Earlier this year, the team at Dallas-based media startup InspireMore learned about a troubling case of elementary school bullying from nonprofit Behind Every Door.
McKenzie Steward, who was born with albinism, had been bullied by other students because of her skin condition. So the InspireMore team put out a request to readers to submit kind letters to the fifth-grader.
“It was truly one of the most cool moments because we got over 500 letters,” InspireMore co-founder and chief marketing officer Hunter Stensrud said.
Partnering with Behind Every Door, InspireMore ended up compiling the crowdsourced letters and artwork into a book and giving it to Steward and her mother. A video recording and article about this became content shared with the site’s followers, thanking them for their participation.
“Each person is made uniquely beautiful, which means there is no one else like you,” Behind Every Door operations director Darrion Lewis read aloud from the book of letters given to Steward earlier this year as she sat in a folding chair beside him, fidgeting with her hands and smiling coyly.
The update on Steward’s saga published to InspireMore’s website joined headlines like “Woman Flies Abused Dog 2,500 Miles To Shower Her With Love And Healing” and “Disney Princesses Help 6-Yr-Old With Autism Find His Confidence.”
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InspireMore, now in its fifth year, was launched out of the Dallas Entrepreneur Center in March 2014. It was driven by a singular mission: inspire overwhelmed media consumers to realize how much good there is in the world.
Some stories are aggregated by InspireMore’s staff from mainstream media outlets where they may be buried by news with greater public implications. Others are dug up by the site’s crew of half a dozen writers who scour social media for tales of heroism and empathy.
Stensrud and InspireMore founder Robert Neely didn’t study journalism and they’ve never worked in news. They don’t consider themselves or their team to be journalists.
“Our team really cares about others, really loves media and wants to find things that are interesting,” Neely said.
Neely is a former strategy and operations consultant for Deloitte who went on to study the human condition at the faith-based Kanakuk Institute. Stensrud was a marketing strategist for Reap Marketing.
To them, InspireMore is a platform for connecting people as well as a supplement to readers’ existing media diets.
“We don’t want to replace the news,” Neely said.
He refers to it as “righteous disruption.”
“You know, a lot of things that are reported on can be depressing,” he said.
InspireMore’s early mission, which was based on bringing as much attention as possible to positive and inspiring stories, has evolved in the years since. It’s started to become more focused and purposeful, Neely said.
“When you have attention, and eyeballs, and you have people’s passion — how do you leverage that?” Stensrud noted.
Since launching, the company has reached up to 3 million readers monthly and donated $125,000 to charity. InspireMore even rose to become the 15th-most visited mobile website in the U.S. in June 2017, according to Quantcast data.
The startup moved into new offices in Dallas’ West End in 2018 and is in a fundraising round now to bring in more than $2.7 million. Neely said he hopes the company will see profitability by mid-2020.
The company makes money primarily by selling advertising on its site and with sponsored posts across its social media profiles and newsletters.
But it wasn’t always this way.
In its first year of operation, Neely said InspireMore barely made money and hardly anybody took home a salary as the company worked to find its footing in the media landscape.
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Social media algorithms have changed over the past several years, with Facebook’s deprioritization of publishers being among the most notable, forcing media outlets to find new avenues to reach audiences.
“We were getting a lot of social traffic,” Neely said. “But people weren’t as attached to the brand as we wanted and it’s because of how we were reaching them, how they were visiting our site, how we were engaging them.”
The company wants to build a “tribe” around the InspireMore brand, a group of people who are driven not just by a cynicism toward negative news media and social media platforms but by a desire to see more good in their lives.
In this vein, Neely and Stensrud hope to develop an app and build more strategic partnerships like they did recently with the Mister Rogers film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. The partnership with film distributor Sony Pictures and Dallas-based Vomo encouraged people around the country to partake in community service in November, as well as promoted the film through email sponsorships, sponsored articles and social promotion.
The company is also exploring hyperlocal email newsletters — including one specifically for Dallas residents.
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‘This year will be the first time that we’ll see a global ad spend of over a trillion’ U.S. dollars, says Charles Etienne Morier
Published Apr 23, 2024 • Last updated 26 minutes ago • 5 minute read
Like their partners in the Canadian news industry, the country’s media agencies are undergoing unprecedented transformation. The National Post is holding conversations with leaders of Canada’s largest agencies on the fast-changing fundamentals. This week, Charles Etienne Morier, chief operating officer of Touché! & Omnicom Media Group Montreal, speaks to writer Rebecca Harris.
