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5 things you need to know | |  | Before you scoff at Shingy -- the hair, the "digital prophet" job title, the name "Shingy" -- try walking a mile in his shoes. We recently had AOL's David Shing describe a typical day in his life of reading the internet tea leaves. | |  | Retailers, forced to stretch themselves thin across content creation, data mining and tech building, are facing a string of struggles. At the Digiday Retail Summit they shared, anonymously, the challenges keeping them up at night. | |  | Stella Artois, in an effort to ditch the "lager lout" stigma, is betting big on mobile video content, creating educational fare, doing live video on Facebook and experimenting with shoppable video. | |  | Half of the Fortune 500 now have Instagram accounts, up from 24.6 percent in 2013. Here, in five charts is how big brands are using the photo sharing platform. | |  | Facebook's latest algorithm tweak comes as bad news for publishers that are heavily dependent on the social network for traffic -- unless they've mastered the art of getting shared on the social network. | |
 Jordan Valinsky David Shing flies around the world on behalf of AOL to translate internet trends for brands and agencies. He walks us through a recent typical day. |
| | | Hilary Milnes Attendees at the Digiday Retail Summit in Nashville shared the biggest obstacle they’re currently facing within their companies for the Digiday challenge board. The main takeaways: attribution is difficult to track across channels, communicating a strong brand story that customers connect with is the struggle of social media, and data overload is real. So, we asked a few to elaborate, anonymously, on their challenges. Responses included one retailer who is figuring out how to keep customers coming back, and another who doesn’t know which social media strategy is winning. |
| | | Grace Caffyn Mobile video is on the rise as TV viewership stagnates. But with brands clogging up the newsfeed with content, Stella Artois is looking to differentiate with deeper, richer content beyond the hard sell. As part of its push towards lifestyle-focused content, it’s testing out Q&A sessions with up-and-coming chefs on Facebook Live, and creating “touchable” videos for users to explore and going big on how-tos. | | | | Shareen Pathak The world's biggest brand — Fortune 500 companies — are gung-ho on Instagram. TrackMaven analyzed 41,000 posts from them to see what worked: Questions work, hashtags work — but adding exclamation points doesn’t. The company also found that 89 percent of posts from those companies are #nofilter. |
| The Media Trust With the shadow of ad blocking looming a number of industry leaders have come forward to propose new ad standards. The IAB, The Media Trust and even Adblock Plus have each suggested measures with the same goal in mind: to improve display advertising and stem the tide of ad blocker adoption. Sponsored content by The Media Trust |
| | | Lucia Moses With its latest algorithm tweak, Facebook said it will favor posts from friends and families over publishers. That’s generally bad for publishers, which have been increasingly building their distribution strategies around the social behemoth. Within them, the ones with the most shareable content and those that have mastered video will likely fare the best. But the changes suggest that plain-vanilla news content and medium-sized publishers that are heavily dependent on Facebook for audience will be on the losing side. |
| IBM Marketing Cloud In this all-in-one behavioral marketing strategy session, IBM's Jodi Wearn will teach you how you can start personalizing your customer communications to drive more conversions now. You will learn which data matters most for personalization on each channel and how to tie it all together, how automated personalized campaigns can free your team up to start thinking strategically again, key engagement metrics for everything from email to mobile to point-of-sale, plus case studies from major brands that have zeroed in on exactly what their customers were looking for. Watch this jam-packed strategy session when it’s most convenient for you. Sponsor content by IBM Marketing Cloud. |
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