Want to improve your Facebook ad performance? Wondering which metrics to look at? Using key insights from Facebook to see how users respond to and engage with your ads can help you optimize your campaigns. In this article, you’ll discover six ways Facebook ad metrics can help you improve your Facebook ads. Export Your Facebook [...]
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
The landscape of content is evolving. In an age where most advertisements fall victim to the "skip" button, it takes something truly creative to make people pay attention.
It's no longer enough to simply create a straightforward ad -- to shine, content must make us laugh, cry, think, and believe.
There is no bigger stage for celebrating advertising that moves us than the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
This year's recipients blur the line between marketing and art, delivering pieces of content that push the boundaries of media.
Get inspired by 21 of the best below.
London-based communications agency adam&eveDDB mashed-up real security cam footage of shoplifters at Harvey Nichols stores with delightfully devious cartoon characters to create this extended spot for the retailer's freebie rewards app. (Spoiler alert: All the thieves get caught.)
This gritty piece from Under Armour offers a peek into Michael Phelp's demanding training regimen as the champion swimmer prepares for his final Olympic Games this summer. Aptly set to The Last Goodbye by The Kills, the ad was produced by New York-based agency Droga5 and directed by Epoch's Martin de Thurah.
Venables Bell & Partners created this rebellious campaign for outdoor lifestyle brand REI, urging consumers to skip the mall and instead spend time outdoors on Black Friday. The call to ignore retail's biggest holiday was whole-heartedly answered by the hundreds of National Parks that opened for free on Black Friday in direct response to the campaign.
With the 2016 presidential election rapidly approaching, advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty saw an opportunity to insert Netflix's political drama House of Cards into the conversation. This ad took the show's main antihero, Frank Underwood, and cast him as a presidential candidate.
To highlight the positive impact that eating organic food can have on overall health, the Swedish Environmental Research Institute IVL and its client, supermarket chain Coop, documented a family as they switched to a fully organic diet.
After analyzing more than 160,000 fragments from Rembrandt's paintings, ING and JWT Amsterdam 3D-printed a completely new piece of work in the revered Dutch artist's distinct style.
Get your tissues out for this one -- Spanish agency Leo Burnett Madrid gives us the touching story of a night watchman in a mannequin factory who forms a connection with the day-time staff by arranging the mannequins in charming displays. When his colleagues win the lottery jackpot without him, something truly touching takes place. The Pixar-style tale was an ad for Anuncio Loteria de Navidad, the annual Christmas lottery in Spain.
In a big step for the internet of things, the Google-owned Advanced Technology and Product Group (ATAP) developed a fabric that could reasonably be described as nothing short of magical. Comprised of a special, conductive yarn, Jacquard fabric has the ability to turn everyday items of clothing into touchscreen surfaces.
This campaign from Burger King ended up bringing home the top prize in two categories after the original print ad launched an ongoing conversation in the media. Styled as an open letter to fast food rival McDonald's, Burger King invited the golden arches to "end the beef ... with beef" at at proposed pop-up restaurant in Atlanta. Even though McDonald's turned its fellow burger chain down, the Cannes judges thought that the campaign by Y&R New Zealand delivered.
Dentsu Inc. Tokyo's campaign for Panasonic poses the question: Can you see electricity? In a series of short films, they present simple but visually stunning metaphors which attempt to address the question.
How do you maintain a love for singing when every breath is a battle? To promote Phillip's SimplyGo Mini, an oxygen device, Ogilvy & Mather London took 18 people with breathing problems and helped them learn to sing without wasting breath.
Drink more beer, save the planet. This is premise of DB Export's initiative to make biofuel from brewery byproducts. The ad, produced by Auckland-based Colenso BBDO, is actually a real project -- the yeast slurry-recycled fuel is apparently sold at every Gull gas station in New Zealand, giving consumers an eco-friendly excuse to pick up a DB six pack.
To combat discrimination against transgender people in India, Unilever tea brand Brooke Bond Red Label decided the best tool at its disposal was song and dance. And so the first transgender pop group, 6 Pack Band, was born. The group's creative covers of popular songs such as Happy blew up on social media in India and around the world.
In an effort to bring news stories to life in vivid virtual reality, the New York Times took full advantage of Google Cardboard, a low cost VR viewing device. The news giant delivered Google Cardboard to the doorsteps of more than 1 million newspaper subscribers, inviting them to view stories live in 360-degree VR. Check out Displaced, a VR story about child displacement below.
