TechBytes with Rasmus Skjoldan, Chief Marketing Officer, Magnolia

Why do you think YouTube decided to create more targeted advertising spots rather than just showcase different forms of advertisements?

Targeted Advertising is all about achieving relevancy. Digital experiences are still terribly disconnected from the real desires of the human beings that are searching online for entertainment, new skills, news or the thrill of peculiarity. Becoming relevant now is about real human communication—and as soon as you reach a near-human communication or even something that feel could honest and real, equals a massive upside to time spent on a platform.

When YouTube wants to teach marketers how to target better, they do that because they know improvements in authenticity of communication happening on their platform are insanely valuable to the experiences they deliver. That’s dollars in the wallet and also a respectable improvement to the digital micro-events that they supply.

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Why is there a greater need for marketers to take the time to understand what motivates an audience and create more personalized advertising?

Personalized Advertising is essentially a shortcut to delivering more impactful and touching engagements with an audience.

Before personalization, advertisers needed to master the intensely difficult skill of broadcasting emotion, of reaching the many with a message that felt personal but which never were. Now that Personalized Advertising is possible, it’s up to marketers to learn a new skill of making the personalized personal. It’s difficult to achieve the desired level of relevance to the audience and we’re only at the very beginning of learning how to do that.

What can marketers do to ensure they are personalizing Advertising and Marketing content for their target audience?

Most personalization happening in 2019 is not one-to-one personalization.  It’s merely delivering variants to the known segments of audience.

Now that one-to-one or hyper-personalization is really starting to kick in, digital marketers frankly need to learn something from Mad Men. They need to get back to the fundamentals of creativity and figure out how to craft messages that can adapt to myriads of context changes. The better a message works for the many, the easier it will be to inject personalized variants to it. That can only be done if digital marketers learn from what their peers of the past mastered: Effective messaging to the many. If you don’t know where to start, then read books with multiple endings.

That’s the approach you need to deploy when getting into personalization.

How can a smart CMS system help with Content personalization?

A crucial way a smart CMS can help with content personalization is through empowering the user of the Content Management System (CMS). The person behind the screen needs to be guided a lot more than what vendors have done during the first decade and a half of everyone struggling with getting personalization right. Briefing the author while they create personalized content is the next step for better Content Management and Personalization. Moreover, a CMS that pushes to add rich metadata around the unique piece of content also leads to better personalization in the end as the AI tasked to match content to end-user has a much better chance of pairing something on point for the human craving for digital relevancy.

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Do you think other companies will follow in YouTube’s footsteps?

Just as well as Google applied Personalization before most had even heard of the idea, only to see countless companies struggling to follow a decade later – so will we see organizations follow YouTube when it comes to nudging Digital Marketers to get real about personalization and targeting.

Do you have any predictions on news coming out of SXSW for the Content Marketers?

The pivotal rise of feminism in all its forms will impact content marketers to an extent only few are realizing.

Seeing panels like Women are Building the Brands We’ve Always Wanted is thrilling and speaks of a deeper, profound change away from male-dominated brands appealing to men. Content marketers will need to get rid of old habits that essentially embody a dying culture that has failed to welcome diversity. Marketers need to start realizing that the content they produce needs to work in a world of multiplicity, where hidden biases are caught and backfire. If content marketers fail to adapt, they will be like airplane passengers with oxygen masks on, waiting for the end.

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Thank you for answering all our questions!