The First Brand-Sponsored Periscope Stream Is Here

Read original story on: AdWeek

Nestlé has snatched the honor of becoming the first brand to run a paid campaign on live-streaming app Periscope. Working with social influencer platform Izea, Nestlé hired a few Periscope personalities to broadcast classic summertime scenes featuring the Drumstick ice cream cone to their followers, in addition to opening an official account to provide similar content streams.

Ever since Twitter launched Periscope in late March to compete with this year’s SXSW breakout Meerkat, the two apps have been locked in a heated competition that brought much attention to live streaming on mobile. As a result, brands have been quick to follow the audience as well, as we see publishers, cable TV, and even auto brands started to experiment with this emerging media platform, all in attempts to connect with today’s fractured audience. Now that Nestlé has tested water with branded streams, we expect to see more brands to try it out. Twitter also offers their 6 general tips for brands getting on Periscope, although it mostly involves buying promoted tweets.

Amazon Turns Boxes Of Its Packages Into Advertising Space

Read original story on: TechCrunch

As the undisputable leader in ecommerce, Amazon has always been quite tech-savvy, actively exploring emerging media platforms like connected cars and smart home devices. Ironically, however, the ecommerce giant had been overlooking a low-tech, yet prime ad space right under its nose—the Amazon shipping box.

Perhaps realizing this missed opportunity, Amazon inked a deal with Universal Pictures and Illumination Entertainment to put cute cartoon characters from the Minions movie to help promote its impending release, the first time Amazon has ever allowed a third party to completely brand its iconic delivery boxes.

By accepting advertising on its packages, which litter doorsteps and apartment building lobbies across the states, Amazon may just have found a lucrative new revenue stream. Given that the mostly positive early responses from the customers, it seems reasonable to expect more branded boxes to pop up in the near future.

 

Instagram Debuts Crucial New Features for Brands

Read original story on: AdWeek

After using Instagram as a digital billboard for years, brands on Instagram can now finally drive traffic to webpages of their choice via the new “Learn More” button unveiled yesterday, along with a new “Carousel Ad” feature that enables better storytelling through multi-image sliding.  These crucial new ad features signal a maturing Instagram, slowly growing into a more brand-friendly platform.

How Pandora’s New Feature Can Help Artists And Brands

Read original story on: Re/code

Popular Internet radio service Pandora is launching a pilot test this week that will allow music artists to send personalized audio messages to the listeners, which the company foresees will be used to plug upcoming tours and new albums, or simply to provide context on a particular song.

More interestingly, the company also mentioned its plan to make this new Artist Audio Messaging feature geo-targeted and hyperlocal. This means that soon artists and brands alike on Pandora will be able to target fans in a specific city or region with relevant, localized messages.

Why Podcast Ads Have A Measurement Problem

Read original story on: Digiday

Thanks to the surprise hit “Serial,” there’s little dispute that podcasts are all the rage right now. Indeed, the recently revived medium is growing exponentially, reportedly reaching 65 million monthly unique listeners last month. Yet large brands have been hesitant to embrace the medium, for which its undeveloped audience measurement system is to blame.

Apple dominates the podcasting landscape, with around 70% of all podcast downloads via iTunes and its iOS podcast apps, but the company lacks incentive to offer better measurement since it doesn’t host the content and has no plans to monetize the medium. But as its audience size grows, a mature audience measurement system seems inevitable, and necessary, for podcast. After all, brands and podcast belong together.

How Brands Can Survive Facebook’s New “Easy Unfollow” Tool

Read original story on: AdAge

Facebook quietly introduced a new tool last Friday that helps users manage the contents showing up on their newsfeed. Users will be able to see which of their friends or the brands they follow accounted for the most posts in their feeds each week, and unfollow anyone with just one easy click. As a less drastic measure, the company also included a feature to dial down the number of posts from a given friend or brand.

Either way, brands now need to be more mindful of both the quality and quantity of the posts they regularly push out. As users gain more control over whose content occupies their newsfeed on the social network, only brand messages with true substance, used in right doses, will offer a fair value exchange for users’ attention.

POV: How Can Consumers Trust Brands With Personal Information

Download the POV here.

You may think of consumer data collection—and the resulting privacy concerns—as “corporate evil-doing”. But really, it’s just a delicate value exchange that most brands have yet to figure out how to manage.

In order for consumers to trust brands with their personal data, brands must actively take steps to ensure that:

  • Consumers consent to data collection
  • Once collected, data remains secure
  • Data proves helpful to both the brand and the consumer

Learn more about how to win that consumer trust by downloading the POV here.

 

 

What Brands Are Learning By Looking At Your Selfies

Numerous marketing campaigns have deployed the “send-us-your-selfie” gimmick, but few have realized how much valuable information brands can get by analyzing those shared photos. Ditto Lab offers a platform that specializes in image analytics. By gathering those image-based data about brands, valuable intelligence such as consumer interest and brand affiliation could be made available to advertisers, potentially adding a new dimension to the acquisition of big data.

Update: Tumblr has reportedly started working with Ditto Lab to gather data on brand affiliation.

How To Cope With Facebook’s New Ban On Incentives

In its most recent update of platform policies, Facebook is putting an end to the widespread practice of offering reward or access to content to coax consumers into liking a Facebook page. Facebook is hoping this ban will ensure quality connections and further legitimize the number of “likes” as a metric in ad buying. For marketers, however, this regulation poses new challenges in gaining engagement organically and building a genuine relationship with their audience on Facebook. Only by creating quality content of true value to consumers can brands truly earn their “likes”.

Tumblr: Better for Brands Than Facebook or Twitter?

Facebook and Twitter are the go-to channels that emarketers usually choose for social media marketing, but Tumblr says it just might have certain advantages over those two when it comes to brand engagement.

In comparison to Facebook and Twitter, branded content, especially the creative ones, enjoys a significantly longer shelf-life on Tumblr. As a result, this allows for greater earned engagement long after the content would have expired on other platforms. Furthermore, Tumblr offers a mix of video, text, and image-sharing tools that brands are utilizing to better engage with their audience.