M&Ms Offers Touchdown Dance Contest For Super Bowl Return

BY

After M&Ms’ three-year Super Bowl hiatus, parent company Mars seems to want its fans dancing about the brand’s return. The campaign offering: The M&Ms Super Bowl LII Dance Contest, which invites social media users to create and perform their own touchdown dance while holding packages of M&Ms candies.

Entries up to 15 seconds in length must be uploaded to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram and tagged with #MMSuperBowlLIIDanceContest to qualify. Dances will be judged based on entertainment value, humor and originality, with the first round of voting taking place on Thursday. After four rounds, the winner will receive a “Party Pack” consisting of a large football-shaped chest filled with M&Ms candy and other branded products worth $150.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bdh9ffNDyXe/?taken-by=mmschocolate

M&Ms’ video promoting the contest has been viewed over 13,000 times across social media channels to date.

For football fans, the touchdown dance is a long-standing tradition performed by members of a team responsible for scoring a touchdown. By inviting young audiences to participate on social media, M&Ms is connecting with them on an emotional level and encouraging them to tune in to the Super Bowl February 4.

A 30-second M&Ms commercial will air during the first quarter of Super Bowl LII, although details have yet to be revealed. The press release implies a focus on the brand’s characters, each based on a different color or flavor of M&M candies.

The M&Ms brand currently has six such spokescandies, each with his or her own personality. In 2012, the brand created a Super Bowl commercial called “Just My Shell” to introduce Ms. Brown, an intelligent brown candy voiced by singer Vanessa Williams. When Ms. Brown arrives at a party, Red—the red M&M—mistakes her for being naked and responds by ripping off his candy shell to dance.

The following year, Red sang Meat Loaf’s “Anything For Love” while doing things for singer/acress Naya Rivera (Glee) like paint her nails—before revealing what he wouldn’t do, like get inside a piñata or allow himself to be eaten.

2014 was the last year M&Ms appeared at the Super Bowl, this time with a spot called “Delivery” in which Yellow is delivered to a dinner party—blissfully unaware that everyone wants to eat him.

Mars may have taken a three-year Super Bowl break with M&Ms, but its Super Bowl presence has remained consistent with its Snickers and Skittles brands. Last year, actor Adam Driver (Star Wars: The Last Jedi) hosted a live commercial for Snickers with a Western theme. M&Ms will replace Snickers on the Super Bowl commercial roster, as the candy bar will not be featured this year.

Priced at more than $5 million in 2018, Super Bowl commercials have gained a reputation for their emotional impact, whether that be through humor or tugging at the heartstrings. Other brands planning commercials for the big game include Hyundai, Avocados from Mexico, Budweiser, Bud Light, Coca-Cola, Doritos, Pringles and Stella Artois.

Taylor Swift’s Social App Cuts Out Music Marketing Middlemen

BY

Taylor Swift wants to create her very own social network with the launch of The Swift Life, a new Instagram-esque platfrom that focuses on the star songstress and allows fans to see behind-the-scenes footage, images of her at work and all-in-one access to the thoughts and news from their fellow Swift enthusiasts.

She joins a legion of other celebrities like Kim Kardashian West, Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj who have cashed in on their recognizable faces and released their own branded apps. However, as others have emulated popular mobile games, Swift is abandoning high scores and flashy graphics for a straightforward social platform, perhaps hoping to eliminate previously proven music marketing tactics across digital channels.

If the Glu Mobile-designed social app takes off, Taylor Swift will have a chance to completely control her public-facing persona, bypassing third-party publications to market her albums and tours.

The Swift Life isn’t just an Instagram knock-off, either. Fans can earn Swift-themed emojis, dubbed Taymojis, by completing in-app challenges. The impatient and wealthy can bypass this process with in-app purchases, and can pay extra to get access to a Taymoji that supposedly guarantee Swift herself will look at their post. While other celebrities, like Kardashian West, have created their own emoji, gif and sticker sets tied in with existing social networks, Swift’s take on the trend is only usable within her own app.

This isn’t the first time that Swift has sought to control access to her music—she partnered with Ticketmaster in August to give exclusive concert tickets to fans who completed a variety of hype-generating, sales-increasing tasks. She also continues to delay the release of her albums on Spotify, pushing her biggest fans to the artist-controlled Tidal service if they want day-one access. It’s not clear yet how her music will be incorporated into The Swift Life.

