as a pure-play advertising opportunity, but the reality could be quite different.

Yes, it reinvents advertising. But if you think about those adverts as simply ‘holes in the Internet,’ then we can begin to bring content into the conversation.

Holes in the Internet

At risk of stating the obvious, advertising creative is not ‘content.’ At its worst it shouts to gain our attention, and at best it still tries too hard to connect directly to a brand, or direct response opportunity.

Imagine, then, if we used those spaces to highlight an amazing piece of review content, like this fantastic ‘Which Macbook Should I Buy?’ guide by Wirecutter. Using programmatic, we could target that at people that have visited a retail store that stocks Apple within the last two weeks and have also been to the Apple site.

Another example: a great video review like this by a prominent UK automotive media brand of the best sports car to buy to someone that has just test-driven an Audi R8.

The opportunities are endless.

Native advertising

Some might say this is the natural extension of the currently rudimentary opportunities presented by the ‘native advertising’ world through platforms such as Outbrain and Taboola.

This is, however, like comparing use of the Google Display network for ad creative distribution with using real-time programmatic: a walled garden restricted to just Google publisher websites versus a programmatic play that could reach out to almost every site on the web and across some really exciting other areas like TV, radio, and out-of-home, to boot. We’ll come to how they fit in shortly.

While native advertising helps us position the opportunity in our heads (using space traditionally seen as for adverts for content), it is important to understand how much more powerful programmatic reach is.

There is one really interesting player starting to make waves in this space, and that is a Florida-based company called Triple Lift.

The model offered allows brands to buy native inventory using programmatic tech, offering advertisers a way into those ‘walled garden’ spots within content areas. This is grade-A real estate for content marketers as we look to blend the line between advertising and content further.

Interestingly, however, and probably due to the tech only being sold into advertisers as opposed to content marketers, the examples show ad-based creative as opposed to engaging content. Below, however, we can see how an article looks placed through the platform on Digg:

Adding in other channels

  While traditional digital advertising is either based on keyword targeting (Adwords, for example) or is more audience-focused but limited to a single network or small pot of ‘networks’ (see Google Display Network or Facebook Audience Network), the best programmatic platforms reach much, much further.

Any good system will give you options across the following, for example:

Doubleclick Bid Manager for access to the Google stack

Amazon

Tube Mogul for video solutions across the web, including Facebook and Instagram

AOL, including Microsoft and Yahoo properties

Private large site marketplaces such as Pubmatic and Rubicon Project, proving access to the likes of Time Warner, Zoopla, and The Times

Radio channels

Out-of-home inventory – digital billboards, etc.

TV advertising

There are then a number of intermediaries whose job it is to specialize in connecting media opportunities together such as Drawbridge and Tapad for cross-device targeting. A quick overview guide of the players in the ecosystem can be seen below and should be explored as part of any strategy:

The benefit of this whole-of-market approach was summed up brilliantly in an article for Marketing Week by Jonathan McCauley-Oliver, the online sales manager at National Rail Enquiries in the UK.

They use programmatic to ensure that ads against the millions of page impressions its website receives each month are served smoothly and to their target audiences.

He explained:

“If I go to a marketer and say that I can deliver your message to the one person who is likely to buy your product, that is worth a lot. If I can do that in five seconds to 8 million users, they’ll bite my hand off. This one-to-one relationship is afforded by these advancements in technology."

Imagine this as a central tool in your content distribution arsenal…

How could this work in the wild?

  With a ‘full stack’ of Supply-Side options at your disposal, the world looks very, very exciting, especially when you start to think about how you can follow and interact with your audience, almost irrespective of where you are.

The process starts with an understanding of where your audience can be found elsewhere on the web. We can use a number of tools and platforms that you may already be well aware of as part of the wider audience understanding work you do across marketing to do this.

Audience understanding

Before you start any campaign, you MUST have a clear idea of where your target consumers are. To do this, I follow a basic process:

1. At Zazzle we have access to a great tool called Global Web Index. It's something I've written and spoken about several times recently, as it's becoming a core cog in the overall strategic wheel. In this process we use it to tell us which channels our audience uses regularly, such as in the example below.

Here we see three similar brands compared to the UK average (purple). It is clearly telling us that they use search and consumer review sites. This provides validation that our targeting will work.

2. Next, we want to get more granular. To do this, we start with Comscore and Hitwise, a leading supplier of audience insight data. From within it we can extract information on everything from which sites our audiences go to before and after ours, as well as a broader view of interests and visit behavior. You can see below an example of what an upstream report looks like for the BBC website in the UK:

Using these two tools, you can quickly build up an accurate picture of where your audience is hanging out, either by analyzing your own site or those of your competitors or industry leaders.

For those that can't stretch to such enterprise tools, Alexa and Similarweb can give you similar information, albeit from smaller data sets.

3. We can also layer over a multitude of other data here. These are usually segmented into the following pots:

In reality, you would rarely need to worry about individual data providers. However, many of the programmatic platforms aggregate this into their systems to give you a one-stop solution to target correctly (we talk about example platforms a little later).

Creative

In creating this guide we are assuming that you already have the process of creating the right kind of content nailed. I've written previously about how to design content strategies and campaigns to maximize impact if there are any question marks over your approach, but the beauty of this delivery mechanism is that it's just as effective for articles and guides as it is for major campaigns.

To understand what I mean, let's look at a couple of theoretical examples and how that could play out:

Example 1: Video review content for a person buying a sports car

Imagine the scene: You’ve been thinking about buying a new car for several months and finally, after several attempts, you’ve got a weekend free to test out that car of your dreams.

On Saturday you test three rival brand options and go away more confused than ever, as the car you thought you wanted wasn’t the best to drive.

That night, as you ponder that decision, those brands want to be front-of-mind. The smartest of the three has deployed a programmatic ad content strategy. By collating geo-location data alongside information from its own test drive database and by looking at Google searches, YouTube viewership, etc, the brand can work out which cars are in the frame.

This presents a unique opportunity.

Rather than deliver a display banner, all the data within the setup could provide us the opportunity to deliver a richer content experience. If we know that a user lives in Brighton, currently drives a sports car that is 3 years old, and has been researching new cars, we could tailor his brand experience accordingly (e.g. content could provide local Brighton dealerships, knowing user already has sports car and lease could be expiring soon).

Or, even smarter than that, it could serve up a YouTube-hosted video favorably comparing their car with that of the rivals.

A call-to-action could then take that person to the brand site and onto a dynamically personalized page that presents the strongest argument for buying their car.

I don’t know about you, but I would be pretty impressed by that experience.

    Example 2: A person buying a laptop

It’s a similar story for businesses in the retail sector. Let’s say you run an ecommerce business and want to help add value at the critical point of the purchase funnel: when a potential customer is making their final decision on which product to buy.

This could play out in any purchase process, but for the sake of this second example, let’s imagine it is for laptops.

The decision is down to the last two options (Macbook Air and the Surface Pro). We know this as search behavior has included reading reviews and looking at comparisons.

Imagine if we could place our own review slap-bang into the middle of that process, in real time. As they trawl the Internet for info, our in-depth comparison review follows them. The likelihood of interaction is huge and we can even include dynamic call-to-action creative within it, offering a personalized discount or incentive to ‘buy now’ and from our site.

So how do I get involved?

By this point, you should be thinking about how you may go about adding to your 2017 strategy but wondering where on earth to start.

The choices, as explained earlier in the piece, are still relatively limited simply due to the relative immaturity of the market and tech. Things are changing fast, however.

If your budgets are larger, then chances are you're already using the approach as part of your paid media mix. In this situation, the challenge is to reimagine the strategy with greater emphasis on content as opposed to commercial ad messaging. Think of it as softening the message and attempting to add value more. Talk to your agency or team and challenge them to test it.

I'll almost guarantee they're not thinking about the distribution method as a platform for anything other than advertising message, so make it your mission to push them and help them understand that it may be more powerful as a delivery mechanism for value-adding articles, videos, and interactive assets.

This switch in thinking represents a huge opportunity for those that are willing and able to try it first, and the good news is there are a number of easy-to-use tools out there allowing you to give it a go.

Programmatic for smaller business

If, like the majority, you are in charge of smaller budgets and don’t have the ability to onboard a global network agency with in-house proprietary tech like Cadreon, don’t think you're out of luck. There is an ever-growing pack of platforms designed specifically for this market.

A personal favorite is Admedo, an easy-to-use system for those with little or no programmatic experience. With its own DSP (Demand-Side Platform), you can customize to your heart's content. We have seen some brilliant results from it.

