The luxury industry has started carving its own space in the social sphere, setting its own behaviour, managing consumer expectations and showcasing its personality. It is by understanding the data behind this landscape, and through partnerships like Tubular Labs, that we are unlocking preferences and uncovering emerging behaviours.
GENUINE AND RELEVANT
Adverts and premium content currently deliver the lowest return in engagement compared to the volume uploaded. Mystery is no longer enough, consumers are craving more entry into the exclusive world of luxury to observe the beauty, craft and story of every angle of luxury brands. It is this genuine content – fashion shows, montages and behind the brand access – that is driving 74% of all luxury video engagements.
However, brands also need to harness the power of digital content. There is an opportunity for luxury brands to deliver content solutions dynamically, serving more relevant videos based on data such as age, interest and behaviour.
Looking specifically at the luxury watch category, as expected, 73% of YouTube engagement is driven by those under the age of 34, who are mainly luxury owners in waiting. Perhaps surprising, luxury watch videos are also generating 18% of their engagements from those over 55 years old, which is 14 times the YouTube average.
Nevertheless, how these audiences engage with luxury watch video content is different. Those under 35 years focus on beauty and entertainment influencers, concentrating on how luxury brands make them look. Older audiences, meanwhile, engage with influencers who concentrate on craftsmanship and in-depth luxury product reviews.
AUTHENTICITY AND ORIGINALITY
The new influencer authority is authenticity and originality. As tempting as it is to seed products for visibility, luxury brands need to be selective. The rapid adoption of influencer strategies for categories from FMCG to luxury automobiles has also left consumers more sceptical of the true relationship between brands and influencers. As a result, only 16 luxury lifestyle influencers made The Sermo Digital Influencer Index cut.
Choosing the right influencers is absolutely critical, involving in-depth research identifying a profile of their background, beliefs and audience to ascertain if they truly fit the brand’s vision. For luxury brands it is not about volume, it is about the right contextual fit, originality and innovation which an influencer partnership can generate.
For example, as the official watch partner of FC Barcelona football club, Maurice Lacroix’s ‘Unique Fans Watch’ campaign invited the team’s players to design their own Maurice Lacroix Pontos S Extreme watches. The partnership has resulted in 20 videos, generating more than 9.8 million views and over 404,000 unique engagements or interactions. Additionally, the campaign generated 41% more visits to the partnership site and increased Maurice Lacroix social media fan base by over 11,000 fans.
“Luxury brands are always leading and setting the standard, that’s why people are eager to see what’s next”
Despite the niche nature of luxury, brands still need to produce content for the masses. By utilising popular themes, events and culture, brands can create a universal understanding to build brand desire and convert demand. The balance brands need to strike is between humanising their influencers and still driving views and engagement with topical content, such as unboxing which accounted for 72% of the luxury watch topics viewed in 2017.
Luxury brands are always leading and setting the standard, that’s why people are eager to see what’s next. Just like film studios, luxury brands have anticipated releases and consumer expectations to meet. Whether it’s their collections or showcases the bar for luxury has always been set high and that’s no different for their social channels.
The most successful luxury brands have embraced the opportunity of social video to truly immerse people in their unique stories, building authenticity and equity in this redefined category.
To access a summary of the study, click here (PDF).
Just in time for this summer’s Olympics in Rio, Facebook has launched its very own Snapchat-style camera. It comes at a time where, despite strong business success, Zuckerberg’s social platform has recently seen a 21% decline in the amount of posts shared per user and a rise in competition from rival Snapchat. According to the company, “people are increasingly sharing via videos and photos”, so this measure has been taken with the aim of boosting the number of posts uploaded daily. So now, when someone wants to share what’s on their mind, they will now be given the option of an open camera. After all, video is definitely on the rise. Please do share anything interesting you spot on Twitter with #OMDFWD
The Shallows is a twist on a classic story of human vs nature – the story of a shark attack in open water where Blake Lively’s character must use her survival skills to overcome all odds. Sony Pictures wanted to launch the movie by bringing to life the challenges she must overcome in a way that would captivate a younger audience. In close collaboration with FUSE, we put together a launch event where 12 internet celebrities from across the globe came together to take part in challenges in shark-infested waters. With professional camera crews on board, a drone camera and a mechanical shark fin, we were able to capture some fantastic footage of these YouTube stars that we are now sharing out across paid and owned channels.