Only time will tell if the app actually garners any major traction, and even so, its replicability for other brands seems dubious. Even brand faces as recognizable as Colonel Sanders lack the power of Swift’s cult of personality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f24IrRsf-lQ

Facebook Fights Low-Effort Engagement Bait, Emphasizes Importance Of An Authentic News Feed

BY

In the past few months, Facebook has been overrun by “engagement bait”—posts with minimal actual content that beg users to tag a friend or like if they relate to a general statement. Starting this week, Facebook will begin to demote these posts that attempt to game Facebook’s News Feed algorithm, and penalize people and Pages that repeatedly produce them.

This update will adversely affect Pages that repost content with baiting text, hopefully driving more content to original creators. Brands that hope to rank well in News Feed will be forced to organically drive engagement, rather than just beg for it.

“To help us foster more authentic engagement, teams at Facebook have reviewed and categorized hundreds of thousands of posts to inform a machine learning model that can detect different types of engagement bait,” Henry Silverman, operations integrity specialist at Facebook, said in the announcement. “Posts that use this tactic will be shown less in News Feed.”

Additionally, Facebook will begin taking direct action against Pages like EpicLOL and UNILAD that use engagement bait in the coming weeks.

“We will roll out this Page-level demotion over the course of several weeks to give publishers time to adapt and avoid inadvertently using engagement bait in their posts,” Silverman added.

According to Silverman, this update will not demote all posts that explicitly ask for engagement, like circulating missing persons reports or raising money for causes, just ones that are attempting to game Facebook’s algorithms. For now, the feature is only rolling out to English-language posts, though Facebook’s News Feed guidelines page promises that other languages will be covered by the update beginning in 2018.

Facebook has declined to make specific guidelines available for fear of Pages acting in bad faith to continue exploiting its algorithm, but given the rapid spread of engagement bait posts, and clickbait posts before that, it’s only a matter of time before the next reach shortcut springs up. Nevertheless, this marks the second Facebook update in the last week attempting to clean up its News Feed.

“Page Admins should continue to focus on posting relevant and meaningful stories,” Silverman said. “Moving forward, we will continue to find ways to improve and scale our efforts to reduce engagement bait.”

 

Facebook Lets Users ‘Snooze’ Bad Brands, Adds Mid-Roll Ad Breaks

BY

Brands beware: Facebook’s latest platform update may throw a wrench into your engagement metrics. Starting next week, users will be able to “Snooze” any person, page or group they choose, temporarily hiding their posts from the News Feed.

“One of our core News Feed values is giving people more control,” writes Shruthi Muraleedharan, product manager at Facebook, in the announcement. “We’ve heard from people that they want more options to determine what they see in News Feed and when they see it.”

The Snooze feature is another incremental personal curation tool—like a less-severe Unfollow. Pages that get Snoozed are hidden from the Snoozer’s News Feed for 30 days, and they’re not notified of the lost views.

For brands, this update puts further importance on producing content they know is relevant, as the incremental Unfollow can hurt viewership and engagement without affecting a Page’s likes or follower numbers.

This comes just a day after significant changes to Facebook’s News Feed ranking algorithm, which will give preferential treatment to Pages with active audiences and repeat viewers.

“With this update, we will show more videos in News Feed that people seek out or return to watch from the same publisher or creator week after week,” writes Maria Angelidou-Smith, Facebook’s product management director. “For example, shows or videos that are part of a series, or from partners who are creating active communities.”

Additionally, Facebook is changing its Ad Break settings, only adding mid-roll video ads at the 60-second mark to videos longer than three minutes. Previously, all videos over 90 seconds were eligible for Ad Break placement, with ads appearing at the 20-second mark.

This change marks a further shift on Facebook’s part toward longer-form video content, and also means that ads displayed in the middle of videos will reach more-invested viewers more likely to sit through the ad than click away. Brands that take a part in Ad Break buys will be able to track both impression and CPM metrics at the video level as well.

Facebook also announced that it will begin testing pre-roll ads for sought-out (outside the News Feed) videos next year, promising six-second slots similar to YouTube’s offerings.

https://www.facebook.com/facebook/videos/10156872367266729/

Snap Lets Brands Develop Their Own AR Activations With Lens Studio

BY

Just days after Facebook announced the public beta of its augmented reality development tools, Snap has done the same with Lens Studio, allowing brands to design and distribute their own AR activations within the Snapchat app.

