Good morning, Marketer, and what does today mean for the tech space?

While it’s safe to say that a lot of us are feeling much better today than we have for, well, the last four years, it’s worth taking a deep breath and asking what the tech industry can expect from a Biden-Harris administration.

Some things, I’d say, are notably good. There’s a commitment to reform H1-B visas and the green card system in a way which will make it easier for overseas talent to support U.S. businesses. But there will be bi-partisan demands to regulate social media, and the fate of Section 230 (which provides liability protection to “interactive computer services,” as they were once known) remains uncertain.

Personally, I think the administration’s tech priority should be security, and especially the security of the national grid. After all, wasn’t there some big hack recently which got lost in the news cycle? President Obama’s cyber security initiatives ran into a roadblock directed by the late Senator McCain. But once that’s taken care of, Section 230 does deserve some careful, thoughtful reconsideration.

Kim Davis
Editorial Director

 
 
 
Stacks
 

How Rakuten Viki is promoting K-drama to a global audience

Doing more with less might be the mantra for many marketing organizations. At Viki, a unit of Rakuten offering streaming K-dramas, and other Asian movie and TV content, a very small team split between the U.S. and Korea is finding ways to understand, segment and engage a multilingual global audience numbering in the millions.

The martech stack is what enables customized and personalized engagement at scale. In the case of Viki, which primarily engages with users over mobile channels (many watch the shows on phones or tablets), Braze is at the heart of their messaging strategy. Braze, a customer engagement platform with a specialism in mobile, allows the team not only to plot customer journeys for various audience segments, but to automate them, with pre-set actions and events triggering emails or push notifications.

Viki also leverages visual experience platform Movable Ink to launch engaging creatives the team would struggle to piece together in-house. These include scratch-off discount offers — literally scratchable within emails and notifications — and countdown timers to the launch of new content.

Read more here.

 

Measuring marketing attribution

No one wants to invest time, money and energy into campaigns that don’t provide any ROI. In this quick reference guide, marketing professionals from small and medium businesses share how they make sure marketing efforts convert to sales.

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Pro Tip
 

Breaking out Google Smart Shopping campaign performance by network type

Smart Shopping campaigns are convenient because they don’t require much active optimization and can help you cover the full sales funnel with a single campaign. One of the downsides, however, is that Smart Shopping advertisers may not have a clear idea of where their ads are running, so it’s difficult to know whether a good ROAS is due to Google’s automation, or because the ads are being shown across the Google Display Network with remarketing.

Harpal Singl has discovered a way for advertisers to discern where their ads are showing up. First, go to your Google Ads dashboard; in the Tools section of the top navigation menu, select Measurement > Attribution. Then, click on Assisted conversions in the left-hand navigation. In the Dimensions drop-down menu, make sure Campaign and Network are checked, then click Apply. Next, click Add filter, select Campaign, and input “Smart Shopping” in the “contains” field. Once that is applied, you can view your Smart Shopping campaign performance by network. 

Watch Harpal’s video on the process here.

 
On the move
 

Knotch adds execs

New hires are on their way to Knotch, the enterprise content intelligence platform headed up by CEO Anda Gansca. Ben Plummer joins the leadership team as EVP Marketing. He was previously CEO of Tier 3 Technologies, and prior to that held the CMO role at a series of SaaS ventures.

David Brown and Eli Grant also join the leadership team, Brown as SVP and Head of Strategy and Grant as VP of Accounts. On the move within Knotch is Jamie Block ,promoted from Senior Director of Sales Operations to VP of Business Operations.  

 

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Quote(s) of the day
 

“15+ years in marketing…I’ve never worked out what ‘JAZZ’ means. ‘Can you jazz this up a little?’ ‘We just need to add a bit more jazz.’ ‘It’s missing a bit of jazz.’ Nope. We didn’t study jazz…PS. Would love to know the criteria for reaching sufficient jazz-levels.” – Danny Asling, CRO, Zendbox.

Danny, here’s your answer:

“Hot can be cool, cool can be hot, each can be both. But hot or cool, man, Jazz is Jazz” – Louis Armstrong