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5 Brands That Made the Most out of Marketing Global Events

July 24, 2018 No Comments

Global events can captivate and engage the masses around the world. So it comes as no surprise to see brands working hard to to take advantage of events like the World Cup, the Super Bowl, astronomical events and everything else you can think of. And thanks to the digital revolution, it is now easier than ever before, for smaller brands to follow suit and create their own marketing campaigns during these occasions to generate engagement and brand awareness.

To help find inspiration on your next campaign we’ve highlighted five brands that took advantage of topical events to help grow awareness about their brand and sell their products and services.

1. Iceland Foods – The World Cup

When England’s national soccer team were eliminated by lowly ranked Iceland during Euro 2016, it didn’t take long for a plethora of jokes and memes to emerge on Twitter. Most notably, the UK-based supermarket, Iceland Foods got involved.

In this year’s World Cup tournament taking place in Russia, Iceland qualified for the competition for the first time. Iceland Foods again took advantage by sharing humorous tweets and engaging directly with Iceland’s national soccer team’s Twitter account. Their tongue-in-cheek tweets were numerous, attracting hundreds and sometimes thousands of retweets.

2. Kraft – The Super Bowl

Figures from Statista show us that this year’s Super Bowl was watched by 103.4 million viewers. The Super Bowl has always been a major platform for advertising, generating $385 million in ad revenue in 2017, with each 30-second ad costing $5 million. A majority of these Super Bowl ads rely on celebrity endorsements, which can bump up the overall advertisement cost significantly. Kraft, on the other hand, didn’t rely on celebrity endorsements and opted to create their 2018 Super Bowl ad using user-generated content.

Kraft asked Instagram and Twitter users to upload videos and photos of themselves watching the game with their families using the hashtags #FamilyGreatly and #KraftEntry. The resulting ad, which was essentially a compilation of pictures and videos of families watching the game, positioned Kraft as a family-centered brand.

3. Virgin Media – The Olympics

Virgin Media promotes their Wifi speed as either “superfast” or “ultrafast”. As part of their marketing campaign during the 2016 Summer Olympics, Virgin Media paid homage to Usain Bolt, who set the world record for the 100-meter sprint at 9.58 seconds at the 2009 World Athletics Championship. In their advertisement, Virgin Media strung together ten 9.58-second vignettes that showcased a different part of Bolt’s life. The purpose of the advert was to pay tribute to Bolt and to emphasize the role of speed in sports, and in web browsing.

4. KFC – The Royal Wedding

The rumored story of Prince Harry proposing to Meghan Markle over a roast chicken dinner definitely caught the attention of the marketing department at global restaurant chain, KFC. The fried chicken fast food chain developed a commemorative bucket of chicken that was decorated with a classic regal crest and also had both British and American flags.

Though this campaign was not a big revenue driver, it did align the brand with the royal wedding event and got people talking. Reports suggest that only 50 of these commemorative buckets were available at the KFC branch in Windsor.

5. Amtrak – The Solar Eclipse

The 2017 solar eclipse was the first to hit the US since 1979, and it generated a great deal of excitement. The eclipse was observed right across the country, with the best viewing spots in Missouri, Tennessee, Utah, Nebraska and Wyoming. Many brands took advantage of this occasion, most notably Amtrak. They successfully ran an “Eclipse Train” from Chicago to southern Illinois that gave passengers mesmerizing views of the solar eclipse. They even provided free viewing glasses on board and tickets were sold out.

What’s the most inventive way a brand has taken advantage of a global event? Share your take in the comments below!

By Kaya Ismail

Sourced from CMS WiRE

In News

As brands take marketing in-house, consultancies cash in

July 18, 2018 No Comments

By Shareen Pathak

What’s agencies’ loss is consultancies’ gain.

Consultancies like Accenture Interactive, PwC and Deloitte Digital are all making one core tenet part of their pitch to marketers: If you want to take back more marketing in-house, we’ll help you do it. They’re buoyed by a stronger relationship that goes beyond the chief marketing officer and an overall perception that they’re objective partners, not simply vendors — putting them in a good position to remain top of mind for advertisers even as agencies can’t.

