Digiday.com Content Audit as of 2013-8-15

If you haven't heard, Grumpy Cat isn't letting itself fade into Internet culture obscurity. The cat meme has morphed into beverage line: Grumpaccino. Memes, while they become wildly popular and unanimously recognizable for a moment, are fads. They are fleeting. Brands, on the other hand, are built for the long haul.

Every publisher is trying to figure out its strategy when it comes to differentiation in the world of the banner. National Public Radio is no different. As part of an NPR.org overhaul, NPR has rolled out a "native sponsorship" large format ad unit running on its homepage that will feature longer-form sponsor content.

Renaissance Hotels wants to help you discover what's behind its doors through its new interactive video experience and game. The hotel brand has 155 locations worldwide, but it still struggles with brand awareness, according toDan Vinh, vp of global marketing at Marriott/Renaissance Hotels.

Call it the vicious cycle of online advertising. As the value of standardized Web-ad inventory falls, publishers are offsetting the declines by pasting as many impressions as they possibly can all over their sites. That helps drive inventory prices down even more. Digiday has highlighted some egregious examples of this in action.

Today, Digiday will host a two-hour Programmatic Advertising Breakfast featuring speakers from The New York Times, Business Insider and Google at the Grand Hyatt in New York City. Matt Prohaska, programmatic advertising director at The New York Times, will explain how the Times is expanding its ad tech offerings, and Pete Spande, chief revenue officer at Business Insider, will discuss how new publications can be grown with automated media.

The fate of its proposed merger with Omnicom is yet to be decided, but Publicis Groupe is still buying up agencies in the meantime. The holding company today announced it has acquired Ohio-based digital shop Engauge Marketing and will add it to its ZenithOptimedia Group.

New sites come around regularly, but not many have an outspoken founder and a nice chunk of VC change. Yesterday, the world met Bustle, a women-focused site created by Bleacher Report co-founder Bryan Goldberg. True to his style, Goldberg unveiled the site with a chest-thumping, at times bizarre post on Pando Daily, where he serves as a regular columnist.

The typically fast-paced world of digital media slows drastically in summer. Ad budgets are already allocated for summer campaigns, and everyone's taking a breather before Q4 planning begins. Half the industry's on vacation, and the other half might as well be.

Last week, Domino's stepped in it on Facebook. A customer took to the brand's Facebook page to compliment the chain, which then responded with a rote "Sorry for your bad experience" response. Digiday, along with others, covered the snafu, which appeared to point out the perils of relying on automated responses in social media.

The New Programmatic Advertising Economy: Digital advertising is in the midst of a revolution. The ability to separate data from media impressions, along with technology that efficiently matches buyers and sellers, is changing the game for brands, agencies and publishers. The increasing pool of data, and the sophistication by which it's separated and recombined, has eliminated [...]

The year of ad tech consolidation is a bit like the year of mobile, which has happened annually since 2001. The rationalization of the crowded advertising technology landscape is happening, slowly and surely, as winners and losers become clear. Already there are signs that many ad tech firms are stuck in a holding pattern.

Billboard is bridging the digital and analog worlds with its latest marketing stunt. With the help of Ogilvy & Mather Brazil, the music magazine publisher created a special magazine vending machine. The catch is that the machine only dispenses copies to actual fans of the cover artist.

2013 was hailed as the year of mobile, but more and more, it's turning out to be the year of mobile video. Vine, Instagram and now YouTube have all introduced short-form mobile video sharing platforms this year.

Agency Problem Solvers: Digital media has taken agencies by storm. Both large and small shops must constantly evolve in order to stay afloat in the ever-changing environment. The traditional way of doing things no longer guarantees survival - in fact, it more than likely guarantees failure.

The finalists have been decided for the annual Digiday Sammy Awards, which recognize excellence and breakthrough achievement in social advertising, media and marketing. Three finalists were chosen in most of the 12 categories, and five categories were narrowed down to four or five. See here for our panel of 10 judges who determined the finalists.

Steve Goldberg is a senior associate with Empirical Media, a consulting firm that provides marketing intelligence, media services and investment support for media and related technology companies. Find him on Twitter @stevegol. Viewable impression issues continue to vex vendors, puzzle publishers and aggravate agencies.

NBC News yesterday announced it acquired Stringwire. The purchase added a user-generated streaming video platform but also buffed up the media organization's tech ranks with Stringwire founder Phil Grossman, who will join NBC News as a product lead out of its San Francisco office.

For two cities over 6,500 miles apart, San Francisco and Auckland have a lot of similarities. That's the tricky part of Air New Zealand's new campaign. To promote its new daily flight route between the two cities, Air New Zealand is testing your knowledge of Auckland and San Francisco landscapes.

Retailers today are armed with data, more data, and big data...but mining out truly actionable insights remains a challenge. Presented by DataPop.

Amid the explosion of emerging tech, content and devices, what's really shaping the media industry and business outcomes? Here are seven observations about the state of media today that will have the biggest implications for the media industry tomorrow. Multichannel is not integrated Marketers are still defining "integrated" as using multiple media channels to distribute consistent content.

Domino's Pizza apparently isn't used to getting compliments. The fast-food pizza brand responded with what seemed like an automated customer service bot to happy customer Jeaneth Manzaniita Tavares. The problem is that the Tavares posted a compliment about Domino's on its Facebook page, and Domino's responded with an apology: "So sorry about that!

San Pellegrino is taking fans for a stroll through Taormina, Sicily, three minutes at a time. " Three Minutes in Italy," a campaign created by Ogilvy New York, is a Facebook app that enables people to virtually "walk around" the streets of Taormina via special San Pellegrino robots.

If you've used a free online music service, you know this feeling well: the infuriating moment your Daft Punk playlist is interrupted by an ad for a mobile phone, a car or a premium ad-free subscription for the very service you're using.

Being a media buyer today is not what it used to be. And we're not talking about 20 or 50 years ago - it's changed drastically just over the past few years. Early digital-era media buyers were playing the game the same way their granddad did - taking long, expensive lunches with major publishers and then buying up big chunks of their ad inventory.

Think about this for a second: The audiences for whom we design are increasingly using smaller screens, those screens are increasingly becoming their primary screens, and people are using them for an increasingly wider set of activities. People are communicating more, buying more, sharing more, photographing more, videographing more-the list goes on.