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It has dramatically changed with technological advancement and shifts in consumer behaviour. Now, more than 80% of digital ad spend is transacted through digital buying platforms, so it has become increasingly important for our workforce to have a good understanding of the algorithms and how to maximize them.
The process has changed also. It’s no longer about creating a 30-second spot and then selecting a media channel to distribute the message. We start with the audiences, the channels where we need to reach them, and then tailor a message that will be appealing. And so, we need to work even more closely with our creative partners.
And we think 2024 will change even more. It’s going to be an inflection point despite all the changes we have gone through over the last three years. This year will be the first time that we’ll see a global ad spend of over a trillion (U.S. dollars). It shows the responsibility that we have as advertisers and agencies to spend that money wisely and ensure we make every ad dollar count, and that we are engaging consumers in a way that speaks to them in an age where there’s a lot of uncertainty about how they share their data and private information.
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The team now needs to be proficient in so many areas. We used to have strategy, media buying and planning, and optimization and reporting. Now, we need to be able to help our clients navigate within this complex digital ecosystem with clean rooms (environments where brands, publishers and advertisers share data), the deprecation of cookies, and dynamic creative optimization. Our agency has changed dramatically in the sense that we offer much more depth in our services now. So, our leaders need to be proficient in being able to discuss those subjects with clients. We have a strong learning system in place and it’s part of our value, to make sure that our teams stay curious because it’s changing so much by the day.
Brands that are breaking through are able to prioritize authenticity, relevance and creativity in their messaging and their approach to media. Consumers are bombarded with messages every day and there’s ad blocking, so we have to find new ways of capturing consumer attention… We need to make ads relevant to consumers and bring more value into their lives. And leverage the data we have at our disposal to tailor the message to specific audience segments and engage the consumer in multiple touchpoints.
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We’ve been working for almost two years on educating our clients, making sure that they are prepared. So, we are doing assessments to make sure we have everything in place to prepare for the impact of the deprecation of cookies. It will change a lot for measurement because we will not be able to measure the same things the same way. We will not be able to target in the same way. But I see it as an opportunity somewhat, to be able to come back to (advertising) that is more creative and more around content and context… and more in relation to targeting the right people in the right moment instead of relying too much on the data.
Retail media (platforms that allow retailers to sell ads to brands) will be expanding. Now, the stat is one in five dollars will be spent in retail media globally and 20 per cent of the commerce ecosystem will be done online. So, it’s going to be more important to have a strong omnichannel approach and deliver a positive consumer experience.
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There’s also social commerce… There are so many influencers – there are 50 million creators globally. So how, as an agency, we’re able to harness that and power that at scale is crucial, and how we can partner with creators effectively. It’s changing a lot in media planning on that front. There is a real shift from curation to generation of content.
Television as well is changing a lot, from linear to connected TV. There is a streaming war at the moment, so we need to create new standards, overcome walled gardens (where the platform provider controls the content and data) and figure out measurement.
And obviously automation will play a bigger role. The way I see it is (artificial intelligence) will bring more value to what we do to bring smarter, faster and more effective work. For me, it’s not just about AI itself. It’s more about connected intelligence with the human at the centre of it. So, it’s how we can use the tool to amplify what we are doing.
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A 13-year-old western Quebec boy accused of harassing and threatening another child online is facing four charges and conditions restricting his internet activity.
In a news release issued Friday, police in the MRC des Collines-de-l’Outaouais said the alleged victim’s parent filed a complaint after being “subjected to the suspect’s wrath for several months.”
Police said they went to the accused’s home on Sunday to arrest him, but had to return with a warrant the following day after his parents initially refused to co-operate.
The 13-year-old was arrested Monday evening and detained. He was formally charged on Tuesday with criminal harassment, uttering threats to cause death or bodily harm, distributing child pornography and unauthorized possession of an unspecified restricted weapon.
Among his release conditions, the boy can’t access social media and can’t use the internet without adult supervision.
Police didn’t offer details about the alleged threats or where the youth lives. The municipality includes the communities of Chelsea, Quyon, Val-des-Monts and Wakefield.
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