The DBE team and I hope you had a great holiday season and that 2021 is behaving for you. Let’s see what digital marketing news caught our attention over the break:

• This is a good perspective piece to get your marketing brain sparking: Top Tech Trends from 30 Experts (think iRobot, OpenAI, GitHub, IDEO).
• Back on December 16, Facebook launched an aggressive ad campaign with print and digital ads in The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, accusing Apple of unfair business practices masked as privacy protections but, according to Facebook, designed to line Apple’s pockets. You can read Facebook’s POV here and here’s a story from CNBC adding more flavor. Mind you, your ads on Facebook are not affected. This pending change by Apple will affect ads served by the Facebook network to people using mobile apps (games, news services, etc.) on Apple devices.
  • Remember our story about Apple taking steps to become a search engine…this ties in nicely with that move, don’t you think??? Here’s the article we linked to on November 11 last year.
• The deaf community has had to face unique challenges through the pandemic. Brands and other professional communicators have to adapt their communication styles in order to be inclusive of the deaf community. It’s a topic that deserves attention, and here’s a smart read from eMarketer.
• Search Engine Watch provides a B2B Paid Search Forecast for 2021 that includes an interesting (though maybe not surprising) COVID-19 impact. Paid search desktop traffic is up 60% while mobile is down 7% AND the paid search conversion rate for desktop has increased 4% while mobile decreased by almost 19%. It’s worth exploring these trends for at least the first half of the new year.

• Just for fun: did you ever wonder about the books you see in bookcases and on shelves on TV and in the movies? Have you ever seen someone have a super curated bookshelf on their Zoom calls? You didn’t think that was serendipity, did you? We thought it was cool that Books by the Foot is often the behind-the-scenes resource for those oh-so-on-topic books in the background. Here’s an article about that company.

Do Good Spotlight: Brain & Behavior Research Foundation

This week’s spotlight is on Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. Their reason for being is to alleviate the suffering caused by mental illness by awarding grants that will lead to advances and breakthroughs in scientific research. We learned about this organization through a tragedy experienced by a friend, a suicide by their friend suffering with mental illness. We donated in their friend’s honor to help BBRF with their relentless work to fund the research that is helping bring about positive change. Here’s where to learn more about BBRF and why their work is so important.

Thank you for reading. Please keep suggesting not-for-profits for us to spotlight, we have several in the pipeline for the next few weeks and are actively seeking to support the organizations that our audience values, so shout them out!

And in the meantime, I hope the rest of your week goes smoothly and sets a good pace for the rest of 2021.