The event ran just over a week ago, so the media campaign is still currently in progress – with a phased market by market rollout that continues until the end of August. Influencers involved include Cheng Loew – Germany, Valeriia Liubarskaya – Russia, Room 94 Members: Sean Lemon, Dean Lemon, Kieran Lemon and Kit Tanton – UK, Francesco Gentile – Italy, Bullysteria (Hector Trejo) – Mexico, Pauline Wang – France, Celopan – Spain, OllieGamerz – Spain and Federico Devito – Brazil.
There is a huge amount of debate in the marketing industry regarding millennials, our value, affect and the way in which we are shaping the future of the industry as we know it. However who better to ask than a millennial themselves? As a 26-year-old working in the marketing industry I decided to take a closer look at why we’re a generation to be taken seriously.
When looking at the importance of the millennial generation to advertisers I could simply say we’re important because we’re shaping the future of the world. However that in itself is a huge statement so to break that down…millennials today account for nearly 50% of the world’s population. This makes us the dominant workforce and the generation holding the majority of the globe’s spending power. A recent study by Accenture found we spend on average $600 billion each year, and therefore based on this staggering figure alone, I’d say at the very least we’re worth advertisers’ consideration! With millennials spanning an age range of 16-34, 1 in 4 of us are now parents, holding not only the spending power and purchasing decisions for ourselves, but for our families. However it’s not just about sheer numbers, although these are impressive and would make a compelling argument by themselves. For me it’s the way in which we behave that makes us such an important and interesting target audience.
As a generation of digital natives we live in a hyper-connected world that provides endless opportunities at our fingertips, fuelling a hunger to discover more. This means that our expectations have permanently changed and are constantly changing: we want more in life, to discover more and go further, and in turn we demand not only more from our lives and ourselves but also from the brands we love. By demanding more we’re challenging brands, pushing them to be more innovative and creative in order to catch our attention and create noise. If advertisers weren’t striving to break the mould would Virgin Holidays have created a campaign using Virtual Reality to sell holidays? If we weren’t a generation pushing brands to be more innovative we could still be booking our holidays on the telephone. Likewise, if Carlsberg wasn’t interested in capturing our imaginations, they would dedicate their entire media budget to TV instead of making a bar (of the booze variety!) made entirely out of chocolate!
Not only are we a generation whose demand is fuelling continuous innovation but we’re the harshest critics, and therefore the best generation for a brand to learn from in order to gain a share of voice and see real business growth. Yet it is not just about our being opinionated that is important to advertisers, but the fact that we share our views on blogs, social media, with our friends, family and colleagues. We can make or break a brand in a few keystrokes, and brands know it. With 67% of consumers using a company’s social media channel for customer service, hundreds of brands including Nike, Starbucks and Walmart have customer service teams dedicated to their social channels, ready to handle negative comments and promote praise.
By challenging brands to be continually dynamic, millennials have subsequently become a force that has changed the way advertisers use media. The way in which brands interact with a 16-year-old on Snapchat vs. how they engage with a 34-year browsing Instagram or through Stylist magazine on a Tuesday commute home is very different. There is therefore no ‘one size fits all’ strategy when looking at the channels through with to engage millennials and this again has led advertisers to view their marketing strategies through a different lens.
Whilst we cannot group millennials into a single channel or platform, I think there are inherent themes that apply to all millennials which advertisers can apply to any media channel. For example, I believe authenticity is incredibly important – and by authenticity I mean approachable authenticity: we want to see and hear from real people who we can relate to, or aspire to be like. This theme comes to life through blogs, vlogging and social media; Zoella’s YouTube channel has over seven million subscribers whilst the Kardashian sisters have a combined Instagram following of 275 million. With 50% of millennials researching products on social media, we can see what a powerful and credible tool it can be. By building their brand through social media and reality TV the Kardashians’ empire is now worth $300 million.
