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Airstream might just have the most iconic and recognizable campers around. So when it came to visualizing their marketing technology stacks, the company didn’t stray far from the campgrounds.

The company partnered with marketing agency Element Three to develop a slide that ultimately earned them one of five Stackie Awards at MarTech earlier this month through a visualization that demonstrated the many technologies at work in their martech stack, while playing on the theme of nature and escaping to the great outdoors.

But it wasn’t all for the prize. Digital marketing director Dustin Clark said that during the teams’ creative processes and analysis of the stacks, they recognized common goals — and opportunities — across marketing operations teams.

Here are the takeaways they gleaned.

Better data

The persistent need to pull together disparate data remains a pain point for many organizations. “I’m happy to see clients, and others, adopt connectors — systems to move data from one system or another to consolidate sources to get better data,” said Clark. “It’s also nice to see a series of project management software included since the operations side of marketing doesn’t get much love.”

‘Single source of truth’

According to Clark, integrating technologies and creating a reliable source of data continues to challenge marketers. As organizations continue to add technology, it becomes increasingly difficult to create a method for sharing data in a scalable, digestible way. “The biggest opportunity we continue to see is connecting technologies. As communications continue to evolve — ad platforms, chatbots, automation, etc. — the need to work towards one ‘single source of truth’ continues to get trickier, but it’s a fun challenge to solve.”

Analytics are key

“Investing in and setting up analytics is so often overlooked, and yet always pays for itself in the long run, especially in marketing operations. Being able to track and report on the results of marketing efforts quickly is crucial to getting buy-in on projects and budget approvals. You’re not going to get those numbers easily if the state of your web analytics is a mess,” Clark added.

Bring it all together

For digital marketers striving to provide the ‘single source of truth,’ Clark said that integrating data sources properly is crucial to success. “Start with cleaning up your analytics and implementing those technology connectors,” said Clark. “This will help stakeholders see the value of their efforts.”

The Stackie Awards were announced at the MarTech West in San Jose on April 3, 2019. The event also raised $4,800 for Girls Who Code, a nonprofit organization supporting women in the field of computer science. This year’s other winners include ESRI, Juniper Networks, Paychex and Sargento.

This story first appeared on MarTech Today. For more on marketing technology, click here.

https://martechtoday.com/what-stackie-winner-airstream-learned-from-communing-with-its-stack-232768

About The Author

Jennifer Videtta serves as Third Door Media’s Senior Editor, covering topics from email marketing, analytics and marketing automation to project management. With over a decade of digital marketing experience, she has held in-house management positions overseeing digital marketing operations, and agency roles, advising enterprise marketers on maximizing their martech capabilities. Jennifer formerly organized the Inbound Marketing Summit and holds a certificate in Digital Marketing Analytics from MIT Sloan School of Management.

Today we are rolling out support in Google Search’s AMP web results (also known as “blue links”) to link to signed exchanges, an emerging new feature of the web enabled by the IETF web packaging specification. Signed exchanges enable displaying the publisher’s domain when content is instantly loaded via Google Search. This is available in browsers that support the necessary web platform feature—as of the time of writing, Google Chrome—and availability will expand to include other browsers as they gain support (e.g. the upcoming version of Microsoft Edge).

Background on AMP’s instant loading

One of AMP’s biggest user benefits has been the unique ability to instantly load AMP web pages that users click on in Google Search. Near-instant loading works by requesting content ahead of time, balancing the likelihood of a user clicking on a result with device and network constraints–and doing it in a privacy-sensitive way.

We believe that privacy-preserving instant loading web content is a transformative user experience, but in order to accomplish this, we had to make trade-offs; namely, the URLs displayed in browser address bars begin with google.com/amp, as a consequence of being shown in the Google AMP Viewer, rather than display the domain of the publisher. We heard both user and publisher feedback over this, and last year we identified a web platform innovation that provides a solution that shows the content’s original URL while still retaining AMP’s instant loading.

Introducing signed exchanges

A signed exchange is a file format, defined in the web packaging specification, that allows the browser to trust a document as if it belongs to your origin. This allows you to use first-party cookies and storage to customize content and simplify analytics integration. Your page appears under your URL instead of the google.com/amp URL.

Google Search links to signed exchanges when the publisher, browser, and the Search experience context all support it. As a publisher, you will need to publish both the signed exchange version of the content in addition to the non-signed exchange version. Learn more about how Google Search supports signed exchange.

Getting started with signed exchanges

Many publishers have already begun to publish signed exchanges since the developer preview opened up last fall. To implement signed exchanges in your own serving infrastructure, follow the guide “Serve AMP using Signed Exchanges” available at amp.dev.

If you use a CDN provider, ask them if they can provide AMP signed exchanges. Cloudflare has recently announced that it is offering signed exchanges to all of its customers free of charge.

