#SocialSkim: All About Facebook M, Plus 8 More Stories in This Week's Roundup

by Angela Natividad  |  

August 28, 2015

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Get the latest on what makes M—the Facebook approach to Siri—different and worth trying. You'll also get an early glimpse of how Instagram ads are faring, how Snapchat's wooing back-to-schoolers, and how to conduct a results-bearing social media audit. Skim to stay in the know.

All About M

This week in the Bay Area, Facebook launched its virtual assistant M. Its pilot capabilities include making restaurant reservations, finding birthday gifts, and suggesting—then booking—vacations. Users must download Facebook's Messenger app to use it, but messaging products VP David Marcus hopes to compensate by making M more powerful than any other personal assistant app.

M differentiates itself from people-powered TaskRabbit and tech-powered Siri or Cortana (Apple and Microsoft products, respectively) because it's a hybrid between technology and employees (labeled "M trainers") who ensure every request is answered.

Marcus hopes M becomes a one-stop shop for people planning to make purchases of any kind—simultaneously boosting mobile use and creating a new revenue opportunity. Eventually, M will be a gateway to get businesses to boost their customer service and overall presence on Messenger, and as a possible route to partnership with Facebook (if you're getting a lot of orders via M).

When the new service opens to you, you can send a task to M via Messenger, the same way you'd message anyone on Facebook. M will ask follow-up questions if necessary and send you updates as the task is completed. You won't know whether your task was completed by a robot or human, and M has no gender. The service is free and will eventually roll out to all Facebook Messenger users.

 

1. Snapchat's back-to-school channel: a boon for youth advertisers

Snapchat's created a "Back to School" video-streaming outlet for students returning to college and high school this fall. Advertisers creating content for it include Pink, Coca-Cola, and the movie "The Visit." This is the first year Snapchat is targeting back-to-schoolers specifically, responding to an issue advertisers face on the platform: It lacks the targeting ability to deliver messages to certain audiences. But this is a start in guiding brands to a demographic of choice, in this case folks under 25, during a critical marketing moment.

Students themselves are sharing videos that show them walking to class, studying, moving into dorms, and more—all of which help Snapchat solidify its hold on college students especially. Additionally, it's doubling the number of universities with dedicated Live Story feeds. 50 US colleges will have their own feed, available only to on-campus students. Brands can pay 2 cents a view for sponsored videos to appear in Stories.

Snapchat also expanded its media-hosted Discover section to include Mashable, Tastermade, and IGN—all great college-facing brands.

 

2. How are advertisers doing on Instagram?

Salesforce, an Instagram launch partner, provided early performance numbers on how Instagram ads are doing for a handful of clients across different industries. Overall CTR is 1.50%, compared to a CTR of 0.84% in Q1 2015 on Facebook—reinforcing Insta's position as a premium ad type for mobile that is highly engaging.

Costs are reasonable: In the six markets where Instagram launched ads (US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, and Australia), global CPM costs about $6.29. CPC is $0.42, which is two cents higher than all Facebook ads. To ensure an optimal user experience, available ad impressions on Instagram are much lower than on Facebook (which also works hard to minimize exposure to ads on Newsfeed). But considering 40% of all Instagram engagement is one-way (customers following brands, vs. brands pushing to non-followers), the likelihood of engagement is higher, because following is like a natural opt-in for brand content.

Instagram will represent more than 10% of global Facebook revenues by 2017, and 28% of all US mobile revenues. If you plan to advertise, though, ensure your content is high-quality: Locowise found that follower growth and engagement went down in July, which may reflect saturation.

 

3. Facebook updates: customizable music videos, new story formats, a Donate Now button

It's been a big week for Facebook updates and test launches! First off, users of its Moments app can now create customizable music videos featuring shared photos. It also added a Donate Now button for non-profits, who can add them to page posts or link ads (shown below). Lastly, it's testing a story post format that lets you convert a series of photos into a slideshow on news feeds. It will be similar to its "Year in Review" posts, but if it launches formally, you can use them for vacation photos or campaign highlights.

If you're looking to amp up your Facebook savvy, here's a step-by-step checklist for creating Facebook ads.

4. YouTube Gaming: a Google response to Twitch

YouTube Gaming went live Wednesday, featuring over 25,000 pages for game titles with their own livestreams, promo vids, gameplay footage, and more.

