marketing briefings. – Page 2 – a collection of content creations from various marketing classes (COMM 462, COMM 464 & COMM 296)

Honda: Press “R”

Honda just released a brand new advertisement online, and it’s super interactive. Titled “The Other Side” and hosted on YouTube, the advertisement is two minutes and fifty-five seconds and brings the viewer through the day of a guy driving a Honda. Or, if you simply hit the “R” key on your keyboard, you can view his adventure-filled evening.

The interactive advertisement plays two concurrent short films, and it’s up to the viewer which they want to see and at what time.

A split screen still from Honda’s new “Type R” advertisement. Image source: Marketing Land (linked in text)

Obviously, an advertisement that’s interactive can’t be played on traditional mediums, such as television. This is unfortunate due to the sheer amount of production and detail that went into it.

Still, the ad is featured on one of the most popular websites in the world and it’s gaining a lot of attention. AdWeek called the spot “mind-bendingly brilliant” and Marketing Land called it “amazing.” People are also buzzing about the advertisement on social media and online communities. Take, for example, this thread on Reddit where people are fawning over the interactivity and cinematography. This coming from an online community that prides itself on being adfree and has a collection of people constantly on the watch for subliminal advertising.

Honda hit it out of the park with advertisements. We’ve heard all of it before: people don’t trust advertisements, and people are getting tired of television advertisements. This work by Honda and Wieden + Kennedy London simply proves that people will still pay close attention to advertisements – if they’re well made and interesting. (Interactive is a big help too).

Ads such as “Type R” set a good example for businesses as more and more people make the transition to viewing the majority of their content online. If people are adapting to the digital world, so too should companies’ advertisements.

Could the Apple Watch change social media (and our lives)?

The Apple Watch was announced recently. This is no news to you. You’d have to completely shut yourself off from the outside world in order to have missed that announcement. What has resulted is a flurry of critiques of the product, as well as speculation on sales. On this, it seems people are pretty split: “among the finance set, estimates range from a few million to almost 40 million in the first year of sales.”

Interestingly enough, CNBC recently featured a number of business professionals, marketers, writers, bloggers, etc. to speculate on what the future of social media will look like. A number of these predictions focused on the integration of wearables into our daily lives and our social media.

Melody Kramer of NPR predicted the following: social media “will become part of the fabric of our clothes, part of the glasses we wear and the shoes we put on, and the gadgets we no longer see as gadgets but as part of our very selves. Social will measure, but sharing will become more passive in the process; it won’t require any effort on our part to share any part of our lives.”
Piera Gelardi, a creative director of Refinery 29 predicted: “I think that anything we talk about in 25 years is going to sound like science fiction. Mobile is the first step toward the portable future of social media and how we consume it, and I think wearables will be a big part of that. I can see it evolving into an implanted device in our bodies that will connect to everything around us.”

That might seem a little far-fetched right now, but the common trend is that wearables could be a large part of our daily lives within a short period of time. The information that we process and share could be shared even more instantaneously while we’re on the go. We could be constantly collecting data as we walk, talk, jog, or mountain climb. Our weekend getaway could be supplied by a virtual reality machine (see: Oculus).

The predictions are an interesting read and they do raise many important questions:

As social media becomes more and more engrained in our lives, will we even view social media as a separate entity or will it simply be commonplace in our share of ideas, commerce, etc.?
How quickly will the shift from online/mobile platforms change to wearable platforms? When will this be adopted by the majority of consumers? How will this impact our lives and the industry?
Is the Apple Watch the first step — or is it just a gimmick?

If you’ve got an opinion on this, sound off by commenting below or tweeting me @aclavers.

Mobile commerce rapidly growing

By Q2 2013, experts were estimating that 25% of online sales transactions would occur on a mobile device by 2017. Reports show that by Q2 2014, a full year following this estimate, mobile commerce traffic had already increased by 125%. Important to note is that this is the first time that mobile commerce has overtaken tablet commerce in the online sales transaction market. This is pretty big. Customers may very well be on the way to becoming more comfortable with making a quick purchase off of their iPhone or Android, rather than having the desire to fully browse on a more interactive and larger tablet or desktop platform or, of course, by actually touching an item in a traditional brick-and-mortar store.

