Avishai Sharon, Co-founder & CEO of TrenDemon, discussed their software on ILTV:

How Do You Connect Content Marketing to Sales?

My personal background was heading a marketing agency for many years and one of my biggest struggles was how do I prove our value and our effort to our customers and how do you connect the impact of what we call content marketing to business goals and to sales? When we couldn’t find an easy way to show that correlation three and a half years ago we went ahead and founded TrenDemon to help companies do just that.

We connect their marketing efforts, which today rely mostly on content, you want your audience to consume valuable content, as opposed to just advertising. The big challenge is how do you attribute those efforts to sales? There’s actually a prior problem, how do you actually map the customer journey? How do you track those different touch points into one picture?

Reverse Engineering Successful Customer Journeys

The first thing we do is look at all the different touchpoints that a customer has had over his lifecycle. We ask the question, not just where do they come from, but how deep was their engagement? Did they actually watch the video? Did they actually read the article? Then you can start reverse engineering those successful journeys and say what’s common about all of these successful journeys.

What we found, and this is the interesting thing, we’re working with over 90 companies today worldwide and the vast majority of content the companies produce, over 90 percent, is ineffective at driving business goals. As you guys know it’s very expensive to create quality content and it takes a lot of effort.

If People Read the Right Content They Will Covert to a Sale

The second interesting thing is that if you do manage to find those 10 percent and you find a way to get it in front of the right people you’re actually able to improve dramatically your results. So there’s not just a correlation between what buyers did beforehand, there’s also a causation, a causal relationship, that if people read the right content at the right time they’re more likely to follow a path. We’re not probably as sophisticated as we believe that we are.

We’re a SaaS company, a cloud-based solution. We’re working a lot in the US and one of our biggest markets and growing markets is Japan. They’re investing a lot of content and a lot on technology. Essentially, because we look at the customer journey and not necessarily specific languages we can operate in any environment which allows us to grow pretty much anywhere. As long as they have content, which means that they’re producing something other than just advertising, they want people and audiences to actually engage with what they’re producing and they do have some business outcomes that they’re looking to measure.

About TrenDemon:

Founded in 2013, TrenDemon is the world’s leading content marketing attribution and optimization solution, helping marketers prove and improve their content’s impact.

TrenDemon insights can help you uncover your content marketing ROI, impact on business goals, and engagement to help guide the content strategy. Our optimization units will help you increase conversions and shorten time to convert on your owned assets.

TrenDemon proudly serves a wide range of customers, from Fortune 500s and brands to SaaS, B2B, and financial companies and is backed by leading VCs.

AI is being used to generate content, with it being an especially popular option among students. Educators are anxious for tools to detect such content, with many different tools claiming to be able to do so.

Unfortunately, according to an article on the company’s website, such tools simply don’t work:

Do AI detectors work?

• In short, no. While some (including OpenAI) have released tools that purport to detect AI-generated content, none of these have proven to reliably distinguish between AI-generated and human-generated content.
• Additionally, ChatGPT has no “knowledge” of what content could be AI-generated. It will sometimes make up responses to questions like “did you write this [essay]?” or “could this have been written by AI?” These responses are random and have no basis in fact.
• To elaborate on our research into the shortcomings of detectors, one of our key findings was that these tools sometimes suggest that human-written content was generated by AI.
  • When we at OpenAI tried to train an AI-generated content detector, we found that it labeled human-written text like Shakespeare and the Declaration of Independence as AI-generated.
  • There were also indications that it could disproportionately impact students who had learned or were learning English as a second language and students whose writing was particularly formulaic or concise.
• Even if these tools could accurately identify AI-generated content (which they cannot yet), students can make small edits to evade detection.

The revelation sheds greater light on why OpenAI shuttered its own AI content detector and illustrates the challenges that lie ahead for educators and others.

According to Google Product Expert Kenichi Suzuki, Google has revealed that some 60% of the internet is duplicate content.

The revelation is sure to be unsettling to many web developers and content creators, although there were no additional details about the criteria Google uses to determine “duplicate” content.

Avishai Sharon, Co-founder & CEO of TrenDemon, discussed their software on ILTV:

How Do You Connect Content Marketing to Sales?

My personal background was heading a marketing agency for many years and one of my biggest struggles was how do I prove our value and our effort to our customers and how do you connect the impact of what we call content marketing to business goals and to sales? When we couldn’t find an easy way to show that correlation three and a half years ago we went ahead and founded TrenDemon to help companies do just that.

We connect their marketing efforts, which today rely mostly on content, you want your audience to consume valuable content, as opposed to just advertising. The big challenge is how do you attribute those efforts to sales? There’s actually a prior problem, how do you actually map the customer journey? How do you track those different touch points into one picture?

Reverse Engineering Successful Customer Journeys

The first thing we do is look at all the different touchpoints that a customer has had over his lifecycle. We ask the question, not just where do they come from, but how deep was their engagement? Did they actually watch the video? Did they actually read the article? Then you can start reverse engineering those successful journeys and say what’s common about all of these successful journeys.

What we found, and this is the interesting thing, we’re working with over 90 companies today worldwide and the vast majority of content the companies produce, over 90 percent, is ineffective at driving business goals. As you guys know it’s very expensive to create quality content and it takes a lot of effort.

If People Read the Right Content They Will Covert to a Sale

The second interesting thing is that if you do manage to find those 10 percent and you find a way to get it in front of the right people you’re actually able to improve dramatically your results. So there’s not just a correlation between what buyers did beforehand, there’s also a causation, a causal relationship, that if people read the right content at the right time they’re more likely to follow a path. We’re not probably as sophisticated as we believe that we are.

We’re a SaaS company, a cloud-based solution. We’re working a lot in the US and one of our biggest markets and growing markets is Japan. They’re investing a lot of content and a lot on technology. Essentially, because we look at the customer journey and not necessarily specific languages we can operate in any environment which allows us to grow pretty much anywhere. As long as they have content, which means that they’re producing something other than just advertising, they want people and audiences to actually engage with what they’re producing and they do have some business outcomes that they’re looking to measure.

