Computers think, as you know, in ones and zeros. The reason for this is that if everything is either a one or a zero, it’s either “on” or “off.” A light switch is a highly digital input device because there’s a “one” position and a “zero” position. Dimmer switches, by contrast, are analog.

I’ve now visited with executive, marketing, and development leaders from over 11 different organizations in eight cities. I have learned many amazing and remarkable things that my colleagues are implementing across North America, but my attention keeps returning to one thing. Every organization has the same structure: unanimously in our institutions, marketing and sales are one team.

Anyone in the art market who was not already been paying attention to the social media platform Instagram had to sit up and take notice in April after the actor Pierce Brosnan visited the showroom of Phillips auction house in London. Mr. Brosnan snapped a selfie in front of a work he admired: the “Lockheed Lounge,” a space-age aluminum chaise longue by the industrial designer Marc Newson. Then he added the words “let the bidding commence,” and posted it to the 164,000 followers of his Instagram feed.
 

There is a great tension between the investments an artist makes to produce work and the living she extracts from selling art. It is a classic conundrum that many artists have to fund their own efforts for some length of time by an alternative means of support, and one major expense, especially for beginning or mid-career artists, is swinging travel expenses for residencies, art fairs, and international shows.

In the world of content marketing, almost every blog post has a hero image, and every social post has a thumbnail. Meanwhile, brands are trying to take over visual-heavy social media networks Instagram and Snapchat. And even though visuals are often overlooked, they significantly impact how we interact with the content we devour every day.

After putting the desktop web in the rear view mirror in Q2 2011, and eclipsing television in Q4 2014, mobile and its apps have cemented their position as the top media channel and grabbed more time spent from the average American consumer. In Q2 of 2015, American consumers spent, on average, 3 hours and 40 minutes per day on their mobile devices. That is a 35% increase in time spent from one year ago and a 24% increase from Q4 2014. In just six short months, the average time American consumers spend on their phones each day increased by 43 minutes.

The best creative work loses all its power if it isn’t seen or experienced in the right setting or context. That’s why we at Adweek honor the media plan, arguably the most important part of the marketing process.
For more than 20 years, Adweek has run the Media Plan of the Year competition (though for many of its first years it ran in former sibling publication Mediaweek), which celebrates the best executions and communications plans created by media departments big and small for their clients.

Native advertising—articles paid for and/or written by a brand that live on a publisher’s site—has emerged as a powerful and popular new advertising tool over the past few years. Media companies like BuzzFeed, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic have all invested heavily in the creation and distribution of native advertisements on behalf of brands, with many charging over $100,000 for a native advertising campaign.

Brothers Fred and Mark Hajjar own a clothing company. And it’s pretty successful, generating about $3.5 million in revenue last year. So it’s reasonable to think they’d know something about fashion. But when I ask them about their design backgrounds, there’s an awkward pause. Finally, Mark haltingly says, "I've kind of studied it since I've been here?" As an example of a product of theirs he likes, Mark tells me about a sweater with a mirror embedded in it, above a ribbon that says "ugliest sweater prize.

The duo behind Smosh are every bit as big in the YouTube universe. The two friends, who met in sixth grade in Northern California, started posting parodic, self-mocking videos online in 2002. (Time has called them the "SNL of YouTube.") Three years later, they became an overnight phenomenon on the fledgling platform known as YouTube when they put up a video of themselves lip-synching the theme song to Pokemon.

The digital storefront, dubbed Classical Live, will feature both on-demand streaming audio and digital downloads of performances by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam.

A patron is told on the phone that the theatre she wants to visit is accessible. When she arrives, she can enter the lobby and house in her wheelchair, but at intermission she discovers a step into the ladies’ room. Another patron arrives for a show, but has to wait for the head carpenter to arrive and remove a seat in order to accommodate her wheelchair, delaying the show. Another calls a theatre to ask if they can accommodate two wheelchairs, because he would like to bring a friend.

Thanks to the internet, global reach is no longer reserved for deep-pocketed brands, nor is it an incredible hassle for already over-burdened marketing managers. In fact, a global presence is possible for any business with a creative strategy and an understanding of world markets. To give you an idea of what a great global marketing strategy looks like, we've compiled a list of brands that totally "get it."

Logitech, the company most of us still know for selling that very nice computer mouse we bought around the first time we dialed in to AOL, is about to drop the "tech." As part of a new rebranding, the company will simply go by Logi (pronounced "lodge-ee").

Don’t look now, but 450 penguins are mimicking your every move. It may sound like a horror movie, but it’s actually an installation in which motorized toys form a mechanical mirror. Through the color contrast on their bodies, the penguins create a silhouette which moves in sync with the viewer.