Mobile commerce is on the rise. Image from fastcompany.net.

The rise in mobile commerce is not without some issues of course. As the Econsultancy article outlines, “a mobile customer’s visit to an ecommerce website has a 50% higher bounce rate, a 30% lower add-to-cart rate, and is 10% more likely to abandon cart.”

Mobile developers and advertisers are working to combat these rates, however. Just recently, AdWords announced an upgrade to their mobile ads. For example, as discussed on Marketing Pilgrim, AdWords’ new Mobile Lightbox Engagement Ads, generated ads will now dynamically resize to fit the screen. Mobile ads will start to do what we have seen on desktop platforms for a couple of years now: advertisements will start small before expanding into visually appealing, dynamic advertisements. Some consumers may be annoyed, of course, but these mobile advertisements will no longer go unnoticed nor will they no longer be improperly optimized for our mobile devices.

Combined with this and many retailers’ efforts to make sure their own online stores are mobile optimized, we can’t forget that social media giant Twitter is experimenting with their own “Buy Now” button. While no results are available yet, Burberry tested out the button on sponsored tweets that were available to select U.S. Twitter users during London Fashion Week. If this feature rolls out mainstream, the ability to buy things on your iPhone will become extraordinarily easy and potentially risky for impulse buyers — but this could be a huge aid to reaching that 25% by 2017 estimate that experts made last year.

E-commerce is growing at a quick rate. If retailers and developers can create e-commerce platforms for mobile devices that are attractive, optimized, easy-to-use, and secure for consumers, mobile commerce poses a huge opportunity for businesses and marketers to boost sales.

Sound Off: Are you comfortable online shopping off of your mobile phone? What sort of features/elements do you look for while mobile shopping?

Ello and (probably) goodbye.

If you follow the internet, which you probably do, you’ve now heard of Ello.

Ello is all the rage, especially amongst the defenders of the free, advertising-liberated internet. Even Tom from MySpace is kickin’ around, repeatedly poking fun at his former default popularity on MySpace. (And the fact that MySpace is now, essentially, irrelevant).

Even Tom from MySpace is on Ello.
Screenshot from https://ello.co/myspacetom.

So what’s the scoop with this bare-bones social media network? Deemed by some as the “hipster” social network, Ello has branded itself as the antithesis to Facebook. According to its manifesto, Ello will have be completely ad-free, will never charge a dime for access (but will be “freemium” by charging for additional services), and will never sell user information to third parties.

Recently, Ello has exploded. There have been reports that the site is getting between 4,000 and 30,000 account requests per day. A staggering number for a social media site essentially in Beta. If reviews are positive from initial users, Ello could be on the cusp of becoming the next big thing.

But will it be?

As Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols noted on ZDNet, there’s a lot of people who have been quite unhappy with Facebook. Some of it has to do with the mood-experimentation that it completed on users without permission. Some of it has to do with their “real name” rule that has affected numerous members of the LGBT community. But is this really enough to convince 1 billion users of Facebook (or even a sizeable fraction) to leave for something new?

Admittedly, I have not yet received my invitation to Ello, although I requested it multiple days ago. I was initially quite intrigued but have now lost a lot of my interest. The whole idea of a completely ad-free social media platform is definitely attractive. But Ello really offers nothing new. It’s been online since March and it still has a number of basic features which are listed only as “coming soon,” including: user blocking and a notification centre. These two features have become almost integral on social platforms. I don’t know about you, but I don’t see much of a point in developing or sharing any content if I’m not even going to be notified when someone interacts with it. What motivation do I have to actually make my profile interesting?

