Messaging remains in the news this week, and the buzzword continues to be “stickers.” Today, Viber, Kik, GroupMe, and Cubie all confirmed that they are working with TextPride, a company devoted to creating branded content and stickers for messaging apps. TextPride is bringing officially licensed content from over 200 sports and entertainment brands to the over 500 million users of messaging apps. Users can access the stickers in paid packs accessible in individual stores on each app. Packs generally run at $1.99, and grant access to about 30 emoji. While traditional ad tactics like mobile banner ads often disrupt the fundamental service of the messenger, branded stickers offer a natural, almost native opportunity to monetize the space, and increase broad consumer engagement amongst a younger demographic. This partnership is good news for brands and agencies looking to expand into the messaging space.
Category: Percolate
Kickstarter Passes $1 Billion
Kickstarter is the undisputed leader of the crowd-funding game. Competitors like Indiegogo have kept the company on its toes, but at the end of the day it’s Kickstarter that enabled readily accessible campaigns for companies looking to gain support from the masses for projects that would, at least in theory, be more successful if those supporting them were more engaged. Now, the award-winning startup has surpassed $1 Billion in funds pledged, with more than half of that money being donated in the past year. Certainly, much of that money has come from multi-million dollar campaigns, but $619 million has come from donors, meaning that crowd-funding is a genuinely sustainable practice: in total, 5.7 million people from all seven continents have pledged money on the site. It speaks to the power of a good idea, as well as the power of the Internet – and more specifically, data – to achieve positive goals. Crowd-funding is officially mainstream.
Amazon Considers Free Music Streaming
Amazon has offered free movies and TV shows for Prime subscribers, and now it looks like they might be set to offer music as well. Some have predicted a parallel to Spotify from Amazon, and now it looks like it’ll be bundled into prime, according to industry sources. These same sources claim that talks are ongoing, while Amazon has been playing a hard line about pricing with labels. If Amazon decides to maintain the music service as it does the video – as a reward for Prime subscription – it would bank on many more prime users appearing on the incentive of free music. As well, it would let Amazon justifiably raise the price for the platform, which the company said it would do. Amazon is clearly trying to break into the streamed music game – just as YouTube has attempted to do – which is an indication of just how potent the space appears to be for big media companies.
Google Updates Hangouts To Compete With Facebook
Google Hangouts looks a lot different after a complete renovation on Thursday, and it takes many design cues from its new conglomerate competitor, WhatsApp & Facebook. The new iOS app features tabs along the bottom of the screen with names like Hangouts, Contacts, and Favorites, much like its competitors. You can now also send videos, add stickers, or share your location within the conversation, and the new app is also optimized for iPad with a dual-pane design. Just as the messaging space has been thrust into the spotlight by Facebook’s acquisition, Hangouts has established itself as one of the bigger players in the space simply through its user base already garnered through gmail users. With this redesign, it positions itself not as a direct extension of gmail, but more of a firm competitor in the increasingly fragmented messaging battle.
Facebook Rewards Natural Brand Interplay
Facebook made a subtle, but important change to its product Pages on Tuesday. Pages can now tag other pages in their Facebook posts, which means that brands can extend their reach on Facebook by tagging other brands or pages. For instance, if you don’t “like” a brand like Pepsi, but Pepsi has tagged someone that you do “like,” the Pepsi post will show up in your feed. The sample post was a Bleacher Report piece that tagged Houston Rockets players; though users don’t necessarily like Bleacher Report, if they do like James Harden, the post showed up. The goal here is to reach, and thereafter capture, users they might not have previously had access to.
But Facebook is doing its job of making sure that the cross-pollination is natural. It won’t be allowing Twitter-like tactics of brand interaction and simply hopping onto zeitgeist-y trends for the sake of growth hacking. Facebook is actively discouraging such behavior by punishing brands: the post won’t be seen by those who follow the tagged page if the post isn’t related to the page the brand has tagged. For now, Facebook isn’t showing whether the algorithm is catching the post as unrelated, so brands are going to have to go out of their way to make sure they do the right thing. The moral of the story is: if you want to expand your reach on Facebook through this method, do it right, or Facebook’s algorithms will show you the consequences.
Google Launches Maps Gallery
A new Google Maps Gallery was announced today, a new way for governments, businesses, and others to share and publish mapping data to Google’s Maps Engine. Maps in the Gallery are viewable in Google Earth, and and are easily discoverable via search engines, which means that branded maps – e.g. a National Geographic sponsored map that relates to a new edition of the magazine, or a map of important spots in an upcoming movie – are now possible. It’s an opportunity for third parties to utilize Google’s effective mapping system for additional, well-designed maps that plot out specific data points in a way that’s both searchable and easily accessible.
LINE’s Creators Market Lets Users Create Stickers For Sale
For messaging apps, stickers have been a boon for a while. Line, one of the more popular Japanese messaging apps, is now letting its users sell their original stickers in Line’s web store. Called the Line Creators Market, the store is free for all users to register to. Creators can sell sets of 40 stickers at ~$1, once the graphics are approved by Line, and will receive half of the proceeds. Not only is the store a play to get at additional, popular in-app revenue streams, it’s also a move to increase user engagement and global expansion – sticker purchases accounted for 20% of the app’s revenue thus far, and sticker creation, which are popular globally, could be a way for Line to push its expansion beyond Japan’s borders.
MasterCard Protects Purchases Via Location
MasterCard is debuting a new program that protects purchases made on credit cards based on smartphone location. In partnership with Syniverse, the program lets customers protect purchases made in foreign countries unless their smartphone is also in that location. It limits fraud, and takes the toll off of call centers, in that customers don’t have to call banks to alert them to travel plans. The system simply sees that you’re in the same place as your purchases, and clears them. As far as privacy of location is concerned, MasterCard says that the program is only opt-in, so there’s no automatic activation. It’s also said that it will be combining the program with select offers for specific locations, so users in the program can expect to see coupons and offers for things around them, a key step forward for brands looking to work with MasterCard on digital campaigns.
Samsung s5 Authenticates PayPal Payments
Amongst the new features on Samsung’s new s5 is fingerprint authentication. It didn’t get much attention, though, because at first it seemed like a simple catch-up to Apple’s developments. Nonetheless, it turns out that Samsung partnered with PayPal to develop a unique encrypted key that lets PayPal verify users’ identities via the fingerprint authentication, and thus pay with PayPal from the phone. With the simple swipe of a finger to authenticate identity, PayPal users can use the phone as their wallet. Though Apple is behind, they’ve made noise about fingerprint-authenticated payments as well – they’ve got one of the largest credit card repositories on the planet at the moment; all they need to do is leverage it. At the moment, though, Samsung’s beat them to it.
Ford To Use BlackBerry OS For In-Car Systems
According to Bloomberg News, Ford has dropped Microsoft as its Sync software provider, and has instead switched to BlackBerry’s OS after the second-gen, MyFord Touch suffered from technical problems and consistent bugs. These issues were so persistent that Ford has continued to build on the first-gen system, and has left the second-gen system entirely. The QNX BlackBerry system will, ideally, provide engineers with a whole new type of mobile platform that the present systems lack, including support for touch screen, HTML5, and other interface enhancements. QNX is already in use with Audi, BMW, Chrysler, Acura, Porsche, Saab, and Hyundai, so for Ford to join on speaks more to a broad industry standard than anything else. And for BlackBerry, it represents a big bright spot in a new year of restructuring for the company.
