Insights from Nebo

Apple iOS 13 was released in September, and with it came a slew of new privacy features. In an era of increasing digital privacy concerns, this is great news for Apple customers. However, these changes are making major waves for digital businesses that are trying to connect with and understand their audiences.

Marketers especially will feel the effects of Sign in with Apple, enhanced location privacy settings and default tracking changes in Safari. These are likely to impact not only the collection of first-party data by businesses, but third-party user tracking for digital advertising purposes.

We’re here with a rundown of all the new privacy features Apple has to offer and how each one will affect consumers, businesses and marketers.

Email marketing is often misunderstood. When people ask me what I do and I tell them I’m an email marketing specialist, the first (and most frequent) response I get is “Oh, so you send all those spam emails? I hate you.” Or “Oh, so you just send emails all day? That’s easy. I wish that’s all I had to do.”

This is annoying for a number of reasons, but mostly because it seems that no one really appreciates (or understands) the effort that goes into making a good email.

We live in a time of rapid growth and innovation. Take AI for example, which has completely changed the way we approach everything from social listening to media buying. New tech is transforming everything digital.

Can that be said for email as well?

This past Sunday we marched in the 2019 Atlanta Pride Parade, complete with our very own, lovingly made parade float. Naturally, as soon as I found out about this very special project, I was ON it, mocking up designs, thinking of theme concepts, choosing materials and, of course, thinking about the perfect playlist.

Today, I’m so happy to use my love of design to participate in Pride. But it wasn’t always this way.

Every year, World Mental Health Day is the one day that people break the silence about their triumphs and struggles with mental health. But why is it that there’s only one day per year that we feel comfortable having an open dialogue about mental health? On other days, we hide behind stigma and stay silent, as if our well-being is a taboo subject that should never be mentioned.

We here at Nebo believe talking about mental health should be anything but taboo in the workplace. We believe that so much so that we are implementing a Wellness Committee.

Data-driven decision making is a hot topic these days with company after company boasting about their "data-driven strategy" value differentiator. A quick Google search inundates you with analytics and big data companies preaching their methodology and approach to creating data-first systems and processes. But what these guides often don't mention is the importance of wading through the dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of data sources available to companies to put together meaningful action items.

Existing customer data will always be a great source of insights for informing your business decisions. However, there's a resource that your marketing team regularly uses that can, and should, be added into the mix when making those decisions: keyword data. 

A few weeks ago, a few of my closest friends and I were sitting on the back porch of my friend’s lake house. We were chatting and sipping White Claw classy beverages when the topic of body hair came up. Someone asked the guys in the group if they’d feel weird dating a woman who chose not to shave. The general consensus was that yeah, it’d be a little weird.

Over the next few days, I thought a lot about that conversation. I examined my own internalized sexism. I boiled my feelings down to a few thoughts:

• Body hair on women should be normalized.

• Society should support people having as much or as little body hair as they want.

• A selectively hairless standard for women is time-consuming, expensive, oppressive and stupid.

I, myself, have a complicated relationship with depilation. You see, I’m a self-proclaimed feminist-in-progress, à la Jameela Jamil. Over the years, I’ve read many articles about how “real feminists” don’t remove their hair because it’s just conforming to oppressive and outdated Eurocentric beauty standards and/or catering to the male gaze.

However, I’ve noticed that whenever I ask the women in my life, they often tell me that they like shaving. That there’s no better feeling than sliding into clean sheets with silky smooth legs.

Bullshit.