Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

About a week ago, the Times of London published an investigation revealing ads sponsored by the British government and several private sector companies had appeared ahead of YouTube videos supporting terrorist groups. In response, advertisers started pulling their spending from YouTube and the wider Google ad network. The boycott has grown as more problems have emerged. PepsiCo and Wal-Mart have now joined the ranks of advertisers pulling dollars from Google.

Google for its part has said it is examining its policies and renewing its commitment to better police content. It will accelerate reviews of potentially objectionable videos and filter more ads while giving advertisers more control over where their ads appear.

“While we recognize that no system will be 100 percent perfect, we believe these major steps will further safeguard our advertisers’ brands,” Philipp Schindler, Google’s chief business officer, said in a statement....

It’s been over a decade since the Internet transformed print media.

Very quickly the web’s ability to rapidly disseminate news, and articles, made newspapers and magazines obsolete. Along with their demise went the ability for advertisers to reach customers via print. What was once an “easy buy” for the auto or home section of a paper, or for magazines targeting your audience, simply disappeared. Due to very clear measuring tools, unlike print, Internet ads were far cheaper and more appealing to advertisers – so that’s where at least some of the money went.

While this trend was easy enough to predict, few expected the unanticipated consequences....

There are many new, intriguing data points, including Denny’s viral tweet, Snapchat and YouTube numbers, Facebook local and connected cars.

It was a stellar week in digital marketing stats, and here are the nine that really stood out:

1. If one tweet can sell a thousand Moons Over My Hammy, this is itDenny’s tweet on Wednesday represents a historic Twitter marketing achievement. The following message has garnered 108,000 retweets and more than 152,000 likes in the last couple of days.

The diner-style restaurant chain utilized a popular “zoom in” scavenger hunt meme to inspire such robust interest. How does it stack up compared to tweets of marketing lore? Well, it has surpassed the engagement seen by Arby’s iconic “Hey @Pharrell, can we have our hat back?” 2014 Grammys post....