Price is not the biggest driver for the first native digital generation | Chain Store Age

Once price becomes secondary, values become the primary driver of purchases. Gen Z is tuned into how their spending impacts the world. They hate the inauthentic. Storytelling will be the key to moving their intentions.”Personalization” here means that the story must be connected to their individual values.

The challenge is to develop stories that bridge trivial differences of opinion while engaging the audiences about important issues. The environment, economic equity, and health, for example, will serve as important themes in marketing as a result.

“It is clear that Gen Z will be different from Millennials and the generations before them on many levels — on top of being the most culturally diverse shopper population to date, Gen Zers are already forming unique purchase motivators and preferences,” said Robert I. Tomei, president of consumer and shopper marketing and core content services for IRI. “It will be critical for manufacturers and retailers to have a deeper understanding of these young shoppers as they gain influence and purchasing power, and leverage the power of personalization to reach them.”

Source: Price is not the biggest driver for the first native digital generation | Chain Store Age

Adobe’s free visual storytelling tool Spark adds premium features – The Verge

DIY storytelling for small business. Everyone can get into the storytelling marketing. The challenge is telling the story well, being consistent with the business’ customer experience, and listening carefully to how the audience responds. Stories will be continuously delivered in the narrative era, like software on the cloud is today.

Adobe is adding a new paid feature to help small businesses create branded media content. The feature, called Branded Stories, lets you make graphics, web pages, and video stories. You can set one consistent template or theme to be present across every piece of media. Adobe lets you easily lets you change a font or color throughout all of your creations and templates at once, while notifying you of how many places are being changed. Adobe Spark only offers a small selection of fonts, like Calluna, Raleway, and the very Pinterest-friendly Wanderlust Shine. It also offers font suggestions to pair your selected typeface with another that Adobe thinks is aesthetically complementary.

Source: Adobe’s free visual storytelling tool Spark adds premium features – The Verge

1 Brand, Many Audiences: 3 Levels Of Intent — MediaPost

The opportunity now is to use less prominent channels, such as short pre-roll videos on YouTube or influencer-shared links to get your brand in front of an audience at the right time. Then, extend the relationship with deep content and customer experience that keeps people coming back until they’ve purchased, and beyond. It is not always necessary battle for attention during the Super Bowl, because the active purchaser is seeking information — and helpful insight — in many channels.

Slice and dice your own audience in myriad ways in order to understand their attributes and path to purchase: researchers vs. intenders, sedan vs. SUV seekers — what makes each of these customers tick? Where do they research online? How can you, reach them earlier and speak to them better?

Source: 1 Brand, Many Audiences: 3 Levels Of Intent 09/19/2017

YouTube Kills Paid Channels, Launches Sponsorships Across Gaming App | Variety

YouTube kills paid content in its game streaming channels, opting for revenue splits among producers based on viewership. The company may extend this to its other programming channels on YouTube, which would be a significant change in the economics of creativity.

YouTube is getting rid of one of its first paid content models: The Google-owned video site announced Tuesday that it is discontinuing its paid channels initiative, effectively killing the option to sell the content of individual channels to paying subscribers. Instead, YouTube is expanding its sponsorship model, making it available to all YouTube Gaming creators and testing it with some creators within the main YouTube app.

Source: YouTube Kills Paid Channels, Launches Sponsorships Across Gaming App | Variety

Carolyn Everson’s Brand Safety Manifesto, Translated | Digital – AdAge

Facebook’s rapprochement to the ad industry includes clear warnings that the company cannot control everything it publishes. It is introducing tools to pre-screen influencers whom a brand may engage through Facebook.

Carolyn Everson, is on a mission to make Facebook safe for brands. Everson, the Facebook vp of global marketing solutions, has made the twin issues of transparency and brand safety a cornerstone of her talks with the advertising world for much of the past year.

Today, at the technology conference Dmexco, outside Cologne, Germany, Everson released an op-ed outlining the path forward for Facebook to address problems on both fronts, giving marketers reliable data about their ad campaigns and establishing content ground rules for the social network, especially in its new video hub called Watch. That’s where any video creators can host a channel for their show, and share in ad revenue just like on YouTube.

Source: Carolyn Everson’s Brand Safety Manifesto, Translated | Digital – AdAge

The Silent Film Returns — on Social Media – The New York Times

Media evolution repeats itself, borrowing from the past to find a future.

