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More than half of Gen C use the internet as their main source of entertainment, and 66% spend the same or more time watching online video as watching television [2].

Conversation drives Gen C, especially when it’s aligned with their interests. They are hungry for content that they can share and spread, no matter where it comes from: other people, content providers, brands.

The majority -- 85% -- of Gen C relies on peer approval for their buying decisions [2]. The under 35 set will be 40% of the population by 2020. But more importantly, by then, we’ll all likely be Gen C.

Gen C has a camera in their pockets, so the stuff they capture and curate looks more common, ordinary, even pointless at times. But the ordinary-ness of it all is what is extraordinary. Pictures of the everyday-ness around them allow them to find new meaning, as if they are seeing things for the first time.

They record every detail and then curate that content to reflect their personal values and how they see the world. In fact, 1 in 4 upload a video every week and nearly half upload a photo every week [2]. It’s their way of controlling how they want to be perceived by others

Giving them a way to add their own uniqueness to an experience gives them a reason to add it to the collage of their lives.

Giving them content that matches their definition of quality has become their expectation, not a nice to have.

Well-thought-out, useful and interesting branded content has more opportunity than ever to contribute meaning to people’s everyday lives. But there is also greater risk than ever from messaging that doesn’t feel authentic, relevant, personalized, and participatory.

Gen C wants to give us signals of their interest. They are looking to connect directly with brands that create experiences that offer something relevant and valuable, and they expect that we’ll be ready and willing to act on those signals and continuously improve the quality of our interactions with them.

Rather than starting by thinking about how to reach or broadcast to as many people as possible to get to those who matter, what if we began with engaging those who matter the most. We could prioritize surfacing the 5% — and make our entire plan better by learning from their interactions and leaning on their advocacy to expand our reach in a smarter way. We wouldn’t be abandoning “reach”; we’d be reorienting our thinking towards greater “engaged reach”?

By turning the reach-driven funnel upside down, we’re in effect creating an ‘engagement pyramid’. The engagement pyramid isn’t just about retention and growth of our existing customer base. It’s about starting with the 5% who will be most interested in what we have to say and most willing to speak for us. This group not only includes current customers, but also those most likely to influence others toward your brand.

you need to be “always on” because Gen C is “always on”.

Prioritize content, beyond commercials

Some of today’s most successful brands realize the power of their fans to help generate content that they in turn surface to a broader group.

Advertising is a key way that Facebook will monetize its 751 million mobile users.   Earlier this year, the number of active daily visitors checking Facebook on mobile devices surpassed people checking the social network on the web.

Photos are still the most popular item of personal content that we share right now with nearly 550 million+ photos shared each day on various internet services and this is expected to double within the next 12 months.

Advertising in the News Feed has moved towards bigger pictures and richer media and it will continue to go in that direction.

fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than writing that is specifically designed to persuade through argument and evidence.

Why are we putty in a storyteller’s hands? The psychologists Melanie Green and Tim Brock argue that entering fictional worlds “radically alters the way information is processed.” Green and Brock’s studies shows that the more absorbed readers are in a story, the more the story changes them. Highly absorbed readers also detected significantly fewer “false notes” in stories--inaccuracies, missteps--than less transported readers.

When we read dry, factual arguments, we read with our dukes up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally and this seems to leave us defenseless.

stories can also function as Trojan Horses. The audience accepts the story because, for a human, a good story always seems like a gift. But the story is actually just a delivery system for the teller’s agenda. A story is a trick for sneaking a message into the fortified citadel of the human mind.

storytelling is a uniquely powerful form of persuasive jujitsu

we are beasts of emotion more than logic. We are creatures of story, and the process of changing one mind or the whole world must begin with “Once upon a time.”

22 percent of ad clicks are “misclicks,” or accidental clicks, and 18 percent were fraudulent. Those accidental and fraudulent clicks had a conversion rate of less than 0.1%.

A similar study conducted a year ago said 47% of clicks on mobile ads were worthless

In his own study, Macy analyzed words expressing mood in 500 million tweets sent between February 2008 and January 2010. He found that people’s mood, as measured by their tweets, tended to be elevated in the morning and to decline as the day progressed. Weekends tended to be “happier” days, although mood peak started later in the morning, possibly reflecting twitterers' tendency to sleep in. Most remarkable, Macy said in an interview with Science magazine, was that the tweets showed a similar pattern across the 84 countries where the tweets originated, suggesting that the daily mood curve is fundamentally human rather than cultural.

A series of studies have used electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the neural correlates of the “Aha! moment” and its antecedents. Although the experience of insight is sudden and can seem disconnected from the immediately preceding thought, these studies show that insight is the culmination of a series of brain states and processes operating at different time scales.

Drop the whole subject and put it out of your mind and let your subconscious do its thing.