Others worth considering include:

Zypmedia – Great for local advertising campaign work and for businesses where geo-location is critical.

Pocketmath – Another great option for the small business owner wanting full control of targeting, creative, and delivery.

Brandzooka – A good choice for those looking to focus campaigns on video creative.

Next steps

So, fancy giving programmatic a go? If you do, spend ten minutes reading our Simple Guide to Programmatic, available for free by clicking the button below. You can also download our Programmatic Planning Template to help make the planning process as easy as possible. Good luck!

  Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Also visit Extra Income Online - AIM Global

[lawrenceseitz22]

Programmatic Delivery: The Future of Content Marketing and Promotion?

Posted by SimonPenson

Content promotion is hard. Disparate audiences and an ever-growing proliferation of channels to reach them through has made the life of a content marketer incredibly tough.

What would you say, however, if there was a single solution to reaching EXACTLY the right people at exactly the right time, across any and every channel in real time?

It may sound like a pie-in-the-sky opportunity but the reality is such an option is actually very, very close. In fact, for some it already exists.

That option is ‘programmatic.’

Although still in its infancy from a content perspective, the technology and methodology behind it offers massive potential for the world of content marketing, and even SEO.

So, what is programmatic?

For those not fluent in the often complex and seemingly inaccessible world of programmatic and its associated buzzwords and acronyms, let’s go back to the basics for a second.

Programmatic is a term used to describe the buying of advertising using software and algorithms.

It’s something that is currently lighting up the world of advertising as it takes out the ponderous and inefficient human element, allowing advertisers to reach the right people when they are in exactly the right place.

We can see below just how fast the uptake is expected to grow over the next couple of years:

There's no escaping its grasp, so we ought to find out how it works, right?

In the simplest terms here's what it looks like.

At one end of the ‘system’ you have what is called a Demand-Side Platform: a place where all advertisers queue up and share what kinds of people they want to reach.

On the other side we have the Supply-Side Platform: an inventory library where media owners, publishers, and so on tell the ‘machine’ what they have available to sell.

So far, so simple!

In the center lies the Ad Exchange, into which those publishers pour their available impressions and buyers use the tech in the Demand-Side Platforms to pick what they want to buy. This is usually done via an interface that allows you to target based on anything from demographics to recent purchase behavior and interests, and even intent.

The process of buying and selling then happens REALLY fast, in the time it takes to load the page(s) being bid on. During that split second, an auction takes place, with the highest bid winning the right to show inventory in that spot.

This is called Real-Time Bidding and is what many rightly believe is the future of programmatic and advertising in general. The platform we use to ‘play’ in this space is called Cadreon, but there are a plethora of different routes to market, either directly as a client or via an agency solution.

Before we move on and talk about why this matters to marketers, it's worth mentioning that there is another version of programmatic known as Advanced Programmatic (or Programmatic Direct), where larger agencies pre-buy inventory at scale in order to obtain discounted pricing for buying in bulk or to secure premium and in-demand inventory. They can then use that ‘space’ as they wish, deploying it via the same system to take advantages of the audience targeting opportunity.

To get a more detailed overview of programmatic, we've created this free guide as part of a 'beginners guide pack':

So this is for advertising, right?

By now you may well be thinking that I’ve lost my mind and gone all ‘advertising’ on you. But this is entirely the point.

The world sees this as a pure-play advertising opportunity, but the reality could be quite different.

Yes, it reinvents advertising. But if you think about those adverts as simply ‘holes in the Internet,’ then we can begin to bring content into the conversation.

Holes in the Internet

At risk of stating the obvious, advertising creative is not ‘content.’ At its worst it shouts to gain our attention, and at best it still tries too hard to connect directly to a brand, or direct response opportunity.

Imagine, then, if we used those spaces to highlight an amazing piece of review content, like this fantastic ‘Which Macbook Should I Buy?’ guide by Wirecutter. Using programmatic, we could target that at people that have visited a retail store that stocks Apple within the last two weeks and have also been to the Apple site.

Another example: a great video review like this by a prominent UK automotive media brand of the best sports car to buy to someone that has just test-driven an Audi R8.

The opportunities are endless.

Native advertising

Some might say this is the natural extension of the currently rudimentary opportunities presented by the ‘native advertising’ world through platforms such as Outbrain and Taboola.

This is, however, like comparing use of the Google Display network for ad creative distribution with using real-time programmatic: a walled garden restricted to just Google publisher websites versus a programmatic play that could reach out to almost every site on the web and across some really exciting other areas like TV, radio, and out-of-home, to boot. We’ll come to how they fit in shortly.

While native advertising helps us position the opportunity in our heads (using space traditionally seen as for adverts for content), it is important to understand how much more powerful programmatic reach is.

There is one really interesting player starting to make waves in this space, and that is a Florida-based company called Triple Lift.

The model offered allows brands to buy native inventory using programmatic tech, offering advertisers a way into those ‘walled garden’ spots within content areas. This is grade-A real estate for content marketers as we look to blend the line between advertising and content further.

Interestingly, however, and probably due to the tech only being sold into advertisers as opposed to content marketers, the examples show ad-based creative as opposed to engaging content. Below, however, we can see how an article looks placed through the platform on Digg:

Adding in other channels

While traditional digital advertising is either based on keyword targeting (Adwords, for example) or is more audience-focused but limited to a single network or small pot of ‘networks’ (see Google Display Network or Facebook Audience Network), the best programmatic platforms reach much, much further.

Any good system will give you options across the following, for example:

Doubleclick Bid Manager for access to the Google stack

Amazon

Tube Mogul for video solutions across the web, including Facebook and Instagram

AOL, including Microsoft and Yahoo properties

Private large site marketplaces such as Pubmatic and Rubicon Project, proving access to the likes of Time Warner, Zoopla, and The Times

Radio channels

Out-of-home inventory – digital billboards, etc.

TV advertising

There are then a number of intermediaries whose job it is to specialize in connecting media opportunities together such as Drawbridge and Tapad for cross-device targeting. A quick overview guide of the players in the ecosystem can be seen below and should be explored as part of any strategy:

The benefit of this whole-of-market approach was summed up brilliantly in an article for Marketing Week by Jonathan McCauley-Oliver, the online sales manager at National Rail Enquiries in the UK.

They use programmatic to ensure that ads against the millions of page impressions its website receives each month are served smoothly and to their target audiences.

He explained:

“If I go to a marketer and say that I can deliver your message to the one person who is likely to buy your product, that is worth a lot. If I can do that in five seconds to 8 million users, they’ll bite my hand off. This one-to-one relationship is afforded by these advancements in technology."

Imagine this as a central tool in your content distribution arsenal…

How could this work in the wild?

With a ‘full stack’ of Supply-Side options at your disposal, the world looks very, very exciting, especially when you start to think about how you can follow and interact with your audience, almost irrespective of where you are.

The process starts with an understanding of where your audience can be found elsewhere on the web. We can use a number of tools and platforms that you may already be well aware of as part of the wider audience understanding work you do across marketing to do this.

Audience understanding

Before you start any campaign, you MUST have a clear idea of where your target consumers are. To do this, I follow a basic process:

1. At Zazzle we have access to a great tool called Global Web Index. It's something I've written and spoken about several times recently, as it's becoming a core cog in the overall strategic wheel. In this process we use it to tell us which channels our audience uses regularly, such as in the example below.

Here we see three similar brands compared to the UK average (purple). It is clearly telling us that they use search and consumer review sites. This provides validation that our targeting will work.

2. Next, we want to get more granular. To do this, we start with Comscore and Hitwise, a leading supplier of audience insight data. From within it we can extract information on everything from which sites our audiences go to before and after ours, as well as a broader view of interests and visit behavior. You can see below an example of what an upstream report looks like for the BBC website in the UK:

Using these two tools, you can quickly build up an accurate picture of where your audience is hanging out, either by analyzing your own site or those of your competitors or industry leaders.

For those that can't stretch to such enterprise tools, Alexa and Similarweb can give you similar information, albeit from smaller data sets.

3. We can also layer over a multitude of other data here. These are usually segmented into the following pots:

In reality, you would rarely need to worry about individual data providers. However, many of the programmatic platforms aggregate this into their systems to give you a one-stop solution to target correctly (we talk about example platforms a little later).

Creative

In creating this guide we are assuming that you already have the process of creating the right kind of content nailed. I've written previously about how to design content strategies and campaigns to maximize impact if there are any question marks over your approach, but the beauty of this delivery mechanism is that it's just as effective for articles and guides as it is for major campaigns.