Brands can now use Snap’s free Lens Studio application to create their own placeable World Lenses and placeable 3D objects like dancing hot dogs and beer salesmen. Once the Lens is done, the creator receives a Snapcode for the Lens that they can share on their own channels, or choose to place it as sponsored Lenses programmatically.

For Face Lenses, Snapchat’s selfie filters, such as Zynga’s poker overlay, options for brands are less expansive. Snap limited access to its Face Lenses to seven studios: AvatarLabs, Fishermen Labs, Haus, MediaMonks, North Kingdon, Trigger Global and VidMob.

In an interview with AListDaily, VidMob CEO Alex Collmer said that Snap worked with each studio to train them with its development kit and ensure the same level of quality as its own in-house team.

Previously, advertisers had to work with Snapchat’s editorial team to produce Lens content, which meant that Lenses were limited to paying customers. Now, brands can produce AR content and distribute it themselves with Snapcodes, potentially cutting the platform out of the revenue picture, at least in part.

Ushering in a new age of community-generated content for the platform may well cancel out any lost revenue from outsourced Lens creation, however.

Collmer said these publicly available tools will improve Snapchat’s usage amongst its young user base.

Snapchat’s Lens features are its most potent draw for advertisers. The app has been falling behind the likes of Instagram and Pinterest when it comes to potential influencer partnerships. By expanding its creation tools, Snap is playing to its strengths.

For brands looking to take advantage of these new possibilities, there’s no time like the present. The best way to learn what works best is to start and keep experimenting, Collmer said.

To Resonate, Influencer Marketing Can’t Just Borrow Interest

BY

As the year comes to a close and brands jostle for position for top of mind among gift-givers, social media influencer marketing may seem like a sure thing to make an authentic connection with consumers. However, holiday gift-giving may not play to the strengths that make influencers so potent.

“It’s borrowed interest. We used to be harder on ourselves as an industry, trying to do good work, trying to avoid borrowed interest,” Rick Bursky, an advertising professor at USC, told AListDaily. “Influencers are just the new version of [celebrity] spokespeople. I’ve never gotten any great results out of influencers.”

The Cannes-winning Bursky, whose career spans work across agencies offering creative direction for top brands, offered that “as a rule, I would recommend against [influencers], but come up with relevant ones. Come up with something a little more interesting.”

A potential fix for the issue is to stop treating the medium as the message. According to Bursky, using influencers is similar to running a TV commercial—it may garner plenty of views, but it still needs to grab attention on its own merits.

“If you’re selling baby powder, get a baby to do it,” he said. “You spend money and you’re buying clicks, you’re buying eyeballs, the same way you would buy it on TV or in a magazine.”

Marketers have long posited that partnerships with popular social media accounts (even ones belonging to pets) pose a panacea for advertising fatigue, especially among younger consumers. A survey by Linqia found that in 2017, 86 percent of marketers used influencers. Almost all of that group claimed their efforts were effective, despite three quarters reporting difficulty actually tracking the return on their investment.

Part of this enthusiasm comes from equating activity by high-profile influencers with peer recommendations.

“Social media is like digital word-of-mouth,” said Mindy Pankoke, a product manager for Experian Marketing Services. “Leverage that digital word-of-mouth to engage those high influencers, delivering messages to them that resonate so they will be more inclined to advocate for your brand.”

Word-of-mouth is vital, especially around the holidays. Personal recommendations are the largest factor in making gift choices, with 48 percent of respondents valuing input from their peers, according to a survey conducted by Pollfish made available to AListDaily. However, many Americans don’t see high-profile social media users as their peers. Just 12 percent claim to value celebrity and social media influencer endorsements.

Though interest in influencer marketing has skyrocketed in the past year, Google says the increasing saturation may actually work to its disadvantage.

“Maybe it works, but I don’t think it’s brilliant marketing—it’s just expected,” said Bursky. “You can’t bore people into buying your product. You can’t look like everyone else and say what everyone else is saying and expect people to think differently of you.”

According to recent FTC guidelines, all endorsers, even influencers on social media, must disclose their affiliation with brands if they’re given any incentives to mention their products online. This kind of disclosure lumps brand-influencer partnerships with sponsored posts, which 67 percent of millennials claim they’ve never clicked on.

