Author: rssmasher

Bud Light is hoping Snap will be the right accompaniment for its two television ads on Super Bowl Sunday.

The brand plans to run three types of Snap Ads, including a Snapchat game and two different types of Snapchat filters. The work is part of Bud Light’s largest Snapchat campaign ever.

During the game, Bud Light will rotate animated filters of “Dilly Dilly” signs and clinking Bud Light bottles. After the game, Bud Light will run geotargeted filters based on the winner’s home city: The winning city will get a “Friend of the Crown” filter, and the losing city will get a “Pit of Misery” filter.

Most of the Snap Ads preview one of Bud Light’s trilogy of “Dilly Dilly” spots, including the new spot that will air on Super Bowl Sunday. Users can swipe up in these ads to watch the full commercial.

One of these Snap Ads is a 45-second interactive game called “The Battle of Beer Run,” in which a knight runs through a battle to collect Bud Lights for his townspeople. Bud Light began running the game on Snapchat roughly two weeks before Super Bowl Sunday. As with the other Snap Ads, a user can swipe up into a “Dilly Dilly” commercial when they are done playing the game.

Bud Light declined to reveal its Snapchat spend for Super Bowl Sunday.

“We chose Snapchat, as it is the right platform for millennial consumers,” said Margot Weiss, senior digital brand manager at Bud Light. “Our core target consumer for Bud Light is 21- to 24-year-old men and women who want to engage with brands through their mobile phone.”

But Snapchat might seem like an odd choice for a beer brand aiming to reach an audience of drinkers.

Alcohol brands, including Heineken and Sailor Jerry, have told Digiday that they have been hesitant to spend on Snapchat because of concerns about the platform’s ability to verify that ads are only served to people 21 and older. The platform won’t reveal the percentage of its users that are 21 or older, but the largest demographic on the platform is users between 18 and 24, which makes up 36 percent of the overall audience. Alcohol brands are only allowed to buy ads on platforms where 72 percent of the audience is over 21.

For Super Bowl last year, Bud Light launched a Snapchat game that got an average watch time of 108 seconds, and users spent 4,700 hours playing the game, according to the company. In 2017, Snapchat said it saw an increase in brands running branded games, which average over a minute of engagement time.

 

 

Anheuser-Busch is also running Snapchat Super Bowl activations for its other brands, including a Snapchat Lens for Budweiser and filter for Michelob Ultra.

The post Inside Bud Light’s Super Bowl Snapchat strategy appeared first on Digiday.

Facebook’s news-feed change didn’t catch The Vitamin Shoppe by surprise. The supplements chain was already at work on a new Facebook strategy that will see it adding more influencers to its roster and placing more focus on Facebook Live and groups.

So far, The Vitamin Shoppe, which has 1.3 million followers on Facebook, said it’s still seeing a “great deal” of engagement on the platform, but it’s taking additional steps to ensure its footing there in the future.

The Vitamin Shoppe sees enormous potential in Facebook Live, posting one Facebook Live video every week, but planning on doubling those efforts with the algorithm change, according to Lisa Chudnofsky, head of content and customer engagement. “We know Facebook has always favored Facebook Live from the get-go,” she said.

The main objective of Facebook Live for The Vitamin Shoppe, which has nearly 800 locations across the U.S., is to connect followers with employees at 20 redesigned stores that Chudnofsky describes as its stores of the future. These stores have communal areas where employees host workout sessions, health and wellness classes and taste tests, like with kombucha or protein pizza. These sessions are livestreamed on Facebook Live. It’s all part of the retailer’s strategy to be the authority on everything health and wellness, beyond nutritional products.

The Vitamin Shoppe will also involve more influencers in its Facebook posts. The idea is that since influencers maintain authentic relationships with their followers, content from or featuring them is less likely to get buried in the feed. On Jan. 1, The Vitamin Shoppe launched its largest influencer campaign to date called “Victory is Yours,” according to Chudnofsky.

The campaign features YouTube influencer Cassey Ho, who has 1.4 million Instagram followers and 1.2 million Facebook followers, and Noah Galloway, who lost his arm and leg while fighting in the Iraq War and has followings of 224,000 on Instagram and 137,000 on Facebook. These influencers appear in the retailer’s social posts and Facebook Live videos, which are designed to encourage dialogue in the comments section, according to Chudnofsky.

Chudnofsky said The Vitamin Shoppe is also building a health and fitness community of influencers it can use for future campaigns.

The Vitamin Shoppe is placing more emphasis on Facebook groups, developing between five and 10 groups around niche topics such as sports nutrition, healthy eating and bodybuilding, according to Chudnofsky. The retailer joins other brands that are creating groups because the algorithm that controls Facebook’s feed doesn’t apply to groups. At the same time, brands can serve more customized content in groups.

“Health and wellness is such a broad industry that if we can get it a little more granular, then we can offer specific videos, giveaways and exclusive coupons,” said Chudnofsky. “We all have different types of needs and goals.”

The post How The Vitamin Shoppe is adapting to Facebook’s algorithm changes appeared first on Digiday.

If you’re reading the headlines, the bitcoin bubble and crypto craze are having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week.

On Tuesday Facebook announced it was going to ban ads for coin offerings and crypto couching it as a move to cut down on scams.

