The Best Content Marketing of May 2019

And a bonus terrible example!

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by Dave Robson

Latest from the Blog

Display Advertising: Direct Buy or DSP – Which is Right for You?

Bypassing the middleman usually means a lower price for the buyer. But when it comes to display advertising, this truism ain’t, umm, true.

Google Downranks AI Content. But Google Is Paying Publishers to Create AI Content

Google, what the heck?

The Everything App Will Amount to Nothing

Elon’s cringey press release about X as the “everything app” is a case of a billionaire smelling his own farts for too long.

The Google Ads Algorithm and the (Dreaded) Learning Period

Google Ads’ advanced algorithms learn from vast datasets to predict outcomes. Tweaking campaigns may reset this process and trigger a learning period.

How Can AI Improve Your SEO?

This article is only 35% written by ChatGPT!

This month in content marketing, there’s a pool full of Jell-O, more than you ever wanted to know about coffee, and a whole lot of dancing Pikachu.

NordVPN Sponsors a Pool Full of Jell-O

The last time we featured content from NordVPN, they were sponsoring a video about breaking a smart lock. That was smart, on-brand content marketing. But NordVPN has expanded their horizons, which is why they’ve sponsored Mark Rober’s super interesting engineering challenge: how to get a pool full of Jell-O. It’s tougher than you’d think, but the idea is worth nearly eighteen million views (at the time of this writing).

Binging With Babish Partners With Trade

The main bread and butter of Binging With Babish is creator Andrew Rea’s recreations of food from movies and TV. However, he has a second series called Basics With Babish, and it affords him two things. One, he shows viewers how to cook basic stuff like pasta, chicken, bread, etc. Two, he has a little more room to partner with sponsors, such as Trade, a coffee subscription service. It’s smart that he does a second series like this, as subscribers who are less comfortable with content marketing can stick with the original series and those who are fine with a little marketing in their YouTube get more content.

Ryan Reynolds Posts the Whole Detective Pikachu Movie

Well, he posted a YouTube video titled “Detective Pikachu: Full Picture”, which ended up just being Pikachu dancing for an hour and forty-two minutes. Reynolds is a master of content marketing, as seen in his many Deadpool stunts. His internet literacy helps a lot here (the dancing Pikachu is pretty reminiscent of the 1988 Crystal Light National Aerobic Championship Opening, a video loved by the internet and parodied by everyone from Key and Peele to Team Fortress 2), but Reynolds most valuable asset is he understands when people think it’s fun to be tricked. Speaking of which . . .

Bonus: Terrible Content Marketing from North Face

Outdoor clothing company North Face faced derision and ridicule this week when they launched a campaign to insert their brand into Wikipedia. By taking images of models wearing North Face at popular tourist destinations and putting those images into Wikipedia, ad agency Leo Burnett Taylor Made hoped to improve North Face’s Google ranking. Coverage of the stunt has been fairly negative though, and they’re being accused of “vandalizing” Wikipedia.