Hola y bienvenidos a su FWD semanal!
This week the Spanish hit ‘Despacito’ became the most viewed YouTube video ever proving just how global YouTube’s reach is. However, it’s not just music fans that are flocking to the site, as top global advertisers are returning to YouTube after a brand-safety boycott.
Meanwhile, Instagram is maintaining its first-choice status for both food lovers and under 25-year-olds, as Instagram food photographers are to be celebrated at a London exhibition and the younger audience is now reported to spend an average of over 32 minutes a day on the app.
In the AI world, there have been more new and interesting developments, as it is revealed that intelligent drones are helping to stop poaching in Africa and this TED talk shows how AI is improving image recognition and detection…
Although Brits could soon go undetected on social media under a new data protection bill.
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If you see anything FWD worthy in the week ahead, please share using #OMDFWD
How we buy things is becoming more polarised: on one hand, you have demand for shopping to be as easy, as effortless, as frictionless as possible. On the other hand, customers desire an experience that is as memorable and as enjoyable as possible. This is nothing new – we’ve always been delighted by buying things one day and the next, want to get in and out of a store as fast as possible. But technology is both shaping, and sharpening, this dichotomy and as progressive communications planners, we have to adapt.
We need to make buying as easy as possible.
Byron Sharp, Author of “How Brands Grow” and Professor of Marketing Science at the University of South Australia, thinks so – in fact, he boils the entire job of marketing down to just that. This might be due to the fact that our brains are hardwired to take the easy route, as Nobel-winning behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman describes: “Humans are to thinking, as cats are to swimming,” he says, “We can do it when we have to, but we’d much prefer not to”.
Amazon knows the cost of friction. They’ve calculated that a page load delay of just one second would cost $1.6 billion in sales a year. This learning has been taken to the very heart of the business. From a Dash button on your washing machine, through voice purchasing on Echo to Amazon Go, to their bricks’n’mortar store concept with no checkouts and no queues – every investment made helps customers buy quicker and easier. If you listen to commentators such as Scott Galloway, Founder, L2; Clinical Professor of Marketing, NYU Stern, this could be a big threat for your brand – why will consumers want to think about choosing your brand when Alexa can do it for them?
Ease can also speak volumes about a brand.
Look at Domino’s, who geared its entire turnaround on making it as easy as possible to order a pizza. In the past, you had to find the number, dial, wait, order, order louder, and cross your fingers in hopes they got the right address. You can now order on every platform imaginable – from text, to voice, to Echo, to a connected car. Even with an emoji! You don’t even need to click – simply open the app and you can now automatically order your favourite pizza.
Of course, examples like these are absolutely changing what consumers expect from brands. Uber, an OMD client, calculated that when the service launches in a city, expectations on how long travellers are prepared to wait for a cab drops by a third.
So brands can’t sit still. They have to ask themselves: how can I make this as easy as possible to buy? Where is the friction in the purchase? How can technology help remove it?
But ease is just one side of the retail coin. In a world of one-hour drone deliveries, sometimes people still want to go shopping.
John Lewis, a long-standing Manning Gottlieb OMD client and Britain’s best-loved retailer, knows this. We plan according to four shopper “missions” and the easiest to observe in-store is “entertain and inspire me”. In this mind-set we seek to surprise and delight customers throughout the purchase journey, adding unique touches and creating memorable moments.
Communications provide a key aperture to enhance this experience…Meet Monty. A few years ago he starred in John Lewis’ Christmas ad, telling the story of a young boy who dreams about his toy penguin coming to life. We were inspired to make this happen for real in John Lewis stores. We created “Monty’s Magical Toy Machine”, which took a 3-D scan of a child’s most loved toy and brought it to life digitally, allowing the delighted child to dance and play with it.
But retail experiences don’t just live at point of purchase – take Lego for example. Knowing that sharing the wacky and wonderful things you create is half the fun, it created Lego Life, a social network designed specifically for kids under 13, allowing them to delight in sharing their real-world Lego creations in a safe environment online.