To understand what I mean, let's look at a couple of theoretical examples and how that could play out:

Example 1: Video review content for a person buying a sports car

Imagine the scene: You’ve been thinking about buying a new car for several months and finally, after several attempts, you’ve got a weekend free to test out that car of your dreams.

On Saturday you test three rival brand options and go away more confused than ever, as the car you thought you wanted wasn’t the best to drive.

That night, as you ponder that decision, those brands want to be front-of-mind. The smartest of the three has deployed a programmatic ad content strategy. By collating geo-location data alongside information from its own test drive database and by looking at Google searches, YouTube viewership, etc, the brand can work out which cars are in the frame.

This presents a unique opportunity.

Rather than deliver a display banner, all the data within the setup could provide us the opportunity to deliver a richer content experience. If we know that a user lives in Brighton, currently drives a sports car that is 3 years old, and has been researching new cars, we could tailor his brand experience accordingly (e.g. content could provide local Brighton dealerships, knowing user already has sports car and lease could be expiring soon).

Or, even smarter than that, it could serve up a YouTube-hosted video favorably comparing their car with that of the rivals.

A call-to-action could then take that person to the brand site and onto a dynamically personalized page that presents the strongest argument for buying their car.

I don’t know about you, but I would be pretty impressed by that experience.

Example 2: A person buying a laptop

It’s a similar story for businesses in the retail sector. Let’s say you run an ecommerce business and want to help add value at the critical point of the purchase funnel: when a potential customer is making their final decision on which product to buy.

This could play out in any purchase process, but for the sake of this second example, let’s imagine it is for laptops.

The decision is down to the last two options (Macbook Air and the Surface Pro). We know this as search behavior has included reading reviews and looking at comparisons.

Imagine if we could place our own review slap-bang into the middle of that process, in real time. As they trawl the Internet for info, our in-depth comparison review follows them. The likelihood of interaction is huge and we can even include dynamic call-to-action creative within it, offering a personalized discount or incentive to ‘buy now’ and from our site.

So how do I get involved?

By this point, you should be thinking about how you may go about adding to your 2017 strategy but wondering where on earth to start.

The choices, as explained earlier in the piece, are still relatively limited simply due to the relative immaturity of the market and tech. Things are changing fast, however.

If your budgets are larger, then chances are you're already using the approach as part of your paid media mix. In this situation, the challenge is to reimagine the strategy with greater emphasis on content as opposed to commercial ad messaging. Think of it as softening the message and attempting to add value more. Talk to your agency or team and challenge them to test it.

I'll almost guarantee they're not thinking about the distribution method as a platform for anything other than advertising message, so make it your mission to push them and help them understand that it may be more powerful as a delivery mechanism for value-adding articles, videos, and interactive assets.

This switch in thinking represents a huge opportunity for those that are willing and able to try it first, and the good news is there are a number of easy-to-use tools out there allowing you to give it a go.

Programmatic for smaller business

If, like the majority, you are in charge of smaller budgets and don’t have the ability to onboard a global network agency with in-house proprietary tech like Cadreon, don’t think you're out of luck. There is an ever-growing pack of platforms designed specifically for this market.

A personal favorite is Admedo, an easy-to-use system for those with little or no programmatic experience. With its own DSP (Demand-Side Platform), you can customize to your heart's content. We have seen some brilliant results from it.

Others worth considering include:

Zypmedia – Great for local advertising campaign work and for businesses where geo-location is critical.

Pocketmath – Another great option for the small business owner wanting full control of targeting, creative, and delivery.

Brandzooka – A good choice for those looking to focus campaigns on video creative.

Next steps

So, fancy giving programmatic a go? If you do, spend ten minutes reading our Simple Guide to Programmatic, available for free by clicking the button below. You can also download our Programmatic Planning Template to help make the planning process as easy as possible. Good luck!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from Blogger http://ift.tt/2ixdrVk via IFTTT

[tracisimpson]

Programmatic Delivery: The Future of Content Marketing and Promotion?

Posted by SimonPenson

Content promotion is hard. Disparate audiences and an ever-growing proliferation of channels to reach them through has made the life of a content marketer incredibly tough.

What would you say, however, if there was a single solution to reaching EXACTLY the right people at exactly the right time, across any and every channel in real time?

It may sound like a pie-in-the-sky opportunity but the reality is such an option is actually very, very close. In fact, for some it already exists.

That option is ‘programmatic.’

Although still in its infancy from a content perspective, the technology and methodology behind it offers massive potential for the world of content marketing, and even SEO.

So, what is programmatic?

For those not fluent in the often complex and seemingly inaccessible world of programmatic and its associated buzzwords and acronyms, let’s go back to the basics for a second.

Programmatic is a term used to describe the buying of advertising using software and algorithms.

It’s something that is currently lighting up the world of advertising as it takes out the ponderous and inefficient human element, allowing advertisers to reach the right people when they are in exactly the right place.

We can see below just how fast the uptake is expected to grow over the next couple of years:

There's no escaping its grasp, so we ought to find out how it works, right?

In the simplest terms here's what it looks like.

At one end of the ‘system’ you have what is called a Demand-Side Platform: a place where all advertisers queue up and share what kinds of people they want to reach.

On the other side we have the Supply-Side Platform: an inventory library where media owners, publishers, and so on tell the ‘machine’ what they have available to sell.

So far, so simple!

In the center lies the Ad Exchange, into which those publishers pour their available impressions and buyers use the tech in the Demand-Side Platforms to pick what they want to buy. This is usually done via an interface that allows you to target based on anything from demographics to recent purchase behavior and interests, and even intent.

The process of buying and selling then happens REALLY fast, in the time it takes to load the page(s) being bid on. During that split second, an auction takes place, with the highest bid winning the right to show inventory in that spot.

This is called Real-Time Bidding and is what many rightly believe is the future of programmatic and advertising in general. The platform we use to ‘play’ in this space is called Cadreon, but there are a plethora of different routes to market, either directly as a client or via an agency solution.

Before we move on and talk about why this matters to marketers, it's worth mentioning that there is another version of programmatic known as Advanced Programmatic (or Programmatic Direct), where larger agencies pre-buy inventory at scale in order to obtain discounted pricing for buying in bulk or to secure premium and in-demand inventory. They can then use that ‘space’ as they wish, deploying it via the same system to take advantages of the audience targeting opportunity.

To get a more detailed overview of programmatic, we've created this free guide as part of a 'beginners guide pack':

So this is for advertising, right?

By now you may well be thinking that I’ve lost my mind and gone all ‘advertising’ on you. But this is entirely the point.

The world sees this as a pure-play advertising opportunity, but the reality could be quite different.

Yes, it reinvents advertising. But if you think about those adverts as simply ‘holes in the Internet,’ then we can begin to bring content into the conversation.

Holes in the Internet

At risk of stating the obvious, advertising creative is not ‘content.’ At its worst it shouts to gain our attention, and at best it still tries too hard to connect directly to a brand, or direct response opportunity.

Imagine, then, if we used those spaces to highlight an amazing piece of review content, like this fantastic ‘Which Macbook Should I Buy?’ guide by Wirecutter. Using programmatic, we could target that at people that have visited a retail store that stocks Apple within the last two weeks and have also been to the Apple site.

Another example: a great video review like this by a prominent UK automotive media brand of the best sports car to buy to someone that has just test-driven an Audi R8.

The opportunities are endless.

Native advertising

Some might say this is the natural extension of the currently rudimentary opportunities presented by the ‘native advertising’ world through platforms such as Outbrain and Taboola.

This is, however, like comparing use of the Google Display network for ad creative distribution with using real-time programmatic: a walled garden restricted to just Google publisher websites versus a programmatic play that could reach out to almost every site on the web and across some really exciting other areas like TV, radio, and out-of-home, to boot. We’ll come to how they fit in shortly.

While native advertising helps us position the opportunity in our heads (using space traditionally seen as for adverts for content), it is important to understand how much more powerful programmatic reach is.

There is one really interesting player starting to make waves in this space, and that is a Florida-based company called Triple Lift.

The model offered allows brands to buy native inventory using programmatic tech, offering advertisers a way into those ‘walled garden’ spots within content areas. This is grade-A real estate for content marketers as we look to blend the line between advertising and content further.

