Mike's Industry View - Issue #95
Creativity
Blimey! Brands get royal wedding fever — adage.com Brands like Campbell's, Dunkin' and Farmers Insurance try to cash in on the Royal Wedding craze with promotions, tweets and tie-ins.
Marketing/Advertising
Spotify hypes freemium upgrades with its largest ad campaign ever — www.fastcompany.com A new ad campaign focuses on increased personalization, which Spotify says makes its free version better for both users and advertisers.
The increasing influence of the word ‘influencer’ — blog.oxforddictionaries.com Good or bad, there is no denying the influence social media has on many of our lives, and with it has come a new type of marketing: the influencer.
Interestingness
Tech Addiction and the Business of Mindfulness — www.wired.com Meditation isn’t for you? These phone-free social media workshops promise to build the mindfulness right into your technology.
Wife got prized Picasso painting in divorce, hangs fake version anyway — nypost.com Sue Gross didn’t wait until she and Wall Street titan Bill Gross had finalized their split, swapping out a 1932 Pablo Picasso painting entitled “Le Repos” hanging in their bedroom with her own rendering. The original is expected to fetch as much as $35 million at Sotheby’s Monday evening.
Why There Is No Salt on Restaurant Tables Anymore — www.bloomberg.com
Salt shakers, once ubiquitous at fancy restaurants, have vanished. That’s deliberate, say top chefs, and there are a few explanations why.
Retail
The 17-Year-Old Personal Shopper Who Is Kitting Out Premier League Footballers — bleacherreport.com Seventeen-year-old Sam Morgan is unlike most teenagers studying for exams. While other kids work out-of-school hours sitting on checkouts at grocery stores or delivering pizzas, Morgan is supplying elite players with designer clothes and trainers...
Why Unmanned Stores Are About To Take Off In China's Retail Market Amazon, Alibaba and JD.com are all getting into the game, placing bets that unmanned stores will be the future of retail. But there are a few reasons why China, above anywhere else in the world, is uniqely suited for personnel-free shops to thrive. Here's why.
Video
Magazine publishers with video ambitions see YouTube as safer bet than Facebook — digiday.com
Fast Company and The Atlantic are among other smaller video publishers that are prioritising YouTube.
Publicis Media launches '6 Second Video' to focus on short-form brand video content creation to counter decreasing consumer attention spans — www.campaignbrief.com
Too little too late?
Platform News
Burger King just showed how valuable Instagram stories are for brands — mashable.com Burger King used Instagram stories to allow its followers to customize their Whoppers, and get free burgers.
The lowdown on Snapchat's new six-second unskippable ads — immediatefuture.co.uk
The platform's new ad format might be the best way to test your return on investment. Launching this week, the new six-second unskippable video ad format puts Snapchat firmly in the same ring as Facebook and YouTube, both of which already offer a similar advertising option.