Check out our resources like the webmaster community or get in touch with members of the AMP Project with any questions. You can also provide feedback on the signed exchange specification.

Posted by Devin Mullins and Greg Rogers

Instagram is a phenomenon of our time. The photo-sharing app has 7.7 billion users by now (and counting).

One billion people use Instagram every month and 500 million use the platform every day. Its engagement is also 10 times higher than that of Facebook, 54 times higher than Pinterest’s, and 84 times higher than Twitter’s.

All kinds of businesses ranging from your teen neighbor making earrings to huge corporations and media are on Instagram. And for a good reason — 80% of Instagram accounts follow at least one business.

[Screenshot taken from the Instagram Business homepage]

At times when Facebook is becoming more and more Messenger-based and Twitter revolves around politics and social issues, Instagram stands to be the platform for friends, strangers, and brands alike.

It’s no surprise we’re so serious about Instagram marketing and the tools that help us with it.

Below is the list of such tools which covers everything from filters to analytics.

19 top Instagram marketing tools

1. Grum

Grum is a scheduling tool that lets you publish content (both photos and videos) on Instagram. You can publish from multiple accounts at the same time and tag the users. You can do that right from your desktop.

Price: Starts at $9.9/month. Offers a free trial for 3 days.

2. Awario

Awario is a social media monitoring tool that finds mentions of your brand (or any other keyword) across the web, news/blogs, and social media platforms, including Instagram. By analyzing mentions of your brand on the platform, it tells you who your brand advocates and who the industry influencers are, what the sentiment behind your brand (positive, negative, or neutral) is, as well as the languages and locations of your audience. It also analyzes the growth and reach of your mentions, and tells you how you compare to your competitors.

Price: Starts at $29/month. Offers a free trial for 14 days.

3. Buffer

Buffer is another scheduling tool. However, it includes Instagram among other social networks rather than focusing on Instagram alone. With Buffer, you can schedule content to be published across Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. You can publish the same or different messages across different platforms. You can also review how your posts are performing in terms of engagement, impressions, and clicks.

The tool can be used by up to 25 team members, and you can assign them the appropriate access levels.

Price: Starts at $15/month. Offers free 7-day or 14-day trials depending on the plan.

4. Hashtags for likes

Hashtags for likes is a simple tool that suggests you the most trending relevant hashtags. Knowing the most popular hashtags in real time helps brands keep up with trends, bandwagon on the news, and ultimately grow followers.

Price: $9.99/month.

5. Iconosquare

Iconosquare is a social media analytics tool that works for Instagram and Facebook. It shows you the metrics on content performance and engagement as well as on your followers. You’ll discover the best times to post and understand your followers better. The tool also analyzes Instagram Stories.

Besides analytics, you can schedule posts, monitor tags and comments about your brand.

Price: Starts at $39/month. A free 14-day trial is available.

6. Canva

Canva is a design tool that is a great fit for marketers and companies that don’t have an in-house designer. Among other things, Canva helps create perfect Instagram stories. Stylish templates and easy design tools ensure that your Story stands out, which, again, isn’t easy in the world of Instagram.

Price: Free

7. Shortstack

Shortstack is a tool to run Instagram contests. Contests are huge on this platform, they cause loads of buzz, increase brand awareness, and attract new followers. They are a practice loved by marketers.

ShortStack gathers all user-generated content, such as images that have been posted on your content hashtag, and displays them. It also keeps track of your campaign’s performance, showing your traffic, engagement, and other valuable data.

Price: Free up to 100 entries. Paid plans start at $29/month.

8. Soldsie

Soldsie is a handy tool that helps you to sell on Instagram and Facebook using comments. All you have to do is upload a product picture with relevant product information. Users who are registered with Soldsie can simply comment on the photo, and Soldsie will turn that into a transaction.

More expensive Soldsie plans are also integrated with Shopify.

Price: Starts at $49/monthly and 5.9% transaction fee.

9. Social Rank

Social Rank is a tool that identifies and analyzes your audience. You can identify influencers among your followers, see who engages with your brand and with what frequency. You can sort your followers in lists that are easy to work with (for example: most valuable, most engaged, and others).

You can also filter your audience by bio keyword, word/hashtag, and geographic location.

Price: Available on request.

10. Plann

Plann is an Instagram social media management tool. It allows you to design, edit, schedule, and analyze your posts. For example, you can edit the Instagram grid to look just as you wish. You can rearrange, organize, crop, and schedule your Instagram Stories. All exciting stats, from best times to post and best-performing hashtags to your best-performing color schemes are available. And you can also collaborate with other marketers to run your Instagram account together.

Price: Free, paid plans start from $6/month.

