Category: Data-Labor-Technology Stories

Chris Victory, vice president of partnerships at demand-side platform MediaMath, discusses the applications of AI in the programmatic space.
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Efforts to find an alternative route to internet access are gaining ground in Silicon Valley, where entrepreneurs were rattled by a recent government decision to overturn rules that required big internet providers to treat all traffic equally.
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Low-cost fitness chain PureGym has overhauled its marketing strategy to move on perceptions that it is simply a budget brand, and instead show the impact its services have on consumers’ day-to-day lives. 

The company, which has over one million members in 200 locations, has unveiled a fresh campaign which is centered around the ethos that ‘People Are Incredible’.

As it looks towards the next stage of growth, PureGym’s chief marketing officer Stephen Rowe told The Drum that the brand is taking cues from the likes of Premiere Inn which has leveraged its marketing to move up the value chain and create a deeper connection with consumers. 

Until now, Pure Gym has relied on competitive pricing, a no annual contract policy and 24-hour access to attract sign ups; but now is it looking to get customers to emotionally invest in the brand too. 

As such, its latest campaign comprises several films juxtaposing ordinary equipment such as the humble exercise bike against a backdrop of gritty ‘This Girl Can’-style footage showing people working out. This footage is shown alongside other films which reveal what effect going to gym has on members’ day-to-day pursuits.

The campaign will run over the busy post-Christmas and New Year period, with fresh takes on the proposition to come in 2018.

While it would be easy to plump for tired tropes about having eaten too many pigs in blankets over the festive period, or imagery focused on physical results, the brand wants to instead show the role it can play in people’s everyday lives. 

“These aren’t stories about the ‘before and after’ reveal or people with six packs,” PureGym’s chief marketing officer Stephen Rowe told The Drum, “these are ordinary everyday people that really value healthy lifestyles and the role Pure Gym can play in that.

The firm’s recently appointed creative agency BJL worked closely with PureGym’s in-house team to develop a number of iterations that will run across TV, digital and social, CRM, in-club and a range of other recruitment communications.

Accompanying the campaign is a series of social videos which tell the real-life stories of some of PureGym’s members, including Abbie who took up running as a way to cope with grief and firefighter Lenny. 

PureGym, which was recently acquired by US investor Leonard Green & Partners, has been one of the driving forces behind the budget gym boom since its launch eight years ago.

Rowe said that social trends focused around fitness, nutrition and the positive impact exercise has on wellbeing have also influenced the brand’s latest turnaround. “People are more conscious of exercise,” said Rowe, “particularly in younger audiences.”

According to  non-profit health body UK Active, close to 15% of UK consumers now stump up for a gym membership. 

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Snapchat had a tough but busy year. After a disappointing earnings call in November, ad buyers continue to reserve Snapchat campaigns for the “experimental” portions of their budgets, a slim 10 to 20 percent.

“While there are still a lot of strides that they have to work on as it relates to the performance marketing and direct-response side,” said Sherwin Su, social activation director at Essence Global, “their product development establishes a good foundation and signals they are continuing to add value for their core users, content creators, premium publishers and advertisers.”

Here’s a rundown of all the developments in Snapchat’s advertising in 2017:

Leaning into self-serve 
Ad buyers agree that Snapchat’s best move of the year was introducing the Snapchat Ads Manager. In May, Snapchat began allowing ad buyers to run two of the platform’s ad units, Snap Ads and sponsored filters, via a self-serve auction. The platform’s third ad unit, sponsored lenses, must still be bought through the Snapchat sales team.

Although Snapchat lost ad revenue due to this new application programming interface as reported in the company’s third-quarter earnings, ad buyers applaud the tool for making it easier and faster to roll out campaigns.

“The rollout and consistent development of their self-serve buying API reduced the cost of entry, which has led us to see a slight decline in total spend on the platform for some of our clients,” said Brittany Richter, vp and head of social at Dentsu Aegis’ iProspect, “but it has also led to an increase in performance and trust on the platform, as well as in the number of brands investing and planning to continue to invest in the platform.”

In the summer, Snapchat launched its marketing mix modeling platform, partnering with third parties like Neustar MarketShare and Nielsen to measure marketers’ return on investment, a necessary move in the current transparency climate.

Aiming to be the finest in AR
Snapchat wants to be the platform brands turn to for AR. In 2017, there’s no doubt it has made more developments in this area than major competitors Facebook and Instagram. Marketers have begun to discover AR’s capabilities and are spending millions to experiment with them.

In the last year, Snapchat has made a number of AR launches, including branded 3D World Lenses, where users can place 3-D avatars into snaps. Bud Light was the first to test this, according to Snapchat, making a character that appeared in a commercial running at the time (a vendor selling the beer) virtual.

