Overskies

The first banner ad, published on Wired.com in 1994, was unbelievably effective. The simple JPG—part of an AT&T campaign—garnered a whopping 44% click-through rate.

What a time it is to be alive and in the marketing business, huh? With over 4 billion Internet users worldwide (over 3 billion of whom are active on social media), it’s never been easier for marketers and brand managers to reach so many potential customers so quickly.

But here’s the thing about the ubiquity of the Web and social media. Anyone with an Internet connection can say anything they want about your brand.

The question is, are you listening?

When it comes to building your brand, you can’t sleep on video content. At this point, continuing to do so could actually be detrimental to your growth. The video-centric future is here, and the data proves it.

In this age of Big Data, it’s easier than ever to develop campaigns that resonate with your audience and target them directly. While it was once a queasy notion that advertisers have so much data on everyone, by now, most consumers accept—and even expect—personalization throughout the customer experience...

...as long as they feel like they can trust you.

In an episode from the fourth season of Seinfeld, Jerry is seated next to a fashion model named Tia. At her behest, Jerry opens the magazine he's reading to page 146, where he sees her posing, only a washcloth obscuring her otherwise naked body.

If you hang around CSI HQ long enough, you might notice that we get a bit...extra sometimes.

This is especially true when it comes to beating each other at stuff. While fairly mild-mannered on the outside, it turns out half of the agency is competitive AF. So, when our president Rich decided to kick off a new team-building tradition with a pub-style trivia game, needless to say, things got really REAL.

The road to great branded content is paved with good intentions, but let’s be honest. In the scramble to keep up with the competition, prove ROI to leadership, and increase content output speed, it’s easy for marketers to get ahead of themselves by creating content without a clue as to how they’re going to actually promote it.

Our attention spans are shrinking.

No, seriously. We’ve all gotten really bad at staying focused.

Even as you’re reading this, your mind is probably inclined to wander. There are ads and Black Mirror episodes and emails and animal Instagrams just dying to snatch your attention away—and you clicked into this post willingly.

So imagine, then, what it’s like for your customers debating if they should pull the trigger on your product or service.

We’re living in an exciting time. One in which artificial intelligence and automation can do a lot of the heavy lifting for us in the digital space. This gives advertisers and marketing execs more gas to throw behind their campaigns, plus an advantage over their less-savvy competitors.

Just about everyone knows that video is the new darling of the marketing world. In fact, many marketers—even those in the B2B space—have gotten their video marketing strategy down to a science.