About TrenDemon:

Founded in 2013, TrenDemon is the world’s leading content marketing attribution and optimization solution, helping marketers prove and improve their content’s impact.

TrenDemon insights can help you uncover your content marketing ROI, impact on business goals, and engagement to help guide the content strategy. Our optimization units will help you increase conversions and shorten time to convert on your owned assets.

TrenDemon proudly serves a wide range of customers, from Fortune 500s and brands to SaaS, B2B, and financial companies and is backed by leading VCs.

Shantanu Narayen, Chairman and CEO of Adobe, discusses how the pandemic has created another “inflection point” in the move toward digital transformation:

Digital Transformation Is A $120 Billion Opportunity

It was a good quarter all around. All of our businesses performed exceedingly well. On the Creative Cloud and the Document Cloud, not only did we have a great acquisition. in other words, new customers adopting the platform, but we really focused on engagement and demonstrating the value of our products to our customers. Even our retention levels came back to pre-COVID levels which we believe is a really good sign.

What’s happening in the world is the businesses that we’re in, namely creativity and enabling people to tell their story, what’s happening with documents and accelerating document productivity, and what’s happening associated with every single enterprise needing to engage with their customers digitally, when you add all of this up we think it’s over a $120 billion of an addressable market opportunity for Adobe.

Pandemic Was Inflection Point For Everything Being Digital

What the pandemic and the current health situation has done is that it has created yet another inflection point for everything being digital. What we will have to continue to monitor is what happens in the spending environment. But as it relates to the overall need for the kinds of solutions that Adobe provides as well as the importance of digital in the marketplace I think that’s going to be sustainable for decades. You’re not going to put the genie back in the bottle as it relates to engaging digitally and creating content digitally.

We believe that we’re in this third phase of what is happening in the enterprise. Traditionally, businesses first focused on automating the back office, and then they focused on automating the front office for knowledge workers. It’s absolutely clear that the biggest imperative that exists in the enterprise today is how do you engage with customers? This is a category that we call Customer Experience Management.

Customer Insight Is Key To Your Digital Transformation

If you’re an enterprise today and you’re thinking about digital transformation, what’s top of that stack in terms of where you have to invest is to make sure that you have insight into what your customers are doing. How are they engaging with you? What’s the profile? How do you deliver the personalized experience?

We really believe that what you’re seeing in the enterprise spend environment is that the companies that are focused on this next generation of delivering customer engagement, the customer experiences, and the insight associated with how to take the most advantage of that data, they’re going to be the secular winners moving forward.

Dan Springer, CEO of DocuSign, discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digital transformation and he says that businesses are not going back to a manual world:

COVID Pandemic Accelerated Digital Transformation

We’ve been really pleased with the growth we’ve had since going public a few years. We have also seen significant acceleration since the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s obviously a horrible pandemic and our number one priority has been the health and wellbeing of our employees so we can take good care of our customers. As you can see in our Q1 earnings we did see an acceleration of our bookings to 59 percent.

Traditionally, if you look at the billings-type metric they have been in the mid-30s’. A significant portion of that (increase) was due to increased use cases from customers driving that digital transformation faster with services like DocuSign.

Companies To Stay In This Digitally Transformed World

One of the things we’ve seen with the pandemic impact is that it has really accelerated the path that companies were already on to drive that digital transformation. We don’t see companies after the pandemic settles down going back and saying they want more paper and more manual processes.

Once they’ve got the benefits from that efficiency in their business, the better customer experience, and the better employee experience, they’re going to stay in a digitally transformed world. They are going to use DocuSign and other fantastic services to do that.

The Future Is Going To Have eSignature At The Center

We really think that the future is going to have eSignature at the center of what we call the overall Agreement Cloud. Companies want to be more agreeable. They want to be easier to do business with and be easier to do business for. They’re going to not just use DocuSign for signature but all of the other components of preparing agreements and managing those agreements digitally once they’ve been created. That’s why we’re excited about our very robust future.

We just past a billion dollars in revenue (for DocuSign eSignature). We are only four percent penetrated today and we’re six times larger than the next biggest player in the space. There’s not a lot of penetration yet in that core business. Notary is still predominantly done manually. We are making investments there. We believe we can bring the same ease of use that we brought to eSignature we can bring to notary.

AI To Power The DocuSign Agreement Cloud

Much bigger than that, even expanding upon the opportunity of eSignature is that broader Agreement Cloud opportunity. We think this is the next big cloud opportunity. You are going to see companies increasingly say I don’t just want to do the workflow and signature. I also want to drive the creations of those agreements. I want to think about artificial intelligence and search capability to manage my agreements. This would enable me to actually manage my business and make my company more agreeable.

Those are some of the investments we’re making. That’s why we just finished the acquisition of Seal Software last month so we can bring additional artificial intelligence and analytic capability to help people run their businesses better.

WordPress VIP (WPVIP), Automattic’s enterprise subsidiary, is buying Parse.ly to provide enterprise clients with content analytics.

WPVIP currently offers enterprise-grade WordPress services to some of the biggest names in tech. Much of those services revolve around providing consultation, products and services to help clients get the most from WordPress.

The acquisition of Parse.ly is a natural fit for WPVIP, adding powerful content analytics for the enterprise. WPVIP’s Nick Gernert highlighted some of the benefits:

Over the years, we’ve been fortunate to see firsthand the impact of Parse.ly’s content analytics platform. Parse.ly isn’t simply capturing traditional traffic analytics. Instead, the platform goes deeper—revealing exactly how individual content pieces are impacting traffic in real-time. The upshot for content marketers? Rich reporting with detailed insights into the business impact of their content.

With Parse.ly, the workflows that WPVIP customers use every day will surface insights that move beyond page views and visits. For example, commerce brands will understand which content converts visitors into buyers. They will also be able to deliver content recommendations for top-performing products.