Interestingly, however, and probably due to the tech only being sold into advertisers as opposed to content marketers, the examples show ad-based creative as opposed to engaging content. Below, however, we can see how an article looks placed through the platform on Digg:

Adding in other channels

While traditional digital advertising is either based on keyword targeting (Adwords, for example) or is more audience-focused but limited to a single network or small pot of ‘networks’ (see Google Display Network or Facebook Audience Network), the best programmatic platforms reach much, much further.

Any good system will give you options across the following, for example:

Doubleclick Bid Manager for access to the Google stack

Amazon

Tube Mogul for video solutions across the web, including Facebook and Instagram

AOL, including Microsoft and Yahoo properties

Private large site marketplaces such as Pubmatic and Rubicon Project, proving access to the likes of Time Warner, Zoopla, and The Times

Radio channels

Out-of-home inventory – digital billboards, etc.

TV advertising

There are then a number of intermediaries whose job it is to specialize in connecting media opportunities together such as Drawbridge and Tapad for cross-device targeting. A quick overview guide of the players in the ecosystem can be seen below and should be explored as part of any strategy:

The benefit of this whole-of-market approach was summed up brilliantly in an article for Marketing Week by Jonathan McCauley-Oliver, the online sales manager at National Rail Enquiries in the UK.

They use programmatic to ensure that ads against the millions of page impressions its website receives each month are served smoothly and to their target audiences.

He explained:

“If I go to a marketer and say that I can deliver your message to the one person who is likely to buy your product, that is worth a lot. If I can do that in five seconds to 8 million users, they’ll bite my hand off. This one-to-one relationship is afforded by these advancements in technology."

Imagine this as a central tool in your content distribution arsenal…

How could this work in the wild?

With a ‘full stack’ of Supply-Side options at your disposal, the world looks very, very exciting, especially when you start to think about how you can follow and interact with your audience, almost irrespective of where you are.

The process starts with an understanding of where your audience can be found elsewhere on the web. We can use a number of tools and platforms that you may already be well aware of as part of the wider audience understanding work you do across marketing to do this.

Audience understanding

Before you start any campaign, you MUST have a clear idea of where your target consumers are. To do this, I follow a basic process:

1. At Zazzle we have access to a great tool called Global Web Index. It's something I've written and spoken about several times recently, as it's becoming a core cog in the overall strategic wheel. In this process we use it to tell us which channels our audience uses regularly, such as in the example below.

Here we see three similar brands compared to the UK average (purple). It is clearly telling us that they use search and consumer review sites. This provides validation that our targeting will work.

2. Next, we want to get more granular. To do this, we start with Comscore and Hitwise, a leading supplier of audience insight data. From within it we can extract information on everything from which sites our audiences go to before and after ours, as well as a broader view of interests and visit behavior. You can see below an example of what an upstream report looks like for the BBC website in the UK:

Using these two tools, you can quickly build up an accurate picture of where your audience is hanging out, either by analyzing your own site or those of your competitors or industry leaders.

For those that can't stretch to such enterprise tools, Alexa and Similarweb can give you similar information, albeit from smaller data sets.

3. We can also layer over a multitude of other data here. These are usually segmented into the following pots:

In reality, you would rarely need to worry about individual data providers. However, many of the programmatic platforms aggregate this into their systems to give you a one-stop solution to target correctly (we talk about example platforms a little later).

Creative

In creating this guide we are assuming that you already have the process of creating the right kind of content nailed. I've written previously about how to design content strategies and campaigns to maximize impact if there are any question marks over your approach, but the beauty of this delivery mechanism is that it's just as effective for articles and guides as it is for major campaigns.

To understand what I mean, let's look at a couple of theoretical examples and how that could play out:

Example 1: Video review content for a person buying a sports car

Imagine the scene: You’ve been thinking about buying a new car for several months and finally, after several attempts, you’ve got a weekend free to test out that car of your dreams.

On Saturday you test three rival brand options and go away more confused than ever, as the car you thought you wanted wasn’t the best to drive.

That night, as you ponder that decision, those brands want to be front-of-mind. The smartest of the three has deployed a programmatic ad content strategy. By collating geo-location data alongside information from its own test drive database and by looking at Google searches, YouTube viewership, etc, the brand can work out which cars are in the frame.

This presents a unique opportunity.

Rather than deliver a display banner, all the data within the setup could provide us the opportunity to deliver a richer content experience. If we know that a user lives in Brighton, currently drives a sports car that is 3 years old, and has been researching new cars, we could tailor his brand experience accordingly (e.g. content could provide local Brighton dealerships, knowing user already has sports car and lease could be expiring soon).

Or, even smarter than that, it could serve up a YouTube-hosted video favorably comparing their car with that of the rivals.

A call-to-action could then take that person to the brand site and onto a dynamically personalized page that presents the strongest argument for buying their car.

I don’t know about you, but I would be pretty impressed by that experience.

Example 2: A person buying a laptop

It’s a similar story for businesses in the retail sector. Let’s say you run an ecommerce business and want to help add value at the critical point of the purchase funnel: when a potential customer is making their final decision on which product to buy.

This could play out in any purchase process, but for the sake of this second example, let’s imagine it is for laptops.

The decision is down to the last two options (Macbook Air and the Surface Pro). We know this as search behavior has included reading reviews and looking at comparisons.

Imagine if we could place our own review slap-bang into the middle of that process, in real time. As they trawl the Internet for info, our in-depth comparison review follows them. The likelihood of interaction is huge and we can even include dynamic call-to-action creative within it, offering a personalized discount or incentive to ‘buy now’ and from our site.

So how do I get involved?

By this point, you should be thinking about how you may go about adding to your 2017 strategy but wondering where on earth to start.

The choices, as explained earlier in the piece, are still relatively limited simply due to the relative immaturity of the market and tech. Things are changing fast, however.

If your budgets are larger, then chances are you're already using the approach as part of your paid media mix. In this situation, the challenge is to reimagine the strategy with greater emphasis on content as opposed to commercial ad messaging. Think of it as softening the message and attempting to add value more. Talk to your agency or team and challenge them to test it.

I'll almost guarantee they're not thinking about the distribution method as a platform for anything other than advertising message, so make it your mission to push them and help them understand that it may be more powerful as a delivery mechanism for value-adding articles, videos, and interactive assets.

This switch in thinking represents a huge opportunity for those that are willing and able to try it first, and the good news is there are a number of easy-to-use tools out there allowing you to give it a go.

Programmatic for smaller business

If, like the majority, you are in charge of smaller budgets and don’t have the ability to onboard a global network agency with in-house proprietary tech like Cadreon, don’t think you're out of luck. There is an ever-growing pack of platforms designed specifically for this market.

A personal favorite is Admedo, an easy-to-use system for those with little or no programmatic experience. With its own DSP (Demand-Side Platform), you can customize to your heart's content. We have seen some brilliant results from it.

Others worth considering include:

Zypmedia – Great for local advertising campaign work and for businesses where geo-location is critical.

Pocketmath – Another great option for the small business owner wanting full control of targeting, creative, and delivery.

Brandzooka – A good choice for those looking to focus campaigns on video creative.

Next steps

So, fancy giving programmatic a go? If you do, spend ten minutes reading our Simple Guide to Programmatic, available for free by clicking the button below. You can also download our Programmatic Planning Template to help make the planning process as easy as possible. Good luck!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[swunlimitednj]

Programmatic Delivery: The Future of Content Marketing and Promotion?

Posted by SimonPenson

Content promotion is hard. Disparate audiences and an ever-growing proliferation of channels to reach them through has made the life of a content marketer incredibly tough.

What would you say, however, if there was a single solution to reaching EXACTLY the right people at exactly the right time, across any and every channel in real time?

It may sound like a pie-in-the-sky opportunity but the reality is such an option is actually very, very close. In fact, for some it already exists.

That option is ‘programmatic.’

Although still in its infancy from a content perspective, the technology and methodology behind it offers massive potential for the world of content marketing, and even SEO.

So, what is programmatic?

For those not fluent in the often complex and seemingly inaccessible world of programmatic and its associated buzzwords and acronyms, let’s go back to the basics for a second.

Programmatic is a term used to describe the buying of advertising using software and algorithms.

It’s something that is currently lighting up the world of advertising as it takes out the ponderous and inefficient human element, allowing advertisers to reach the right people when they are in exactly the right place.

We can see below just how fast the uptake is expected to grow over the next couple of years:

There's no escaping its grasp, so we ought to find out how it works, right?

In the simplest terms here's what it looks like.

At one end of the ‘system’ you have what is called a Demand-Side Platform: a place where all advertisers queue up and share what kinds of people they want to reach.