AR Trial Ads debuted in November, allowing brands to showcase their products virtually in the real world. BMW, for instance, presented a 3-D model of the new BMW X2 in the camera’s field of vision. This gives viewers a way to see the car within their environment.

In December, Snapchat launched Lens Studio, which lets developers design their own AR lenses. The average Lens user spends three minutes daily trying out new lenses, and on average, Lens campaigns saw 19 ad lift awareness points and 9 percent in sales lift.

Contrasting storytelling and instant impact
In the summer, Snapchat began to determine the impact Snap Ads have on users. Compared with sponsored lenses and filters, which lead to more engagement, Snap Ads are meant to serve as a jumping-off place and provide “instant impact,” according to Snapchat. In July, Snapchat launched three new types of Snap Ads to emphasize this: cinemagraphs, GIFs and still images, which are ads that appear for a few seconds.

In the last few months, Snapchat has increased the number of ways brands can tell stories in filters and lenses, introducing Promoted Stories, which give brands the ability to share up to 10 photos or videos as part of one Story, in November. HBO was one of the first to use the format, using six photos on Black Friday of the TV series or movies people could watch instead of shopping.

On Dec. 20, Snapchat began letting brands sponsor their own animated filters with graphics that move across a screen that users can snap and share. Dunkin’ Donuts is the first brand to use these filters, promoting its dark roast coffee on the winter solstice. In the coming months, advertisers will be able to use these branded animated filters to target based on age, gender, interests and even time of day.

Breaking into gaming
In 2017, Snapchat made progress with gamified Snap Ads, where users swipe up into a branded game experience, and gamified sponsored lenses. According to Snapchat, 2017 saw a significant increase in brands launching game-style ads. Brands like Gatorade, McDonald’s, Mars, Hershey’s, Grubhub, Moët and Hollister worked with Snapchat to run branded games — ranging from trivia to choose-your-own-adventure games — in an effort to drive more engagement on the platform. Gamified ads average over a minute of engagement time when users swipe up, according to Snapchat.

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There’s not much to laugh about when it comes to airline travel during the holiday season, but Fox is trying to change that with the marketing campaign for its new airplane comedy, LA to Vegas. The network has launched a holiday-travel-themed campaign for the new comedy, premiering Jan. 2, about the crew and passengers who…
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The loss of confidence in online media could be the cinema industry’s gain.

At least that’s the hope of Digital Cinema Media, which sells ad placements at movie theaters to brands. Like publishers and broadcasters tried to do before it, DCM sees advertising’s transparency crisis as a chance to take some power back from online media.

The media owner launched its creative division earlier this month at the height of the latest brand-safety crisis, using the timing to position cinema as a safe haven of sorts compared to the disorder in online media, per The Drum. Advertisers are realizing that digital media “isn’t the be-all and end-all,” said Jeremy Kolesar, creative business director at DCM, pointing to a 10 percent year-over-year increase in the number of brands DCM worked with in 2017.

Cinema seems to be winning new advertisers. Ad spend on cinema rose 8.4 percent to £258 million ($345 million) in the U.K. in 2016, according to the Advertising Association and Warc, which predicts that figure to swell 12.6 percent to around £290.5 million ($389 million) in 2017. Growth is expected to slow in 2018, however.

To ease the slowdown, DCM must move closer to marketers. The creative studio’s mandate is to get DCM in front of ad agencies rather than media agencies in order to secure larger projects that aren’t necessarily adaptations of the TV spots it had become accustomed to producing in the past. “We’re moving from a relationship with media agencies where the briefing into our creative team can be as little as a 48-hour turnaround to a relationship with the creative agency and the client that could stretch over five months,” Kolesar said. “The creative agencies are more involved at 12 to 18 months, which means we’re able to talk about our media in a slightly different way.”

That revised pitch is split into four areas: technology, film content, film partnerships and content production. Cosmetics giant Max Factor bought into the idea early and launched in October a long-term partnership with boutique cinema chains Curzon, Everyman and Picturehouse Cinemas. Ending next June, the partnership involves the brand creating one ad each for four films due out over the next nine months, which started with “Murder on the Orient Express” in October. While media agency Zenith brokered the deal, Max Factor’s ad agency Adam&eveDDB worked with DCM’s team on the campaign.

The campaign is the largest of a handful that DCM’s studio has worked on to date, and there are “three or four biggish” ones on the horizon, revealed Kolesar. “By having that longer lead time to work on campaigns, it’s changing the way we talk about our media,” he said. “Because we know the film slate for the next 18 months to five years, we can start to talk to brands about building strategies around certain releases.”

