5 Tips to Create and Manage Visual Content

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Visual content is being used in a variety of ways to communicate. Large amounts of data are being packaged into easily consumable infographics. Videos are being used to tell dynamic stories. Even consumers, knowingly or not, are in on the visual content creation with sharing pictures of their interaction with products and brands. All of this content needs to be managed in order to be shared and used. Get the most out of your visual content with these 5 tips for managing visual content.

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by Steve Hall    Dec- 9-13    
Topic: Tools



How Smarter Ads Will Shape Consumer Intent This Holiday Season

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Well, the Halloween candy is now on clearance and the plastic turkeys are on display. That can mean only one thing: we're at the cusp of Holiday Shopping Season! As someone who spends all day, every day thinking about the best way to get the right message to the rightperson at the right time, the holidays keep me up.

Recently we all learned from the IAB that digital ad revenue is significantly up over previous years. Yet, despite the mind-blowing $20.1 billion spent in the first half of 2013 alone, I'm excited about the opportunity to help retailers make sense of all their options and use them in the most effective manner - especially, during the critical holiday shopping period.

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by Steve Hall    Oct-31-13    
Topic: Tools, Trends and Culture



7 Ways to Improve Your Ad Agency's Efficiency

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Nothing loses an agency client faster than inefficient process and the frustration it causes. Not even Cannes-winning work can keep a client if the agency can't manage the relationship properly. Earlier, we wrote about the impact of industry consolidation and how it has affected the ability of the acquired agency and its holding company siblings to work smoothly and efficiently.

Here are seven tips you can put to use right now to ensure your agency is serving your clients swiftly, effectively and efficiently - like the proverbial well-oiled machine.

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by Steve Hall    Oct-21-13    
Topic: Agencies, Opinion, Tools



LiquidM Aims to Remove Headaches From Mobile Media Buying

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According to estimates from an August eMarketer report, mobile advertising is a $16.7B market but represents just 14% of the total $117.6B digital ad spend. Despite market opportunity and years of "this is the year of mobile," mobile media buyers have struggled to manage campaigns given the voluminous variety of players and their incompatibilities.

As smart phones and tablets consume more and more audience time, ad spend will (we are told) further shift into mobile. One new company, LiquidM, aims to make things easier for the mobile advertising space with its whitelabeled product offering.

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by Steve Hall    Oct-10-13    
Topic: Mobile/Wireless, Tools



How to Use Call Tracking to Prove Email Marketing's Value to Your CEO

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Not So Old School Anymore

It seems like every week there's another article proclaiming the end of email as a marketing tool. But the truth is that email marketing has never been more popular, and with good reason:

- The rise in smartphones and tablet adoption has made it easy for people to access your emails from anywhere at anytime.

- Depending on your industry, most leads will require some form of nurturing before they are ready to engage with a sales rep.

- Sophisticated email delivery tools like those in marketing automation solutions now make it easy for you to create targeted, relevant, personalized (and perhaps most importantly, automated) email campaigns.

It should therefore come as no surprise that according to a 2013 benchmark report from MarketingSherpa, 64% of companies planned to increase their investment in email marketing in 2013.

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by Steve Hall    Oct- 8-13    
Topic: Tools



New Tool Promises Real-Time Analytics For Paid Social Campaigns

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Self-anointed "real-time marketing platform for agencies and brands" SHIFT has announced the SHIFT Media Analyzer, an analytics tool for social advertisers. SHIFT Media Analyzer is said to enable marketers to analyze paid media campaigns across various brands at a global scale - all within a single dashboard.

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by Steve Hall    Aug-22-13    
Topic: Tools



Bar Refaeli Strips, Apple Facepalms, DOMA Celebrated, Cannes Critiqued

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- Bar Refaeli strips down to her lingerie again for a new Passionista ad campaign.

- This Digiday article explores the belief among young agency employees that it's the agency itself which causes them to job hop so much because staying doesn't allow them to move ahead. People...same shit, different decade. Nothing has changed in 30 years.

- Apple's new ad campaign isn't impressing the critics nor the public.

- The Sun has rounded up what they deem to be the sexiest TV ads of all time, all of which have been covered here on Adrants over the years (Except the 1992 Cindy Crawford Pepsi ad as that was before our time.)

- Social media erupted with joy yesterday in reaction to the Supreme Court's decision to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act and California's Proposition 8.

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by Steve Hall    Jun-27-13    
Topic: Agencies, Brands, Campaigns, Industry Events, Racy, Social, Tools



HubSpot Social Inbox Brings Personalization Back to Social

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This afternoon, HubSpot announced Social Inbox, a new suite of tools -- and part of HubSpot's Inbound Marketing offering -- that aims to bring the human element back to social media. Joe Chernov, current VP of Marketing at Kinvey and former CMO of Eloqua (somewhat of a competitor to HubSpot), was in attendance at this afternoon's launch and tweeted, "Conclusion: @HubSpot Social Inbox is what Radian6 should be."

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by Steve Hall    May- 7-13    
Topic: Tools



Here's One Way to Avoid A Social Media Kerfuffle

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"Topsy not only helps me understand what the most influential people are saying, but also allows me to determine who my clients should engage with and when, and which words they should choose to assure they knock their messages out of the park. No joke, choosing the right 140 characters keeps my clients in movies, at the top of the charts, on Wheaties boxes and off of TMZ."

No offense to Topsy (which humorously sounds like a nickname for a top heavy girl) but it's quotes like this that make us want to pack it in, rob a bank, head to a remote island in the South Pacific and live a life free of social media bullshit.

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by Steve Hall    May- 7-13    
Topic: Tools



11 Templates to Create Social Updates, Blog Posts, Infographics

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If you're doing marketing right, you have a lot on your plate. Managing social media, producing content, updating your website, tweaking your SEO and more. And you have to create reports to summarize all this work to clients, bosses and co-workers. Wouldn't it be great if you had a cheat sheet of sorts for all this reporting?

Thanks to HubSpot, now you do. HubSpot has put together the Ultimate Library of Inbound Marketing Templates. But don 't let the term Inbound Marketing hang you up. Although much of what you're doing now is inbound marketing (perhaps without even knowing it), these templates can be used for all kinds of marketing.

The templates include:

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by Steve Hall    Apr- 9-13    
Topic: Tools