The summer’s hottest destination for video entertainment is a U.K.-based social media brand called LADbible. In July alone, the viral clips that churn out of its Facebook page were viewed more than 3 billion times. Though the site is nominally branded around young British men, its offerings hold an oddly universal appeal. On a recent afternoon, it served up videos of a guy accidentally hitting himself in the head with a baseball bat; a pizza being made out of French fries; a dog bathing in a Jacuzzi; a woodworker crafting a salad bowl; a tourist riding a slide down the Great Wall of China and a manatee kissing a snorkeler.

Source: The Silent Film Returns — on Social Media – The New York Times

Why don’t facts matter? (opinion) – CNN

It’s important to remember that these studies don’t define us, but it is certain that we suffer from many biases. The headline on this story makes it an all-or-nothing proposition. But storytellers know there is truth in what Tali Sharot writes.

The very first thing we need to realize is that beliefs are like fast cars, designer shoes, chocolate cupcakes and exotic holidays: they affect our well-being and happiness. So just as we aspire to fill our fridge with fresh fare and our wardrobe with nice attire, we try to fill our minds with information that makes us feel strong and right, and to avoid information that makes us confused or insecure.

Source: Why don’t facts matter? (opinion) – CNN

Data scientist skills range from data prep to storytelling – TechTarget

“Ninety percent of data science is ETL [extract, transform and load] — the data wrangling aspects,” said Michael Li, founder and CEO of The Data Incubator, a data science training organization, during a presentation at TDWI Accelerate. “Focusing just on the analytics layer is not going to deliver the value and the insights you are looking for.”

It takes many different kinds to tell a story. Data science is exposing more, massively more, raw material for stories. However, automation will reduce the current workload from 90 percent on ETL (data prep and staging for analysis) toward interpreters and artists who work with data to tell stories.

Source: Data scientist skills range from data prep to storytelling

‘Ad fatigue’ drives viewers to on-demand TV | News | Research Live

Your audience grows tired of your ads. The independent producer — what has become popularly known by the industry jargon “showrunner” now holds more power to choose their channels and collect much of the subscription revenue. Marketers need to find ways to subsidize paid TV that provides subtle reminders to the viewer that they got the programming for less, or free.

In an important way, we are back to the dawn of television, when advertisers “presented” shows as a way of earning favor and attention. The Texaco Star Theatre, for example, that gave the world Uncle Miltie, was a transitional effort when, like now, the audience’s attention was ripped away from “traditional” media, such as radio and newspaper, which were only 30 and 250 years old, respectively.

Forty one per cent of respondents in On Device’s latest survey said that sitting through fewer ads was part of their motivation for watching paid on-demand TV services such as Netflix and Amazon, rather than old-fashioned TV.

Source: ‘Ad fatigue’ drives viewers to on-demand TV | News | Research Live

Influencers can also be poisonous

AdAge laments the risks of working with influencers. The problem here, even if “PewDiePie” has 60 million subscribers, is that he is not interested in the brands that sponsor his shows — he’s more like a television-era exec who thinks the only thing they provide to viewers is a distraction. In fact, people care about whether they support messages that align with their values.

“The fallen YouTuber known as PewDiePie, Felix Kjellberg, with nearly 60 million subscribers, used the “N-word” when his gameplay went poorly during the live stream. The slur was just the latest offensive outburst by Swedish-born Kjellberg, who lost a deal with Disney‘s Maker earlier this year for making anti-Semitic jokes.”

PewDiePie had 60 million viewers, but what will his numbers be next year? If they will be up, because people flock to the use of racial slurs, are those the right people to be engaged with? Brands need to genuinely engage and vet their influencers. Providing clear-cut guidance to consumers about the influencer’s role as a marketer on behalf of the brand is essential to consumer trust.

In fact, the FTC will make this a requirement, and the crackdown has begun. Brands need tools that connect them to traffic, but also that clearly delineate the relationship of the influence to the brand. Cutting off an influencer when they egregiously attack values the brand supports is one step, but basic public standard for disclosure of influencer relationships will also force brands to think more carefully about who they engage to speak to audiences.  Against that backdrop, we can intelligently judge companies’ social intentions as consumers.