I found this blogpost from one of the more popular online marketing blogs, Convince&Convert, and found it to be very interesting!

Nike Celebrates Instagram Milestones by Thanking Its Community

Nike has grown from the first hashtag #Nike on Instagram two years ago to more than 1 million followers and 6 million photos today. To commemorate this day, Nike created a 24 hour event for the celebration. Nike shared ten Instagram photos from its fans that inspire the company to “push further” on the platform.  Each photo included a motivational caption and highlighted the original fan who created the photo.

The use of social media and the trend of using hashtags to market a company’s brand image has been growing these few years. This could be a form of pull advertising for Nike as the end consumers using Instagram would be exposed to this kind of marketing strategy.

Hashtags are a great way for companies to give further insight into an image or product. They allow for categorisation, interest honing and drive targeted consumer purchases. Nike could be associated with #Nike, #motivation, #justdoit, #exercise, #sports, #athlete etc.

Nike has always been creative in advertising, finding ways to get to the mass consumers. This is one of their methods of connecting with the social media crowd and it is very impressive!

This marketing post is a reference to my buddy’s blogpost in COMM296: Billboard War

After reading his blogpost about luxury car companies competing with each other for the better billboard ad, I have found other industry’s companies having a billboard war as well.

These are the 10 Fiercest Advertisement Wars.

My personal favourite is the advertisement battle between McDonalds and Burger King. It shows Ronald McDonald, the mascot for McDonalds, ordering food in a trench coat at a Burger King restaurant. The interesting fact about this ad was that he had to hide himself in a suspicious manner, with his red hair and red boots revealing himself to everyone instead.

These competitive advertisements are not legal in some places but I feel that these ad campaigns makes advertising much more interesting from the consumers’ point of view. Some billboards which just informs or persuades consumers may not be appealing to a large audience. Busy people just glance across what it conveys and forget about it the moment they walk past it. These competitive ad campaigns can introduce humour to the consumers which they might share with their friends, increasing the exposure to consumers.

Billboard wars is a great approach to creative advertising whereby both companies outsmart and outwit each other to come out as the winner of the “war”. I would very much like to see a huge billboard war between Samsung and Apple for their smartphones because I can anticipate it to be very interesting.

Link: Why companies pay big bucks to advertise during the Super Bowl

Super Bowl ad prices have been on the rise for the last couple of years. It used to cost $2,385,365 in 2007 and now, it costs $3,442,752. It seems crazy to pay that amount of money for a 30 second commercial but why do companies still do so?

I feel that Super Bowl commercials are a special genre of commercials whereby marketing companies throw out all they have for the products they are marketing for. It’s like a “Super Bowl” for commercials. The best and most entertaining commercials tend to be aired only during the Super Bowl period.

One Super Bowl commercial that stood out was a commercial by Chrysler’s Ram which is mostly composed by photos. It lasts around 2min which means that Chrysler would have paid a whopping $16 million to broadcast this ad!

Chrysler’s Super Bowl Commercial