According to Parse.ly’s co-founder Sachin Kamdar, all of the company’s employees will now join WPVIP. Meanwhile, all of Parse.ly’s customers will gain access to WPVIP.

Kamdar emphasized the further innovation that will result from WPVIP’s investment:

Parse.ly’s open source WordPress plugin is already the most popular way to deploy Parse.ly to websites. And we have lots of ideas for how Parse.ly’s dashboard and API can improve enterprise WordPress sites. But, that’s not the only (or even the primary) place we’ll be innovating in 2021 and beyond. Our desire was always to make Parse.ly the top content analytics system on the market, and solve key real-time and historical analytics needs for editors, journalists, corporate marketers, and content marketers alike.

With investment from the WPVIP team, and with wider product innovation support from the Automattic team, this dream will be a reality. You, our customers and prospective customers, will benefit directly from this investment.

Why is it important to resist the urge to have your content do the selling?

Tim: What we do at The Tot is provide trust and advice and mindfully curated products. For it to be considered trusted advice it needs to come from a credible real place. It needs to be authentic and it needs to come from experts, people who know what they are talking about. At The Tot we work with a network of experts around the globe to create parenting content. What first-time parents are looking for most is information and they are just as likely to turn to a website as they are to go to a doctor and they are even more likely to go to a website than to ask their own Mother. If we are able to develop and curate content of moms sharing to other moms, that develops a relationship and provides values for them.

How do you measure the success and performance of a content-driven marketing strategy?

Matt: When you consider measuring in general, there are so many different formats that are out there that people can leverage. Oftentimes, people are saying… well I want articles for my blog. What type of article are you looking for? What is the goal of that piece of content? Are you trying to drive organic search and bring in new audiences so they can learn who you are or are you trying to engage them a bit more with videos and infographics? Every single format has a very specific measurement.

Beyond that, your measurements are somewhat different than your basic media buying for example, where you spend a dollar and hope to make back three, or some version of that. When we are looking at content marketing, especially when it is brand agnostic, the real important ideal there is to think about how can I actually give something to my audience that resonates with them, teaches them and solves a problem. Then ultimately, your brand is there waiting for them.

Awareness, Engagement, Advocacy

The three things that I look at are awareness, engagement, and advocacy. The first thing you would want to do in building a content marketing strategy is to consider the idea of awareness, giving awareness to the people you are working with. Then having intent-driven content. People are asking questions in Google all the time and they are getting answers. If your site has the answers in its content, especially if it’s early stages, then that’s going to do something that most (ecommerce) sites aren’t doing, which is to put eyes onto your site, without the brand and product coming into play at first.

With this brand agnostic content, the bulk of your content is primarily text-based content. With measurement I look at eyes on site and what they are doing when they get there. Are they jumping around to different pages or are they bouncing right away? When you bring in somebody to your site where it is solving something you have to have something that is engaging to keep them there and keep them coming back.

Tim: We definitely watch inside of Google Analytics to be able to see the pageviews, what people are doing, and how they move from the editorial side of the site to the product side of the site. We also use content as part of our marketing program. It’s definitely an upper funnel prospecting piece.

Quality Content is Just as Important as Ad Spend

Tim: As somebody who came from an ad agency working with clients who had large ad spends and then coming to a start-up to help them grow and find customers, we didn’t have a large ad budget. What we did have though is this wonderful bank of content. This quality content has become just as important as the ad spend. Every month we put together a new prospecting campaign with a variety of articles and then we keep some evergreen pieces of what performed and that gives us a really good indicator of the type of people we are able to draw and attract to the site. It’s very contextually targeted so somebody that is clicking and looking at an article titled, “9 Ways to Prepare for a New Baby,” is probably going to be our customer.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act gives companies immunity for content users upload or post on their sites. As a result, companies like Facebook, Twitter and others cannot be held legally liable for an offensive post, picture or the like.

In recent years Section 230 has come under fire, culminating in President Trump threatening to veto a defense spending bill unless Section 230 is revoked. While President-elect Biden has not weighed in on Section 230 directly, his former top tech advisor has said its time for changes to the law, throwing in question the law’s status even with a change of administration.

Internet Works, however, is working to help educate lawmakers about the role of the law. Automattic (maker of WordPress), Cloudflare, Dropbox, eBay, Etsy, Glassdoor, GoDaddy, Medium, Nextdoor, Patreon, Pinterest, Reddit, Snap Inc., Tripadvisor, Vimeo and the Wikimedia Foundation are all members of the coalition.

“These well-known internet companies and nonprofits launched Internet Works to elevate the voice of stakeholders across the digital economy and work with policymakers to preserve the benefits of Section 230, the foundational internet law that enables the United States to lead the world in innovation and robust job growth in the technology sector,” said Josh Ackil, Spokesperson for Internet Works. “Internet Works members rely on CDA 230 to make their platforms safe for users and support free expression. This coalition brings new voices and diverse perspectives to Washington’s current Section 230 debate, which too often focuses on the largest internet platforms.”

The wide range of companies making up the coalition illustrates the far-reaching impact of Section 230. While many think of social media platforms as the primary beneficiaries of the law, companies like Dropbox also benefit. As a cloud storage provider, should Dropbox be liable for whatever a customer chooses to use that storage for? If Dropbox should be liable, then what measures should they be expected to take to verify the content they host? What privacy protections will customers be able to expect, or not expect, as a result of those measures?

Whatever happens with Section 230, it’s clear there are significant challenges to addressing the problems of a modern internet.

The world’s two leading companies in the discovery & native advertising industry will remain fierce competitors in what still is a chaotic and unpredictable ad market.

“As part of the process we exchanged financial information with each other,” says Taboola Founder & CEO Adam Singolda in a blog post. “Based on the relative performance of the two companies, we decided the original deal does not make sense anymore. We could choose to pay the same price of 30% in equity + $250M, but our shareholders thought it’s too much for what we would get based on the relative contribution of the two companies. Nothing emotional, not about culture fit, just data.”

