Archive for June, 2013

I’ve been talking a bit lately about the ultimate brand question. That one question you can ask of a brand to determine its worth. And it’s a simple one. How did the brand make you feel?

This lovely little video from Apple captures that.

Amazing footage of the AC boats. Skip to 6.10 to be blown-away – she’s up and out of the water and they are driving her airbourne. Just amazing.

The Hashtag is well down the path to ubiquitous marketing use. One hashtag, all platforms and a common brand meme. Like it.

“If you are already using hashtags in an advertising campaign through other channels, you can amplify these campaigns by including your hashtags in Facebook advertising … Any hashtags that you use on other platforms that are connected to your Facebook page will be automatically clickable and searchable on Facebook.”

“Facebook and hashtags are two words social marketers absolutely must pay attention to,” Michael Lazerow, CMO Salesforce Marketing Cloud told USA Today. “The door is open for companies to better discover their customers’ immediate interests, creating the potential for increased real-time marketing based around ongoing pop culture, sports and other major events.”

Prior to the hashtag launch, Facebook also introduced sponsored, targeted posts in Newsfeed, another tid-bit of social ad prowess that it borrowed from Twitter. And we use the phrase “borrowed” pretty losely.

Related articles:

• Facebook finally introduces hashtags – maybe we’ll all talk a little more
• #Ready? Clickable Hashtags are Coming to Your Facebook Newsfeed
• Facebook Finally Gets Hashtags: How They Work
• Clickable Hashtags on Facebook
• Facebook introduces #hashtags, taking a page from Twitter
• Use Hashtags to Increase the Reach of your Tweets
• What a #copycat: Facebook apes Twitter with hashtags
• Introducing Hashtags on Facebook… #Finally!
• Facebook introduces hashtags; no details on other new tools
• Is Facebook #ready?

WPP’s moves into “big data” are a potential source of competitive differentiation. While other agencies are attempting to do this, none are attempting to nail it down at a holding company level. The potential for WPP’s agencies to share the insights and develop cross silo discipline solutions could be very powerful.

In short, “We’ll have access to behavioural data that Twitter has developed, which will be available to our media planning and buying business, to Kantar, and to our public relations and public affairs businesses,” Sir Martin Sorrell, WPP’s chief executive, told the Financial Times. Dick Costolo, chief executive of Twitter, said “marketers are leveraging the platform for brand insights, relevant real-time messaging, and customer research”. “This partnership will benefit clients by pairing Twitter with WPP’s world-class analytics, targeting, and creative capabilities,” he said.

While much of this data is available through third parties, getting that data into a consolidated useable form, and sharing across a network is a whole other matter. And doing it outside the confines of a media agency should broaden understanding of what the various holding companies can do with the data.

You can see how it works here.