Native advertising continues to make substantial inroads across a wide range of publishers; even some previously resistant pubs, like the New York Times, have gotten on board. Their success has prompted rapid migration onto mobile screens as well, providing some hope to mobile publishers and app developers who had until recently struggled to extract meaningful value from their smartphone and tablet inventory.

While the earliest mobile native pioneers have been the largest social networks—Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn organize their content into feeds that lend themselves well to the story-driven native placements we profiled in our eBook on native advertising—other prominent publishers and app developers have also successfully made the leap. 

Considering content marketing's enormous scope—$44 billion according to a comprehensive estimate by the Custom Content Council—it's no surprise that a large range of software and platform solutions have emerged to help scale marketers' workflows. Altimeter Group, a tech research and consulting firm, has just released a report on the landscape of content marketing software vendors that provides context to the various service segments.

The report begins with the premise that platform/tool selection is a difficult proposition. Vendors' offerings are highly differentiated and present a wide range of capabilities that might not be relevant to all marketers' needs. The report's author, Rebecca Lieb, suggests that evolution in the space will drive consolidation and the formation of end-to-end solutions incorporating capabilities from content creation to compliance within the next two years. 

NBC Universal's President of Research and Media Development, Alan Wurtzel, made waves a couple of days ago in an interview with the Financial Times when he claimed that social media "is not a game changer yet" in driving television viewing. The revelation was a bit of a shock to those of us who regularly see hashtags planted in the corner of our favorite television shows, and assumed that we were the only ones not tweeting at every discussion-worthy plot twist.

As it turns out, Wurtzel drew his conclusions based on the Winter Olympics, which NBC had exclusive rights to broadcast. Across the 1500+ hours of coverage over 18 days, his team's research found that approx 3 million unique users, or about 19% of the television viewing audience, posted 10.6 million Tweets, and around 20 million people somehow engaged with Olympics-related commentary on Facebook. His conclusion? Popular shows drive social media activity, not the other way around.

Not everyone agrees with his conclusion. 

No one in the digital advertising space has missed the explosion of social media activity by large brands over the past few years, particularly during major media and sporting events when everyone's eyes are shuttling between their television and their phone or tablet. After every year's Oscars and Super Bowl, the advertising world is abuzz with chatter about which social media forays garnered outsized attention for brands (think Oreo at the Super Bowl in 2013 and Arby's at the Grammys this year). Brands with an impeccable sense of timing and creative smarts earn well-deserved kudos.