Tag: Trends

Trending from G/L: Facebook gets ready to launch Facebook TV

Geile/Leon Marketing Communications

Trending from G/L: Facebook gets ready to launch Facebook TV

Trending Now

Last week, Bloomberg reported that Facebook was back on track for releasing Facebook TV, rumored to release later this month. In other words, the company is about to take on user-generated video content giant, YouTube. Shocking? I think not. What is shocking is how long it’s taken a rival to take on the behemoth. Facebook’s rounded-up their fair share of social dynamite over the past few years, including Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Facebook Live and most recently, taking a page from SnapChat’s ever-engaging, ever-addicting, short-lived video/photo messaging content via Instagram Stories and Facebook Stories.

Image via Variety

So what can we expect from Facebook TV? Ridiculously targeted content and world domination. Not necessarily, but you can count on a mix of scripted and user-generated content, that thankfully (at least for now), will not be featured on your News Feed. Facebook’s impressive 2 billion users can catch fresh content on Facebook’s TV designated page. The company aims to create higher-end content compared to YouTube, but supposedly it’s not competing with video producers such as Netflix, HBO and Showtime…sure you aren’t Facebook, not this month.

Facebook’s newest endeavor comes on the heels of the company’s push toward longer-form entertainment and tackling an over-crowded News Feed filled with advertising, as well as incorporating ads into Facebook Messenger. Facebook is funding a set of original programs intended to give the company a slice of the super-sweet $70 billion television advertising market.

Facebook originally expected the project to be ready about a month ago, but it has taken longer than anticipated and further delays could occur, according to Bloomberg.

Now, this new TV venture does not come without its constraints. There’s a risk that Facebook’s users won’t necessarily spend as much time scrolling through Facebook’s News Feed if they start watching long-lasting videos via Facebook TV. “That’s going to have an impact on impression rate growth,” said CFO David Wehner. “So there is, in that sense, a cannibalistic effect of sort happening there.” Indeed advertisers, how will we survive without our traditional News Feed impressions? Video content advertising via Facebook TV, am I right?

We’ll be staying tuned for updates on the company’s latest project and any advertising opportunities that come with it.

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Trending from G/L: Ads in Colombia Sell Peace

Randy Micheletti
VP, Director of Brand Strategy

Trending from G/L: Ads in Colombia Sell Peace

Advertising

So let’s face it. When you think of advertising, you usually think of highly egotistical, Mad Men-style executives, or a bunch of overconfident hipsters sitting around their offices thinking of ways to push products on people. And yes, some of that is true. But in Colombia, advertising’s being used to save a country and its people.

It’s the power of changing minds that’s being used to try and put an end to a 50+ year war that’s killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions of others. Yes, advertising is being used to help stop a revolutionary army hell-bent on overthrowing the government.

“This gives us the ohance to apply our skills to something that is fundamentally important to us, to our kids, to our country. We created campaigns and TV commercials that were all build to convince guerillas to surrender and, as important, to help the Colombian people accept them back,” Jose Miguel Sokoloff, Co-Chairman and Chief Creative Officers at MullenLowe SSP3 said in a statement.

Here are several campaign videos that show the amazing work that Sokoloff and his team are doing – and talk about results that truly count:

  • Over eight years, 18,000 guerilla fighters have put down their weapons and came home.

  • Negotiations between the fighters and Colombian government have started

  • The overall energy and spirit in Colombia is back again. Per Sokoloff, “If you had been there 10 years ago and you go today, you would say, this is a completely different planet.”

This quote really sums it up nicely:

“You have to find a truth in what you’re saying,” Sokoloff says. “And when you get there, when you find something, that’s something that you can actually hold onto and you can actually communicate, that’s the salvation.”

Pretty cool, right? Let us know if you have anything awesome you’d share with our team!

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Trending from G/L: We are All Going To Die

Dave Geile
Creative Director Managing Partner

Trending from G/L: We are All Going To Die

Brainstorms

If trending products like this one continue to be invented, we are all going to die of muscle atrophy. I present to you the Honda U3-X Personal Mobility device. Personally I would feel ridiculous riding around on this thing. But if someone doesn’t put their foot down (pun intended) and take a stand, this kind of lazy contraptions will become the norm – and life as we know it will be extinguished.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8IoQoprBXk

Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for technology and I admire this technology a great deal. I suppose I’m more upset in how it is presented and how it’s major contribution to mankind is demonstrated. In this new product video, we see perfectly healthy, capable people mounting their personal mobility device to get together to go over some office information. They wave at each other as they pass in the hall or admire and discuss art in a gallery. Huh?! The video even touts the benefit of being hands free so you can carry stuff! Here’s a news flash: walking allows for the same benefit!!!

