AnimojiKaraoke

It didn't take long for people to find a fun use for the new Apple animated emojis!

And then we proceeded to waste half our day. #animojikaraoke #iphonex #queen #bohemianrapsody #carriedaway pic.twitter.com/4TBBg6qQKS

— Mia Harrison (@ManxomeMia) November 4, 2017

Dell's Spider-Man Game in Times Square

Play along with your phone at the poster side in Times Square, New York.

Play Spider-Man Scramble LIVE in Times Square now. Look for the Inspiron 15 Gaming laptop. You can’t miss it. #SpiderManHomecoming pic.twitter.com/nQRyvzHbIm

— Dell (@Dell) June 30, 2017

Great use of a gif in their tweet!

Krispy Kreme's 'Talk Like A Pirate Day' Giveaway on Snapchat

I love this - sadly I think it's happening in the US only.

This campaign will run on 29th September, to tie in with the bizarre 'Talk Like A Pirate Day' which was created in 1995:

"In celebration of Talk Like a Pirate Day, which falls on September 19 this year, Krispy Kreme is inviting customers to dress up in their finest pirate gear to receive one dozen free original glazed doughnuts. Qualifying costumes must include three pirate-themed items, such as a bandana or eye patch.

If individuals do not own such gear, they can simply visit a Krispy Kreme store to access the chain’s custom Snapchat geofilter, which can be used to digitally adorn their outfits.

The filter features a pirate hat, parrot and sword.

Consumers must then show their Snapchat selfie with the accompanying filter to any in-store associate to receive a free set of a dozen original doughnuts."

Source

I think it's a great use of both location (you've got to be in a Krispy Kreme to get the filter), couponing (one of the first give-aways I've heard of on Snapchat), and you can bet that the pics are going to be shared far and wide, as will pics of people eating the free donuts!

Deliveroo feeds the Pokemon Go players in London

Seemingly everyone is playing (& talking about) Pokemon Go

It's not yet possible to buy locations in the UK - although it will come soon, and McDonalds has paid for 'Gyms' to be located at 3,000 of its restaurants in Japan - but some companies are using guerrilla tactics to capitalise on the craze.

Why are we on a mission to feed the Pokemon gyms across the land? #GottaFeedEmAllhttps://t.co/kdN7tQMqPZ

— Deliveroo (@Deliveroo) July 25, 2016

For example, Deliveroo, the food delivery people, are taking out food to popular gyms, and giving it out to players when they tweet the #GottaFeedEmAll hashtag - with a different restaurant each day

A Wild Deliveroo Appears! We're out feeding Pokemon Go gyms in London. Tweet #GottaFeedEmAll + location to lure us! pic.twitter.com/h3lpam6Sf7

— Deliveroo (@Deliveroo) July 25, 2016

See some happy customers here:

Thank you @Deliveroo for yesterdays #Poke lunch 😍 #GottaFeedEmAll pic.twitter.com/iNjPuBKfTS

— Alvin Chen (@alvinch3n) July 26, 2016

& here

Thank you #GottaFeedEmAll pic.twitter.com/AGwZq4lovr

— イチゴ (@Yukan00) July 25, 2016

Brands & Google Cardboard

Virtual Reality is all the rage in some circles, with Oculus Rift finally coming out at the end of this month (it's fully sold out as far as I know), but for me the real sign that it's taking off is that mass market brands are getting involved, with their own versions of 'Oculus Thrift', the Google Cardboard.

Google Cardboard costs only about £10, and uses your existing phone but with special VR apps.  The experience isn't as good as Oculus Rift, but whenever I've shown it to friends at my home they've immediately gone to Amazon on their phones and bought one.



Last month I saw that Coca Cola was using multi-pack packaging in different ways to make virtual reality viewers -



Earlier this week McDonalds unveiled a video of a viewer made from a Happy Meal box - called, appropriately, Happy Goggles.

More examples as I find them (but you have to admit that both Coke and McDonalds doing something very similar is a great endorsement!)

Inferring boredom from mobile behaviour

One of my trends for this year is ‘Telepathy’ - how AI and machine learning makes it possible for devices to learn how people are feeling and what they want.  Another great example of this – the Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, now infers mobile engagement of its readers.  If they’re not scrolling through the story a bar emerges at the bottom of the story offering other stories that might be more interesting.

It’s early days, but I’d expect to see many more examples like this

Jeep uses Vertical Video at the Super Bowl

Last weekend one of Jeep's Super Bowl ads deliberately only used 1/3 of the screen - so that it could easily be re-purposed for 'vertical' viewing - i.e. on mobiles, held normally.



