The year in social and the year ahead: online video (part 2)

This is the second post discussing the key trends surrounding social video. The first post is available here.

Content creators – YouTube celebrities & brands

• YouTube has a network of content creators embedded into the platform and is keeping them (at least for now) by sharing advertising revenue. Facebook has been wooing them with a pitch they’ll get discovered more easily and so increase their fan base and reach with its platform. Many are interested as they are aggrieved Google takes a 45% cut of the ad revenue. Facebook could change this situation by offering a slice of advertising revenue with its soon-to-be expanded video advertising offering.
• Social influencers are rather useful for brands and many have worked smartly with, paid and given perks to promote them – Boohoo’s partnership with Zoella to promote its range is but one example (YouTube video, website landing page). They enable brands to reach into a community and latch onto the influence and affinity of the influencer.
• But of course these social stars aren’t just on YouTube or a single social platform. The savvy ones have developed their communities across a range of platforms and so they are social media celebrities, and arguably full-blown celebrities, in their own right. So for brands the shift where social influencers release their content may not change the dynamic of who they partner with. But instead the channels in which the partnership is communicated and the type of content they create/co-create.
• Partnering with a social celebrity could be a key way marketers impact the Facebook News Feed. Brand page organic reach has plummeted and it takes truly special content to create wide break-through without paying for it. But pages of public figures still generate strong organic cut-through, so sponsoring or co-creating with a social celebrity could be a more cost effective way to reach audiences than Facebook advertising. There’s also the additional benefits of association among the social star’s community.

Social video advertising

• Video advertising on social is an burgeoning space and one currently dominated by Google. YouTube has fared so well as it appeals to the heavy-spending brand advertisers (in part due to its similarity with TV advertising), it’s on the whole native to the YouTube experience, there’s the ability to skip adverts (so users aren’t forced to watch content they don’t want to and brands only pay for engaged viewers), there’s targeting and there’s complementary direct response advertising.
• YouTube currently dominates with about 20% of the overall online video ad market (and therefore a higher percentage of social video advertising) and will bring in $1.13 billion in 2014 video ad revenue, according to eMarketer estimates.
• But Facebook is building on its existing offerings and will undertake a huge push in 2015. Facebook already has video ads but their introduction has been slow. It launched a premium video ad product which starts at $1 million for a 24-hour campaign. The big change will be more auto-play video ads through 2015 and the ability to buy video advertising on a small-scale.
• Facebook with auto-play video ads does risk cluttering the experience, especially on mobile, and negatively impacting the user experience. It’ll need to tread a fine line between creating social advertising vs. just becoming an environment for display advertising masquerading as a social platform.

YouTube US video ad revenues 2013-2016

The other major players in video

Multimedia on Twitter is growing but there’s limited availability of native video so, in the very short term, will likely remain a way to extend the reach of videos on other channels: YouTube and Vine. But big changes are underway and in 2015 we’re likely to see:

• The wider release of a native video player this should spur more video content in the Twitter timeline.
• The likely adoption of video auto-play (Vines already auto-play on desktop) which should (as it’s done on Facebook) sky-rocket views.
• The further courting of professional content creators and social stars. Native video is currently available to certain brands and verified accounts. But with the release of a native player Twitter is likely to adopt a similar approach that it’s done with its Amplify offering. This currently links TV events to Twitter’s social second screen. Sports and media brands have capitalized on this to inject near-real-time video (think instant replays and highlights), therefore extremely relevant content, into social conversations and earn revenue through Twitter-initiated brand sponsorships. If they roll this out more broadly and offer a better advertising revenue split than YouTube’s 55% they are likely to get more content producers onto the platform.

https://twitter.com/TwitterAmplify/status/516981620448845825

2014 was a big year for micro-video with a sharp rise in social stars and brands using Vine, Instagram, Snapchat and Tumblr to disseminate content and build followings. Marketers have also been using these platforms in an increasingly sophisticated way to create content and co-create with their communities. 2014 was the year of experimentation and 2015 will see these platforms form a key pillar of a social content and community strategy.

• Vine’s (Twitter’s six-second social network popular among teenagers) biggest change in 2014 was the ability to upload videos from the phone (pre-produced therefore more professional videos can be made by brands), the ability to send messages and notifications of new Vines from accounts people have favorited. Expect in 2015: better analytics (Vine recently introduced ‘Loop Counts’ to show views) and the slow introduction of native advertising. Brands, without an advertising option, have so far been limited to paying social influencers to advertise their products on Vine via product placement (ala Coca-Cola’s #ShareACoke campaign below). With Twitter’s re-focus on native video there is the possibility Vine may get sidelined in 2015, especially as decent brand Vine content is tricky and resource intensive to create.

• Instagram represents the visual social web, brands are present and developing mature communities. 25 percent of Fortune 500 companies now have Instagram profiles, 40 percent of the top 1000 “liked” Instagram videos are posted by brands, and branded Instagram content has gained 416 percent over the last two years (Millward Brown). The platform hit 300 million monthly users this year, it continued to roll-out incremental updates to improve image taking and the sharing experience, such as the ability to embed content on the web. Marketers should expect in 2015: improved imaging features, better analytics, more advertising options and features which mirror Snapchat’s product updates so Facebook can counter its growing impact (read more on Snapchat’s threat to Facebook).

• The past year has seen brands developing Snapchat presences with a raft of quirky, transpiring content. Snapchat is an outlier compared to other social media networks as it’s building a curated social experience more akin to a media platform and it isn’t scraping user data to target advertising. 2015 will see Snapchat continue to build itself out as a service platform within a platform (similar to WeChat and Line, an early example of this is Snapcash) and media platform, evolving beyond its core original use case of sending vanishing visual messages. The key trends to look out for:
  • Wider roll-out of brand advertising in the Our Story feature – where Snapchatters send pictures and videos to create social coverage of events. This will be useful for marketers to introduce brand advertising to people during relevant events.
  • The launch of ‘Snapchat Discover’ whereby content (articles, videos, music, images) from professional producers will be available within Snapchat. There’s likely to be an ad revenue split to attract the producers.
  • The continued rise of Snapchat celebrities who are willing to partner with brands to co-create branded content. Disney and Grubhub and just two brands who have worked with them in 2014.