As we engage our conscious minds in other tasks, like sleeping or taking a shower, our subconscious can go to work on finding relationships in all the data we’ve collected so far.

Seth Godin wrote about how important it is to be willing to produce a lot of bad ideas, saying that people who have lots of ideas like entrepreneurs, writers and musicians all fail far more often than they succeed, but they fail less than those who have no ideas at all.

They throw into relief the larger questions of privacy policy we’re currently wrestling with as a culture: Too much disclosure of the social graph can lead to friends feeling that you’re tattling on them to a corporation. The interest graph can turn your passions into a marketing campaign. The behavior graph can allow people who wish you harm to know where you are and what you’re doing. And revealing the personal graph can make it feel like an outside entity is quite literally reading your mind.

companies are actively constructing these graphs already. These products and services are in the market today, but most in existence target only one or two of these graphs. Few are pursuing all four, both given the immaturity of the space and a lack of clear targets to shoot for. This has the unintentional effect of highlighting the risks of using such services, without demonstrating their benefits. For the potential of contextual computing to be realized, these data sets must be integrated.

In an ideal contextual computing state, this graph would be complete--so gentle nudges by software and services can bring together two people who are strangers but who could get along brilliantly and are in the same place at the same time. It could be two people who share a friend and who simultaneously move to Omaha, where neither person knows a soul.

It’s easy for data to depict what you actually do instead of what you claim to do. Sensors do the job. So do, if less elegantly, self-reporting mechanisms. This data can sit in pivotal contrast to the interest graph, allowing computers to know, perhaps better than you, how likely you are to go for a jog. It would be useful, too, for a travel site that notes how you tell friends you’d like to visit China but records that you only vacation in Europe. Rather than uselessly recommending vacation deals to Beijing, a smart travel app would instead feed you deals to Paris or Berlin. The behavior graph provides the foundation, to some extent, of Google Search, Netflix recommendations, Amazon recommendations, iTunes Genius, Nike+ run tracking, FourSquare, FitBit, and the entire "quantified self" movement. When mashed against the other three graphs, there’s a potential for real insight.

Within a decade, contextual computing will be the dominant paradigm in technology.

during Q4 Facebook delivered a 68 percent lower cost-per-acquisition than other channels, though Jakubowski declined to specific the average CPA advertisers saw on Facebook. "Facebook is a bargain right now. My customers would like to keep it that way," he said.

In these new mobile settings, maybe success for an ad doesn’t mean lots of clicks or even lots of online purchases. Maybe it means phone calls, or foot traffic to stores. Maybe it means someone searches for something now and later follows up on a desktop computer. Google has been exploring ways to measure all of these possibilities.

About 30% of restaurant searches and 25% of movie searches take place on mobile devices. About 25% of YouTube traffic is mobile. But according to earnings reports the company filed with the SEC, its cost-per-click fees and profit margins are smaller for mobile advertising products than for similar advertising on its websites.

A Google spokesperson says that on average, campaigns see on average a 6% to 8% increase in average click-through rate when brands include a click-to-call phone number in an ad.

aims to turn foot traffic into a measurable outcome of mobile ads, something that it has already done with phone calls. With a click-to-call ad offering, users can click a phone number within their search results to call an advertiser who has sponsored the term.

He argues that it makes more sense to measure effectiveness of mobile advertising by metrics such as reach, frequency, and recall--like TV--than by the same click-through metric on which desktop digital advertising relies.

Facebook's Head of Measurement and Insights, Brad Smallwood, recently made a similar argument for all digital advertising, desktop included. He wrote in a blog post that when brands focus on reach rather than clicks on Facebook, they have 70% higher return on investment from their campaigns. T

It's hard to break free of the mindset that treats communication as a control function. But many leaders find that ceding control over what employees say on company channels — on an intranet discussion forum, for example — means gaining a new way to tap into the talent, the insight, and the passion of their people. They also find that self-policing by employees works to keep such discussion from going off-track.

Advertising spending in emerging markets is increasing faster than in the worldwide market

Globally, advertising was up 3.1 percent in the first quarter year-over-year to US$ 128 billion, following a strong finish last year.

In terms of total dollars spent, TV is still king with the most spending. The growth in TV market ad spend, like the growth in overall spending, was region-dependent. In the emerging markets of the Middle and Africa, for instance, TV soared 33.8 percent, while it grew only 4 percent in North America.

The evolution of print advertising is also heavily region-dependent, meaning that any predictions about the demise of print might best specify a location. Magazine ad spending actually increased by 7.6 percent in Latin America, for instance, but dropped by 5 percent in the U.S. Newspapers showed a similar difference, increasing by 10.3 percent in Latin America and dropping by 2.1 percent in the U.S.

However, the growth in online advertising was consistently strong around the planet. The Middle East and Africa again led, with 35.2 percent, followed by Latin America at 31.8 percent and Europe at 12.1 percent. Radio also saw growth in every region.