See what ads your competitors are running!

In one of the most jarring updates to Facebook in some time, you can now see what ads your competitors are running.

Previously, all the ads that a Facebook page was running were only visible to the Facebook Page admins and the people in the target audience that the ads were running to. Now, anyone at any time can go see the ads running in their country on any Facebook page.

How? Check it out:

On mobile, load a facebook page and look for a white oblong box to appear at the bottom of the cover photo. Click on that box to take you to all active ads on Facebook.

On Desktop, navigate to a Facebook page, look on the left-hand side menu and find the “Info and Ads” section.

This goes even deeper on political facebook accounts. On Facebook accounts that have political messaging, you can see all the ads that pages have run. This is largely due to the role of Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and foreign influence on the last election cycle.

You will also notice now that you can see who is running the ads, regardless of the name of the Facebook page on political campaigns.

These are with Facebook’s effort to make their ads more transparent to the community. I think in the instance of political marketing, this makes a lot of sense.

Election Season 2018

We had the pleasure of working with four different campaigns this election season. Each campaign showcased a different personality and, as a result, each had different needs for their work. We are very selective of the groups we work with in this arena and I (Kevin) was glad to work with these four people not only as clients but also as friends.

  1. Jay Bush for State Representative.
    We did a lot of work for Jay Bush. We launched a website, created a campaign video, recorded testimonials with the community, took photos of families supporting Jay, and ran social media ads.
  2. Shannon Stewart for School Board:
    The “Shannon for Schools” branding needed to match the bright personality of the candidate. We went with an untraditional angle for the signage and branding. We also took some family photos to use during the campaign.
  3. Shawn Daly for School Board:
    Shawn is a fantastic candidate for school board. We created a traditional brand and landing page to help him introduce himself more to the community.
  4. AJ Massey for School Board:
    AJ’s branding colors are modeled after his favorite school, Ole Miss, and have an athletic flair (I mean the guy did play college football!). AJ ended up not having an opponent in the election so we didn’t have much additional work for him.

Client Spotlight: Leadership University

This video shoot was a little more complicated than most that we have completed for a client. It involved shooting at a high ropes course and about 5-6 other locations and dates. It involved 4-5 different cameras with different gear for each. But to capture the excitement of the ropes course and to capture the variety of locations and actions was well worth the extra effort.

One of my favorite parts of this was including a GoPro trained on the faces of some of the students. It helped capture the excitement of jumping out of a tree! This video needed to be fun to help capture students’ imagination and attention.

Here is the Leadership Jackson recruitment video for 2018!

State of the Apps: May 2018

At Adelsberger Marketing, we use a lot of apps to help keep the business running smoothly. I know you probably use a few, too, but I wanted share ours in case you were looking for others to help productivity!

RainyMood: Rainy Mood is a free browser-based rain noise maker. I frequently use this in Chrome, with an extension called ‘Volume’ Master. I like to make the rain noises be the base layer of sound in my earphones when I am at theCO or working around other people. This allows a continuous background noise that I often edit video over or play focus music on top of it. It helps keep dips and track changes in the music from becoming distracting.

Google Drive: Adelsberger Marketing using Google’s G Suite for our emails, this also gives us access to Google Drive which we have nearly unlimited amounts of storage on. This is a way we share files internally and externally with clients. Instead of also paying for DropBox, we use Google Drive’s provided storage with G Suite. It’s pretty sweet.

BackBlaze: Fortunately, I have not needed to implement the recovery feature of BackBlaze yet, and hopefully I never will. Backblaze is a very affordable in-the-background backup service. It is always backing up my computer and it’s $5 a month for all you can use data. It also backs up external hard drives that you connect to your computer once a month. I have this running on all of my team’s computers.

Toggl: Toggle is our time tracking method of choice (right now). It helps us keep our time based on the client. We don’t charge hourly but it helps us review where we are spending our time.

Slack: We use slack internally to communicate as a team. We try to avoid sending email in house as much as possible. Slack is a lifesaver. Pro-tip: I recently found out that you can ask Slack to remind you of a message in a certain period of time. This is a new tool that I will use a lot.