11. Social Insights

Social Insights is another platform that offers many important Instagram marketing features, such as scheduling and posting from your computer, identifying and organizing your followers, and analyzing followers’ growth, interactions, and engagement. You can add other team members without sharing your Instagram login.

Price: Starts at $29/month. A free 14-day trial is available.

12. Instagram Ads by Mailchimp

If you’re already using MailChimp, its Instagram Ads feature might come in handy. The tool lets you use MailChimp contact lists to create Instagram campaigns. The whole process (creating, buying, and tracking results of your ads) is, therefore, in the familiar place and powered by data.

Price: No extra fees if you’re using MailChimp.

13. Unfold – Story Creator

Unfold – Story Creator is an iOS app that makes lifestyle, fashion, and travel content more professional-looking. The app offers stylish templates, advanced fonts and text tools, and exports your stories in high resolution so that you can share them to other platforms besides Instagram.

Price: Free

14. Picodash

Picodash is an Instagram tool that finds target audiences and influencers on the platform. It lets you export your and your competitors’ Instagram followers and following lists, users that have used a specific hashtag, posted at a specific location or venue, commented or liked a specific post, as well as tagged users. You can also download any account stories or highlighted stories.

Price: Starts from $10 for a Followers/Hashtag Posts export. You can also request a sample of 100 for free before you order a full export report.

15. Wyng

Wyng is an enterprise-level platform that finds user-generated content with a specific mention or hashtag, exports it, and gets the rights to this content. This is very helpful for running contests. Instagram is, however, a tiny fraction of what the tool covers.

Price: Available on request. A free 14-day trial is available.

16. Afterlight

Afterlight is the iOS/Android image editing app that makes your content look more professional and refined. It offers plenty of unique filters, natural effects, and frames.

Price: $2.99

17. Sendible

Sendible is a popular social media management platform that lets you run accounts on different social media platforms, including Instagram. It’s integrated with some other tools that are useful for Instagram, such as Canva. The tool does scheduling, monitors mentions, and tracks the performance of your Instagram posts. You can also team up with other marketers and work together on your Instagram marketing (and other) goals.

Price: Starts at $29/month. A free 14-day trial is available.

18. Olapic

Olapic is an advanced visual commerce platform. It collects user-generated video content in real time, publishes it to your social media channels (including Instagram) makes it shoppable, measures and predicts which content will perform best. It goes far beyond Instagram and even social media. What is more, it obtains rights for the content for you so that you’re able to use it across your advertising, email, and offline channels.

Price: Available on request.

19. Pablo

Pablo (made by Buffer) is a platform that lets you easily create beautiful images for your Instagram marketing purposes. You can choose photos from Pablo’s own library which includes more than 500,000 images, add text (25+ stylish fonts are available) and format. The resizing option for various social platforms, including Instagram, will ensure your image fits perfectly.

Price: Free

Conclusion

As you can see, there’re plenty of tools to choose from. Check them out, spot the ones that you need, and take your Instagram marketing to a whole new level.

Aleh is the Founder and CMO at SEO PowerSuite and Awario. He can be found on Twitter at .

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Artist Donald Glover (aka Childish Gambino) used iOS Airdrop at Coachella to surprise random festival-goers with a photo of shoes he created in collaboration with Adidas. Those who accepted the Airdrop received a free pair of the sneakers – with terms and conditions, of course.

The lucky recipients had to sign a contract stating they would wear the shoes, attend the show, and keep the shoes on all weekend. Experiential marketing in action.

childish gambino airdropped a picture at coachella of his adidas collab and everyone who accepted got a pair of his unreleased shoes… pic.twitter.com/JLKsmNb4LM

— jay ➐ (@THEGOODSlDE) April 12, 2019

Why we should care

Glover’s Airdrop play comes at a time when experiential marketing is making waves. From Chanel’s Le Rouge Pop-Up to Refinery29’s 29Rooms funhouse, brands are finding ways to invite customers into their story.

But the creative experiences are only part of the strategy. In Adidas’ case, the brand leveraged Glover’s celebrity to influence an audience that was already tuned in (literally). The Airdrop tactic was simply an unexpected and delightful conduit bringing fans to the product.

Before launching an experiential strategy, we should consider what resources are appropriate and available to rally awareness and engagement. Because if there’s anything we’ve learned about tangible experiences, it’s that delivery and perception can be everything.

About The Author

Taylor Peterson is Third Door Media’s Deputy Editor, managing industry-leading coverage that informs and inspires marketers. Based in New York, Taylor brings marketing expertise grounded in creative production and agency advertising for global brands. Taylor’s editorial focus blends digital marketing and creative strategy with topics like campaign management, emerging formats, and display advertising.

Search queries for your brand name, called “brand searches,” are among the most important keywords in a keyword portfolio. Even so, marketers are not often paying as much attention to these types of queries as they should.

