Tag: social media

Taco Bell Rings Wedding Bells For Its Next Live Streaming Event

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
To promote the grand opening of its Las Vegas Strip location, Taco Bell has launched an ambitious social campaign that will culminate with a real wedding in the fast-service restaurant’s new Las Vegas flagship store.

Aiming to stage a spectacle that will drive traffic to the restaurant location, Taco Bells is asking prospective newlyweds to share their love stories on social media with the hashtag #LoveAndTacosContest. The entries will then be able to public votes, and the company will select a winning couple on March 1st for an all-expenses-paid trip to Vegas to get hitched in its restaurant. Taco Bell plans to live stream the ceremony for fans worldwide, and Taco Bell customers who voted in the contest will be invited to attend in person.

What Brands Need To Do
While this is certainly a bit on the side of “out there” as far as branded events go, this campaign is illustrative of brands’ increasing need to come up with bold and creative ways to stage live events so as to grab consumer attention in today’s fragmented media landscape. This campaign cleverly ties the event to a physical store location to drive local traffic while also incorporating live streaming to amplify the reach of the event. As live videos quickly become a crucial component of social media marketing, brand marketers need to think outside the box to come up with share-worthy events that can capture the mobile audience and get them talking.

 

 

Source: GeoMarketing

 

Pinterest Launches Showcase To Help Brands Present Their Best Sides

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Pinterest has introduced a new feature called Showcase to help brands on its platform leave a strong first impression on customers visiting their profile pages. Rolling out to business accounts, this new feature enables brand managers to choose up to five customizable Pinterest boards and Buyable Pins in the US to feature as a rotating carousel on top of their profile pages.

Why Brands Should Care
A new report from our sibling Mediabrands agency Magna found that social and search captured the bulk of digital dollar growth in 2016, and social media is expected to rise to the top of advertising spending in market share by 2017. Pinterest stands to benefit from this ad dollar boom, as it has long enjoyed its reputation among social networks as a “Sales Conversion Powerhouse.”

This new feature should offer brands a way to curate their best content collections and present them in a prominent manner to attract the attention of potential customers and hopefully lead to conversion. As social platforms like Pinterest continue to build out their ad products and add brand-friendly features, brands advertisers need to learn to leverage these tools to reach their desired audiences .

 

Source: Marketing Land

Instagram Updates Stories With Direct Links And More

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
On Thursday, Instagram updated its app to add some neat new features to its Stories feature. Besides a built-in Boomerang mode and support for tagging other Instagram users in Stories, this update brings an important function to the app –– the ability to add URL links to their stories that viewers can open without leaving Instagram.

To keep the Stories free of long ugly URLs, Instagram is adding a “See More” button to the bottom of any story that includes a link. Users who tap on the button will be directed to the destination page via an in-app web browser. At launch, this link feature will only be available to verified Instagram accounts.

What Brands Should Do
This update shows Instagram’s determination in improving Stories to better compete with Snapchat, and the addition of links in particular should come as a useful tool for content creators and brands. Instagram has long resisted clickable links, limiting them to one per account profile, and only recently started supporting direct links in its ad products. Now brands on Instagram can use Stories as a call-to-action tool to drive traffic and encourage sign-up. Retailers in particular should take advantage of this new feature to expand their social commerce efforts to Instagram.  

 

Source: TechCrunch

How To Use Twitter’s New Character Limit Rule For Promoted Tweets

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
On Monday, Twitter rolled out new rules for its infamous 140-character limit. Now, photos, videos, polls, and quoted tweets no longer count toward the limit, although usernames in replies, links, and hashtags still do. However, the relaxed character limit does not seem to apply to Promoted Tweets created using Twitter’s ad dashboard. Brands can get around this inconvenience by creating a regular tweet first before running it as a Promoted Tweet ad.

What Brands Should Do
Twitter has been making its platform more brand-friendly, adding new customer service tools and delivering a smooth, ad-supported NFL livestream last week. Relaxing its character limit enables brands to include more photos, videos, and polls in their tweets without sacrificing space for text, allowing them to pack more rich media content into their tweets to engage with users.

 

Source: Marketing Land

Chevy Taps IBM’s Watson For New “Fueling Possibilities” Campaign

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Chevrolet has found an innovative way to integrate IBM’s cognitive cloud service Watson into its new ad campaign called “Fueling Possibilities.” The campaign leverages Watson’s cognitive power to offer people “positivity tests,” which assess how positive and upbeat their posts on Twitter and Facebook are and assign positivity scores accordingly.

So far, Chevrolet has set up so-called “positivity pumps” at gas stations in Buenos Aires, Cape Town, and New Orleans to engage consumers, who are encouraged to input their social media account names and receive free gas based on their positivity scores. Chevrolet’s parent company, GM, said that it is working to bring them to gas stations around the world for the rest of the year. The auto brand also created a website where interested consumers can check their positivity scores online.

What Brands Need To Do
This Chevrolet campaign showcases an interesting example of harnessing social media data for sentiment analysis and bringing some personalization into a marketing campaign. As cognitive cloud services like Watson mature and become more widely available, brands should consider experimenting with this type of analytical tool in order to learn more about their customers and devise new ways to engage with consumers.  

 

Source: ARSTechnica

Header image courtesy of ChevroletCanada’s YouTube Video

YouTube Adds Call-To-Action Format To TrueView Ads, Tests New “Community” Tab

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
This week, YouTube added two new features that brands need to look out for. To begin with, the Google-owned video platform added a new call-to-action format for its TrueView video ads, allowing brand advertisers to display a customizable call-to-action banner at the bottom of a video during or at the end of playback. Google says it will be testing this format throughout the year, aiming to make it available globally soon.