For example, an Accenture Interactive rep said inside the company’s newly launched Programmatic Services division, one of the core competencies is “in-housing,” which includes helping advertisers take back control of their media capabilities — building programmatic strategies, in-sourcing technology, changing operational models and creating internal capabilities.

Accenture is working with companies including HP and Radisson Hotel Group. For Radisson, it was a way to take back control of the customer journey from third-party partners — and feel comfortable that it would deliver what it wanted.

Antonio Lucio, HP’s chief marketing officer, has been a loud voice calling for a serious internal cleanup of capabilities as part of an overall mission to take back control. Most of this, said Lucio, is driven by a change in mindset that the brand, not the agency, controls and must take ultimate responsibility for the customer. “To do marketing today … you need deep analytics and insight capabilities, creative content, programmatic buying capabilities. As a client, you have to build internal capabilities in four or five of those areas,” he said on Digiday’s Starting Out podcast earlier this month.

“The consultancies’ most relevant strengths in this case are organizational structuring or restructuring and digital transformation,” said Ann Billock, partner at Ark Advisors. “If companies take, say, programmatic, content or digital and production inside, the consultancies — with their C-level connections — can be called in from the top to help structure the organization and processes of the newly in-housed functions.”

The interesting question for the industry is this, said Billock: “Do the consultancies come in before the decisions to in-house are made, or are they parties to those decisions from the outset?”

One agency executive who didn’t want to be named because he is entertaining a job offer from a consultancy said it’s mostly the latter: Consultancies are buoyed by louder calls for transparency and control from advertisers and riding the wave of the bombshell Association of National Advertisers report from 2016 that alleged widespread issues in the agency business, plus ongoing issues of fraud in the digital advertising ecosystem.

Much of the pitch was on display at the Cannes Lions festival last week. At Deloitte Digital, which took over a suite at the top of the Majestic hotel, the talking points were clear: We’re not here to displace agencies, but we are here to service the CMO. “The message is: So, we’re here to optimize for the brands. We’re helping brands own capability sets like in-housing. We’re helping the ecosystem at large,” said Todd Paris, managing director at Deloitte Digital.

Deloitte Digital helps clients do more things in-house, including customer and audience data, augmented reality, media buying and event execution. Deloitte Digital CMO Alicia Hatch said this puts consultancies in a stronger position than agencies.

“Helping a client in-house marketing capabilities isn’t just about putting teams under one roof,” she said. “In-housing is a strategic business decision that can ultimately impact a company’s bottom line. We are able to help clients decide if in-housing is the right decision for them, identify the right technologies and talent, and undergo significant organizational restructuring to ensure in-housing efforts are successful and sustainable.”

Paris agreed that consultancies like Deloitte aren’t here to necessarily take on the role of agencies. But, he said, there has been a marked shift in companies realizing they need to control the customer experience.

“From an opportunity perspective, brands and CMOs understand now that ‘I’m the owner and the owner of the data, and of the customer experience,’” said Paris.

Bill Duggan, svp at the ANA, said he expects about 65 percent of marketers to say they’ve taken some part of marketing capabilities in-house in the next release of a survey it does on the topic. In-house is attractive to companies because of cost and speed as well as transparency.

“Unlike agencies, consultants are more used to one-off projects,” said Duggan. “When it comes to helping brands figure out in-house capabilities, for example, they’re in a better place. Plus, they have their ear all the way up to the CEO or CFO, not just the CMO. They’re stronger in that way.”

Marketing services is also just one thing that consultancies do. They already count major marketers in their parent companies’ client bases, helping them sort out business processes, from technology to auditing to risk to even helping pick partners and manage agency review processes. That means they’re already often part of advertisers’ expenditure — putting them in a good position to take on projects like building internal programmatic capabilities, for example.

