Programmatic buying for display ad inventory hit an inflection point this year and is expected to account for 70% of total display expenditure in 2016. This major shift is being driven primarily by digital agencies like Bluetext who are leveraging rapid advances in advertising technology systems such as Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) that automate the buying process with real-time bidding (RTB) – the backbone of programmatic buying. Programmatic media buying allows agencies to manage and purchase inventory from multiple ad networks through the single interface of the DSP – allowing advertisers to buy a select set of algorithmically filtered impressions across a range of publisher sites simultaneously – all targeted at a specific user persona.

With RTB, a media buyer can create a set parameters such as bid price and network reach, and can combine those with demographics and attitudinal data and auto adjust dozens of performance based variables in real time to determine the right campaign settings to achieve the desired ROI.

So what are primary advantages that programmatic media buying provides to marketers?

1. Speed

The automated buying process allows marketers to place ads through the DSP enabling quicker turnaround and increased speed to market, both of which become more critical as planning cycles get shorter, and more stringent performance goals call for dynamic testing and optimization of new strategies that can be obtained via RTB.

2. Targeting

Programmatic buying in its purist sense isn’t media buying – its audience buying. DSPs allow marketers to target a specific segment of users, wherever they are – and with retargeting capabilities built in – wherever they’re going based on previous interest in a specific product or service.

3. ROI

Increased ROI is achieved by the buying efficiency that programmatic platforms afford marketers – from both a time and cost perspective – as well as the ability to target and optimize in real time. The ability to gain traction in the market at an increasingly rapid rate with new technology also allows marketers to test various strategies simultaneously and shift budgets to the best performing channels

As advertising technology advances, approaches to programmatic buying are sure to become more sophisticated. With the addition of RTB to social networks – and even more traditional channels like print, tv and radio as some predict – new strategies will present themselves that weren’t previously possible. At Bluetext – 100% of our online display buying is programmatic – so I recommend taking a peek over your agency’s shoulder to make sure they are buying smarter and giving your brand the best opportunity to win in today’s highly charged competitive environment.

Since my last post was on “Mobile First” I thought it might make sense to opine on mobile marketing…specifically mobile apps where Bluetext has waded deep into the water this summer.

While we are all waiting for mobile browsing to overtake desktop – mobile apps screamed past PC websites in terms of Internet usage. As this trend is bound to continue in 2016, marketing strategies should evolve to keep up.

Approximately two-thirds of the world’s population are mobile phone users, with the total number of mobile subscriptions globally approaching 8 billion. The mobile market is continuing to explode with no signs that it is going to slow down anytime soon.

These broad advances in technology and interaction create the need for new tactics and strategies that will keep brands strong and customers loyal. Users spent almost 25% more time in apps last year than they did the year before, and 2016 is more than likely to see an equal, if not more precipitous increase.

As new mobile apps continue to flood the market, the way that users engage with them is going to continue to change. And as app makers respond to these changes, app marketers will need to analyze and predict trends to keep their brands one step ahead of the game.

Mainstream marketers put more value on organic versus acquired users, however from an engagement standpoint, paid search and ad networks are by far the two of the most effective channels by which users are brought to apps. And while both are of equal value once they’re using the app, our analytics show that users who find an app through an ad network are more likely to return to download and use the app than organic users. This would certainly suggest a sea change is coming in how brands will approach mobile marketing.

As this change is taking place, user retention will remain a top priority for app developers. Users already inside the app will come back to it again and again and, in turn, become more inclined to make an increasing number of in-app purchases.

In this scenario, app loyalty is the ultimate goal. In order to better engage users, apps will have to start using more sophisticated methods to foster loyalty and that’s where the advertisers come in. The rapid increase in in-app purchases will result in a race to produce more ads, both externally and within apps, to engage the growing user base once they are committed to the app.

As apps are becoming an increasingly more important aspect of daily life, developers are becoming smarter and more creative, encouraging users to embrace technology in every aspect of their lives and attracting advertisers like yourselves to reward them for it.

 

 

 

We have leapfrogged almost overnight from a digital first to mobile first multi-screen world.

Brands – no matter their size – can no longer afford to ignore the mobile market.  Users aren’t just browsing on mobile devices – they are now finding content, sharing it socially and completing purchases at a rate that is increasingly on par with their older desktop siblings – and this is now having significant implications on website design.