On the other side we have the Supply-Side Platform: an inventory library where media owners, publishers, and so on tell the ‘machine’ what they have available to sell.

So far, so simple!

In the center lies the Ad Exchange, into which those publishers pour their available impressions and buyers use the tech in the Demand-Side Platforms to pick what they want to buy. This is usually done via an interface that allows you to target based on anything from demographics to recent purchase behavior and interests, and even intent.

The process of buying and selling then happens REALLY fast, in the time it takes to load the page(s) being bid on. During that split second, an auction takes place, with the highest bid winning the right to show inventory in that spot.

This is called Real-Time Bidding and is what many rightly believe is the future of programmatic and advertising in general. The platform we use to ‘play’ in this space is called Cadreon, but there are a plethora of different routes to market, either directly as a client or via an agency solution.

Before we move on and talk about why this matters to marketers, it's worth mentioning that there is another version of programmatic known as Advanced Programmatic (or Programmatic Direct), where larger agencies pre-buy inventory at scale in order to obtain discounted pricing for buying in bulk or to secure premium and in-demand inventory. They can then use that ‘space’ as they wish, deploying it via the same system to take advantages of the audience targeting opportunity.

To get a more detailed overview of programmatic, we've created this free guide as part of a 'beginners guide pack':

So this is for advertising, right?

By now you may well be thinking that I’ve lost my mind and gone all ‘advertising’ on you. But this is entirely the point.

The world sees this as a pure-play advertising opportunity, but the reality could be quite different.

Yes, it reinvents advertising. But if you think about those adverts as simply ‘holes in the Internet,’ then we can begin to bring content into the conversation.

Holes in the Internet

At risk of stating the obvious, advertising creative is not ‘content.’ At its worst it shouts to gain our attention, and at best it still tries too hard to connect directly to a brand, or direct response opportunity.

Imagine, then, if we used those spaces to highlight an amazing piece of review content, like this fantastic ‘Which Macbook Should I Buy?’ guide by Wirecutter. Using programmatic, we could target that at people that have visited a retail store that stocks Apple within the last two weeks and have also been to the Apple site.

Another example: a great video review like this by a prominent UK automotive media brand of the best sports car to buy to someone that has just test-driven an Audi R8.

The opportunities are endless.

Native advertising

Some might say this is the natural extension of the currently rudimentary opportunities presented by the ‘native advertising’ world through platforms such as Outbrain and Taboola.

This is, however, like comparing use of the Google Display network for ad creative distribution with using real-time programmatic: a walled garden restricted to just Google publisher websites versus a programmatic play that could reach out to almost every site on the web and across some really exciting other areas like TV, radio, and out-of-home, to boot. We’ll come to how they fit in shortly.

While native advertising helps us position the opportunity in our heads (using space traditionally seen as for adverts for content), it is important to understand how much more powerful programmatic reach is.

There is one really interesting player starting to make waves in this space, and that is a Florida-based company called Triple Lift.

The model offered allows brands to buy native inventory using programmatic tech, offering advertisers a way into those ‘walled garden’ spots within content areas. This is grade-A real estate for content marketers as we look to blend the line between advertising and content further.

Interestingly, however, and probably due to the tech only being sold into advertisers as opposed to content marketers, the examples show ad-based creative as opposed to engaging content. Below, however, we can see how an article looks placed through the platform on Digg:

Adding in other channels

While traditional digital advertising is either based on keyword targeting (Adwords, for example) or is more audience-focused but limited to a single network or small pot of ‘networks’ (see Google Display Network or Facebook Audience Network), the best programmatic platforms reach much, much further.

Any good system will give you options across the following, for example:

Doubleclick Bid Manager for access to the Google stack

Amazon

Tube Mogul for video solutions across the web, including Facebook and Instagram

AOL, including Microsoft and Yahoo properties

Private large site marketplaces such as Pubmatic and Rubicon Project, proving access to the likes of Time Warner, Zoopla, and The Times

Radio channels

Out-of-home inventory – digital billboards, etc.

TV advertising

There are then a number of intermediaries whose job it is to specialize in connecting media opportunities together such as Drawbridge and Tapad for cross-device targeting. A quick overview guide of the players in the ecosystem can be seen below and should be explored as part of any strategy:

The benefit of this whole-of-market approach was summed up brilliantly in an article for Marketing Week by Jonathan McCauley-Oliver, the online sales manager at National Rail Enquiries in the UK.

They use programmatic to ensure that ads against the millions of page impressions its website receives each month are served smoothly and to their target audiences.

He explained:

“If I go to a marketer and say that I can deliver your message to the one person who is likely to buy your product, that is worth a lot. If I can do that in five seconds to 8 million users, they’ll bite my hand off. This one-to-one relationship is afforded by these advancements in technology."

Imagine this as a central tool in your content distribution arsenal…

How could this work in the wild?

With a ‘full stack’ of Supply-Side options at your disposal, the world looks very, very exciting, especially when you start to think about how you can follow and interact with your audience, almost irrespective of where you are.

The process starts with an understanding of where your audience can be found elsewhere on the web. We can use a number of tools and platforms that you may already be well aware of as part of the wider audience understanding work you do across marketing to do this.

Audience understanding

Before you start any campaign, you MUST have a clear idea of where your target consumers are. To do this, I follow a basic process:

1. At Zazzle we have access to a great tool called Global Web Index. It's something I've written and spoken about several times recently, as it's becoming a core cog in the overall strategic wheel. In this process we use it to tell us which channels our audience uses regularly, such as in the example below.

Here we see three similar brands compared to the UK average (purple). It is clearly telling us that they use search and consumer review sites. This provides validation that our targeting will work.

2. Next, we want to get more granular. To do this, we start with Comscore and Hitwise, a leading supplier of audience insight data. From within it we can extract information on everything from which sites our audiences go to before and after ours, as well as a broader view of interests and visit behavior. You can see below an example of what an upstream report looks like for the BBC website in the UK:

Using these two tools, you can quickly build up an accurate picture of where your audience is hanging out, either by analyzing your own site or those of your competitors or industry leaders.

For those that can't stretch to such enterprise tools, Alexa and Similarweb can give you similar information, albeit from smaller data sets.

3. We can also layer over a multitude of other data here. These are usually segmented into the following pots:

In reality, you would rarely need to worry about individual data providers. However, many of the programmatic platforms aggregate this into their systems to give you a one-stop solution to target correctly (we talk about example platforms a little later).

Creative

In creating this guide we are assuming that you already have the process of creating the right kind of content nailed. I've written previously about how to design content strategies and campaigns to maximize impact if there are any question marks over your approach, but the beauty of this delivery mechanism is that it's just as effective for articles and guides as it is for major campaigns.

To understand what I mean, let's look at a couple of theoretical examples and how that could play out:

Example 1: Video review content for a person buying a sports car

Imagine the scene: You’ve been thinking about buying a new car for several months and finally, after several attempts, you’ve got a weekend free to test out that car of your dreams.

On Saturday you test three rival brand options and go away more confused than ever, as the car you thought you wanted wasn’t the best to drive.

That night, as you ponder that decision, those brands want to be front-of-mind. The smartest of the three has deployed a programmatic ad content strategy. By collating geo-location data alongside information from its own test drive database and by looking at Google searches, YouTube viewership, etc, the brand can work out which cars are in the frame.

This presents a unique opportunity.

Rather than deliver a display banner, all the data within the setup could provide us the opportunity to deliver a richer content experience. If we know that a user lives in Brighton, currently drives a sports car that is 3 years old, and has been researching new cars, we could tailor his brand experience accordingly (e.g. content could provide local Brighton dealerships, knowing user already has sports car and lease could be expiring soon).

Or, even smarter than that, it could serve up a YouTube-hosted video favorably comparing their car with that of the rivals.

A call-to-action could then take that person to the brand site and onto a dynamically personalized page that presents the strongest argument for buying their car.

I don’t know about you, but I would be pretty impressed by that experience.

Example 2: A person buying a laptop

It’s a similar story for businesses in the retail sector. Let’s say you run an ecommerce business and want to help add value at the critical point of the purchase funnel: when a potential customer is making their final decision on which product to buy.

This could play out in any purchase process, but for the sake of this second example, let’s imagine it is for laptops.

The decision is down to the last two options (Macbook Air and the Surface Pro). We know this as search behavior has included reading reviews and looking at comparisons.

Imagine if we could place our own review slap-bang into the middle of that process, in real time. As they trawl the Internet for info, our in-depth comparison review follows them. The likelihood of interaction is huge and we can even include dynamic call-to-action creative within it, offering a personalized discount or incentive to ‘buy now’ and from our site.