Paul Marcum, co-founder at Big Finish Digital and the former president at Truffle Pig, said consultancies often win because brands see them as being more “objective” and results-oriented. That means a chief financial officer can get behind a CMO’s decision to use them. “And all of the key components to in-housing, like IT, systems integration, workflow optimization, training are core competencies for consultants,” said Marcum, who is making it a point to provide more of a services model at his agency and recognizing that a shift must happen to compete in this new mode of working.

Consultancies, to brands at least, place a higher premium on business analytics and return on investment, as well as data. So, whether a marketer wants to just understand more about what’s happening with their spending or take back control of some of it, consultancies are seen as more trusted and capable of doing that, said Marcum.

Dan Salzman, global head of media at HP, told Digiday that even though HP is focusing on building internal capabilities, agencies remain important to HP, especially in creative. “We believe that deep creative capabilities will always sit outside of brands,” he said. “And that this is not a strength of today’s consulting firms. So, we are asking our agencies to return to their roots and invest deeply in creative.”

“We want to make sure we’re free to optimize for the brands,” said Paris. “Our incentives are directly aligned with the CMOs’. We can listen and work in the marketing organization.”

By Shareen Pathak

Sourced from DIGIDAY UK

In News

How the Customer Experience is Powering the Fastest Growing Brands

May 9, 2018 No Comments

Sourced from KISSMETRICS

When we talk about the future of retail, industry news is abuzz with the idea of brands creating experiences for their customers. Consumers want more than an email newsletter—they want easy tracking and personalization. They want more than a product—they want community. The experiences we read about in headlines are often grandiose and costly, like virtual fitting rooms and same-day shipping. So, how can small- to mid-sized brands keep up with this trend in a cost-effective, creative way? With the help of scrappy teams and technology to automate processes, these brands are not only keeping up with the trend, but also are redefining it and leveraging it to grow. In this guide, we’ll discuss different approaches for building a memorable customer experience and how successful brands are executing on these creative ideas.

Automated Personalization Isn’t a Contradiction

Most businesses under-invest in customer loyalty, even though establishing some type of loyalty program is one of the most obvious ways retailers enhance their customer experience. Instead, they often put all of their eggs in the new customer acquisition basket. While this approach may work well in the early days of a business, it can be detrimental for scaling later. In order to set your business up for future success, you’ll want to think early on about a backend system that will scale with you. You’ll also want to think about today’s first-time customers who you hope will become tomorrow’s loyal brand advocates. As you grow in resources, you can consider many types of loyalty programs that will help you track and analyze customer behaviors and reward repeat purchases. If you’re starting out, there are simpler—yet still scalable— ways to personalize the customer experience. Customizing gifts based on the product someone buys is a thoughtful—yet realistic—way to make a customer feel warm and fuzzy about your brand. Chubbies, a clothing brand with an emphasis on the weekend lifestyle known for their colorful shorts and hilariously quirky marketing campaigns, figured out a way to send gifts without breaking the bank.

Image SourceWith their target customer in mind, they created add-on gifts like branded koozies, coasters, and baseball cards that fit within their lifestyle theme but are significantly less expensive than sending an additional item of clothing. The gifts can match the purchases, too. For example, sending sunscreen when someone buys a swimsuit, or golf tees when a customer purchases golf shorts. This program is able to delight the customer in a personalized way, without having to know personalized information about the customer. In automating this process, they can quickly swap out a gift that isn’t garnering excitement and track orders so customers don’t receive the same gift twice. Their customers are surprised and delighted to receive add-ons and their loyal social media followers will often post their latest gift, thus increasing brand awareness in addition to fostering loyalty.

Using Data To Improve Customer Experience

The previous section is all about personalising the offline experience with your brand, but what about improving the online one?

The better you know your customer, the better the experience you can deliver – on and off-line. Data from customer behavior on your eCommerce site allows you to better understand your customer and therefore engage with them in a way that is deeply personalized to their experiences with your brand. With customers being bombarded with emails and offers that have little relevance to how they’ve interacted with a brand, you can stand out with more targeted, personalized engagements.