“Out of deep respect, we tried to do a deal that was equity only (but less equity), or equity and cash (but less cash) that matched Outbrain’s financial contribution to Taboola. We failed, and we called it off.”

Outbrain Co-Founder and CEO Yaron Galai expressed his own thoughts on the collapse of the merger:

“It is now public news that Outbrain’s planned merger with Taboola is heading to termination in the near future. This isn’t the outcome any of us anticipated for this process. We believed when entering this deal that there is great potential value to be had for our employees, our marketers and publisher partners, and our shareholders. However, this combination apparently was simply not meant to be. We worked hard to mix water and oil, but ultimately the companies proved to be too different to be mixed.” 

“During a very stormy year for the Outbrain team, due to both the pandemic and the cloud of the merger, Outbrain’s character as the #1 most trusted partner for the world’s best publishers has shone through very brightly. We’re excited to continue innovating and building the best native advertising products for publishers and marketers as an independent company for many years to come.”

“The Qualtrics IPO is actually a win-win situation for both SAP and Qualtrics,” says SAP CEO Christian Klein. “When we are talking about Qualtrics let me first outline that Qualtrics was for sure one of the best acquisitions SAP ever did. They performed in the last 9 months above and beyond all the expectations we have set at the point of the acquisition. Now, three months back when I became the sole CEO of SAP Ryan Smith and I discussed a few options about how to move Qualtrics to the next level.”

“SAP’s acquisition of Qualtrics has been a great success and has outperformed our expectations with 2019 cloud growth in excess of 40 percent, demonstrating very strong performance in the current setup,” Klein stated. “As Ryan Smith, Zig Serafin, and I worked together, we decided that an IPO would provide the greatest opportunity for Qualtrics to grow the Experience Management category, serve its customers, explore its own acquisition strategy and continue building the best talent. SAP will remain Qualtrics’ largest and most important go-to-market and research and development (R&D) partner while giving Qualtrics greater independence to broaden its base by partnering and building out the entire experience management ecosystem.”

“When we launched the Experience Management category, our goal was always to help as many organizations as possible leverage the XM Platform as a system of action,” Qualtrics Founder Ryan Smith said. “SAP is an incredible partner with unprecedented global reach, and we couldn’t be more excited about continuing the partnership. This will allow us to continue building out the XM ecosystem across a broad array of partners.”

SAP agreed to acquire Qualtrics just four days before Qualtrics was to go public in 2018, recognizing the potential of bringing together experience and operational data (X+O) to help organizations take action. SAP currently owns 100 percent of Qualtrics shares. SAP will retain majority ownership of Qualtrics and has no intention of spinning off or otherwise divesting its majority ownership interest. Ryan Smith intends to be Qualtrics’ largest individual shareholder.

Christian Klein, CEO of SAP, discusses the reasons for their IPO and says that Qualtrics has been the best acquisition that SAP ever did:

Qualtrics IPO Is A Win-Win For SAP and Qualtrics

When we are talking about Qualtrics let me first outline that Qualtrics was for sure one of the best acquisitions SAP ever did. They performed in the last 9 months above and beyond all the expectations we have set at the point of the acquisition. Now, three months back when I became the sole CEO of SAP Ryan Smith and I discussed a few options about how to move Qualtrics to the next level. The partial IPO, we are both fully convinced, is actually a win-win situation for both SAP and Qualtrics. 

First, it will allow Qualtrics to focus on the non-SAP customer base in a high closed market. Second, despite the IPO, of course, SAP will remain fully committed to Experience Management (XM) and we will develop further use cases for our customers. We will also continue with the joint go-to-market. SAP is fully committed and will be in the long run highly committed to to Qualtrics and also will remain a majority shareholder of Qualtrics going forward.

IPO Allows Qualtrics To Go After non-SAP Customers

We kicked off already in the last 19 months, great use cases for our customers. We launched Human Experience Management (HXM) which helped both to accelerate the sales of Qualtrics but also our core application success factors. We did the same for commerce. In our product strategy, it actually plans to really expand experience management across our solution portfolio. 

Our employees are very excited about that because they see the benefits for our customers and this is something that won’t change with the IPO. This will allow Qualtrics more autonomy to also go after the market with non-SAP customers as this is a high quote segment.

Armita Peymandoust, VP Product Management, Analytics, and Einstein at Salesforce, discusses new AI-powered email features for Marketing Cloud announced by Salesforce at Connections 19:

AI-Powered Email Capabilities Released Into Salesforce Marketing Cloud

As we know email is still a really important channel. Over 64 percent of customers are still saying that they prefer email channels to all the others. What we’re doing is we’re making email marketing even smarter with a set of new AI capabilities getting released into Salesforce Marketing Cloud. One of them is Einstein Engagement Frequency. The other one is Einstein Send Time Optimization. We also have Einstein Content Tagging out and available today to our customers. Email is definitely not dead. Even the Millennials say that.

Einstein Engagement Frequency

With Einstein Engagement Frequency we’re trying to tell the marketer what’s the sweet range that they should keep on engaging with their customers. As marketers, we want to keep on engaging with our customers but we just don’t want to get to a point that we’re potentially annoying them. So we are telling them that this is the range that you should stay in.

Einstein Send Time Optimization

Now that the marketer knows what the frequency of engagement should be, with Einstein Send Time Optimization we’re also telling them what is the right time to send those messages. It’s really easy with a drag and drop of an activity into Journey Builder we make every message go out at the right time for the customers.

Einstein Content Tagging

Then with Einstein Content Tagging, we’re basically bringing image recognition the same set of AI capabilities that you’re familiar with for your customer based or consumer based products. This is where you upload photos and then they automatically get tagged. We are bringing that same technology to the hand of the marketer. Every image that’s getting uploaded into Content Builder gets automatically tagged so they can find it later and use it when they’re building their messages.

