What were some of the top stories from the world of marketing and video? Each week with Render Perfect Productions, your video marketing experts in Baltimore and beyond, we’ll take a look at marketing news this week. In this edition, we are covering some of the top stories from the week of May 2nd to May 6th 2022.
Snapchat Partners with Cameo
- Snap Inc. unveiled a partnership with the video shout-out app Cameo as part of its presentation at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s NewFronts Tuesday.
- The Snap x Cameo Advertiser Program was developed with Cameo for Business and gives Snapchat advertisers access to the platform’s talent pool of over 45,000 personalities, who will create custom short-form video ads to run on the social media app. The service is expected to become widely available to Snap partners in the coming months.
- Mattress Firm, Molson Coors and Kraft are among the marketers that have been beta testing the program this spring. With the deal — the first of its kind for Cameo — Snap can expand its footprint in a creator economy that plays a growing role in commanding consumer attention.
Snap had a lot of announcements on deck at the NewFronts, but the Cameo tie-up was the most substantial on the brand-side. Cameo has seen its star rise in recent years thanks to a content model where people pay celebrities and influencers from a range of backgrounds and levels of fame to read personalized video messages. After the pandemic shut down many productions and live venues, more creators flocked to the shout-out platform, with some earning massive paydays.
Pitching the new program to advertisers and media buyers, Snap and Cameo positioned the partnership to lessen friction when working with talent. Striking ambassador deals for ad campaigns can be a costly and time-intensive process. The Snap x Cameo Advertiser Program aims to provide an easier way for marketers to connect with tens of thousands of creators and deploy them for short-form video campaigns on Snapchat. Snapchat now reaches over 600 million monthly active users, as well as 332 million daily active users.
Some brands beta testing the Cameo program have seen positive results. Mattress Firm leveraged the offering for its new “Junk Sleep” campaign, working with Cameo creators including Erin Andrews, Mario Cantone and Kerri Walsh Jennings. The effort drove an 8-point lift in category awareness, according to Snap. A portion of the push run through Snap Ads also saw a video view rate three times higher than the retail category average.
The news shows Snap trying to strengthen its foothold in the creator economy, an increasingly competitive front for social media apps that rely on creators to keep their communities engaged. Last year, the company launched a Creator Marketplace that helps brands better connect with talent on the app. For Cameo, the agreement is another sign that the service is placing more of its growth bets on advertising.
Snap at the NewFronts additionally showcased a Snap Promote solution that helps partners set up paid promotions to compliment organic content running on the For You and Stories pages. The capability is integrated with Snap’s Ads Manager. The NFL beta-tested Snap Promote and saw seven times more users subscribe to its profile.
Snap on Tuesday revealed it had extended its content pacts with the NFL, NBA and WBNA. The NFL and NBA will work with Snapchat for the first time this year on Spotlight Challenges. Spotlight is a short-form video portal that shares many similarities with TikTok.
The growing emphasis on creators and short-form video comes as Snap’s larger ad business encounters headwinds. Like other social media apps, the firm has been roiled by privacy changes implemented by Apple that have made it harder to track and measure mobile campaigns. On the macroeconomic level, demand has been affected by the war in Ukraine, a disordered supply chain and rising inflation. Snap saw revenue rise 38% year-over-year to hit $1.06 billion in the first quarter, missing Wall Street’s targets.
TikTok’s New Premium Ad Unit
TikTok has become a major cultural trendsetter, but what’s catching interest on the video platform can change at a head-spinning pace set by the whims of its algorithmically powered For You page. That poses a challenge for advertisers that are eager to reach the app’s global audience of over 1 billion monthly users but need to set a concrete media plan.
For its third appearance — and first in-person — at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s NewFronts, the ByteDance-owned company detailed a new ad product that lets brands latch onto creator videos as they’re taking off versus when their popularity is already cresting and an ad might register as wearying to viewers. Called TikTok Pulse, the offering shows TikTok putting a larger focus on premium media units that cater to deep-pocketed brands versus a pure scale play.
“It wouldn’t be culturally relevant content if it didn’t change every single day,” said Jiayi “Ray” Cao, TikTok’s global head of product strategy, of the app’s content model to a packed crowd. Many attendees at The Glasshouse event space on New York’s West Side Highway were standing because of a lack of seating room, and the line to check into the Wednesday evening presentation snaked around the venue.
Advertisers and media buyers listening in heard a good deal about Pulse, which is sold through TikTok Ads Manager and has limited inventory. The format puts brand partners around the top 4% of all videos on the app, while trying to keep suitability parameters in mind. Pulse can be purchased across 12 categories, including beauty and personal care, fashion and automotive. It is bought at a fixed CPM rate and on a reservation basis — a sign that TikTok is gunning for more blue-chip, exclusive marketers with the rollout.
“With TikTok Pulse, branded TikToks will show up next to top-performing, brand-safe content that’s driving conversation and actions,” said Cao. “Think of Pulse as supercharged contextual targeting.”
IPG Mediabrands and Omnicom Media Group are already working with Pulse, according to TikTok’s advertising chief Sandie Hawkins. Those using the product can apply TikTok’s own brand safety filter or third-party verification, and the format launches with third-party viewability and sales lift integrations as well. Post-campaign audience reporting is also available.
