Ford Inspires Viewers to Start Their Engines with its “One-Tank Adventure” Video Ads on Yahoo.com

Our “Ad of the Week” challenges you to chase your dreams with a little help from Ford in these stories of personal courage.

How far can you get on one tank of gas? Far enough to reach your dreams, with a little help from Ford’s fuel-efficient Fusion, Focus, and Escape. That’s the premise of Ford’s “One-Tank Adventure,” a custom video program running on Yahoo Screen throughout December.

The ads share video stories about ordinary people with extraordinary passion. In this week’s edition, we see a dancer, comedian, and fitness competitor each take advantage of Ford’s impressive gas mileage as they embark on road trips that take them closer to realizing their goals.

The 970x250 billboard on the Yahoo homepage drove viewers over to Yahoo Screen to watch the videos. Here’s how it worked:

Starbucks in China makes money by renting its couches

Well, this is interesting. Rather than offering some local variation on the latte, Starbucks is gaining the market share in China by catering to the uniquely Chinese need for space. Smart push into a foreign market, and especially the one that doesn’t even like drinking coffee.

Have you seen the Festive Van?

I am an absolute sucker for smart stunts, and Burberry certainly delivered one this season. It’s Festive Fan is making rounds around London, bringing surprise gifts to lucky winners of sweeps that took place on Twitter in the early December. In addition to copiously Instagraming, Pinning, Tweeting and Facebooking Festive Van’s movements, Burberry releases some pretty cool brand content every day of the campaign. Christmas countdown is on!

Sony’s stealthy approach towards interactive augmented reality

Through luck or foresight, Sony appears to be converging on something of a home technology miracle – but to see their approach clearly we should first step back and take a look at the development of 3D.

Do we believe in 3D yet?

We had 3D video content for a long time, it just wasn’t good enough to become more than a novelty. A few years ago I caught a screening of The Creature from the Black Lagoon in the original old-school anaglyphic (red/blue) 3D. While it was an interesting novelty, it was clearly not a compelling  enough experience to beat movies in 2D and colour.

Despite it’s naysayers, the modern 3D cinema experience has gained so much traction that on any given trip to the multiplex you’re almost certain to find at least one new 3D release or another, and the box office takings continue to be respectable; the business case for cinemas to upgrade their projectors conveniently boosted by also including an upgrade to digital, killing two birds with one stone. It seems that audiences are prepared to accept the costs (financial, but also the inconvenience of wearing the glasses, not being able to tilt your head, and a slight reduction in brightness) since the result is (usually) sufficiently impressive. The fact that the conversation has moved on to the quality of the 3D (or lack of it, as seen in the hasty post-production processing 3D of the recent versions of Alice in Wonderland and Clash of the Titans) is surely a good sign for acceptance of the medium. Designer and prescription versions of the glasses also suggest that we are at the next stage of technology adoption.

On other screens, the field is still nascent. Predictably, the first consumer version of autostereoscopic 3D, with it’s look-no-glasses magic, is due to appear on a small screen (to make the cost bearable) designed for a single fixed-position viewer (as is at required by the technology), backed by an experienced player in innovative interfaces: the forthcoming Nintendo 3DS.

In television, active shutter 3D at first seems to be a strange proposition: each viewer must have a pair of active shutter glasses, which will seem expensive in comparison to the well-established polarisation glasses used in cinemas and available for some 3D TVs. On the other hand, the advantage is that many 120Hz televisions are already able to produce active shutter 3D imagery. Despite the perception of being uber-early-adopter territory, 3D televisions are effectively already here.

Then there’s the equally amazing fact that a few months ago Sony rolled out a PS3 upgrade to support 3D, removing another hardware barrier – 3D players are already here, in the form of 38 million PS3 consoles.

Meanwhile, in the console wars

Here’s where things get really interesting. Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony are all pushing for new modes of interaction for the games console. Nintendo took a huge gamble but secured an early lead with the Wii in 2006 (remember how the name first sounded to you and you’ll probably experience a flashback to just how crazy the whole idea seemed at the time).

Microsoft claim to have achieved interface nirvana with the entirely controllerless Kinect. Even the oft-cited screens of Minority Report needed a peripheral to operate, although it remains to be seen if it is as incredible as it seems, and accuracy remains a question.

