This Week in Content Marketing: This is the Year Agencies Buy Media Companies. In this broken-pipe episode of This Old Marketing, Robert and I talk about Medium’s latest pivot, while AOL thinks it’s discovered a better way to serve up advertising. In addition, Gary V leads the way for 2017 to be the year agencies started buying media companies. This week’s TOM example: AARP. One of the new ad units, for example, doles out free Verizon data in exchange for clicking on a mobile ad to download a coupon.” AOL thinks that creating better, less-intrusive ads will lead to higher engagement. Robert talks about how he loves the idea of taking content that already provided value and setting it up to bring in additional revenue. Whether you are just getting started with content marketing or are looking to take your expertise to the next level, CMI’s portfolio of events has you covered. 3.Rants and raves (40:44) Robert’s rave 1: Though Robert gives it a rave, it pains him a little bit to laud Tom Brady’s new product line at Under Armour – sleepwear with technology to help athletes recover faster. We know that’s the challenge of programmatic advertising – brands buy ads through a program without knowing which sites will publish them. Game Informer, a print magazine from GameStop, is also on the top 10 list.
PNR: This Old Marketing with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose can be found on both iTunes and Stitcher.
In this broken-pipe episode of This Old Marketing, Robert and I talk about Medium’s latest pivot, while AOL thinks it’s discovered a better way to serve up advertising. In addition, Gary V leads the way for 2017 to be the year agencies started buying media companies. Rants and raves include Tom Brady and long-form content. This week’s TOM example: AARP.
This week’s show
(Recorded live on Jan. 9, 2017; Length: 01:04:49)
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1. Content marketing in the news
- Renewing Medium’s focus (6:52): Ev Williams, CEO of Medium, wrote about the company’s decision to reduce its team by one-third and to pivot Medium’s business model to more directly drive its original mission: “We set out to build a better publishing platform – one that allowed anyone to offer their stories and ideas to the world and that helped the great ones rise to the top.
Medium found that it can’t get to that mission by simply tweaking the publishing model that relies on advertising. As I said in an earlier episode, Medium’s business model is right in front of them – paid versus free subscription – like WordPress. To us that’s the clearest path to profitability, but we’re not sure that’s where they intend to go.
- Gary Vaynerchuk acquires women’s publisher PureWow (17:20): The new year started with an agency acquisition of a lifestyle digital media company. As The Wall Street Journal reports, Gary Vaynerchuk, who owns the agency VaynerMedia, is creating a sister company, The Gallery, which is to be the home for PureWow as well as possible future niche media acquisitions. Neither Robert nor I saw this move as surprising. Robert calls it a “brilliant move” to make VaynerMedia an integrated platform that is building the media part last instead of first. We both think the M&A environment will get crazy this year.
- AOL hopes these two new ad formats will thwart ad blocking (22:29): Though we weren’t at CES, the Verizon-owned AOL was and released its new initiative, BrandBuilder. As Adweek reports: “… AOL hopes to create custom and native ads that encourage consumers to not use an ad blocker. One of the new ad units, for example, doles out free Verizon data in exchange for clicking on a mobile ad to download a coupon.”
AOL thinks that creating better, less-intrusive ads will lead to higher engagement. Robert thinks it’s the dumbest idea. I call it stupid. To me, it seems like BrandBuilder will be sold as NAB – not as bad as – other forms of advertising. With just…
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