More info on the device:

Honda’s U3-X was cleverly developed by pursuing the concept of “harmony with people” and with its size and weight, it will clearly mix comfortably with pedestrian traffic, though Honda will be conducting extensive testing in a real-world environment to verify and refine the practicality of the device.

The design of the U3-X places the rider on the eye level zone of other pedestrians so that it as friendly and non-threatening to fellow footpath users as possible, while also making it easier for the rider to reach the ground from the footrest without stretching.

Like the Segway and Hands Free Transporter, the U3-X’s speed is adjusted by shifting body weight, though the U3-X adds a whole new dimension in that it doesn’t just go backwards and forwards – it goes sideways, thanks to an ingenious omni-directional wheel system which Honda has dubbed its “HOT Drive System” which is short for Honda Omni Traction Drive System.

Foot reconstruction, knee replacement, hip surgery…now ya got me. But the inability to get off your health butt and move across the room is not what Honda should be broadcasting. If this trending item is our future destiny, we are all going to look like the Wal-Mart people shopping from a mobile cart. Not because of their inability to walk, but because of their crushing weight!

Sorry to be so upset about this…I need to go sit down. I just wish I could go get a cup of coffee while doing so.

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Trending from G/L: Time Travel Maps

Ben Schwab
Creative Director

Trending from G/L: Time Travel Maps

Brainstorms

How bored are you right this second? Do you currently find yourself tossing pencils upward in an attempt to harpoon the office ceiling? Maybe you’re on the couch binging this year’s Yule Log on Netflix for the second time while scrambling to complete last minute online gift shopping. In the midst of these activities you may begin to wish you had the ability to time travel and control time and space at your will. I’m happy to announce that this holiday season the power described has now been granted to you…sort of.

Since 1984 there have been annual mosaics painstakingly stitched together from satellite imagery of our earth’s surface. The public now has full, interactive access to these maps thanks to the work of Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab and their Time Machine Library, along with the dedicated effort put forth by the team at Google. Together they have managed to painstakingly transform this immense, static archive of imagery into a user-friendly and navigable tool for exploring the face of our dynamic earth. The resulting images are visually striking and breathtaking in their intricate detail and scope.

It took the folks at Google to upgrade these choppy visual sequences from crude flip-book quality to true video footage. With the help of massive amounts of computer muscle, they have scrubbed away cloud cover, filled in missing pixels, digitally stitched puzzle-piece pictures together, until the growing, thriving, sometimes dying planet is revealed in all its dynamic churn. The images are striking not just because of their vast sweep of geography and time but also because of their staggering detail. Consider: a standard TV image uses about one-third of a million pixels per frame, while a high-definition image uses 2 million. The Landsat images, by contrast, weigh in at 1.8 trillion pixels per frame, the equivalent of 900,000 high-def TVs assembled into a single mosaic.

Along with the obvious novelty inherent in watching your hometown expand outwards over the course of three decades in less than three seconds, this tool also gifts us an opportunity to reflect on how we have and continue to impact our planet.

See anything cool recently? Have you figured out other ways to time travel? Send us a note using the form below:

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Trending from G/L: New TV Tracking Opens New Doors for Brands

Mary Sawyer
Vice President of Public Relations

Trending from G/L: New TV Tracking Opens New Doors for Brands

Advertising

You should know when your brand’s paid advertising is supposed to run on TV. But it has been somewhat difficult to thoroughly monitor unpaid news or other programming brand coverage on TV through true TV tracking.

That situation appears to be changing, though, thanks to new media platforms and monitoring capabilities – just think about the benefits of being able to search for your brand’s appearance or mention on TV anytime.

According to a recent story in AdWeek, iQMedia has technology that can provide those capabilities. Marketers can now track every time their brands are mentioned and when their logos are shown. And they can monitor their competitor’s coverage.

The iQMedia platform includes spoken-word and logo recognition technology, and provides demographics, geographic and other statistics that a brand can use with its own internal metrics. The data is available within a couple of hours of its appearance on TV. Brands can also access six years of historical TV tracking and programming.

iQ Media’s platform includes spoken-word detection technology and, in what the company said is an industry first, logo recognition technology to identify when a brand is seen or heard on TV. It also provides demographic, geographic and time-of-day stats, and lets marketers correlate the raw data with their own internal metrics.

“Our systems are designed to be able to listen and hear for the content, and to be able to distinguish whether it’s in paid or earned,” said John Derham, iQ Media’s chief technology officer. “We get depth and breadth of content and resources in an unprecedented time frame.”

Domino’s Pizza, Energizer, the NHL, Red Bull and Sonic Drive-In will all be using the new platform, which makes data available to clients within a couple of hours of its appearance on TV. (Nielsen and comScore’s brand-mention services take 30 days.) Marketers can enter keywords, brand names or logos for the platform to track, much like a Google alert, and use the data to measure the ROI of theirs or their competitors’ major media investments.