• Tumblr has had a topsy-turvy year. Figures points to flat and falling traffic since the Yahoo buy-out while a recent GWI study noted Tumblr’s user base in the last six months grew 120% to a total of 428 million users, of which 200 million are active monthly. Key in 2014 was Tumblr revamping its platform to make it more visual and specifically video-centric. In fact, video posts are now growing twice as fast as photo posts on Tumblr. This may negatively impact the platform as Tumblr has generated the most love / engagement from its community around gifs, graphics and photos. But Yahoo is making a big video play so expect Tumblr attempt to become a competitor to YouTube in 2015. A key part of this is the recently rolled-out improved native video player to encourage direct video uploads instead of embeds from YouTube and Vimeo and Yahoo’s maneuvering to attract social stars onto Tumblr. A key advantage of Tumblr for brands is that content / videos have longevity – nearly a third of engagement comes 30 days after its first posted.

The year in social and the year ahead: online video

The end of 2014 is approaching and a new year will soon commence. So it’s a good time to reflect and look ahead. Which of course a great many people do. So queue numerous rounds of predictions – some are rather sensible while others are utterly ridiculous.

The next couple of posts will look back at the main trends in social video in 2014 and ahead to the big issues likely to impact marketers.

Social video: battle for viewers, content creators and ads – part one

While there are several interesting platforms which deserve marketer’s attention, the real social video war is an all-out battle between Google and Facebook.

Google’s YouTube was once the undisputed leader of online social video. People consumed and shared mountains of content on the platform which in turn spurred an ever increasing flood of content on the platform – from amateurs, professional content creators, brands and YouTube stars / vloggers.

Facebook has changed this over the past year or so. It has pursued an aggressive strategy to make Facebook the go-to destination for online video (in fact Mark Zuckerberg predicted Facebook will be almost all video in five years). The platform made videos auto-play in 2013 to reduce the friction of people watching; has been courting YouTube content producers; has tinkered with its all-important algorithm to push videos into the News Feed; and crucially,

its content recommendation algorithm gives precedence to its own videos – therefore other platforms’ videos (i.e. YouTube) don’t get reach and engagement, which is the key way to fuel virality.

Shifting audiences

The Facebook strategy is paying off and is rapidly changing the state of play for social video. In terms of audience, YouTube says it has 1 billion monthly viewers while Facebook reported 1.35 monthly visitors. YouTube has racked up 4 billion views a day since the start of 2012 while Facebook has averaged roughly 1 billion views a day since 2014. But Facebook is closing up fast. ComScore data in September showed YouTube was the top online video property in August with 159.8 million unique viewers with Facebook ranked second with 108.3 million viewers. Facebook has actually overtaken YouTube in desktop video views (comScore, graph below).

comScore – YouTube and Facebook video viewership

The following areas surrounding social video are key shifts impacting brands and what marketers should look closely at over the next 12 months.

Video discovery

• Facebook and YouTube have two fundamentally different approaches to discovery. Facebook content reaches you with algorithmic behavioral data and social interactions – you lean back and the videos finds you. With YouTube, on the whole, you have to lean in – actively search for it, subscribe to a channel or receive a video via a shared link.
• But Facebook Graph Search has just been released which allows users (on the web and iOS for now) to search for content more intelligently within the platform. This means brand videos previously posted have another avenue to be re-surfaced / found on Facebook, re-engaged with and thrown back into the all-important News Feed.
• This cuts into one of YouTube’s core strengths. But YouTube still enables the sharing to and embedding on other platforms – whereas Facebook only facilitates these two things within its own universe. Actually Instagram (Facebook inc owned) allows embedding of its content across the web and this is something Facebook could follow in 2015, further cutting into a YouTube advantage.

Facebook Graph Search – now easier for users to find historic content

Posting & promotion of brand videos

• I work with a number of clients who have seen click-through-rate to YouTube videos from Facebook posts drop substantially to a negligible level. Facebook’s algorithm means it’s pointless to merely promote links to YouTube videos on Facebook. But of course, it’s still important to secure views for YouTube videos as this impacts the visibility of the video in search results and YouTube’s recommended videos.
• So now both platforms are crucial for native video and brands need to think smartly about how they work with similar video content across the two platforms. Marketers can either publish the video on both YouTube and Facebook or publish a teaser on Facebook (for the initial reach / awareness) and direct people to view the full video on YouTube (for longevity and wider sharing) with a link in the post or comment section.

Will Pinterest really dwarf Facebook and Twitter?

Pinterest advertising

Forbes published an interesting look inside Pinterest – the social network where people ‘Pin’ content from around the web and discover content fellow users have posted. The piece is a bit hyperbolic at times, example: ‘it’s only a matter of time before Pinterest blows past Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the social pack’. But hits on two key points about Pinterest’s value to marketers:

The introduction of Pinterest advertising saw advertisers fork out $30-$40 per thousand impressions – many multiples of what Facebook commands.

People using Pinterest and engaging with content on the platform are doing so primarily on future events or aspirations – i.e. an upcoming wedding. Therefore, Pinterest offers marketers the opportunity to hit consumers when they have an intent to purchase. This arguably makes it the next generation (more visual, more about discovery), and the successor, to the greatest digital advertising model to be developed – Google AdWords / Search PPC.

The link to the full piece here:

Inside Pinterest: The Coming Ad Colossus That Could Dwarf Twitter And Facebook

Xiaomi the ‘Apple of China’ is no fan of advertising

A lovely selection of Xiaomi MiPad tablets

Xiaomi (can you pronounce it? It’s along the lines of ‘shower me’) says traditional advertising is no way to market a product and drive sales in the age of the internet.

The President of the mobile maker and of one of CLina’s / Asia’s most buzzed about technology brands has been speaking to Nikkei Asian Review. In the interview Xiaomi’s president, Lin Bin, stressed great products driving natural word-of-mouth was the most effective way to stimulate sales growth. In Lin’s own words:

Marketing methods that have been used by traditional industries are a thing of the past in the Internet age. Even if you spend tens of millions of yuan on television advertising, you cannot know how many customers bought your products because of the advertising… Before the Internet, word of mouth spread very slowly. But today, word of mouth spreads a million times faster, thanks to social media. At Xiaomi, we put our full energy into improving our products, and count on our customers to spread [word of] their satisfaction through Weibo (a Chinese microblogging site) and other social networking platforms.

Common sense really, as no matter how good the advertising is if the product is fundamentally bad or doesn’t fit the consumer need a brand and business will not succeed.

In Xiaomi’s case it has been able to drive huge sales in China due to the rock-star like status of it CEO Lei Jun (the ‘Steve Jobs of China’) and the cult-like status of the brand (the ‘Apple of China’). This in turn has driven massive amounts of media and social media coverage, which generates buzz, drives sales (26m smartphones in H1 2014) and developed the brand further.