To do this, a tool like Kissmetrics collects person-based behavioral data, defines and tracks key customer segments and then enables you to engage more effectively across email, facebook and more. You can segment by location, products purchased, time between events, etc. The more detailed you make your segmentation, the more easily you can personalize your messaging. Why does this matter? Because when you create refined segments of your many different customer types and tailor messaging uniquely toward just that segment you’re creating yet another delightful moment between your brand and your customer. Not to mention better suited engagements increase purchases and brand loyalty.

Collaborations: Combine Forces To Get New Customers

While brands obviously want customers to love their products enough to buy from them time and time again, we know no customer is 100 percent brand loyal. Even your most loyal customers have other brands they love and those are the very brands with whom you should consider working. Topo Designs, a Denver-based outdoor apparel and bag company, has partnered with brands like Woolrich and Chacos (not direct competitors, but other brands Topo’s target customer loves!) to create unique, limited-edition items that they then promote across both of their customer bases.

Image SourceEven if your brand doesn’t have the desire or resources to make physical products with another brand, there are many ways to collaborate with lower barriers to entry. Find brands with similar audiences and aesthetic and stock each other’s items in your brick and-mortar stores. Create a themed “swag bag” with several other brands and host an Instagram giveaway by having followers tag three friends for a chance to win. Similarly, host a giveaway where those who enter to win agree to sign up for your and your partners’ email lists.

Austin-based metallic tattoo and accessories company, Flash Tattoos is always finding ways to collaborate with brands who share target audiences. Entries can be as simple as tagging friends in an Instagram post or you could go so far as to have people fill out a form to ensure you’re capturing email addresses (and even additional information you can use to collect data). Keep in mind, the more involved the entry procedure, the more desirable you’ll want to make your prize.

Events: The Low Cost Way To Get Foot Traffic In Your Store

Want an even easier way to collaborate with other brands—without having to give away free product? Consider hosting an event at your store (or theirs). Modern Citizen, a San Francisco-based women’s apparel brand, hosts a series of events both with and without partners to foster a sense of community while getting people into their physical store. For one event, they teamed up with Fashion Incubator SF, a nonprofit that supports up and coming fashion designers. They hosted an open discussion with the two founders and answered questions from the audience—which was made up mainly of their exact target demographic. The total cost of the event was buying donuts and coffee for 30 people (who each purchased $10 tickets to attend, the proceeds of which were donated to Fashion Incubator SF) but they were able to establish themselves as thought leaders and make sales from the shopping attendees did after the talk. Additionally, they sent an email after the event thanking everyone who attended and included a 15 percent off coupon code that expires at the end of the month, encouraging further shopping as well as a sense of urgency and immediacy.

But what if you don’t have a physical store? Brands everywhere are using popups to boost awareness and collect data in a cost-effective way. Whether it’s renting a booth at a local fair or event or even creating a mobile trailer to determine the best location for your next (or first!) brick-and-mortar, temporary shops are great ways to gauge interest and build hype without breaking the bank.

Build a Community

Many brands are still at loss when it comes to Amazon. Is it better to adopt a, ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ approach, or try to compete as best you can with the behemoth? Building a community is small to mid-sized brands leg up on Amazon. They may provide same day shipping and low costs, but they don’t provide the customer experience that’s only increasing in importance for today’s consumer. One team hyper-focused on building a community and showing their customers they’re much more than a shoe brand is Freda Salvador. Through their mobile shoe trailer, in-store events, and collaborations with other brands, Freda Salvador is everywhere their customer is.

Image SourceSimilar to Modern Citizen, the Freda team hosts in-store events that both increase foot traffic and brand awareness while simultaneously creating a sense of community between customers and the brand. They often choose tangentially related concepts that their target customer is interested in—like a flower arrangement workshop, a skin care workshop, etc. Since they aren’t actually selling anything Freda-related at the event or even talking about their brand, this is a great way to foster a sense of community in an authentic way.