Within the 24 hours around the announcement, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission subpoenaed exchanges Bitfinex and Tether, the Securities and Exchange Commission halted an ICO by AriseBank, and South Korea said it found $600 million tied to crypto-related crime.

But at the same time, stock trading app Robinhood announced the launch of commission-free trading of 16 cryptocurrencies on its platform later this month and Square, which had recently made bitcoin buying and selling available to a select number of Square Cash users, expanded the service to its entire user base Wednesday.

The fact is that for anyone that’s serious about their crypto company or their proposed ICO, Facebook ads don’t really matter. The removal of advertising from Facebook will certainly do something to slow these schemes down but there are other ways they’ll be able to get their message out; through Telegram groups — some by invitation only — Internet chat rooms, Reddit. Facebook advertising is clearly just about getting mindshare, said Sid Kalla, co-founder of Turing Group.

“Less technically serious projects might raise less money and thats probably good for the space,” he said. New projects without strong technical merit are coming up and raising a lot of money.” At most, “this would affect regular people that want to invest in ICOs without doing their research. Bitcoin’s value in lieu of the advertising that goes with it has nothing to do with Facebook ads. That’s true of most established cryptocurrencies as well.”

Read the full story on tearsheet.co

The post Reality check: Why Facebook’s crypto ad ban won’t affect cryptocurrencies or ICOs appeared first on Digiday.

New York magazine is refining its year-old membership program, New York by New York, with a bigger focus on food and drink events.

Launched in late 2016 as “insider access to extraordinary experiences,” New York by New York members got early access to sales at retailers, a newsletter with tips on how to thrive in the city and access to a private Instagram feed (which has since been made public).

There will still be special discount codes and early access to sales at retailers, but more emphasis on exclusive food and drink events, ideally hosted by editors of its Grub Street vertical. Earlier this week, for example, New York by New York members got together to eat an entire pig with food critic Adam Platt and Grub Street editor Alan Sytsma at Gramercy Italian restaurant Maialino.

New York is still selling the membership as a standalone product — it costs $99 for a year or $9.99 per month — but it’s now bundling memberships with other products. For example, it now offers a year of New York by New York plus an all-access subscription to New York magazine (which is being advertised now for $50) for $125.

These and other tweaks come as New York continues to grow its non-advertising revenue, particularly commerce. The magazine said the membership program was profitable in 2017, with just three full-time staffers devoting time to it, but it remains small. The magazine signed up “hundreds” of subscribers during a beta launch in late 2016, but wouldn’t say how many subscribers there are now.

The next challenge is figuring out how to market something New York’s readers are unfamiliar with.  “Honestly, this is the area where we’ve struggled the most,” said Camilla Cho, New York magazine’s director of business development. “I don’t think people are looking to New York by New York for discounts. Part of the goal [for 2018] is to actually learn as much as possible about what it takes to get a recurring revenue stream from your user base.”

During that first year, Cho and Alison Hutchison, an associate manager of business development, whipped up “around 160” offers for members, including VIP ticket packages to hit musical “Hamilton” and a private tour of The Richard Avedon Foundation led by New York’s design editor Wendy Goodman.

Cho will use the responses to those offers to make the program more structured. For example, food and drink events were a hit, so Hutchison is now responsible for putting together at least one exclusive food event per month.

The hope is that having recurring series will make it easier to communicate the program’s value to potential subscribers and include sales and marketing more. Last year, only one New York by New York event, a conversation between Goodman and the CEO of luxury designer Van Cleef & Arpels, secured a sponsorship, as part of a broader advertising buy across other parts of the organization.

The program’s team will now have regular meetings with editorial, sales and marketing to monetize and promote events. Some editors from New York’s verticals will have to participate in membership programs on a quarterly basis.

Along with the change in focus, the program also will get new marketing creative to reflect the focus on food events. Initial tests across a number of promotional channels, including Facebook, print ads in its magazine, newsletters and in-person promotion at events, haven’t yielded satisfactory results in sign-ups.

“What we need to do is refresh our market positioning, especially if we’re not getting the numbers we want,” Cho said.

The post One year in, New York magazine pivots membership program to exclusive events focus appeared first on Digiday.

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Facebook’s dominance in digital advertising powered another surge in quarterly profit, though it said users were starting to shave back their time on its platform as it tries to address critics claims that the social network has harmful effects.

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Meredith closed its acquisition of Time Inc. Wednesday to create a media company with 174 million digital US unique visitors – not far behind Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon. Meredith will triple its digital revenue by acquiring Time Inc., with projected digital revenue this year of $700 million. Digital will contribute 30% to overall… Continue reading »

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Microsoft Corp. took a $13.8 billion charge related to the new U.S. tax law but reported significant growth in its cloud operations, the business fueling the company’s resurgence.

Qualcomm Inc. entered into an expanded deal with one of its biggest customers and beat revenue estimates in its latest quarter even as it swung to a deep loss.

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Pandora said Wednesday it would shift resources and savings by investing in ad tech. The music streaming platform, which has fallen behind competitors in developing programmatic advertising solutions for buyers, said it will redeploy staff and to build ad tech and mar tech and expand into non-music content. Pandora declined to comment further. Read the… Continue reading »

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