Even Apple still supplements its crazy amount of brand love and word-of-mouth marketing with large amounts of advertising. And as Xiaomi expands outside of China they will not be able to rely on the brand affinity it has developed in its home market. They are likely to find that advertising (whether on television or digital platforms) in the brutally competitive tech hardware market is crucial to build the brand and generate sales.

Facebook’s mission to make Snapchat disappear

The Facebook Snapchat wars

Facebook, the gargantuan social media empire, feels it’s facing a threat. Facebook, however, seems to in a rather insurmountable position:

• The main Facebook property has 829 million daily active users with 1.32 billion monthly users, revenue is large and growing rapidly ($2.91 billion in the last quarter), the platform and business has transitioned successfully to mobile
• It is successfully splintering out its platform to create standalone mobile experience in an effort to dominate mobile real estate in app store charts and the homescreen – examples of this are Messenger and Paper. This is the so called constellation strategy where certain functionality of a dominant mobile application is splintered into separate apps but deep web-like linking / connections are forged between the apps
• It owns two of the biggest social and communications apps which are dominant in their spaces: Instagram (200 million) and WhatsApp (600 million active users)

Despite this there is still the belief within Facebook’s that its burgeoning empire, for certain demographics at least, is under threat. And that threat is from Snapchat – the ephemeral content app.

So let’s take a look at Snapchat to evaluate the supposed threat:

• It has recently hit the 100 million user milestone
• 400 millions Snaps are shared every day
• It’s the third most popular app among millennials – the most engaged generation of social media users. While penetration is over 50% with the younger end of the millennials – the 18-24 year-olds – and a third of US teens use Snapchat
• It’s rumored to be launching a feature called Snapchat Discovery. Where media companies would be able to upload content (think videos, news articles, images) that disappears once the user has finished interacting with it. This of course will encroach onto Facebook as it is increasingly promoting social shared media content in its news feed

Control & contain

So Facebook having seen this growing influence and threat of Snapchat has tried to control and contain it.

Facebook first tried to control Snapchat by buying it for a reported $3 billion. This was a similar strategy levied at Instagram: offer an astronomical amount for a young, but established and defensible network, before it got to a point where it was too large to buy, then nurture it further under your influence and worry about monetization much later.

Then Facebook tried to contain Snapchat by launching similar apps and services. First there was Poke – it generated buzz, some downloads among the curious but ultimately flopped. And ironically the combination of the huge offer to buy Snapchat and the Poke clone app created a huge blast of publicity building Snapchat’s profile and userbase. Other efforts followed Poke: Slingshot (similar story to Poke); Bolt (Facebook changed tact and soft launched it under the Instagram brand); and now Facebook is introducing the option of disappearing content into its main platform.

Facebook ephemeral applications: Poke, Slingshot & Bolt

It all seems a like a little bit of paranoia. But of course as Andrew Cove, the former CEO of Intel, said: ‘Only the paranoid survive’. While certainly Snapchat is a large and growing platform it’s way short of the vast number of active users Facebook platforms have garnered and has yet to develop any business model. But what Snapchat has is swathes of younger demographics – the millennials and teenagers. It also has professional content creators (so-called social media stars, brands and soon media companies) flocking to the platform.

Zero-sum game?

Some argue businesses which are built on a network effect face a zero-sum game – where one’s gains are directly related to others losing. But people use different social and communication networks for different reasons and therefore bounce between numerous apps throughout the day / week / month. People don’t use apps exclusively so social isn’t a zero-sum game. But what is key for these social platforms is active users and how engaged they are in the platform – this is critical and directly impacts the amount and price of advertising that can be sold.

The more time someone spends on a platform there’s more opportunity to serve them advertising. And the more engagement people have with a platform the more data they emit about themselves, creating a more complete profile to offer up to advertisers. Advertising is shifting rapidly away from a focus on channels to people-based marketing. So the social platforms which offer sophistication in targeting the individual can demand a higher pricing from advertisers.

These social networks aren’t facing a zero-sum game. But what they do face is a battle for people’s limited attention and engagement. If people are using Snapchat for social interactions the less time they are spending on Facebook’s platforms. This is key for Facebook as it reduces its opportunity to sell advertising and generate revenue across its digital empire.

A visual social media landscape

Brands’ social media strategies will become more effective the more visual they get. The number crunching, social media scientist Dan Zarrella, has just published some new data further showing visual content generates the most engagement. His study does however just cover Facebook.

Read about it: [New Data] The Performance of Facebook Post Types Over 3.5 Years

The graph explains all: photos have continually outperformed text / link based content for a long-time; while video’s social effectiveness is growing fast.

A more visual social media landscape is a natural human response as social networks and the internet access became dominated by mobile. There’s a few reasons for this: a smaller screen means images and videos are easier to digest and interact with rather than text; smartphones / their high quality cameras enable visual content to be captured and shared easily; and there’s much more content for an individual to consume, therefore visual-based is much more snackable. 

Facebook itself recognized the engagement shift from text to visual and has been altering its platform to focus around showcasing visual content (more on this here and here). That’s why we’ve also seen the emergence and explosive growth of visual-focused social networks like Vine, Snapchat and Instagram.

 

Twitter’s message problem

Twitter’s COO has left Twitter. Read into it as a resignation, a nudged resignation or a firing. It doesn’t matter, Ali Rowghani is no longer employed by Twitter.

The reasons for his departure are down to Twitter’s sluggish growth and an inability to innovate the product. Soon after Twitter announced it hit 200 million users in 2012, CEO Dick Costolo said he expected to reach 400 by 2013’s end. Yet by the first quarter of 2014 is was languishing at 255 million – which caused the stock price to take a battering.

One of the key areas Twitter / Costolo believe Rowghani failed is messaging. Mobile messaging has become one of the explosive growth areas of technology. WhatsApp sold to Facebook for $19 billion, messaging / mobile platforms like WeChat and Line have experienced massive user and revenue growth and Snapchat developed a new growth era of ephemeral communication.

Business Insider quoted an ‘industry source’: “When you talk to Dick about messaging, he’s like, ‘Sigh, that should have been us.'” Costolo is right in many ways, Twitter has the right ingredients for peer-to-peer communication. It was built for mobile, it had a large user-base, crucially a large mobile user-base, it’s got a network effect and it engineered a new, innovative way for people to connect and communicate.

Twitter messaging feature (source: Twitter)

But significantly, Twitter is not set-up to be a messaging product. In particular, a private messaging product.

