Ideas

If you’re anything like me, you can sometimes get distracted by shiny objects. For digital marketers and content creators, those shiny objects can appear in the form of emerging social media networks.

When Stephen Dubner interviewed Charles Duhigg, author of the book Smarter Faster Better in a Freakonomics podcast focused on productivity, Duhigg told a story about how electricity, when it was first popularized, was hailed as a game changer for productivity. There was a huge wave of factories that replaced their steam engines with electric engines. But what happened next is what economists called a “productivity paradox”- initially, productivity didn’t rise in the factories.

No, no, no. Not that kind of canvas -- Facebook Canvas!

Earlier this year, Facebook introduced Canvas (now known as Instant Experience) -- a fully immersive, mobile-only ad experience. The new format is full-screen and designed to engage users with a mix of video, carousels, and photo galleries.  

The blank white page. The blinking cursor. The email/text/Facebook pings constantly distracting you, along with the thousand other projects looming that keep zipping through your mind. Time is ticking! You’ll tackle those things later. Back to the white page and taunting cursor you go. 

One of the most powerful things about digital advertising is the ability to measure results. But the ability to measure results should influence your strategy, not dictate it.

Are you ready for November 8 to arrive? If you're one of Facebook's nearly 1.5 billion monthly users, chances are that you've been inundated with 2016 presidential campaign commentary. Candidates have vied for your attention; supporters have eagerly shared stats, memes, and photos of their candidate flying in coach. You've seen the good, the bad, the inspiring, and the confounding. You've been moved in positive and negative ways. You've felt something.

I hear these requests far too often from arts marketers. I don’t blame them for wanting something fast and inexpensive, but these timelines and budgets are incredibly unrealistic and create a domino effect that causes more work, lots of headaches, and ultimately leads to poor websites that keep our industry in the dark ages.

Welcome to the world of Instagram advertising!  I bet you’re thinking, “Man, I just figured out Facebook!”

The web has no shortage of alarmist articles about how "email is dead" yet email is very much still alive. Let’s be honest—email is known as social media’s lame older brother. However it is a critical channel for arts marketing.

All of us working at or with nonprofits love the “Monopoly money” Google gives us every month via our Google Grant accounts. That $10,000 in free, monthly search advertising money calls to mind the stereotypical Hollywood representation of the New York Stock Exchange trading floor: numbers flashing, people shouting things about bids and buys and sells at each other and into phones.