Tag: Social Media
Hello and welcome to your weekly FWD.
You may be spending less time watching television and more time on your device, but that won’t shield you from the latest onslaught of advertising content being pushed online. Amazon is testing video ads in mobile search results. Ads are shown below the fold in search results and will either drive shoppers a product page, directly to an Amazon Store or to a custom landing page. Your Netflix nights may also see an unwelcome visitor in the form of promos in between episodes. How many videos in one sitting is too many?
Time to get a little more savvy on social media as the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is clamping down on how influencers declare their paid sponsorships. Gone are the days where someone’s affinities are purely personal. Finally, for a critical look into the aesthetics of Instagram set-ups, one user places posts side-by-side to prove that no one is completely unique. Time to opt out of ads and buy into originality.
HEADLINES
INSIGHTS
- The new instalment in the IPA’s AI Radar series looks at public attitudes to AI in the workplace
- Are ‘dumb phone’ sales rising because users want a break from always-on connectivity?
- Smartphones account for 62% of time spent online in the UK, according to UKOM’s Digital Market Overview
COOL
DEEP READS
Please feel free to pass OMD FWD onto your colleagues, clients and friends – they can subscribe here at any time and watch Wednesday’s get better! #OMDFWD
Hello and welcome to your weekly FWD.
You may be spending less time watching television and more time on your device, but that won’t shield you from the latest onslaught of advertising content being pushed online. Amazon is testing video ads in mobile search results. Ads are shown below the fold in search results and will either drive shoppers a product page, directly to an Amazon Store or to a custom landing page. Your Netflix nights may also see an unwelcome visitor in the form of promos in between episodes. How many videos in one sitting is too many?
Time to get a little more savvy on social media as the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is clamping down on how influencers declare their paid sponsorships. Gone are the days where someone’s affinities are purely personal. Finally, for a critical look into the aesthetics of Instagram set-ups, one user places posts side-by-side to prove that no one is completely unique. Time to opt out of ads and buy into originality.
HEADLINES
INSIGHTS
- The new instalment in the IPA’s AI Radar series looks at public attitudes to AI in the workplace
- Are ‘dumb phone’ sales rising because users want a break from always-on connectivity?
- Smartphones account for 62% of time spent online in the UK, according to UKOM’s Digital Market Overview
COOL
DEEP READS
Please feel free to pass OMD FWD onto your colleagues, clients and friends – they can subscribe here at any time and watch Wednesday’s get better! #OMDFWD
Hello and welcome to your weekly FWD.
Square eyes, sore thumbs, general FOMO… is your time well spent? Social media platforms are contradicting the behaviour that inherently comes with their programs by monitoring how much time you wile away online. In the interest of saving time, Instagram now adds shopping capabilities to stories whilst Snapchat adds ‘another dimension’ of measurement through marketing mix modelling. Oh snap.
Whilst you jealously watch revellers on the French Riviera at Cannes, do so in the knowledge that hot nights = loads more shopping. Restless sleepers will turn to the internet to soothe themselves back to a restful state with the promise of a shiny delivery in the morning. Festival-goers (and anyone for that matter) can also rest easy by knowing that any emergency calls made will automatically share your iPhone location with iOS12. Time to get that update.
Last but far from least, check out the great work that OMD is doing at Cannes Lions 2018 with our purpose-built site – bringing you live feeds, blogs, thought leadership and the ‘best of’ in one hot spot. Get in on the action and join the conversation – #OMDCANNES
HEADLINES
INSIGHTS
COOL
- During an emergency iOS 12 will share your location
- A journalist who lost his voice due to a rare condition, is back on air with the help of AI
- Budweiser launches the first sound-activated Snapchat Lens during the World Cup
DEEP READS
As always, please share anything you find interesting using #OMDFWD
In a rather classy venue, ironically nestled under a railway bridge close to London’s Borough market, during Social Media Week (Sept 11-15), I went along to discover how major brands, publishers and agencies are working to reinvent storytelling and how they plan to deal with ever-changing modern consumption habits.
A diverse panel helped jumpstart discussions. Luisa Mauro from LADbible-owned site, Pretty 52, sat alongside Charles Ubaghs from Global, and OMD UK’s XMP digital manager Charles McNeill, armed with a media perspective and case studies from arguably the greatest storyteller of all, Walt Disney himself.
I went to quite a few talks this year at SMW (to the dislike of my liver but the benefit of my brain) and above all else retained two clear points. which were echoed by nearly all of those presenting; that of personalized experiences and ensuring your audiences was the right ones. Unsurprisingly, these two points formed the backbone of the talk and some of the guiding principles that kept coming up during the week.