These types of TV tracking tools give media planning and PR professionals’ insights that help to make better marketing decisions. The more that we know about who, what when, why and how people are brands; the better we are able to counsel our clients.

As measurement of success becomes more important to our clients, we’re putting data at the heart of everything we do. If you’d like to learn more about our approach, contact us using the form below:

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Trending from G/L: Thanks Canada for telling us we’re great!

Mary Sawyer
Vice President of Public Relations

Trending from G/L: Thanks Canada for telling us we’re great!

Branding

A couple of weeks ago, Ken Bone, a debate audience member, emerged as an unlikely hero to Americans weary of political negativity. Someone referred to Mr. Bone as a “human version of a hug.” With a week to go until Election Day now, we keep looking for positive moments to keep us sane.

Now, our neighbors to the North in Canada are sending us virtual “hugs” and positive affirmations via a social media campaign called “Tell America It’s Great,” complete with a hashtag, a Twitter account and a series of YouTube videos.

Seems America could use some cheering up right about now. As their closest friends and neighbours, we thought we should take a minute to help remind them that no matter how bad things might seem at the moment, there are lots of reasons why we think they’re still pretty great.To paraphrase the Stuart Smalley character from Saturday Night Live, the campaign tells we Americans that, “We’re Good Enough, We’re Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Us.”

Designed by workers at a Toronto creative agency to make positive statements as a response to the depressing American political setting, the campaign is not selling anything. Its motivation is to be remind us that the world sees us as great.

The Canada campaign comes at a time when most Americans are desperately looking forward to the end of the election cycle with all of the sniping and accusations. We do need to take a breath and think about our national parks, our contributions to music and the countless other American innovations and characteristics that are admired by people throughout the world.

Many Americans are showing their appreciation to this campaign through a reciprocating “TellCanadaThankYou” campaign.

It is nice to receive a group hug from our kind Canadian neighbors. Maybe their goodwill and civility will inspire us to feel better about ourselves, as well as acting nicer to one another. Eh?

Have you seen any politically-focused messaging that stood out for its lack of, um, toxicity? Please share it with us using the form below.

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Trending from G/L: The Vegetable Orchestra is cooler than a cucumber

Geile/Leon Marketing Communications

Trending from G/L: The Vegetable Orchestra is cooler than a cucumber

Branding

The Vegetable Orchestra based in Vienna, Austria performs with instruments made from fresh, local vegetables.

Worldwide one of a kind, the Vegetable Orchestra performs on instruments made of fresh vegetables. The utilization of various ever refined vegetable instruments creates a musically and aesthetically unique sound universe.

The Vegetable Orchestra was founded in 1998. Based in Vienna, the Vegetable Orchestra plays concerts in all over the world.

There are no musical boundaries for the Vegetable Orchestra. The most diverse music styles fuse here – contemporary music, beat-oriented House tracks, experimental Electronic, Free Jazz, Noise, Dub, Clicks’n’Cuts – the musical scope of the ensemble expands consistently, and recently developed vegetable instruments and their inherent sounds often determine the direction.

Founded in 1998, this innovative group creates a “musically and aesthetically unique sound universe” for their audience. Their concerts truly appeal to all of your senses.

The Vegetable Orchestra prepares for each performance by first shopping at local markets for vegetables to create their instruments with.

Some of these perishable instruments are “ready-made” — like two peppers rubbed together for a squeaking sound. Others require cutting, drilling and assembly to make something similar to traditional instruments — like a carrot flute or a leek violin.

Since their instruments are brand new before each performance, a long sound check is necessary after the creations are complete.

These vegetable instruments achieve sounds traditional instruments cannot — each concert has a completely different and unique sound. The group draws from a number of diverse music styles and influences to create their unusual melodies.

After the concert, the lucky audience members even get to enjoy a homemade soup created from the vegetable instrument left overs.

It is so cool to see such a fresh idea. It just goes to show that you can create something great out of anything — even a carrot.

Be sure to check out this video for a closer look at The Vegetable Orchestra:

Or listen to one of their super unique performances:

Pretty cool, right? Let us know if you have anything awesome you’d share with our team!

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Trending from G/L: Media Planning and House of Cards

Ben Schwab
Creative Director

Trending from G/L: Media Planning and House of Cards

Branding

Having that Big Idea is the backbone behind most impactful and memorable advertising campaigns. But, without the ability to properly expand that core concept across available modern media planning in a relevant and clever way, you are possibly squandering an opportunity to enter attention as part of the larger cultural conversation.

Case-in-point would be the work done over this last year promoting the return of the Netflix original series House of Cards. If you’re unaware of it, this popular Netflix bing-watch focuses on scheming politician Frank Underwood, played by Kevin Spacey, who manages to weasel his way to becoming president of the United States through a series backstabbing and nefarious acts. The show recently dropped its fourth season in March.