I feel like the strongest argument on generating content on Ello is to be individualistic. To have an online profile that defines “me.” A utopian profile free of advertising and without Big Brother tracking my keywords. But with such a minimalistic theme and a platform driven by, seemingly, visual content – what’s the difference between Ello and Tumblr besides a few visual tweaks? What feature would cause me to actually interrupt my natural time spent on Facebook (where thousands of people in my network are) for a brand new site. I don’t think Ello is there yet – but with the added attention it’s been getting, they better start figuring it out or people will say goodbye as quickly as they’ve said Ello.

Ello logo from ello.co

Sound Off: What are your thoughts on Ello? Are you a fan? Do you think it will survive? Comment below, or tweet me @aclavers.

Is there a backlash against social media?

A recent article published on Forbes asked a couple of key questions regarding social media and digital marketing efforts within corporations:

Are companies bored with social media?
Is there a backlash against social media within many companies?

Photo from http://terezalitsa.blogspot.ca/2013/09/is-it-time-to-unplug-from-social-media.html. Original artwork credit unknown.

Depending on how you look at things, author David Amerland says that it could be true. There is some evidence that many companies across America are laying off some social media employees. A key motivator behind skepticism of social media marketing, citing a McKinsey study in the article, is the difficulty in which the ROI of digital efforts can be measured. Simply put, the effectiveness of a Tweet cannot be translated as easily into dollars and cents as a traditional advertising campaign or a traditional direct sales push.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of people in sales roles in 2012 was virtually unchanged with that compared to a pre-Web 1992. And that’s without even taking into account the trend for changing traditional titles into “Associates” or “Service Directors.” -Forbes, Amerland

Personally, I have to admit my skepticism of social media as a career. Without a doubt, I think social media is a very important aspect of marketing and customer service these days. However, year after year, more and more young people are entering into the workforce with an almost natural ability to understand social media trends and learn social media marketing at a fast rate. I think this raises the question of whether or not we’re going to need specific people within our marketing departments to handle the execution of our social media, or if any marketing/communications generalist will be able to handle social media within a few years time? Why would companies continue to create more salaried positions if the duties could be merged with the work of another new hire? Combined with this, the difficulty of measuring ROI is a very important pitfall of social media marketing endeavours. Without a doubt, many individuals in corporate executive roles are still of the older generation. This is a generation that learned to measure much of business success on dollar figures. More efforts will likely need to be made in order to make social media an obviously profitable marketing stream. The link to ROI is not as clear with social media as it is with direct sales. In order to measure this, much attention will need to be paid to tying in business goals with social media efforts, as well as assigning proper analytics in order to track the progress. HootSuite (an obvious advocate of social media) presented a short blog post on a handful of ways businesses can measure the ROI of social media.

Sound Off: Do you think social media jobs will continue to remain prevalent in the coming years? How should firms measure the ROI of social media? Tweet me at @aclavers.

THE START OF COMM 464

Any posts below this divider were originally created for COMM 296 – An Introduction to Marketing. I originally intended on archiving all of the prior posts but I then thought it might be interesting to show any evolution of thought (if there has been any) in my views on marketing and the world.

A Reflection

As a member of Team 10 (whaddup!), we decided to focus our marketing attention and energy onto global retail brand Zara, a member of the Inditex Group and famous for its “fast-fashion model.”

The company has already been thoroughly analyzed numerous times, as evidenced by reports on the internet. Through our own personal experience and research, we were able to quickly decipher who Zara’s typical consumer segments are and the image they are attempting to achieve in their Promotion (albeit, little promotion) and Place.

What I was surprised to find out during research for Part A, however, is that Zara’s main direct competitor is considered to be The Gap. It’s no wonder that The Gap is a major force to be reckoned with in the retail world, but their image is completely different. The Gap screams traditional America (slightly more East Coast after Mickey Drexler stepped in and saved them, sort of like the revolutions to J. Crew) with “khakis, khakis, khakis.” Zara, on the other hand, is much more fashion-forward and cutting edge. While they do have some relatively staple items, their stock changes as often as bi-weekly and they model some of their pieces off of global runways, not a New England soccer mom.