Transactional Messaging

We’re also releasing Transactional API’s for Emails and SMS. There are different types of emails out there. There’s the commercial one and there’s the transactional one. It allows the marketer to bring both of those two in an inter-marketing cloud and take advantage of Marketing Cloud to send those emails to have the same voice, the same brand voice, and also be able to see how those are performing all in one place.

Indiana Pacers Improved Customer Engagements By 20 Percent

These features are all relatively new. So we have pilot customers that have been taking advantage of them. We have one retailer that talked about Einstein Engagement Frequency. They had a hunch that they were over messaging customers but they couldn’t really put their finger on it. With Einstein Engagement Frequency we could show them visually exactly where they’re over engaging with their customers and let them take action on it. The platform automatically created lists so that they would not send messages to the ones that are getting too many email messages.

We’ve had a set of AI features in Marketing Cloud, specifically Einstein Engagement Scores, was one that the NBA’s Indiana Pacers is taking advantage of, to increase the engagement rate that they’re having with their fans. They got a 20 percent increase in engagements with their fans using that.

Customer Engagement Getting Even More Granular

We have a jam-packed roadmap for the next of the rest of the year as well. One of the things that I’m really excited about is Content Selection that’s coming out. Content Selection lets each of those messages that we’re creating be dynamically optimized for every customer that’s receiving them. Think of your email as a template that has different aspects or different selections in it that gets automatically replaced with what your customer cares about most and also what they have engaged with most and historically. It’s very engaging for every one of your customers.

The other one that I’m interested in (that is coming later) is bringing natural language processing to understanding your subject lines. What types of subject lines are resonating? Why is it that they’re resonating with your customers? It will give you an insight on them first and then also give you recommendations on how to improve your subject lines.

Dr. Vivian Chan, Sparrho CEO, recently discussed on CNBC their unique hybrid AI approach to helping companies use science and information to back up their brands messaging:

AI Enables Humans to Make Better-Informed Decisions

Artificial intelligence is really about algorithms and how we can use data that we collect to enable humans to make better-informed decisions. I not at all about having computers make decisions on behalf of humans. In a way, I think it’s machines that will be helping evolve the tasks and not actually replacing the human roles. Human roles themselves will be evolving also as the technology improves. This allows humans to have more headspace to be thinking about things that machines can’t do right now.

Machines can’t necessarily summarize a lot of pieces of contextual analysis very well yet to a 100 percent accuracy and humans are still better at making nonlinear connection points. For example, being able to say that this mathematical equation is super relevant to an agricultural problem. If we don’t have the tagging and reference and citations humans are still better at making those nonlinear new connection points than machines.

Humans are still good at coming up with the questions. If you actually pose the right question and you train the data and the algorithms you might actually get the right answer. However, you still need to have the humans to be thinking about what the questions are in order to ultimately get the answers.

It’s About Using AI as a Means to an End

I  think the angle is really thinking about using AI as a means to an end and not just the end. Ultimately, this is a hybrid approach and various different people are calling it differently. Even MIT professors are calling it a hybrid approach. We’re calling it augmented intelligence. We need to come up with a good relationship between humans and machines. Marketing is about building relationships. It’s about building relationships between brands and consumers and now how do we build that relationship digitally?

Using Science to Build an Authenticated Brand

In this digital age, consumers are a lot more tech savvy but are also information savvy. They want to know what the is science behind certain things. Even if you’re talking about CPG, consumer packaged goods, what is the science behind a shampoo product right now when it claims 98 percent prevention of hair loss? What is the real science behind that and how do we actually bring that simplified science-oriented message to the consumer? How can consumers educate themselves and make informed decisions based on the products and thereby build a stronger brand relationship?

Ultimately what we’re trying to do at Sparrow is simplify science to build trust in brands. Especially for marketing departments and brands, it’s really allowing them to have the evidence-based science and the facts because building a very authenticated brand is what is meaningful to consumers. Research says that about 71 percent of consumers immediately reject content that looks like a sales pitch. Building a relationship and having an authenticated brand and content is super important in building that relationship between brand and consumers.

Sparrho Provides Content as a Service On Demand

We’re going even wider with that by providing what we call content as a service or relevant content on demand. We then integrate that into the digital platforms or the brands. We have what we call augmented intelligence with over 16 million pieces of content that is augmented by a network of more than 400,000 monthly active PhDs in a150 countries. They curate and summarize what’s actually happening in the latest of science.

We know that in about 60 percent of pharmaceuticals, biotech, and even med-tech companies, are spending more than $50 million per year just in content. Content has been the major driver for a lot of their marketing. In pharmaceuticals, they’re trying to really bring that relationship that they have offline to online. It’s at the heart of this digital transformation age that we are going through. This is really helping bring that relationship online by using the right engaging content. Our goal with Sparrow is to drive more engagement and ultimately more sales.

Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe, discusses how Adobe is helping companies large and small through their digital transformation in an interview on CNBC:

Adobe Helping Businesses Transform

When we talk about helping businesses transform we do every aspect of it. We help them create that experience and help them understand how to attract customers. That last mile of transacting with customers is so critical. Adobe was a company that actually innovated tremendously but we had a two-tier distribution channel. We have two businesses. We have the creative business and we have the enterprise business. If you look at what we’ve been able to accomplish in the long run and the two tailwinds that we have, we continue to be really optimistic about Adobe’s prospects.

When we completely moved to the cloud we recognized that every other company would go through what we did. Namely, how do you engage with your customers digitally? Do you understand how to acquire them and how do they use your software? I think sharing our learnings with other people gives us incredible credibility in the enterprise and we learn from these customers.

Creating a Real-Time Customer Profile is So Critical

In enterprise software, this third generation, which is all about customer experience management, I think it’s the companies who recognize that you have to partner with an entire ecosystem to create this real-time customer profile that’s absolutely so critical. That’s why our partnerships, whether they be with ServiceNow or Microsoft or the other cloud kings is so critical in enabling our customers to completely transform themselves.