Have a Backend That Supports Your Initiatives

There are so many creative ways to enhance your consumer experience but even the most well-intentioned plan can have the opposite effect on customer retention if your backend can’t support it. These creative ideas are great ways to connect with your customer, but you first and foremost must master the most basic customer experience: getting the right product, to the right person, at the right time. If someone can’t count on your brand for clear and descriptive product pages, easy checkout, and speedy delivery, you’ve already fallen behind. So, before you begin creating the experience of your customers’ dreams, get organized and make sure you have the right systems and people in place. Stitch Labs provides brands with visibility into their inventory at all times and across all channels, allowing them to be more efficient with their inventory. Stitch connects to your eCommerce site, 3PL, and marketplaces to make sure inventory numbers are accurate and you know where a product is at all times. This level of control lets you not worry about inventory, so you can focus on what matters most—your customers.

A form of this article originally appeared on Stitch Labs. Stitch Labs is a purpose-built inventory management software to help brands improve customer experience and scale efficiency. Download the original guide here.

Sourced from KISSMETRICS

In News

Digital Marketers Will Devote More Resources to Online Reputation Management in 2018

March 28, 2018 No Comments

Online reputation management is very necessary all of a sudden.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Businesses say they plan to allocate more resources to their online reputations in response to the growing popularity of social media and online reviews.

According to a new survey from Clutch, 40% of businesses will increase their investment in online reputation management (ORM) this year.

All this is due to the growing power of social media and third-party reviews sites, which impact businesses’ control over their online reputation.

Clutch surveyed 224 digital marketers and found that more than half of businesses (54%) consider ORM “very necessary” for success. As a result, 34% said they allocated more resources to ORM in 2018, and an additional 43% said they plan to hire a professional public relations or ORM agency in 2018.

Businesses already invest a significant amount of time observing their online reputation, Clutch found. More than 40% of digital marketers (42%) monitor their companies’ brand online daily, while 21% monitor their online reputation hourly.

According to public relations experts, businesses frequently monitor how their brand is portrayed online because they know even one negative media mention can quickly damage the public’s perception of their company.

“When people search for brands online, they tend to search for stamps of credibility,” explained Simon Wadsworth, managing partner at Igniyte, an online reputation management agency in the UK. “If potential customers find anything negative, that could end up being a significant amount of leads the business won’t get from people who are put off from using the service.”

Social media also has shifted the ORM landscape because it gives consumers free-reign to share their opinions and experiences quickly and frequently: 46% of businesses look to social media most often to monitor their online reputation.

By using professional agencies that have expertise in online reputation management, businesses can minimise losing new customers who may be dissuaded from purchasing their product or service.

To read the complete report, click here.

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In News

Getting People to Focus on your Product Will Make Them Desire It More

March 27, 2018 No Comments

Here’s why you need to get your advertising to zoom in.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

The relationship between desire and attention was long thought to only work in one direction: When a person desires something, they focus their attention on it.

Now, new research reveals this relationship works the other way, too. Increasing a person’s focus on a desirable object makes them want the object even more – a finding with important implications for marketers seeking to influence behaviour.

The study, published in the journal Motivation and Emotion, is the first to demonstrate a two-way relationship.

“People will block out distraction and narrow their attention on something they want,” said Anne Kotynski, author of the study. “Now we know this works in the opposite direction, too.”

In marketing, advertisements with a hyper focus on a product’s desirable aspect – say zooming in on the texture of icing and frosting – might help sell a certain brand of cake.

Findings suggest the ad could be targeted to people who have shown an interest in a similar product, such as running the cake commercial during a baking show.

This finding also works in other areas outside advertising too. For example, doctors could potentially help their patients develop a stronger focus on healthy activities that they may desire but otherwise resist, such as exercising or eating a balanced diet.

The study’s findings also add a wrinkle to knowledge of focus and emotion. According to a spate of previous research, positive emotions, such as happiness and joy, widen a person’s attention span, while negative emotions such as disgust and fear, do the opposite: narrowing a person’s focus.

“We conceptualise fear as drastically different from desire,” Kotynski said. “But our findings contribute to growing evidence that these different emotions have something key in common: They both narrow our focus in similar ways.”