Don’t talk to the masses – get up close and personal.
Millennials and Gen-Zers came up in conversation – as these buzzword age groups always seem to – and highlighted the need to address the boom in mobile consumption and the many mediums that younger audiences use. The new screen is the mobile screen and it’s key for brands to stop employing old TVC habits of marketing and embrace mobile-ready content campaigns. It’s by using new social media and tech platforms in creative and out of the box ways to deliver content, says Ubaghs, that will help keep storytelling at the heart of digital content and maintain that coveted essence of authenticity that brands seem to all want.
We’ve been hearing this from Facebook too: best practice recommendations suggest that the effectiveness and resonance of content is largely dependent on whether the content is optimized for social media or not. Largely, brands that are still opening up to being more present on social media need to ensure that they don’t simply slap a traditional, long format TVC on their social channels and instead re-edit and re-cut content to suit the social platform they are deploying their content on.
McNeill also says that it’s essential that content is digested by the right audiences, and that different KPIs are associated with each group – this seems to be particularly valuable to the Walt Disney Company. At the heart of his talk was the importance of custom campaigns for each audience, thereby allowing the story to flow as naturally as possible.
Storytelling is an integral part of the work that we at OMD Create, a specialist social and content arm, undertake for The Walt Disney Company. Leading on social analytics across 26 markets with more than 17-million combined fans, we have huge volumes of content we report on and help develop in conjunction with Disney. Moreover, we operate within the vast Kid’s Entertainment space which this year to date has generated more than 15-billion views alone. What we find across multiple content themes is that telling a story is as every bit relevant to an unboxing video as it is to a song compilation; this is how we captivate our audiences and ensure they always come back for more.
Talk with your audience, not to them.
As marketers, we sometimes get too focused on driving results and forget about the consumers we’re trying to impact. a human audience that’s not focused on CPC metric but about how a brand makes them feel and what a brand can do for them. McNeill adds that we need to ensure we know what content has already been served to our custom audiences – have they previously re-engaged with our stories and if so, to what extent does this dampen their opinion of us? We strive at OMD Create to do exactly this, by keeping our partners such as Facebook close to us when working on the optimization of campaigns to keep our metrics close, and our audiences closer.
What all panelists did solidly agree on was on the primary way of measuring how successful their storytelling has been. Their golden metric as described by the moderator was shares. Why? In the eyes of the panelists, people sharing content was synonymous to putting their name on it, to regarding it as something worthy of their own friends and audience and something that has generated enough interest to spark conversation.
So what about the future? It’s a space that marketers can win in if agencies are able to help their clients tell stories while using insights to help guide content. Also if they are able to ensure that this content is customized to suit the audiences they are trying to reach while at the same time embracing ever-changing technology. The only limitations lie within ourselves, whether we dare experiment with the tools and process we have in place.
We’re not always going to win, but we won’t lose by keeping on our toes.
For more information regarding OMD EMEA or anything you’ve read here please contact us at [email protected]
In a rather classy venue, ironically nestled under a railway bridge close to London’s Borough market, during Social Media Week (Sept 11-15), I went along to discover how major brands, publishers and agencies are working to reinvent storytelling and how they plan to deal with ever-changing modern consumption habits.
A diverse panel helped jumpstart discussions. Luisa Mauro from LADbible-owned site, Pretty 52, sat alongside Charles Ubaghs from Global, and OMD UK’s XMP digital manager Charles McNeill, armed with a media perspective and case studies from arguably the greatest storyteller of all, Walt Disney himself.
I went to quite a few talks this year at SMW (to the dislike of my liver but the benefit of my brain) and above all else retained two clear points. which were echoed by nearly all of those presenting; that of personalized experiences and ensuring your audiences was the right ones. Unsurprisingly, these two points formed the backbone of the talk and some of the guiding principles that kept coming up during the week.
Don’t talk to the masses – get up close and personal.
Millennials and Gen-Zers came up in conversation – as these buzzword age groups always seem to – and highlighted the need to address the boom in mobile consumption and the many mediums that younger audiences use. The new screen is the mobile screen and it’s key for brands to stop employing old TVC habits of marketing and embrace mobile-ready content campaigns. It’s by using new social media and tech platforms in creative and out of the box ways to deliver content, says Ubaghs, that will help keep storytelling at the heart of digital content and maintain that coveted essence of authenticity that brands seem to all want.
