After a fun 4 years of video looping, laughs, and video editing glory, Vine, the six second video app, is getting cut off by twitter. In the cleverly titled blog Why Vine Died, Casey Newton discussed points of differences vine had that users stopped appreciating. This fun blog brought up interesting aspects of vine that marketers capitalized in order to capture the attention of audiences.

Short and Sweet

Time is of the essence when it comes to capturing the consumer’s attention. With Vines six second time constraint, content creators were forced to jam pack the six seconds with as much visually pleasing content as possible. This concentrated content resulted in very high quality advertisements that targeted certain demographics depending on the creator.

Targeted Demographics 

Marketers are able to choose which content creator they want to collaborate with depending on the demographic of the creators following. We’ve seen this kind of targeted marketing with other social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram. While this is not new, this form of marketing may be more effective than traditional poster, commercial, and radio advertisements.

Looping

Unlike traditional advertisements, Vine advertisements loop automatically once the vine is “finished”. A single viewer may unknowingly watch a single advertisement multiple times because of this vine exclusive feature. Viewers can get more engaged with vine advertisements as the vines do not stop until you physically click pause.

Popular Viners such as Logan Paul capitalized on their creativity and this opportunity and collaborated with companies such as Piano Tiles, Areopostale, and Verizon in order to make money using their six seconds of fame. According to a 60 minutes report, Logan Paul was paid $200,000 for a single vine, reaching more than seven thousand views and having the same impact as a primetime TV advertisement ad would have.

Although vine is not viewed as a typical advertisement platform, subtle branding across many vines like Logan’s vines can have the same reach as the traditional advertisement platforms. With twitter discontinuing vine as a social media platform, they are also discontinuing a channel of distribution for marketers, forcing marketers to seek and use other social media platforms suitable for adverts.

Google pixel recently released its new aggressively elegant marketing videos to pave its path into the smartphone world. Does high Camera resolution, a powerful processor, scratch resistant glass, lots of ram, and a big screen sound familiar? Advertisements of these points of parity only make up four seconds out of the 1:21 long video. What did google do and why are people talking about the Pixel? To understand more we need to jump to Janice Chok’s Blog.

In her blog, Janice breaks the explosive issues with the Samsung Galaxy Note S7 and how a company that once scorched the Mobile Device market, might be getting smothered out by competition. In her analysis, mentioned that “consumers are persuaded to be loyal to Samsung brand instead of competitors such as Apple and Google. With the official introduction of pixel, that may not be true anymore and here’s why.

Pixel Has Astonishing Points of Difference

The Google Pixel has impressive points of difference that may ignite the brand switching threat that Samsung may face. 7 hours of battery life in a 15-minute charging session? Unlimited photo storage 24/7 customer support with video connectivity? I’m not going to ask again, sign me up!

Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better

Google ensured that Pixel would have an edge over the points of parity it shares with competitors. Ultra High Definition screens? Got it. Lots of megapixels in your camera? Upgraded it. 3.5 mm headphone jack? Kept it.

Google Inspires Action

Google as a company has defined their purpose to “organize the worlds information and make it universally accessible”. According the TedTalk, Google has established why they do what they do, resulting in a direct connection with the limbic of the consumer’s mind. The limbic brain is responsible for feelings and gut decisions. These feelings include trust and loyalty, which explains why this kind of marketing is more effective in producing sales, as the consumer knows the intentions of the company. Samsung on the other hand, is theoretically at a competitive disadvantage because they do not deliver the same marketing tactic. Their mission is to “make Samsung a digital leader”, which does not deliver the customer oriented product integrity google is approaching.

Because of these three points we can see why Pixel may be a huge threat to Samsung’s market share in the phone industry. Pixel can compete and in some cases, out competes Samsung in technology, and Pixel delivers their marketing in a more persuasive manner. With Samsung’s major recall of Note S7’s and the introduction to pixel, I would be concerned with Samsung’s market share in the phone market.

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Vancouver’s super-heated housing market was first faced with government intervention when it saw the introduction of the Foreign Buyers Tax back in June. This tax meant that overseas real-estate purchases would be slapped with an additional 15% tax, resulting in house prices costing hundreds of thousands more for overseas purchasers. The Vancouver real estate market is once again facing government intervention, this time addressing short term rent conflicts.

Unless one owns a hotel, motel, or bed and breakfast business licenses, one is not permitted to rent real estate to tenants for less than 30 days. The concern for short term renting arises when homeowners no longer rent to locals and resort to renting to tourists in order to maximize profits. “Housing is first and foremost about homes, not about operating a business” says Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson. To take action, Mayor Gregor Robertson wants those renting sections of their homes on Airbnb to attain a business license, and to ban Airbnb listings for users that do not live in the home they post.

Airbnb is a beautiful concept. It allows those who live in homes to rent out rooms in their homes to tourists culminating in both consumer surplus and producer surplus.  Homeowners are able to fully utilize all their resources in order to make extra money and tourists are able to live more inexpensively. The issue with Airbnb arises when homeowners exploit Airbnb’s business model of home sharing and stop renting to locals, limiting the number of available homes for Vancouverites. I do see the major exploitation flaws of home sharing businesses. Unethical participants in the home sharing businesses use Airbnb as a source of untaxed income, while those looking for long term homes to rent suffer as renting to them would be less profitable then to rent to Airbnb.

There is a pattern for the problems that arise in item sharing businesses. Uber, cannot enter Canadian cities because of difficulties obtaining proper business licensing as there are scarce numbers of taxi licensing available. We can see this licensing issue stem to home sharing businesses, where renting homes for a short amount of time requires proper hotel or bed and breakfast business licenses. I guess one of the biggest lingering questions is what actions will Mayor Gregor Robertson take to intercept illegal home sharing businesses, and will his actions set legal precedence across Canadian cities to deal with illegal Airbnb postings.

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