So how do I get involved?

By this point, you should be thinking about how you may go about adding to your 2017 strategy but wondering where on earth to start.

The choices, as explained earlier in the piece, are still relatively limited simply due to the relative immaturity of the market and tech. Things are changing fast, however.

If your budgets are larger, then chances are you're already using the approach as part of your paid media mix. In this situation, the challenge is to reimagine the strategy with greater emphasis on content as opposed to commercial ad messaging. Think of it as softening the message and attempting to add value more. Talk to your agency or team and challenge them to test it.

I'll almost guarantee they're not thinking about the distribution method as a platform for anything other than advertising message, so make it your mission to push them and help them understand that it may be more powerful as a delivery mechanism for value-adding articles, videos, and interactive assets.

This switch in thinking represents a huge opportunity for those that are willing and able to try it first, and the good news is there are a number of easy-to-use tools out there allowing you to give it a go.

Programmatic for smaller business

If, like the majority, you are in charge of smaller budgets and don’t have the ability to onboard a global network agency with in-house proprietary tech like Cadreon, don’t think you're out of luck. There is an ever-growing pack of platforms designed specifically for this market.

A personal favorite is Admedo, an easy-to-use system for those with little or no programmatic experience. With its own DSP (Demand-Side Platform), you can customize to your heart's content. We have seen some brilliant results from it.

Others worth considering include:

Zypmedia – Great for local advertising campaign work and for businesses where geo-location is critical.

Pocketmath – Another great option for the small business owner wanting full control of targeting, creative, and delivery.

Brandzooka – A good choice for those looking to focus campaigns on video creative.

Next steps

So, fancy giving programmatic a go? If you do, spend ten minutes reading our Simple Guide to Programmatic, available for free by clicking the button below. You can also download our Programmatic Planning Template to help make the planning process as easy as possible. Good luck!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from Blogger http://ift.tt/2iCrpc1 via SW Unlimited

[luxuryltdcars]

Programmatic Delivery: The Future of Content Marketing and Promotion?

http://ift.tt/2jpVn3P

Posted by SimonPenson

Content promotion is hard. Disparate audiences and an ever-growing proliferation of channels to reach them through has made the life of a content marketer incredibly tough.

What would you say, however, if there was a single solution to reaching EXACTLY the right people at exactly the right time, across any and every channel in real time?

It may sound like a pie-in-the-sky opportunity but the reality is such an option is actually very, very close. In fact, for some it already exists.

That option is ‘programmatic.’

Although still in its infancy from a content perspective, the technology and methodology behind it offers massive potential for the world of content marketing, and even SEO.

So, what is programmatic?

For those not fluent in the often complex and seemingly inaccessible world of programmatic and its associated buzzwords and acronyms, let’s go back to the basics for a second.

Programmatic is a term used to describe the buying of advertising using software and algorithms.

It’s something that is currently lighting up the world of advertising as it takes out the ponderous and inefficient human element, allowing advertisers to reach the right people when they are in exactly the right place.

We can see below just how fast the uptake is expected to grow over the next couple of years:

There's no escaping its grasp, so we ought to find out how it works, right?

In the simplest terms here's what it looks like.

At one end of the ‘system’ you have what is called a Demand-Side Platform: a place where all advertisers queue up and share what kinds of people they want to reach.

On the other side we have the Supply-Side Platform: an inventory library where media owners, publishers, and so on tell the ‘machine’ what they have available to sell.

So far, so simple!

In the center lies the Ad Exchange, into which those publishers pour their available impressions and buyers use the tech in the Demand-Side Platforms to pick what they want to buy. This is usually done via an interface that allows you to target based on anything from demographics to recent purchase behavior and interests, and even intent.

The process of buying and selling then happens REALLY fast, in the time it takes to load the page(s) being bid on. During that split second, an auction takes place, with the highest bid winning the right to show inventory in that spot.

This is called Real-Time Bidding and is what many rightly believe is the future of programmatic and advertising in general. The platform we use to ‘play’ in this space is called Cadreon, but there are a plethora of different routes to market, either directly as a client or via an agency solution.

Before we move on and talk about why this matters to marketers, it's worth mentioning that there is another version of programmatic known as Advanced Programmatic (or Programmatic Direct), where larger agencies pre-buy inventory at scale in order to obtain discounted pricing for buying in bulk or to secure premium and in-demand inventory. They can then use that ‘space’ as they wish, deploying it via the same system to take advantages of the audience targeting opportunity.

To get a more detailed overview of programmatic, we've created this free guide as part of a 'beginners guide pack':

So this is for advertising, right?

By now you may well be thinking that I’ve lost my mind and gone all ‘advertising’ on you. But this is entirely the point.

The world sees this as a pure-play advertising opportunity, but the reality could be quite different.

Yes, it reinvents advertising. But if you think about those adverts as simply ‘holes in the Internet,’ then we can begin to bring content into the conversation.

Holes in the Internet

At risk of stating the obvious, advertising creative is not ‘content.’ At its worst it shouts to gain our attention, and at best it still tries too hard to connect directly to a brand, or direct response opportunity.

Imagine, then, if we used those spaces to highlight an amazing piece of review content, like this fantastic ‘Which Macbook Should I Buy?’ guide by Wirecutter. Using programmatic, we could target that at people that have visited a retail store that stocks Apple within the last two weeks and have also been to the Apple site.

Another example: a great video review like this by a prominent UK automotive media brand of the best sports car to buy to someone that has just test-driven an Audi R8.

The opportunities are endless.

Native advertising

Some might say this is the natural extension of the currently rudimentary opportunities presented by the ‘native advertising’ world through platforms such as Outbrain and Taboola.

This is, however, like comparing use of the Google Display network for ad creative distribution with using real-time programmatic: a walled garden restricted to just Google publisher websites versus a programmatic play that could reach out to almost every site on the web and across some really exciting other areas like TV, radio, and out-of-home, to boot. We’ll come to how they fit in shortly.

While native advertising helps us position the opportunity in our heads (using space traditionally seen as for adverts for content), it is important to understand how much more powerful programmatic reach is.

There is one really interesting player starting to make waves in this space, and that is a Florida-based company called Triple Lift.

The model offered allows brands to buy native inventory using programmatic tech, offering advertisers a way into those ‘walled garden’ spots within content areas. This is grade-A real estate for content marketers as we look to blend the line between advertising and content further.

Interestingly, however, and probably due to the tech only being sold into advertisers as opposed to content marketers, the examples show ad-based creative as opposed to engaging content. Below, however, we can see how an article looks placed through the platform on Digg:

Adding in other channels

While traditional digital advertising is either based on keyword targeting (Adwords, for example) or is more audience-focused but limited to a single network or small pot of ‘networks’ (see Google Display Network or Facebook Audience Network), the best programmatic platforms reach much, much further.

Any good system will give you options across the following, for example:

Doubleclick Bid Manager for access to the Google stack

Amazon

Tube Mogul for video solutions across the web, including Facebook and Instagram

AOL, including Microsoft and Yahoo properties

Private large site marketplaces such as Pubmatic and Rubicon Project, proving access to the likes of Time Warner, Zoopla, and The Times

Radio channels

Out-of-home inventory – digital billboards, etc.

TV advertising

There are then a number of intermediaries whose job it is to specialize in connecting media opportunities together such as Drawbridge and Tapad for cross-device targeting. A quick overview guide of the players in the ecosystem can be seen below and should be explored as part of any strategy:

The benefit of this whole-of-market approach was summed up brilliantly in an article for Marketing Week by Jonathan McCauley-Oliver, the online sales manager at National Rail Enquiries in the UK.

They use programmatic to ensure that ads against the millions of page impressions its website receives each month are served smoothly and to their target audiences.

He explained:

“If I go to a marketer and say that I can deliver your message to the one person who is likely to buy your product, that is worth a lot. If I can do that in five seconds to 8 million users, they’ll bite my hand off. This one-to-one relationship is afforded by these advancements in technology."

Imagine this as a central tool in your content distribution arsenal…

How could this work in the wild?

With a ‘full stack’ of Supply-Side options at your disposal, the world looks very, very exciting, especially when you start to think about how you can follow and interact with your audience, almost irrespective of where you are.

The process starts with an understanding of where your audience can be found elsewhere on the web. We can use a number of tools and platforms that you may already be well aware of as part of the wider audience understanding work you do across marketing to do this.

