Hollywood has their Oscars, and we have our SIPAwards.  And although they've held a few more than we have—91 to 40—we plan on having a host at our celebration this year (June 4). And if we had five nominated songs, we would showcase them all. (I did write about one cool publishing song last week.)

Editor's note: This is the third of an ongoing series profiling the 2018 SIPAward winners.

In news just yesterday, Bloomberg and Vanity Fair were both reported to be moving to paywalls. Vanity Fair will offer three free articles a month, then readers will be required to subscribe for $19.99 a year for either digital-only or print plus digital, Digiday reported. They'll add a searchable archive of its articles, a subscriber-only newsletter and possibly even access to its writers and editors—the latter being the trend of the year, it seems like. (Read my recent article on that.)

Charity Huff and Shannon McBride started new SIPA member January Spring in 2017 and have been growing the digital agency rapidly ever since. With a combined 50 years in media and sales experience and calling themselves “jargon-clearers,” they excel at making marketing tech work for all types of media companies. Lately they have been fielding requests for content management systems migration and media website build-out projects, so they have engaged the very experienced and knowledgeable Chris Tippie to lead these projects. In a recent phone conversation, I asked Huff and McBride about the company, digital advertising, CMS migrations and social media strategy, specifically Facebook. SIPA: What made you start January Spring? CHARITY HUFF: We thought about opening our own agency for several years. As digital executives, we’ve worked for or competed against almost every provider. We wanted to work with the b ...

Despite most experts recommending it, paid search might still be underused. A recent report from Clutch and Ignite Visibility found that just 19% of SEO-focused businesses put resources into paid search.