Full story here

Snapchat sponsored lenses for the Peanuts movie

Lots of fun - these apparently were available in the US for the opening weekend of the film.

It's pretty hard to measure what impact these would have on ticket sales, but they're going to spread the word about the film!

More here

Using Snapchat for location-targeting

There's a great example of location-based targeting in AdAge, showing how P&G used it to promote a special Star Wars edition of its CoverGirl cosmetics, only sold in Ultra stores in the US.

P&G created special filters for photos that could only be used near the stores, and was able to track sales by missing out some stores so that they could test (potentially) exposed and unexposed shoppers.  No results are published, but it's a great illustration of what can be done.

"Snapchat offered something else that made it attractive to P&G: geo-targeting. P&G was able to set up geofilters around a majority of the 868 Ulta stores across the country stocking the Star Wars line. When people went to post a photo or video to Snapchat within a certain proximity to the stores, they could place a branded overlay, or filter, atop the post so that anyone they shared it with through Snapchat would see the cosmetics line as well as CoverGirl's and Ulta's branding.

[...]

For the CoverGirl campaign, P&G received three statistics from Snapchat: 1) how many views its ads received 2) how many times people used the branded filter and 3) how many times people swiped over to see its branded filter when posting to Snapchat vs. the number of times people actually used it, which Mr. Rose described as akin to the ad's engagement rate.

In order to correlate those numbers with in-store sales, P&G had to isolate a few things. It limited its campaign to Snapchat only and didn't run those ads around every Ulta store in order to create a control group. And the campaign only featured two versions of the creative, one for each of the collection's two product lines. As a result, P&G was able to cross-reference sales between the stores it advertised and the ones it didn't and could drill down to see how many more sales of which of the collection's two product lines the geo-filtered stores generated, which could then be attributed to the Snapchat campaign."

I think that Snapchat is one of the most distinctive new channels to emerge in recent years - like Twitter and Instagram it's unlikely to be mistaken for anything else, and it has its dedicated fans.

Full story here

Star Wars uses landcape video on Instagram

Star Wars is (I think) the first user to use landscape video on Instagram (as opposed to square video).

There has been an awakening... #StarWars #TheForceAwakens

A video posted by Star Wars (@starwars) on Aug 27, 2015 at 10:00am PDT

It's part of Instagram's new (possibly controversial) support for full screen, portrait and landscape pictures.

More examples here


Instagram Video in Landscape - Examples from Instagram on Vimeo.

Follow that, Vine!

Instagram's new clickable 'Carousel' ad format

A New Way for Brands to Tell Stories on Instagram from Instagram on Vimeo.

This is pretty huge news, I think:  Instagram is launching a new ad unit, where advertisers can show multiple pics (slide from left to right), plus - crucially - a clickable link.

Until now Instagram has only allowed one clickable link, in the profile page, to try to deter spam accounts and comment spammers.  The new ad unit allows a clickable link to a web page - you can see how this could be very effective for advertisers.

This is likely to be US first, and then rolled out elsewhere later.

More here

Plus - Pinterest is also looking at a 'Carousel' ad feature.

Carlsberg's #BarBandits in-pub game

New from Carlsberg is this in-bar game:


#BarBandits by Carlsberg from Konstellation on Vimeo.

Carlsberg beer taps were wifi-enabled, to that they could connect with a large screen in the bar.  Patrons would upload an Instagram picture with the tag #BarBandits and the name of the bar.  Your picture would then appear on the screen in the bar, and when the bar staff pulled the Carlsberg tap, a 'fruit machine' style game started; if your pic came up in a run of 3 you won a free pint.

(But you have to overlook the line 'if there's one thing that makes the bar a bar it's the Carslberg beer tap'...)

(& the fact that if you look for #BarBandits on Instagram there are only 148 pics...)

Snapchat's Discover

Yesterday Snapchat launched their new 'Discover' feature - daily stories from a collection of media partners, including Yahoo News, Mail Online, Cosmopolitan, Vice, MTV, Comedy Central, CNN and more.

When you open the tab and tap on an icon, you get about 5 stories - swipe down to get more of the story, from right to left to get a new story, and up to close.

Stories can include video or text.  The Yahoo News feed, of example has Katie Couric presenting news stories.  Items are quite 'tabloid' - the Mail has stories about The Kardashians, and also US-focussed - the New York blizzard for example.

