Snapchat has launched Spotlight to, you guessed it, spotlight the best videos on the platform. Creators whose videos are selected can “earn a share of more than $1 million that we’re distributing to creators every day!,” says the company. 

Creators can submit their videos to Spotlight. They must be at least 16 years old to be eligible for revenue sharing. Spotlight is first rolling out in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and France.

Why we care. It’s perhaps ironic that this launch comes as TikTok announced its first creator, Charli D’Amelio, to gain 100 million followers. Unlike TikTok, creator discovery has never been an integral feature of Snapchat, and Spotlight presents a big change. Spotlight will have a very TikTok feel, with the ability for users to swipe up through videos in the Spotlight feed. Paying users to make and promote their content on the app could help Snapchat maintain creator engagement on the app, rather than losing out to other platforms. 

Nielsen surveyed over 350 marketers from around the globe and found that enthusiasm for digital was tempered by severe data quality issues and measurement challenges. Many of you feel you don’t have the right tools to measure and compare the ROI of your ad campaigns across all the channels you use. Download the “Nielsen Annual Marketing Report: The Age of Dissonance” to learn why marketers hold digital channels to a different standard than traditional channels.

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Hubspot recently announced the launch of a Center of Digital Business that will be located within the Howard University Business School and is part of a five-year commitment that HubSpot is making to Howard University.

For well over 250 years, Howard University has been a premier institute of higher education within the Historically Black Colleges and University (HBCU) circuit. There are well over 100 HBCUs across the U.S., and they work with a wide range of corporate entities to develop mentoring and corporate personnel pipelines. Howard University’s relationship with HubSpot goes back to 2018.

“This is much more than a company writing a check,” said Andrew Lindsay, SVP of Corporate and Business Development at HubSpot, who is also an alumnus of Howard University. “At HubSpot we feel that it’s vital for leading businesses to play an active role in the development of the next generation of Black business leaders and this center is just one key component of our commitment.”

Read more here.

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At a time when so many people’s interactions with businesses are conducted solely online, Josh Koenig, co-founder and head of product at WebOps platform Pantheon, urged his audience at the recent MarTech virtual event to step up to the challenge of delivering a great user experience.

“This is the primary, if not only, channel by which you’re going to be able to reach people, certainly you don’t want them to have a poor experience,” he said. “I think we’re going to see many, many more organizations really stepping up, taking this seriously and striving for excellence.”

What that means, according to Koenig, is being able to respond to changes in circumstances quickly, so that your digital communications are always as effective as they can be. That involves adopting a product-oriented approach to web development called WebOps.

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Digital Remedy, a digital marketing services provider, recently launched the AdReady+ self-service platform for digital advertising management, targeted to independent marketing agencies. Originally an unbranded internal tool, Digital Remedy repurposed their internal platform for external use in only 75 days to meet client demand. 

One thing which helped the turnaround was the availability of data. Digital Remedy’s past campaign history, outreach data, algorithms and metrics of success were all transferred from AdReady+’s previous life as an internal tool.

Digital Remedy was already in the planning processes of building a campaign management tool for external use by clients, but the sudden onslaught of new demands made producing a new platform a necessity. Making the platform self-service was also a requirement to ensure that the user experience was not slowed down by support requests or information silos. To ensure marketers are able to report the in-depth information required by the C-suite and company executives, AdReady+ offers charts and tables for reporting, including weekly performance, spend by media type, KPI by media type, upcoming campaigns and concluding campaigns.

Read more here.