We’ve been hearing this from Facebook too: best practice recommendations suggest that the effectiveness and resonance of content is largely dependent on whether the content is optimized for social media or not. Largely, brands that are still opening up to being more present on social media need to ensure that they don’t simply slap a traditional, long format TVC on their social channels and instead re-edit and re-cut content to suit the social platform they are deploying their content on.
McNeill also says that it’s essential that content is digested by the right audiences, and that different KPIs are associated with each group – this seems to be particularly valuable to the Walt Disney Company. At the heart of his talk was the importance of custom campaigns for each audience, thereby allowing the story to flow as naturally as possible.
Storytelling is an integral part of the work that we at OMD Create, a specialist social and content arm, undertake for The Walt Disney Company. Leading on social analytics across 26 markets with more than 17-million combined fans, we have huge volumes of content we report on and help develop in conjunction with Disney. Moreover, we operate within the vast Kid’s Entertainment space which this year to date has generated more than 15-billion views alone. What we find across multiple content themes is that telling a story is as every bit relevant to an unboxing video as it is to a song compilation; this is how we captivate our audiences and ensure they always come back for more.
Talk with your audience, not to them.
As marketers, we sometimes get too focused on driving results and forget about the consumers we’re trying to impact. a human audience that’s not focused on CPC metric but about how a brand makes them feel and what a brand can do for them. McNeill adds that we need to ensure we know what content has already been served to our custom audiences – have they previously re-engaged with our stories and if so, to what extent does this dampen their opinion of us? We strive at OMD Create to do exactly this, by keeping our partners such as Facebook close to us when working on the optimization of campaigns to keep our metrics close, and our audiences closer.
What all panelists did solidly agree on was on the primary way of measuring how successful their storytelling has been. Their golden metric as described by the moderator was shares. Why? In the eyes of the panelists, people sharing content was synonymous to putting their name on it, to regarding it as something worthy of their own friends and audience and something that has generated enough interest to spark conversation.
So what about the future? It’s a space that marketers can win in if agencies are able to help their clients tell stories while using insights to help guide content. Also if they are able to ensure that this content is customized to suit the audiences they are trying to reach while at the same time embracing ever-changing technology. The only limitations lie within ourselves, whether we dare experiment with the tools and process we have in place.
We’re not always going to win, but we won’t lose by keeping on our toes.
For more information regarding OMD EMEA or anything you’ve read here please contact us at [email protected]
This week the remnants of last week’s global cyber attack has continued to hold news. A security blogger known as ‘MalwareTech’, managed to halt the global attack by accidentally finding a hole in the software code. The blogger found the web address attached to the malware unregistered and bought it for eight pounds! This allowed him to see where the computers were accessing it from, instantly triggering a code to halt the spread. Elsewhere, AI maintains a strong position in media news, particularly on the subject of Chatbots and voice-activated devices. Juniper Research predicts Chatbots will save UK businesses £6 billion every year until 2022, the areas of predicted savings are in the healthcare and banking industries. Whilst in connection to voice-activated devices, Amazon remains dominant as American Express has launched payment using Alexa and the new ‘Echo Show’ starts shipping next month.
HEADLINES
INSIGHTS
COOL
DEEP READS
As always, please share anything you find interesting at #OMDFWD
Hello and welcome to another weekly dose of FWD where recent studies have proven ‘Generation X’ are more addicted to Social Media than ‘Millennials’. This might come as a surprise to some of you, however, this demonstrates how the younger generation is moving away from traditional social platforms.
That said, Facebook is still the most popular network on our smartphones, followed by Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest according to Nielsen’s latest report. This, in turn, explains how Facebook had more conversations via mobile than desktop for the first time, particularly around Black Friday, with transactions growing by 55% year on year. This is a 10% increase on the same time in 2015.
In further developments, Facebook is now testing ads within their mobile messaging interface, which could be the start of something big if successful in both Australia and Thailand, watch this space!
HEADLINES
INSIGHTS
COOL
DEEP READS
As ever, share anything interesting you spot with #OMDFWD
2017 marked both the 50th anniversary and my first attendance to CES. I couldn’t have been more excited to see it all in action. Whilst it seemed nearly impossible to experience every single inch of the vast booths of new tech, entrepreneurs, and titans of innovation, the OMD Word team and I eagerly explored as much as possible, gaining several thousand steps on our wearables in the process.
