“Visual storytelling is a marketing strategy that leverages compelling narratives, placing the customer at the heart of the story, staged with an emotional visual media experience and effectively distributed across your buyer’s journey, in order to empower customer’s lives and drive business results.” That is how Shlomi Ron defines his specialty, which he shares by teaching university courses as well as consulting for major companies in his role as CEO of the Visual Storytelling Institute.

Over the past year, Ron has sized up how brands were handling the COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted, of course, in states and nations shutting down commerce to contain the virus. Companies could not carry on with business as usual. Brands had to find “ways to empathize with their audiences during uncertain times,” Ron noted. That means telling “meaningful stories that translate into acts, versus just sympathetic words,” he said.

“A great example is what Panera Bread did with their ‘From One Neighbor To Another’ campaign,” Ron said. “They asked their delivery drivers to shoot short authentic stories about their day using their smartphones. It’s authentic, it’s real, not salesy, and it’s a great way to diversify storytellers.” (Watch examples here.)

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Ahead of Adobe Summit, which will run Tuesday and Wednesday this week and encompasses some 400 virtual sessions, labs and workshops, Adobe announced new capabilities in its Experience Manager platform. The main aim of the enhancements is to speed the creation of assets targeted at defined personas.

Creative Cloud-powered content automation in Adobe Experience Manager Assets supports the development of assets that can be used across a range of different channels, based on one master file. These capabilities are expected to be generally available in May, 2021.

Using Adobe Sensei AI within Experience Manager Assets, it will be possible automatically to tag product images with color labels, and automatically extract keywords from text, converting them into smart tags for faster content discovery. This will be available in the second half of 2021.

Upcoming quick site creation features will enable rapid delivery of web experiences without the need for back-end development. Customizable and reusable site templates can be used to create production-ready sites, ready to be populated with content. Finally, a new workflow allows front-end developers to edit web design in their coding program before pushing the changes back into Adobe Experience Manager.

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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Online searches with local intent, coupled with social platforms’ increasing influence, have yielded big results for multi-location businesses with localized strategies, according to the Localized Marketing Benchmark Report (LMBR). The report was released by localized marketing platform SOCi and Localogy, a not-for-profit trade association for tech, media services and marketing companies.

Even during the uncertainty of pandemic lockdowns in the past year, the report found that businesses with an optimized localized marketing strategy grew revenue up to three times that of their peers. Researchers established benchmarks and assigned scores for businesses on a 100-point scale, based on localized search and localized social, quantifying their digital presence and performance.

There were 276 businesses surveyed. The most over-indexed categories across all brands, were retail, home services, personal care services and restaurants. The ten brands that distinguished themselves the most above the rest of the field were:

• Arby’s
• Batteries Plus Bulbs 
• Clean Juice
• IHOP
• Jason’s Deli 
• Jersey Mike’s Subs 
• Pet Supplies Plus 
• Planet Fitness
• Sonic Drive-In
• Urban Air Adventure Park

Why we care. For big brands, local search and social remain important channels to meet customers where they are or drive traffic to physical locations, even during a pandemic. E-commerce and delivery are the no-brainer solutions when consumers are staying indoors, but hybrid buying methods like BOPIS still involve the local chain, and big companies need to leverage their brand value through localized messaging strategies.

Dive deep into the latest, most sophisticated SEO and PPC topics and trends, including automation, Quality Score, Core Web Vitals, and more at SMX Advanced — online June 15-16.

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Digital ad verification platform Integral Ad Science (IAS) went through data from trillions of events in 20 countries to produce their Media Quality Report for the second half of 2020. They found overall that fraud rates had dropped globally, ranging from 0.3% to 0.8% in various regions. This success shows that marketers are increasingly adopting ad fraud solutions. But how did they do in mitigating brand risk in what proved to be a perilous and contentious digital climate? IAS Chief Marketing Officer Tony Marlow had some thoughts to share about how brands responded, and what they can do now.

“The pandemic and political climate of the past twelve months not only transformed our daily lives, it impacted the nature of digital content and news cycles,” Marlow explained. “Regardless of whether brand risk will rise or fall in 2021, marketers are now better prepared with solutions to navigate societal events that can be difficult to anticipate.”

According to the IAS study, “adult content” was the primary driver, followed closely by hate speech. Mobile web video remained the safest inventory for ad fraud (0.3%), but it was the most hazardous when it came to brand risk at 8.6%.

“As 2021 unfolds, it’s critical that marketers understand how to mitigate elevated brand safety risk effectively,” said Marlow.

But how?

“The most important first step a marketer can take when navigating brand safety and suitability is to know what their brand stands for,” Marlow stated. “This is the North Star of any brand safety effort. Once this is clear, they can then work with the right partners to find those contextual adjacencies that best represent their brand while avoiding those that don’t. 

He added, “When it comes to avoiding certain risky channels, such as sites that repeatedly purvey misinformation, that is just one part of the equation. It’s also important to be able to navigate more opaque scenarios such as user generated content and social media where the high volume of content generated also stems from a wide array of creators. This requires a more sophisticated level of control to mitigate adjacency risks based on the content.”

With IAS’s reach, brands can get more control back in some of these more opaque scenarios, which threaten to overwhelm marketers in an increasingly fragmented digital landscape. But marketers need to look at a more comprehensive strategy that includes risk as only part of the overall goal. That goal is “quality.”

“Beyond brand safety, right now digital advertising is all about understanding digital media quality, what we call ‘Quality Impressions,’” Marlow said. “The highest quality ad placements allow brands to better connect with the right audiences in the places that represent their brand values and campaign objectives. They can also avoid low-quality media adjacencies, such as hate speech, that don’t align with what they represent.”

Why we care. If the pandemic accelerated a brand’s need to ramp up e-commerce, the political climate during a campaign year placed a comparable priority on brand risk. Public health issues, as well as political calls for justice and equity, aren’t going away in 2021. Last year set the tone for creating a better digital playbook that is necessary to meet existing and new challenges ahead.

“In any market where there’s a major player, there’s always room for a ‘leading alternative.’ Serve different features, a different niche, different point of view.” Steve Pratley, Growth Consultant, The Conversion Co