The site is a response to the popularity of Twitch, where gamers congregate to chat, swap footage, and discover new games. Its search feature is also more gamer-oriented; for example, a search for "Call" will feature an autocomplete for "Call of Duty" instead of "Call Me Maybe." Like on Twitch, people can chat during livestreams, monitor app comments, and share streams with custom URLs.

5. What can you learn from Netflix about customer engagement?

LookBookHQ created an infographic that details what you can learn about Netflix about engaging with people on social, or in general. A few insights: "Scheduled marketing forces your audience to engage on your timeline, not theirs," says LookBookHQ. "Moving from scheduled to on-demand marketing leads to higher engagement—and engaged prospects will self-accelerate through your funnel." Personalization is also a big priority: Netflix channels vary based on niche to ensure the right content gets to the right people (based on past behavior).

6. Need a project management tool?

Here's 45 of them, divided by need, from better communications to tech ticketing. Now you'll learn the difference between Asana (great if your team is anti-email) and Basecamp (great if you love Gantt charts). Jump in!

7. A social media audit that can improve traffic by 300%

The Next Web promises that taking the following steps can improve your traffic by 300% or more, because it'll enable you to optimize your social presence to meet your marketing needs. The first step? Document your presence, including the platforms you're already on, your URLs, who has access to your accounts, your fans and follower numbers, and more. (Yes, this is going to be a lot of work. But it's worthwhile!). Next step: Understand your space, including where your competitors are, whether they run paid ads, and more. Step 3: Identify your own key metrics, which will obviously vary based on what you want to accomplish on social.

To do this right, and if you can't do it yourself, delegate a meticulous, social-savvy person to the task and give him or her ample time to conduct a proper audit. A good timeline may be two full working weeks, after which you can refine based on the results.

8. We'll wrap with something geeky: Star Wars nerds unite!

As part of a super-ambitious Lucasfilm partnership, Target is collecting and sharing the memories and tributes of Star Wars' 147 million fans around the world. Share the Force asks people to upload videos and photos with captions on the site, then categorizes those memories into "galaxies" in the shape of beloved characters. When the campaign ends, as all must, the site and all its contents will go to Lucasfilm for permanent archiving—so your memories will never fade.

Read more: http://www.marketingprofs.com/chirp/2015/28366/socialskim-all-about-facebook-m-plus-more-stories-in-this-weeks-roundup#ixzz3k7g3J7Ok

What Instagram's New Formats May Mean for Marketers

Instagram is breaking outside the box.

After years of limiting photos and videos to the square format, Instagram announced on Thursday that people will be able to post photos and videos shot in landscape and portrait mode -- aka the formats available on roughly every other major social network except Vine.

The support of new formats isn't necessarily groundbreaking. Nearly one out of every five photos and videos posted to Instagram don't adhere to the Instagram-mandated square format, according to a company blog post. And other major social networks already support horizontal photos and vertical videos, if not both. But Instagram's adoption of these new formats could lead to a foundational shift in the way that brands use the Facebook-owned photo sharing service.

"I feel like Instagram pretty much made people adopt their format as the square. It gave them a unique voice and storytelling where brands had to adapt their imagery to fit that format. Now that they're kind of shifting away from that, there's definitely going to be a little commoditization across different platforms," said Nick Tran, VP of Integrated Marketing at sock brand Stance.

There are pros and cons to Instagram removing the need for marketers to bend over backwards to incorporate Instagram into their campaigns. A brand like Apple can take those beautiful "Shot on iPhone 6" images and post them to Instagram without degrading the image by cropping the scene. And "Star Wars" used Instagram's support of horizontal video to post a new clip teasing the saga's upcoming installment, becoming the first Instagram user to deploy horizontal video on Instagram, according to an Instagram spokeswoman. More movie studios could follow suit.

"I'm sure we'll see an explosion of movies and sneak peeks of trailers," Mr. Tran said. "The fact that Star Wars dropped stuff that had never been seen before was cool. But if people just start throwing up their 15-second trailer or their TV ads, that's where Instagram falls into the trap of looking like every other platform."

One platform Instagram may more closely resemble is Facebook. Brands will be able to take their Facebook campaigns and extend them to Instagram and vice versa, which could lead to more money for Facebook as a whole. "It just easily increases the revenue for Facebook Inc. because they're making it a seamless story for marketers to activate the ad piece," said Travis Freeman, divisional VP-social, media and content integration at Sears Holdings.

