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Perhaps most reflective of this has been the award-winning juggernaut of REI's #OptOutside campaign, which won the Titanium Grand Prix on Saturday. If for some reason you weren't one of its 6.7 billion media impressions, essentially the company closed its doors on Black Friday, encouraging its employees and everyone else to get out into the outdoors. Beyond the ad, starring REI chief exec Jerry Stritzke introducing the idea from a wide-open office, the brand also created a helpful online guide to hiking trails and other outdoor activities around the U.S.
By encouraging us to drop out of the annual shopping day, the outdoor retailer aims for more sales and brand loyalty. The company said the brand's social media impressions went up 7,000%, with 2.7 billion media impressions in 24 hours, while overall the campaign attracted 6.7 billion media impressions, 1.2 billion social impressions, and got more than 1.4 million people to spend the day outdoors. Meanwhile, more than 150 other companies joined REI to close their doors on Black Friday, and hundreds of state parks opened up for free.
If Cannes is the ad and marketing industry's Oscars, than this is arguably Best Picture. The Titanium category is meant to honor work that breaks new ground, crosses boundaries, and pushes the industry forward. The win adds to the campaign's Media and Promotions Grand Prix, picked up earlier in the week, and its run of wins at other industry awards like the D&ADs, and Best of Show at the One Show awards in May....
Recent research has shown that half of 18-49 year olds turn to their mobile device first to watch video. Even in the living room, many people prefer to watch on their smartphone – for the control, personalization and ease it offers. And as viewing habits change, we are working to introduce new formats adapted to these habits.
That’s why today we’re announcing Bumper ads – a new six-second video format, sold through the AdWords auction on a CPM basis. Bumper ads are ideal for driving incremental reach and frequency, especially on mobile, where “snackable videos” perform well.
Given the succinct nature of the format, we’ve seen Bumper ads work best when combined with a TrueView or Google Preferred campaign. In early tests, Bumpers drove strong lift in upper funnel metrics like recall, awareness and consideration. We also see that Bumpers work well to drive incremental reach and frequency when paired with a TrueView campaign....
A spirited panel at Social Media Week in New York spelled out why marketers should stop treating content like ads and start being storytellers. For marketers, all bets are off. It's time to think differently about customer engagement or risk crapping out. “The game has changed. The channels have changed. That means that brands have to change,” Brian Becker, VP of content marketing for JPMorgan Chase, said during the panel “Content: A Brand's Most Essential Resource” at Social Media Week in New York. Becker asserted that many companies still struggle to put consumers' wants, needs, and perspectives into the brand narrative. Content, however, allows them to do just that. “Bring the voice of the customer into your marketing,” Becker said. “That's when you sound so much more authentic.”...
An ad is an ad is an ad. Or is it? Millennials have grown up with a media diet far different than the generations that came before them. Has that changed their media taste? Do brands need different types of ads to reach people of different ages? Google partnered with L'Oréal Paris to find out....
It has the world's largest print run: a staggering 220 million copies. And yet no literary critics have deemed it worthy of their commentary.
Until now.
German literary critic Hellmuth Karasek lowers himself to reading an Ikea catalog in a clip hosted by the mega-retailer's Swiss channel on YouTube.
Admittedly, it's a bit of a slog getting through the first three minutes, but once you settle into the right headspace, there's actually quite a bit to enjoy here. He references Freud and Goethe, and if he's being ironic, he's playing it so subtly you might be forgiven for taking it as an earnest review.
In keeping with results from biometric and eye tracking data, 47% of consumers said they immediately skip or ignore a video ad on Facebook before watching it.
Innerscope says 25% of consumers were more likely to say they would try or buy target brands after watching the ads on TV, compared to watching the ads on Facebook at 9%.
Innerscope says smaller screens are a big factor in lower video ad impact, where visual attention spent on branding moments, logos and taglines declined with screen size....
Brand teams are quick to rebrand when they hit a rough patch. But they sometimes forget that a brand is more than a company name, logo, tagline, or ad creative. And that a shiny new brand identity won’t automatically solve all of the problems of the business.
