The Jeopardy Question We All Got RIGHT, Adobe Puts on a Show, and Content Clumsiness

Our brains nearly exploded with information and stimulation overload. 15,000 people came together in LA with one singular focus: to improve and amplify creative literacy.

Beckie and I were excited to hear about Photoshop Camera, a brand new app coming out in 2020. It will bring the magic of Photoshop to the palm of our hands using Adobe’s artificial intelligence platform. Cool!

But PsC was only one of many new apps, techniques, and workflows we gathered into our toolkits on the way to accelerated productivity. We connected with experts like Michael Ninness, Senior Dr. of Product at Adobe, Adam Morgan, Executive Creative Dr. at Adobe, and Paula Sher, Principal at Pentagram, to hear their views on the power of rich media.

Beckie’s favorite keynote speaker was Shantell Martin, a visual artist known for large scale black-and-white drawing, who said, "You don’t discover your art, you extract it. It’s part of you."

Adobe also announced the Content Authenticity Initiative – and not a minute too soon. The CAI is dedicated to proper content attribution to ensure trust and transparency with online imagery.

Our most salient takeaway and a common thread that wound its way through the conference: emotional ideas are still the most powerful way to reach a customer’s heart.

Better experiences = healthier profits.

As many of you know, the webSURGE team guesses a Jeopardy question every morning Monday-Thursday that comes from Marc’s tear-off calendar. Then Fridays are our Super Jeopardy days as we guess Friday and Saturday’s answer and play Sunday’s Final Jeopardy. The way we play, Marc sends the answer out over chat, and everyone gets a chance to guess every answer (honors system). Then we tally up how much money each of us has earned to bet against the final Jeopardy question.

Daily Jeopardy has become a fun little webSURGE staple that has lasted for 11 months now. But over those 11 months, what started as just a fun way to start our mornings has turned into a necessity to our morning routine. Some of us (cough-cough – the content team) get really into it. Like so into it that if we miss a day, that day is essentially ruined.

Such a day happened to me one Friday last month. I was running a little later than I normally do and rushing out of my apartment. Trying to get out the door, I gathered all of my things hastily – but not hastily enough.

As I was opening my door, I heard the ding of my work chat on my phone. At that time of the day, it could only mean one thing. Involuntarily I yelled, "No! Don’t play Jeopardy without me!"

When I looked up, a neighbor I had never met before was innocently walking past my apartment, looking at me with a look of surprise. Surprised myself, I gasped. And tripped. Towards this poor woman.

Once I steadied and composed myself, I offered up some apologies and reassurances that I wasn’t crazy, then hurried away to try to make it into the office before Final Jeopardy.

It’s a silly story, I know. But when I relayed it to our Content Director, Kendall, her face lit up, and she said, "That’s exactly what we want to do with our content: create pieces that the audience really looks forward to and gets that excited to read."

Less eloquently stated, the whole point of content marketing is to make content worth tripping over.

In the B2B world, this kind of content might be hard to picture and maybe you’ll never get someone to literally trip over your content, but here are some tips to make your video, social, blog, newsletter, or website content get closer:

Be unique – your company’s expertise, values, and culture are different than any other’s. Show it off
Be valuable – give your audience information they want or need
Be personable – your company is made up of real, exciting humans. Your content should reflect that
Be fun – set yourself apart by having interactive, quirky, or visually interesting content
Be consistent – produce content that is consistently valuable and unique to create a buzz around loyal followers when something new is published

Google has introduced a new update referred to as BERT. BERT uses machine learning to better understand people’s searches in natural language by relating the words in a long query to each other. No worries for SEO – this just means that websites need to create content that is well suited for users rather than search engines.

Facebook got a facelift as it announced its new corporate brand that was designed to better represent all the entities the tech giant owns to create a distinction between Facebook the company and Facebook the app. No app branding has changed as a result.

JC Jones Advisory Services has been leveraging their LinkedIn account to position their team as experts in their field. In the third quarter of this year, the page increased its follower count by one third, and the page’s posts currently achieve consistent reach and engagement.

How did they do it? JC Jones posts unique, relevant, original content that resonates with their audience and includes relevant hashtags – and then encourage their employees to like, comment, and share new posts.

JC Jones is a business management consulting firm that specializes in internal audit, risk and compliance; data analytics and IT; profit and performance improvement; and employee placement.

At the beginning of 2019, one of our developers, Marc, received a Jeopardy! tear-off calendar that features a new question every day at increasing price points leading up to Final Jeopardy on Sunday. Since the first week in January, our office has participated in daily Jeopardy (and 3x the Jeopardy on Fridays to take us through the weekend!). Without further ado...

Straight from Marc’s tear-off calendar...it’s Jeopardy!

See if you can get this question that stumped us all except Lisa:

We Dished It Up at Dish It Out! We all attended the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s foodie gala, Dish It Out, earlier this month, and saw a few of you there too!

Giving Thanks – We hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving. This time of year, we reflect on the things we have to be thankful for both personally and as a company. This year, webSURGE is thankful for each of our amazing, loyal clients and your support as we grow and change to become the best agency we can be. Thank you for being on this journey with us.