A client wanted a list of all the different interests which you can select on Facebook to refine a advertising campaign.
I am a woman on a mission. To raise the visibility of midlife women in the media.
Why?
We are a sizeable population, we make around 50% of buying decisions and we are IGNORED by mainstream media.
Midlife is the age from 45 to 70 where women are in their prime. We have life experience, we have worked, had relationships, lived life (a bit or a lot) and we still have about half our life to live. And if you just looked at the adverts on TV and print media you’d think we didn’t exist.
Women of this age group are invisible.
Well the media tells a story about women through the advertising produced and presented to the buying public. It runs something like this:
This ageism is hard wired into our society – young kids understand it – and it gets ugly when you realise the amount of airbrushing and photo editing that goes into published advertising and media. It’s dishonest. And although we may crave youthfulness, any decent marketing person will tell you that the advert has to be targeted to the right buyer. Who’s making the decisions?
Midlife women are.
If you have any media budget, if you select images for sharing on social media, if you are a product manager, a buyer or a journalist – try to find images that represent us.
Let’s make midlife women “Uninvisible”.
Hyundai is leading the way
When I first became aware of this trend, I started watching adverts to see how old the women were – and I found two with midlife women who are front and centre characters.
The perennial Briscoes lady (now 59) and still wearing the wig….
And Hyundai.
In May 2021 they released this advert for their new Kona Series II electric car.
How refreshing.
Hooray for Michelle Langdon Marketing Manager at Hyundai NZ. Go tell her how wonderful her work is.
Advocate, challenge when images for media do not line up with the age of your consumer – make it real, New Zealand.
We can make this change happen.
Tell us your story in the comments – we need more examples of brands leading the way to #uninvisible.
The top of the funnel is ready to be filled again.
It is imperative that all marketers restart advertising and early-stage communications.
We look at Google AdWords and the Google AdWords optimiser AI software.
Would you consider doing mini videos? We get good feedback from these ones.
The Superdrug campaign
Superdrug’s kinder and smarter campaign icons
If you have missed past episodes – here’s the playlist of Recession Marketing mini videos
WTF? That’s likely a thought running through many people’s minds as they hear that Facebook has just announced one of the biggest changes to the social media platform – ever.
With over 2.13 billion active users each month, there’s no doubt that this news has made a groundbreaking difference in the way that people and businesses use Facebook.
What’s the big news and what can we do about it? Below, we uncover what these changes are, how they will impact the way businesses use Facebook, and give suggestions on how you can adapt your Facebook strategy by creating meaningful content.
We will also share details of a seminar on how to stay up to date with the most popular social media platforms and their ever-changing algorithms.
Algorithms, that’s what. Complex algorithms are what determines your unique experience on Facebook. Your news feed is catered specifically to you – based on what you like, how you interact and even search history from outside of Facebook.
When it comes to using Facebook for business, many strive to create content that resonates with their audience. Competitions, giveaways, new products – these are all important business updates that are shared on Facebook everyday. Techcrunch reports that there are over 50 million small businesses that use Facebook’s Pages app. For many companies, Facebook is one of their key business assets.
However, Facebook has made some drastic changes that will affect business pages on the platform. On January 11th, 2018, Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook announced algorithm changes that may indicate the start of what Michael Stelzner calls a “Facebook apocalypse”:
As you can see, this is possibly one of the biggest changes that Facebook has ever made to the platform. Zuckerberg himself has even stated that he expects the market price will drop due to these changes. On the one hand, it appears that these changes are purely to improve user experience. But, it can also be debated that these changes are a move to encourage more businesses to turn to paid Facebook advertising to get the traffic they want. And, it’s highly anticipated that Facebook advertising costs will increase following the surge in advertising campaigns.
These algorithm changes will start with your news feed, but this is only the beginning. Likely, it will be an update rolled out across all Facebook products.
For businesses, there are a few changes that will invariably happen – something to take into consideration when adapting your marketing strategy to adopt this algorithm change.
For pages that thrive on short, viral videos (think LADbible), they’re likely to be affected the most. Bloggers will also see a hit in organic reach, as will pages that exist purely to share memes, quotes and ‘tag-worthy’ photos.
How to create meaningful content on Facebook
These changes all hold one key goal in mind: to promote meaningful interactions. It’s more than just getting your audience to tag their friends or liking a picture. Meaningful, by Facebook terms, involves interacting with friends, family and other users in insightful conversations.
Here is what will no longer work:
Basically, posts that exist purely to gather likes will be phased out from your news feed.
What can you do to create meaningful content?
This all seems fairly straightforward, but as Facebook continues to make these changes to more than just your news feed, it will be more important than ever to understand these each and every one of these variables that will be affected.
Ultimately, your audience on Facebook isn’t yours – it’s purely borrowed from Facebook. And now that Facebook has set the ball rolling, who is to say other social platforms such as Instagram and Twitter won’t follow suit?
We have a seminar coming up that will cover Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and even Snapchat. There will be an insightful analysis on the algorithms that prioritise content, and what you can do to stay ahead of the crowd when it comes to creating meaningful content.
Click the button below to secure a ticket.