What we have been able to do is create this real-time customer profile. People are really within an enterprise saying how do I create native applications? ServiceNow is clearly the leader in IT Service Management. What John (Donahoe) has done is truly special. I think partnering with them to enable IT professionals within an enterprise to use Adobe’s Customer Experience Management with ServiceNow’s IT Service Management, that was a natural.

The Need to Transform is Front and Center for Every C-Level Executive

Design and creativity have never been more important. Everything has a screen. So people are creating content, whether that’s a car, whether that’s a retail experience, whether it’s a basketball stadium. Adobe is the content provider that enables all of these screens to be delivered with incredible content. Given design is more important and given mobile devices are in every single place, that’s a tremendous tailwind.

Secondly, when people look at what’s happening with Amazon trying to get into their businesses, the need to transform is also front and center for every c-level executive. Given that Adobe’s been through our own transformation and has software they want to hear from us and they want to experience that same benefit that we have been able to see.

I’ve talked about how video is explosive. II think what Disney is doing both with their own service as well as with more control of Hulu is really saying people are consuming more and more content digitally. So providing the analytics for that, providing the digital rights management for that, the right ability to audience segment in terms of who you are attracting, a lot of that is what Adobe powers. This is not just for Disney but for frankly all the major media companies in the world.

Adobe Powering Big CPG Companies Through a Digital Transformation

The big CPG companies are going through the following question. They have sometimes hundreds of millions or billions of people using their products and they just don’t necessarily know who they are. Giving them that insight into how they create this incredible customer database, how they understand usage patterns, and how they understand what these people want. If we can provide that insight to companies then all the CPG companies can recognize that this direct relationship will enable them to innovate at a faster pace.

For example, what Unilever is trying to do is really say we have this tremendous distribution network but what they’ve tried to do even with Dollar Shave Club is really say, “How do we create an incredible customer database?” But the same thing is happening across Colgate or Procter & Gamble. We are partnering very heavily with Unilever as they embark on this digital transformation and understanding customer patterns and customer sentiments across the world.

Also read:

Without AI, Real-Time Personalization Would Not Be Possible

Adobe Experience Manager is a content management system that helps companies design, build and manage websites. Unlike much of Adobe’s software, however, Experience Manager was still based on legacy software that required large monolithic updates and slow patch times, rather than the benefits of cloud-based software and its continuous delivery approach.

“Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service supercharges organizations’ abilities to create, manage and deliver more campaigns, digital assets and experiences faster than ever before,” said Loni Stark, senior director of strategy and product marketing. “It creates a compelling offer for mid-size companies and enterprises that are increasingly transforming to adopt advanced digital tools but need more simplicity and flexibility to support their changing business models.”

The move to the cloud is already paying off for Adobe’s early adopters.

“Early results from mid-market to large enterprise companies using the application show a 50% faster ingestion time, a 40% increase in administrative efficiency, zero downtime resulting from regularly scheduled updates and an over 20% surge in author productivity.”

Dan Springer, CEO of DocuSign, discusses their launch of the Agreement Cloud and how it will transform companies to more easily work together and “be more agreeable.” Springer was interviewed on CNBC:

DocuSign Helping Companies Be “More Agreeable”

We’re super excited about the DocuSign Agreement Cloud. We realize that our customers have said e-signature is a fantastic foundation for their business. But they have a broader set of needs around the way they not only sign agreements but the way they prepare them and the way they manage them after they’ve been signed. So we’ve built out a broader suite of products and that’s what we’re bringing to market today. 

I think it’s key, the connectedness that Slack is seeing and pushing for is very similar to what we see as well. Companies want to be, in our terminology, more agreeable. Those are the communications they want to have within their companies or their back-office functions that they’ve tried to digitally transform, but also for the front office. They really want to have a customer experience that is what the customers expect so they will be easy to do business with. We see that the Slack moves are very similar to what we’re seeing in the Agreement Cloud.

We Like To Talk About How DocuSign Is Unusual

We’re super excited about the core e-signature business. While we talk about the Agreement Cloud, we think that’s the broader opportunity to really make this one of the most significant cloud opportunities. We don’t in any way want to move away from the excitement we have over the course e-signature business. It’s sort of what brought us to the dance. If you think about the roughly billion dollars of revenue that we will deliver this year the bulk of it will still come from e-signature. The growth opportunities are very broad. 

We like to talk about the fact that DocuSign is unusual. We serve from the smallest business to the largest enterprise and across all verticals. We are excited to talk about federal. We had our first million-dollar ACVD deal that we just announced in the quarter. So it’s not just that segment, it really is very broad. We think financial services will continue to be a driver for us and as I mentioned federal will be exciting. You’re going to see us continue to expand internationally and domestically. It really is a broad-based opportunity.

The Agreement Cloud Is Going To Be The Next Big Cloud

If you think about the overall TAM, e-signature is a $25 billion dollar market. With the broader Agreement Cloud that gets into a magnitude of many billions more, maybe doubling the overall opportunity. When you think about the competitive set it’s so early. We’re only about four or five percent penetrated in the core signature business and less on the broader ones. When we actually talk about competition, we talk about paper and manual processes. This business is so early days. We’re in the early innings. We believe that our biggest competition really is paper and manual processes. We like to say it’s a great competitive set to have because they don’t fight back very hard. It’s just a matter of time before we really are going to be able to replace and modernize those systems.

When you think about the infrastructure side, it’s a huge part of where the cloud is going. We’ve been much more focused on the application and thinking about that end-user value. But on the infrastructure side, I think it’s a hugely competitive space. It used to be looking like a two-horse race with Microsoft and Amazon. Now looking at some of the other players, such as what Google’s doing, I think you’re going to see more and more competition in that space. I don’t think it’s going to be necessarily bad for those players because it’s a really large expanding market. 