Numerous issues abound such as messaging still lacks prominence in the UI (despite the recent design changes to hero messaging, as above), the debilitating 140 character limit and a lack of functionality.

But more fundamentally, private messaging was always a second thought for Twitter. The vision was always about public communication. This was confirmed in Nick Bilton’s company biography ‘Hatching Twitter’ outlining the vision of key founding figures: Evan Williams and knowing what’s going on in the world (think Arab Spring); Jack Dorsey and projecting your image on the world (think Kim Kardashian). These competing visions (arguably Twitter has achieved both) is not possible through private communication.

People communicate very differently is a private environment than they do in public, they therefore use / interact differently with different platforms. Simply, people view Twitter as a public communication platform – not a place for closed communicating. And it’s hard for a business to shift a consumer’s perception once it is ingrained.

Facebook has recognized this and ripped Messenger out of the main mobile app. It has taken its Messenger user-base, built up on the desktop, and taken them into a private, more user-friendly experience where they are naturally more comfortable messaging each other.

Twitter needs to make significant changes to its product if it is to succeed in messaging. And it’s already likely to be too late.

Facebook Messenger’s path to a platform (1/2)

Facebook has pulled of a large Silicon Valley coup by poaching PayPal President David Marcus from eBay. Marcus will move to Facebook to become head of messaging products – just Messenger, not WhatsApp, Instagram or the nascent Slingshot. The move has signaled to many that Facebook will start aggressively pursuing a money making strategy for its messaging products – in the first instance Messenger.

The interesting element here isn’t Facebook searching for new revenue streams but its mobile strategy with its two messaging apps – Messenger and WhatsApp.

In this first post I’ll take a look at why Facebook is searching for revenue outside of advertising. In the second part I’ll provide some thoughts why Facebook’s product strategy will see Messenger and WhatsApp take different paths resulting in Messenger ultimately transformed into a broad platform.

Facebook state of play

Facebook’s business is titled. It makes the vast majority of its money through advertising on its main Facebook.com/app platform. The company has a revenue stream through virtual goods and taking a slice of developers in-app purchasing (mainly social games) – although this is relatively small and stagnant stream. It will also start to earn decent sums on Instagram’s fledgling advertising business and WhatsApp’s $1 annual fee.

Facebook revenue – heavily weighted towards advertising

So the company is searching for ways to develop diversified revenue opportunities for its growing set of products. This is where Messenger fits in.

Messenger state of play

Marcus will take the lead on a product which is arguably mature. It has a large, growing and relatively global user-base (if slightly US centric) – more than 200 million people regularly use Messenger (Facebook Q414 earnings call).

Interestingly, on the last earnings call Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was quite clear that Messenger’s priority was still growth and not monetization: “For the next set of apps like Messenger, Instagram and hopefully soon WhatsApp, the current priority is growth. Messenger and Instagram both reached 200 million monthly actives this quarter. We believe these apps have a lot of room to grow and will start to be important businesses in the future, but monetization isn’t our near-term priority here.”

Facebook clearly views Messenger as a fledgling, growth product and won’t risk stunting this growth with aggressive moves to monetize the app that impact the user experience. Facebook has just ripped Messenger out of its main mobile applications to create a standalone mobile experience. With Messenger unshackled from the main Facebook app it can look to develop as a standalone product. So there may not be large product changes to drive monetization in the near-term. But what about the mid-to-long-term?

Money with Messenger

There is obviously a huge opportunity with Messenger – a large user base and a standalone experience to build on top of. And Marcus’ appointment points to a product direction focused on payments and commerce.

An obvious revenue opportunity is a money transfer service.  Facebook has/is getting some of the foundations in place for this already. It’s seeking approval for a Europe-wide license for an e-money service (Financial Times). While in the US is has already got a Money Service Business licenses in 48 states. This effectively means Facebook users can store and transfer money through the social network.

A peer-to-peer money service makes sense. Imagine a groups of friends out at dinner and someone doesn’t have cash – they could simply transfer what they owe to a Facebook friend who then can move it into a linked account. This provides a seamless way people can shift small amounts of money between friends without having to install a new app and get their friends to do so as well. Facebook’s network effect lends itself well in this peer-to-peer scenario.

This type of service has been successfully rolled out by other companies. The most successful is Barclays bank and its Pingit app. This enables UK current account holders to shift money through phone numbers. Pingit has been downloaded by 2.8m people, who have made £475m worth of transfers on the platform since its launch in 2012.

It’s a nice opportunity and is a natural route for Marcus to take with his PayPal experience. But functionality is one thing, trust is another. It’s far easier for a brand like Barclays to gain a consumer’s trust when it comes to money than it is for Facebook.

It’s a big leap from a Facebook / Messenger user who is more attuned to using the products for social networking and communication. For the product to develop into any form of a payment and commerce platform it needs to build trust.

Facebook gains trust by focusing on its heritage in virtual goods and following a path carved out by its Asian messaging app rivals.

Asian influence

Facebook has taken a cue from rival messaging apps emanating from Asia. It recognizes virtual goods are the first move to develop and monetize Messenger.

Step one trust. Facebook has a heritage in offering virtual goods with app subscriptions and in-app purchases. It has got people comfortable with the idea of paying for virtual goods through Facebook. It’s an easy step for people to now pay for virtual goods in Messenger.

Step 2 product. Simply put, stickers.

Facebook stickers currently available

Facebook is already offering a variety of stickers in Messenger but all of them are free. Stickers are a big opportunity. Take Asia, where stickers have absolutely blown up. Mainly through the difficultly of writing in Asian characters and it being easier, and more fun, to communicate through graphics rather than characters (incidentally this is why voice text messaging has taken off in Asia – you regularly see people speaking into their phones like walkie-talkies). While seemingly frivolous, stickers are big business. Line sold $70 million of digital stickers in 2013 – or 20% of its revenue.

People now feel comfortable downloading free stickers in Messenger. The next step is to make them buy stickers in Messenger which in-turn makes them feel comfortable with Messenger / Facebook handling their money.

This is a path which begins to take Messenger far beyond a communication app and into its future as a platform. More on this in part two.

Amazon delivery drones – PR brilliance

Amazon just made the perfect delivery with its drone octocopters. The autonomous flying delivery machines dubbed Amazon Air Prime – unveiled by Jeff Bezos in a US prime-time interview slot on CBS with Charlie Rose –  may never take to the skies, but that isn’t the point.