On Tuesday, YouTube started testing a Community tab, a Facebook News Feed-esque social feed where content creators can share text, images, GIFs, and even live videos with their subscribers. Viewers can vote “thumbs up or down” and comment on those updates, in addition to choosing to receive push notifications for posts from their favorite YouTubers. Community features are only available to a select group of content creators at the moment.

What Brands Need To Do
With competitors such as Facebook and Twitter ramping up their video products, YouTube is also improving theirs to maintain its appeal to digital advertisers. The TrueView ad format grants brands some flexibility to customize call-to-action messages so as to best suit their needs. The Community social features, on the other hand, could offer brands a valuable fan engagement tool on YouTube once it becomes more widely available, allowing them to engage with subscribers with a variety of content.

 

Source: AdWeek

Instagram Debuts Live Event-Based Video Channel

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Instagram today launched a live event-based video channel that calls to mind Snapchat’s Live Stories. Appearing in the Explore tab in the Instagram app, the new feature uses an algorithm to curate user-generated videos from concerts, sports games, and other types of live events as they happen. Each user will see videos from different events based on their interests, just like the rest of the content recommended in Explore. This new video channel is only available in the U.S. at the moment but Instagram says it will roll out to global markets soon.

Why Brands Should Care
As Instagram continues to “borrow” from Snapchat and build out its video products, it is not only aiming to better compete with Snapchat for user attention, but also making the necessary preparations for more video ads. As a new study indicates, brand marketers prefer social media sites over ad networks when it comes to digital video ads.

Although Instagram has not specified whether it will insert ads into the new video features, it seems like a matter of time given that it has been ramping up its ad efforts in recent months with its ad sales expected to jump to $1.5 billion this year. For brands looking to reach mobile consumers, this new feature marks an interesting development that brands need to be aware of.

Source: AdWeek

Brands Love Instagram Stories Already

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Although Instagram only launched its Snapchat Stories-esque feature on Tuesday, a number of brands have started using the ephemeral sharing feature and are already seeing great results. According to AdAge’s report, Nike has received 800,000 views in 24 hours for its Instagram Story posted on Tuesday. For comparison, Nike says its most viewed video on Snapchat got 66,000 views. Besides Nike, brands like Mountain Dew, Quaker, Coach, and GE have all gotten started with Instagram Stories. In addition, major cosmetic brands including Covergirl, L’Oréal, and Maybelline have all jumped on this new Instagram feature to share content with their followers, with many opting for behind-the-scene looks or sneak peeks at some of the products they are working on.

What Brands Need To Do
The consensus among brand marketers so far seems to be that Instagram is more brand-friendly than Snapchat, as the former offers better ad products and measurement tools for marketers and has a referral-based discovery system that makes it easier for brands to build followers. Given that most brands have a bigger follower base on Instagram than on Snapchat, it is not surprising that brands are seeing better results from Instagram Stories.

Although Instagram has not specified whether it will insert ads into Stories as Snapchat does, it seems safe to assume that Stories will start carrying ads sooner or later. For now, Instagram Stories remains a shiny new tool that brands should use to connect with followers.

 

Source: AdAge & Glossy

Could This New App Be The Next Instagram?

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
A new social network app called Yubl (pronounced like “bubble” with a “y”) is taking off among teens as an alternative to Instagram. The app, launched in February in U.K., has amassed a big following among young people and become one of the hottest social apps in the U.K. App Store at the moment. Besides the standard content feed and direct messaging features common in today’s social apps, Yubl sets itself apart with five types of interactive buttons – Vote, Link, Whereabouts, Pinpoint, and Count – that users can add to their posts like stickers. For example, with the Vote button users can post a photo or video with a question for the followers to vote on or they can use the Link button to add a clickable URL to their posts. Early adopting brands such Red Bull, ASOS, Accessorize, and Primark have set up verified accounts on Yubl and started exploring the new app to reach its young users.

What Brands Need To Do
While it remains to be seen if Yubl can sustain its growth or extend its success to this side of the pond, it should certainly be on your radar if your brand is seeking to reach young people in the U.K.. Compared to the likes of Snapchat and Instagram, the app is remarkably brand-friendly given its Link button and other interactive features that brands can use to drive traffic and engage users without buying ads. As the social media landscape continues to evolve, it is important for brands to keep an eye out for the up-and-coming social platforms and learn to use their unique features for marketing purposes.

 

Source: Digiday

Header image courtesy of Yubl’s website

Twitter Launches New Carousel Ad Unit, Opens Up API For Pre-Roll Ads

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Twitter is launching a new ad unit that borrows some elements from its “Moments” feature to help brand advertisers curate a collection of tweets. Just like Moments, the new Promoted Tweet Carousel features a swipeable carousel of multiple rich media tweets from multiple sources, allowing brands to craft an engaging narrative that gets the brand message across.

In related news, Twitter is also opening up its Ads API to make it easier for brands to purchase pre-roll video ads on its network. The company first opened up its pre-roll video ad marketplace in October, allowing brands to buy pre-roll ads before videos tweeted by popular publishers such as Buzzfeed or Tastemade.

What Brands Need To Do
This new carousel ad product enables brands to escape Twitter’s 140-character limit and use multiple photos and videos to tell an interesting brand story or highlight different aspects of a product. Brands can also use it to incorporate fan-generated tweets into their campaigns to add a touch of authenticity and enhance online community management.

In terms of video ads, Twitter obviously still has a lot of catching-up to do compared to Facebook or Snapchat. While the new API tweak is a step in the right direction, it does little to improve Twitter’s existing video ads. Still, it enables brands to buy Twitter’s pre-roll ads through third-party, automated ad buying platforms such as AdParlor and TubeMogul, which should be a welcome addition for media buyers and planners.

 

Sources: AdWeek & Marketing Land