This potentially bodes poorly for the future of a group whose appeal came from a higher level of perceived authenticity than the celebrities brands used to seek endorsements from.

Just 21 percent of millennials claim that celebrity purchase behavior has any effect on their own, and the increasing focus on paid influencer sponsorships are eroding that group’s credibility as well. Among those ages 17 to 37, 40 percent reported trusting an influencer less after seeing them participate in paid sponsorships.

As the Fyre Festival debacle earlier this year demonstrates, influencers can be highly effective in certain areas. According to research by The Shelf, ROI on social media partnerships is highest when it comes to experiences—food, drinks and travel—while holiday shopping trends more toward clothing, electronics and toys.

To stand out in an ever-crowding marketplace and reach groups that are actively trying to shut advertising out, Bursky suggests putting a little more faith in creatives, even if it means taking risks.

“You can crunch data in a million ways, but still, someone has to have an idea before you put something out there,” he said. “If you want to be noticed, be brave.”

Instagram’s New Follow Hashtags Feature Gives Brands More Social Options

BY

Instagram has introduced new tools to help users find interesting brands and vice versa. Starting today, users can follow hashtags.

“Following a hashtag is just like following a friend,” Instagram said in an announcement made Tuesday. “Now it’s even easier to stay connected with the interests, hobbies, passions and communities you care about.”

Rather than requiring users to search manually for hashtags to keep abreast of specific topics, the photosharing service now creates pages for topics, populating them with “top stories” that its algorithm curates. When users follow hashtags, they will see the latest top posts in their feed, just as if they were following another user publishing posts. Additionally, Stories including the hashtag will appear in the following user’s Stories bar as well, and a user’s followed hashtags will appear in their profile.

The new engagement method grants brands additional ways to reach photo fiends who haven’t followed their official social media accounts yet, but it comes with some caveats. Hashtag additions to the feeds of followers are algorithmically generated, and because hashtags can have multiple valid meanings, users can mark posts in their feed as irrelevant to them.

Because of this, brands that use the new feature irresponsibly can find themselves shut out from it entirely, and ultimately, the update will influence how brands use hashtags on Instagram from here on out. Because posts now easily reach audiences well beyond an account’s followers, social media managers need to doubly ensure their posts are relevant to the hashtags they include. The addition of topic following may shift the social-spend landscape as well, at least in part away from popular influencers to popular topics.

Like Spotify did with its discovery features, Instagram is giving users the ability to discover more relevant content without ever having to leave the app.

“Following hashtags is just the beginning of how we’re giving you the tools to discover and be inspired by our community,” said the Instagram announcement.

Now that users can follow hashtags, Instagram has begun to sort the wheat from the chaff within individual topics.

Safety In Focus As Facebook Unveils Messenger For Kids App

BY

After releasing a tepid set of advertising principles and announcing a $50 million donation fund, Facebook continues to build public trust in the face of its growing crisis of confidence.

Latest up is Facebook Messenger Kids, an all-new product that the social media platform claims will help parents keep children under the age of 13 safe online—and not just another way to garner more early adopters.

Loren Cheng, Facebook’s product management director, said Messenger Kids is a standalone app “that makes it easier for kids to safely video chat and message with family and friends when they can’t be together in person.” The app will work the same way as Facebook Messenger and is currently only available in the United States and on iOS. It will be released on Amazon and Google devices in the coming months.

“Today, parents are increasingly allowing their children to use tablets and smartphones, but often have questions and concerns about how their kids use them and which apps are appropriate,” Cheng said in the announcement made Monday. “Messenger Kids opens up a new world of online communication to families.”

Messenger Kids needs to be linked to an existing Facebook account, presumably one belonging to the parents, and the administrating account has to approve any added contact before the Messenger Kids user can speak to them. Messenger Kids does not include any ads or in-app purchases, meaning that parents needn’t worry about mysterious credit card bills and marketers needn’t worry about accusations about targeting messages to children. The app is also Children’s Online and Protection Act compliant, which is less of a feature as it is a legal requirement.