Given the above, Sony’s decision to back what is widely seen as just a more accurate version of the Wii’s system seems a bit baffling. Being a PS3 owner myself, and curious to understand what Sony is thinking, I recently picked up the Move Starter Pack myself.

The answer became abundantly clear as soon as I tried the demo of Tumble, a very simple stack-em-up knock-em-down game. Your movements of the controller – including depth and rotation, which feels somehow much more impressive than movement in the plane – are mapped to an on-screen version that can pick up each brick (see image at top). It’s an impressive technological trick, but it then immediately demonstrates the next problem to solve: there is no depth perception, and you have to rely on a virtual shadow that indicates exactly which part of the playfield is directly below the object you are holding.

And so it suddenly becomes clear that Sony has brought all the ingredients together for interactive augmented reality. The 3D TVs are already here, the players are already here, and with the Move we suddenly have our 3D controller, which means the hardware for proper augmented reality in the home is pre-installed, just waiting for the right software. The final ingredient is the active shutter glasses, which simply paired with 3D viewing may seem expensive and clunky, but I suspect that image will fall away if you can put them on and then see yourself holding a lightsabre and interacting directly in a 3D virtual environment.

The fact this only works within a field-of-view that includes your TV screen is a limitation, certainly; and the question of whether or not all this can actually be used to create compelling games or usable interfaces remains to be seen – but we can rely on Nintendo to begin exploring this space intelligently with the 3DS, possibly followed by Apple, since the tablet form factor is the natural successor in autostereoscopic 3D.

Instagram Ads Work, Advertisers Say

On Nov. 1, Instagram began running ad campaigns from 10 advertisers, including Adidas, Burberry, Michael Kors, Ben & Jerry's and Levi's, among others. The Facebook unit Thursday released results from the latter two advertisers plus two unnamed advertisers. Among the findings: There was a 32% incremental lift in ad recall per campaign for people who were repeatedly exposed to a particular campaign versus control groups. That means if you saw an Instagram ad for a new product, like Ben & Jerry's Scotchy Scotch ice cream, you were 32% more likely to remember that product than those who had not seen the Instagram ad. There was also a 10% incremental lift in brand message awareness per campaign for people who saw an ad or ads compared to those who didn't.

Levi's also reached 7.4 million people during a nine-day period, targeting consumers aged 18 to 34. Ben & Jerry's reached 9.8 million people in the U.S. over eight days, targeting people aged 18 to 35.

To put that in perspective, Levi's has about 155,000 followers on Instagram. Running the ads let the brand reach an audience about 47 times as big. For Ben & Jerry's, which has 334,000 followers, the ads got in front of an audience about 29 times larger. Levi's also saw a jump of about 20% in its follower count since the ads started running. Reps from Ben & Jerry's could not be reached for comment.

Since Instagram and the advertisers aren't saying what they've paid for the ads, determining ROI is impossible. A study by Sales force earlier this year found that Facebook Sponsored Page "Like" Stories were selling at a CPM (or cost per thousand readers) of $4.58.

A Facebook ad partner says the 32% is a solid number and should be encouraged. However, he cautioned that the one reason the ads worked is that Facebook kept meticulous control of the quality of the ads. When more advertisers come on board, it will be more challenging to maintain that. Nevertheless, monetizing Instagram users, who skew younger than Facebook users on average, will be a top priority for Facebook in 2014 as the platform struggles to keep teens engaged and from migrating to other apps, most notably Snapchat.

ulie Channing, head of digital for Levi's, says she thought the novelty of the ads probably boosted some results. " .

We suspected these ads would attract more attention regardless of the content, given their newness.That's partly why we didn't prioritize engagement as the primary performance metric out of the gate," she says. "Our focus was on metrics like recall, which reflects our success in capturing the attention of the user. It's doubtful this effect will decline over time, because the key to high recall is Instagram's ability to take over a small screen with a message that is fully integrated into the content being organically consumed by the user."

Marketers scratch their heads as nail-product category goes bust.