Adobe Creative Cloud: We use the creative cloud suite for all of our creative work around here. Seems like on a weekly basis we use almost all of the major Adobe products!

Splice: Splice is the app I use to assemble my daily videos. It is a free app from GoPro and has built-in titles and sound files. It makes putting that video together a snap.

WordSwag: WordSwag may be some of the best money I have ever spent on an app. We use it all the time. Fortunately, they recently released some new fonts.

Overcast: Listening to podcasts is something I spend a lot of time on. Overcast helps me to do that better. It has smart speed, which removes dead spaces in conversation, which helps you listen to podcasts faster. It also allows you to save custom speeds for each of the shows that you listen to.

Social Media Win: We Beefin?

Wendy’s is back at it again. They have taken their viral quality attacks on other burger chains to a new level of production with a mixtape. Yes, a mixtape. Released on Spotify.

You, too, can listen to the 5 tracks from Wendy’s taking shots at their competition. The best one from ‘fast food’s first lady’ is Rest in Grease. They very clearly take a shot at McDonalds, “why is your ice cream machine always broken?” This is a hilarious execution of a strategy that was already working on Twitter. The songs are not good enough to listen to just to listen to, but people checking them out once is worth the investment.

You can listen to them here:

State of the Podcasts: April 2018

I love listening to podcasts. I listen to them when I run, drive, and clean. Some people know this about me and I regularly get asked about suggested podcast listening. So I am going to put out an annual list to talk about what shows I am listening to and give you some suggestions on things to pick up:

(* Indicates a favorite)

SOCIAL MEDIA:

Social Media Marketing Podcast: Social Media Examiner
*Social Media Marketing Talk Show: Social Media Examiner
Perpetual Traffic: Digital Marketer
Smart Pizza Marketing Podcast: Bruce Irving

PRODUCTIVITY:

**Cortex: Relay FM
Free Agents: Relay FM

BUSINESS:

Corner Office Podcast: Market Place
*How I Built This with Guy Raz: NPR
The Businessology Show: Blumer
Open for Business: Gimlet
**StartUp: Gimlet (Start from Season 1 EP 1)
The Venture: Gimlet
The Pitch: Gimlet Media

EDUCATIONAL:
99% Invisible: Roman Mars
*Planet Money: NPR

FUN/OTHER:
Embedded: NPR
Empowered Parent Podcast (Formerly Empowered to Connect): One Big Happy Home
Ungeniused: Relay FM
**50 Things That Made the Modern Economy: BBC World Service (Start from Episode 1)
**Crimetown: Gimlet (Start from Episode 1)
*Hello Internet: CGP Grey Brady Haran
(During Draft Season Only) NFL: Move the Sticks: NFL Network
*Revisionist History: Malcolm Gladwell (Start from Episode 1)
Science VS: Gimlet
The Unmade Podcast: Brady Haran
*What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law (Start from Episode 1)

FAITH:
*Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast: Gospel in Life

IN MY CUE (haven’t got through enough of the above yet to try these new ones):
Akimbo: Seth Godin
Building a Business that Lasts: Jay Owen
Business Wars: Wondery
GaryVee Audio Experience: Gary Vaynerchuk

Anchor: A quick way to get into podcasting

Most people have not heard of Anchor. Anchor made a go at being the audio only social media a few years ago. It worked but it was a little clunky and I a lover of podcasts wrote it off. I thought Anchor was dead. But then Google bought it. Google does nothing halfway.

Anchor was reborn a few weeks ago as a podcast creator in your pocket. The new anchor was designed to allow you create and edit podcasts quickly from your phone. They have music for you to use as transitions. They also allow you to record differnt parts of your podcast in segements. This can allow you to focus on each section and create someting worth listening too.

But the most powerful part of Anchor is that it distributes podcasts instantly. There was a time when hosting a podcast cost money and submitting to the different feeds took some time. Now Anchor does that automatically and for free. Record a podcast with Anchor, or upload it to their website, and it will be automatically distribute to major podcast outlets.

Renae is even using this to distribute audio for an Alexa Flash Briefing. Check her out by searching for Daily Women’s Devotional on the Flash Library.

