Month: October 2015

There are tectonic shifts underway among competing web, mobile, and social platforms, that will have profound effects on digital strategies. There are too many moving parts and shifting alliances for anyone to predict outcomes with any certainty. But Apple, Google, Facebook, and others are making moves that need to be considered in the context of platform competition, whether it is Apple ad-blocking, and News, Google AMP, and Polymer, Facebook Instant Articles, and Notify, or Twitter Moments. Some thoughts…

Mobile is not a neutral platform

For sure. Benedict Evan’s lead-up discussion on desktop vs mobile platform doesn’t sit quite right, but it isn’t necessary to the argument or the other insights which are on target. It is certainly true that mobile operating systems are becoming less neutral and more intrusive and there will be serious consequences as this trend continues.

… this summer we saw moves from Apple and Google to create their own real-estate around the home screen. … but the broader point is that this is Apple’s screen or Google’s screen, and another content provider gets there only if Apple or Google want (and if they implement the indexing APIs that Apple and Google require). This will get bigger… Next, Apple and Google are exploring new ways to unbundle the content within apps into new usage models. Hence Apple’s 3D Touch unbundles app content into the home screen … Can there be apps where this is the main UI? (And of course this isn’t on Android, so the fantasy of a cross-platform app gets even further away.) Read More

Notes from the Platform’s Edge

“Platforms for everyone, publications for no one”. John Herrman on the fascinating dance between publishers and platforms and social “platforms” like Facebook and Twitter who want to compete / survive via notification control. Referrals to websites from Facebook are trending down for many and the top ten membership is changing, and…

Facebook is … experimenting with a new editorial space… an app called Notify, which lets people aggregate… notifications? It was previously reported by Business Insider to be “a standalone mobile news publication.” … An Apple Watch future or a Siri future or a notifications-based future would threaten the most obvious ways Facebook and Twitter make money—by cramming ads into feeds—so it makes sense, probably, to at least try to get ahead of it, by becoming a sort of news notification clearinghouse—better or more vital than the notifications sent to users by, say, an Apple or Google News app…All along, platforms and publications have been interacting in two ways: on one end, by mingling audience and attention; on the other, by the advertising business model of one replacing the advertising business model of the other. Read More

For more on this join us for the New Frontiers in Digital Content Distribution panel discussion at the Gilbane conference.

The Apple-Google, App-Web Divide

Apple wants mobile devices to be filled with apps. Google supports a world where people browse the web for most things. Now websites are increasingly caught in the middle of those competing visions.

The full title of the article is “Publishers Straddle the Apple-Google, App-Web Divide”, but it is not just about publishers—everyone has to to figure out how to navigate among this divide and all of the exhaust from it. Ad-blocking, app-blocking, AMP-advantaging, non-neutral mobile platforms, and (healthy) web standards (e.g., web components) development competition, are all driven by the competing business models. Read More

Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages AMP Project

Google’s latest strategic salvo in the app-web battle is to provide another way to speed up web pages with an open source project based on the web components standard. The idea is to neutralize any speed advantages of Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News, or other apps. Of course this also serves to influence the direction of the web components standard development in the same way as Polymer. This is all good, but there are some concerns about how open AMP is in its current form. There is already a (beta) WordPress plugin which I have installed on gilbane.com but haven’t tested yet. Danny Sullivan’s post from the announcement contains a description and useful links. Read More

You can hear more about Web Components and Polymer; Deep Linking and App Indexing at the upcoming Gilbane conference.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programing…

Integrating marketing technologies? That’s the easy part

It would be difficult to find someone more qualified than Scott Brinker to talk about integrating marketing technology. He knows firsthand how hard it is, which is why you should listen to what he has to say about what’s even more difficult.

Is the “integration” challenge of marketing technology really our top obstacle?… There are two studies that I’ve come across in the past couple of weeks that have caused me to wonder if integration has become a bit of a red herring for marketers who are wrestling with the much more hairy, vicious, pointy-toothed beast of digital transformation… Integration is getting easier. Marketing, however, is not. Read more

Hear Scott’s keynote on Building an Infrastructure for Marketing Digital Transformation at the Gilbane conference and join us for multiple sessions on integration, digital transformation and marketing challenges.

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Short takes

Why ContentEditable is Terrible Or: How the Medium Editor Works… In case you thought building text editors was easy Or: If you are just curious. via Medium Engineering

CMS and Author Experience Or: Pushing WordPress’ boundaries… via responsivewebdesign.com

World of Service Providers, October 2015… WPP, Publicis, Havas, and Fullsix via Digital Clarity Group

Web Content Management Round-Up, October 2015… including discussion of latest WCM Magic Quadrant. via Digital Clarity Group

A new way to improve app experiences with web content… Safari View Controller and Automatic Safari Reader Activation. via MacStories

Digital Asset Management Round-Up, October 2015… Open Text, SAP, and Widen. via Digital Clarity Group

Useful infographic for anyone wondering why mobile apps take so long and cost so much… Overview of the mobile app development process. via Tech.in.Asia.com

E-Commerce Round-Up: September 2015… Farfetch, Time Inc, and Mondelez.  via Digital Clarity Group

Sorry to say the Boston.com leads the pack… The Cost of Mobile Ads on 50 News Websites. via nytimes.com

About

The Gilbane Advisor curates content for our conference community of content, computing, and digital experience professionals throughout the year. You can also subscribe via our feed.

