Digital Connections – 360i Blog, Digital Marketing Agency

We’re excited to announce today that 360i has hired Adam Kerj as Chief Creative Officer, effective immediately. Adam joins as us a member of the agency’s executive team and will oversee 360i’s creative department. A pioneer in identifying and implementing big ideas that solve business challenges, Adam’s expertise and passion will expand our current capabilities to help brands connect with people in the digital age.

Prior to 360i, Adam served as Executive Creative Director and Founding Partner at Saatchi & Saatchi in Stockholm, Sweden. He’s a highly-decorated creative who has garnered more than 50 international industry awards in his career, including several from the Cannes Lions, CLIOs, New York Festival Awards, FAB and Eurobest.

Across your entire portfolio, what work are you most proud of, and why?

AK: I’m most proud of my work for Ariel, a detergent brand within P&G Nordic. The campaign, called “The Ariel Fashion Shoot,” was a classic product demo remixed for the 2012 audience. The shoot was the world’s biggest product demo in detergent history – and it was completely transparent. This meant that people could – for the first time ever – see that Ariel’s new stain-fighting formula actually worked as well as the brand said it did, because we washed the clothes in front of a live audience of viewers.

But what makes the campaign truly innovative is that we invited consumers to take part in the demo themselves by allowing them to take aim at premium designer clothes and stain them. To pull this off, we custom-built an industrial robot and armed it with lingonberry jam (a Scandinavian staple), chocolate sauce and ketchup. Then, we connected it to Facebook.

The results exceeded our expectations, as post-campaign awareness for Ariel reached an all-time high. To me, this campaign was a fantastic example of how we used a relevant idea to fuel conversations online. With very little paid media, we were able to own conversations online regarding detergent – proving that if you’re relevant to the consumer and facilitate a worthwhile value exchange, brands can create exciting conversations around any topic – even something as commonplace as detergent.

Of course, I also credit P&G for being so committed to change the way their brand was communicating to its consumers and for understanding the difference between being simply ‘digital’ and being ‘social and participatory.’ It’s no surprise to me that the campaign was recently voted one of the Best Digital Ideas of 2011 by Adweek, and continues to garner accolades in several global awards programs.

Continue reading our Q&A with Adam Kerj

Social media has had a way of disrupting industries over the past five years, with the world of fashion being no different. The unique operational cycles of luxury fashion labels (i.e. the time lapse between runway shows and actual product availability) are being challenged by a real-time environment where bloggers and socially savvy fashion enthusiasts can drum up interest in a designer or particular look overnight.

What’s more, the proliferation of consumer content on emerging platforms like Pinterest and Tumblr, and within social shopping sites like Polyvore, is changing the way designers view their brand identity. Labels previously exclusive and “closed” are becoming more open to sharing content across multiple social platforms.

Inspired by the SXSW panel entitled “Who Needs Fashion Cycle? I’ve Got Social Media,” this post outlines three key ways social media has disrupted the luxury fashion cycle as we know it, and what marketers in this space can do to get ahead of the trend to better reach their customers.

1. The real time web is speeding up the traditional fashion communications cycle, sparking consumer interest from the moment products hit the runway.
Ten years ago the fashion communication cycle was highly controlled. Fashion houses put on two major shows per year – private events for 1,000 to 2,000 industry insiders. Photographs from the shows did not reach the general public for six months, when they were seen in the pages of fashion glossies at the same time apparel was made available in stores. This communication flow aligned with the fashion operations cycle post-show, during which buyers and designers coordinated their orders and created the pieces over the next six months before going to market.

Read the full article »

In a video landscape twist, Hulu has made a move whereby its buying model will now more closely resemble that of TV. The platform announced this week that it will now only charge advertisers for video ad views that reach 100 percent completion rate. This is all tied to where the beacon resides on the ad – previously, it was fired at the initial ad play, and now it fires at the end of it. The change impacts both free and subscription (Hulu Plus) offerings.

Hulu ad unit for the Mini Roadster

The significance of this move is twofold:

1. Digital is setting itself up to play in the broadcast sandbox. Digital video companies are taking big leaps to structure their packages in a way that appeals to the broader landscape of “video” buyers. Hulu, and many others, are putting some serious skin in the game. This not only relates to their shift in a more buyer-friendly pricing model, but also in the expansion of content.

On Monday, the New York Times reported on Hulu’s plans to increase investment in original programming – content that will be pitched to the ad community today as part of the Digital Content NewFronts kick-off event in New York (see more coverage over on Adweek). Over the course of 13 days, in the closest resemblance to the broadcast upfronts that we as an industry have experienced to date, the leading powerhouses in the digital content space will showcase their programming line ups. The themes we should expect to see as the digital space tries to compete with its TV counterparts are an emphasis on content, quality and scalability.