On the application side, the new cloud opportunity that we see is in the Agreement Cloud. It is going to be the next big cloud because we think this is about bringing multiple clouds together. We work strongly with ERP and strongly with CRM. We’re actually finding opportunities increasingly every day to make the other cloud investments that people are making have more value before them by bringing them together. What connects them is the agreements those companies do.

However, in order to get the most of your content marketing efforts, you’ll need to have a clear and defined strategy. And, you’ll need to stick to it! This will not only make it easier to create more content but also help you analyze, set goals, and measure your ROI.

How to Build Content Marketing Strategy

Determine Your Objectives

The first step to developing a content marketing strategy is to determine your company’s objective. In other words, you’ll need to have an end goal. Are you trying to create more awareness about your brand? Or, are you trying to gain more subscriptions to a service you provide? Decide on one or two core goals that will affect your bottom line and two or three supporting objectives you want to meet.

Define Your Target Market

You want to market to the right customer using the right content at the right time. To do so, you would need to define your target market. You can do this by creating buyer personas and using them as a model for your content marketing plan. Conduct qualitative research to build these personas. Make use of surveys, customer feedback, focus groups, social media activity, and customer interviews. Even user profiles and transaction histories will help you in understanding who your real customers are.

Study What Your Customers Need

Make use of social media, search browsers, surveys, customer conversations and insight from your sales and customer service personnel to understand what your customers need. You can then use the collected data to segment your customers and send them content that is specific to their needs.

Decide on What Content to Prioritize

Once you have determined your end goal and identified your buyers, you can start focusing on content. There are a lot of content types to choose from—blogs, ebooks, infographics, games, courses, mobile apps, webinars, podcasts, and newsletters to name a few. Choose two or three types that are most suited or relevant to your audience to ensure you can always provide high-quality content. Once you have decided on the content channels you want, you can start creating a content schedule.

According to a 2018 B2C survey by Conductor, businesses use blogs and videos 3 times more than any other type of content marketing.

Develop a Plan for Executing Content

Utilize your buyer personas and customer information to design a plan for executing your content. Start brainstorming for ideas, like what keywords to use or topics for your blog. Think about how and where your audience will receive their information. Consider that customers require different kinds of content per funnel stage.

Design Ways to Measure Your Content Marketing

Your objectives will help define your metrics. Develop a measurement framework to help you keep track of how your strategy is helping with your goals. There are different categories of content marketing metrics that you can find online.

Amplify Your Content 

It’s not enough to just develop content. Even an in-depth blog post or expertly edited video will fall on deaf ears unless you amplify its reach. Consider that there are at least 4 million blog posts published every day, how will you get your post to rise above the noise? You can get the word out through social media channels or explore other avenues, like using influencers or creating events.

3 Tips on How to Stick to Your Strategy

Once you have established your content marketing strategy, you’ll have to stick to it to reap the benefits. Unfortunately, this is where a lot of companies falter. Here are three tips to help you stay on your path:

1. Make sure everybody knows what to expect

Every departments’ goals should align with each other. For instance, the goals of the marketing and sales department should be in tune with each other and should fall in line with that of the upper management. Every member should also know the metrics that will be used.

2. Concentrate on initiatives that are already successful

Check which previous marketing strategies gave you the best results and build from there. After all, why fix something that isn’t broken? For instance, if one PPC campaign resulted in a good ROI, update it by either boosting the ad spending or launching a similar campaign using a different product.

3. Delegate or outsource

Good marketers know they should play to their strengths and delegate or outsource the rest. For instance, if you have good graphic design skills, make your own business logo or visual banners. If you are terrible at getting your ideas across in words, hire a writer. There’s no reason to do it all yourself when you can tap the services of others who can do a better job.

Conclusion

A solid content marketing strategy is essential to a successful business. Brainstorm for ideas and do not be afraid to experiment with different approaches or try a variety of tools. Keep track of customer engagement to ensure that you will stick to the strategy you devised. These will help in the continued improvement of your content marketing strategy and the success of your business.

Joey Levin, CEO of IAC, discusses their position as the “arms dealer” in the streaming wars in an interview on CNBC at The Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference:

If It’s a Streaming War We’d Like To Be an Arms Dealer

If it’s a streaming war we’d like to be an arms dealer. We want to send the product and services to people who are making video. Video is relevant not just to people building streaming services, which there are now endless amounts of that and endless amounts of capital, but also every small business and every event. Everywhere people interact they’re expecting video now. It used to be text, then it was images, and now it’s video. People need the tools to make that and our goal is to provide them.

I’m thrilled (we pivoted away from being a platform for streaming) now that everyone’s jumping into that space. I think between the time we announced that we were going to get into the streaming wars and the time we backed out there was another several billion dollars within a few months that entered the category. We were not competing with weapons that size and thought we’d be better off being a service provider. 

It’s Possible To Compete With Google But They Have To Play Fairly

I don’t know what the right answer is (regarding breaking up big tech companies such as Google and Facebook) but I do know that we need an answer. Regulations are very hard to get right. I think frequently regulations in areas like that end up helping the incumbents. Those companies have already built huge data stores and they know what to do with those. It’ll just make it harder for the next people that come in to gather the data they need to compete. I don’t know how the regulations would work. I’d love to see that happen. I’d love to see regulations allow for more competition and protect competition, but it’s hard to see how that’s going to work. I don’t think GDPR did that really and I don’t know what would. They may need other solutions.

I think it’s possible (to compete with Google) but they have to play fairly. They have a significant position in search and they have a significant position in other areas too and that’s where a lot of people start their behavior. If Google starts favoring its own products or continues favoring its own products that is not going to leave room for others. I think that’s not necessarily great for the country.

