Earlier this month, Ben Hindman, CEO at event marketing platform Splash, raised some hackles on LinkedIn by predicting that COVID would break the addiction to massive events, and that the shift to “bite size” is underway. Splash followed up Hindman’s opinion piece with some supporting data in their report “Online, Shorter, and Here to Stay: An Outlook on Virtual and Hybrid Events in 2021”:

• 43% of companies moved all events to virtual and are hosting more virtual events than originally planned;
• 79% of companies now expect to host events that include an online component even once in-person events resume; and
• Fewer than 7% of event attendees believe virtual events should be longer than an hour.

“There’s going to be a place for the big events,” said Splash CRO Eric Holmen. Splash, after all, does support both large and small events. “But it’s when big events have small moments that they have the most value; when you’re able to have a special VIP session or dinner, not when you have these big rooms full of people. They’re okay, they’re good for learning, but that super-niche experience within the big event is where most of the value comes from.” 

Holmen also predicted that experimentation with hybrid events will be the next chapter in the story. 

Read more here.

Read up on the latest MarTech topics and trends, and learn what’s working (and what’s not) for agencies like yours. Sharpspring surveyed leading marketing professionals from across the U.S. to find out the most sought-after MarTech trends and the challenges they’re facing right now.

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At our fall virtual edition of SMX, Cultivative’s Amy Bishop led a session on leveraging tests to identify new opportunities to achieve your business goals. During the Overtime Q&A, she fielded a range of questions.

Here’s one of those answers.

Q: Why would learning be limited on an ad campaign that has a bigger budget and more conversions than the other ad campaigns? The audience is large, from the client’s email list, with a lookalike audience.

A: Facebook’s learning phase requires 50 optimization events and any changes that are made can send it back into learning mode. So, there are a few things that could be happening here

1. The audience may be bigger, but it may not have hit the threshold of 50 optimization events yet.
2. Each ad set enters and exits the learning phase individually, so even if the campaign has hit the threshold of 50 optimization events, it could be that not all ad sets have achieved that threshold yet and some could still be in the learning phase.
3. There may have been recent changes that could have sent parts of this campaign back into the learning phase even if it was out of learning mode before, such as new ads, budget changes, bidding changes, or changes to targeting. You can check this by looking at the recent changes to see if any edits were recently made. At that point, another 50 optimization events would need to happen after the most recent significant edit in order to exit the learning phase again.

Get more here.

Join us online, February 23, 2021 at SMX Report: a deep dive into everything you need to know about analytics for search marketing. Book now for just $99!

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Inbound marketing has become a strategy small businesses must invest in — but you probably already knew that. What’s more compelling is how the results show that call-tracking software is one of the best tools available for measuring attribution and optimizing the effectiveness of your inbound marketing and phone calls.

We analyzed more than 129 million calls across 12 industries to understand inbound marketing’s impact on generating calls from leads.

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This holiday season, outdoor media company Outfront is stepping in to help Santa out. Animated winter window displays in outdoor locations will encourage shoppers to interact by scanning a QR code to receive a digital “gift” that can be kept, traded or re-gifted, and shared on social media.

The QR code opens a hidden site in the user’s browser and unwraps one of 20 different animated presents. The gift-giving will run through end of year, and can be found throughout the MTA in New York City, and in Washington DC and Miami on pedestrian-level out of home assets such as Liveboards and bus shelters.

You can also click to try it out here.

Why we care. We had never thought about OOH advertising as Santa’s little helper before.