Event info:
WTF Happened to your Social Media Traffic?
Date: Wednesday 18th April, 2018, 7:30am – 9am
Where: Ponsonby Community Centre, Glue Pot room – 20 Ponsonby Terrace
Cost: $30
With many services out there for marketers, producing content and getting it to your audience has never been easier. However, not all services are trustworthy. We recently came to learn about TopBuzz, a platform that has divided opinions.
A couple of weeks ago, we received an email out of the blue from TopBuzz, a content distribution platform, claiming to be ‘impressed’ by a video we did for a client. The email content was quite generic and seemed to be automated. TopBuzz said they were able to enlarge our video audience via their platform and we would be compensated for all the views we got.
A couple days ago, we received another email. This time, it was from a person claiming to be from this company, boasting about the number of active users and the number of views that all the videos get that are shared on their platform. She was very forward in her approach and encouraged us to become a ‘premium creator’.
Now, we did a little bit of research on these guys and it was scary to see what would have happened if we signed up with them.
We were never interested in using this platform in the first place as the video we created for our client was content produced for a niche segment, it was an hour long and was a face to face interview. Targeting a mass audience and making revenue off views was not on the agenda, therefore, using this platform would have been unnecessary.
If you are producing viral videos, pursuing avenues through social media seems to be a safer option. For example, with Facebook, there are various pages that are dedicated to redistributing content according to different tastes.
Nevertheless, it’s important to be aware of dodgy services like this so be sure to do your research before jumping in!
Sources:
https://medium.com/@attibear/should-you-gin-up-for-topbuzz-ca19d5c1edac
https://digitalfox.media/tech-rhino/topbuzz-5-big-problems-service/
I saw the Barfoot & Thompson’s advertising sponsorship of the Auckland World Masters Games and was stunned by the ingenuity of the imagery. Here’s a poster near my office.
Barfoot And Thompson sponsorship of World Masters Games
And this prompted me to want to find out more about the context for the campaign.
Barfoot’s Chief Marketing Officer, Jen Baird, kindly answered my questions and also introduced me to Joe Holden, the Creative Director.
Jen Baird, CMO, Barfoot & Thompson
Sponsorship has become a larger part of our strategy over the years – a large part of our business is residential property sales – most people do this every 5-10 years. We want to stay relevant in their lives when they’re not thinking about real estate.
Being involved in the community is key – we have always been very involved because real estate is about community and people. WMG was an opportunity for us to be hugely about this amazing place where we all live. Our over-arching objective is to make Auckland an amazing place to live, work and visit. We are an Auckland-only real estate firm. Bringing the event to Auckland is about us giving back to the City.
Our sponsorship helped WMG happen.
The brief was quite broad – this is the largest sponsorship that B&T has undertaken. The event fits nicely with our philosophy of supporting the local area and also sports – we have backed sport with sponsorship before.
We wanted brand awareness, and also to continue to build awareness of us as a strong community partner. We have a philosophy of being a family-run business. This is all about Auckland, a celebration of sport and Auckland tied together and made relevant for us.
We sent a full brief about what the WMG event was all about and what our sponsorship means to us as an organisation and what our goals are. It’s about celebrating the games and also the City and making the city amazing and creating great events that bring visitors here from overseas.
We felt that when the creative team came back with such as strong concept – we felt we didn’t need lots of iterations – it was so strong on its own and so we put everything behind it.
All the space has been booked by us. It was launched beginning of February with light touch digital – there’s more this month and again in April, it’s largely digital and outdoor media.
One of the things we’re excited about is an activation using a Cheer Squad – visiting competitors entered a draw to win their own “cheer squad” – we have 7 winners and they will have their very own squad to support while they are competing. … we did a Skype interview with the first winner, she’s a Professor from Yale University. She was entered in Softball with an Australian team.
The athletes who have won are competing in cycling, golf, hammer throw, triathlon, softball and 2 x athletics.
We are doing lots of local promotion with staff in our branches and local schools. One of the legacy goals is to get kids involved to try out sports. There are 42 venues across the region – we are also down at the entertainment hub at the Cloud. We’ve got a sports arena set up there, for try-outs for a load of sports.
And the medals are also branded in corporate colours, Blue and gold, blue and silver, blue and bronze.
[Watch out for Jen in her running shoes as she will be doing the 10k run from the Cloud to Orakei and back.]
Take a sneak peek behind the scenes of our World Masters Games campaign video! Each of the events in the Games has been represented here – can you find your sport?
Posted by Barfoot & Thompson on Tuesday, March 14, 2017
This was sold to us as the biggest sponsorship Barfoots had ever done. We needed to really reflect that as in the past these sponsorships have had ideas that have tied in with selling real estate. This time the brief was more open – the background to the sponsorship is that B&T love Auckland, and giving to the City, and enabling Aucklanders to benefit from the big events, which may not come here without their sponsorship. They did it in the past with the Triathlon World Wide Naming Sponsor for 2 years.
This is all about participation – not spectatorship. It’s a massive event and unless they’re participating the people in the street won’t know much about it. Awareness is mainly with the competitors but Day 1 on April 21st everyone is going to realise something massive is on.
