The DBE Team and I hope your summer has been filled with get-togethers with family and friends. We’re enjoying our summer with roadside farm stands, swimming, picnics, BBQs, and all the ways summer makes life better.

This week we’re introducing a new feature: the DBE Client Spotlight. We’ll periodically share what our clients have been up to and encourage you to check them out.

New Feature: DBE Client Spotlight

If you have a pool, you may want to visit the website for DBE’s client Water Tech Corp. They design and manufacturer cordless, pool-cleaning robots and other technologies that make pool-cleaning time short and sweet for you and your family. Explore here.

And now, the news our team asked me to spotlight for the digital marketer in you:

• Emarketer has published its US Ecommerce Forecast 2021. It includes projections through 2025. No surprise ecommerce sales will continue to grow post-pandemic with sales via e-commerce projected to be 23.6% by 2025.
• Is Google a “public utility” or a “common carrier?” If it’s the latter, Google could be subject to related laws and regulations like the phone companies. That’s the core question of an Ohio lawsuit filed in June of this year. This piece in Wired offers an interesting defense of Google – essentially saying Google’s algorithmic approach to delivering relevant results to searchers makes it discriminatory and therefore not subject to the public utility definition. But seriously, if you like to geek out on legalities and debate definitions, you’ll love this article.
• Video is becoming more prominent in the customer journey, and Microsoft has introduced a way to feature video in search results using Video Extensions. Like Image Extensions, Video Extensions are eligible to serve with text ads while providing a richer experience to users.

Do Good Spotlight on: Charity Water’s Tiny Heros

Kids are doing inspiring, heartwarming, and over-the-top incredible things for clean water, so Charity: Water created an annual award to celebrate these “Tiny Heroes.” They recently announced the six winners for this year and are sharing those kids’ stories. Fascinating! These kids helped raise $1.8 million, benefitting over 45,000 people. Read about them, their projects, and how to help this organization that’s helping us all with water-sustainability projects and technologies. We donated to Charity: Water this week and encourage you to consider doing the same.

But Wait! Here’s More Digital Marketing News…

• Marketing Charts summarizes a recent survey by CMO Council on confidence in the marketing department. It’s mostly good.

• Cool tech! We’re testing these out at DBE and we’ll let you know what we think after we do, but we thought, why wait! Isn’t this device cool? It easily adds 2 more screens to your laptop. Now you can work with multiple screens away from your desk!
• Speaking of cool, what do you think of this animator?

• “The goal here is to find advertisers cheaper conversions that might be outside of their perceived audience,” said Google. Carolyn Lyden writes about Google’s new “Signal” ads in Search Engine Land. The new “Signal” label is under the demographics tab and is for “optimized targeting.” Details here.
• Stay up to date on the latest in social media video trends with Breadnbeyond. Here’s an article we like about 10 tips for social videos now.

That’s the shares for this week. I hope the rest of your week is a good combination of fun and productive. Catch you next week. In the meantime, enjoy!