The findings also fit the notion that both of these emotions – fear (negative) and desire (positive) – are associated with evolutionarily pursuits that narrowed our ancestors’ attentions.

For example, fear of predators motivated attention focused on an escape route, while an urge to mate motivated focus on a sexual partner.

“If a person has a strong desire, research says this positive emotion would make them have a wide attention span,” Kotynski said. “Our research shows we developed a more beneficial behaviour around desire: focusing our mental energy on the important object, much like fear would.”

The study

Study participants were shown images of desserts mixed in with mundane items. They were instructed to pull a joystick toward them if the image was tilted one direction and push the stick away if it was tilted the opposite direction. Researchers recorded the reaction time of each.

Participants who responded fastest to pull the images of desserts were those whose attention had been narrowed. Responses were much slower to the mundane, and for participants whose attention was broad, suggesting narrowed attention increases desire for desserts but not for everyday objects.

The study used dessert pictures to measure reaction time because such images have been shown to increase desire across individuals, most likely due to a motivation to seek high fat, high calorie foods that is rooted in evolution.

There you go people. If people love cars and you can get them to focus on the car you are hawking, you’ll have a better chance of converting that to a sale. May the ROI forever be in your favour.

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In News

Women-Owned Small Businesses More Likely to Use Social Media

March 23, 2018 No Comments

Women-owned businesses are most likely to use social media. Men! What y’all doing?

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

A woman-owned small business is more likely to use social media, according to a new survey from Clutch, a leading B2B research and reviews firm.

Among women-owned businesses, 74% use social media, compared to 66% of men-owned businesses.

The findings came as no surprise to experts, who said women overall are more likely to use social media. Given that trend, female small business owners more easily can bring their business onto social media.

“Women are generally better conversationalists than men,” said Jeff Gibbard, chief social strategist at digital agency I’m From the Future. “They tend to be more expressive and more emotive. It’s no surprise to me why more women business owners use social media.”

Women often communicate better than men, which translates to the online world where they are more likely to use social media effectively.

Millennial-Owned Small Businesses Lead Social Media Use

There is also a generational divide among small businesses’ social media use. The survey finds that 79% of millennial-owned small businesses use social media compared to 65% of small businesses owned by older generations.

Millennials, like women in general, frequently use social media for their personal lives. Their social media skills easily carry over into their businesses – unlike older generations, experts say.

“The older people didn’t grow up with social media, so many don’t understand how to use it for their business,” said Shawn Alain, president of social media agency Viral in Nature. “They went through a significant part of their life without even the internet, and they remember what it was like not to have a smartphone or email.”

Millennials are also more likely to use Instagram and Snapchat than older generations, but Generation Xers and Baby Boomers are more likely to use LinkedIn.

Most Small Businesses Use Facebook

Facebook remains the most popular social media channel for small businesses, no matter the gender or generation of the owner – 86% say they use it, which is nearly twice the number of small businesses that use the second-place channel, Instagram (48%).

Among small business users of social media, 12% say they use Facebook exclusively for their social media efforts.

Overall, 71% of small businesses use social media, and more than half (52%) share content at least once per day. Images and infographics (54%) are the most popular content types that businesses post to social media.

Read the full report here.

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In News

Facebook’s Trust Crisis: What Now?

March 22, 2018 No Comments

Less than 1 in 3 people call Facebook a responsible company, according to a new survey.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Barraged by accusations of spreading divisive fake news and amid new allegations that it handed over personal information on up to 50 million users without their consent, Facebook is losing the faith of the people, according to a new survey.

Almost 4 out of 10 people surveyed said: “Facebook is not a responsible company because it puts making profits most of the time ahead of trying to do the right thing.” Less than 1 in 3 said that Facebook is a “responsible company because it tries to do the right thing most of the time even if that gets in the way of it making profits.” The rest were unsure.

By a 7-1 ratio people surveyed said that Facebook has had a negative influence on political discourse. Sixty-one percent said that “Facebook has damaged American politics and made it more negative by enabling manipulation and falsehoods that polarize people.”