Where responsive design was the new frontier not more than 18 months ago – most progressive digital studios have adopted a mobile first design mentality. Instead of designing websites for desktop users and degrading the experience and functionality for mobile  – they are now starting with the mobile screen as their primary palette and adding layers to ‘dilute’ the experience for desktop and larger screens.

Putting mobile at the front of the website design process leads to sites that are simpler, faster, more usable and – most importantly – more accessible to your customers. Here are the five primary keys to a smart, mobile first design strategy.

Speed

With users – and Google – demanding sub-one-second page loads – speed is a critical component of mobile first design methodology. As a result, you will be seeing a lot more sites going to a flat, 2D design with single blocks of color and streamlined images.

Navigation

Navigation is a major consideration for mobile website design, so we’ll be seeing more brands using fixed menu bars and infinite scrolls for continuous access and loading of content…and of course the ‘hamburger’ menu with three horizontal lines is now almost ubiquitous.

Typography

Since the days of newspapers – type has always been a good way to show the visual hierarchy of page elements. But in a mobile first world, readability is critical, so many brands are using a wider range of larger fonts that better render text as easily visible on smaller screens.

Layout

A desire to cater to mobile users has led to a variety of new layout trends, including tile or grid-based layouts where the content shifts to accommodate different dimensions, displaying single or multiple tiles depending on the screen size. Parallax scrolling to make page elements shift or disappear is also seen as a cool and sophisticated trend in mobile design.

Usability

The last – but far from least – consideration is usability, which brings everything together to optimize how much content can actually be consumed on a smaller screen through gestures, taps, swipes and clicks to get to more content faster. This is huge push for the Google search engine algorithm, so companies whose audiences are coming in via their mobile devices need to understand how important mobile usability has become.

Don’t let your content get left behind in a cloud of mobile dust – or worse yet – your brand annihilated by ‘Mobilegeddon’…don’t be last to mobile first.

During my younger days I was fortunate enough to cut my teeth in the public sector at powerhouse Washington radio station WTOP, and was part of the launch of FederalNewsRadio. During that part of my career, I was lucky to be able to work with CMOs at just about every major defense and global technology brand serving the federal government. At the time, my biggest competitors were the stacks and stacks of Federal IT and Defense magazines that filled the bookcases behind them. These were the reams of tangible, tactile publications that their CEO’s demanded they advertise in before even considering buying 60-second slices of intangible “air.”

The precipitous decline in those print publications, combined with the impact of budget cuts on the federal agency buyer’s ability to travel to attend industry conferences, trade shows and seminars, has flipped that model on its head over the last 5 years. The resulting void of strong brand void has led to an increased thirst for more readily accessible “premium” content—white papers, e-books, survey reports and other in-depth materials that can be indispensable for government decision-makers. Yet, defense and technology vendors and contractors continue to peddle their wares using increasingly ineffective traditional methods of marketing.

The most notorious of these are companies that load up on traditional marketing to push government contracting vehicles—their IDIQs, GWACs and GSA Schedules – especially at the end of the federal buying season. There was once a time and a place for that – but no more. Marketing is now forever changed thanks to Al Gore – or who ever invented the internet.

As a result – government buyers have become real buyers just like you and I, involved to varying degrees in researching, influencing and taking themselves 75 percent through a buying process to ultimately select a solution that your company – and your 10 largest competitors – all provide.

This is why it is now so critical to target your marketing with premium content to specific and very real buyer personas. You need to put yourselves in their shoes to differentiate your brand and fill that void with contextually relevant content before your competitors do. No matter who that buyer is, they are all facing the same quandries:

1. I have a problem, but I don’t know what the solution is.
2. I know what some solutions are, but I don’t know which one is best for me.
3. I know which solution I want, but I don’t know who to buy it from.

And while the best way to answer these is with content, the biggest obstacle I find since joining the agency side is that most of the companies we work with do not yet have mature content marketing strategies and lack the in-house resources needed to generate enough thoughtful, relevant content to drive engagement that results in traction for their brands in this market. The other challenge is their inability to harness the thought leadership of their subject matter experts. The people inside their company who have the expertise on issues most relevant to your target audience often do not have the time or have not been engaged to contribute content on a regular basis. As a result, marketers are struggling not only to develop the editorial calendar, but more importantly the content itself.

It’s no secret that a lot of successful marketers are turning to agencies to overcome this very challenge. When they do, they realize very quickly that we can capture more eyeballs – and drive much more significant and targeted brand engagement—by empowering them to become masters of their own content for far less than what they used to spend on traditional ads in all of those long-gone publications– and for a fraction of the cost of those radio ads. They all once had their time and place – and so will your brand if you continue to allow your competitors to outmarket you and find a cozy place for their content in the minds of your buyer.