It comes as no surprise, CES delivered on being a fantastic incubator for viewing trends within innovation. As these trends reach mass consumers, social media becomes the hotbed capturing consumers’ responses and participation within these trends. Three key themes continuously bubbled up to the top when walking the conference. While not entirely new to the world of CES, these themes have the capability of reshaping consumers’ behaviour on social media. We’ll call them the three A’s of CES 2017: Autonomous, AI, and the prospective bell of the ball, Alexa.
First up, Autonomous
Autonomous cars increased in sophistication and the metaphorical road got way more crowded this year. After achieving the ability to take consumers from one place to another, the focus expanded to how these vehicles could communicate with each other making transportation even safer and more efficient by reducing traffic buildups. How consumers will occupy their time once the physical act of driving is removed as a necessity still remains to be seen. But it allows for a variety of entertainment and connection opportunities via a new touch point of consumers’ attention.
AI
Throughout the conference, AI weaved its way across robotics, to self-driving cars, to health and fitness, and everything in between. With the ever-growing surge of big data, 2017 AI fosters personalization of experiences across robotic home companions, sleep technology, and intelligent assistants. Even better, the more these AI devices learn and interact with consumers the smarter they become. This especially rings true within health and fitness, where there was a large presence of ingredient brands to grow the market of bio feedback. Gamification of health and fitness nurtures the socialisation of precise bio feedback potentially popping up on social platforms, as consumers have increased motivation to do better and beat out their friends and family.
Alexa
With the rise of voice activation technology, such as Alexa, consumers will be given new tools and ways to connect within their social spheres generating new types of shareable content. Both editorial publishers and social platforms alike will be responsible for finding the interesting and compelling way to share the new consumer experiences. Practically at every turn, companies were trying to dovetail voice activation tech, Alexa specifically, to their products in conventional and unconventional ways. Voice analytics, including emotional tracking through voice, was lightly sprinkled through the conference creating opportunities for consumers to deepen their understanding of their social interactions both within the physical and digital world.
As the three A’s of CES 2017 continue to trickle out to mass consumers, cultural adoption of connected, intelligent devices across multiple touch points within their lives will advance. With the ease of connecting to everything and the sheer immediacy of it, one hypothesis I have is consumers’ social platform behaviours will start to merge and be less siloed. Consumers’ mindsets will shift from needing to share a specific, individual piece of content across a specific social platform, to having a multi-pronged experience to share across their social ecosystem. In this collapse of the more traditional existing social silos, social platforms will need to adapt to the new consumer demand of a social ecosystem rather than an echo chamber. However in the true spirit of innovation at CES and perpetually dynamic nature of human social behaviours, only time will tell if I’m right or wrong.
Similar to previous years, the social platforms themselves got in on the action of CES.
Facebook lead the pack as the “official” social media partner of CES 2017. Pumping out exhaustive editorial content, on-site interviews, and virtual tours, Facebook served the role of a crucial resource of information for attendees. Not surprisingly, Twitter was not going to let the Facebook relationship go unanswered. Continuing to position themselves as the real time platform, Twitter showed up with prominent on-site branding and a heavy focus on live streamed content, on the heels of their announcement of 360 live videos.
All in all, CES 2017 did not disappoint and perfectly served up the recipe of its 50 years of success. Our industry moves fast and in unexpected directions sometimes, and CES continues to be the conference where we can get together to be delightfully surprised and inspired.
Traditional e-commerce websites may be good for shopping when you know what you’re looking for. But for those times when you don’t, Instagram has introduced new features. These new features will help users identify products in Instagram photos from brands. Vishal Shah, Instagram’s Head of Product Management for Monetization, mentions that even though we have seen progress in mobile purchasing “these two things — discovery and the actual purchase — are just not well-connected like in physical stores”. The feature will enable retailers to price label their products on the platform and then direct customers to their mobile website – still not enabling users to purchase through the app. However, Shah does mention that commerce will evolve into big business in the future – either through ads or a cut in sales.
HEADLINES
- Facebook is a hive of activity, reporting very strong Q3 fiscal results, testing instant games it now wants to start selling TV spots on TVs through Apple TV and Roku
- In a move that will please e-commerce teams, Instagram is set to add some shoppable features
- WhatsApp tests Status, a new feature that’s like Snapchat stories as the platform continues to evolve
INSIGHTS
COOL
DEEP READS
Share anything you see through the week with the hashtag #OMDFWD
By Caroline Clancy and Virginia Alvarez
Most of us realise that the world of marketing is constantly changing. Unless we understand our customers’ shifting desires, our attempts to reach them will inevitably fall flat. Many times these changes are temporary, caused by short-term trends. However, over the last few years a fundamental, long-term shift has arisen in consumer behaviour that has wide-ranging implications.