Audience understanding

Before you start any campaign, you MUST have a clear idea of where your target consumers are. To do this, I follow a basic process:

1. At Zazzle we have access to a great tool called Global Web Index. It's something I've written and spoken about several times recently, as it's becoming a core cog in the overall strategic wheel. In this process we use it to tell us which channels our audience uses regularly, such as in the example below.

Here we see three similar brands compared to the UK average (purple). It is clearly telling us that they use search and consumer review sites. This provides validation that our targeting will work.

2. Next, we want to get more granular. To do this, we start with Comscore and Hitwise, a leading supplier of audience insight data. From within it we can extract information on everything from which sites our audiences go to before and after ours, as well as a broader view of interests and visit behavior. You can see below an example of what an upstream report looks like for the BBC website in the UK:

Using these two tools, you can quickly build up an accurate picture of where your audience is hanging out, either by analyzing your own site or those of your competitors or industry leaders.

For those that can't stretch to such enterprise tools, Alexa and Similarweb can give you similar information, albeit from smaller data sets.

3. We can also layer over a multitude of other data here. These are usually segmented into the following pots:

In reality, you would rarely need to worry about individual data providers. However, many of the programmatic platforms aggregate this into their systems to give you a one-stop solution to target correctly (we talk about example platforms a little later).

Creative

In creating this guide we are assuming that you already have the process of creating the right kind of content nailed. I've written previously about how to design content strategies and campaigns to maximize impact if there are any question marks over your approach, but the beauty of this delivery mechanism is that it's just as effective for articles and guides as it is for major campaigns.

To understand what I mean, let's look at a couple of theoretical examples and how that could play out:

Example 1: Video review content for a person buying a sports car

Imagine the scene: You’ve been thinking about buying a new car for several months and finally, after several attempts, you’ve got a weekend free to test out that car of your dreams.

On Saturday you test three rival brand options and go away more confused than ever, as the car you thought you wanted wasn’t the best to drive.

That night, as you ponder that decision, those brands want to be front-of-mind. The smartest of the three has deployed a programmatic ad content strategy. By collating geo-location data alongside information from its own test drive database and by looking at Google searches, YouTube viewership, etc, the brand can work out which cars are in the frame.

This presents a unique opportunity.

Rather than deliver a display banner, all the data within the setup could provide us the opportunity to deliver a richer content experience. If we know that a user lives in Brighton, currently drives a sports car that is 3 years old, and has been researching new cars, we could tailor his brand experience accordingly (e.g. content could provide local Brighton dealerships, knowing user already has sports car and lease could be expiring soon).

Or, even smarter than that, it could serve up a YouTube-hosted video favorably comparing their car with that of the rivals.

A call-to-action could then take that person to the brand site and onto a dynamically personalized page that presents the strongest argument for buying their car.

I don’t know about you, but I would be pretty impressed by that experience.

Example 2: A person buying a laptop

It’s a similar story for businesses in the retail sector. Let’s say you run an ecommerce business and want to help add value at the critical point of the purchase funnel: when a potential customer is making their final decision on which product to buy.

This could play out in any purchase process, but for the sake of this second example, let’s imagine it is for laptops.

The decision is down to the last two options (Macbook Air and the Surface Pro). We know this as search behavior has included reading reviews and looking at comparisons.

Imagine if we could place our own review slap-bang into the middle of that process, in real time. As they trawl the Internet for info, our in-depth comparison review follows them. The likelihood of interaction is huge and we can even include dynamic call-to-action creative within it, offering a personalized discount or incentive to ‘buy now’ and from our site.

So how do I get involved?

By this point, you should be thinking about how you may go about adding to your 2017 strategy but wondering where on earth to start.

The choices, as explained earlier in the piece, are still relatively limited simply due to the relative immaturity of the market and tech. Things are changing fast, however.

If your budgets are larger, then chances are you're already using the approach as part of your paid media mix. In this situation, the challenge is to reimagine the strategy with greater emphasis on content as opposed to commercial ad messaging. Think of it as softening the message and attempting to add value more. Talk to your agency or team and challenge them to test it.

I'll almost guarantee they're not thinking about the distribution method as a platform for anything other than advertising message, so make it your mission to push them and help them understand that it may be more powerful as a delivery mechanism for value-adding articles, videos, and interactive assets.

This switch in thinking represents a huge opportunity for those that are willing and able to try it first, and the good news is there are a number of easy-to-use tools out there allowing you to give it a go.

Programmatic for smaller business

If, like the majority, you are in charge of smaller budgets and don’t have the ability to onboard a global network agency with in-house proprietary tech like Cadreon, don’t think you're out of luck. There is an ever-growing pack of platforms designed specifically for this market.

A personal favorite is Admedo, an easy-to-use system for those with little or no programmatic experience. With its own DSP (Demand-Side Platform), you can customize to your heart's content. We have seen some brilliant results from it.

Others worth considering include:

Zypmedia – Great for local advertising campaign work and for businesses where geo-location is critical.

Pocketmath – Another great option for the small business owner wanting full control of targeting, creative, and delivery.

Brandzooka – A good choice for those looking to focus campaigns on video creative.

Next steps

So, fancy giving programmatic a go? If you do, spend ten minutes reading our Simple Guide to Programmatic, available for free by clicking the button below. You can also download our Programmatic Planning Template to help make the planning process as easy as possible. Good luck!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[mylifeisbeer]

Programmatic Delivery: The Future of Content Marketing and Promotion?

Posted by SimonPenson

Content promotion is hard. Disparate audiences and an ever-growing proliferation of channels to reach them through has made the life of a content marketer incredibly tough.

What would you say, however, if there was a single solution to reaching EXACTLY the right people at exactly the right time, across any and every channel in real time?

It may sound like a pie-in-the-sky opportunity but the reality is such an option is actually very, very close. In fact, for some it already exists.

That option is ‘programmatic.’

Although still in its infancy from a content perspective, the technology and methodology behind it offers massive potential for the world of content marketing, and even SEO.

So, what is programmatic?

For those not fluent in the often complex and seemingly inaccessible world of programmatic and its associated buzzwords and acronyms, let’s go back to the basics for a second.

Programmatic is a term used to describe the buying of advertising using software and algorithms.

It’s something that is currently lighting up the world of advertising as it takes out the ponderous and inefficient human element, allowing advertisers to reach the right people when they are in exactly the right place.

We can see below just how fast the uptake is expected to grow over the next couple of years:

There's no escaping its grasp, so we ought to find out how it works, right?

In the simplest terms here's what it looks like.

At one end of the ‘system’ you have what is called a Demand-Side Platform: a place where all advertisers queue up and share what kinds of people they want to reach.

On the other side we have the Supply-Side Platform: an inventory library where media owners, publishers, and so on tell the ‘machine’ what they have available to sell.

So far, so simple!

In the center lies the Ad Exchange, into which those publishers pour their available impressions and buyers use the tech in the Demand-Side Platforms to pick what they want to buy. This is usually done via an interface that allows you to target based on anything from demographics to recent purchase behavior and interests, and even intent.

The process of buying and selling then happens REALLY fast, in the time it takes to load the page(s) being bid on. During that split second, an auction takes place, with the highest bid winning the right to show inventory in that spot.

This is called Real-Time Bidding and is what many rightly believe is the future of programmatic and advertising in general. The platform we use to ‘play’ in this space is called Cadreon, but there are a plethora of different routes to market, either directly as a client or via an agency solution.

Before we move on and talk about why this matters to marketers, it's worth mentioning that there is another version of programmatic known as Advanced Programmatic (or Programmatic Direct), where larger agencies pre-buy inventory at scale in order to obtain discounted pricing for buying in bulk or to secure premium and in-demand inventory. They can then use that ‘space’ as they wish, deploying it via the same system to take advantages of the audience targeting opportunity.

To get a more detailed overview of programmatic, we've created this free guide as part of a 'beginners guide pack':

So this is for advertising, right?

By now you may well be thinking that I’ve lost my mind and gone all ‘advertising’ on you. But this is entirely the point.

The world sees this as a pure-play advertising opportunity, but the reality could be quite different.

Yes, it reinvents advertising. But if you think about those adverts as simply ‘holes in the Internet,’ then we can begin to bring content into the conversation.

Holes in the Internet

At risk of stating the obvious, advertising creative is not ‘content.’ At its worst it shouts to gain our attention, and at best it still tries too hard to connect directly to a brand, or direct response opportunity.

Imagine, then, if we used those spaces to highlight an amazing piece of review content, like this fantastic ‘Which Macbook Should I Buy?’ guide by Wirecutter. Using programmatic, we could target that at people that have visited a retail store that stocks Apple within the last two weeks and have also been to the Apple site.