Large corporations that define an industry are a magnet for criticism – think of McDonalds and fast food / unhealthy eating (Super Size Me), think Coca-Cola and obesity, think ExxonMobil and climate change, think Google and personal privacy from advertisers. Amazon defines ecommerce and as such it’s a lighting rod for criticism – think of wiping out corner shops, local book stores, exploiting workers in warehouses.

But Jeff Bezos has a strategy to deal with the swirl of hatred Amazon could encounter as a defining company. It’s outlined in his Amazon.Love memo which Brad Stone of BusinessWeek explains here:

In his 2010 internal “Amazon.Love” memo to senior executives, Amazon (AMZN)Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos identified a serious problem that can plague big, successful companies: They tend to be feared and, in some quarters, hated… Bezos had an answer to the perennial big-company image problem. “Risk taking is cool,” he wrote. “Inventing is cool.”

The delivery drones are a perfect example of this strategy in action. It provides an image of a company re-imagining shopping, a company of innovation, a company willing to push the boundaries to ensure quick and cheap delivery. It perfectly reinforces the brand values that Amazon wants to promote.

This is an example of good brand communication, but what makes it great brand communication is the timing, the environment it was released into and how the story was told. The timing coincided with Cyber Monday, the busiest online shopping day of the year. Amazon wants to be front of mind on this crucial day, it needed to dominate headlines. It also needed to positively dominate headlines and drown out a growing ripple of criticism circling the brand, some of it general but some of it specific to its holiday operations. Stories about workers striking in Germany, Amazon warehouse employees facing illness risks or The Supreme Court rejecting Amazon’s petition against an online state sales tax do not create an environment which encourages people to look to the brand. And finally it was delivered in a sophisticated, natural way- the bomb was dropped on a high profile segment and supported with social content which enabled it to ripple out across the media and social media. It simply wouldn’t have worked if it was told via a traditional media announcement.

British Airways’ smart #lookup campaign

I’m weirdly fascinated by the aviation industry and still strangely excited to visit airports and fly. So British Airways’ recent innovative marketing work has been catching my eye. Brian Habana racing a BA A380 super-jumbo to promote the route to South Africa is one such example – great content and smart relevance to the brand and service.

BA’s latest effort seeks to remind customers how magical flying can be, from the perspective of children. The campaign called #lookup features digital billboards in Chiswick and Piccadilly Circus that interacts with overhead BA planes as they fly by. A child on screen spots the plane, points and a message relating to the plane is shown such as its flight number, destination / location, the lowest route fare available or the weather at the destination.

It’s clever stuff,  watch it in action.

Axe to grind at women’s lengthy beauty regime

Axe (or Lynx for all your UK chaps) have released a lovely piece of digital communication to promote its hair styling range by poking fun at man’s stereotypical gripe at women taking forever to get ready. Hosted on its YouTube channel, it pits a man’s styling regime against a young lady styling her hair into a ‘high top bun’ – whatever that is.

‘Styled in Seconds’ – digital campaign by Axe hair product 

The videos, seven + minutes in length, are shown side-by-side and while she takes the full seven minutes, he’s ‘styled in seconds’. The lad therefore gets to spend the rest of the video having a whale of a time with his chum by discussing methods of picking up girls and bemoaning how long she is taking to do her hair. The videos work playfully together and the facial gestures the girl is making brilliantly contrasts to the audio of the opposite male video.

It’s a nice piece of communication, connects with a pain point of the target audience, pokes fun at girls in a boyish manner and demands to be shared. It’s also executed rather stylishly. It’s a tough ask for a piece of content on the internet to ask for attention for such a long time – but this does it, and does it pretty darn well.

Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/user/axe/custom?x=us-en_axehair

Via Razorfish

Gone in ten seconds – Snapchat’s multi-billion valuation

Snapchat logo

The fleeting image sharing app, Snapchat turned down a $3 billion offer from Facebook. It apparently expects a better buyout offer or mammoth funding round at a $4 billion valuation in the new year as users and the number of messages grow (it hopes).

Snapchat is rising rapidly – 350 million messages were being sent per day in September up from 200 million in June. But can an app with no revenue and no apparent business model really be worth so much?

Companies with limited or no revenue are getting gargantuan sums of venture capital leading to astronomical valuations. But take Airbnb, which had a revenue model from bookings built into it from the start. While Pinterest, at the beginning of its journey to monetize ahead of IPO, has a reported valuation of $3.8 billion. However, its referral rates through to retailers’ sites are through the roof – a clear revenue opportunity to capitalize on the explosion of ecommerce. These are business models that make sense.

Snapchat’s temporary images have appeal for app’s younger demographic. It provides an opportunity to be fun, ‘whacky’ and a little bit cheeky. But on the surface the Snapchat model doesn’t make sense for advertisers and thses advertising will be key in monetizing the app.

A key pattern I’ve witnessed while watching people around me use Snapchat (I personally don’t use it) is they dip in and out of the app rapidly – they make check it several times a day but it doesn’t hold their attention for long. Which makes sense as Snapchat’s content is there and then it’s not – essentially the app soon becomes a vacuum, a black hole. Whereas with Pinterest, or other chat apps and social networks, the site is sticky and the content is permanent, it gives people a clear motivation to keep returning while also spending time on there.

For Snapchat, selling traditional banner ads on the site won’t work as it will clutter the UX, neither will forcing people to watch pre-roll advertising before viewing personal snaps – people will not tolerate this if they’re dipping in an out.

There are options for the app though. Brand accounts are not only a great way to get a never ending source of engaging content onto the site, and keep people dipping in and out, but also push them to pay to promote their account and content. Video and images are a powerful means of brand communication and if Snapchat provides the right tools, targeting features and analytics capabilities for companies it can create an advertising platform. And it may well be worth its multi-billion dollar valuation.

TomTom – driving messages on the right road

TomTom have released a rather nice piece of quirky Facebook advertising, you can see it below:

TomTom Facebook advertising

It’s a great piece of communication for a number of reasons:

• The tone is right for the platform, the millennial plus demographic will appreciate the humour  in the copy and design
• It has been tailored for a male audience of a certain age – one of the great things about using digital platforms is the ability to target specific groups of people. No doubt there is a female version with a male ex along with a letchy father-in-law and disapproving mother-in-law
• It provides brand relevant messaging (TomTom gets you to places in efficiently) in an engaging way – far too often advertising has no real connection to actual brand truths and just serves as creative vanity ‘branding’ projects
• It actively encourages participation and provides a genuine reason for people to engage with the advertising and brand, instead of just cluttering up their Facebook feeds

Beats ‘Color’ reminiscent of iPod branding

Beats has created quite a superb brand since its inception just six years ago which allows it to charge an astronomical premium on audio equipment. Of course it’s easier to build a brand if you have a front man like Andre Young aka Dr Dre – who let’s face it, is hands down the coolest man in hip hop – and shareholders like will.i.am.