My colleagues and I at Bluetext have spent a fair amount of time developing brand and positioning strategies for dozens of new, disruptive and innovative brands…and more often than not are tasked with creating a new name for the company, the products or services they deliver, or both.

With 99.9 percent of the commonly-used words in the dictionary already taken among the close to 300 million registered domains from more than 125 million companies worldwide, how many great names could possibly be left?

We are currently in the process of branding and naming a highly disruptive technology product that is almost certain to quickly become one of the most visible B2B product brands in the US. We thought this might be a good time to define the five critical tenets of coming up with a great new name:

1. The most important aspect of a brand or product’s name is a crystallized vision statement and its supporting proof points. The name should deliver against your core objective for the business and central vision for the brand. Perhaps the most important question you need to answer is whether the brand should be company-focused or product-centric. In most cases it’s the former – but many well-known brands – like RIM’s Blackberry – have successfully incorporated a strategy that leads with the latter.

2. Before you begin the name-storming process, agree on what you want the attitude or voice of the brand to be – what emotion, feeling or idea do you want it to evoke when you see and hear it? Starbucks Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz summed it up best by saying, “A great brand raises the bar – it adds a greater sense of purpose to the experience, whether it’s the challenge to do your best in sports and fitness, or the affirmation that the cup of coffee you’re drinking really matters.”

3. Once you establish your vision, there is a set of ten key initial criteria that any name being considered must meet:

• Is it easy to remember?
• Is it easy to understand?
• Is it easy to pronounce?
• Is it easy to spell?
• Does it sound good when spoken?
• Does it look good when written?
• Is it unique?
• Is it trademarked?
• Is the domain name available?
• Are there any negative connotations with it?

4. Consider the five primary approaches to naming to determine which may best represent your central vision for the brand in a distinct and powerful way:

• Functional or Descriptive (Facebook, Instagram, UnderArmor )
• Derived from Color, Number, Shape or Word Root (Accenture, RedBull, Starbucks)
• Experiential based on Human Processes (Discover, United, Visa)
• Abstract or Evocative (Apple, Uber, Virgin)
• Invented (Google, Skype, Xfinity)

5. Quantity and Diversity Equals Quality – Naming is a matter of satisfying many competing criteria – and while we have seen cases where the first name our team comes up with ends up being the final one chosen – the chances of having a name just pop into your head that meets all of them is practically impossible. The most effective way to come up with a name is to think of lots of different ideas, carefully screen and choose, and repeat. One method that’s proven effective is having all names under consideration sorted into an A and B list and reconciling it every time a new one is introduced. It is interesting to see names held initially in high favor lose a little bit of their luster with each review, while others move up the ladder.

Once a name is chosen – it will be forever attached to the brand or product it is developed for – so continuous review is critical to ensure it will stand the test of time.

Need help with a branding or marketing challenge?  Lets talk!

 

 

 

Marketing professional understandably struggle to make the best decisions on how to most effectively spend their marketing dollars. The options for building creative assets and reaching customers through media buys are extensive. We have all seen how quickly budgets can be squandered with little or no results.

That’s why we believe that constantly measuring each campaign is essential, in order to make the directional shifts necessary to achieve the desired results. Our approach is to work with our clients to establish the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for the campaign, and working backwards from these to develop an effective strategy scaled to optimize budget, desired timeline and client resources.

So as we begin to get deeper into 2015, here are 5 of the most effective tactics we employ to maximize budget:

 

Re-Targeting

Retargeting is a recent tool that allows you to place a cookie on any potential customer who visits your website, your campaign microsite or even a landing page. Leveraging that cookie, targeted ads can be placed on sites that they visit at a much lower cost than serving up ads on a site that every visitor would see. Re-Targeting allows you to continue reaching potential customers who came to your site to motivate them to return to the site and take further action. Regardless of the number of potential customers that visit your website, retargeting will almost certainly deliver an increase in conversions.

Retargeting doesn’t rely on collecting any personally identifying data; the cookie merely confirms the area of your site that your visitor browsed, allowing your ad to be targeted accordingly. Retargeting has the potential to deliver up to a ten-fold increase in the ROI of your marketing spend – making each dollar invested perform like five to ten.