Anchor is making it easier than ever to great audio content. How can you make use of this and become an expert in your own field

 

Client Spotlight: BizTech Roadshow

If you haven’t heard by now, Adelsberger Marketing and theCO are in the middle of a 15 county tour of West Tennessee with Kevin getting a chance to speak at all the stops and theCO bus showing off the latest in technology. We have had great turnouts so we wanted to take a look at the components that have gone into making the event successful.

  1. Cool Branding: Katie Howerton of Our Jackson Home and theCO put together a great brand to make the tour folks look cooler than we really are. This brand has been implemented across all of our components to give a unified feel to the marketing. 
  2. A great place to find out more: We created a simple but branded website to help direct people to find out more. BizTechRoadshow.com has a video explaining what the tour is and provides information about each of our tour stops that are open to the public. We chose to leave the details off there to help make the site more streamlined. We put the details on Facebook events that were created for each county that was open to the public.
  3. Facebook Events: We created Facebook events for each of the stops. We really like using Facebook events because it helps create a reminder system that people are native to. If you RSVP for an event on Facebook, it opens you up to additional communication from us. This means we can send you reminders and notes about the event. Facebook will also send reminders the day of the event which will help people to remember.
  4. Facebook Video: We created videos for almost every stop on the tour, depending if they are open to the public or not. We did this in a way that allowed to us to use some parts of the video multiple times to cut down on editing and shooting time. Each of these videos is specific for the county that we are visiting so our local partners are able to share a video that is talking about their specific location. It was worth the extra time to do custom videos because people like to feel like they are being talked to specifically not generally.
  5. Facebook Ads and Retargeting: We have run a good amount of ads for each location on the tour. We have been able to target folks via Facebook based on interests that they have in Entrepreneurship and Social Media. Additionally, we target folks who have shown interest in the event with messages saying: “There is still time to RSVP.” These have been effective.
  6. Local Partnerships: The most important part of the tour is the local partnerships to execute these events. Having these events with a local entity, mostly chambers, gives us added credibility as we go into a town to talk. We are also providing in demand content which in turn helps the chamber seem more valuable to their members.  It is a win-win for sure!

We have a few more stops left and we hope to see you come out to the BizTech Roadshow!

Client Spotlight: First Presbyterian Church

We recently completed a website for First Presbyterian Church of Jackson Tennessee. The staff and lay folks felt it was time for an internet Facelift so we went to work!

They already had a strong brand so we just needed to give the website an updated look. This included writing new copy, doing a photo shoot on a Sunday, and recording a new welcome message from the pastor. It also led them to work on a new system to stream and log their services. This component was done in partnership with Cody Cunningham.

First Pres takes their history seriously so we worked that into the new site. We also worked to streamline the menu navigation and bring a responsive element to the site which had been lacking. We also built the site on WordPress to make content updates easy for the staff as they continue their progress into the future.

Check it out here. 

 

Book Review: End of Advertising

For Christmas, my little brother gave me The End of Advertising by Andrew Essex.

I would recommend this book for someone who has worked in the advertising world for a long time or whose thoughts on advertising stem from years ago.

As a digital native and Gary Vaynerchuck fan, the concepts in the book are preaching to the choir. But I am regularly surprised by people I speak with that are way behind the times when it comes to advertising.

To Andrew’s credit, he is a storied and successful advertising man. But he is wise enough to see the changes coming and is writing this book, I think, to help awaken his colleagues to the modern realities of today.

One of the core concepts that most people to figure out is that appointment TV no longer exists. What is appointment TV? It’s TV that people watch at certain time every night/week and, therefore, are there to watch the commercials, too. But with the exception of live sports, almost no one watches live tv anymore, and almost no one watches TV commercials. (With the huge exception being the SuperBowl, even Gary Vee says that it is one of the best deals in advertising!)

This applies also to banner ads and increasingly all forms of digital marketing. Interruption-based marketing, as Seth Godin would refer to it, is becoming less and less effective. Most large companies are just riding the Titanic down to the bottom.

The second thing I loved about this book was the case study of CitiBike. Here is a link to an article Andrew wrote that gives a shorter version of the account in the book.

The big point is here: the next generation doesn’t want to watch your interruption ads. How your company deals with that will determine a lot about how your company succeeds in the next 40 years.