Picking a target segment was not difficult. We feel that Zara could do a lot more for men, ages 18-24 who are low income, in school, and hope to remain in fashion. Zara is already cost effective with its low pricing, but it could offer more in its product line for men and we made the bold suggestion of adding an in-store tailor or at least training sales staff how to measure. Their suiting is affordable, but is not generally the best fit off the rack. Having this added convenience could go a long way in building loyalty to a brand, for a big item such as suiting.

The video was an interesting venture. Luckily, we had someone on our team with a little bit of experience in production. I can’t imagine how many extra hours some teams probably put in to get it complete for only 10%. In the end, we were happy with our product and our recommendations and I am happy to never say “fast-fashion model” again.

Utilizing Social Media

Having had a small amount of experience utilizing social media in a business setting, I am always curious to see how various companies manipulate social media networks to their advantage. Be it Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+, etc. etc., companies have a huge opportunity to reach vast amounts of people at the click of a button.

Social media marketing blog Convince and Convert recently posted about JetBlue and how they utilized Facebook on April Fool’s Day. The idea was highly unique:

Proclaiming that, “April’s No Fool,” JetBlue gave back to those most impacted by the day – people named April. JetBlue offered people with the first name April who were flying the airline on April 1 a JetBlue credit equal to the value of their flight.

An interesting promotional move — a very directed sales promotion, and a funny public relations stunt. And it seems to have paid off: close to 500 people interacted with the post, it was shared over 3,600 times, and moderately made its way around the internet as the antithesis to most online April Fool’s pranks (see: G-Mail Blue).

Fellow COMM 296er Cody Malloy also discussed social media marketing in a recent post on his own blog:

Convince & Convert reports that posts to users’ “fan pages” can reach anywhere between 2% and 47% of the fans subscribed to the page. That is quite the difference. It really just goes to show you that you really don’t know how effective or worthwhile a fan page Facebook post will be.

Cody then goes on to state:

Social media posting are all about posting at the right time, so you have to take into account various factors (age, geographic location) of your fans/followers.

I couldn’t agree more. Social media can also be a huge burden for companies: a free forum for consumers to post their thoughts both negative and positive (as Nestle once found out). Additionally, some companies make the mistake of neglecting their social media, using them as avenues for automated updates rather than communication, or for constant spam. However, sometimes companies come along like JetBlue and use it in an innovative way — and it works.

To explain one model, God made a farmer.

In our fast-paced age it takes a lot to gain the attention of consumers, especially on one of the most cluttered mediums: television.

Loud, flashy, obnoxious are all terms that could be used to describe a large majority of the advertisements that hit television nowadays. True, that may be of my own opinion but I’d love to hear the arguments of someone who disagrees.

For me, Dodge truly gained my attention with their 2013 Superbowl Ad simply titled, “Farmer.” The commercial itself was fairly quiet. The images moved slowly, there was a relative lack of colour in comparison to most advertisements that aired that day. Over the moving images, a piece of poetry was read. It was simple, and it has gone viral: close to fifteen million views on YouTube in less than two months.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMpZ0TGjbWE

Why then, can an ad such as “Farmer” attract so much attention during an ad such as the Superbowl? Simply put, it directly follows the AIDA promotion model, which can further be reduced to three steps (CAB)

Cognition (Awareness or learning) – within the mix of all the loud, flashy, raunchy commercials, the quiet calm of “Farmer” was sure to catch the attention of many. Additionally, for a select crowd, the explicit farming images would have likely heightened an awareness within them, if they are connected to agriculture.
Affect (Feeling, interest or desire) – the poetry laid over the images has the direct intent of stirring up a feeling of warmth and respect towards a traditional American occupation, an embrace of religion/faith and, for any farmers watching, a sense of pride and connection.
Behavior (Action) – although an ad such as this may not immediately compel a consumer to purchase a truck, if it was successful in winning over a consumer on the cognition and affect factors, they could link the Dodge brand to the feelings they had: warmth, respect, pride, patriotism, faith. If a consumer is in need of a truck, they may view Dodge more positively.

What are some of your favorite commercials?