There’s a whole host of reasons you’d want to rebrand your local business: Your product and service offering might be outgrowing your name and website. You might have found a new location close to the center of town. You feel a facelift might revitalize a flagging business. Whatever your reasons, they must be good given the work it takes to rebrand. It may be the biggest and highest-risk challenge you’ve ever faced. The tone of voice, website design, color scheme, logos, directory listings and sales process may all need to change at once. It’s not an easy or quick switch. Interest in a local business’ rebranding isn’t as strong as big brands enjoy, so you can kiss that viral piece on the evolution of your brand goodbye. Unlike Pepsi or other big brands, there is a high likelihood few will notice a logo change from a small business. Small businesses don’t have access to a multimillion-dollar branding and communications strategy. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still make a true impac..

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Tech Lab has been moving quickly to catch up with blockchain. A week ago, its Blockchain Working Group announced a pilot program that would analyze the results of blockchain-based projects by its 150+ member organizations. This effort will include a white paper that pinpoints the most promising ad-related aspects of the participating projects, sets up some standardization targets and possibly notes which claims are farther off. Now, the Working Group is releasing some explainer documents. There’s a freeBlockchain Technology Primer and a Resources Wiki,both assembled by Working Group participants. [Read the full article on MarTech Today.]

Link-building mistakes come with the territory: The longer you spend pitching webmasters, the more war stories and link failures you’ll have under your belt. I’ve done many, many linking campaigns and have made my share of mistakes. Based on my experience, I am not sure which campaign was a bigger epic fail: The campaign where all the email I sent went to the trash folder because I used a term associated with spam in the subject line. The fact I launched a huge content campaign the same day Donald Trump was inaugurated. via GIPHY These things happen. Mistakes are a key ingredient of learning, particularly when it comes to link outreach. You will probably make a lot of mistakes and get very frustrated before you learn how to consistently build links with content. It’s all part of the learning process. What if you could skip over the costly learning curve and jump directly into all the link-building lessons without committing all the mistakes? Would you like to know which mistakes ca..

According to Ipsos, over 75 percent of advertising impact is determined by creative quality. And yet, creative messaging seems to be an afterthought next to ad placement and targeting. I get it. Making the perfect creative requires some patience. But if you have the budget for it, testing programmatic display creatives is worth your time. I’m talking consistent optimization, a dramatic increase in performance and insights that can be used in other channels. For the best results, you’ll need to thoroughly test programmatic display creatives. At Brainlabs (my company), we want to know which creatives work best for particular audiences, to maximize performance at the most tailored level. There are two ways we approach testing. Each depends on the objectives and length of the campaign. Creative testing The first method is to test lots of creatives at one time with the aim of gathering insights. This is typically for short campaign periods (two months or less) with larger budgets. This ..

From the Brand Safety Institute/TAG white paper, “Defining Brand Safety” In the days of “Mad Men” and before, ads were delivered into fixed placements that were known in advance. But these are the days of real-time delivery into millions of dynamic contexts, defined by surrounding content and challenged by viewing conditions. So, advertisers find themselves increasingly concerned that their messages are being compromised by factors they don’t control. Toward the goal of re-establishing control, a new organization — the Brand Safety Institute — launched this week in Washington, DC. Formed by Mike Zaneis, CEO of the corporate-focused Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) and Neal Thurman, director at Coalition for Better Ads (CBA), the organization intends to help define best practices, provide a certification program for the new role of Brand Safety Officer and offer other kinds of supporting education, training and resources. Zameis told me that, to his knowledge, this is the fir..