Sara McCorquodale, CEO, CORQ: On influencer and brand relationships and Gen Z/millennial priorities

Influencer marketing is a catchy, catch-all buzzword - but for a term so vast, it has a litany of caveats attached to it.

Right now, in these uncertain Covid times, the word has a certain stigma - especially referring to those who are jetting off to conduct 'essential work' when so many are unable to travel. PR Week dubbed it the Dubai dilemma. Yet this undercuts the work many others are doing with far lower budget and scope.

Since the first brands caught on to the...

28 January 2021 | Content Marketing

How to make digital audio a headline act for the ad industry

During lockdown 1.0, publishers saw digital audio consumption increase up to more than 30%; with 74% of listeners intending to continue engaging at the same rate. Lockdown 2.0 further cemented streaming and podcast content as the consumer’s constant companion, making it crucial for the industry to harness its large-scale connection potential.

To achieve that, however, advertisers will need a better understanding of how they can turn this developing opportunity into their newest...

28 January 2021 | Advertising

Thinking of going shoppable? Don’t forget to A/B test your video ads

Shoppable video is poised for stardom. Expected to soon become one of advertising’s fastest growing categories, the format is already gaining sizeable investment; with marketing spend climbing by 40% this year in the US alone, up from 33% in 2019.

Much of this meteoric rise is due to the recent ecommerce boom. Amid rapid acceleration in online purchasing — now accounting for 16.4% of all global sales — the blend of commerce and content that shoppable media provides has...

19 January 2021 | Advertising Technology

Brands need to utilise user-generated content – but only with a safe, scalable process in place

Just how much user-generated content (UGC) is out there right now? As of May 2019, more than 500 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute; more than a billion hours of all those videos get watched every day. Facebook has more than 2.7 billion monthly active users, the vast majority of whom post and share family pics, jokes and memes.

There’s probably no way to measure all the content going up every second of every day on Amazon reviews, question-answer databases,...

8 January 2021 | Commerce

Assessing the 2021 landscape: Commerce aligned with social set to rocket as brands truly digitise

If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that massive disruptions can happen overnight across industries, with customer communication responsibilities from marketing to care often falling to the social media marketing team. The trends we at Socialbakers have seen take shape this year -- from increased usage of social messaging to recruiting niche influencers to help expand social reach -- are likely to grow in the coming year as more and more customer interactions happen...

14 December 2020 | Advertising

Scott Brinker: “Times are stressful, but this is the state of modern marketing now – let’s just embrace it”

The Marketing Technology Landscape, the ultimate who's who of the martech space from social to data and everything in between, is otherwise known as the Martech 5000. Yet that moniker, while memorable, soon became a touch mistaken as ever more companies joined the party. For the 2020 edition, published in April, there are now 8,000 vendors listed.

There was, however, plenty of interest between the lines. Data vendors saw a 25.5% growth since 2019, while management platforms saw a...

2 December 2020 | Advertising Technology

Travis Scott, J Balvin, and McDonald’s: Why some social partnerships work and others are destined to fail

If you went to McDonald’s in September, chances are you encountered Travis Scott. The prolific rapper had the first celebrity meal partnership to be featured on the McDonald’s menu since Michael Jordan’s in 1992. The Cactus Jack meal, named after Scott’s record label, replicated his favorite childhood special-order. The partnership was wildly successful. In its first few weeks, McDonald’s saw many franchises completely run out of ingredients for the meal, forcing a logistical...

12 November 2020 | Influencer Marketing

How user-generated content can be more powerful than influencer marketing campaigns

User-generated content (UGC) is quickly becoming the most popular marketing tool ahead of online influencer campaigns. The public have become accustomed to reality stars and has-been celebrities flogging whichever never-used-gadget that they’ve been paid to promote.

Since the rise of the Insta-marketeer, the Advertising Standards Authority has prescribed new rules for promoting products and services through social media platforms and online blogs, where a paid promotion must be...

11 November 2020 | Content Marketing

Content creators: Here’s how to monetise digital content effectively

Sponsored If you’re a digitally transformed organisation in the brand, publishing or broadcasting space, or any digital content creator for that matter, chances are you’ve discovered that while having a digital content strategy and a platform to share it is one thing, monetising all that great content is another matter.

For digital content creators, monetising digital content is the last great hurdle on the journey to sustainability, with traditional revenue-generating...

2 November 2020 | Advertising

How brands can stand out on TikTok for the right reasons: A guide

All eyes are on TikTok; from users who can’t get enough of its content to the US companies making a bid for acquisition — and brands are waking up to the potential.

High on the list of attractions is scale. In just two years, the video app has gone from 55 million to almost 700 million monthly active users globally. Much of that growth is down to the pandemic-driven spike in demand for digital media, but it’s also fuelled by the specific appeal of TikTok’s short-form...

20 October 2020 | Branding