While juicy high-volume non-branded queries are exciting, providing your audience and customers with helpful brand information it is an equally thrilling prospect. The truth is that users for many brands, big and small, are commonly underserved by branded search results they find.

In this post, we’ll show you exactly how to conduct a branded search audit, identify failing results, and implement improvements. This audit is one that we perform for our clients at Stella Rising. Now you can do the same for your clients or website.

The first part of the audit is about setting the stage. Do you know what ratio of your traffic is the result of non-brand queries vs. brand queries? You should. In this section of the audit, you’ll set the stage to discuss the importance of what you identify.

Why are branded queries so important?

Branded queries are among the most important keywords you can optimize as they represent a brand-aware audience that is more likely to convert. In fact, many of the people searching for your brand are already customers looking for information or looking to purchase again.

It’s easy (generally)

Unlike most things in SEO, Google wants you to rank well for your own brand terms. Whenever we see branded searches that are failing users, it’s usually easy to fix. Often, it’s as simple as creating a new page or changing a meta tag. Other times it can be more challenging, such as when brands have significant PR and/or brand reputation issues. That said, in most cases, branded search queries are among the easiest to rank for. Don’t overlook them.

Correlation to rankings and personalization

While the search volume of a domain name is not a confirmed ranking factor, Google does hold a patent that may indicate the more searches a brand receives, the more likely that brand is to to be seen as high quality by Google. This, in turn, may help them to rank for associated non-brand terms. What does that mean? Essentially, if tens of thousands of people search your brand name + couch, you may be more likely to rank for “sofas.” A number of 2014 Wayfair commercials brilliantly capitalized on this opportunity. The commercials literally told people to Google “Wayfair my sofa” or “Wayfair my kitchen,” thus tying signals around their entity to other non-brand entities.

How Wayfair brilliantly linked its advertising with its branded search terms

Branded searches can also impact autocomplete which in turn can impact more branded searches, feeding into the connection described above. When users click one of these autocompleted search suggestions, they execute a “branded search,” which then signals to Google that the entities are related. For example, “Amazon, Ralph Lauren or Macy’s” with “Men’s shirts”.

Branded search audit part one: Setting the stage

In part one of this audit, you will provide branded search landscape insights. Like any good show, you need to set the stage for the information you are about to present. This will help to win buy-in, prioritize your efforts, and keep you strategically on track.

What is your ratio of branded search?

For this part, you’ll need to head to the Google Search Console and open up your performance report for the last three months. Start by setting up a filter for your brand name. If you have a brand name that people commonly misspell, then you will want to take that into account.*

Click the “+ New” button and then click “Query.” Filter by “Queries Containing” and not “Query is Exactly.”

*Advanced Tip: The above instructions only account for your brand name, not product names that are proprietary to your brand. Consider using the API to pull down your GSC report and do filtering for those as well.

You’ll then see the total number of branded clicks and impressions your site receives.

Now change your filter to “Queries not containing,” this will give you roughly the number of non-branded clicks the website has received from Google search.

Take this data and bring it into Excel. From there, create a pie chart to visually demonstrate the ratio of branded to non-branded clicks the website receives.

What are the top branded queries driving traffic?

The next and perhaps one of the most critical questions for this analysis is, “What are the top branded queries?” Understanding this is important because the next step in this audit is to manually search each of the top ten (or more) queries. Then you will understand which queries will better serve users.

While this analysis is simple, we found that creating a simple visual with the data makes for a better story in your presentation. To do this, download the data by clicking the down arrow at the top of the queries table.

Once you have the data in Excel, you can create a cool visual using the 2D bar chart graph.

What are the top pages receiving branded clicks?

Similar to the above analysis, you will need to download the top pages from the “pages” tab in your performance report.

Where do branded searches come from?

For some brands, it is worth considering where branded searches come from geographically. To find this information, set your filter to include brand queries and then click the “countries” tab in the Google Search Console.

Now we could just put that image into a report, but what fun would that be? Instead, download the data and bring it into Excel to create a visual.

You can do this a number of ways, but we recommend either using a map or a tree-map which generates a cool way of looking at the data. A pie chart would do but is not as visually appealing. Open Excel and highlight the data you downloaded. Click “Insert”, then click either on “Maps” or the second box for a treemap.

Tree-map visualization of country click data

How has branded search trended over time?

The last and perhaps the most essential question outside of which queries get clicks is, “how has branded search trended over time?” This trend is a hugely important question for any brand that has or is currently investing in brand building efforts, media, PR, or even non-branded paid search campaigns.

During this section of the audit, we have seen brands that previously invested millions in traditional print flatten out for years. Alternatively, we’ve also seen DTC brand’s growth hit a wall. Knowing where brand interest stands is a data point that is vital to all brands and their performance marketing strategies. Whether you are conducting a branded search audit or not, tracking the branded search volume is something that should be on the KPI list for marketers across a multitude of disciplines.