One agency exec said that Instagram will not be enabling the new photo and video formats until the beginning of September. The Instagram spokeswoman would only say that the new formats will be available to advertisers "soon."

But it won't only be Facebook ads that brands would be able to syndicate to Instagram. There isn't much stopping a marketer from a running made-for-TV ad or even a standard display ad as an Instagram post.

"I hope marketers aren't stupid enough to take a banner ad and put it in there. But they have the ability to do that now," Mr. Freeman said.

Of course any marketers that do that on Instagram would likely get smacked down by Instagram's audience that associates the service with pretty pictures, not boring banners. "If you have two things going on at once where you have new formats users are trying to get used to and then someone coming in and putting up awful content, they will go rabid on that brand," Mr. Freeman said.

Instagram's move could spur wider support and investment in vertical video, which is becoming increasingly considered the mobile-native video format. Snapchat has been the biggest backer of vertical video to date, and YouTube recently began to support vertical video.

Of course that carries its own potential complications if brands think they can cross-post the same vertical videos across Snapchat and Instagram. "You really need to have different strategies and different content-creation infrastructures. You can't just use your Snapchat video on Instagram vertical video," Mr. Stein said."Vertical video -- whether traditional filmmakers like it or not -- is how people create and consume content on their phone," said Laundry ServiceCEO Jason Stein. "It's already a large percentage of all mobile video being consumed. Now with Instagram embracing it, that's only going to go up and up."

However it may be a while until any of this comes to bear. "I feel like most marketers might throw out a horizontal picture or vertical video, but I don't really expect marketers or brands overall to adapt to this like when Instagram first launched video," Mr. Tran said.

He's not alone in that thinking. Matt Wurst, VP and general manager of social media at 360i, said his reaction to the change in format is "tempered but cautiously optimistic." He added that the update isn't necessarily groundbreaking or transformational, but Instagram's responsiveness to feedback is appreciated. There are, however, other changes he said he'd be more excited about, like the ability for brands to post to Instagram through their social marketing dashboards -- with all the control and content moderation those social publishing tools provide -- instead of through Instagram's mobile app. (And there's always the odd chance that someone with access to a brand's Instagram account will accidentally post a personal, possibly damaging photo.)

"I hope [the update] is a sign for more adaptation and things to come," Mr. Wurst said. "There are definitely other limitations."

7 critical questions to ask when doing ad testing

December 16, 2013

By Taylor Beggs

---

‰”The people of Tibet are in trouble, their very culture in jeopardy. But they still whip up an amazing fish curry. And since 200 of us bought on Groupon.com, we‰’re getting $30 worth of Tibetan food for just $15 at Himalayan restaurant in Chicago.‰”

When Groupon aired this commercial during the 2011 Super Bowl, the social media backlash was instantaneous:

‰”That @Groupon commercial was terribly offensive. Way to commodify an entire people‰’s real struggles & experience.‰”

‰”@groupon You lost another customer from that Super Bowl commercial‰”

‰”Dear @Groupon ‰ – over a million Tibetans have been killed during Chinese occupation. Your ad wasn‰’t funny.‰”

‰”Groupon seems to have achieved the unique feat of paying $3M to lose customers who previously loved them.‰”

After the criticism, Groupon stopped airing the commercial and made many apologies about how it had been misunderstood. But Groupon might well have avoided the reputational and financial costs of crisis management if the company simply tested its ad beforehand to get an indication of how the message would be received.

In the era of social media, complaints about marketing can go viral so quickly that ad testing is no longer optional. Companies can‰’t afford to spend over a million dollars on a high-profile advertisement or campaign without knowing the impact it can have on their brand. Happily, the same technologies that make a fast backlash possible also make it easier and faster to get customer feedback before an ad launches. For ad testing to be effective, however, it must answer the following questions:

1. Will the target audience notice the ad?

TNT‰’s Dramatic Surprise on a Quiet Square was created to raise awareness about the launch of their new TV channel in Belgium. The goal was to produce an ad that was not only relevant to high-quality drama TV but an ad that would make their target audience want to share with their friends. Overall, the campaign captured viewer‰’s attention and strengthened feelings about the brand. It garnered over 10 million YouTube views and 1 million Facebook shares in less than 24 hours, according to Unruly. To date, it has been shared over 4.5 million times, making it the second most shared ad ever.