With millennials spending an estimated 22 hours on their phone each week it would seem an easy solution to simply target us through digital channels; however, I believe we can still be reached through traditional channels by being authentic. Notably, Dove’s Beauty Sketches campaign used real, normal women to shine a light on the differences in beauty perceptions. This campaign resonated with millennial women around the world and resulted in becoming the most viral video of all time, with over 135 million views.
Another theme that I believe can transgress all media channels is the evolution of the brand ambassador. I have already mentioned how important it is for millennials to feel like they can connect with real people and I think this is becoming particularly apparent in who advertisers now pick to front campaigns. The most successful supermodels today are no longer just visible on the catwalk and billboards, but let us into their lives. The likes of Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid (millennials themselves) now take us backstage at the Victoria Secret Show and on their Saturday night out with the Taylor Swift squad, opening their world to us via social media. Their influence cannot be ignored and many brands such as H&M and Balmain have chosen to embrace it.
To promote their new partnership and collection with H&M, Balmain chose Kendall, Gigi and Jourdan Dunn to front their campaign which launched exclusively on Instagram. Using their influence with the millennial audience H&M and Balmain’s collaboration went on to be their most successful, with an Instagram reach larger than the UK population and the range selling out online and in-store in a matter of hours. This demonstrates the power of brand ambassadors when attributed to the right brand.
Likewise the role of the brand ambassador can be just as influential when used on traditional media channels, if advertisers use the right person to fit their purpose. For instance, Burberry’s use of Emma Watson, a millennial we have grown up with watching Harry Potter and whose passions for issues such as gender equality we now share, led to a 23% increase in sales for the brand.
I could go on about the themes that I think are important to millennials that can be used on any media channel, but the key point I am trying to address is that millennials are changing the way advertisers address their marketing strategies. It’s not just about our sheer numbers and spending power that makes us an important audience but our behaviour and what advertisers can learn from us. By being a demanding generation and challenging brands to always be more innovative than the previous day, we are pushing them to find new ways to create noise, which means looking at how channels can be used in new ways. You just have to look at Carlsberg’s billboard including a beer tap to see how traditional channels can be using in a unique way to catch our attention. By taking note of millennials’ demands, criticism and behaviour we offer advertisers the opportunity to learn, challenge themselves and in turn become the most innovative, creative and powerful brands in the world.
Netflix is the latest brand to inventively tie Snapchat into its promotional campaigns. Instead of simply sending out its own snaps, Netflix are asking fans of its original shows to interact with them while out and about. Using iconic characters from popular Netflix shows, including Frank Underwood (House of Cards) and Kimmy Schmidt (Unbreakable) passers by can Face Swap onto the billboards by taking a selfie using Snapchat. As facial recognition software gets better and better this is a brilliant example of leveraging Snapchat that can take over the internet through offline activity.
With deals from the NFL and MLB already on the books, Snapchat has locked up another sports partnership: A deal with NBC to show Olympics highlights from the 2016 Games in Rio inside the app’s Discover section. Snapchat will be given exclusive behind-the-scenes footage at the games and in return with give NBC access to its super-young user base. But with the NBC partnership not being exclusive they can partner with other social platforms, and that’s exactly what they’re trying to do. With conversations already in place with Facebook and Twitter what does this mean for Snapchat and their levels of exclusivity?
In a move to direct monetisation, Snapchat have been testing their first shoppable ads
Snapchat, Buzzfeed and NBC ink huge deal to deliver the Olympics highlights, next move to Facebook and Twitter in their conquest for a piece of the sporting pie
Video Games are a global phenomenon with the industry now worth over $23.5 billion. It is, therefore, no surprise that in Germany alone there are over 29 Million gamers. However, the rising love of gaming has resulted in the average child spending up to 136 minutes video gaming a day! Our aim was to re-energise gamers and beat the digital industry with their own weapons.
Bringing gamers into the action
Using the Hasbro Nerf, we sought to get gamers away from the screen and take part of the action whilst unlocking additional growth potential for Hasbro’s fun blaster range.
So how can Hasbro make a lost generation enthusiastic about a range of non-digital toy guns? It was time to fight back for physical fun, but in order to relate to our gamers, we needed to make sure we had a fun digital element. We, therefore, headed straight to the dragon’s den, the biggest international Digital Game Fair in Cologne, and conquered the epicentre of the digital gamer’s world with the most famous influencers of this generation.