The survey was conducted as new revelations surfaced that the company connected to the 2016 Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, inappropriately harvested personal information on millions of Facebook users.

The sharp rise in negative feelings is a significant departure from Facebook’s standing prior to the 2016 election, when the rise of so-called Fake News and polarizing content led to calls for the company to take greater responsibility for the content on the popular social media site – or face government regulation.

By a 2-1 margin, people surveyed said it’s Facebook’s responsibility to remove or warn about posts that contain false or misleading information. And 59 percent reported that the company is not doing enough to address the issues of false and inflammatory information that appear on its site.

“Facebook is at a crossroads because of its inability – nearly a year-and-a-half after the election – to get a handle on its divisive effects on society,” said Tom Galvin, Executive Director of Digital Citizens, who commissioned the survey. “From spreading fake and manipulative information to becoming a ‘Dark Web-like’ place for illicit commerce, Facebook seems to losing the trust of the American public. Regulation will not be far behind for social media companies if things don’t change.”

This declining trust reflects a growing concern about the impact Facebook and other social media sites have on young teens. In the survey, more than two in five people surveyed said that the minimum age to have a Facebook account should be at least 18 years old.

“Digital platforms have to rise to the occasion and assure internet users that their personal information will be safe, that the content will be legal, safe and not contrived to manipulate. In short, they have to demonstrate they will be the positive influence on our society that they espouse to be,” said Galvin.

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In News

How to Win at Marketing Using a Hashtag

March 21, 2018 No Comments

A travel company has managed to stir up a lot of viral traffic with their hashtag. Watch and learn, people.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

What do a dream wedding in New York, an adventure through the mountains of Sri Lanka and a family’s search for their roots in Scotland all have in common? All saw a hospitality professional going out of their way to make or save someone’s trip. And a holiday booking company use this mushy sequence of events with a hashtag to fire up social media views and get a great repsonse from them.

Booking.com call themselves the global leader in connecting travellers with the widest choice of incredible places to stay. Established in 1996 in Amsterdam, Booking.com B.V. has grown from a small Dutch start-up to one of the largest travel e-commerce companies in the world. Part of The Priceline Group (NASDAQ: BKNG), Booking.com now employs more than 17,000 employees in 198 offices in 70 countries worldwide.

So, what are they doing with their social media marketing? They are riding hastags like a showjumper would a prize horse.

They have had some great success with their recent hashtag #BookingHero. They asked people to share their travel stories using the hashtag. The best story won travel prizes and big kudos online.

Following thousands of submissions via social media, Booking.com selected the three most touching and inspiring accounts of hospitality professionals going above and beyond to create unique and unforgettable travel experiences for their guests.

The customers were then flown back to say thank you to the person who saved their trips. Here are the stories.

The point isn’t the stories though. The point is that real people’s journeys made the hashtag come alive and generate traffic for booking.com. In fact, the call out for submissions via social media has been so successsful that Booking.com is now using the hashtag to extend the social media campaign with long-form video content that extends the #BookingHero message, with TV to follow.

According to recent research conducted by Booking.com across 25 markets in 2017, a personal connection is essential for many travellers with 29% saying that an accommodation feeling like home is key and 24% sharing that a welcoming host is a make or break factor during the first 24 hours of their trip.

Said Pepijn Rijvers, Chief Marketing Officer, Booking.com. “These stories beautifully demonstrate that an amazing trip is about more than simply finding the right destination or the perfect accommodation– it’s also about the people you meet along the way which truly make for an unforgettable journey. And that’s what travel is all about.”

And for the company, it is about finding the right hashtag and getting it to go viral.

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In News

Uh-Oh. How Do We Mobile-Advertise to Gen-Z When They Don’t Like Their Phones That Much?

March 20, 2018 No Comments

Gen Z use their phones a lot, but are relieved when they are taken away. So how do marketers reach this age group if they have a love/hate relationship with their smartphones?

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Members of Generation Z are relieved when placed in a situation where they are unable to access their smartphones for several weeks. This is according to a new study conducted by Screen Education, a non-profit organisation that addresses smartphone addiction.