So, make it as easy as possible to buy, but don’t forget consumers love of unique experiences. When are customers looking to be entertained? How can you create magical moments of surprise and delight in the purchase process? Balancing ease and experience may just be the key to success.
Originally published on Omnicom Media Group’s Media Pulse
Hello and welcome to your weekly OMD FWD!
Reality is stranger than fiction with printed submarines and robots in the workplace, but fear not, they are not here to steal our jobs. You can now say ‘adios’ to being lost in translation during your holiday with this real-time translating earpiece. Moment marketing becomes easier with Facebook launching natural language processing in Messenger 2.1, enabling brands to scale their experiences on the platform.
On another note, Google was named the world’s healthiest brand and is now trialling autoplay videos in search results, which could pose opportunities for brands. Amazon is a contender to turn the digital duopoly into a troika as the company pledges to become an ad platform leader. Also, Arianna Huffington raises the bar for Uber’s next CEO.
While you wait for next week’s OMD FWD, check out the best iPhone and iPad apps of 2017.
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If you see anything of FWD worthy in the week ahead, please share using #OMDFWD
Hello and welcome to your friendly, neighbourhood weekly FWD!
As Comic-Con fever has taken over this week, the digital galaxy has been lit up as the tech giants take on their foes! While Facebook tackles fake news by preparing to let users pay for their favourite news content, Google is hunting down fraudulent ads and YouTube is going up against online extremism. There is also a new army of giants being built, this time from AI, that hope to protect us from future cyber-attacks.
Back on planet earth – have you ever wondered how to monitor your pets’ fitness? You can now measure it playing fetch with a high-tech rubber ball. And you’ll never go hungry in an Uber again as start-up Cargo aims to launch an in-Uber vending machine, giving new meaning to food on the go!
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and finally, The Rock shows us all how to get the best out of Siri
If you see anything of FWD worthy in the week ahead, please share using #OMDFWD
This week momentum has been building around Google’s reported plans to introduce its own ad-blocking feature, in both the mobile and desktop versions of Chrome. At first glance, the feature seems counter-intuitive, since Google’s annual online ad revenue exceeded $60 billion, yet it is clearly a defensive move. The focus is on the improvement of user experience and ultimately the reduction in fast growing third party ad blocking software. Elsewhere, at Facebook’s F8 conference, augmented reality continues to gain prominence, as they launched their strategy and intent for developing the Metaverse.
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As ever, please tag and share anything you spot with #OMDFWD.
This week momentum has been building around Google’s reported plans to introduce its own ad-blocking feature, in both the mobile and desktop versions of Chrome. At first glance, the feature seems counter-intuitive, since Google’s annual online ad revenue exceeded $60 billion, yet it is clearly a defensive move. The focus is on the improvement of user experience and ultimately the reduction in fast growing third party ad blocking software. Elsewhere, at Facebook’s F8 conference, augmented reality continues to gain prominence, as they launched their strategy and intent for developing the Metaverse.
HEADLINES
INSIGHTS
COOL
DEEP READS
As ever, please tag and share anything you spot with #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!
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As ever, share anything interesting you spot with #OMDFWD
At a convention powered by the latest in technological innovation, it was the art of storytelling that captivated the marketing community at OMD Oasis. Claudia Cahill, OMD Content Collective’s President, led a panel comprised of the industry’s leaders in storytelling: Steve Peace (SVP International Media, Sony Pictures), Brad Jakeman (President, PepsiCo’s Global Beverage Group), Dawn Ostroff (President, Condé Nast Entertainment), Mike McCue (CEO Flipboard) and Bryn Mooser (Co-Founder & CEO RYOT).
Each panelist offered a distinct and fascinating perspective on the challenges and contradictions inherent in storytelling in a world that demands both short, snackable content as well as complex, immersive stories that fuel our deepest passions.