Despite the lack of in-app advertising or monetization options, Messenger Kids is still a powerful marketing tool. Facebook is selling itself, offering, in essence, a demo of the real deal to children that its terms and conditions bars it from interacting with. If popularly used, Messenger Kids will build a stable of early adopters for Messenger itself, stealing market share from the more-popular-among-youths Snapchat before it even has the chance, legally, to reach out to them.

 

https://www.facebook.com/facebook/videos/10156805537206729/

Facebook Expands Support For Donations, Nonprofits

BY

If Facebook’s advertising principles were just vague gestures at what it hopes people want to hear, the results from the second Facebook Social Good forum mark genuine efforts to “put people first” and support cause marketing efforts.

Naomi Gleit, Facebook’s vice president of social good, has revealed a list of concrete policies to help organizations, communities and individuals, including a $50 million donation fund, removal of fees for nonprofits and feature support for charitable groups.

New Charity Features

Facebook now offers nonprofit organizations several new features, applicable to efforts from fundraising to support services.

The simplest feature is a new API that allows charities to sync outside fundraisers, allowing them to receive donations directly from Facebook in addition to other platforms. The feature will be available to 500 nonprofit organizations by Spring 2018.

https://www.facebook.com/facebook/videos/10156800308136729/

Facebook is also partnering with organizations like the Red Cross and NetHope on its Community Help service launched earlier this year. Now, these groups will get access to help requests by the Facebook community, providing them with more information in the case of a disaster or crisis.

“This data will help organizations coordinate information and response resources as fast as possible,” said Gleit.

In a similar vein, Facebook is now launching a mentorship service to connect nonprofits with people in need.

“Our goal is to expand these tools to help connect people around a variety of causes like addiction recovery, career advancement and other areas where having someone you can count on for support can make all the difference,” said Gleit.

Social Good Updates

Facebook is also updating several of its existing social good features, starting with the elimination of nonprofit fees. The social media giant will no longer skim some off the top from user donations, allowing 100 percent of funds to funnel to the respective charity.

The site’s blood donation feature, first launched in India this September, is expanding to Bangladesh, allowing non-profits to notify nearby donors when they create blood drives.

Lastly, Facebook is expanding support for nonprofit and personal fundraisers to Canada, Austrailia, Europe and New Zealand.

These changes, in addition to marking real efforts by Facebook itself to support social good, allow companies to more easily host donation campaigns and other cause marketing efforts.

“We are constantly inspired by all the good that people do on Facebook and are committed to continuing to build tools that help communities do more good together,” said Gleit.

Snapchat Update Splits Users From Publishers, Ads Unaffected

BY

Snapchat promised investors that it would launch a major redesign update earlier this month and has now followed through, separating people from publishers, splitting social from media. The company’s ad products will not be affected, meaning that Stories ads, Lenses and filters will all function as they have in the past.

In a blog post released today, Snapchat promised that it is departing from the integrated-content approach taken by Twitter, Facebook, Instagram—every other social network—blaming it for the fake news crisis specifically and social performance-caused discontent in general.

“This means that the Chats and Stories from your friends are on the left side of Snapchat, and the Stories from publishers, creators and the community are on the right,” the post reads.

For the confused users, Snap’s co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel released a 62-second video outlining the changes, but for the most part they’re self-explanatory. In essence, Snapchat is just moving friend Stories from the Discover tab to the Friends tab.

Despite Spiegel’s language about moving away from traditional social media business practices, other changes in the Snapchat update see the company falling further in line. The company will begin to algorithmically sort both its Friends and Discover pages for users on an individual basis, something that Facebook and Twitter have done for years.

Though the blog post promises that Discover content will continue to be reviewed by real humans, this algorithmic filtering of content has been attributed by many, including Bill Gates, to be the source of the spread of “fake news” that Snapchat blames on “blurring lines between professional content creators and your friends.”

It’s no secret that investors have expressed concerns over the app’s usability, and this is likewise not the first time that a Snapchat update has implemented technology long used by other social media companies.

This update only further brings to light Snapchat’s ongoing identity crisis. While Facebook just yesterday promised to provide sponsored content as indistinguishable from user posts as possible, Snapchat is widening the divide between communication and community. Is the app a photo-sharing service or a video-content delivery platform?

“Separating social from media has allowed us to build the best way to communicate with friends and the best way to watch great content,” the blog post reads. “And, as always, Snapchat opens to the Camera.”

According to Spiegel, the answer is both, though the ties that bind them together are tenuous.