This is issue no. 37 of 180. Last issue saw a 52.20% open rate with 6.78% of you going to this story by Bonobos CEO Andy Dunn called 'Digitally Native Vertical Brands.'
DATA: To drive meaningful and contextual customer relationships, brands must reach their intended audiences with the right offers, in the right channel and at the right moment. A closed-loop approach grounded in accurate customer data—and the ability to harness and activate insights in real or near real time—make brands smarter with every interaction.
BRAND: Facebook, up 44%, is the fastest-growing brand in the top 100 for the second straight year. The number of active users has surged to 1.65 billion. The average user spends 50 minutes daily using Facebook and Instagram (our brand value excludes the financial impact of Instagram). “Companies are figuring out how to use Facebook, so their revenue is growing.
BRAND: Increasingly, companies like Taco Bell and McDonald's are trying very hard to reach teens like me by using social media. Over the past few months, I've been working with NPR business reporter Sonari Glinton to examine how well some of these campaigns are working — including asking some of my friends at Youth Radio to weigh in.
MEDIA: The Instagram community has evolved over the past five years from a place to share filtered photos to so much more — a global community of interests sharing more than 80 million photos and videos every day. Our updated look reflects how vibrant and diverse your storytelling has become.
ECOMMERCE: That e-commerce can help (or even save) your retail business isn’t all e-vapour and selfie sticks. Even some of the most entrenched B&M retailers have been able to adapt by shedding redundant overhead and embracing e-commerce where they can.
DATA:R/GA has slowly but surely brought some clients on board Slack.“With a lot of our clients, we’re doing technical, in-depth work,” said Katrina Bekessy, director of tech and design. “At the end of the day, they own the work we do, and we need to provide the visibility they need into our work.”
MEDIA: Adobe has offered Facebook display ads for some time in its Adobe Media Optimizer system, which lets brands, in theory, get better return on their investments through various kinds of tests. Starting today, Facebook video ads are part of the system. In addition, video ads can be optimized via Adobe's software for other social networks.
BRAND: Handed a solid defeat by voters over the weekend on a proposal that would have allowed them greater self-regulation, Uber and Lyft followed through on promises to shut down operations in Austin on Monday morning. The tech-friendly city and host of the annual SXSW Interactivegathering became another casualty on the ride-sharing-vs.-municipality battlefield.
ECOMMERCE: The reason revolves around concerns about assuring fit and comfort with an online purchase; and that's a big barrier to entry. A recent study of 1.3 million customer reviews connected to fashion ecommerce products found that the words shoppers most commonly use have to do with fit, quality, size and comfort.
DATA: What keyboard apps do with the data you type all depends on the developer, and you have to dive deep into these companies’ privacy policies to figure out what they plan to do with your keystrokes. Some keyboard apps, such as the Bitmoji Keyboard, don’t do much with your data beyond anonymizing it and using it to improve the product.
Last Word: An Apolitical Look At Demographic Data
As the general election heats up, so will digital marketing spend. Every four years, brands tune into political campaign seasonal data to reengage brand loyalists or to harvest new brand ambassadors. With the data available to brands and media outlets, we will see a summer '16 spike in targeting based upon our location, political affiliation, and our estimated median household income.
Here is a look at home the median household income stacks up by candidate and how terms like: working class, middle class, and upwardly mobile are being redefined by political affiliations.
But the definition of “working class” and similar terms is fuzzy, and narratives like these risk obscuring an important and perhaps counterintuitive fact about Trump’s voters: As compared with most Americans, Trump’s voters are better off. The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data. That’s lower than the $91,000 median for Kasich voters. But it’s well above the national median household income of about $56,000. It’s also higher than the median income for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters, which is around $61,000 for both.
Several party apolitical inferences can be considered here. I'd love to hear your thoughts by tweeting them to @2pmlinks.