The Gilbane Conference on Content, Technology, and Customer Experience helps marketers, IT, and business managers integrate content strategies and computing technologies to produce superior customer experiences for all stakeholders.

Mobile browser traffic is 2X bigger than app traffic, and growing faster

Mobile browser traffic is actually twice that of mobile app traffic, according to a just-released Morgan Stanley report… This appears to fly in the face of recent, strong, and repeated evidence that the app is winning, capturing 80-90 percent of our time on mobile.

Using comScore data, Morgan Stanley says the web is winning… comScore says the app is winning… Both are right… The problem is terminology and the exact focus of each study. Morgan Stanley’s study is focused on unique visitors… while comScore’s report is focused on actual user time spent.

There is still a lot of confusion around this. It’s not as simple as mobile web vs app. Marketers need mobile strategies that cover both: a mobile web strategy for top of the funnel reach and growth, and an app strategy for increasing engagement with those further along in the “customer journey”. For details Read More

Adaptive Content, Context, and Controversy

Trying to decide between responsive design, adaptive design, or separate web and mobile sites? It is a big decision and the attendent debate is both necessary and well worth the effort educationally. Technical, marketing, and business stakeholders should all be involved and all would benefit from Karen McGrane’s accessible and useful perspective on the options. Read More

Marketing technologists, growth hackers, and regression to the mean

This predicted phenomenon — of marketing technologists being a temporary specialization that largely regresses back to the mean of what defines a “marketer” — seems analogous to the pattern we’ve seen with digital marketing and, possibly, what we’re seeing with growth hacking too.

For a while, digital marketers were specialists that raced ahead of baseline marketers with their unique knowledge and domain expertise. But today — even though we’re not there completely — we see the reunification of digital marketing into the standard definition of marketing. Digital marketing is just an implicit part of marketing now. … Although, important to note, it took 20 years. Read More

This free online encyclopedia has achieved what Wikipedia can only dream of

For all Wikipedia’s utility it is too often frustratingly incomplete and blatantly biased. This is not a knock on its hard-working editors or its laudable mission. Wikipedia it is a positive force in advancing education and its faults are mainly a result of its idealistic scope. Hopefully it will continue to grow and improve. There at least one example of a very successful model that should at least be applicable to other special domains…

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy may be the most interesting website on the internet. Not because of the content—which includes fascinating entries on everything from ambiguity to zombies—but because of the site itself… Its creators have solved one of the internet’s fundamental problems: How to provide authoritative, rigorously accurate knowledge, at no cost to readers. It’s something the encyclopedia… has managed to do for two decades … Unfortunately, all of the other current ways of designing an encyclopedia very badly fail to meet at least one of these requirements. Read More

The Fake Traffic Schemes That Are Rotting the Internet

If you’ve been following the topic you won’t be shocked, but will likely find some additional details in this report. If you are not familiar with what has been going on the report will open your eyes wide – where they should be if you are spending money on advertising. The infection by vertical domain is interesting too. Read More

Gilbane Conference 2015

Join us in Boston, December 1-3. Content, technology and customer experience. gilbaneconference.com

Short takes

The Impossible Definition of Content Marketing… “Or we could just call it marketing.” via Percolate

Publishers & advertisers no longer in alignment… Popping the Publishing Bubble via Stratechery

His theory of diffusion causation could be applied to other cases – the Web for example. How quickly will ads disappear from the Internet? via Asymco

One publisher’s reaction to ad blockers… You Can Now Turn Off Ads On Techdirt via Techdirt

Data dwarfs… Why are we still calling them phones? via Quartz

This is a great start in improving citizen web experience. Introducing the U.S. Web Design Standards via 18F.gsa.gov

Adobe’s Plan to Make Your iPad as Good as Your Desktop makes sense for them, and Apple is helping. via Wired

Good advice for product managers and designers. Dark Forest At Night via Medium

If you use Flash you no-doubt already know that this already happened… Google’s Chrome Browser Will Begin Blocking Flash Web Ads via the Wall Street Journal

About

The Gilbane Advisor curates content for our conference community of content, computing, and digital experience professionals throughout the year. You can also subscribe via our feed.

The Gilbane Conference on Content, Technology, and Customer Experience helps marketers, IT, and business managers integrate content strategies and computing technologies to produce superior customer experiences for all stakeholders.