Brand Marketing

The use of ads on YouTube has always been somewhat of a love/hate relationship. They are necessary, but viewers are often frustrated by how ads are managed. Waiting those five seconds before skipping an ad can feel like an eternity. YouTube hope they have resolved that issue with ‘cards’ that add rich annotations to videos.

Cards are available for merchandise, fundraising, video playlists, associated websites and fan funding. This innovation could herald a new era with how YouTube us able to reach and inform viewers with rich annotated video. For corporate marketers, this move may further enhance video’s lead, as the most shared content across the social media space.

The latest report from Leadtail Social in conjunction with Neustar reveals that CMOs are shifting their use of social media. Location-based engagement has diminished in favour of sharable content especially on LinkedIn that sees a massive 200% increase over the past two years. In addition, CMOs are continuing their love affair with visual content, and CMOs are becoming much more discerning with the sources of content they use. But the most promising revelation of this report is that CMOs are finally moving away from simply building large numbers of followers on their social media channels, to developing meaningful content.

Two of today's biggest marketing buzzwords are social media and programmatic. Both have forever changed the brand-consumer conversation and both continue to increase their impact as time goes on. Both are powerful separately, but when you combine social media and programmatic, marketers can achieve unthought of results. The latest infographic from Yieldr highlights five of the biggest social media networks and the benefits of combining them with a programmatic platform.

According to new research from Adyoulike, almost six out of ten (57%) Internet users under the age of 34 will visit online content that appeals to them even if that content has been obviously paid for or sponsored. This figure rises to 63% among those aged 18-24. Written feature articles are the type of paid-for online content most people prefer to consume (32% of users), followed by list-based articles (24%) and videos (17%). Although sponsored social media posts form a key part of many brands’ content strategies, only 13% of Brits prefer them.

A new infographic and curated data from TrueShip reveals that 2015 will be the year that social shopping really enters the mainstream. Mobile of course will gain massive pace with over 100 million mobile shoppers in the U.S., according to Statistica. The think tank has projected that this number will increase by over 49%, to about 150 million by the year 2018. In 2014, this mobile shopping demographic spent an estimated $17 billion online, telling of how powerful the buying power of mobile users is.

Social Recommendations Index