Ariella Brown

So many brands have jumped on the bandwagon of influencer marketing that it may be losing all association with originality and authenticity. So when Amtrak decided on an angle for reach through social media, it went about it differently. Its goal was to work off people whose social reach run deep rather than merely wide.
Late in 2018, Amtrak launched its #AmtrakTakeMeThere Social Media Residency Program. It’s intended to showcase the diversity of the trains’ riders by following the stories of...

Podcasts, which are becoming increasingly important as a journalistic medium, have generally been male-dominated. But the medium is getting more diverse, thanks in part to a new podcasting studio dedicated to giving women a voice.

Raina Penchansky, founder and CEO of Digital Brand Architects, (DBA), a digital talent management and social media marketing firm, spoke to me about her company’s latest endeavor, the recently launched Dear Media (DM). Located in West Hollywood, this new podcasting ...

This year’s Cyber Monday was the biggest ever. Impressive as they are, the numbers for sales only tell one part of the story. The other is which brands invested in ads in kicking off the holiday shopping season and how customers responded and reached out to them.
Crunching through the numbers, Adobe Analytics reported that this year’s Cyber Monday Sales broke US sales records, thitting $7.9 billion, an amount that represent 19.3 percent YOY growth and which exceeded the predicted spend of $7....

Today we have all kinds of “smart” devices, many of which can even be activated by voice alone and offer intelligent responses to our queries. This kind of cutting-edge technology may make us consider AI to be a product of the 21st century. But it actually has much earlier roots, going all the way back to the middle of the 20th century.
AI Roots
It may be said that Alan Turing’s ideas for computational thinking lay the foundation for AI. John McCarthy, Professor of Computer Science, Stanford ...

It is a truth nearly universally acknowledged that a comprehensive marketing strategy must include AI. Most marketers know that AI is the wave of the future. Yet a disconnect persists between that aspiration and the actual number of AI users. Nevertheless, current trends indicate that CMOs and CIOs will have a meeting of minds on the benefits of committing to AI, and businesses will soon reap the benefits.
Recent research from the IBM Institute for Business Value found that the overwhelming m...

Even in our high-tech, hyper-connected world, people crave the type of human connection that only comes through live events. According to EventMarketer's 2018 Event & Experiential Marketing Industry Forecast & Best Practices Study, 84 percent of marketers surveyed consider events integral to their marketing operations.
Among the brands tapping into the power of live events are tlocal journalism outlets under the USA Today Network umbrella.
“We’ve focused on a couple of key areas, that are pas...

How AI can turn a small optimistic sample into a national audience
Can you leverage the sampling of responses to a single question to effectively target people for a nationwide campaign? The answer, it seems, is yes, thanks to the power of machine learning.
This past summer, Texas-based Frost Bank launched its Opt for Optimism campaign.. Frost’s goal is to not only foster optimistic feelings but to promote action through the digital awareness campaign, set up by AdTheorent, and a “30 day opti...

Here we are in November, and holiday marketing is in full swing already. In fact, some holiday marketing has been in place already since early October, much to the chagrin of those of us who think they should at least let us get through Halloween before decking things out in red and green. While there is some method to the marketing madness, there is much room for improvement, and the key to that is meeting the expectations of your target market.
Timing is everything
The first question is: wh...

All businesses aim to improve their bottom line. The end goal is to increase revenue while keeping costs down. So some may be hesitant to add on an additional cost in adopting a CDP. But that kind of thinking is what is known as being penny-wise and pound-foolish.
"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half."
This difficulty was observed by a 19th Century marketing pioneer, John Wanamaker. To a large extent, it still holds true, but thanks to more...

Is this the future of ad exchanges? Transparent (and profitable) for consumers, thanks to Blockchain
The cost of ad fraud for this year alone is $19 billion, according to Juniper Research. That amounts to $51 million lost each day of the year. And things are expected to get worse, hitting yearly loss of $44 billion in four years. Blockchain may be one key to combatting the problem of skewed market data that results from spam traffic.
A company called NOIZ serves as an AI+blockchain ad exchang...

Takeaway: In order for automation to work with and for humanity rather than against it, we need safeguards and informed humans empowered to stop or fix a system error.
“To err is human; to really foul things up requires a computer.” William E. Vaughan made this observation back in 1969. Giving control over to an automated system carries potential for the system to go awry and cause serious harm before it is checked.
Automation is not new, but it is becoming a lot more widespread thanks to the...

Anthony Coleman, senior director, search and social, Digital Remedy, believes that easily-accessible metrics are not as useful as some people think
Click-through rate (CTR) has long dominated as a core marketing metrics because it is so easily tracked. With video, new metrics, like engagement rates and completion rates (VCR), are also taken into account.
However, these metrics don’t necessarily prove the campaign is working toward the marketing goal if it isn’t defined properly.
Anthony Colem...

Takeaway: Blockchain enables the creation of a tamper-proof trail that establishes trust that things are what people claim them to be. Applying the same principle to people’s credentials and work history changes the recruiting game.
The Problem with Candidates’ Self-Representation
It’s quite common for recruiters to identify likely candidates from their LinkedIn profiles. In fact, many online applications offer the option of using that rather than manually filling in all the fields; it can ev...