Due to recessions and economic uncertainty, people are reassessing their priorities and asking themselves what they truly value. As a result, we are moving towards a new economy that values experience over possessions. In recent research: [ctt template=”1″ link=”Tv647″ via=”yes” ]3 in 4 millennial’s chose to spend money on an experience or event, rather than purchasing a desired object @HarrisCorp @OMD_EMEA[/ctt] [ctt template=”1″ link=”jzCVA” via=”yes” ]Consumer spending on recreational & cultural services has risen 85% in Western & Eastern Europe over the last 5 years @Euromonitor @OMD_EMEA[/ctt]
This shift is impacting a multitude of industries and has the power to transform even the most established markets.
In fact, Airbnb’s co-founder, Brian Chesky, has observed:
“No longer do consumers want to show off, on Instagram or Snapchat, the wheels of their car or the clothes they wear. But they want to show off the experiences that they’re having. I think, more and more, we’re living in an experience-based economy”.
Material possessions are no longer enough
As a society, we are spending more money to do things, rather than to have things. We then share these lived experiences via social media, in effect, elevating them to the position of status symbols. Whereas once the designer handbag was a sign of success, now a memory from a faraway land is the marker of a good life. We aspire to turn our leisure time into social capital spent on moments that are unique, fleeting and personal.
At Live Nation, the world’s largest event company, two in five (40%) attendees share content on social media directly from their venues and three in five (59%) upload pictures afterwards (Source: WARC Consumers value brand experiences – 13 May 2013).
Plenty of research has shown that experiences bring more happiness than possessions. In fact, even the moments preceding and following an experience are more positively charged than those surrounding the purchase of a product. Experiments have shown that participants elicit more happiness and excitement when anticipating experiences. Whereas, waiting times for possessions are often fraught with impatience. Further research indicates that people also tend to talk more about experiences than they do products and derive more value from doing so.
This has led renowned psychologist Thomas Gilovich to conclude that “spending money on experiences provides more enduring happiness.”
Using this insight, OMD created an immersive theatre experience to launch HTC VIVE. We partnered with Noma Labs to host a once in a lifetime apocalypse event, HTC Virtually Dead, targeted to Millennials in both London and Paris. Tickets sold out in just over a week after showing the first teaser video in London. To meet demand, we extended the time period and put on more shows. Overall there were 900 shows over three weeks bringing in £300,000 worth of tickets, which is equivalent to a popular West End show running for over two years.
How can classic brands survive?
We need to refocus our strategies away from short-term demand and towards long-term desire. Brand experiences can help us drive this change, with luxury labels leading the way.
According to PWC, the annual sales growth of luxury experiences grew by 14% compared with 11% for luxury goods. Moreover, in 2014 The Boston Consulting Group found that experiences which include travel, gourmet dining and art auctions accounted for 55% of the global luxury spending. By creating enhanced sensory experiences for shoppers, luxury retailers have evolved a simple transaction into something more.
A great example of this is The Bentley Inspirator. The experience starts on an iPad in dealerships. You watch a beautiful video full of lifestyle images, off-piste skiing, yachts sailing through the ocean. Meanwhile, in real-time, facial recognition software is measuring your preferences. By the end of the video, a personalised Bentley configuration is created based on your preferences. A playful piece of technology which creates a magical experience by unlocking new information about the customer.
Is technology killing anticipation?
Technology has allowed us to engage with customers in ways we never thought possible. But, it has also fuelled new expectations, resulting in less patience and a rising demand for frictionless experiences. Amazon has calculated that even a one-second delay in page downloads could cost them $1.6 billion each year in lost revenue.
Modern technologies (e.g. Uber and drone delivery systems) are built on our desire for instant gratification. These technologies cure pain points in our lives. However, science has shown that anticipation can be far more gratifying than the reward itself. Bizarre as it may sound, there is an argument for designing in a little friction into the service process. Designed friction allows experiences to be anticipated, valued and remembered.
Create your experience and people will follow
We have the ability to design amazing experiences, but we need to be mindful about why and how we design them. From our research, we have seen how it is possible to design experiences that create emotional connections, drive memory creation and kindle the desire to share those experiences with others. Our deepest desires as human beings are to learn and grow. Brands have the opportunity to design in these experiences across their consumer touchpoints.
We must embrace this opportunity to move beyond simply creating consumer interactions which are frictionless, invisible and instead craft experiences with enough tension that they are shareable, memorable and teach us something about ourselves that we didn’t know before.
Interested in more information, contact us at [email protected].