Viacom Velocity, the marketing agency that serves Viacom’s music and entertainment teams, just released a ridiculous music video about the importance of data analytics. It stars social media personalities The Fat Jew and Todrick Hall as rappers “Big Data” and “Hadoop,” respectively.

Content such as this leads to a high bounce rate, or number of viewers that see your content and instantly “bounce” to some other content. Content that doesn’t really add value for the intended marketing target audience is a missed conversion opportunity.A conversion can be a variety of things, depending on your goals, but it should be trackable and measurable. A conversion can be a newsletter signup, a new follower on social media, a new blog subscriber, a completed website contact form, etc.

Most people still think PR is some kind of black magic flacks work on the press -- you sprinkle a little witch’s potion, and TA-DA! You’re in The Wall Street Journal. But PR is a more strategic, sustained practice than that, and it’s a field content marketers need to understand as owned, earned and even paid media continue to intersect.

"If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again," claims the old proverb, but W.C. Fields may have said it best when he added, "Then quit. There’s no point in being a damn fool about it." For Will Young, director of Zappos Labs, "try, try" was the easy part. Knowing when it was time to quit, however, was a lesson that took a while to learn. Zappos Labs was created in 2011 to explore new lines of business for the e-commerce company.

For decades, companies have taken for granted the notion that focusing relentlessly on improving customer interactions will lead to greater loyalty from the people who buy their products and services. The relevant metrics usually pertain to familiar questions: How well am I delivering in-the-moment? How are customers experiencing my brand across a range of touch points—call centers, websites, social media, mobile apps, in-store? What will make customers deliriously happy when they’re directly engaged with my brand?

Brands can now track and collect data to answer all sorts of questions, but most of the time these questions are directed internally: “How many people are using are service? How can we leverage our data to optimize our services boost our revenue?” But more often than not, there are other fascinating questions you can answer that’ll appeal to the larger public and help you create the kind of valuable—and perhaps most importantly, exclusive—content that separates you from the

There seems to be a misconception that by sharing one basic social message on multiple social media platforms, companies are doing their job and being active on social media. While there is some truth to this, writing for social media is so much more than that.

When Caitlyn Jenner's Vanity Fair cover story burst onto the web last week, social media instantly lit up with buzz about her transformation.
But one group remained uncharacteristically mum on the subject: the big brands, the companies that have crews of agencies and social media managers at the ready to insert their names into far-reaching conversations.
Conspicuously absent from the Caitlyn Jenner conversation were the calculated, brand-approved congratulatory messages that we've come to expect will accompany big cultural moments.

Being smart is a huge leg up in life, but it's not a golden ticket. Intelligent people, despite their natural gifts, can, and often do, end up stalled in their careers and unhappy in their personal lives just like those of us with less lofty IQs. Why? That's what a recent poster to question-and-answer site Quora wanted to know0.

Researchers have discovered trends in the way that we perform every major action on Facebook—liking, posting, sharing, commenting and even lurking. And there’s a ton of psychology involved in what makes Facebook so attractive in the first place. Here’s a look at the psychology of Facebook: what makes us like, post, share and keep coming back for more.

For the arts to thrive in our community in the future I believe that inspired, creative leadership should focus on three essential elements: education, access, and inclusion. I am, of course, talking about the “nonprofit” arts, such as classical music, ballet, opera, visual arts, theater, etc., because the truth is that artistic expression in a variety of other forms is doing just fine.

Now that content marketing is officially a mainstream tactic – nine out of ten organizations are marketing with content – brands are strategizing new ways to achieve visibility in a competitive environment. As a marketer, you are tasked with delivering a distinctive brand experience with your content – one that cuts through the clutter and leaves a lasting impression. To help you attract (and keep) the attention of your audience in an increasingly crowded space, below are five content marketing differentiation tactics from the pros.

Spotify is already the biggest music subscription service in the U.S., but it is facing increasing competition as more big players, including Apple and Jay Z, enter the streaming-music market. Today, Spotify is launching a new version that incorporates podcasts, video, and a new, contextually aware approach to music playback.

Where are you most able to execute your mission: inside your facility, or outside of it? There are a lot of reasons we focus on work inside our facilities. Our facilities are, ideally, spaces optimized for mission execution. Galleries purpose-made to show artwork. Performance halls perfectly tuned for the orchestra. Archives with climate control to protect artifacts.

As social networking has taken over the web, and users no longer visit publishers' homepages to find news, Facebook has become a primary funnel for readers, pointing you, your friends, and your family to articles like this one. Today, Facebook is taking that idea to its next logical conclusion. The company launched Instant Articles, a publishing platform that lives natively on Facebook, and will host stories by an elite group of launch partners: the New York Times, BuzzFeed, National Geographic, NBC and The Atlantic.