Your Digital Intelligence Report

Digital Intelligence Report

September 2019

Digital marketing is an arena with many experts and just as many charts, graphics and articles about how to do it all better. But those tend to stay at the surface level. The deeper you go, the more murky things get.

Don't get me wrong, digital works. But, in my 20 years of work in digital, I have found a laundry list of areas in digital where there is a serious lack of transparency and oversight. Where there is a lack of transparency, there are people and brands willing to make a buck exploiting them. For instance:

Were your banners really targeted to the list you requested?
Is your partner re-selling your pixel-scripted audience to competitors?
Is the site you are buying purchasing random traffic to fulfill the buy?
Are your metrics being manually or automatically inflated?
Are your emails boosted by auto-openers and auto-clickers?

Blockchain is touted in one article as a possible solution ( MORE). But, you might as well have columns about how AI, chatbots, machine learning and other digital buzzwords will solve it, too. And yes there are many routes to spend your way to greater comfort. MORE ... But these are all symptom crushing rather than disease eradication.

Digital marketing needs to be professionalized from within. Just because you can hack a marketing problem doesn't mean you should. My encouragement to you is to work with people you trust, ask deeper questions of those you want to trust but aren't certain yet, and check/test everything.

By the way, if anything in this note offends you, I have some advice about when and how to respond. MORE

SOCIAL MEDIA: Good content from quality sources is magical. Don't let influencer support change how you content market. Optimize, target to new audiences and change up the call to action. MORE ... Three quarters of social media marketers use some sort of automation tool but more than half agree there is a personalization downside to it. MORE ... Influencer marketing continues to work and grow. MORE ... Social has an array of helpful software supporting your efforts. Here's a handy tool to both see many of them and compare. MORE ... Want quick results? There is no hack of social (although there are code snippets that might help). Be interesting, professional and provide quality. MORE ... Instagram is removing "like" counts, so better metrics will need to be sought to judge effectiveness. MORE ... Facebook like counting may go away, but the engagement tool is far too powerful and necessary to remove the ability to like. MORE ... Even the nation's brightest minds can screw up in social media strategy. MORE ... Influencers are not just the people with the most likes or followers. It's about true quality and alignment of message. MORE

PROGRAMMATIC: Google may need to check its math but the bottom line is everyone is angry with Apple for trying to kill cookies. MORE ... There is life after the cookie. There are many alternative ID solutions out there. Some are better than others. MORE ... Still aren't comfortable with your programmatic knowledge. Here are some basics. MORE ... Are you familiar with SmartyAds, TubeMogul, Simpli.fi, MediaMath and PubMatic? You probably should at least know what these programmatic advertising platforms do. MORE

USER EXPERIENCE: In a marketing era of interruption and targeting, maybe the secret is to make the journey so great that conversion of those interested is high enough to nullify the need to annoy. MORE ... Technology leaders in marketing already see this as a growth area. MORE ... The near future user experience issues won't include only the visual. MORE

AGRICULTURAL NEWS WEB SITES: According to SEM Rush (click for chart), Farm Progress, Agriculture.com and AgWeb are in a tight race for unique visitor supremacy in the competitive set. In this third-party measure, AgWeb had 546,200, Agriculture.com had 535,500 and Farm Progress had 444,300 in July 2019. Interestingly, the audience overlap is quite low among those sites, below 20 percent in most cases. MORE

MOBILE: Three of the four top apps on smartphones are used to interact with others. The phone isn't where engagement dies. MORE

EMAIL MARKETING: Be relevant, target appropriately, design to be a quick read on all screens and coordinate with other marketing. MORE

CONTENT MARKETING: Always be selling the value of content internally because it isn't inherently understood. And be really good at something rather than decent at a lot of things. MORE ... Take advantage of your opportunity to engage with National Batman Day. It's Sept. 21. MORE

VIDEO: YouTube's ad targeting support recently shifted away from helping reach niche recipients. There are ways to work around it to get closer, but substantial changes like this are annoying. MORE ... YouTube is also pulling away from exact follower counts. MORE ... YouTube removed more than 100,000 videos for violating hate speech regulations. MORE ... Long intros, irrelevant or generic content and sticking only with long-form are some of the mistakes you can make with video marketing. MORE ... Forty percent of the daily video watching is taking place online. MORE ... Ninety percent of video marketers have landed a new customer by using a social media video campaign. MORE

AUDIO: Spotify is out front because it does the basics of digital marketing well -- audience targeting and ad options. MORE

SEARCH: The experts agree that the content of a given page is the leading factor in Google search results. There are many other important factors though. See the chart below. MORE

VOICE ASSISTANTS: It should tell you how far voice has come when an article laying the digital groundwork includes voice as a core starting block of digital marketing. MORE ... Apple apologized for listening. MORE ... Should you even start in voice marketing? Probably. But, here are some things to consider. MORE ... China-focused Baidu became the leading seller of voice assistant devices. MORE ... LG might be poised to enter the market as soon as today. MORE

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Don't let AI make you feel stupid. Here is a primer that explains the key aspects. MORE ... Here are some details on eight AI software platforms. Interesting to see capabilities at the moment. MORE ... Where does machine-learning work the best? Here are a few examples. MORE ... When AI systems can talk to each other, that's when AI takes off .. and eventually the Terminator appears. MORE ... Too over the top? Well, imagine a scenario where AI-enhanced voice has your boss telling you to send thousands of dollars to an account. Would you know not to? MORE

CHATBOTS: Chatbots from a customer service standpoint often make sense. Here is a basic primer on when and how to deploy them. MORE

VIRTUAL REALITY: VR shopping used to be futuristic. Now, it's completely plausible and might be the next big thing in retail. MORE

PRIVACY/REGULATIONS: TCF 2.0 is something you should at least understand. An industry-led set of regulations has always been preferred. It may be too late to stave off federal and state regulations, but it's certainly interesting. MORE ... States are looking at Google with anti-trust on their minds. MORE ... The MRC has set some very basic guidelines for TV, OTT, desktop and mobile, including 2 seconds of full view for it to be an impression, audio setting reporting and audience/traffic monitoring. MORE ... The California regulations are still in flux, hopefully. MORE

THE BEST FROM THE DIGITAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT:

For more details on any of the topics covered here, contact Rooster’s Chief Digital Officer James Arnold:

Cell: (913) 291-6996

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james.arnold@roosterstrategy.com

The goal of the Rooster Strategic Solutions Digital Intelligence Report is to provide intelligence around the digital product landscape. What is coming next. How to use what you already have. Who might be doing it right.