The study involved participants aged from 12 to 16, who spent 2-4 weeks at Camp Livingston during the summer of 2017. Because Camp Livingston does not permit its campers to bring smartphones with them, they are an ideal group for conducting research about refraining from smartphone use.

According to Michael Mercier, President of Screen Education, “Many children said they have become overwhelmed by their smartphones. They no longer can keep up with all their notifications, and they are burdened by the ‘drama’ they encounter through social media via their smartphones. Consequently, they were relieved to be separated from their smartphones because it eliminated that stress.”

This relief was reflected in a survey conducted with the campers after they had returned home. The campers were asked the extent to which they experienced feelings of gladness and frustration from being without their phones. “A large number − 92% − experienced gladness, while only 41% felt any frustration. We had expected the opposite,” said Mercier.

When asked what their experience would have been like if they had been allowed to bring their phones to camp, campers revealed just how severe smartphone addiction is among their age group. “They almost unanimously admitted they would have spent the entire time on their phones,” recounts Max Yamson, Executive Director of Camp Livingston. “They said they would not have formed deep relationships with the staff and fellow campers, would not have connected with their surroundings and nature on the same level, and would not have engaged as much in recreational activities.”

According to Yamson, “The study shows that the campers were glad to have left their phones behind so that they could experience a deeper level of engagement.”

“The research also revealed a stunning insight,” said Mercier. “Many campers discussed the experience of face-to-face communication as though it were a novel one. They exhibited a sense of discovery at learning that face-to-face communication is far superior to screen communication when it comes to building friendships and getting to know other people.”

Yamson added, “One camper said that in four short weeks she got to know her friends at camp better than she knows some of her friends at home – because she mostly communicates with her friends at home through screens.”

Other key findings include:

92% said it was beneficial to have gone without their phones while at camp
83% considered having gone without their phones for several weeks to be an important life experience
35% were successful at curbing their smartphone use after leaving camp
17% tried to influence a friend to spend less time on their phone after leaving camp

The researchers plan to follow this study up with additional research during the summer of 2018.

Marketers trying to catch the attention of this demographic may need to think carefully about how they approach mobile advertising for this generation of digital natives. It’s another day in the life of modern media.

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In News

Using Models in Your Advertising Campaign? Be Careful With Their Make-Up

March 13, 2018 No Comments

It could be sending the wrong message to your intended audience.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

An academic study has found that women wearing heavy makeup are less likely to be perceived as leaders. Of course, it depends on what you are selling and to whom. But if you want your model to portray leadership, then stay away from the make-up kit.

The research from Abertay University found that women wearing heavy makeup were less likely to be thought of as good leaders. The study was led by Dr Christopher Watkins of Abertay’s Division of Psychology, and published today in Perception journal. It revealed that the amount of makeup a woman is wearing can have a negative impact on perceptions of her leadership ability.

Study participants were asked to view a series of images featuring the same woman without cosmetics and with makeup applied for a “social night out”.

Computer software was used to manipulate the faces and the amount of makeup was also manipulated in the face images.

Each participant completed a face perception task where they judged sixteen face-pairs, indicating how much better a leader they felt their chosen face to be compared to the other face.

It was found that both men and women evaluated women more negatively as a leader if the image suggested she was wearing a lot of makeup.

Dr Watkins said, “This research follows previous work in this area, which suggests that wearing makeup enhances how dominant a woman looks. While the previous findings suggest that we are inclined to show some deference to a woman with a good looking face, our new research suggests that makeup does not enhance a woman’s dominance by benefitting how we evaluate her in a leadership role.”

The study was carried out by Abertay graduates Esther James and Shauny Jenkins and used a measurement scale common in face perception research, which calculates the first-impressions of the participant group as a whole, working out an average verdict.

Dr Watkins has carried out previous high-profile studies including work looking at how women remember the faces potential love rivals and the role of traits related to dominance in our choice of allies, colleagues and friends.

To view the full study click here.

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