Pre-testing and accessing real-time reactions to key scenes help fine tune creative, and marketers have different methods to measure likeability, humor, casting, music and simplicity. Qualitative focus groups, in-depth interviews and facial imaging are ideal if you have the time and budget, but the majority of ad tests requires results at thespeed of business. An online interactive survey is cost effective, can be compared against a database of norms and benchmarked against similar ads or media types. Most importantly, an online study can provide feedback and direction on an ad within days, not weeks.

2. Will the ad have an effect on purchase intent?

Effective ads get noticed and create an emotional connection with their viewers. These two key metrics have been shown to predict cut-through & purchase intent.

Chrysler Group LLC‰’s Imported from Detroit ad differentiated itself in the competitive auto industry. Instead of focusing on the features and benefits of its product, Chrysler 200, the company created an authentic and compelling story. Featuring Detroit native Eminem, the ad scored in the top quartile for all auto ads and helped Chrysler post its first profitable quarter since it filed for bankruptcy in 2009. Whenever you decide to feature a famous public figure, the spokesperson should fit the brand and messaging. If you’re unsure as to who would make a good spokesperson, you can ask your insight community or utilize a market panel to determine which person would have the greatest effect on brand feelings.

3. Is the brand name clearly communicated?

When measuring the effectiveness of an ad, a key metric to take into consideration is brand recall, which refers to the extent to which consumers will remember the brand behind the ad. This does not necessarily mean you have to display your brand at the end or repeatedly throughout the campaign, but it suggests creatively integrating the brand into the ad.

In 1970, a luggage brand aired a commercial featuring a caged gorilla bashing on a suitcase that would eventually become one of the most famous in advertising history. The ad successfully demonstrated the product‰’s durability. While many viewers still remember the ad, people incorrectly associate it with Samsonite. The brand was actuallyAmerican Tourister. Had the ad been tested in advance, American Tourister could have improved brand linkage and prevented a competitor from gaining the credit that they deserved.

4. How does the ad compare with others in their category or country?

To make global comparisons across different countries, ad testing should take into account cultural and language nuances of respondents. Calibrating their answers for their country‰’s normative response will help determine whether your ad surpassed country or industry benchmarks. Before Coca Cola’s Share a Coke with Kate campaign launched in Australia, 50% of teens and young adults had never tasted a ‘Coke’. So, Coke decided to print the country’s 150 most popular names and put these as labels on Coke product. They encouraged Aussies to find the names of friends and family and ‰”Share a Coke‰” together. The ad scored in the top quartile for all ads in the soft drinks industry and led to a 7% increase in young adult consumption, 870% increase in Facebook traffic, 12,020,000 earned media impressions, 76,000 virtual ‘coke’ cans shared, and 378,000 extra coke cans printed at kiosks. Most importantly, Coke sales volume in Australia grew by 4%.

5. What potential changes can be made to improve the impact of the ad?

Ad rates have jumped almost 70% over the last decade. In 2013, 30 seconds of ad time for the Super Bowl on the CBS network cost roughly $4 million,according to CNN Money. Increasingly, many companies test their ads before they are released to the public to prevent unexpected reactions and ensure their message is clearly communicated. In preparation for the 2012 Super Bowl, Hyundai Motor Co. tested its commercial Think Fast many months in advance. Early versions included a conversation in which the older man, discussing business, made condescending remarks about “a blonde from Albuquerque.” Respondents found the older man offensive, so the South Korean car maker restructured the ad to have the older man chat about how to succeed in business, making him more amiable.

6. What effect does the advertising have on consumer‰’s feelings towards the brand?

Many ads today communicate a particular product or service benefit: they don’t always evoke emotion. But to build a strong, long-term brand relationship, advertising should strengthen people‰’s feelings about brands. Consumers are more inclined to buy or consider brands they feel good about. Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches ad illustrates an ad that successfully struck a chord emotionally with women, their target audience. Dove drove home the message that women tend to be overly critical of their appearances and overlook their true beauty. The campaign elicited intense emotional responses of warmth, happiness and knowledge from its target demographic, one of the key factors behind the video’s sharing success.

