2 blogs you must be reading as a marketer - Advance Creatives Recommend
What should you be reading? Recommendations from Advance creatives
We sat down with two of our gifted creatives, Senior Concept Developer, Chris Calvert, and Digital Designer, Roxana Ciocsan, to get their recommendations on the content that you as a marketer simply cannot miss.
Chris Calvert on content creation: “We tend to forget that the core task of communication is to tell a compelling story”
We asked our UK creative on his go-to blog, and why this specific blog inspires him as a copywriter.
“My choice would be The AdContrarian. The blog is my armour against the buzzwords and narcissism of the Kool-Aid drinking, navel-gazing, hubris peddling world of AdTech evangelism.”
And rightly so. Business Insider named The AdContrarian as being one of the world’s most influential advertising and marketing blogs. It is written by Bob Hoffmann, a sought-after international speaker and author of four Amazon #1 bestselling books about advertising. Chris reflects about why this blog has become such a huge success in the minds of marketers:
“Old copy hack and all-round common-sense crusader Bob Hoffman uses in-depth analysis and a rapier wit to discuss, debunk and demystify the mess that marketing has got itself into. He’s not merely a marketing naysayer, though – indeed, he’s a devotee of the trade – but he has little patience for the kind of deceptive, data trawling tactics employed by marketing automation and social media which conspire to drag us away from the core task of communication – to tell a compelling story.”
And in a world with more channels, shorter attention spans and increased demand for individual experiences, why not cut through the noise by telling authentic stories about the brand?
If you want to read a blog that challenges the mainstream in a provocative but truthful way, you’ll find The AdContrarian here.
“Video beats static content any day” – Digital Designer, Roxana Ciocsan
At the other side of the creative spectrum, we have someone, who finds her best solutions by navigating in the digital landscape. Our talented Romanian Digital Designer, Roxana Ciocsan, joined Advance in 2018 and works on content for a portfolio of different clients. Her recommendation is very much based on the medium that she works with on a daily basis:
“I think Falcon’s blog has a lot of specific tips that are easy to implement in my daily work. It's got everything from the ideal length of a Facebook video to where to place the call to action.”
Falcon.io offers a platform to monitor and improve social media marketing, while their blog explores the full potential of digital marketing. Based on data from Facebook itself, the blog talks about social media marketing best practices like how best to build social analytics, how to match your KPIs with Facebook video formats, and much more.
Roxana elaborates on why being on the forefront of new developments in the media landscape is so important:
“Our clients trust in us to be experts, so it’s nice to have specific data to refer to when we're advising them. For instance, people spend 1,7 seconds with a piece of content on mobile compared to 2,5 on desktop, or we spend 5 times longer looking at video compared to static content across both Facebook and Instagram. Video beats static content every day. This is something that needs to be in the back of our minds when we design content for our clients.”
If you are interested in how to work with Facebook video advertising, Roxana recommends the post on the 15 essential best practices for 2019.