The marketing world is littered with failed rebranding initiatives (from the Gap to Tropicana) that illustrate one simple truth about branding. A company doesn’t own a brand. It’s consumers do. Giving a brand a new coat of paint (or dressing it in sheep's clothing) won’t change consumers feelings and expectations of a brand....
At a time when good-paying freelance assignments are harder to come by, many journalists are heeding the call of native advertising, where the pay is decent and the work is steady. But there’s a cost. Many worry about the impact on their credibility as a journalist. Some are even finding they aren’t so welcome back in newsrooms once they work for the business side.
In the latest in Digiday’s “Confessions” series, we talked to a veteran freelance writer who has written for top women’s magazines and other national publications about the dark side of native. In this case, the journalist was working for a publisher’s content studio, which assigned stories a given client wanted written....
...The first episode of "Fanta For The Funny," which rolls out Friday on CollegeHumor.com and across Fanta's social and digital channels, is comprised of dozens of Vine clips depicting gags and pratfalls from some of the platform's most popular personalities. There's no host of the show, just the brief video clips organized into vignettes around topics. In the first episode, Fanta doesn't actually appear in the Vine videos, though its branding is interspersed several times between segments. The series will run over the course of six weeks.
Brands are increasingly looking to platforms like Vine, a rising social media service owned by Twitter, to promote themselves and their products. On Vine, users post six-second clips, also called Vines. Despite -- or perhaps because of -- these time constraints, Vine has emerged as fertile ground for comedy, with hordes of young people posting humorous clips. Already, companies like General Mills, Ford and Virgin Mobile have tapped Vine stars for their campaigns....
Go big or go home, right? Brands everywhere are going over the top to impress consumers and grab their attention. To do this, they’re coupling pranks with video advertising strategies to create compelling content that goes viral. While some marvel at the creativity, others argue that prankvertising goes too far. Regardless, the power of the latest trend in video advertising is undeniable. Here are some of our favorite prankvertisements.
Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest are all moving to native ads. The native-social rush is on.
BIA/Kelsey estimates that social ad spend will reach over $10 billion by 2017 and that up to 40% or more of those outlays will go to native ads. In the social context, we define native ads as ads that are seamlessly integrated into a user's feed and are nearly indistinguishable from organic content.
...On Facebook, native ads in the News Feed generate 49-times higher click-through rates and a 54% lower cost-per-click than traditional placements in the right-rail sidebar. LinkedIn is making major investments in its native strategy and Pinterest is piloting native ads on its platform.
According to Jan Rezab, CEO of Socialbakers, a social media analytics company that works with Fortune 100 brands, "In the future, all advertising on social media will be native in-stream ads. The right rail and banners will disappear altogether."...
The results part of our content retargeting experiment. We learned a lot. And we like this stuff.
Back in July, we reported on a B2B Content Remarketing experiment we’re doing with the people at Resonance. This is the second post: the results.
To summarise, we wanted to find out if a certain kind of ad retargeting could work for B2B content marketing. So we worked with Resonance to design a test, in two phases...
Earlier this July, video technology company Unruly released the results of its 20-page study, “The Science of Sharing,” measuring the viral effects of 12 Super Bowl commercials. Using a complex algorithm from their sharing analysis tool, ShareRank, Unruly was able to identify the parts of each video that triggered the strongest viewer responses, and grade the advertisements on their overall shareability (see below). By doing this, Unruly was able to give an in-depth look at why some viral ads perform well online, while others don’t. ...
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On Monday, Gucci will release its latest fashion film, a Gia Coppola-directed spin on the tragic Greek love story of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in present-day New York City and starring Lou Doillon, Marcel Castenmiller, Laura Love, Rocco Di Gregorio, among others. Coppola and stylist Arianne Phillips worked in tandem with Alessandro Michele to capture the dreamy feel of the hot-shot creative director’s Pre-Fall 2016 collection, which the film — shot across five locations and broken into four episodes — was created to promote. Michele even designed a custom pink 10-foot long wedding veil for Doillon’s character.