But Beats’ marketing campaigns are snappy, clever and engaging and also helped create the brand. Perhaps one of the best was its Olympic ambush marketing campaign. Beats seeded headphones with high profile athletes which resulted in them indirectly endorsing the brand – either via their social media channels or wearing the products ahead of their events. The Guardian reported ‘Beats headphones have been almost ubiquitous in the Aquatics Centre with swimmers including Michael Phelps using them to block background noise before races.’ This was a beautifully brilliant tactic to gain celebrity association and mass exposure of the brand.

The latest campaign from Beats appeared in the run-up to Christmas which featured a mix of musicians such as will.i.am, Nicole Scherzinger, Lil Wayne and Ellie Goulding, along with an assortment of other figures such as Robin Van Persie and ‘ordinary’ folk who won a competition to feature in the advert. It’s a nice piece of communication (included below) which helps to show the youthful vibrancy and personality of the brand.

However, it strikes a strong similarity to Apple iPod and iTunes advertising (a large selection can be seen here). Apple too used celebrities, vibrant colours, the latest music and fast-paced dancing to showcase the products. One such spot for the iPod Nano which appeared in 2009 is embedded below. This particular advert both wonderfully builds the iPod and Apple brand but it also communicates the new video feature in a beautifully simple and engaging way.

Of course, they are both consumer musical electronic products aimed at similar demographics – young folk with a natural interest in music – so you would expect a fair amount of creative crossover. But the spots are terribly similar in their style – fast-paced, music at the heart of the story, people focused with the individuals embracing the product and a colourful connection between product and the user.

Beats has got itself a quality brand and it is no shame to take creative guidance / inspiration from old school iPod communication.

Every word matters

Every word that is written and spoken by people in a position of power or responsibility is re-read, scrutinised and critiqued. And with the growing global reach of the internet and social media enabling the mass ability to share opinion it has never been more crucial that words are chosen carefully.

I came across an article in the London Evening Standard which demonstrates the importance of selecting the right words. Lewisham Council regeneration supremo Nigel Adams is commenting on various development plans in the London borough. He’s quoted saying: ‘However, the regeneration is being achieved with private money as well as public cash.’ The section of the article is  pictured below:

At first you might think there isn’t anything wrong with a single word in this short statement. But read it and re-read it, then think about the final word ‘cash.’ It’s informal, flippant even, and with public finances under such a squeeze public officials have to be seen to be treating public finances with utmost respect. A formal word such as finances or money would have been more suitable in this situation.

Those tasked with representing their organisation in public mediums have to realise that every single word needs to be considered carefully before releasing it into the wild. And the media and public can be savage if  a stance is not positioned in the right way and the most effective words used.

How social media sold OMGPOP to Zynga

Until late March, OMGPOP was a little known game developer limping along and was running desperately low on money. This was until it created Draw Something. The game became an overnight sensation, catapulting the company into the mainstream and leading to its $180 million purchase by Zynga. The game’s addictive fun got people hooked but it was social media that generated mass awareness and spread the product virally.

OMGPOP hadn’t advertised or undertaken traditional PR but it became hugely successful within a matter of weeks. People shared their sketches, talked about the game and challenged their friends to play through their online social networks. The game quickly gained popularity as celebrities tweeting about the game – such as Stephen Fry and Jimmy Fallon – created a huge amount of additional buzz. The rise of OMGPOP demonstrates perfectly the evolution of brand communication. The ability of social media to spread publicity and corporate messages means it’s now arguably more powerful now than traditional media.

Social media has changed the way that products are marketed and brands are built. Previously companies had to funnel their message through the media. This either involved brands earning placement in news or feature articles or paying for the privilege to appear. While these more traditional methods are still important and are an effective way for brands to reach their audiences as part of an integrated comms approach, social media offers a bigger opportunity to reach more people and create more buzz. The Guardian.co.uk, as an example, has daily unique visits of just over four million (March 2012) while Facebook had 483 million daily active users on average in December 2011 and 1.36 million visited Pintrest per day in March. Social media also enables brands to create campaigns that are highly targeted and reach the right audience. This shows the scale of social media and the opportunity brands have to reach a large audience but also the right one.

Despite there being a potential huge audience in the hundreds of millions, brands won’t get noticed if they don’t capture people’s attention. So what underpins any social media strategy is content that forces people to read, watch or listen and then share it round their network. This is why Draw Something exploded in popularity. The sketches that people drew and the game itself were the content that captured people’s attention and made them share around their social media sites. So while social is the platform, it’s great content that engages people and creates the buzz.

Nike, digital and its relationship with customers

Who does digital and who does it well?

There are many companies proclaiming they do digital. Only some have actually done intelligent things in digital. Then there’s even fewer that are actually doing intelligent things on a regular basis. While only the very few have incorporated it into the wider business and its becoming part of who the company is. However, of all the companies who actually do digital, there’s perhaps none better than Nike.

Nike has embraced digital communications and realise its value of creating, building and enhancing relationships with its customers. Whether it’s NikePlus, mobile apps or social media content that begs to be watched and shared (as per the below video which was part of the FuelBand campaign), you have to appreciate the brilliance of Nike’s digital strategy.

Nike used to rely on the mass media to convince customers to buy its products. However, Nike now uses digital to create a more lasting and intelligent edge to its marketing and brand building. As Stefan Orlander, VP Digital Sport, Nike, said at the launch of his co-authored book Velocity: “Once you have established a direct relationship with a consumer, you don’t need to advertise to them.” Therefore Nike has used its digital services in order to latch onto customers in order to develop a deeper and more meaningful relationship. And once this relationship has been created and nurtured, the customer will be more inclined to buy Nike and also advocate on behalf of the brand.

The below video (via the link) of Stefan speaking at the WIRED Business Conference is definitely worth a watch. In it he discusses the thinking behind some of Nike’s digital initiatives including the FuelBand, NikePlus and sharing data with its customers.

