“Digital turned 21 in 2017. It’s an adult now. The responsibilities are increasing. We pushed transparency; that’s step one. That leads to: You need more controls on your systems. It’s very clear that expectations are rising for digital companies.”— Marc Pritchard, digiday.com
“Legacy brands can buy identity (for example, Unilever, which snatched up subscription-based personal grooming company Dollar Shave Club for $1 billion); they can invest in identity (e.g., General Motors, which poured $500 million into ride-sharing startup Lyft to better understand and serve a new ge…”— Kathy Menis, adage.com
“I think it’s really important to not try and just win on scale alone. I think that’s where a lot of people make mistakes. The way to differentiate yourself and provide value to the advertiser is to bring storytelling and content development to the mix.”— Rich Antoniello, wsj.com
“Consumers are so empowered now that they can bypass almost any kind of marketing they want. People will ignore or skip anything they don’t like. So brands have to start making things they love”— Steve Pratt, digiday.com
“People have learned how to become influencers, so brands have to utilize influencers more all the time. What we loved about Influential’s model is it helps us sort through that, and in this case finding those 10 specific people that were perfect, not just for the vehicle, but for our brand and what…”— Dean Evans, adweek.com
“2017 was an incredibly difficult year for digital media. Small and more challenged digital media companies have been hit hard. This is a time for companies with cash flow and capital to start acquiring the more challenged digital assets.”— Bryan Goldberg, bloomberg.com
“The brilliance of socially distributed media companies today is that they’re not trying to fight an unwinnable war. The idea that we should take people to our owned and operated properties is frankly a losing strategy.”— Matthew Segal, digiday.com
“The 21st century ad seller is a business problem solver. She doesn’t wait for budgets, she helps create them. She avoids the watering hole where the herd gathers for RFPs and planning cycles. She hunts alone. She knows more about how the client’s business works – how he sells his products, who he se…”— Doug Weaver, getthedrift.com
“Brands often use dark posts as a way of testing ads without having to show the whole world their homework, which is convenient when an ad misses the mark or, worse, offends people. Now, the test ads will be attached to their pages of origin for as long as they are running.”— Garrett Sloane, adage.com
“If we spend more time talking about social media internally than we do talking to our customers on social media, something’s wrong.”— Jeff Elder, medium.com
“Any publisher leader who has a long-term view on their business should be building a Plan B. That is, a business and product strategy for your digital business that assumes zero organic reach for any content via Facebook.”— Kunal Gupta, polar.me
“Advertisers are now paying ad rates for user-initiated video that are two to three times higher than autoplay video, and the fill rate is about twice as high. Intent to watch is the buzzword of 2018. That’s where the ad demand is. Autoplay sound off will continue, but the real growth will move to in…”— Brian Rifkin, digiday.com
“Syndication of influencer content will continue to be a trend because it makes no sense to just pay influencers for content creation. Influencers are the new publishers, and we want to leverage that. Publishers still have value, but their pricing model doesn’t evolve fast enough. If I can find the s…”— Megan Jones, digiday.com
“Advertisers are taking influencer marketing one step further by placing paid media to amplify influencer content beyond the individual’s social accounts. This turns to be a cheaper alternative to branded content purchased from major publishers.”— Yuyu Chen, digiday.com
“Most digital brands have sought scale over connections. We, as a company, are entirely about connections and actual engagement with our audience. So for any show that we do, we can bring in Barstool as a marketing platform and deliver an audience.”— Erika Nardini, digiday.com
“Audience-based planning is shifting from cookie-based to ID-based. Cookie-based planning has lots of problems: People change their devices, cookies get deleted and cookies are not available on mobile apps, et cetera. Consumer ID-based planning can bypass cross-device problems, and we can even connec…”— Peter Vandre, digiday.com
“The fact that everybody in America gets the same ads, at the same time, for the same products, has never made that much sense. I grew up in a small coal town in western Pennsylvania, my mother’s still there. I live on the upper west side of Manhattan, there’s more people on my block than in my homet…”— Dave Morgan, recode.net
“The world of digital has been distracted by what can be done, not what makes sense. In a world where we can see in real-time precisely if people click, we optimize for what we can measure and change most quickly, not what matters most. We endlessly shift money from brand to performance marketing bec…”— Tom Goodwin, thedrum.com
“Its official – Facebook has entered the branded content arena, now directly competing with premium publishers on agency RFPs. The formula for a successful branded content campaign: awesome content plus scaled and targeted distribution? Well, maybe not… There is one essential objective that should be…”— Gavin Merwood, polar.me
“At the end of the day, the way people are finding things are through their friends sharing something or via a search. So if you can think about as an artist, what are people searching for and making art around that.”— The Most Famous Artist, youtube.com