This article was originally published on the Outbrain blog.

Swing states. Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin — in this contentious election climate, the pressure is on to win supporters and target demographics with traditionally low turnout to make it out to the polls.

While Trump and Clinton continue to rely on traditional marketing — newspapers, radio, and TV — to communicate their message to the masses, there’s no doubt they are also putting a lot of thought on how to target voters in these swing states on a micro-level through digital media and content marketing. …

Originally published on the Outbrain blog.

Yesterday, Verizon announced its acquisition of Yahoo for $4.8 billion. Aside from what this means for Marissa Mayer’s future, the acquisition solidifies Verizon’s evolution into a competitive global mobile media company. While it is still a long way behind Google and Facebook — the reigning king and queen of mobile advertising — the deal puts it at a more competitive number three spot.

Following the heels of last year’s AOL acquisition (in which it got HuffPo, TechCrunch, Moviephone, and a bunch of video platforms), Verizon now gains Yahoo’s 1 billion monthly users of email, news, sports, and finance tools. …

Hi, all.

Hope you had a good week.

Welcome to Friday Thing/k — a brand storytelling canvas where I’d like to share with you smart, creative, inspiring, engaging, cool, and innovative content marketing ideas that take my digital marketing breath away once a week.

The music is always on at our office, it’s like working in a musical.

Between Ayal (Minister of Sound and our MD), Adam (aka Shazam and our Head of Brands and Agencies), and Ed & Brett (Spotify borrows playlists from these two Account Managers), the music never stops at Outbrain Sydney.

When it comes to me, well, that’s a different story. …

Article originally published on the Outbrain blog.

Content marketing has taken over. You hear about it all the time.

You’re probably talking about it with your marketing friends and trying to explain it to your significant other. You may even be interested in leveraging it to create more meaningful relationships with prospects and customers.

But you still might not be sure how. After all, there are a variety of strategies, tactics, and tools at your disposal.

What should you focus on first?

I’m going to set you up with a simple framework that will help you get started with content marketing as early as today. …

by Dennis Yuscavitch

Over the past few months, Outbrain has been working with Google on its AMP project to address what’s always been a singular focus for this company: improving the user experience with content and how it’s discovered.

For those who may not know, AMP stands for “Accelerated Mobile Pages.” As the name suggests, it’s an open source initiative to build a faster, more beautiful open web — one that is sorely needed for audiences, advertisers and publishers who have shifted to mobile.

We know that the mobile user experience can often be clunky, slow and frustrating. AMP can largely put those days behind us, enabling publishers to create mobile-friendly content that loads instantly for consumers on any screen. …

When we made our list of the best native ads of 2014, we noted that while overall quality had improved from the year before, transparency, authenticity and editorial value continued to be problematic.

The 2015 crop continues the progress made last year, with most publishers clearly labeling their native ads as “sponsored” and really stepping up the production value.

Naturally, there are growing pains. Discoverability is still an issue. Outside of coverage in the trades or a very specific Search, these native ads can be hard to come by, which seems at odds with their imagined purpose. …

According to the latest from the National Retail Federation, consumers are spending as much time online as they are in line at retail stores during Black Friday. So it’s both fitting and ironic that online interest (pageviews) in tech gear was 27% higher on Black Friday than on Cyber Monday.

How to read these maps

You can zoom in and out on the map using the -/+ buttons in the top left corner. And use the time lapse bar in the lower-left corner to track the activity throughout both days, starting at 12:00 AM. All times in EST.

If fashion is famously fickle, what about consumer interest in it?

To commemorate the new Fall season and the Fashion Week storm now rolling through Milan, we took a look at some fashion brands and how they fared among audiences over the last month. Specifically, which brands captured the most interest relative to their presence in the news?

If you’re new to Outbrain’s proxy for “interest,” we use average Page Views Per Story to gauge a brand’s magnetic force in the media.

The Weeks Leading Up to Fashion Week

As a well-oiled hype machine, Fashion Week is an interesting case study for how fashion brands maneuver the spotlight. It’s both a condensed view of what it takes to generate “buzz” at any time of year (not just during Fashion Week) and complete and utter hyperbole. A hot new item here, a surprise collaboration there, a star-studded runway show, a killer party, and a little controversy are all par for the course. …