As influencers increasingly create video content, what does this mean for brands?

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video must equate to millions. At least, that’s what social media users are banking on. The number of videos being created and shared across social platforms has soared in recent years.

Photo sharing platform Instagram has shifted its focus to video recently, with the Instagram Stories feature - and over on YouTube, 400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every single minute.

Platforms have been telling us for a while...

24 January 2020 | Branding

Using emojis for business communications and boosting customer engagement: A guide

Using images to communicate is not a new phenomenon. After all, images actually pre-date the written word – just think of cave people who painted murals on their walls to tell stories  of their battles and culture. The fact is, images can convey so much more than words; a single image can communicate a tone and emotion that is personal to the recipient.

For marketers, images and iconography have always been a fundamental component of the company’s brand, but this...

12 November 2019 | Branding

How Mastercard is leveraging its sonic identity – and evolving brand security in the process

In February, Mastercard issued a press release which announced the launch of what the company called its ‘sonic brand identity.’ The result was touted as ‘a distinct and memorable melody with adaptations across genres and cultures.’

Naturally, there was also an audio press release sent out where the tone was played (1:04) and further described as the ‘sound equivalent’ of the company’s red and yellow circles. “What you just heard was...

30 October 2019 | Advertising

The BBC’s Beeb shows why AI voice assistants are not yet ready for enterprise prime time

Opinion Last week, the BBC announced that it has begun work on a voice-enabled virtual assistant scheduled for 2020. Codenamed Beeb, the new virtual assistant is being seen as an alternative to Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home, with a focus on helping users find content on the British broadcaster’s services and being able to understand British regional accents.

This last part is important, because it indicates that even as far as we have come with voice technology,...

2 September 2019 | Automation

VRJAM and Agora partnership aims to provide sleek – and sustainable – VR event experience

The events industry in the UK is worth somewhere in the £40 billion area today. 2014 figures from BVEP put it just below that figure, while an AV Technology piece from last year spiked it at £42.3bn. 

This includes everything from the events themselves to travel costs - many readers will understand the 'on the road' mentality that comes with frequent executive international travel. But with climate awareness continuing to gain traction - Greta Thunberg...

26 August 2019 | Customer Experience

The fluctuating fortunes of Britbox and Netflix: What does the future of OTT look like for marketers?

Last week, Britbox finally nailed its colours to the mast, pricing its wide range of British content at a very reasonable monthly fee of £5.99 – a full £3 cheaper than Netflix’s most popular subscription. That announcement is just the latest news in a year of serious changes in the OTT landscape, including slowing Netflix growth, the upcoming Disney+ and Apple TV+ launches and more.

These developments are indicators of broad change in the streaming...

1 August 2019 | Advertising Technology

Why virtual reality needs to become the new reality for marketers

Virtual reality (VR), an immersive computing technology that submerges consumers in a virtual world, is predicted to completely transform the shopping experience. Goldman Sachs estimates that investments in VR, along with augmented reality, will reach a staggering $1.6 billion by 2025.

While brands are clambering to become part of the virtual environment, there is very little known about how to enhance the brand experience for all consumers and where to employ VR technology. Thus,...

22 July 2019 | Advertising Technology

Please stand by: Exploring the future of media and entertainment – and the VR, AR, and AI tech advancing it

It has been 83 years since TV hit UK screens, nearly 40 since Channel 4 broke the boundaries of a three channel TV service, and just over seven years since all television broadcasts went from analogue to digital. There is estimated to be 27,000 hours of domestic content produced a year at a cost of £2.6 billion.  But that’s just TV.

We all know that how we consume media and our entertainment has evolved more in the last few years than it had in the last...

10 July 2019 | Advertising Technology

Why marketers must be the keepers of their own content – or risk losing it

More marketers than ever are using video as a marketing tool, with the number rising from 63% in 2017 to 87% in 2019. This is unsurprising when you consider that research has found that viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to 10% when reading it in text.

As the demand on marketers to create digital content has grown, it has led to rapidly expanding volumes of large video files; as a solution, marketers often rely on platforms such as YouTube to host...

5 June 2019 | Content Marketing

The seven deadly vids: Video content to amplify and generate leads on social media

Today’s marketing departments are creating more videos than ever before – and with good reason as such content attracts more organic traffic from search engines, keeping prospects on websites for longer.

The figures speak volumes too as nearly 60% of executives said they would choose video over text content if shown both, and 77% rated video would as an effective content marketing tactic.

It’s therefore important to have video as...

9 April 2019 | Advertising