7. Is this ad shareable?

Old Spice‰’s The Man Your Man Could Smell Like demonstrates how quickly ads could go viral as a result of positive word of mouth from consumers. Social media can dramatically amplify an ad and extend the reach of an ad buy with what is essentially earned coverage. It may be worth spending more on creative and less on airtime or print coverage if it allows your brand to make an ad so compelling that people will share and distribute it for you.

Getting people to pay attention to ads today is more complex than ever‰ – that‰’s why brands need to be thoughtful when doing ad research.

How do you measure your campaigns? Can you name an ad that should have been tested? Or an ad that you think is successful? Feel free to comment and let us know!

Solving the ‘human problem’

Taxi's Thomas Kenny on how the ad industry is taking the wrong approach to the creative brief.

 Staff  3 hours ago
shutterstock_192308534

By Thomas Kenny

Good advertising is possible without a good brief, but it’s stumbled upon by chance rather than by design and is, as a result, far more elusive.

A good brief will set the parameters within which successful advertising can be created. We may not know the landscape of our final destination at the briefing stage, but we will know the criteria with which to evaluate whether or not we’ve found it. Writing a good brief is hard, but the formula is actually quite straightforward.

Far too many briefs focus on the desired business outcome when they should be focusing on the problem we’re solving for the people we’re talking to. Right now, most briefs begin with identifying the business problem. They will describe how mainstream beer sales are down among millennial drinkers, or how millennials aren’t eating breakfast anymore, or the need to increase the millennial buy rate for chewing gum (it’s shocking how often these stubborn millennials seem to be at the heart of so many business problems over the past few years).

But the problem with beginning a brief this way is that it asks the wrong question. A brief that asks “how do we get millennials to eat breakfast again?” doesn’t bring us any closer to finding a solution. Instead of asking “what is the business problem to be solved?” the question a brief needs to ask – and usually answer – is “what is the human problem to be solved?”

It’s commonly agreed that the best and most inspiring briefs are insightful briefs. Sadly, “insight” is perhaps the most mercurial term in advertising. It is frequently evoked, but rarely understood. It’s commonly defined in the context of advertising as the underlying motivation behind why someone behaves a certain way.

In my mind (and others would surely disagree), the insight we should all be seeking when writing a brief is the correct identification of the human need or human tension which our product will fulfill or resolve. In some instances that need may be functional (“I can’t get my tub clean without scrubbing it for 20 minutes”) and sometimes that need may be emotional (“I want a restaurant that reminds me of the comforts of home”).

By correctly identifying the human problem, we establish the role our product will play in people’s lives and can begin figuring out the best way to position our product as the solution to that problem. If we discover that there is no human problem for which our product is the resolution then, well, that product is a dud and no one is going to buy it.

When I graduated university and started interviewing for my first real job, my dad gave me a great piece of advice. He said, don’t ever talk to a potential employer about what you’ll get out of a job. Instead, he advised that I list the ways that hiring me will benefit my employer. It was great advice.

Likewise, in 2013, Teehan + Lax published a great blog post on their “Jobs to be Done’” approach to product design. In it, they outlined how they viewed a product as a job applicant. They explained how consumers have needs – or to use their analogy, “jobs to be done” – and they set out to design the best products, or “applicants,” to fill those jobs.

The same thinking they applied to designing products should logically be extended to the marketing of those products.

Where this approach, and unlocking a great brief, becomes difficult is in not simply taking the easy way out. If the task at hand is to sell a new deodorant, then the human problem to be solved can’t simply be “people want a great smelling, long lasting deodorant.” If that is in fact the human problem, then there are dozens, if not hundreds of deodorants that solve that problem. The key to writing a great brief is to identify the problem that our product can uniquely solve or that our product solves better than its competitors.

Having identified the human problem to be solved, the rest of the brief becomes an exercise in positioning our product as the solution. At its simplest, a brief should consist of the target audience, the human problem to be solved and the words/actions required to convince the target our product is the best solution to their problem. Anything that doesn’t inform or provide context to one of these three things is extraneous and should be excised.

This approach does, however, presume that a pre-existing solution already exists. In some instances briefs will be required to solve human problems where there is not already a solution – new product development, websites, contests, apps, etc. In these cases, the same basic principles apply. But rather than convincing people that the perfect solution to their problem exists, our task is to create that solution.