AlphaGo is Google's latest and greatest foray into artificial intelligence. The gaming bot, designed by experts at the Google-owned DeepMind in the U.K., managed to best the European grandmaster champion of Go in five out of five games. This is no small feat for AI -- Go is considered the world's most complex and strategic board game, with more game play options than there are atoms in the universe.
We dare you not to shed a happy tear at the heartwarming Christmas ad that adam&eveDDB spun up for U.K. department store John Lewis. This commercial hits all the right notes for optimal holiday cheer -- childhood magic, true love, and an adorably plump penguin.
For their tenth anniversary, French music company Because Music enlisted the help of 84.Paris to build an interactive, multi-media experience celebrating its artists. The project invites users to click, drag, and tap to change the music on this creative retrospective tour.
This radio ad from Ogilvy & Mather Johannesburg presents a series of hesitant men confessing their un-manly traits ("I like cherry chapstick" and "I like Pinterest") while a deep-voiced narrator reassures them that they're still men.
If you ever find yourself pondering a trip to Sweden and in desperate need of a tip about night clubs, ice fishing, or meatballs, the Swedish Tourism Association has you covered. Launched to celebrate 250 years since the abolition of censorship in Sweden, The Swedish Number is a simple phone number anyone can call to be connected with a random "Telephone Ambassador" in Sweden.
In an effort to put global illiteracy on millennials' radar, FCB Inferno produced an alternative version of the alphabet song for Pearson. The video pulls the curtain back on 26 shocking consequences of illiteracy -- one world evil for each letter of the alphabet.
This series of animated shorts from 180LA and UNICEF start out like fairy tales, but reality slowly creeps in; each tale is a real story from a Syrian refugee child, prompting the conclusion that, "some stories were never meant for children."
http://bit.ly/29xqylD
Looking for ways to position yourself as an industry expert? Have you considered using video to increase your visibility? Using video to give your own take on news and stories that are relevant to your industry can help you build influence with peers, prospects, and customers. In this article, you’ll discover how to use video [...]
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention. What’s New This Week Snapchat Introduces Memories Feature: “Memories is a new way to save Snaps and Stories on Snapchat.” This new [...]
This post Snapchat Memories Allows Republishing of Content: This Week in Social Media first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Over the past three years, Snapchat has been slowly moving away from its original concept: a place for creating and sharing ephemeral content that disappears immediately after being shared. With the introduction of Stories in 2013, a feature that allows photos and videos to be visible for 24 hours, the app started inching away from that mission.
This week, Snapchat took a giant leap away from its initial premise by introducing Memories. The new feature enables users to share content after the initial photo has been taken, allowing for a more curated (and less instantaneous) experience.
But is this too far away from the Snapchat its core user base loves? Will Snapchat shoot itself in the foot by trying to capture a broader audience?
Here's everything you need to know about Memories, and what it might mean for the future of the social app.
Memories contains four sections: Snaps you’ve taken, Stories you’ve posted, Camera Roll (photos from your phone’s camera), and “My Eyes Only” -- a passcode-protected folder for “personal” Snaps. You can access Memories by swiping up from your Camera screen.
Save a Snap you’ve taken within the Snapchat interface by tapping the icon in the lower left of the screen. The saved photo will now be available in the “Snaps” section of Memories. Any filters, doodles, or stickers you’ve added will still be available to edit later.
Memories cuts out the middle man: your phone's built-in photo library. As part of the Chat 2.0 rollout back in March, Snapchat introduced the ability for users to upload photos from their phone's photo library to a private message. Memories' Camera Roll took things a significant step further by building a replacement to your photo library -- and Snapchat's Camera Roll is far better (at least in this social media manager's opinion).
The search feature rivals Google’s Photos app, allowing you to search by location, date, stickers, emoji, or even objects (for example “sunset” or “surfing”). The “Taken Nearby” section allows you to browse all photos taken within the same physical area, like your home or favorite neighborhood spots.
TBT fans will love “Flashbacks” -- a feature similar to Timehop or Facebook’s “On This Day” -- which surfaces Snaps taken on this date in the past.