The media planning was designed to capitalize on the growing media attention given to the real world presidential election cycle by targeting political events and using them as a springboard to promote the reelection of the show’s main protagonist, Frank Underwood. By weaving mock campaign style ads for Frank into commercial breaks during televised events such as CNN’s Republican presidential debate, the spots became more of a topic of discussion in the following weeks than the content of the debate itself.

https://youtu.be/Se44ed4KBMA

The initial ads, which trended across Facebook and Twitter, focused on targeting aired debates and political events leading up to the show’s March launch date. They even went as far as to establish a “campaign headquarters” for the character’s election campaign directly across the street from where the GOP debates were held, bringing the mock campaign style of the television spots to the real world.

When all was said and done, this unique campaign managed to gain 6.6 billion impressions, the most successful launch of a show for Netflix to date. That’s the kind of seamless, timely integration that inspires us at G/L.

Geile/Leon generates tons of unique and captivating ideas like this for our clients every day. Contact us today to learn how we can help your brand tell a compelling story. And if you have any cool examples you want to share with us, we’d be more than happy to see them and chat!

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Trending from G/L: Nivea Reshapes Behaviors with Clever Marketing Campaign

Luke Smith
Senior Account Executive

Trending from G/L: Nivea Reshapes Behaviors with Clever Marketing Campaign

Advertising

Nivea recently launched a guerilla marketing effort that focused on teaching children about the importance of sunscreen.

We all know how hyper and excited kids can get at the beach, the park or at the pool, so how do you convince them to wait 10 minutes to let mom or dad apply sunscreen?

Nivea and FCB Brazil came up with a brilliant solution to distract kids long enough to get apply sunscreen, while also teaching them an important lesson about sun safety as well.

The Nivea Doll was developed to show kids how unpleasant sunburns can be. The doll has built-in UV sensitivity and will turn beet red once the sun hits it- representative of what will happen to your own skin if you don’t use sunscreen:

Nivea

Once you apply sunscreen to the doll the sunburn will disappear and the skin tone will be back to normal – ultimately teaching kids a valuable lesson about why sunscreen is so important.

“Protecting and caring is something we learn from an early age. This emotional bond is what this Nivea action offers,” Joanna Monteiro, creative VP at FCB Brazil, said in a statement. “Through the magic of technology, children can see the sun’s effect on the skin of the doll.”

As seen in the video below, street teams handed out The Nivea Doll along with a pre-packaged sunscreen and showed the recipient how the doll worked:

This concept is extremely unique, has an immediate payoff. It generated tons of press and product trial and has a very important message to boot.

Geile/Leon generates tons of unique and captivating ideas like this for our clients every day. Contact us today to learn how we can help your brand tell a compelling story. And if you have any cool examples you want to share with us, we’d be more than happy to see them and chat!

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Trending At G/L: Size Matters Not – Creating Gaming’s Largest Universe with a Tiny Team

Geile/Leon Marketing Communications

Trending At G/L: Size Matters Not – Creating Gaming’s Largest Universe with a Tiny Team

Branding

Imagine a gaming universe with 18,466,744,073,709,551,616 planets (for those of you who don’t want to count commas, that’s over 18 quintillion, or 18 billion billions). Fathoming such a number is insane. Now picture what must’ve created it. A Big Bang? God? A long-extinct alien civilization?

What if I told you it was a team of just 13 developers?

Mind blown, right? It seems impossible, but it’s the reality behind Hello Games’ new hit video game, No Man’s Sky.

The key ingredient to No Man’s Sky’s expansive universe of quintillions of unique, full-sized planets is a developing trick known as procedural generation. Without parsing the coding mechanics of it, procedural generation in a game like No Man’s Sky generates playspace on the fly, following a pre-programmed gaming algorithm, rather than relying on handcrafted worlds carefully sculpted by artists.

No two planets are alike, and many come with their own native species, which are also procedurally generated. So far, gamers have discovered well over 10 million species.

In the first 24 hours since No Man’s Sky became available, creator Sean Murray has been reporting amazing data that indicate his passion project has been very popular.

After reaching 1 million discoveries in the first hour, the game’s servers continued to hold strong despite being pushed to their limits, resulting in over 10 million discovered species a few hours later.

It’s an impressive universe, created on a shoestring budget (with a relatively small 6GB install size to boot) by a relative handful of incredibly dedicated and resourceful developers. And yet, even if gamers were to discover one new planet per second, it will take 500 billion years to discover each one.

*sigh*

Well… better get started.

If you’re looking to dig deeper into the concept behind No Man’s Sky, take a look at TIME’s recent interview with creator Sean Murray.

Have any initial thoughts? Shoot us a note anytime and we’ll be happy to nerd out:

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