Branded search audit part two: Identifying issues in branded search

Do you have any brand image issues?

Sorry, no SEO magic here. If your brand, founder or employee made headlines (and not the good ones you send to mom) your only strategy is to do your best to rectify the situation.

Take, for example, a brand we came across which was at one point dealing with first page Google results full of nasty headlines. The headings covered how the center had allegedly abandoned more than 40 research animals on an island.

When I first heard this story and considered the best plan forward I thought, “Can they just decide not to abandon the animals and find them homes?”

In fact, that’s exactly what they did. As a result, the negative stories were replaced over time with positive ones about how the center reached an agreement to find a sanctuary for the animals. The first page of results for their brand name is now squeaky clean. The moral of this story is, never abandon animals on an island.

But, if you do, and get dragged through the mud for it, no amount of SEO will save you. Are there any abandoned research animals in your organization? If so, get them off the island.

In other less metaphorical terms, part of auditing brand search is brand reputation.

As we all now know, “E-A-T” and reputation are hugely important to Google. Deal with business practice issues head-on and find the best resolution possible. John Mueller has reminded us that Google has a really good memory and is not apt to forget anything about your brand history. Stains on your brand reputation can really take a toll and have lasting power. The best offense here is a good defense.

Searching the top ten queries

Now for the part of the audit where we find the broken stuff.

Take your list of top terms and manually execute the search in a private browsing window for each term. Record your results and a screenshot of the SERP.

What are we looking for?

• The number of positions on the page we own – With branded searches for things like “brand name backpacks,” you can own 15+ of the top positions.
• Others owning our conversation – Look for other brands ranking for your branded terms. Are they authorized to sell or talk about your products? Is the information they provide correct or accurate? Could a better job be done?
• Misalignment of the query and title/meta – Does your title tag and meta description clearly speak to the query searched and align to the searcher’s intent? If not, make some changes to bring this into alignment. For example, if your shipping info is on a page labeled “FAQ” that’s unclear for users.
• Cross-channel insights – Are all of your social properties listed on the first page where appropriate? Are others bidding on brand terms where you are not? Look for cross-channel synergies that could be leveraged for more aggregate traffic.
• Broken pages – For big and small brands we have found soft “404” messages, outdated or broken pages ranking for highly searched branded terms. Click around the top ten and make sure everything is working as expected.
• Out of stock products – Sometimes the products that rank for branded searches on ecommerce sites are out of stock. Make sure you have a protocol in place for managing inventory so that searchers are best served by the landing page.

Searching other navigational queries

Other areas to check out are navigational or known brand queries that help users navigate and interact with your brand. For example:

• Brand Name Opening Hours
• Brand Name Location
• Brand Name Address
• Brand Name Telephone Number
• Brand Name Customer Service
• Brand Name FAQ
• Brand Name Return Policy
• Brand Name Shipping
• Brand Name Refund Policy
• Brand Name Size Chart/Guide
• Brand Name Sale

Manually execute a search in a private browsing window for these terms. You’re looking for title tags and meta descriptions that do not speak to the query, missing pages where content would be better-served broken-out, and other websites owing the conversation around your terms. In some of our audits, we have seen third-party sellers ranking on position one for things like “brand name return policy”.

Furthermore, the information presented was not even correct. When it came to our site, we were not making that information easy to find, and as such, we got beat out. Simple adjustments to meta information and where content lived helped to improve our visibility and win back the featured snippet.

Track and measure

As with any good SEO effort, you should carefully track and measure the success of your recommendations. Consider setting up a monthly tracking sheet for your branded search volume. Also, consider tracking some of the branded queries identified as “needing work” in your rank tracker.

Conclusion

The branded search audit is a deliverable which does not take a great deal of time but can result in tremendous impact for your brand or client. By focusing on branded queries first, you are serving those most likely to convert on your site while simultaneously addressing your lowest hanging fruit.

Have questions about conducting your own audit? Let us know in the comments section below.

John Morabito is the Director of SEO at Women’s Marketing / Flying Point Digital. He can be found on Twitter .

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Consumers spend an overwhelming majority of their mobile internet time within apps. Recognizing this trend, the world’s biggest brands have developed apps as tools for providing services (like checking a bank balance) or making a purchase (through an e-commerce store). But many of these apps have untapped potential. Beyond basic transactions, branded apps can be used as powerful video delivery mechanisms that increase engagement and brand loyalty.

Especially as email open rates decline, apps can serve as a new way to connect with consumers with greater efficiency. Customers who have taken the time to download a brand’s app onto their device are some of the most loyal customers a brand has. This advocacy is ripe for brands to mine.