The album within Memories might also be useful to replace and/or supplement a traditional phone backup for your photos. Lost your phone but forgot to backup to the cloud? All your Snaps will still be intact, safely tied to your account. Though photos from your camera roll won’t be automatically backed up using Memories, you can manually move them over. The camera roll is directly accessible without leaving Snapchat.
Snapchat Memories does extend an olive branch to real-time purists if you look closely: Any Snaps that are more than 24 hours old are displayed with a round white frame, signaling to followers that it’s from the past (see the sushi Snap below.)
Finally, the last feature of Memories -- “My Eyes Only” -- allows users to lock photos more personal in nature behind a passcode. Any Snaps you don't want others to see can be stored here. (Some things never change.)
Memories will be rolling out to iOS and Android users over the next month.
Uploading photos seems like a relatively small change, but it is indicative of a larger shift in how users will interact with the platform.
Uploads will allow sharing content from other sites, or sharing of highly polished content. Previously, it could be tricky to assemble a coherent and compelling story on the fly. Memories solves for this problem by allowing users to go back and retroactively curate and share their story, moment by moment.
This is a significant shift away from the Snapchat of the past. Snapchat’s distinguishing value proposition has always been a place to share unpolished, unedited moments of your life. Unlike Instagram or Facebook, there’s no emphasis on perfection. Through drawings and stickers, Snapchat encourages users to be silly and light-hearted. The implementation of Memories could fundamentally change this behavior, as users are no longer limited to the Snapchat editorial functionality.
Memories also has crucial implications for Snapchat's user base. By abandoning their original mission to cater to the masses, Snapchat is cementing its position as a top messaging app and real competitor to the bigger social networks.
Moments will be most appealing to those outside the traditional 18-24 Snapchat demographic. Snapchat knows that in order to capture the “early majority,” they need to win this audience.
People who are more “unplugged” than the typical Snapchat user will also appreciate the ability to snap a photo and deal with the sharing later. In addition, creating a more permanent record of photos makes the app more user-friendly and the functionality easier to understand for the less digitally-native population.
More than 50% of new Snapchat users are over the age of 25, and that audience is growing 2x faster than users under 25. By watering down their previously laser-focused mission, the app will appeal to a wider audience, albeit at the risk of alienating their current audience. Time will tell whether it was a risk worth taking.
As many other social networks have done before, Snapchat is attempting to cement its status by widening its net. In this case, they’re trying to become the all-in-one destination for conversation.
This move is the latest of several to pull the platform away from the one thing that separates them from other social networks. In a crusade to take on messaging apps like Facebook and Whatsapp, Snapchat could lose their spark -- the “it factor” that helped them rise to popularity so quickly.
In six months, we could be struggling to find any major differentiators between social networks, and this is likely what Snapchat is aiming for. By incorporating Facebook-like features into their platform, they’re betting on users making Snapchat a larger and larger part of their online presence and communication habits. They’re banking on becoming the first widely-adopted social platform for voice, video, photo, and text communication.
However, in turning their attention away from their core audience and broadening their vision, it wouldn’t be a surprise if young users quickly move on to the next big platform that isn’t infiltrated by advertisers.
When Snapchat released Stories back in October of 2013, they described the feature as “fun and ephemeral, just like Snapchat.”
The word “ephemeral” was noticeably absent from Wednesday’s blog post announcing Memories. While fun may still be central to Snapchat’s mission, it’s clear they’re moving on from their transient roots.
What do you think of Memories? Do you think Memories will help or hurt Snapchat in the long run? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
http://bit.ly/29vECiE
Tragedy. Illness. Job or relationship problems. We all go through tough times at one point or another. It’s unfortunate, but it's inevitable.
What sets us apart, then, is how we recover from the bad things life throws our way. When you experience a negative event in your life, how do you react? What strategies do you use to heal, grow, and move on?
That’s where resilience comes in. Resilience is your ability to bounce back from the problems you face, no matter their severity. The stronger your resilience, the more likely you’ll learn from your setbacks.
But building resilience takes work. To help you get started, check out the infographic below from Happify. They've covered a handful of tips and tricks that'll help you learn how to heal from tough events in both your professional and personal life.
http://bit.ly/29Ufb8o
Do you record videos with your smartphone? Want to make them look really professional? To talk about how to do video like a pro from your smartphone, I interview Justin Brown. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to help busy marketers and [...]
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
