Oh, the things we tell Google. As a basis for storytelling, this willingness to share information to get information, including disclosing an otherwise unacknowledged fact to a search engine, points to an audience eager to share information. That sharing can be the basis of extensive personalization of stories, gathering feedback, and social campaigns. But it requires brands to share more information than they are used to or comfortable with in many cases.

The word “gay” is 10% more likely to complete searches that begin “Is my husband…” than the second-place word, “cheating”. It is eight times more common than “an alcoholic” and 10 times more common than “depressed”.

Most tellingly perhaps, searches questioning a husband’s sexuality are far more prevalent in the least tolerant regions. The states with the highest percentage of women asking this question are South Carolina and Louisiana. In fact, in 21 of the 25 states where this question is most frequently asked, support for gay marriage is lower than the national average.

Source: Everybody lies: how Google search reveals our darkest secrets

Millennials are digital migrants, Gen-Z is native digital.

According to Nielsen’s new Total Audience report, millennials and Gen-Z now comprise 48 percent of the total media audience. Gen-Z in particular is now the single largest audience segment at 26 percent (although there’s a vast age range).

Because members of Gen-Z are different in key ways from millennials, the demographic shift holds some implications for brands and retail marketers.

Source: Move over millennials, Gen-Z now the largest single population segment

The ways social media shapes our memory could end up having knock-on effects for other mental habits. All those hours on Facebook could change not just what we do with our time, but how we think.

Source: Facebook is re-sculpting our memory, says a Harvard psychology professor — Quartz

Here is a living example of competing narratives, between the Vatican’s view and that of President Trump. Historically speaking, the Church has more staying power than any politician, which gives the advantage to Pope Francis.

“The political strategy for success becomes that of raising the tones of the conflictual, exaggerating disorder, agitating the souls of the people by painting worrying scenarios beyond any realism,” it added. On the other hand, Pope Francis was “carrying forward a systematic counter-narration with respect to the narrative of fear” due to the “need to fight the manipulation of this season of anxiety and insecurity”.

Source: Papal allies attack Bannon’s ‘apocalyptic’ vision

Lobbyist Bruce Mehlman’s explanation of the changing narratives in society hits on a number of “core” issues that redefined the mass narrative as many conflicting priorities in the 21st Century.

Seven in 10 adults were married in 1967. Now it’s 50 percent. Three in 10 workers were members of labor unions then. Now it’s 11 percent. Two-thirds of Americans trusted government. It’s never been close to that since Vietnam and Watergate. The latest studies show only about 20 percent of the country trusts the feds to do the right thing.

Source: The Daily 202: Trump is the disrupter-in-chief in an age of disruption – The Washington Post

“Between slowing underlying business growth for core clients, zero-based budgeting at many of them, more aggressive applications of procurement-based processes, the ongoing impact on fees from transparency-related issues, like-for-like fee compression, threats of wider-scale in-housing of programmatic buying, slowing shifts of spending into digital media among the clients agencies service and competitive threats from IT services firms (i.e. “the consultants”), there’s not a lot of good news to point to for

Source: Analysts Downgrade Entire Ad Sector, Cite Media Fragmentation 07/11/2017

The most successful brands are those that recognise that effective content strategies require greater insight and planning, and that they always need to be rooted in the brand’s core promise. For service brands, it is also crucial to have a consistent storyline that is bound with the brand strategy and emphasises a differentiated customer experience. Developing a content strategy that builds a narrative over time is critical to success.

Source: Winning Content Strategies Focus On The Long Game

“The podcasting industry is currently at an inflection point. We’re seeing double-digit listener growth and advertiser investment growing 85% year-over-year [2016 vs. 2017],” Matt Lieber, president and co-founder, Gimlet Media, told Digital Daily News via email.

Source: IAB Sets Podcast Upfront Lineup, Market Expected To Top $220M 07/10/2017

Modern artists have been coming up with more engaging ways to tap into this empathy. Virtual reality (VR) is one of them. Alejandro Iñárritu, the Oscar-winning director of “The Revenant”, created “Carne y Arena” (“Flesh and Sand”) to replicate the experience of migrants making the perilous journey across the Sonoran desert into America.

Source: Immersive experiences, the future of philanthropy

Source: For Some, Live Streaming Video Is Already a Constant – eMarketer