When a brand has an app and separately has video content, produced either for TV spots, social media or their website, there’s no reason these ingredients can’t be combined. The result is a powerful in-app content marketing hub that keeps the best customers engaged and keeps the brand top-of-mind. Some companies, like Nike and Red Bull, are already doing this well. To effectively market in a mobile world, brands need to think of their apps as mobile video mailboxes.

The fight for user attention

To better understand the underutilized value of branded apps, it helps first to recognize just how hard it is to reach consumers through more traditional TV and video channels. TV still comes first for so many marketers, and they invest their budget in a series of spots that will run for 30 or 60 seconds on the air. But with cord-cutting on the rise, it’s harder and harder to achieve the level of penetration TV advertisers achieved in the past. While audiences have switched to digital video, reaching them isn’t necessarily easier in that channel: 65% of consumers skip pre-roll video ads when given the option. With mobile viewership on the rise, brands must find new ways to keep their loyal customers truly engaged.

Maximizing efficiency

The efficiency imperative is front and center for most brands, and leveraging apps as another way to promote already-created video content delivers on that. By using their apps, marketers don’t have to buy media to retarget the consumers who love their brand. Instead, they can recycle content that they already have and hand it directly to the consumers who will be most receptive to its messaging.

The biggest obstacle is that the app developers and media teams are very likely working toward separate goals, and in many organizations, they may not be communicating regularly if they communicate at all. But investing time into connecting these disparate departments can yield great results for the company as a whole.

Constructing a content hub

Apps are purpose built. Airline apps are for purchasing tickets and checking in. Consumers download the AmEx app to access their credit card accounts. If the app development team is focused solely on that goal, there’s no reason to include a video player within the app, and no reason to consider content. No one explicitly downloads a banking app because they want to watch a three-minute video on smart investing tactics. But that doesn’t mean that customers aren’t interested in such content. A recent study from Hubspot found that 68% of consumers say video is their favorite way to learn about new products and services. Brands with a narrow focus can easily miss opportunities to increase spend and grow brand loyalty.

Brand’s don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but they can add functionality to make their apps something better. Users already love the AmEx app – it has a 4.9-star rating in the Apple App Store, based on 910,000 ratings. What if the app included video to promote different rewards packages and destinations that are available to cardholders? Or videos about their card features, to inspire consumers to spend a bit more? Heck, it could even host a library of the brand’s famous Jerry Seinfeld TV ads from years past, which have tens of thousands of views online, thanks to user uploads.

Pushing these videos directly to a user’s device and sending them screen notifications to tell them there’s something new for them to watch in the app is an easy, effective and innovative way to engage users. They can now watch these short videos during downtime: on a commute, standing in line at the store, waiting at the doctor’s office and other moments when they’re looking for content to entertain them.

Brands that relied so heavily on TV advertising in the past are still learning how to market appropriately in a mobile world. The video they’re producing to recruit new customers can live in the branded apps, doing double duty to re-engage loyal customers. Rather than have app and ad teams live in silos, brands need to think about how they can best combine resources to efficiently and nimbly engage with consumers in the modern, mobile-first world.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Daniel Hurwitz boasts more than 20 years of experience in digital marketing/media, AdTech, EdTech and HealthTech and is well versed in technology solutions to support mobile and video. A start-up specialist, Hurwitz led Sales at Evergage, GoNoodle and MapMyFitness (acquired by Under Armour in 2013). His writing has been featured on publications including PhocusWire, Martech Advisor and SalesTechStar.

Two new specs aimed at addressing ad fraud and increasing transparency from the buy-side of the digital advertising ecosystem are out for public comment from the IAB Tech Lab: Sellers.json and the OpenRTB SupplyChain object.

The 30-day public comment period ends May 10.

What is OpenRTB SupplyChain object? The SupplyChain object will show buyers all the parties involved in selling or reselling a given bid request. It consists of a set of nodes, with each node representing an entity participating in the bid request sale. The complete chain of entities involved in (and paid for part of) the sale are then discoverable to the buyer.

“This information can be important to buyers for any number of reasons including transparency of the supply chain, ensuring that all intermediaries are entities that the buyer wants to transact with and that inventory is purchased as directly as possible,” per the spec.

It can be used with OpenRTB 2.5 and OpenRTB 3.0.

What is Sellers.json? It’s a file that allows ad buyers (DSPs) to see and verify the final seller of a given bid request — as long as the seller is ads.txt authorized. It’s like an inverse companion to Ads.txt, which publishers post to their domain to list authorized sellers of their inventory.

It also makes visible the identities of all intermediaries that participated in the sale of a bid request. It allows publisher name and domain attributes to be looked up and cached offline rather than supplied with every bid request. Each seller has a seller_id, which is the same ID that appears in an ads.txt file, SupplyChain.nodes and typically in the Publisher.id property of an OpenRTB request.