“We’re already seeing firm commitment from the world’s largest brands and agencies,” Hawkins said at the show.
While Pulse commanded the spotlight on the product development front, TikTok also attempted to emphasize a diverse base of users and content creators, the latter of which act as the “lifeblood” of the platform, per executives. This was also an agenda item at last year’s NewFronts, showing that the company has struggled to shake off a close association with young consumers.
“More than a billion people around the world using TikTok every month, and it isn’t just Gen Z,” Hawkins said. “Most of our viewers are actually millennials and Gen Xers.”
Reiterating that TikTok connects with an older crowd than teens is another signal that the app wants to broaden its advertiser base, including to brands that might target consumers with higher household incomes. Similarly, executives repeatedly pointed to the variety of communities present on TikTok, which it calls “CommunityToks.” These interest-based groups, which cover everything from book readers to mental health help, were positioned as a break from the usual cohort-based parameters brands look at for their campaigns.
“TikTok is one and a half times more likely to help users explore new communities and content,” said Sofia Hernandez, TikTok’s global head of business marketing.
“Communities are the new demographics,” she added later.
The community concept previously factored into TikTok’s pitch around its commerce products at the NewFronts, but discussions of shopping were scarce this year. Some of the e-commerce boom driven by the pandemic has cooled, while privacy changes implemented by Apple have made targeting and measuring mobile campaigns on this front more difficult. Instead, embedding in communities was a way for brands to raise their overall profile.
“Brands perform better when they work with TikTok creators,” said Hawkins. “In fact, brands who partnered with creators on TikTok saw a 26% lift in brand favorability and a 22% lift in brand recommendations.”
For creators, new bets like Pulse may be appealing. Cao said that TikTok is exploring its first revenue-share program with profiles that meet a minimum follower threshold.
LinkedIn Unveils Insights by Region
LinkedIn has launched a new resource to help marketers branch into international markets, providing a range of insights into key trends and shifts to be aware of as you assess your foreign opportunities.
As explained by LinkedIn:
“As the world becomes smaller and business ambitions grow bigger, more marketers are being handed international marketing mandates. It’s one thing to develop effective marketing strategies in the comfort of your home markets, but quite another to lead the charge into unfamiliar territory.”
To help with this, LinkedIn’s new international marketing resource features a range of region-specific insights, with initial data overviews for the US, UK, Germany, South East Asia and Australia.
The insights include local audience reach on LinkedIn, fastest-growing verticals, best-performing ad formats, and more.
Meta Shares Culture Codes for Advertisers
As social media usage develops, so too do usage trends, and the content types that people find the most engaging and more enticing in social apps.
Initially, in the early days of Facebook and Twitter, brands effectively saw social media as another broadcast platform, another place to display their ads, hoping to catch consumer attention and selling more products, in the same way that they would place ads in magazines, or between TV show episodes.
But as social has democratized creation, and given everyone a platform to share their own thoughts with the world, that’s also altered expectations in brand communications, and how promotions align with their interests.
As explained by Meta:
“We’re seeing a shift away from perfection and polish, and towards a culture that instead celebrates what’s unpolished and real. In a recent report from consumer insights company YPulse, a survey found that 84% of young consumers agreed with the statement that “I like it when content from brands is not perfect” and 79% of them agreed they are “tired of seeing perfect images in advertising.”
This is probably most clear on TikTok, where content that aligns with the presentation style of the platform performs much better than straight up ads, which users will simply flick past in the feed.
In line with this, Meta has established six ‘culture codes’ which it says will help brands create more engaging, natural-looking content that will hold more appeal with modern social media audiences.
“Culture is driven by people, and that culture has its own language – relatable, unpolished and above all, human. Creativity here feels like it’s made by people, for people. When brands understand prevailing culture codes, they communicate as peers, establishing relatability and trust through a shared language.”
Meta’s six Culture Codes are:
- They have real people telling authentic stories, inviting employees or customers to deliver their message
- They use the language of the platform to signal their place in feed and, therefore, in culture
- They harness the power of creators to establish trust and relatability
- They take us behind the scenes to be part of the process
- They use lo-fi editing techniques that feel handmade and human
- They use humor to dissolve boundaries between brand and audience.
With these elements in mind, Meta says that brands will be better placed to create ads and promotions that better align with growing consumer expectations, and ring true to potential customers by speaking their language in-stream.
The core value here is authenticity, and creating content that aligns with how normal people engage, like how you would explain what you do to a friend. Which is probably the central focus – increasingly, as more people look to establish more human connection online, brands also need to move in that direction, and take the time to understand and listen to how their audience engages before jumping in with disruptive promos.
There are some good notes in here. Maybe you take a lot from them, or maybe just a little, but these pointers will definitely help to improve your approach to advertising and appeal to modern consumers.
About Render Perfect Productions:
Render Perfect has been built from the ground up to service growing businesses and help them realize their full visual storytelling and digital marketing potential. We’ve created a service offering and skill-set that spans video production, post-production, motion graphic design, 3D animation, web development, and video marketing strategy. Our insight and experience allow us to help clients make better planning decisions and get more out of their video production effort.
604 E Joppa Road