As powerful a tactic as this is however, it is important that the immediacy and frequency that your retargeted ads are served up are proportionate to the degree of purchase intent exhibited by a visitor, otherwise it could very well turn them off.  So make sure and dial it up and back accordingly

 

Conversion Rate Optimization

While retargeting can be effective for visitors who leave without making a purchase, you should also be working on optimizing first-time conversion rates for your site. While it is smart to use retargeting to pursuing the potential customers who come to your site for the first time, it is always preferable to convert more of them on their initial visit.

Too often, businesses don’t develop a user experience that effectively mirrors their customers’ journey through the sale process. The first step in reversing that is by identifying the reasons they decide to leave in the first place.

A thorough, professional audit and analysis of your site’s overall information architecture, design, content structure, and functionality will provide you with a roadmap to address these problems. Some critical components we recommend include:

• Headlines and Visuals
• Navigation and User Paths
• Calls to Action
• Content & Structure
• Site Analytics

Finding the right digital agency will help you convert a higher rate of first time visitors move them faster through the sales cycle.

 

Geofencing

Geo-Fencing is location-based digital technology that allows an advertiser to select a geographic point using latitude and longitude and then to create a virtual “fence” around that point of a given radius in which your ads will be served up. For example, an advertiser can pinpoint a specific store, office or branch location, then deliver a targeted ad to anyone who comes within a 5-mile or 5-block radius of that location depending upon its density.

Ads delivered through geo-fencing typically yield higher conversions and better ROI for marketers since they’re highly contextual. It’s very much like being able to display a “special offer” sign across a dozen city blocks instantly, and only show it to the consumers you actually want to reach.

 

Well-Timed Ad Delivery

Rates for digital and mobile ad placement can vary widely depending on factors like the popularity and demand for the online property, available inventory, the quality of premium placement you want the ad displayed in – and of course – the time of day you want your ads served.  Online traffic of all kinds tends to peak at different times during the day and week, so it’s critical to understand the persona you are trying to reach. The time an ad runs can be based, for example, on weekday versus weekend usage patterns.

It is equally important to split test the times that ads are run, to see when it is most effective.  Coming from an advertising background myself, I have seen many broadcast media companies charge advertisers a premium to run their ads at a fixed time everyday, when in fact that strategy will only result in them reaching the same people at the same time without reaching additional prospects. Using an attitudinal approach, we might recommend that a B2B client try marketing to its audience after 5pm when they are done with their day and have more time engage with your ad. It’s important to evaluate interactions at all times of day to identify the best windows to most efficiently optimize performance.

 

Paid Twitter Promotion

Often overlooked in favor of better-known pay-per-click options, Twitter’s advertising offerings make good sense for business owners in almost every industry. Easy to use and suitable for even limited marketing budgets, promoted tweets are a great way to boost an existing campaign or to raise the profile of something new.

One of Twitter’s strengths is the relatively unobtrusive nature of its advertising products. These are native ads and are thus identical to an everyday tweet except for a discreet “Promoted by” tag. Users report that engagement with paid-for tweets is often at the same level as that engendered by natural activity, making them ideal for businesses that already have an active Twitter presence.

In addition to promoting their tweets in search results and on other users’ home timelines, Twitter advertisers have the option to send highly targeted and relevant promoted Tweets to a specific audience only.  A further benefit is the syndication of promoted Tweets through Twitter’s mobile apps and to selected third-party Twitter-management tools.

With Twitter, drilling down to your audience is straightforward; in addition to keyword targeting, Twitter offers segmentation by user geolocation, device type, language and other preferences. Setting up specific campaign parameters makes it easy to target in a pre-determined period, and specifying a maximum cost per engagement and daily budget allows you to lock in spend and prevent cost overruns. You’re paying only for each retweet, reply, favorite or click for your tweet, so you’ll be able to assess whether it’s working before a small portion of your budget is even exhausted.

As trends and technologies continue to accelerate at a pace faster than many marketers can match, the New Year is going to provide even more challenges for business-to-business marketers. With that in mind, here are what I believe are the top five most essential strategies you need to consider for 2015.

Omni-Channel Marketing
B2B marketers have been disproportionately focused on the shiny new marketing toy du jour – from mobile to display to social media to content marketing and back to mobile. With the rapid growth of digital consumption and what seems like the daily proliferation of social media channels, marketers are faced with more choices than ever when considering how they want to reach the business customer.