Nike on digital at WIRED Business Conference

Brand exclusivity perfected by German techno

The abandoned power station situated on the former border of West and East Berlin can only be described as an institution. People queue for hours to get in even on a sub-zero morning in March. We joined the back of the line, fully aware of the daunting prospect that lay ahead. The base rang louder as we slowly snaked through the queue caged in by a metal cattle gate. We were eventually greeted by a troll of a man, half his face coloured with tattoos and studded with piercings. Not even glancing at us, he extended his arm towards the exit and growled ‘nein’. It was a swift rejection after a lengthy wait.

We were not alone in our rejection. There is no apparent reason why we and around half the people who try are turned away from Berghain. The club is not a place you wander across by accident. The people slowly flowing in the queue are there because they’ve researched Berlin’s nightlife or they’ve heard others preach about the club. People are fully aware about the challenge of getting in and the potential for a set back to the night but still take the risk because of its reputation. The story of the strict and apparent random door policy has added to Berghain’s prestige and brand. It’s simple really – if you know something has an air of exclusivity, it makes it all the more alluring.

This is also the same for marketing. If brands can create an air of exclusivity about them, they will ultimately create demand and a higher value. One example is of course luxury brands – whether champagne, a member’s club or car – which are aimed at the few and are exclusive due to high cost. Brands like Dior, Moet and Armani have perfected their image However, it’s not just cost that can create an unreasonable desire. Limited offers, the specific targeting at a demographic and invite only will also entice and fuel a craving for people to belong. Exclusivity is perhaps the easiest part to achieve as brands can limit who they sell to. But it is a far greater challenge for brands to create the desire for people to yearn to be part of the exclusive experience.

Berghain has perfected it. Would I queue up again, in the cold, with a high chance of rejection? Of course I would, without a second thought.

Brands need to get social with TV

Social networks have changed the way we watch TV. Now instead of our attention squarely focused on the content which is being broadcast, people are increasingly using their laptops, tablets and smartphones to engage with it as well. But the TV is not being left out in the cold when people ‘dual-screen’ as they’re also usually interacting with the programme online.

People will be posting their opinion about the show on Facebook and Twitter and even Googling it. Savvy production companies are getting in on the act by creating interactive online experiences to keep people within properties they own. Tellybug, develops apps that accompanies popular TV shows. They developed the ‘tap-to-clap’ app for The X Factor which allows people to cheer or boo contestants. Programmes such as The Bank Job encourage people to play online. And to play, Channel 4 makes them hand over personal information which can be sold to advertisers to create more targeted advertising.

The bringing together of the offline and online worlds has mutual benefits. For the programme, viewing figures are likely to be boosted. If people’s social feeds are lit up about a show, they are likely to be intrigued and tune in themselves. However, there are bucket loads of opportunities for marketers, the majority of which have not been exploited. The biggest opportunity lies in using people’s passion for the show and the talkability it generates.

Marketers have only been able to show any kind of affinity to a show and the surrounding brand by sponsorship or advertising that merely annoys people. Brands need to throw themselves into the online debate surrounding a show, in doing so will forge a deeper bond with a show’s audience. They can do this by buying search engine keywords or sponsored trends or hashtags on Twitter to make sure when people search online they find the brand. They can also post content about the show which their fans and followers want to share are their social network. What brands essentially need is a strong digital footprint and engaging content which complements the TV content people are watching.

Facebook is a $100 billion company

There’s a frenzy from Silicon Valley to Wall Street as Facebook gears up for its IPO that’s expected to raise $10 billion and value the eight-year-old company at $100 billion. If as expected, Facebook files next week, it’ll be the hottest tech flotation since Google in 2004. Analysts, bankers, tech executives and the media have been lining up to question Facebook’s lofty valuation. Many say that a value of $100 billion for a business that reportedly rakes in under $4 billion in revenue is insane. However, if we look back at recent history the valuation seems spot on.

Google and Facebook may serve different purposes but they have many similarities. They are both businesses funded almost entirely by pay-per-click advertising and to ultimately succeed they need to court the attention of marketers. They are also quite frankly worldwide phenomenons and companies that fundamentally changed the internet. When Google filed in 2004, it raised $1.67 billion with a valuation of $23 billion, this was on revenue of just under $1 billion. The valuation was around 23 times its revenue. It seemed high to many, but now Google reports revenues of $37.9 billion and its shares have grown 435 per cent since 2004. If one bought shares at Google’s initial public offering, it would be fair to say it was a shrewd investment.

If we look at Facebook’s figures they are already impressive and there’s the potential for high-growth. A $100 billion valuation would be roughly 25 times the current revenue of the company. This mirrors Google’s situation in 2004. But the real statistics investors should be looking at are the 800 million active users; the 50 per cent who log on daily; the 900 million objects people interact with; the seven million apps and websites tied to Facebook; and the 350 million active users who currently access Facebook through their mobile devices. Facebook has a large, engaged user base, a strong presence on mobile and ever growing insight into everyone on the site. This personal information is a valuable commodity for marketers as they crave more intelligent, targeted advertising. Facebook has made a lot of friends among advertisers who have poured billions into the company. Brands and marketing agencies will continue to pour billions more into Facebook as its user base grows, more apps and websites marry to its social graph and it continues to mature as a service. And this is why Facebook is a $100 billion company.

Google: This time, it’s personal

Google’s mission is to ‘organise the world’s information’ and it has done a fine job over the past decade or so by bringing order to the web’s trillion+ pages. But the web has changed since Google was incorporated in 1998. The web is no longer static and the content that makes up the internet has been democratised. Instead of a minority updating the internet, now everyone in the world can impact the make-up of the web. The web has gone social.

So Google has launched Search plus Your World to make its search results more personal in response to the rise of the social web. It wants to do this to make sure the best and most relevant results are returned. The search giant will now include social data from its fledgling social network Google+ to complement search results, complete with information from people’s social graph. Now if someone wants to find information about a car, they will not only get links to pages of car manufacturers, but also comments, pictures and other content about cars from their Google+ network at the top of the page.

There are critics of Google’s move and many say it’s twisting search results in order to boost the profile of its own social network. Twitter’s general counsel Alex Macgillivray has been vocal and said it’s a “bad day for the internet”. Twitter expects that its own content will be sidelined and that Google+ will be given undue prominence in search results. But Google says it cannot index content from Facebook and Twitter as the networks do not allow it to crawl their pages for data.

For many, Google is the gateway to the internet and how they find information aboutevents, their passions and products. So for brands, social search will be important because it adds another factor to the way Google ranks pages for different keywords. We might see some brands being forced to reconsider the importance of Google+ as a social network to reach out to their target audience – because Google has played its trump card to make it significant: search.