Another example: a great video review like this by a prominent UK automotive media brand of the best sports car to buy to someone that has just test-driven an Audi R8.

The opportunities are endless.

Native advertising

Some might say this is the natural extension of the currently rudimentary opportunities presented by the ‘native advertising’ world through platforms such as Outbrain and Taboola.

This is, however, like comparing use of the Google Display network for ad creative distribution with using real-time programmatic: a walled garden restricted to just Google publisher websites versus a programmatic play that could reach out to almost every site on the web and across some really exciting other areas like TV, radio, and out-of-home, to boot. We’ll come to how they fit in shortly.

While native advertising helps us position the opportunity in our heads (using space traditionally seen as for adverts for content), it is important to understand how much more powerful programmatic reach is.

There is one really interesting player starting to make waves in this space, and that is a Florida-based company called Triple Lift.

The model offered allows brands to buy native inventory using programmatic tech, offering advertisers a way into those ‘walled garden’ spots within content areas. This is grade-A real estate for content marketers as we look to blend the line between advertising and content further.

Interestingly, however, and probably due to the tech only being sold into advertisers as opposed to content marketers, the examples show ad-based creative as opposed to engaging content. Below, however, we can see how an article looks placed through the platform on Digg:

Adding in other channels

While traditional digital advertising is either based on keyword targeting (Adwords, for example) or is more audience-focused but limited to a single network or small pot of ‘networks’ (see Google Display Network or Facebook Audience Network), the best programmatic platforms reach much, much further.

Any good system will give you options across the following, for example:

Doubleclick Bid Manager for access to the Google stack

Amazon

Tube Mogul for video solutions across the web, including Facebook and Instagram

AOL, including Microsoft and Yahoo properties

Private large site marketplaces such as Pubmatic and Rubicon Project, proving access to the likes of Time Warner, Zoopla, and The Times

Radio channels

Out-of-home inventory – digital billboards, etc.

TV advertising

There are then a number of intermediaries whose job it is to specialize in connecting media opportunities together such as Drawbridge and Tapad for cross-device targeting. A quick overview guide of the players in the ecosystem can be seen below and should be explored as part of any strategy:

The benefit of this whole-of-market approach was summed up brilliantly in an article for Marketing Week by Jonathan McCauley-Oliver, the online sales manager at National Rail Enquiries in the UK.

They use programmatic to ensure that ads against the millions of page impressions its website receives each month are served smoothly and to their target audiences.

He explained:

“If I go to a marketer and say that I can deliver your message to the one person who is likely to buy your product, that is worth a lot. If I can do that in five seconds to 8 million users, they’ll bite my hand off. This one-to-one relationship is afforded by these advancements in technology."

Imagine this as a central tool in your content distribution arsenal…

How could this work in the wild?

With a ‘full stack’ of Supply-Side options at your disposal, the world looks very, very exciting, especially when you start to think about how you can follow and interact with your audience, almost irrespective of where you are.

The process starts with an understanding of where your audience can be found elsewhere on the web. We can use a number of tools and platforms that you may already be well aware of as part of the wider audience understanding work you do across marketing to do this.

Audience understanding

Before you start any campaign, you MUST have a clear idea of where your target consumers are. To do this, I follow a basic process:

1. At Zazzle we have access to a great tool called Global Web Index. It's something I've written and spoken about several times recently, as it's becoming a core cog in the overall strategic wheel. In this process we use it to tell us which channels our audience uses regularly, such as in the example below.

Here we see three similar brands compared to the UK average (purple). It is clearly telling us that they use search and consumer review sites. This provides validation that our targeting will work.

2. Next, we want to get more granular. To do this, we start with Comscore and Hitwise, a leading supplier of audience insight data. From within it we can extract information on everything from which sites our audiences go to before and after ours, as well as a broader view of interests and visit behavior. You can see below an example of what an upstream report looks like for the BBC website in the UK:

Using these two tools, you can quickly build up an accurate picture of where your audience is hanging out, either by analyzing your own site or those of your competitors or industry leaders.

For those that can't stretch to such enterprise tools, Alexa and Similarweb can give you similar information, albeit from smaller data sets.

3. We can also layer over a multitude of other data here. These are usually segmented into the following pots:

In reality, you would rarely need to worry about individual data providers. However, many of the programmatic platforms aggregate this into their systems to give you a one-stop solution to target correctly (we talk about example platforms a little later).

Creative

In creating this guide we are assuming that you already have the process of creating the right kind of content nailed. I've written previously about how to design content strategies and campaigns to maximize impact if there are any question marks over your approach, but the beauty of this delivery mechanism is that it's just as effective for articles and guides as it is for major campaigns.

To understand what I mean, let's look at a couple of theoretical examples and how that could play out:

Example 1: Video review content for a person buying a sports car

Imagine the scene: You’ve been thinking about buying a new car for several months and finally, after several attempts, you’ve got a weekend free to test out that car of your dreams.

On Saturday you test three rival brand options and go away more confused than ever, as the car you thought you wanted wasn’t the best to drive.

That night, as you ponder that decision, those brands want to be front-of-mind. The smartest of the three has deployed a programmatic ad content strategy. By collating geo-location data alongside information from its own test drive database and by looking at Google searches, YouTube viewership, etc, the brand can work out which cars are in the frame.

This presents a unique opportunity.

Rather than deliver a display banner, all the data within the setup could provide us the opportunity to deliver a richer content experience. If we know that a user lives in Brighton, currently drives a sports car that is 3 years old, and has been researching new cars, we could tailor his brand experience accordingly (e.g. content could provide local Brighton dealerships, knowing user already has sports car and lease could be expiring soon).

Or, even smarter than that, it could serve up a YouTube-hosted video favorably comparing their car with that of the rivals.

A call-to-action could then take that person to the brand site and onto a dynamically personalized page that presents the strongest argument for buying their car.

I don’t know about you, but I would be pretty impressed by that experience.

Example 2: A person buying a laptop

It’s a similar story for businesses in the retail sector. Let’s say you run an ecommerce business and want to help add value at the critical point of the purchase funnel: when a potential customer is making their final decision on which product to buy.

This could play out in any purchase process, but for the sake of this second example, let’s imagine it is for laptops.

The decision is down to the last two options (Macbook Air and the Surface Pro). We know this as search behavior has included reading reviews and looking at comparisons.

Imagine if we could place our own review slap-bang into the middle of that process, in real time. As they trawl the Internet for info, our in-depth comparison review follows them. The likelihood of interaction is huge and we can even include dynamic call-to-action creative within it, offering a personalized discount or incentive to ‘buy now’ and from our site.

So how do I get involved?

By this point, you should be thinking about how you may go about adding to your 2017 strategy but wondering where on earth to start.

The choices, as explained earlier in the piece, are still relatively limited simply due to the relative immaturity of the market and tech. Things are changing fast, however.

If your budgets are larger, then chances are you're already using the approach as part of your paid media mix. In this situation, the challenge is to reimagine the strategy with greater emphasis on content as opposed to commercial ad messaging. Think of it as softening the message and attempting to add value more. Talk to your agency or team and challenge them to test it.

I'll almost guarantee they're not thinking about the distribution method as a platform for anything other than advertising message, so make it your mission to push them and help them understand that it may be more powerful as a delivery mechanism for value-adding articles, videos, and interactive assets.

This switch in thinking represents a huge opportunity for those that are willing and able to try it first, and the good news is there are a number of easy-to-use tools out there allowing you to give it a go.

Programmatic for smaller business

If, like the majority, you are in charge of smaller budgets and don’t have the ability to onboard a global network agency with in-house proprietary tech like Cadreon, don’t think you're out of luck. There is an ever-growing pack of platforms designed specifically for this market.

A personal favorite is Admedo, an easy-to-use system for those with little or no programmatic experience. With its own DSP (Demand-Side Platform), you can customize to your heart's content. We have seen some brilliant results from it.

Others worth considering include:

Zypmedia – Great for local advertising campaign work and for businesses where geo-location is critical.

Pocketmath – Another great option for the small business owner wanting full control of targeting, creative, and delivery.

Brandzooka – A good choice for those looking to focus campaigns on video creative.

Next steps

So, fancy giving programmatic a go? If you do, spend ten minutes reading our Simple Guide to Programmatic, available for free by clicking the button below. You can also download our Programmatic Planning Template to help make the planning process as easy as possible. Good luck!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!