But the studio won’t just be creating slick ads for upcoming releases or repurposing behind-the-scenes footage. It is also exploring how social listening could support campaigns. Kolesar would not go into specifics so early into the test, though he has already seen a “couple of companies that can offer the technology.”

With the latest films becoming a mainstay of social chatter these days, DCM’s top creative is keen to see how some of those conversations can be brought into its projects. Kolesar said that could range from using social listening to understand how cinemagoers use platforms like Facebook and Twitter to decide what films they see or targeting ads to certain theaters so people see comments about the movie they just watched.

Moving forward, DCM plans to increase its head count. Kolesar is the studio’s main employee, while around five other creatives across the wider organization are pulled into projects as needed. The studio’s size, combined with its new approach, means it will act more like a consultant — in theory. It has a network of production studios such as Recipe, which will take on the additional work.

Despite his admission that the transparency crisis is an opportunity, Kolesar doesn’t believe advertisers will suddenly start putting their digital spend into cinema. It’s more about winning larger briefs as a result of being closer to how the broader campaigns are conceived, he added. Kolesar said he doesn’t know “what other media are losing out” as a result of the greater spend coming into cinema, adding: “More advertisers are willing to put more money into cinema because they’re seeing that it’s working.”

Image courtesy of 20th Century Fox

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“For employers and employment agencies that want to exclude older workers, Facebook’s ad platform is a blessing,” the Communications Workers of America alleges.

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To the surprise of no one, Bud Light is extending its popular “Dilly Dilly” ads into a Super Bowl campaign with what it’s calling a “trilogy” of new commercials, beginning with one called “Wizard” that Adweek can reveal exclusively today. The “Dilly Dilly” catchphrase, introduced as a kind of toast in an amusing, medieval-themed Wieden…
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Diageo’s voice strategy is becoming clearer with the launch of a service for the Amazon Echo Show that shows people how to make cocktails with the drink maker’s brands.

It is the company’s first app in Europe for Amazon’s latest voice-controlled speaker, which launched last month with support from a handful of brands and publishers. Diageo was among the early adopters, intrigued by the addition of a screen to Amazon’s range of smart speakers, a feature Diageo believes makes the device perfect for the kitchen.

Rather than adapt an existing skill, the name for apps on Amazon’s voice-controlled devices, Diageo has created a new one for the Echo Show. The advertiser took the concept behind thebar.com, a site it launched in 2013 to tap into the trend of mixing drinks at home, and built a voice-controlled version called “The Bar.” The skill gives people three options: People can ask for a recipe and then be talked through the recipe; it offers cocktail suggestions based on user preferences such as sweet or sour; and it teaches people mixology techniques.

Ingredients for the cocktails can be saved to shopping lists that are then sent to the Alexa mobile app, where the user can buy the ingredients. The skill also gives users the option to purchase certain ingredients and 12 of Diageo’s brands, including Smirnoff, Captain Morgan and Johnnie Walker, by directing them to Amazon.

“Technology is changing the way we socialize in and outside of the home,” said Periklies Antoniou, new technology and media innovation manager at Diageo. “With the new The Bar skill, we’re tapping into the growing number of adults using voice-enabled devices to take them on a journey toward mastering mixology.”

Antoniou’s enthusiasm for the new skill reflects how quickly and aggressively Amazon has flooded the market with its range of smart speakers. Forty percent of U.K. households will own an Echo by next year, according to the Radiocentre. Wise to the possibilities that scale could bring, Diageo has cozied up to the online behemoth’s voice-controlled offering, so much that the advertiser was wheeled out during Amazon’s first upfronts to the U.K. advertising industry earlier this year.

Should the Echo device become ubiquitous in households, then it could potentially become a sales channel for Diageo, which has struggled with direct selling for years like most consumer goods companies. While Diageo’s latest Echo skill is focused more on brand awareness than e-commerce, the brand has previously talked up the latter’s potential on voice-controlled devices. A recent report in the U.K. from Accenture found that 60 percent of people want to use the Echo to help them shop, and 7 percent already do so.

Search will be fundamental to any full-fledged strategy Diageo concocts for voice-controlled devices.

There will come a time when many search queries won’t be “mai tai” in text form; instead, it will be “how to make a mai tai” as a verbal query, the company’s head of digital innovation, Benjamin Lickfett, has said. When that time comes, brands that exploit the most relevant conversational, long-tail search terms will be able to monetize voice searches, which is why Diageo is trying to have a plan in place before its rival brands.

Image courtesy of Diageo

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“Rolling Stone,” the magazine Jann Wenner started 50 years ago with a $7,500 loan from his family, closed a deal with Penske Media Corporation, sending Wenner Media’s value to $100 million and giving
PMC a controlling interest in the company.

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