Podcast Ads for Low CAC and High Scale

The worst-kept secret about me is that I love podcasts. I listen to them when I'm sitting on the train, walking to the grocery store, and working out in the gym. Specifically, I passionately follow histories covering a wide variety of topics and eras, such as the Roman Empire, the Haitian Revolution, and the rise of the Mongols. You know, real nerd stuff. I love listening so much that I give literally hundreds of hours of my time to listen to every detail, every decree and every battle, and so you can bet that if somebody's about to do something nefarious and say Livia did it, I'll be
listening.

So it made me happy when a recent TechCrunch article touted the financial benefits of supporting those who entertain and enlighten me. It makes sense, to target such loyal listeners, right?

It turns out that there is a lot of money on the table, and there are benefits to marketers who get in on the action early.

Some figures from the article:

Autonomous and digital marketing

With the competition seen between Netflix, Disney, Amazon and the likes, it looks like consumers have far more content that they can chew. In the US, consumers already spend 50% of their digital time on mobile and 32% on desktop.

According to Hollywood Report, content spending between the top 6 media companies will spend the below in annual budget on content production.

• Disney: $24 billion

• NBCUniversal: $13 billion

• WarnerMedia: $11 billion

• Netflix: $10.5 billion

• Amazon: $8.6 billion

• Apple: $1 billion

There are signs that consumers are having platform fatigue, and the age of platform aggregator might be upon us. A good example of the change in business model can be found in Roku. Roku is a platform aggregator whereby consumers can be content specific versus platform specific. This allows consumers to curate their content preference without platform loyalty. Roku’s business model is ad driven and this is a great avenue for digital/video advertising.

Now imagine with the roll out of autonomous vehicles, what are drivers/passengers going to do with their free time? On average, Americans spend 17,600 mins driving a year. This translates to about 67 mins a day or about 15 billion additionally media consumption hours. This is previously untapped white space for content and future marketing opportunity. There could be new business models that content companies could market to drivers. Short form entertainment content, or, a programming segment where advertisers could bid for ad space by page rank based on customer’s preference. 

BERT

Google BERT technology was introduced in later 2018 and has been used by Bing, now Google decided to use BERT.

The article interestingly explains how BERT algorithm would change the SEO and digital marketing scene.
BERT would help to optimize the voice search result, which would be one of the trends in upcoming years.
And because of the improved accuracy of search result, the contents must have further relevancy. Flip side is that relevancy would be more important in content creation.

https://www.cmswire.com/digital-marketing/how-google-bert-will-impact-seo-and-marketing/

The CMO is now the cDmo - Really

This week, Unilever, one of the world's largest global consumer packaged goods companies, announced they will be replacing their long time Chief Marketing Officer, Keith Weed, with a Chief Digital and Marketing Officer (to be Conny Braams). The business explained this role as a "CMO++" with a task to future-fit the organization for the speed of change that is certain to come in the digital world. The role will focus on the digital revolution that we studied in many aspects throughout our class.

Unilever is one of several global corporations to morph away from the traditional CMO role in a move towards digital. Uber, Coca-cola, and McDonalds are considering similar changes to their CMO role. The way brands talk and interact with consumers is changing and the old rules of consumer marketing are changing as consumer look for new ways to engage with brands. Companies are up-skilling their marketers to think "digital first" as they are losing market share to local startups who are more digital and more agile.

With the announcement of new leadership, change is certain to trickle down through the rest of the Unilever organization as digital takes on new focus. The traditional consumer marketer will be more focused on digital platforms in the years to come, while consumer relationships and always on media will be demanded for any brand. If we needed proof that Digital Marketing concepts and tools are here to stay, this is it. Winning through Digital Marketing has reached the top prioritization of the biggest organizations.

To read more about the newly created role: https://www.thedrum.com/news/2019/12/03/unilever-appoints-conny-braams-chief-digital-and-marketing-officer

Facebook Testing a Way to Let You Move Photos to Rival Sites

Facebook announced this week that their testing in Ireland the ability to transfer FB photos and videos to Google - portability of files - to appease European regulators. Will this be sufficient? 

Probably not.

The story here.