But while shorts like these are nothing new, the genesis of the film was fairly unorthodox. Instead of tapping its internal marketing team or a traditional agency, Gucci worked with 23 Stories, the branded-content studio launched in January 2015 by publishing giant Condé Nast. Beyond Gucci’s own marketing channels, the film will be distributed through six Condé Nast (US) properties — Vogue, GQ, the New Yorker, W, Vanity Fair and Pitchfork — which, together, attracted a total of about 32 million unique visitors in April 2016, according to Comscore. Beyond their URLs, those six publications boast a cumulative social media following of nearly 67 million. The film will also be promoted via Vogue China and Vogue Japan. Gucci and Condé Nast suggest the project is bigger and more ambitious than anything else either party has previously done in the branded-content space, both in terms of the level of talent recruited and also the scale of the production.
To be sure, the Kering-owned Italian luxury house has the resources and capacity to create video content like this on its own. But Gucci is after Condé Nast’s larger, and presumably more diverse, audience. For instance, Gucci has 8.8 million followers on Instagram while these six titles combined have about 18.5 million. In this deal, Pitchfork’s millennial male followers — an important demographic for Gucci under Michele — are as crucial to the equation as W’s affluent luxury consumer....
Do you remember anything at all when you watch ads -- or is the experience a hazy blur? The fact is, consumers rarely remember a product -- they remember stories, which may inspire the use of the product. That element is what online advertising is lacking. Two weeks ago I talked about the value of complementary storytelling vs. disruption. For advertising to be as effective as it can be, ad stories need to align with the content so that it, along with targeting, ensures relevance of the message in a way that elicits a response.
I also want to remind advertisers to spend the extra time to tell a story that inspires consumers, rather than simply telling them about your product. I don’t mean that all ads have to move you to tears. I’m referring to inspiration in the manner of a quiet...
The reason people hate advertising is because of the pushy nature of messages. Shoving irrelevant pop-ups in people’s faces is a huge turn off. But, a smart marketer like you can marry these two strategies to effectively expand your brand exposure.
Rather than shouting in your ads to be heard, you can invest your precious dollars to launch precisely targeted campaigns and get your brand in front of the right people. That’s the real power of paid advertising. You can clearly measure your results and optimize your campaigns to keep reaping more revenue.
And that’s the reason I experimented with 7 different paid acquisition channels for acquiring new visitors while working with Timothy Sykes. 5 of these channels created positive ROI (remarketing campaign to get visitors back to Tim’s website got a 218% ROI). Paid advertising had a major contribution in making Tim $1.2 million extra in profits....
Therein lies the problem: native advertising is more effective because it masquerades as actual content. But it’s illegal to pass advertising messages off as editorial content. The Advertising Standards Authority in the United Kingdom, for instance, banned a native YouTube ad sponsored by Oreo that featured two well known video bloggers because the agency felt it was not clearly identified as marketing communication.
Stateside, the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) has long waged war on false advertising—marketing or advertising communications that tend to mislead consumers. Recently, the FTC issued an “enforcement policy statement on deceptively formatted advertisements” giving advertisers and publishers alike a heads up: deceptive native ads will not be tolerated.
So how can your brand capitalize on native advertising without breaking the law? The FTC offers some insight in their guide, “Native Advertising: A Guide for Businesses.”...
Face it – the more advertising people receive, the more they hate it. As a result, to reach today’s information savvy customers, content marketing trumps advertising.
What was once interesting and special back in the MadMan days is now something we try to avoid. (Check out what Mad Man Leo Burnett had to say about advertising.)
On average, people in the US receive 5,000 brand messages per day according to Razorfish....