We kicked around a lot of different thoughts – upfront normally when you brief a campaign it’s a minimum of three different executions. But we did come up with a lot of multi-execution ideas. So we struggled in a way – there are 28 different sports and sub-events within them. We couldn’t use ideas that only showed one sport because that would be ignoring 27 others; so multiple executions would not be possible.
We had different views of Auckland – Bean Rock as a shuttlecock and North Head was a cycle helmet…. but that iconic view of downtown from the water with the key things like Sky Tower and Vero Tower we felt that was the strongest one.
To do it well, we realised we needed to put all our eggs into one basket – it was a craft job and had to be done really well to work on any format – you get prolonged enjoyment by seeing more detail.
I’m really happy with the standard of the execution. There aren’t many jobs where you don’t have a thought about how to improve it afterwards. With this one we had a long time to do it and we had ultimate control and we could control all the variables
There was no photographic shooting – it was all done by 3D modelling. All the elements of the sporting equipment pieces were sourced as 3D models and skinned, lit and textured and coloured and logos removed. Or they were created from scratch. You can buy models of sports equipment e.g. Nike shoes – but it’s a rudimentary model and you have to put the colours and textures into it. So you start with that and build each one of them and then have the arguments about what goes where!
For example, the concrete texture in the front of the picture – we felt it should not be water. It’s not a photoshop collage, it’s a representation of Auckland but isn’t Auckland. So it’s concrete.
We got every sport represented – all 28. Some sports are covered off by one element in the image e.g. Cycling is also Triathlon and running shoes also cover a couple of sports.
Which were the hard ones to do? Rowing was a challenge for us (it was going to be a bike end-on as the Sky Tower but it didn’t look right) then we thought why don’t we use a sculling skiff? We couldn’t find a model of that – we had to do it from scratch. There were endless arguments about the Cloud – we used bike helmets which do approximate to the right shape even though they don’t look exactly like the City.
I hope you all agree this is a wonderful piece of work – congratulations to Barfoots team and also to all the competitors.
Auckland manufacturing firm, Cabjaks makes kitchen cabinets. They worked with Creative Agency Secrets for 3 months to improve their keyword natural search results, SEM and on-site keyword SEO.
Cabjaks Manufacturing kitchen cabinets
A “zero to hero” response in just three months demonstrates the success of our work with this manufacturing brand.
I listened to the FIR podcast #790 and found that Cluetrain has been updated!
Cluetrain Original
You want to know what to buy? The business that makes an object of desire is now the worst source of information about it. The best source is all of us.
The New Clues that directly relate to the practice of marketing. Numbered from the original. Read more
Christmas campaigns may seem like a gimmick, but they work. That’s because it’s a time of year where people are looking to buy and as a result, customers are far more communicative.
Hellmann’s Christmas AdvertPlanning early has many benefits. For example, you don’t want to get a campaign stopped behind bureaucratic doors and miss your chance to launch it at the best of times. If your campaigns are pre-approved you won’t miss those good opportunities to launch them when they come by.
Nothing says “viral campaign” like a relevant one that comes out as soon as a meme starts. Start planning your campaigns early, and plan multiple variations for different situations. Then all you need to do is keep your finger on the pulse throughout the run-up to Christmas period and unleash your chosen campaign when the best opportunity arises.
Here’re a few campaign ideas:
One things for sure, each campaign must decide on a clear goal. Review previous campaigns, check their strengths and weaknesses, then carefully plan out how you’ll support your campaign goals through action.
Christmas is a great time to develop customer relationships as well as just push sales. Use the increase of inbox opens and social media interactions to build your email lists and get more in touch with your customers. Outside of capturing emails you could also push feedback forms and surveys to capture behavioural data which can improve all your 2015 campaigns as well.
You could:
Make an impact and stand out from the crowd by doing something different. Implementing a wishlist on your website (EXTRA: can use data for targeted mailing!), personalising your promotions and running some exciting social media competitions are a few ways to have your company look both professional, and interested in its customers.
The question you need to ask yourself now is – “what’s the best Christmas campaign for my business”?
This should be as straight forward as going into a database and looking through campaign statistics. If you’re not doing this already, a simple excel spreadsheet and recording past campaign data should be your next course of action!
These opportunities should be periods around Christmas (start of advent calendars, last week before Christmas, etc). Try to find opportunities that can easily be related to what you offer as a company.
Carefully plan out each campaign with action lists and then make sure you’ve got the content ready to go for each action.
If your campaign is time dependent, schedule it and make an alert to remind you when it goes out. Once it is live, you should still have to take action (such as sharing your campaign via social media), so have that ready.
If you’ve created some reactionary campaigns for the holidays, make sure you’ve got ways of identifying when they can best be activated. We use Google Alerts to track conversations so that we can react to them, and it’s a great way for looking for that perfect campaign launch opportunity.
Once is all said and done, sit down and have a good look at the results of each campaign and how they went. This is very important as it will help you create more successful campaigns for the future!
Looking for fresh ideas and assistance on your Christmas marketing?
Drop us an email and we’ll be happy to brainstorm ideas for you!