With each choice comes a certain amount of risk as marketers choosing to put a heavy investment in one channel may miss the untapped potential of another. This leaves a smaller margin for error as highly informed business consumers have become acutely aware of how to seek out information across a myriad of interactive channels, poll their networks and complete transactions.

Any effective B2B marketing strategy for 2015 should be one that integrates every channel across every device. This approach requires marketers – with the help of their agency – to understand the experience the customer is seeking when interacting with their brand. Omni-channel is a reflection of the wide variety of choices that customers have in how they engage a brand. The successful brand will enable their prospects to use all of the available channels.

Micro-Targeting
The proliferation of mobile, search and social analytics give us marketers all the tools we need to develop custom B2B strategies to hyper-target target customers with surgical precision – allowing us carve out the waste of traditional print and broadcast media and touch each prospect with the near intimacy of a one-to-one conversation.

Critical to creating these targeted messages is knowing who you’re talking to. Developing buyer personas allows you to craft and aim your marketing messaging with a higher degree of accuracy. As a digital-first agency, every campaign we develop is informed by the buyer personas of our clients. We look to yield as much information on these personas as possible, honing in on attributes such as their challenges, goals, background and the channels they use to research their decisions.

Committing to persona development lets you deep dive into needs, lifestyle, and motivations of your buyers. The work is well worth the results, which is the ability to construct more relevant content strategies throughout the buying cycle, post-purchase efforts, and account-based marketing activities. The more we understand their pains, the better we can create content that will point them in the right direction to address that pain.

Social Advertising
A dramatic shift has already begun towards paid social media advertising, a result of the decline in organic reach as social networks surge in popularity. This is a natural result of the growing competition for audience across these social platforms from bigger brands with more resources to spend on both organic and paid social.

As social networks and large publishers move away from earned media and towards paid media, B2B marketing teams will have to spend more time – and money – investing in paid or sponsored placements to engage hard-to-reach business targets. Changes to the Facebook algorithm in late 2013 have already produced a 44 percent decline in non-sponsored brand content in users’ newsfeeds. LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Pinterest now offer sponsored content placements and ads that promise specific reach.

The days of free social exposure are over and the only way to gain mindshare over the competition is to establish a budget to supplement your organic storytelling.

The key is to invest in those social properties that are working best for you and reinforce posts with strong calls to action (CTAs) and other supporting elements. For example, rather than embedding a link to a whitepaper download in the post, send interested users to a content landing page to extend the conversation. Then split test CTAs so you can get the right piece, in the right place, at the right time to further optimize every dollar spent.

Mobile
With more than 50 percent of internet traffic coming from mobile devices, B2B marketers must keep in mind that business prospects are still the same consumers outside of work that expect the same kind of omni-channel access to the types of digital experiences that consumer brands offer.

As B2B marketers, our challenge is to create these digital experiences to fit the preferences and needs of our buyer persona. More and more B2b brands are achieving omni-channel success with highly targeted digital properties that speak to very specific business users. And these efforts aren’t just flashy websites. They fold in mobile-optimized elements, offline activities and dynamic content offers to round out the personalized digital experience.
The key is to consider a “mobile-first” digital strategy so that it incorporates the totality of your content marketing and distribution strategy into dynamic display technology that adjusts content offers and image sizes based on the users’ screen resolution. Mobile is quickly becoming the hotbed of engagement in B2B marketing – if there is one race where you don’t want to get left behind – this is it.

High-Quality Visual Content
As brands turn into publishers, their content needs will span beyond grammatical accuracy and into the finer points of writing compelling copy adaptable across omni-channel platforms, crafted to resonate with the hyper-targeted personas we talked about above.

We are in an age of visual content where the need for well-crafted copy and visuals goes hand-in-hand. Unfortunately, one of the content marketers’ consistent pain points is not being able to produce enough to fill their content pipelines. This has lead forward-thinking marketers to seek out experienced agencies that specialize in creating masterfully written and visually gorgeous content specific to their buyer persona.

To do this most effectively, you must develop in-depth creative briefs with documentation that provides a complete view of what you’re trying to accomplish. Why?

Articles with images get 94 percent more total views

Including a Photo and a video in a press release increases views by over 45 percent

Sixty percent of buyers are more likely to consider or contact a business when an image shows up in a search result
Sixty-seven percent of online buyers say the quality of a product image is “very important” in selecting a brand or purchasing a product
Online buyers think that the quality of a products image is more important than product-specific information (63 percent), a long description (54 percent) and ratings and reviews (53 percent)

There is a 37 percent higher level of engagement for photos over pure text

I had the opportunity to get up close and personal with a collection of some of the the most incredible, technology driven warfighting machines at the 2014 AUSA event at the Washington Convention Center.