Read more: http://strategyonline.ca/2015/08/25/solving-the-human-problem/#ixzz3jqSdJUR3

How Instagram Is Changing the Way Brands Look at Photography, Online and Beyond

Embracing the 'perfectly imperfect' ByMarty Swant

• August 24, 2015, 8:00 AM EDT
• Advertising & Branding

Taco Bell's Instagram photography, created with agency Deutsch L.A., has had an impact beyond the network.Photo: Taco Bell

Call it the "Instagram Effect"—that filtered, shadowed, sharpened, brightened, tilted, faded, structured, saturated way of seeing life through a lens. It's changed the way people portray themselves and see others.

And it's having the same impact on brands.

Design teams are beginning to see the benefit of moving away from over-lit, over-staged and generally over-edited photography for their campaigns and instead are favoring a more organic (albeit filtered) look and feel that matches the medium—on Instagram itself, obviously, but also in print and across an array of other media.

"We kind of call it 'perfectly imperfect,'" said Nathan Iverson, evp and design director at Deutsch LA. "People will call you out pretty easily if your food looks overly propped or overly perfect, because that's not how it is."

Iverson said Instagram certainly isn't pioneering the use of effects, but it is resurrecting and evolving an old-school aesthetic. Making a photo retro or over-saturated or pushed and electric was done long before computers came along. The difference now is that analytics allow for real-time analysis of which visual styles appeal to viewers, blending art with marketing science.

The discussion of the Instagram effect comes up often around the Deutsch office, Iverson said. The agency's designers, many of whom are millennials, have used Instagram for years but weren't around when photographers first experimented with visual techniques by hand.

"Instagram is not necessarily inventing anything new," he said. "What they're doing is tapping into old photographic techniques to give life back to photographs that not everybody had access to."

Iverson pointed to Deutsch's social media photography for Taco Bell, which he said has seen success by "behaving like a fan." Photography focused on post-purchase moments—like friends eating tacos at the beach—give shots a more honest feel. And the Instagram look has spilled over into other parts of the brand's identity like its breakfast menu.

 

How we get through Mondays.

A photo posted by Taco Bell (@tacobell) on Aug 3, 2015 at 1:43pm PDT

Alex Nassour, an art director at McKinney, said Instagram isn't just inspiring new looks for design and photography—it's also accelerating how quickly trends catch on. Following designers, illustrators and photographers from around the world allows other designers to gain the upper hand when it comes to embracing hot styles before they wear out their welcome.

"Now Instagram especially is responsible for speeding up the rate that we try to push aesthetics and try new things," he said.

For advertisers, the most pressing place to capture the Instagram look is, of course, Instagram itself. The network has quickly become one of the top ad platforms for major brands, and ad creatives have had to move away from traditional designs in favor of content that look more natural.

Chris Corley, group creative director at VML in Kansas City, said advertising has to adapt within Instagram to fit in and not get kicked out of the party. To do this, agencies are starting to hire photographers who are respected on Instagram to shoot for both digital and print. A few weeks ago, VML hired photographer Nathan Michael to take all the Instagram photos for the Wendy's account, effectively giving the feed a "reboot" with a new look.

Instagram's influence on photography is opening clients and designers alike to new ideas of what makes an effective marketing photo, whether it's online or in a more traditional medium.

"For so many years, agencies have been trying to make the print medium into art—some very successfully and some not so," Corley said. "Not for lack of trying or lack of talent, but I think for a while, clients had no patience for art."

Corley said authenticity has been a "huge part" of the evolution of photography, as millions of users have made it normal to keep moments natural. He said print campaigns and other ad venues beyond Instagram will likely shift away from being overproduced, becoming a little more raw or offering a first-person view.

"I think we do have the obligation to sell, but we also have an obligation to not pollute the world with garbage," he said.

Not every agency sees Instagram as the cause of this shift. Steve O'Connell, executive creative director and managing partner at Red Tettemer O'Connell + Partners, said the new aesthetic isn't noticeably affecting the way the agency designs print ads. However, he said it has served as a reminder that high standards don't have to be costly.

"I think that gives agencies, or at least us here, some kind of comfort that people will like and be attracted to things that are a little more homegrown," he said, "not overly crafted or overly slick."