2. We still have a long way to go towards standardization. The inconsistencies behind video pricing models and counting methodologies and the slow adoption of commonsense practices (standardized ad players, leveraging the interactivity of digital via ad choice features or charging only for completed ad views, to name a few) pinpoint a hurdle that is yet to be crossed. Google’s TrueView – announced as a test format on YouTube in late 2010 but only recently made official – adopted some of Hulu’s ad features by incorporating viewer choice into the ad experience. However, it also announced a unique “skip-ability” feature (user is permitted to skip an ad, after viewing for five seconds).

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You know those social symbols found across nearly every TV spot and program these days? As it turns out, people actually notice them. A recent Accenture study of US TV viewers found that nearly two-thirds of consumers have recalled a social media graphic while watching television, and one in three viewers have made the next step of interacting with social media after seeing a symbol.

A TV spot for “The Chronicle” prompts viewers to interact via YouTube and Twitter.

These findings are promising for brands actively marketing their social channels through on-air advertising, and even better news for TV networks and programmers — but the question remains: How can marketers move viewers from recognition to engagement?

First, let’s take a look at some of the key findings from the study:

• The greatest motivator for viewers to visit a social presence while watching TV is to obtain more information about a show or product. Scoring coupons and promotions/contests were also strong motivators, indicating that while consumers are “connecting” to brands via social channels, engagement and social interaction are not often what they are instinctively seeking.
• Demographics also factor into the propensity of a viewer to interact with social media while watching TV. More than 60 percent of respondents 18-24 said they have interacted with a social platform or app while watching; less than half of respondents 24-44 reported this behavior. This trend continues through the older demographics.
• Conversations around programming and sharing content were the least interesting action to consumers while watching TV. As digital natives, Millennials are comfortable connecting to brands via social, but they are still interested in receiving the same value as those twice their age. As viewers grow more accustomed to social’s on-air integration, it’s important to keep in mind that many times they are looking for added, differentiated or exclusive content that’s not a carbon copy of what they see on the screen.
• One of the most important findings from the study was that most people avoid interacting with brands via social during TV viewing because they are not aware of what they will get in return. Viewers want to know that liking you on Facebook, tweeting with a specific hashtag or voting via QR code will actually provide value to them.

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Today, we released a new POV on Paid and Earned Media: Building an Integrated Strategy.

As content across the social media landscape proliferates, it is becoming increasingly important for brands to cut through the clutter. Although brands are eager to connect with and engage consumers, industry findings estimate that fewer than 10% of a brand’s Facebook fans see content that is posted by the brand, indicating that brands can no longer rely on smart content alone to drive engagement and organic fan acquisition.  As a result, it’s important for brands to look to paid media as an integral part of overall community strategy.

This report outlines how brands can begin to think about a strategy that integrates paid and earned in order to maximize the opportunity across social channels.

View and download the full report »

When Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion this week, the immediate reaction – beyond a collective gasp at the price tag – was to question why the largest social network would invest so heavily in a simple, yet beloved, mobile photo sharing application. But as our David Berkowitz writes in MediaPost today, there should be no question why Facebook made this deal.

“Beyond any numbers and superlatives, what Facebook’s executives must have realized is that Instagram should never have existed. This should have been Facebook’s photo application all along. Facebook has more than 400 million mobile users, and any of them using a smartphone has to grapple with subpar photo sharing. Once Instagram fully integrated with Facebook, it became even more obvious that Facebook was far behind. As Business Insider put it, ‘Without photos, Facebook is toast.’”

The column continues to explain that Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram was really an acquisition of itself – or, rather, an acquisition of a functionality that Facebook could have very easily built into its service, but didn’t. “This acquisition once again reminds marketers how visual consumers are. Pinterest, Tumblr, and Instagram aren’t flukes; people enjoy expressing themselves via images,” writes Berkowitz.

You can read the full post over on MediaPost’s Social Media Insider blog. For more insight, check out some of our favorite quotes on the acquisition below.

Today we’ve released the second report in our Hispanic POV series, “Language Preference among Digital Hispanics.” Following the first report on Hispanic Digital Influencers, this report discusses language preferences among Hispanics in digital, and identifies innovative ways marketers can better tailor their efforts and be more discoverable by online searchers.

US Hispanics are a multifaceted and fragmented group with varying levels of acculturation, ages, psychographics, language proficiency and demos. As such, it’s important to determine exactly what target within the Hispanic audience your brand is looking to connect with and develop a campaign that speaks directly to them.

As growing population with ever increasing purchasing power and influence, Hispanics are searching for products, brands and information online in large numbers. To capture this demand, it’s recommended that marketers optimize their websites for keywords in Spanish and potentially even words that are commonly misspelled in English by Spanish speakers. These same considerations also apply to paid search efforts.

In this report, we provide insights into this growing market and take a deeper look into how to successfully reach Hispanics online.

View and download the full report »