Insights from Nebo

It’s officially Fall, which means one thing for Paid Media professionals: holiday strategy planning. If you haven’t gotten there yet, don’t worry! In addition to major platform updates, this month’s post is full of guides, articles, and research to start you on your way to a successful holiday season.

The relationship between designer and developer is critical at an agency like Nebo. We’re out to do a lot more than build things that look pretty. Our projects need to tell brand stories, solve users’ problems, and function like a well-oiled machine. Creating great experiences for our clients and their users is a complex process that involves a lot of hard work from a lot of talented people.

Think about the way an architect and a builder work together. Without either, there can be no finished structure, and though both share the end goal of delivering something beautiful, that doesn’t mean there won’t sometimes be miscommunication along the way.

We talk about “quality content” like it’s a destination.

Like all it takes to be a great content marketer is consistently clearing some imaginary hurdle, or reaching the top of a hill somewhere where you can exclaim to the world, “We’ve done our research! We’ve brainstormed topics! We’ve written “quality content”! Now give us all the audience!”

But what happens when you get to the top of that hill and, instead of a megaphone, you find every single one of your competitors clamoring for elbow room?

What happens when pretty much everyone in the world is writing “quality content”?

Picture it:  June 29, 2007.

Steve Jobs, decked out in his patented mom jeans, released an innovative device that revolutionized the way we live and work by combining multiple things into one simple phone. Today, while Apple continues to improve on the iPhone and create new products like the Apple Watch, nothing has had the wow factor of that first device.

It’s not that hard to pull out a credit card versus using Apple Pay. Updates to the camera are so minute that it doesn’t matter. And, while the Apple Watch looks really sweet, it feels more like a grandiose want rather than a need. In short, it’s nothing that’s going to change the way I live and work like the iPhone Uno.

It was bound to happen eventually.

Earlier this summer, something called the Ice Bucket Challenge took social media by storm. For weeks now, videos have been popping up of our friends and favorite celebrities dousing themselves in ice water. Most of us have, at one point or another, been tagged on Facebook by friends urging us to do the same. 

It was all part of a viral campaign to raise awareness and funds for ALS research. And it worked. ALS has raised nearly $80 million in funds since the trend took off. 

But we all know that we can’t have nice things on the Internet! So it was only a matter of time before the criticism set in.