In Deciding To Take a Company Public We Take a Long-Term Perspective

We don’t think a lot about a particular market state when we’re taking a company publicly. We think about what’s right for the company at the time. Does the company need access to capital? Does the company need a currency? Could a company benefit in some way by being public and having a public currency? It’s kind of independent of what market we’re in at that moment (when we decide it’s the right) time to take a company public. Just because the market might be hot or valuations might be high doesn’t mean we need to hit that window because we take a much longer-term perspective.

The (recent IPOs) are all different and they all have their own story. There are fantastic companies going public. I think it’ll be good for investors and they have opportunities to invest in them. It’s better that their public in a lot of cases than being private where a limited number of people can invest in them.

We Now Match 100 Percent of Employee 401k Contributions

I think there are different answers for different businesses (regarding potential regulations that could shut down the gig economy). We have businesses that have gig economy workers, 1099 workers, and we have businesses that are very big on W2 workers. The question is are the employees or the people doing the work getting the benefits that they want and getting the benefits that they need? Many of them prefer to be independent contractors and many of them prefer some of the benefits of independent contractors. Others like BlueCrew, which is all W2 workers, want benefits and need the things that come with being a W2 worker. Each business has its own needs on that.

One of the other things that we’re doing at IAC right now that’s really important for our 8,000 employees is we just announced a big change to our 401k plan to address the income inequality gap, to get more people investing in the market, to get more people participating in the economy and in capitalism. We are now matching a hundred percent of people’s 401k contributions up to 10% of their salary which is I think relatively unheard of among our competitors and other companies. I’m hoping other people follow that.

Video marketing isn’t just an option anymore. It’s now an essential marketing tool.

However, consumers today are viewing their videos in a different manner than in previous years. Horizontal videos don’t have the hold they used to have while vertical videos are becoming more prevalent. This means that advertisers not only have to make video a priority, but they also need to rethink how they create and format their video content.

Why Marketers Should Use Vertical Videos

Not, that long ago, vertical videos were frowned upon by advertisers. Since their reduced size was incompatible to the then wider screens of desktop computers, they tended to look like they were shot by amateurs. But times have changed and vertical videos are now preferred over horizontal ones.

Here’s why marketers should utilize vertical videos:

It’s Now a Mobile World

The popularity of mobile devices has also led to the universal acceptance of vertical videos. Smartphones are designed primarily for accepting and making calls, thus their aspect ratio will be vertical. This has also influenced people’s online experience. About 94 percent of consumers hold their phone vertically, and most won’t bother to turn it on its side just to watch a video horizontally.

Social Media Platforms are Mobile-Friendly

Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter are all optimized for mobile devices. And most of these platforms are quick to follow trends, which is why most have already removed the black bars on vertical videos to give consumers a better viewing experience.

They Give Better Results

Advertisers have discovered that using vertical videos to promote their products have better results in terms of engagement and views. Due to its orientation, vertical videos fill the whole screen and lets people focus solely on what they’re looking at it. Meanwhile, there’s a lot of distraction when watching a horizontal video on an upright screen. MediaBrix data also showed that less than 30 percent of people are willing to turn their devices sideways. It’s likely that they will also skip horizontal video ads.

How to Effectively Use Vertical Videos

Be Mindful of the Platform

Social media platforms optimize their videos differently, and this could impact the viewer experience. Take into consideration the type of users each platform has and design your video accordingly. Longer videos are better suited on Facebook, as the average user experience is usually three minutes per session. Meanwhile, Instagram users favor shorter videos that are under two minutes.

Keep Content Short

Short and sweet is the formula for content success. Even though long-form videos are good on platforms like Facebook, not every user can engage with extended content. It’s better to keep content to 10 seconds or less since it’s easier to digest. Increase the odds of engagement by releasing several short clips. It’s more valuable and encourages repeat views. What’s more, multiple videos will have your audiences staying with your content longer.

Include the Audience

Use your video like an extra set of eyes and take your audience with you. Vertical videos are great for showcasing day-in-the-life clips or behind the scenes shots. It lets your audience feel like they’re the ones behind the camera, providing them with an authentic customer experience.

Vertical video provides marketers with a ton of new opportunities to push their brand. By making vertical video content, you can tap into more mobile device users who will spend more time on your content. this results in more shares, greater exposure for your brand and more sales.

Amazon Launches Textract to Easily Extract Usable Data

Our customers are frustrated that they can’t get more of all those text and data that are in documents into the cloud, so they can actually do machine learning on top of it. So we worked with our customers, we thought about what might solve these problems and I’m excited to announce the launch of Amazon Textract. This is an OCR plus plus service to easily extract text and data from virtually any document and there is no machine learning experience required.

This is important, you don’t need to have any machine learning experience to be able to use Textract. Here’s how it generally works. Below is a pretty typical document, it’s got a couple of columns and it’s got a table in the middle of the left column.

When you use OCR it just basically captures all that information in a row and so what you end up with is the gobbledygook you see in the box below which is completely useless. That’s typically what happens.

Let’s go through what Textract does. Textract is intelligent. Textract is able to tell that there are two columns here so actually when you get the data and the language it reads like it’s supposed to be read. Textract is able to identify that there’s a table there and is able to lay out for you what that table should look like so you can actually read and use that data in whatever you’re trying to do on the analytics and machine learning side. That’s a very different equation.

Textract Works Great with Forms

What happens with most of these forms is that the OCR can’t really read the forms or actually make them coherent at all. Sometimes these templates will kind of effectively memorize in this box is this piece of data. Textract is going to work across legal forms and financial forms and tax forms and healthcare forms, and we will keep adding more and more of these.

But also these forms will change every few years and when they do something that you thought was a Social Security number in this box turns out now not to be a date of birth. What we have built Textract to do is to recognize what certain data items or objects are so it’s able to tell this set of characters is a Social Security number, this set of characters is a date of birth, this set of characters is an address.

Not only can we apply it to many more forms but also if those forms change Textract doesn’t miss a beat. That is a pretty significant change in your capability in being able to extract and digitally use data that are in documents.