Nail products were the big hit of beauty in recent years, with stunning of more than 20% in both 2011 and 2012. But the surge has suddenly come to a halt, hurting results for the whole beauty business. “The overall nail category can’t sustain the accelerated growth it enjoyed in the recent past,” said Coty CEO Michele Scannavini on an October earnings call. She cited a 4% decline in the category in the third quarter compared with a 21% increase in the same quarter last year. Coty, the biggest nail-cosmetics player, wasn’t alone. L’Oréal and Revlon got chipped in the crash, which appears to have intensified in October and November, when nail-polish sales fell 10% and 13% for the four weeks ended Oct. 26 and Nov. 23, respectively, according to Nielsen data from Deutsche Bank. Category sales were $814 million for the 52 weeks ended.

Consumer Edge Research analyst Javier Escalante offers a simple explanation. “It was a fad,” he said. He noted that the biggest drop has been in “special effects” products such as crackletop coats rather than basic nail polish. Google Trends show search volume worldwide and in the U.S. for “nail polish” peaked in July 2012. This year’s July seasonal bump ran 16% below last year’s levels in the U.S. Last year’s sales gains pushed nail polish past lip products for the first time in annual sales, according to IRI data. But that could be a short-lived victory if Google search results are any indicator. In November, searches on “lipstick” surpassed those for “nail polish” in the U.S. for the first time since May 2009.

Overall, Consumer Edge reports that the U.S. beauty market has slowed from 2% growth in the first quarter to 0.9% each of the past two quarters and down 0.5% in October. Nail products and beauty appliances, such as curling irons, are primarily responsible for the slowdown, Mr. Escalante said. The question is: Why? Third-quarter U.S. gross domestic product and November unemployment data came in better than expected, as did comparable- store sales results from several leading retailers in October. L’Oréal Chairman-CEO Jean-Paul Agon in reporting sales results last month blamed the U.S. beauty-sales slowdown on people shifting spending to cars. But Consumer Edge Research data show L’Oréal unduly hit by retailer inventory cuts in the wake of disappointing beauty results, as its shipments significantly lagged behind its U.S. mass retail sales the past two quarters. Sephora and Ulta, the two hottest U.S. beauty retailers, are still scorching. Both reported strong double-digit U.S. growth in sales estimated at more than $2 billion each. Ulta, whose sales are harder to track by analysts, saw sales rise 22% to $618 million for the quarter ended in November. Industry executives say both retailers favor newer and niche brands, so their share gains may be weighing on established players.

"Make it simple. Make it memorable. Make it inviting to look at. Make it fun to read"-ADVERTISING

It’s likely not going to come as a surprise to you to read nearly everyone knows how to click past banner ads, watch the required five seconds of an ad before skipping it to go on to a video, click out of pop-up ads, and fast forward through commercials during television programs.

Combine that with the fact that we’re spending more and more time on the social networks and this year proves to be an interesting time for communicators.

Native advertising is a term you’re going to hear a lot about this year and it’s going to affect how you create content. You already see some of this through Promoted Posts on Facebook and Sponsored Tweets on Twitter because many PR professionals are charged with both. Now the lines between advertising, communications, and marketing blurs even more.

Examples of Native Advertising

Native advertising integrates high-quality content (what I’ll refer to as pull marketing vs. push marketing of the traditional mediums) into the organic experience of a given platform. This means the content is so complementary to the user’s experience on the platform, it doesn’t interrupt the flow. People are willing to comment, like, and share because it feels like it belongs there. For instance, Jay Peak, a ski resort in Northern Vermont, asks skiers to tag Instagram photos that best exemplify what they love about the mountain. It’s user-generated, visually compelling content. Of course, there has to be a separate strategy for native ads, themselves, but as communicators we have to think about how we create content that integrates with our sister disciplines.

Implement Native Advertising

To implement native advertising, we have to think about a few things:

·         Do our users trust us?

·         Does the brand have integrity online?

·         Who is the best person (or team) to implement this?

·         Do we need journalists, designers, and media buyers on our communications team?

·         Should we outsource some of the content creation in order to keep things fresh consistently?

Too often, organizations use the social networks to push their messages out, like they’re accustomed to doing through traditional methods. Native advertising requires a complete shift in thinking and it won’t be easy…particularly with those clients or bosses who are used to leaving messages in the marketplace for a year or more.

Today you can’t leave a message out there for five minutes, let alone an entire year. Some of you may already be doing some education around how to be social and engaging on the social networks.

Take that a step further in 2013 and implement native advertising into your communications programs.