Five on Friday: Mobile Ad Viewability, Product Differentiation, Email Design and More

This week’s Five on Friday explores mobile viewability, how you can differentiate your subscription offering, trademarking hashtags, email design and more!

As the curator of the INSIDER Guide to New Product Development (NPD), I’m constantly keeping an eye out for bite-size information that will help you develop and scale better subscription products. Here’s my “Five on Friday” compilation for April 15th, featuring the five best trends, tips, quotes or stats from my reading this week.

1. Guidelines for Mobile Viewable Advertising Impressions Open for Comment until April 30

Whether buying or selling ad space, it’s important for subscriber businesses to be aware of what counts as a “view” according to the Media Rating Council. This CMO article gives a good background – along with some alarming statistics, of what counts today in the online world, and the ongoing discussion of what will count in mobile. To review and weigh in on the complete proposed guidelines, click here. To see highlights included in the press release, click here.

2. Subscriptions Can Differentiate by Product, Channel, Relationship and More

In this great graphic from marketresearch.com, supplemented with subscription-specific ideas, you can see that there are more ways than just the actual content of your subscription to stand out from the crowd.

3. Trademarking Hashtags the Latest in Brand Protection

According to the American Marketing Association, trademarking of hashtags is becoming a key marketing tactic for subscription and non-subscription businesses alike.

The article quotes Ronda Majure , vice president and head of global sales at Thomson Reuters :

“I think one of the interesting things that we’ve seen is that [trademarking hashtags] is becoming part of the brand strategy,” Majure says. “People are also now looking at whether or not they should they be registering the hashtag. And those are always exciting times in terms of working in the brand business and marketing arena.” —Ronda Majure, Thomson Reuters

4. Inspiring New Looks for Email Marketing

While these come out often, I liked the sheer creativity of this list from Hubspot. The two significant elements to try? Big color and a website-like scroll of information, offers or just – ice cream. You’ll see.

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