Doug Scott’s recent departure from OgilvyEntertainment, the successful unit he founded eight years ago, has raised questions about whether its WPP parent might fold it into another corporate entertainment sibling like media agency Mindshare Entertainment or GroupM Entertainment at the operating level. While Ogilvy execs say that isn’t in the works, such speculation still begs the larger industry question: As media, creative and PR agencies—along with production companies—vie to lead the growing number of marketer content initiatives, where should responsibility for branded storytelling reside? With traditional advertising becoming less profitable, everyone, obviously, is scrambling for these new income sources.
On the creative agency front, proponents argue that without a great concept born from understanding a brand’s narrative, long-form storytelling doesn’t hold an audience’s attention and justify the media expense....
Done well, content marketing is hard, challenging work. It’s no surprise then that three of today’s top content marketers include a former comedian, a successful journalist and an agency strategist. We sat down with Tim Washer of Cisco, Stephanie Losee of Dell and Stacy Minero of Twitter to hear their secrets to exceptional content.
Every brand should learn to be funny
Humor plays the same role in content marketing that it does in entertainment—it helps the company (essentially the content creators) stand out, get noticed and build an audience. From the audience standpoint, it makes the content interesting, easier to understand and overall more exciting.
If a brand can’t find humor, it is a perception problem. Brands can be funny, but they often don’t perceive themselves that way. In that case, the brands just aren’t looking at things the right way....
It seems like everyone has something controversial to say about sponsored content these days, from John Oliver on HBO to even us here at Contently.Much of that controversy centers around two key questions: Is brand-backed content on publisher sites labeled well enough? And is it eroding the publishers’ editorial independence and reputation?
Now, a Google engineer has taken on this transparency and labeling challenge with a browser plug-in for Chrome and Firefox called AdDetector, that adds another layer of labeling to sponsored posts. It’s drumming up a fair amount of buzz in the media world already....
Experiential marketing is a method of advertising through an interactive experience that gets customers to talk about your business or product. It can be an extremely powerful tool for those companies that want to leave a strong and lasting impression on customers.
It’s a unique take on attracting customers, as it relies heavily on creativity to not only capture attention, but to motivate people to experiment with and refer your products to others.Costs can be low—this is definitely a guerilla tactic at heart and will rely more on thinking outside the box than shelling out the kind of money that’s required in traditional advertising....
How can publishers and advertisers survive in today's economy?
Only 6% of the 18-24 population read newspapers; the majority of newspaper readers in this country are in their fifties and sixties. Audiences for CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News pull in viewers with a median age of 60 or above, according to media research company Nielsen.Websites like Yahoo News and Huffington Post pull more traffic than CNN.com or The New York Times website. In two years, Buzzfeed (designed to stimulate social media with listicles: "25 Crazy Things...") has nearly tripled its monthly unique visitors, from 4.3 million to 19.3 million.
Traditional news has lost young people, the gold standard for advertisers....
David Ogilvy is one of the biggest names in advertising, and since advertising is all about “big names”, that’s saying a lot. He created some of the most iconic advertising slogans and imagery in the world, and in 1962, Time magazine called him “the most sought-after wizard in today’s advertising industry.”
Even though Ogilvy created ads at another time, for another audience, his messages have endured for many decades. And the lessons learned from a lifetime in advertising agencies are still applicable today. Bloggers can learn a lot from the world of advertising agencies – about how to target an audience, to think creatively about content, and to manage your time and projects effectively...
A Romanian Coca-Cola ad appears to have broken new ground in integration between Twitter and TV by including live tweets during an ad.
...the ad included a subtitle bar that let the brand run tweets that consumers sent in using the hashtag #LetsEatTogether. Ad agency MRM Worldwide in Romania edited the tweets, five to seven of which made it into each ad placement.
The campaign addressed the fact that 60% of people don't eat meals together, but instead eat them solo while sitting in front of the TV. The tweets were often invitations to specific people to have a meal together (with a Coke, of course.) During the spring campaign, Coke's Twitter followers in that country increased by 15% as hundreds of tweets aired on TV. The effort also made the evening news....
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Good story. Great campaign. Exceptional content marketing results!