The latest ASA report highlights a plethora of issues that brands face in advertising, not least for highlighting the landmark first ever UK ad campaign banned on social media for inappropriateness.

Social media is clearly spearheading the change for many companies in terms of marketing priorities and it has undeniable reach and influence, and current levels of brand investment in the channel look only set to increase. However, as the medium matures, we are starting to see rules and guidelines for its use emerge, and brands can easily be swept up in its responsiveness while forgetting to filter campaigns through considerations of whether their campaign activation online is appropriate. Read More »

Hello and welcome to this week’s Espresso of Innovation; the hottest news and strongest stories from the world of creativity and technology filtered into a quick shot of inspiration. This week we’re taking a little turn on the catwalk.

Following on from the launch of the intimacy dress 2.0 that we covered in our Valentine Espresso I wanted to find out a bit more about technology and fashion. Read More »

The Associated Press last night stirred up a small storm on Twitter as it announced that it will begin to run sponsored Tweets in the timeline of its main @AP Twitter account and signed Samsung as its first sponsor. The story has raised concerns among some journalists as to whether this would damage AP’s credibility as a news organisation. Some have gone as as far to say they were unfollowing AP, that it shouldn’t do it and that it devalues the brand (check out the Storify reaction below).

What these aren’t are official Promoted Tweets from Twitter, but rather promotional messages sent out as Tweets on @AP. Initially it plans to send out two a day this week timed with the 2013 International CES – the consumer electronics show — in Las Vegas. Hardly a huge deal. Read More »

Google is the most successful social video brand of 2012 beating Nike after the technology giant’s video campaigns attracted more shares this year than any other advertiser, according to new data released today by Unruly.

Thanks to the global success of such campaigns as Project Glass: One Day, Google increased the number of shares it attracted in 2012 by 196.8% from the previous year, beating Nike to the top spot by 421,359 shares.  Project Glass proved a huge hit for Google and was also included among Time’s Best Inventions of the Year 2012. Read More »

While Coca-Cola, Chevrolet, P&G, Nike and Volkswagen all feature prominently in the 2012 Unruly Global Viral Video Ads Chart it is a little-known non-profit that we all came to know the name of that is the year’s overall winner.

Kony 2012, created and released by the not-for-profit Invisible Children, was by far the most shared ad of 2012, generating 10.1 million shares since it launched on March 5. Read More »

Fresh from exploits on the edge of space Red Bull has been named number one in a list of the Top 100 Social Video brands having been deemed to have the best overall “social video strategy”. The first Goviral Social Video Equity Report put the energy drink above brands such as Google and Samsung, which came in second and fifth place respectively. Apple and Microsoft both failed to make the top ten, coming in at numbers 11 and 37.

The report looks at how video content is being used by global brands as part of their marketing strategy after auditing them based on volume, total views and engagement for content uploaded to YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook in 2012.  It also evaluated the quality, innovation and relevance of content before calculating a final social. Read More »

More on the soaring growth of Instagram today, following talk of its ‘Superstorm Sandy Citizen Journalism moment’, with research from Simply Measured that reveals more than half of the world’s top brands or 54% are using the photo sharing network to engage consumers.

Earlier this year it looked at how brands are adopting Instagram and now three months later that is paying off with sizable month-over-month growth.

Since August brands including Starbucks, Burberry, Nike, Gucci and Audi have gained over a million new followers. Add to that MTV which has become the first brand to hit the one million follower milestone. Read More »

The Twenty20 World Cup cricket tournament kicked off this week and it will be, by admission of the International Cricket Council (ICC), the “most socially-networked event in the history of cricket”. Given that we’ve just enjoyed a summer of intense sporting activity too, thanks to the Olympic and Paralympic games, it seems hard to remember a time in which social media and sport were not intrinsically linked to one another.

And yet really, we’re all still on something of a learning curve when it comes to gracing social media etiquette – in particular it would seem on Twitter. It’s not hard to see why – professional sport is made up of a melting pot of passion and profit, while Twitter is a world stage from which any sports star – and the brands associated with them – can share their emotion and involvement with a tournament or event. For the most part this is all good – but there have been times when things have backfired. Read More »

Kim Kardashian is crazy for shoes from ShoeDazzle, Jordan and Rio Ferdinand enjoy Snickers, Jimmy Carr is a Starbucks fan and Wayne Rooney wears Nike. We know this because their Twitter feeds say so.

The high profile tweeters were all well compensated by these various brands this year for posting tweets to their millions of followers, in Kardashian’s case to the tune of around $10,000 per tweet.

This process of compensating celebs for tweeting about brands, products and services has caused trouble with the Advertising Standards authority (ASA). Nike’s appeal to the ASA over the decision to ban a campaign on Wayne Rooney’s Twitter feed was rejected in September, maintaining the company’s position as the industry’s first brand to have a Twitter campaign banned.

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Brands love hashtags. Many don’t understand them, but that doesn’t stop them. They’ll hashtag anything, even if it makes no sense whatsoever. I like to look at a hashtag as the social media equivalent of a camp fire story.

Something people can connect with, something that invites the continuation of a story or perhaps even starts a new one.

Getting it right is tough. Especially if you’re a brand. Many make the foolish mistake of thinking a hashtag has to be about the brand to deliver any value. Others think you can make it about an irrelevant strapline no one cares about. Others, like Nike, absolutely 110% get it.

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