KFC has released the Chicken Corsage which pairs baby’s breath flowers with room for a drumstick. The corsage costs $20 and comes with a $5 gift check for the poultry adornment. Clearly KFC’s aim is not to sell more chicken through the corsages directly, although wearable food does seem like a good investment. In reality, it drums up a great deal of buzz as they connect with a younger audience around the awkward hilarity of prom. So far, the marketing stunt has garnered over 200K views on their YouTube video also hosted on a microsite.
Category: Percolate
Twitter Debuts Interactive Web Notifications
DSTRUX Is Snapchat For Everything
Consumers are slowly changing their stance on personal privacy and control over their data. This is most evidenced by apps like Snapchat, that offer at least the illusion of privacy by telling users that their messages will be destroyed upon receipt. The latest iteration of privacy-oriented startups comes by way of DSTRUX, a New York based startup that offers a cloud-based piece of software that lets you send a document and then destroy it remotely. So for instance, if you want to send a friend a rough draft of a word document, you can send it over and after they give you feedback, you can destroy their copy. At the same time, DSTRUX makes it impossible to take screenshots of the images, and the company is working to leverage computer cameras to see if recipients are taking pictures with their mobile phones. The success of the startup thus far speaks to an increased level of scrutiny on the part of consumers; as we continue to learn more about how data is exploitable on the Internet, people are becoming more and more careful about how they let others access their files.
Facebook Forces Users To Use Messenger
Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp threw Facebook’s proprietary Messenger app into question on many different levels, but now we know that Facebook wants to keep its in-house app around – at least for the foreseeable future. The company is doing this by forcing its users to send messages exclusively through the Messenger app by eliminating the chat features from the traditional Facebook app; that is, in two weeks time, anyone who wants to send a Facebook message on their cell phones will need to download the separate message app. The messages tab in the main app will redirect users to the other app. It will allow Facebook to build its Messenger app out even more, adding deeper features like stickers, gifs, and video sharing, pushing branding and native messaging advertising out through the app and onto the customers.
Social Native Ads To Overtake Traditional Display Ads
Social native ads – that is, ads that appear in users’ streams like organic content – are poised to overtake traditional social display ads in terms of industry spend. According to a recent report published through Business Insider, as publishers, media outlets, and social networks themselves reorganize and redesign their platforms around the prospect of driving revenue through native ads, native will come to represent over 40% of the total $10 billion in social media ad spend by 2017. On networks like Facebook and Pinterest, in-stream native advertisements will come to work seamlessly across devices and platforms, making mobile campaigns nearly indistinguishable from others. Breaking the data down to specific social networks, the Business Insider report claims that Facebook ads in news feeds achieve a click through rate 49 times that of traditional placements on the right side of users’ pages. The big takeaway, though, comes with respect to photo sharing: 43% of global internet users have shared a photo in the past month, and Business Insider seems to think that native photo advertisements on platforms like Vine and Snapchat will go a long way in the near future.
WhatsApp Partners With E-Plus To Become Mobile Carrier
E-Plus is now offering a cheap, pre-pad SIM-card that takes WhatsApp traffic off of the data plan; this means that for this pre-paid system, WhatsApp is the primary over-the-top messaging platform for communication. For €10, German E-Plus users can by the small bundle of mobile voice, data, and text messages, while utilizing WhatsApp as their primary form of communication. WhatsApp isn’t taking over E-Plus’s brand, it’s just hooking more E-Plus users into WhatsApp, effectively increasing its active user numbers. WhatsApp’s parent company, Facebook, tried to do something similar with Orange in North Africa and Eastern Europe, to exempt its messaging services from data plans. As messaging platforms become OTT data and service platforms, mobile marketers and advertisers will need to take increasing note of their prominence, as they are rapidly becoming the primary form of communication on mobile devices.
Millennials Trust Peers’ Content Over All Else
As if advertisers needed more proof that millennials are avoiding traditional media, a new study from marketing startup Crowdtap and research company Ipsos reveals just that: millennials will almost always trust their peers over traditional media sources. User generated content (UGC) – including status updates, blog posts, and other types of reviews – is viewed as 50% more trustworthy, 20% more influential, and 35% more memorable than traditional forms of media. Of the 18 hours per day that Millenials spend with media, 30% is with UGC, and 71% of media consumption is on social networks. The most important metric for marketers and advertisers, though, is that 68% trust peer reviews and 74% trust conversations with friends over TV, Print, and Radio. The point: UGC is king with millennials, and is the key to driving purchases, from cars, to clothing, to appliances.
India Becomes Facebook’s Biggest Market
As far as the number of active users is concerned, India is pushing to overtake the U.S. as Facebook’s biggest market. As of march 31, there are over 100 million active users in the country, whose increasing population of mobile phone subscribers means that Facebook can aspire to get into those phones in the near future. Though India might become Facebook’s biggest market, getting money out of those users is always a challenge, as large user markets aren’t always the biggest drivers of revenue. That said, Facebook’s push to increase revenue in user markets outside of the US has yielded a revenue per user increase of $2.14, chiefly powered by 33% growth in Europe and 17% rise in Asia. And as access to the network continues to be dominated by mobile users globally, the push to break the 1 billion mark in India, in conjunction with smartphone use rise, means that Facebook will be focusing much of its ad spend – its lead driver of revenue – through mobile platforms and markets.
Twitter’s Redesign Features Pinned Tweets
After testing out several different design options over the past few months (to the chagrin of many users), Twitter has finally debuted the redesign that is going to stick. It’s a Facebook-like design, with a profile picture and a full background picture that takes up the full screen. The big news, though, comes with the tweets themselves: content that’s popular – that is, retweeted or shared many times – will appear in larger font, drawing attention to material that’s spreading rapidly or that has proven successful on these metrics. As well, twitter accounts can post a stickied tweet to the top of their timeline, promoting a specific campaign or drawing attention to something more about themselves, serving as additional promo for the account. It should allow social media managers and marketers more options in tweaking accounts to push the content that they want to the front of their feeds – and, ideally, their followers.
GoPro Xbox Channel Launches
In January, news started circulating that GoPro would be making a dedicated, streaming Xbox 360 and Xbox One channel. Now, it’s out in the world, live on the Xbox 360. The channel will be featuring all exclusive content, much of which will initially derive from the launch celebration, which features viral-video-kickstarters like basketball shot tricks and Lion hugs. At the same time, users watching the channel will be able to purchase GoPro’s from within the video app, without putting the controller down – of course, the GoPro channel will advertise the specific units used to film the shorts. It’s a shot at Twitch, certainly, and other new forms of live streamed networks over Xbox, which are becoming increasingly popular and a large source of income for companies advertising creatively on the mediums. As the platform expands, expect to see more live streaming entertainment as younger people continue to cut the cord.