An analogue playground
15 YouTube stars invaded the Gamescom equipped with Nerf Blasters turning the whole fair into an analogue playground; proving the strength of real life fun with Nerf. The Gamescom action was recorded and instantly uploaded by the YouTube stars amplifying the Hasbro brand and messages to millions of followers. Moreover, we kicked off a sustainable wave of content creation via the YouTube stars who carried on the Nerf story at home and encouraged their fans to use the hashtag #NerfNicht and create even more real life Nerf-Action Videos online.
The results
A campaign for Nerf’s real live action was born. The results exceeded all expectations with the hashtag #NerfNicht hitting the Top 5 German Twitter trending charts. The videos received over 3.8 Million views (+500% versus benchmark) and 8.2 Million contacts within a 1.9 Million target group, over 190,000 comments and over 653,000 like. Most importantly, Hasbro sold +40% more Nerf Blasters versus the previous year, making Nerf the best performing Hasbro brand (not limited to boys!) in Germany.
CHAPPiE is a movie released by Sony Pictures, centred on Chappie, a police droid who is stolen and given new programming. Effectively born again with artificial intelligence, Chappie was raised from a ‘baby’ to think and feel for himself in the impressionable underbelly of Johannesburg. What impact would nature and nurture have on his upbringing, and could his creator rescue him from becoming the very problem he was initially created to police?
Our challenge
We were given two marketing goals – demonstrate a point of differentiation between CHAPPiE and the cornucopia of other robot movie releases, and to ground the story of CHAPPiE in a way that our young male audience can connect with.
Self-expression
The motifs of CHAPPiE concentrated on the idea of self-expression. What do we learn from our surroundings (both personal and physical) and what impact does that have on who we are and who we become. When developing as human beings, how do we outwardly express ourselves as the existential sum of our learned parts? We took the idea of self-expression and looked at how our young male target audience express themselves in the real world. Our chosen method had to align with the themes of CHAPPiE but needed to remain grounded in a way that delivered against one of the key goals. By talking to our target audience and looking closely at the themes of the movie, it became clear that graffiti and street-art were the most interlinked expressive forms of creative output we could use in our marketing and media.
Europe’s largest piece of shareable graffiti art
Our solution was to build Europe’s largest shareable piece of graffiti art – a 60 feet by 10 feet piece of art created by professional artists using the themes within the movie itself. The artwork was made up of 600 individual canvasses that, when completed, could be dismantled and shared with others – mirroring the theme that we are all just a sum of our learned parts; a canvas on which the world paints itself. However, the artwork itself would only become relevant with the involvement of some key social influencers to let everyone know about it.
Creating noise
An experiential event such as ours existed within a small space for a relatively short time, therefore for it to be relevant we needed a lot of people to know about it quickly. We ran a live-stream of the creation, and eventual destruction, of our artwork via Twitch, played out to core gaming fans who were able to prove had a higher propensity to watch sci-fi movies than the average cinema-goer. We invited 14 of YouTube’s most creative influencers from around Europe to help produce the artwork, whilst recording and posting about their time with us to fans throughout their social channels. At the end of the evening, the giant piece of graffiti art was taken apart and shared amongst the YouTube influencers who gave the pieces away to their fans.
“I can’t believe how this has progressed, from an idea to the event and the huge reach it has had. I couldn’t be prouder of the program and the team. We risked a lot to get this off the ground and it paid off in a big way. I want to thank everyone involved for all of your hard work, dedication, creativity and most of all spirit of true partnership to make this happen. The Chappie event has set the standard for what all of the markets worldwide want to be a part of going forward.” – Aaron Wahle – SVP International Digital Marketing
The results
The first-of-its-kind campaign delivered more live-streams of the artwork being produced than the live-stream of the Amazing Spider-Man 2 premiere. We were able to capture our target audience’s imagination in a way that helped double the film’s unaided awareness levels versus the genre average for that time period and as importantly demonstrated, to Sony Pictures, OMD’s credentials in being a true marketing-performance partner.
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