Ad systems place the sellers.json file on their root domain and any relevant subdomains. For example, http://indexexchange.com/sellers.json. The IAB Tech Lab advises “Every advertising system listed in an ads.txt file and any advertising system that is referencedfrom a SupplyChain object node should also publish a Sellers.json file” on their domains.

Why we should care. These two technical specifications build on the ads.txt imitative that launched two years ago, and apps-ads.txt for app developers, to help combat invalid traffic, ad fraud and counterfeit inventory on open exchanges. With the trio of specs, there are now tools for the sell-side (SSPs), the buy-side (DSPs) and intermediaries.

“Growth in the global digital advertising ecosystem requires trust, and sellers.json and the SupplyChain object provide essential visibility into the supply chain, enabling buyers to curate media sources,” said Dennis Buchheim, senior vice president and general manager, IAB Tech Lab. “Used together, these technologies help enable a more transparent, more efficient advertising environment. I encourage everyone to provide feedback to the Tech Lab, and adopt as soon as the specs are finalized.”

This story first appeared on MarTech Today. For more on marketing technology, click here.

About The Author

Ginny Marvin is Third Door Media’s Editor-in-Chief, managing day-to-day editorial operations across all of our publications. Ginny writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, she has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.

Zazzle Media has released their annual State of Content Marketing 2019 survey, which found that less than one in ten marketers (9%) will be focusing on Digital PR in 2019.

Despite this, over three quarters (76%) state that brand awareness is a key performance indicator for them.

Not only this, but 25% of content marketers will be ceasing to participate in offline PR activity as it has been perceived as an ineffective channel for them over the recent years.

It seems there is an apparent disconnect between marketers’ desired goals and the tactics they need to carry out to achieve these.

So why are marketers seemingly less concerned about off-page distribution, and why should you make a case for Digital PR to hold a key position in your marketing activities?

Brand awareness

Whilst the creation of written blog content will appeal to people on the site, we need a mechanism that is going to drive these people towards the site first.

Digital PR can help users find your site in a more organic way rather than in a targeted advertorial manner.

The survey found that a quarter of marketers want to target new audiences through content distribution, but without Digital PR this will prove to be a difficult task.

Brand protection

PR allows you to control narratives and get involved with industry conversations which you would otherwise be unable to participate in. The digital aspect also allows you to receive real-time coverage updates which mention your brand’s name and put out an immediate response in an attempt to stem or enhance any positive or negative feedback. Protecting your brand, especially in the SERPs, is a powerful tool for PRs.

Read next: Organic reputation management & brand protection

Link building

A major perk of creating Digital PR campaigns is that they usually come with linkable assets that have a chance of being cited within media coverage.

Link building is an activity which has a reputation of relying on black-hat tactics for success, paying for links, directories, and the others. Digital PR allows you to avoid all these techniques and the risks associated with them and build some legitimate links from high authority publications.

Read next: Five proven content formats to maximize link acquisition with digital PR.

Managing director of Zazzle Media, Simon Penson, commented on the statistics:

“Brand awareness has appeared as one of 2019’s core focuses when it comes to brands content marketing efforts. Whilst this can be achieved through a number of marketing techniques, Digital PR is one of the strongest means of getting your name out there to new audiences.

2019 is shaping up to be an exciting year for content marketing, and Digital PR could be the key to giving your brand new audiences and visibility.”

What do you think of these findings? Let us know your thoughts on the results in the comments.

Kirsty Daniel is a Digital Marketing Executive at Zazzle Media. She can be found on Twitter .

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Netflix will announce its Q1 ’19 earnings on Tuesday – when we’ll know for sure if its subscription price hike was a good business move in the short term. Meanwhile, Disney announced Disney+, its new streaming service platform, will only cost $6.99/month and its stock shot up over 11 percent overnight.

This further complicates the pricing model debate for streaming services as Disney overshadows Apple, who had dominated the tech news cycle for weeks after announcing its competing OTT streaming services to Netflix, Amazon and Hulu, called AppleTV+. With big names like Steven Speilberg and Oprah in attendance helping to buttress Apple’s credibility in the increasingly crowded OTT market, Apple sent a clear message that they, in the words of one executive, would “define the commitment to storytelling, on every screen in your life.” While it may have been tempting to be distracted by the cavalcade of celebrities that took to the stage inside Steve Jobs Theatre, Apple’s silence on one topic became deafening on the Twittersphere as everyone began to ask the core underlying question left unanswered: How much will this cost? Disney shared, why can’t you?

