Media mix involves selecting the right message for a medium, coordinating messages across media to reinforce basic concepts, and choosing useful points of entry for customer engagement by media. Sometimes, for example, a short Snap ad could lead to a deep customer experience on a site or in an app — at which point the relationship turns into a transaction. Media are like steps between levels in a home, they can be arranged in many ways.

Besides thinking about the type of content that will perform well on each platform, brands also need to think about the length and visual style of each soundbite.

Source: Why Brands Need to Tailor to Each Social Platform to Win – Adweek

Effective and inclusive Millennial advertising adds to the customer’s brand by extending their values into product and service purchases.

Basically, a brand has to improve a millennials own brand, whether it’s making them appear to be socially responsible (think TOMS or Warby Parker), stylish-looking or even help them be funny, if they can share brand content with their networks.

Source: Apple and Nike Top the List of Millennials Favorite Brands | CMO Strategy – AdAge

This week, for example, is proving to be a risky time for brands to use Twitter to share a silly meme, playfully “clap back” at a customer or riff on a made-up holiday. The platform has been filled with outrage and terrible news since white nationalists and supremacists clashed violently last Saturday with opponents in Charlottesville, Virginia, and President Donald Trump blamed “many sides.”

Source: Not Even Twitter Knows When Brands Should Stop Tweeting | Digital – AdAge

Here’s a real-world example of a corporate narrative taking a stand against hate speech. It will surely be controversial, and the targeted group, white supremacists, are going to complain loudly. There will be boycotts. AirBnB seems to have the nerve to live its principles, but this will be a real test of the unification of personal and corporate values.

In anticipation of a white supremacist rally scheduled for this Saturday in Charlottesville, Virginia, Airbnb has started deactivating accounts of people it believes are booking units to host gatherings related to the rally.

Source: Airbnb Is Deactivating Accounts Of People Trying To Attend A White Supremacist Rally

An exploration of a potential Boomer narrative. Keep reading past the first article for a Gen-Z analysis.

As they age, Boomers are more resistant to absolutism. Hyperbole or strongly worded and delivered claims about a product’s features and benefits usually work better with younger, more literal-minded customers. The young mind tends to see reality in definitive states or conditions: something either is, or it is not. However, Boomers tend to have a greater appreciation for the finer definition that nuance and subtlety give a matter. This predisposition means that marketing communications intended for them should reflect a conditional tone. Say less and let the customer interpret your communications based on their internal needs and related perception of your message.

Source: Know Your Customer 08/07/2017

Marketers cannot cede their storytelling to Facebook, but they do need to listen to Facebook’s feedback based on analysis of engagement with video. There’s no one magic formulae or video length, just the right combinations of medium, story, and time, which will vary based on the novelty of the story, the challenges to existing narratives (“I just don’t do things like that,” for example, in response to a new product — think of your parents’ reaction to Snapchat.)

Facebook will have a notion of what kind of video fits on Facebook. That doesn’t mean marketers should always follow that advice blindly. It’s just one more input in the creative and strategic decision process.

Facebook has had big goals for video for a while and advertisers are ramping up the amount of video content that they produce for the platform. However, brands are still pouring hefty budgets into producing TV assets that don’t necessarily work on mobile where consumers are increasingly watching more video.

Source: Facebook Wants to Help Brands Tailor Their TV Ads for Mobile – Adweek

“Midlennials,” to coin more descriptive name than “iGen,” grew up fully digital instead of in transition from analog to digital experience. It may have broken expectations and norms, blending with the Great Recession, to cast a new narrative for the midlennial.

[T]heirs is a generation shaped by the smartphone and by the concomitant rise of social media. I call them iGen. Born between 1995 and 2012, members of this generation are growing up with smartphones, have an Instagram account before they start high school, and do not remember a time before the internet. The Millennials grew up with the web as well, but it wasn’t ever-present in their lives, at hand at all times, day and night. iGen’s oldest members were early adolescents when the iPhone was introduced, in 2007, and high-school students when the iPad entered the scene, in 2010.

Source: Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? – The Atlantic