The one thing you need to read
Instagram reaches 150m monthly active users / Instagram ads planned for next year
What’s happening: Facebook-owned Instagram has now reached 150 million monthly active users, adding 50 million in just seven months. For some context, it took 19 months for the network to reach its first 50 million after launching. With a rapidly growing number of active users it was only a matter of time before Facebook would want to begin sell ads.
Why it’s interesting: With these latest numbers Instagram should be a strong consideration for reaching relevant and new audiences with your brand’s comms. Even more so because it leads itself completely to visual storytelling, allowing you to make your existing assets work harder.
Platform News
Infographic: Vine facts, top tips and the advantages over Instagram video
What’s Happening: Vine, launching in late-January, opened up opportunities for brands to drive engagement with its post-integrated 6-second media format. As the infographic linked shows there is more to Vine that you might think.
Here are the top 5 tips (further info in infographic) to creating a successful Vine video:
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Use #Hashtags
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Create how-to videos that inform
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The distribution strategy is key to success
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Craft content to match call to action
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Promote Vine across all social channels
Why it’s interesting: Vine is still pretty new, and naturally understanding how it fits into a brand’s comms strategy is going to be a little challenging. Particularly with Instagram now allowing 15 second videos. However, there are advantages to Vine that should not be overlooked. Particularly how Vine videos sit in a tweet and that tweets featuring a vine are 4x more likely to be seen.
Creative uses of technology by brands
The British Red Cross uses Facebook data to make the viewer a witness to a stabbing
What’s happening: The charity’s ‘Witness’ app integrates with a viewer’s Facebook account and inserts information from their profile into the film, which features a young man being stabbed on a night bus while the viewer is a passenger. Facebook data is used to make the destination of the bus appear as the viewer’s hometown, and the character receives messages from the viewer’s Facebook friends while the story unfolds.
Why it’s interesting: By making the viewer part of the film, it makes the experience more compelling and immediate – a necessary requirement for a campaign like this that aims to highlight the importance of first aid skills. These lean forward ideas are extremely effective at getting cut through and motivating the viewer to take notice and act.
RPA create The Listening Cloud to visualise social-media conversations about its clients
What’s happening: Ad agency RPA created The Listening Cloud, a data-driven light sculpture that visualizes social media buzz in real-time using colorful LED lights. Installed in the company’s lobby, it glows different colors depending on where the mention came from (blue for Twitter, purple for Instagram, red for Facebook) and presents a playful way to visualize data. Here’s a how-to for anyone inspired to make their own for their brand – or brief BBH Build to create something even more awesome!
Why it’s interesting: This is one of many examples that demonstrate the fun to be had with data from the social web.
Socially connected experiences
Cloud Over Cuba: An interactive documentary to showcase how close the world came to Nuclear War
What happened: A cross-platform experience to showcase just how close the world came to Nuclear War, commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, produced by the JFK Presidential Library. Fans explore 15 in-depth chapters of the crisis, with over 200 archived images, videos and sound recordings. Each, can be automatically synced to your iCal so that in seemingly real time, you can be invited to the meetings, revealing step by step how the crisis played out through each of the 13 days… it picked up at Cannes too!
Why it’s interesting: This is a wonderful way of telling a story in a completely immersive and refreshing way. What I really find awesome is this gives viewers an opportunity to dive deeper into the narrative if they want to, an idea that could work for any brand wanting to extend their story beyond the TVC.
Guerrilla and Chalk 