Sports drink titan Gatorade recently partnered with Hudl, a platform used by athletes to capture, analyze and even share video clips of their performances, for a new content marketing initiative. The series, “Skills & Drills,” features pro athletes like Boston Celtics All-Star Jayson Tatum delivering training tips to student-athletes of all levels.

Hudl began as a video tool for coaches in 2006 but its popularity exploded as video content became more prevalent on social media. Coaches still use the platform to break down plays and game tape and to communicate with their team, but athletes can also share personal highlight reels from the platform on Facebook and Twitter. In fact, a Hudl presence for student-athletes in the digital age is about as commonplace as Instagram profiles are for photographers and influencers.

It also has 99% penetration in high school football teams, while catering to 40 other sports, and 170,000 total teams at youth, high school and college levels.

At this point, the potential for marketers to leverage niche platforms that host targeted communities is established. Leaving out TikTok and its nearly 800 million global users (of which more than 60% are between 10 and 29 years old), there’s also the success seen by Twitch, a community for gamers, which now has around 140 million monthly active users. Twitch made nearly $2 billion in revenue in 2020 mostly through a mix of advertising, sponsorship and subscription income.

Hudl, which does not disclose revenue numbers, reaches about 5 million athletes on its platform and extends out to as many as 80 million consumers through athlete integrations with other social platforms.

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When retailers across the northeast region of the United States first began closing stores to protect residents against the global pandemic, the leaders of The Vermont Country Store moved quickly to put three marketing initiatives in place.

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Verizon Media announced the launch of a full-funnel digital out of home (DOOH) product suite that aims at enabling advertisers and agencies to plan, execute and measure campaigns in one place, in a self-serve capacity. The suite connects DOOH with other digital channels for omnichannel management and insights.

The key is Verizon Media’s DSP, which includes an insights and forecasting tool, allowing buyers to see availability and pricing against DMA, venue types, media owners and other categories. Advertisers can also retarget DOOH audiences in a privacy-compliant manner across all devices. They can also measure performance using Verizon Media’s identity graph of over 200 billion consent-based consumer touchpoints.

Why we care. As pandemic-related restrictions are lifted, more people will be gathering in public places where DOOH assets can be seen. A single DOOH suite gives advertisers the advantage of orchestrating omnichannel campaigns that leverage real-world out-of-home ads with retargeting on mobile and other devices. Consumers use their phones to navigate the world around them, and by integrating a campaign into this complex ecosystem, brands get closer to customers along their journey.

Marketing automation platforms form the backbone of marketing operations, increasingly serving as sophisticated marketing orchestration platforms. MarTech Today’s “B2B Marketing Automation Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide” examines the market for B2B marketing automation software platforms. This report includes profiles of 13 leading B2B marketing automation vendors, capabilities comparisons, pricing information, and recommended steps for evaluating and purchasing.

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The Trade Desk’s Unified ID 2.0, persistent identifiers based on authenticated logins, will become fully open source through a collaboration between the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media  (PRAM)  Technical Working Group run by IAB Tech Lab.

In January, The Trade Desk passed custody of Unified ID 2.0 to Prebid.org, the open source adtech library and community. The new announcement confirms that the source code base of Unified ID 2.0 is now open source. This means IAB Tech Lab will make the code available under license, and undertake ongoing maintenance of the code.

In practice, anyone will be able to see the code and suggest changes.

Why we care. Widely touted as being the gold standard replacement for third-party cookies (although there are still many other alternatives being developed), Unified ID 2.0 really does now belong to the industry. Does that mean game over for other persistent identifiers? Probably not, although it does raise the question whether there’s a real need or justification for so many.

When you really think about it, it’s interesting that such a huge proportion (65%) of websites (including ours) are created and delivered using an open-source platform launched in 2003 for then-novel bloggers. WordPress has been so successful because its community of developers has made it resilient and versatile, with plug-ins numbering nearly 60,000 allowing for significant customization. However, the consequences of being based on old code that anyone can plug into means the platform suffers from security vulnerabilities and code bloat. The resulting slow-loading insecure pages are exactly what marketers are trying to avoid as they optimize their sites to rank well in search engines.

Meanwhile, people are consuming content on a multitude of devices — from mobile phones to refrigerators to voice assistants — and marketers are looking for efficient ways to reuse and deploy the content they’ve created rather than serving every type of device with its own CMS. These trends are leading more and more marketers — those with a dedicated development team on hand, anyway — to explore the possibilities of headless and hybrid content management systems, which give content creators a user-friendly interface and allow developers to use APIs to distribute their work on devices we haven’t even thought up yet.

This is part of what we’ve learned while developing our newly-released MarTech Intelligence Report on Enterprise Headless & Hybrid CMSs.

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Premium out-of-home inventory will be made available in an automated workflow due to an update in the industry’s OpenDirect platform, an improvement announced Monday by the Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA). The announcement of OpenDirect 1.5.1 comes on Day 2 of the OAAA Media Conference.

With the update, OOH companies can open up their premium inventory to agencies and advertisers, and also offer controlled access and improved tracking of inventory across systems. The OAAA has aligned with the IAB Technology Lab’s OpenDirect Working Group to provide this solution. Contributors include big OOH publishers like Clear Channel, JCDecaux and Ocean Outdoor, among others.

Why we care. For marketers that value one-stop programmatic campaigning (see Verizon Media’s DOOH offering above), the OpenDirect update is a step toward modernizing and transforming the OOH landscape for advertisers and publishers alike.

“Tip for marketing ops pros: remember that strategy should drive technology, not the other way around.” Darrell Alfonso, Global Marketing Operations, Amazon Web Services