I’m super excited for BuzzFeed to release it’s second Social Brand Lift Study today in conjunction with Virgin Mobile.  Great content they’ve been producing like 11 Things No One Wants To See You Instagram has been truly viral with 388,000 views to date and a 16x Viral Lift.  For every one person Virgin paid to send to this post, 16 came as [...]

AdWeek asked me some fun questions about digital creativity and social advertising…have a look.

Was great to be on CNBC talking about the move to social publishing and social advertising.  I think we were able to cover a lot about some trends and the BuzzFeed business in a short period.

[<a href="http://storify.com/jonsteinberg/schick-razorbombing-iab-road-show-slides" target="_blank">View the story "Schick Razorbombing IAB Road Show Slides" on Storify</a>]<br /> <h1>Schick Razorbombing IAB Road Show Slides</h1> <h2>We had the chance a week back to got on the road to SF, LA, and Detroit with our friends from Edelman and Schick to present this awesome case study. We even won the esteemed Short Award for Best Viral [...]

[A slightly edited version of this post appeared in Ad Age] Aspiration in advertising is about great creative that stands on its own, and has all the best qualities of editorial content – a voice, a point of view, and a larger purpose. It’s work that is worth sharing. This philosophy has stuck with me and defined the key elements [...]

In the old days people would clip newspaper articles and send them to each other. And now we use Twitter, Facebook, email, IM, etc. But one thing remains the same, those articles are always the most relevant, interesting, and trusted. At BuzzFeed, we believe that sharing is at the heart of today’s media – that all media is now social [...]

I was reading Martin Lindstrom’s new book, Brandwashed, and this quote really struck me as being relevant to digital advertising: We’re sick and tired of picture-perfect babies and flawless models. Why do we love YouTube videos so much? Because they’re imperfect, amateurish, and the people in them remind us of us. This is why, in places like Whole Foods, we’re [...]

    If you sell digital advertising, you need to join SellerCrowd immediately.  It’s a community that lets digital ad sellers communicate about RFPs, brand contacts, agency contacts, etc.  It operates right now as a simple Q&A platform, but I imagine they’ll be rolling out reputation and answer scoring at some point.  I’ve been reading about the verticalization of professional communities, and SellerCrowd [...]

Creating a content portfolio is becoming the gold standard for branded content creators.  Instead of trying to make one piece of content “go viral”, the smartest brands are focusing on creating as much quality content as possible.  If you create medium to large size pools of content, some pieces will see viral lift and some will not, but over the [...]

[A shorter version of this post ran on Digiday] Roughly ten years ago, while in business school, I decided that I wanted to be a professor of economics. My senior thesis (see page 43) had a some discusion of behavioral economics, and I was intent on writing, researching, and teaching on the subject. Behavioral economics holds that rational economic models [...]