 

The Association of the United States Army (AUSA) annual meeting and exposition once again brought high-tech wares and weapons to the nation’s capital. And In what was a sure sign of the strength of the defense community and its determination to support the warfighter – the turnout for this year’s event was the strongest I have seen in years. And with the sudden and marked increase in global threats to our national security – the air was thick with patriotism.

 

The three-day event brought more than 500 industry and military exhibits and more than 30,000 attendees to AUSA. The expo also included workshops and talks by top Army and Defense Department officials on the state of the U.S. military.

 

Bluetext is proud to honor our defense community and the role we can play to help support its vision and mission of technology, innovation and continued dominance in global warfare.

It was great to attend this year’s GCN Awards Gala and experience the palpable strength, leadership and continued resiliency of the government IT contracting community as it persevered through the back to back storms of recession and sequestration to celebrate the vibrant role it plays in our local economy.

 

The GCN Awards honored IT projects and leaders who showed exceptional creativity and determination in building systems that drove savings and performance for the government in 2014.

 

I was joined by nearly 500 government and IT industry executives who turned out to honor 10 award winners and 10 honorable mentions across 20 critical projects as well as the work of a trio of executives recognized for their achievements and impact across both the government and enterprise components of the public sector IT market.

 

Bluetext is honored to have the opportunity to continue to support our IT community by working with many of its leaders on new and innovative ways to more effectively share their story of innovation and teamwork across the government IT community.

In this week in 1930, following a desperate search by the radio industry for a magic bullet to increase advertising revenue, the first soap opera was born. The industry managed to convince manufacturers of household goods to sponsor programming content that appealed to their primary consumers and “Painted Dreams” debuted on WGN in Chicago – its first sponsor was no other than Colgate-Palmolive.

It didn’t take long for Proctor & Gamble to jump in and up the game with its own innovation – producing and sponsoring its own branded programming content as consumers migrated from radio to TV. That run lasted 80 years and sparked a sudden and seismic shift in the way consumers digested content.

Fast forward to the present, and technology has forced marketers to become both publishers and innovators of branded content to keep up and stay engaged with a customer whose primary screen of interest now changes by the minute.

Chief among them are the hot Cyber Security brands that have stormed onto the global technology stage – in such masse that they are desperately seeking a way to differentiate themselves and appeal to their primary customers. And just like P&G did in the 1930s – they too are producing and sponsoring their own branded content. And given the endless number of channels their customers can chose to digest it, there is no shortage of compelling examples.

Identity solutions leader Lexis Nexis’ “Fraud of the Day” franchise hits it on the nose with breach stories that keep every potential customer of theirs wide awake at night and staring at the ceiling. A simple yet brilliant concept to keep their brand in front of them daily in a contextually relevant way.

http://www.fraudoftheday.com/

Intel & Toshiba pushed the boundaries of branded content with “The Power Inside” a blockbuster film that combined social media and technology to create an immersive, participatory experience for their primary consumer to experience their technology against the backdrop of a full feature motion picture.

http://www.insidefilms.com/en/

Palo Alto Networks has taken a less risky, more proactive and automated approach of creating a library of branded content that they license to partners and re-sellers to co-brand and amplify their industry focused solutions through what we like to call “social shrapnel” to extend the reach of their message.

http://www.computerlinks.com/fms/13679.173466_

McAfee went much farther than a library…they hired Bluetext to build an entire virtual agency on The Mall in Washington – 10 years into the future. “Future Agency” – the rich, immersive and interactive experience we created is a branded “house of content” that their primary consumer can literally fly through to access all things McAfee – branded content so appealing that it drove average time of engagement beyond the six minute mark.

http://bluetext.com/futureagency/

What does this all mean for the modern marketer in today’s increasingly digital environment? That branded content has worked effectively for nearly 100 years to engage the primary consumers it was intended to appeal to, enhanced, of course, by the technology that takes that marketing one step farther by allowing us to interact with it and share it to the friends and colleagues we think it will most appeal to. The only thing that’s changed is how they digest it.

As you plan your marketing strategy to drive visibility and demand for your brand in the red hot and highly competitive cyber security space, branded content can and should play a critical role. Even more critical is finding an agency partner with the creative firepower to “paint your dream”  and drive customer engagement with a truly differentiated and professionalized branded content experience.