Facebook vs Google: Let battle commence

A multi-billion war is raging as internet businesses battle to gain control over two of the most important commodities in today’s economy – time and data. Google, so long the darling of the internet is being steadily supplanted by Facebook, the new superpower. Google created its business by connecting people to the web’s resources, while Facebook has created one of the most exciting and fastest growing companies by connecting people to each other. However, Facebook, with the announcement at F8, has set a new course from not just connecting people to each other, but also to things, ideas and media. Facebook has introduced a range of features over the past few years in order to give people a reason to log in and stay inside its empire. And with the ability to read the news on The Guardian, listen to music on Spotify, or watch a film on Netflix, all within its walls, Facebook is trying to become a social entertainment hub. In doing so, it is encouraging people to view Facebook as the first destination on the internet and then give them no reason to browse anywhere else.

 

Facebook’s growing popularity is a big problem for Google. Facebook is a walled garden which effectively means that Google cannot index any of the content on the site. Google makes billions organising the web, but if it cannot index a large and growing section of that audience, its business is going to suffer. Google is obviously very concerned and its chief internet evangelist Vint Cerf made a rather bold statement saying Facebook must open up or it would suffer the same fate as AOL. Google has also responded to the rise of Facebook by trying to create its own social experience. So far, Google has failed: Wave was scrapped; Google+, despite an initial growth spurt, looks like it’s confined to the technology community; while Google’s only real social success is YouTube, which it acquired.

 

Facebook’s F8 announcements are so significant because they will attract people to the site, keep them there for longer and arm Facebook with greater insight into them. You log into Facebook, tell it who you are, where you’ve been, what you like to watch, listen to and read. While you are doing this, Facebook is getting a 360-degree picture of who you are and the type of things that will catch your attention. This data is the kind of information that advertisers crave, as brands seek a more sophisticated approach to advertising. For decades advertisers adopted a scattergun approach – firing campaigns at a mass audience in hope that their messages would potentially hit the right people. Facebook is now offering access to a mass audience, but it’s also offering advertisers access to the right audience. If Facebook can offer up adverts on your profile which are crafted especially for you, there’s a greater chance you’ll click on it and therefore earn money for the company and its advertising network partners.

 

Oil is one of the most valuable commodities in the world; companies go to the ends of the earth to get it and countries have gone to war for it. It has been said that data is the new oil, and Google and Facebook have squared up to drill for as much information about people in the world as they can. If these businesses can attract you to their online properties, they get your time and data. Both of these are essential to sell to advertisers. The war these two internet giants are fighting is one of the biggest battles in business today. The company which can mine the most data will ultimately succeed and will win a huge slice of the multi-billion pound internet advertising market.

Can jazzy colours conquer the iPad?

Packard Bell will be the latest computer hardware manufacturer to enter into the tablet fray when it launches an offering in June.

Packard hope to stand out, in what is increasingly an extremely crowded market, be selling their tablets in a range of colours. At first it seems like a weak strategy to take on the might of Apple, but it may turn out to be an interesting tactic.

As the majority of tablets which aren’t from Apple all run an Android OS, Packard Bell could be giving themselves an opportunity to differentiate themselves by offering colour customisation.

It also signals an interesting shift at who tablets are being postioned towards. As with most new technologies tablets were scooped up by the early adopters – the kind of technology geeks that wait for hours outside Apple stores to get the latest product first.

However it appears tablets are starting to be aimed at a wider consumer audience. It will be interesting over the coming months to see whether we begin to see a change in how tablets are publicised by PR agencies and marketing departments. It may herald a shift away from articles about technical specifications and a move towards stories which have lighter and fluffier angles.

What answers does Facebook Questions give to marketers?

Facebook has continued its conquest on the whole of social media by officially launching ‘Facebook Questions’. The service allows users to post questions and have them answered by their friends and their friends’ network; this helps to spread the Q&A in a viral like way. It basically means people can get answers and responses to their burning questions from their trusted network.

Brands have already recognised the huge potential of marketing on Facebook and many have developed a dedicated Facebook presence (for a consumer facing brand a Facebook page is now essential). There have been some fantastic ways in which brands have engaged with the Facebook fraternity. Skittles asked Facebookers to bury a man in the sweets, every new ‘Like’ meant sugary treats were poured onto the man.

Now Facebook Questions gives brands a genuinely exciting way to engage their followers and potential followers in a two way conversation they actually want to be a part of. The potential is huge, as now brands can not only reach their Facebook fans but also their fans’ friends. This essentially gives brands a chance to get their message to a new audience. The service will allow brands to gauge opinion, conduct market research or crowd source for inspiration  in an extremely effective and almost instant way from their audience.

However, there are a number of potential pitfalls that brands could face when using Facebook Questions. Kia invested heavily in its social media strategy and after experimenting has developed some nice engagement. Kia UK’s digital marketing manager, John Bache, quickly realised that the brand received less interest in posts if they try to sell to people. He recently told Marketing Week: “One thing we have noticed is that if we ask people to watch a video, or try to push product related messages to them, interaction with those posts is a lot less than if we ask for user generated content, such as ‘where did you take your Kia this weekend?’”

This anecdotal evidence of marketing on Facebook just goes to show that if Facebook Questions is used incorrectly, brands will struggle to engage fans with the service. Just using Facebook Questions in an obvious way – trying to sell to people or shouting corporate ,messaging at them – will not work effectively. People log onto Facebook to socialise and not to be advertised at, so marketing on Facebook needs to talk to people in an interesting and genuine way.  If companies talk at people and don’t engage them in a conversation, people will show their disapproval by disliking the brand on Facebook and in the real world as well.

Lucozade needs to refocus its marketing energy

When you think of Lucozade you immediately think of sport. So Lucozade’s ties with the Premier League and its high-energy sports association works and makes sense.

However Lucozade has partnered with Spotify for the months of March and May to offer drinkers a chance to win free access to Spotify’s Premium service. It seems a bit of a bizarre partnership considering music lovers are a world apart from Lucozade’s traditional core market.

If Lucozade are trying to tap into a new audience then this type of promotion is perhaps a sensible way to do it. But the Lucozade/Spotify deal only lasts until the end of May – and two months to win over a new market is simply not long enough.

Also with Gatorade – the goliath of the sports drink market in America – planning on a marketing push in the UK this summer, positioning it as the ‘resource for athletes and amateur fitness fans’, it may be a wiser strategy for Lucozade to focus its energy on defending their current market position.