Dunkin’ Awesome
This just in hit’s the Target
Gettin' Giphy with it
Bumper Tube
Google Goofs
Random acts of Stats
Dunkin' Awesome
I had the opportunity to attend the Mobile Marketing Association's Mobile Video Event last week in NYC and saw 2 kinda jaw dropping things there.
The first was Dunkin Donut's brilliant Social Video campaign, the World's Fastest Dunkin Run, to promote the start of On The Go Ordering for DD perks members. Sure, they could have driven a race car or a plane, but what fun would that have been really?
Instead, they built a Dunkin Donuts store on top of a mountain in the Rockies, then got Ellen Brennan, the world's fastest flying woman, to don her pink wingsuit, order up a donut on their new app from the top of a higher mountain, then jump off the cliff and fly 200 miles per hour, grab the back off the 'Flight Pickup' hanger and open her chute. She enjoys a bite of her donut on the float down to earth.
Brilliant, almost a million views so far on You Tube and they used stills of it on Insta, promoted the video on Snap, then created and promoted more videos about the making of the video, about Ellen and about Wingsuit basejumping. #WTFast
Target This just in!
The Digital Marketing Manager of target also spoke at MMA, they recently introduced a weekly video series. They call it This just in! And it's like a video circular, highlighting a few interesting and timely products.
When they were looking into this, they were finding that doing it with an agency, locations and talent would be crazy expensive. So the Digital Marketing team decided to rent a house near their minneapolis headquarters. They decorated it with Target furniture and accessories and bought some camera equipment. They call this the Target Style Studio. Then they recruited a sales associate from one of their stories to be their spokesperson. And they shoot and edit all their videos in-house.
A couple of key learnings: Keep the video right around a minute AND show all the products they're going to talk about in the video in the first 4 seconds. And they have a small team that writes, shoots edits and distributes this each week via social and email. The first one had an 18% conversion rate and it's improved from there.
Gettin' Giphy with it
They say a picture is worth a thousand words so an animated gif may be worth many more. Our messages have morphed from text to emoji to pics and now gifs are beginning to dominate the textosphere because they can convey really complex emotional content in seconds
Anybody here send animated Gifs to their friends via email or text message? I know my digital teammates are big fans of Giphy. News or congratulation notes are often accompanied by a telling gif. So the old graphic interchange format, which was created by Compuserve in 1987 is enjoying a rennaissance 40 years later. Of course it started with mobile device users, but it's been picked up by Brands which are creating branded gifs to express topics or emotions that are relevant to them. You'll find Dominos gifs when you search for party, hangover or hungry and Starbucks gifs when you search for Happy, Good Morning and You Got This. Which people do over 2 Million times every month. And when their gif is shared, the brand has slipped it's presence into places where advertising doesn't usually show up.
Gifs are becoming a key part of campaigns and requirements in agency briefs. What themes, emotions, situations and topics would fit with Philips? How about indescribable, yummy, clean, cut, breathe, what else can we come up with. Let's get some clever gifs into Giphy so people can start sharing them.
Bumper Tube
While we're on the subject of short videos, YouTube is doing away with 30 second unskippable preroll and pushing brands to create 6 second bumper ads instead. These are designed for snackable consumption on mobile devices. But the question is, can a company tell a story in 6 seconds. YouTube went so far as to commission an agency competition to create 6 second versions of popular novels, like Jayne Eyre, Dracula and The Origin of species. You can enjoy a whole reel of them.
There's a lot of skepticism out there in the marketing world about whether this will catch on. But I love it. It really requires stretching the creative muscles and thinking differently about how to do it. Long time readers know I have always been a big Vine fan and this is like Vine revisited. So I'm hopeful. How about a whole camnpaign of 6 second ads? Wouldn't that be a cool breakthrough thing?
Google Goofs
The Times of London chose the week before advertising week Europe to ramp up its investigation into brand ads inadvertently appearing next to extremist content on YouTube and, thereby funding the videos' extremist creators. Within a day, more than 250 Brands from McDonald's and Audi to HSBC -- had suspended their campaigns on YouTube and Google's display ad platform until Google could assure them that their ads wouldn't appear next to hate, terror or other content that would be damaging to their brand. Google has promised updates to it's policies, controls and hiring strategy to fix the problem, but the bleeding is still going on. Verizon and ATT pulled their ads this week.
While it's a legitimate problem, there's some opportunism here where people are enjoying being able to bash the big primary color and some advertisers might be hopeful that this will give them some leverage in their ad negotiations.
This is a hard problem to fix though. 400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute and thousands of sites are added to their network each day. And there's no easy way to determine what is offensive vs a 'legitimate voice'. So the Search and advertising giant has a long slog ahead of it to get this figured out and flattened. But they will. They rise to challenges exceedingly well.
Random acts of Stats
In the last 6 months the number of monthly advertisers on Instagram has doubled, growing from 500k last September to over 1Mn according to their announcement this week. And there are 8Mn businesses using a business profile on Instagram.
74% of shoppers will abandon a purchase after putting an item in their cart. Consumer electronics items are abandoned most often at 78.8% while beauty items are abandoned least at 68%. 27% of abandonments are due to issues with shipping
83% of shoppers will shun a retailer that they've had a bad returns experience with. Shoppers return 10% of goods they buy online and 40% of shoppers buy multiple items to send back what they don't want. That's a surprise to me, but the message is clear. Online retailers need to streamline their returns processes and make them user friendly.
Only 50% of charities have a digital strategy in place most of them cite lack of funding but 75% believe they could increase fundraising but growing their digital chops.
25% of shoppers surveyed say they're planning to spend more this year on Mother's Day than last year and 45% said the planned to shop for Mom online. Finally, 38% of shoppers want more gift ideas and inspiration from retailers
44% of advertisers are considering establishing an on-site or in-house capability. Why? Speed of turnaround. 68% of marketers with exteral agencies express frustration over the time it takes to get things done while this figure drops to 20% for inhouse agencies and 8% for on-site agencies. Interesting. Agencies with on-site presence are more than twice as fast as in-house agencies.
See you next month!