In what has to be the silliest bit of news I’ve read in a while, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel says the key to getting Snapchat to profitability by 2019 is to revamp marketing around the app to appeal more to older users. Part of that campaign appears, based on the timing of the announcements, to … Continue reading Snapchat’s Old People Hail Mary
Snapchat Opens Up User Content to Media Brands, But Something’s Missing
Repurposing user-generated content in marketing programs has been a practice since about a day after people started creating that content. Marketers quickly realized, all the way back in the early 2000s, that people reacted more positively to material generated by others like them than to staid, sometimes boring advertising material. The latest iteration of this … Continue reading Snapchat Opens Up User Content to Media Brands, But Something’s Missing
Quick Takes – Marketing and Media News for 2/13/18
I don’t have much to add to it but if you haven’t read this piece at Buzzfeed about the very real dangers we face from technology that allows reality to be manipulated in scary ways, you need to do so right damn now. Similarly, Wired has a report on the upheaval within Facebook in the … Continue reading Quick Takes – Marketing and Media News for 2/13/18
Quick Takes: Content Marketing and Media News for 1/16/18
Media Crackle will rebrand itself as “Sony Crackle” because, according to the story, the company wants to leverage the power of the Sony name. That’s code for “the person who kept insisting it didn’t need to be corporately branded is no longer with the company and so someone finally got their way.” CBS and Viacom … Continue reading Quick Takes: Content Marketing and Media News for 1/16/18
Quick Takes: Content Marketing and Media News for 1/6/18
The Big Story The death of brick-and-mortar retail is coming about because fashion and culture are curated and discoverable on social media now, not exclusively by hitting the mall. And while the retail industry may be fine as a whole, stories are closing twice as fast as they open. That’s going to hit people who … Continue reading Quick Takes: Content Marketing and Media News for 1/6/18
Quick Takes: Content Marketing and Media News for 12/21/17
Media TicToc is the new breaking news channel from Bloomberg and Twitter, showing the latter is serious about being a media distribution platform. I have to think between this, Cheddar and a few other video shows Twitter will eventually break out some sort of separate channel akin to Snapchat’s Discover to get more attention. Penske … Continue reading Quick Takes: Content Marketing and Media News for 12/21/17
Quick Takes: Content Marketing and Media News for 12/19/17
Today’s Must Read This is a great piece on the “other” tech bubble, the one that’s building up inside a Silicon Valley ecosystem that’s still playing as fast and loose as it did in the late 90s, regardless of the changing social scene in the rest of the world. That kind of mindset, where tech … Continue reading Quick Takes: Content Marketing and Media News for 12/19/17
Snapchat Overestimates Its Innovation
I keep reading Evan Spiegel’s vision statement for Snapchat and it keeps making less and less sense. I’m a fairly bright guy who’s been working in content marketing for 15 years and so have been following the rise of social media since its inception. But the way Spiegel frames social media as a whole and … Continue reading Snapchat Overestimates Its Innovation
Quick Takes: Content Marketing and Media News for 11/30/17
Facebook’s move to offer a “breaking” label select publishers can use on their stories to help them be found in the News Feed is a step in the right direction in terms of addressing the spread of fake news in that it assigns some level of verified status to the publisher. You can now mess … Continue reading Quick Takes: Content Marketing and Media News for 11/30/17
Quick Takes: Content Marketing and Media News for 11/28/17
Meetup, the popular event-organizing service, is being acquired by coworking company WeWork, like part of the latter’s plans to basically own or manage any sort of space that any group of two or more could ever gather in. Facebook has clarified its advertising principles, making their efforts appear as innocuous and customizable by the user … Continue reading Quick Takes: Content Marketing and Media News for 11/28/17
Chris Thilk 