CNBC media reporter Alex Sherman, who attended the unveiling in person, tweeted “we got a half hour of actors talking about their shows without clips and zero details on Apple original content pricing or if channels services will be bundled for a discount. The general mood here is shock and mild annoyance among the people sitting around me.” Vox’s critic at large Todd VanDerWerff opined “Apple’s new streaming service is still mostly defined by what we don’t know.”

He’s right. The company chose to avoid addressing any specifics around pricing or the potential savings users could capture by bundling with other Apple services. What we do know is that Apple TV+ will be a subscription service free of advertising. This announcement kicked off an interesting debate about which revenue model – ad-supported or subscription – is most likely to attract large scale consumer audiences.

Apple and now Disney’s decision to forgo ads stands in stark contrast to recent reports from Google-owned YouTube, who instead is purported to be looking into expanding its ad-supported content while potentially deemphasizing subscription-based models as well as Viacom owned PlutoTV which is doubling down on its completely free ad-supported model. Google denies it will abandon its subscription model entirely as others later reported, but it is clear that the world’s largest advertising company sees significant opportunity in offering premium content for free in an ad-supported environment.

As the debate unfolds over ad-supported models vs. subscription-based revenue streams, the real question marketers and content platforms need to be asking is: “What do consumers want?” The answer is both.

To start, it’s important to level set by clarifying that OTT is now mainstream, and this is not a niche consumer audience. In partnership with the Harris Poll, OpenX conducted a nationwide study of OTT users released this week which found that the majority of US consumers now stream at least one OTT service, with most streamers subscribing to an average of three platforms. Within this growing group of streamers, there are very diverse opinions about preferred billing models that signal a broad opportunity for platforms to be creative with how they monetize their content.

The study found a nearly even split among those who want to pay a subscription fee in exchange for zero ads with a slight majority opting for some form of advertising to reduce or eliminate subscription fees. Forty-six percent of consumers prefer a service that costs $10/month with no ads. Interestingly, the survey also found that consumers would be willing to pay as much as $24/month for one primary subscription – nearly twice Netflix’s adjusted monthly rate of its most popular plan now $13/month (up from $12/month), showing there is clear upward pricing mobility for an ultra-premium provider in the subscription market. I expect the earnings call on Tuesday to report no significant hurt in sales because of this increase.

That said, there is a potentially missed opportunity by streaming providers, including Netflix and Apple, to be releasing a tiered pricing model that includes ad-supported, discounted and free subscription models.

Ofthe 2,002 U.S. consumers who answered The Harris Poll survey OpenX commissioned, 54 percent would opt for an ad-supported model; 29 percent of which prefer a service that costs around $5/month with 2-3 minutes of ads per hour, while the other 25 percent prefer a free service with up to 10 minutes of ads per hour. The clear message here is that there is room for multiple models, and a “one-size-fits-all approach” (or singular billing models) will likely be replaced by a menu of options tailored to consumer preferences. One guide to follow comes again from the nationwide survey of OTT users that uncovered the sweet spot of content and cost — what I would call the 15/100 rule of video. Consumers watch around 15 channels of cable TV today and if price weren’t an issue, they would be open to watching 15 different OTT services. For cost, whether it is OTT or cable/satellite, viewers are comfortable spending about $100/month to have access to the content they want to watch.

Consumers don’t want an unlimited number of choices and they don’t want to pay for channels they don’t watch. Just as demand for a variety of OTT providers increases, so too will the diversity of revenue models. Less than five percent of all television advertising dollars flow to OTT channels today. As the eyeballs continue to migrate to streaming platforms, OTT advertising dollars will quickly follow – and they are projected to outstrip the overall growth of all advertising by five times in 2019. Investments in content alone will not determine the winners from the losers in the OTT race. Whichever platforms get the pricing formula, content portfolio and user experience right will ultimately establish market leadership in the rapidly growing OTT market.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Dallas Lawrence is currently the chief communications and brand officer at OpenX, the largest independent advertising exchange. Prior to joining OpenX, Dallas Lawrence served as the chief communications officer for Rubicon Project, led global communications and government affairs for Mattel and served as the chief global digital strategist for Burson-Marsteller. During more than a decade in Washington, DC, Dallas served as a press secretary on Capitol Hill prior to joining President Bush’s communications team, leading outreach efforts for the President’s signature domestic policy initiative No Child Left Behind. Dallas would later deploy to Baghdad, Iraq, on behalf of the White House to serve as a spokesperson for the Coalition. Upon returning from Baghdad, Dallas joined the communications team of Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld where he served as the Pentagon’s director of public liaison for both Rumsfeld and his predecessor Secretary Gates. He has been named both the “Crisis Manager of the Year” by PR News and “Social Media Professional of the Year.” In 2013, PR Week named him one of the 40 most influential leaders in PR. Dallas was previously a commissioned officer in the United States Navy and earned a BA in political science from the University of California at Berkeley and an MA in government from The Johns Hopkins University.