Whilst all agreed that brand storytelling has become a much more complex challenge because of both consumer expectation and the proliferation of platforms and channels, the solutions varied. Steve explained that at Sony Pictures, “a narrative structure has been created in which the first 3 seconds are comprised of 5 to 10 shots; a visual mnemonic of the very best shots in our film that pulls you into watching the entire trailer’’. And it’s a narrative structure that is powered by reams of data.
At PepsiCo, Brad built a Content Center because “it was the only way to create the type of content needed to keep pace with the need for innovation’’. He explained that technology provides enormous opportunity for the expression of ideas but the content is critical. “The holy grail is how deeply someone has engaged with the content and it’s not about reach’’.
Dawn shared how she started the Next Gen Studio at Condé Nast to create a storytelling capability on every single platform and admitted that making content for a younger, Millennial audience is challenging because “GenZ have grown up on a diet of content snacks’’ and that there remains a gap in longer form content that is made specifically for them. Mike reminded the audience of the importance of having clear and meaningful objectives and that “really high-quality stories should be the goal’’, not short snackable content; “any story, short or long, has the power to move the world forward’’.
Disrupting the content creation process
The opportunity to break the rules and to disrupt the content creation process was debated and Bryn explained that the mobile phone has been the vehicle for the democratization of filmmaking. It made it possible for anyone out there to shoot a film and tell a great story. Moreover, with Facebook and YouTube 360, the way you look at video has fundamentally changed; you’re now able to step inside the story, to experience what the person holding the camera sees and feels, bringing people right up close to events around the world. And that closeness is what fuels peoples’ voices and passions.
The discussion shifted into learnings for the audience and there were five key takeaways:
- Global vs. Local: Ensure stories are relevant across different geographies
At PepsiCo, a content slate is developed for brands and countries in advance so that the right content is crafted. Interestingly, 90% of their content is now developed globally and shared across territories.
- Immersive Storytelling isn’t achieved solely by technologies and tactics like VR and AR
Narrative structure can be incredibly immersive. Consider content strategy over longer timeframes to build out worlds and/or characters, and give people a peek into that.
- Be nimble and open to change.
The technology still has to catch up with the vision of storytellers so be prepared to try new things.
- Focus
With so many choices for how and where to tell your story, it’s critical to simplify the complexity and focus on the goal of your story.
- Be Passionate.
Storytelling gives meaning to the world so embrace the emotion, chaos, and challenge of it.
To find out more about the OMD Oasis programming at CES 2017, please visit CES.OMD.COM
Technology is affecting in dramatic fashion how we live, work, eat, socialise and play. 2016 saw the rise and rise of virtual reality, with virtual assistants moving out of our phones and into our homes and smart home technologies finally breaking into the mainstream. Undoubtedly 2017 will see a plethora of new technological breakthroughs and the Digital Trends piece below details five of the most revolutionary – including the Internet of Things based on interoperability, artificial intelligence, the rise of synthetic food, augmented reality and 3D printing for all. Will Christmas 2017 see us eating man-made turkey and asking our artificial assistants to wrap the latest 3D printer to go under the tree?
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As ever, please read, learn and share away, #OMDFWD. Happy new year to all!
In October, Twitter announced it was shutting down Vine, its app that lets users create and share 6-second looping videos. However, the company has now announced it won’t actually pull the Vine app from the app store but instead transition it to a new, low maintenance app called Vine Camera. The videos recorded using the new app can be saved to your camera roll or posted directly to Twitter, following a similar strategy to Facebook-owned Instagram. Whilst it is fairly common for under-performing products to simply get closed down entirely Twitter have kept Vine partially online. It will be interesting to see if Vine Camera takes off in the New Year. But before we say goodbye to 2016, Google take us through a trends overview for 2016, from Pokémon to Donald Trump, and TrendWatching tell us what trends to look out for in 2017.
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… AND THE OMD FWD TOP 3 FOR 2016
See you in 2017! Please share anything you spot interesting over the seasonal period with #OMDFWD