YouTube has announced that they will no longer support 30-second ads that viewers can’t skip, starting 2018. No more. Nada. Zip. Why? A YouTube spokesman said… We’re committed to providing a better ads experience for users online. As part of that, we’ve decided to stop supporting 30-second unskippable ads as of 2018 and focus instead on formats that work well for both users and advertisers. This change will not affect shorter ads – the 20-second videos and six-second bumpers

Is your media business DOOMED? Maybe not… And… Saturday Night Live says the future of advertising is NOT ads. It’s episode 42 of Media Unplugged with branding authority Tom Asacker and media strategist Mark Ramsey. Plus, rants and raves about the coming collapse in broadcast TV advertising…despite a record year? And the fuzzy math assumptions about ad spend vs. consumption time. Listen as we go inside media to reveal the ugly truth! Click the play button below: And if you’re

Recently, Seth Godin penned a great piece on ad blocking. Yes, I know – you can’t block the ads on your local radio station. That’s the beauty of a linear, non-digital programming stream. Hooray! But actually, people block radio ads all the time. Every time a consumer switches stations or switches from radio to a platform that is not radio it’s to hear something that is not on right now, because often what’s on right now is a commercial. And for digital audio the problem is j

Data is powering marketing in general and advertising in particular in ways that could not have been imagined even five years ago. It’s important for folks in the audio space to bend their heads around this because data is, fundamentally, a form of marketing intelligence. And the more marketing intelligence that’s packed into ad inventory, the smarter and more valuable it becomes to the buyers and sellers of those ads. One of the great differences between traditional radio sp

Who needs an agency when brands want CONTENT, not ADS? And… Disruption comes and goes, but human desire is forever. Then Tom Asacker rants/raves about advertisers who don’t seem to mind that their ads aren’t seen. And Mark rants/raves about his first experience “going viral” with a piece on Leonard Nimoy and how video game breasts are made and why they can go so wrong. It’s episode 14 of Media Unplugged with branding authority Tom Asacker and media strategist Mark Ramsey. Lis

We are witnessing the dawn of a new age:  The rise of radio as a feature. That means “radio” isn’t simply a media category run by media institutions.  It is now a feature of other categories – a feature of brands themselves – brands which are capable of monetizing that feature in the same way traditional broadcasters do – with ads. This is another manifestation of one of my regular themes:  Brands are now media.  Brands are becoming “mediacized.” In the wake of unconfirmed go