The providers vary by country.  In the video above it shows that US has ESPN and Comedy Central, which we don't get in the UK (rights reasons, presumably), but sport is covered here by Bleacher Report.

It seems to work seamlessly, and I'm sure will get lots of traction.  You can also see brand feeds integrated - maybe Coca Cola for The Olympics next year, for example.  I'm not sure what the deal is with the channels - who pays who? - but I'm sure this will become clearer.

Update - the channels can sell ads, and share revenue with Snapchat, according to AdWeek:
"Snapchat has been working on Discover for months with major media companies to plan their channels, and there will be advertising on them, according to sources. The media companies will be able to sell ads and share revenue with Snapchat, sources said.
"They're going to have publishers posting daily content to micro-sections of Snapchat that can be monetized," said a top digital ad executive with clients who have been pitched on buying ads in Discover. "[If] Maybelline wants to advertise on the Cosmo section, they negotiate with Cosmo."

It completely changes the Snapchat experience for me - few of my friends use Snapchat - and will probably greatly add to the experience for regular users.

It also puts Snapchat up against Facebook and Twitter more than ever before - it's now a place to go on your phone to find out about what's happening in the world, and not just for messaging.

(It also shows how seriously Snapchat is being taken for Mail Online to be a partner, because it's only a year since they were much more negative about Snapchat)

Read all about it here

Coca Cola's Spotify Jukebox with Blippar

A promotion from the UK.  'Blipp' any can ok Coke with the promotion, and it opens a Sotify playlist on your phone with 50 current UK hits



A nice partnership between Coke, Spotify & Blippar - full info on the Blippar blog

Heineken's @wherenext local discovery service

This is a fun idea.

If you want to know where is 'hot' locally, you can tweet @wherenext with your location - e.g. '@wherenext Chelsea' - and it will tell you places nearby which are being mentioned in social media.

It also works on desktop or mobile through this site http://openyourcity.heineken.com/#/en-gb/wherenext/venues - see screen grab

It's a fun idea, but clearly it depends on the level of data being produced, which depends on the existence of people like me tweeting their social, food and drink experiences.

It's also clearly game-able, and many of the most savvy venue owners are actively trying to encourage people to post on social media while they're out.

#PowerParkPic WIN £500 this week by sharing you best pics of #ThePowerOfSummer and #RiversideFeast with us https://t.co/QiweSUQbKU
— Street Feast London (@StreetFeastLDN) July 14, 2014

It also comes down to whether you trust machines (I'm assuming that this is automatically generated) or local experts to curate the best of what's on, for example to tell you in the screen grab that The Lukin is a far better place to go to than The Green Man.

But...  It's a good idea and I suspect that that there will be many more shots like this fired in the 'local' war before we find something that works reliably.  Well done to Heineken, who are pioneers in experimenting with location.

McDonald's Augmented Reality World Cup App

About 5 years after we first swooned to this, is augmented reality finally going to go mainstream?



Get the app here (iOS & Android only)

#LastSelfie - The WWF on Snapchat

A very nice idea from the World Wildlife Fund in Denmark - the animals are as transitory as the pictures, unless we save them.  Although it is clearly preaching to the converted, since you have to follow them first on Snapchat to get the pics...

#LastSelfie

Android Wear

I'm sure this Google ad for a *mahoooosive* watch is going to look hilarious in ten years time when they show it on TV clip shows, but it's got some nice examples of how you could use a smart watch



In other Google news, the ChromeCast went on sale in the UK today (& I've ordered mine already)

Burberry on WeChat for the #AW14 Runway Show

Burberry, always very innovative in their media use, have created a special way of interacting with their Autumn Winter 2014 runway collection at Lndon Fashion Week:



Because WeChat is a messaging app, not a social network, it's very tailored to the individual.  Burberry's connections on WeChat can send them a message, and get personalised clips and content in return.  It's an automated process, and shows the sorts of things that you can do through messaging that are different to what you would do with social networks.

Full story here (ignore the bit where they describe WeChat as 'a mobile-based social network)

Nokia's Robotic Photos in Turkey

Crowdsourced Robotic Photography from Carat Turkey on Vimeo.

Colleagues in Turkey have done a very neat thing for our client Nokia.  To promote the 41 megapixel camera in the Lumia 1020, they have set up a phone on a robotic arm in Istanbul, and let Facebook fans take photos.  7,000 photos were taken in the first week alone.

It's quite hard to follow the instructions as it's all in Turkish, but you can have a play with it here

& see examples of the photos in the video at the top.

Nice work!