In the latest in her series on agile marketing strategies, agile coach Stacey Ackerman drills down into why agile teams can get work done faster than traditionally organized marketing teams. There are two important and related keys to success: cross-functional representation on the agile team and the avoidance of over-specialization.

Cross-functional representation on the team itself avoids the familiar lag when projects are handed off to other departments. There is no waiting for a response — from creative, from graphic design, from marketing ops — when each function is on the team and engaged in the work.

Of course, there are likely to be specialists on any such team — but a team composed entirely of specialists invites bottle-necks. Instead of waiting for the graphic design department to do their piece, you can end up waiting for the graphic designer on the team. Team members with versatile skills enable tasks to be nimbly passed around when other team members are overloaded. Have at least some team members with T-shaped skill-sets: a specialism, plus the ability to take on other tasks.

Read more here.

There’s a lot of buzz around BIMI – Brand Indicators for Message Identification – Google’s new standard that displays brand logos alongside DMARC compliant email messages. The goal is to protect brands from phishing campaigns by creating a strict DMARC policy that stops impersonation attacks. Join our BIMI experts for this webinar where they will explain everything marketing managers need to know about BIMI and why it is important to every organization that uses email.

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Beginning today, Google has again suspended all political ads through the inauguration. The first political ad ban took place after the November U.S. election and lasted through December 10. The new ban is set to last a week, but the company says they’ll monitor the situation to determine if it should be extended.

Google’s ads policies ban content that incites hate or violence, but they regularly monitor ads around sensitive events: “We regularly pause ads over unpredictable, ‘sensitive’ events when ads can be used to exploit the event or amplify misleading information,” says a Google spokesperson. The ad ban is comprehensive and includes ads run by news organizations and merchandisers.

Read more here.

Publishers can now access new data in Google Search Console about their Google News visibility. The new dedicated performance report displays clicks, impressions and click-through-rate information for your performance on Google News and from the Google News app on Android and iOS.

This data tells you which articles show up in Google News, which are most popular, and how audience behavior varies by reader location. The new Search Console report does not cover data from the “News” tab in Google Search. That data is covered separately in the Performance report for Search, filtered to the news search type.

Read more here.

Oftentimes, when we visualize the perfect buyer’s journey, we’re looking at it from a marketer’s perspective, imagining what we’re trying to achieve with our initiatives. But, ultimately, the definition of the perfect journey is in the eye of the buyer. The buyer doesn’t really care about your programs, your channels or what technologies you’re using, they’re just trying to get enough information to make a purchase decision.

We recently spoke to Integrate CMO Deb Wolf about the perfect buyer’s journey and the obstacles marketing teams face when trying to deliver the ideal customer experience. In the lightly-edited conversation, Wolf shares specific tips for building connections between siloed channels, technologies and teams, as well as the reasons why this is so important today.

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App Annie, the mobile marketing data and analytics platform yesterday released a new report, The State of Mobile, 2021. Predictably, 2020 saw soaring use of mobile devices as people sought to maintain remote connections, both personal and commercial. Mobile marketing saw across the board growth in app downloads, app store spend, mobile ad spend, and daily time spent per user. Venture capital invested $73 billion in mobile tech, a YoY growth of 27%.

The key was acceleration, with mobile adoption advancing two to three years in just 12 months. With consumers moving to mobile to make purchases, spend is $143 billion worldwide, a growth of 20% YoY. Consumers spent more time on mobile devices than watching live TV — and it’s not just Gen Z: Millennials and Baby Boomers also increased their time spent in the top 50 apps.

Why we care. Of course, it’s possible that new kinds of devices and new channels are just around the corner, but the directionality of these trends is unmistakable. Consumers are adjusting more rapidly than ever to engaging with the world around them and making important purchases, through something they can hold in their hands or carry in their pockets.

SEO For Developers. Google Tag Manager For Marketers And Analysts. Which workshop will you choose? Join us online, February 24-25, for an expert-led, interactive training experience loaded with actionable tactics and proven advice… just $149!

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We have too many external struggles in marketing tech/operations to be having pissing contests over which platform is better than the other (i.e. “mine is better than yours”), y’all.” Sara McNamara, Solution Architect, Slack.