| Will brands go over the top this year? | | 04 February 2014, 11:47AM |  According to data collected by Informa Telecoms & Media, over 41 billion over-the-top (OTT) messages are being sent each day. That's an incredible number, and it continues to rise as people switch from SMS to OTT en masse. As SMS marketing declines and email is starting to show signs of fallibility, OTT could very well be the next communication platform that brands take on.
| | | | Ten years after Facebook launched, we're back to the days before Facebook | | 04 February 2014, 11:18AM |  Before Facebook, most social sharing among my group of friends happened on instant messaging via MSN. Depending on your own group of friends you might have used AIM or Yahoo instead. Most of the photos we shared were via e-mail, with large albums uploaded to YouSendIt or another cloud storage server. Most of my friends had social media profiles, automatically created by MSN, but few of us posted there regularly. Then Facebook came along. By 2006, when I started at university, practically every single student in my year had it. We shared everything on Facebook: what we were up to, our relationship status, movies we watched, pictures from events, classes we were attending, our plans for the weekend, everything.
| | | | The end of mindless consumption and rise of conspicuous production | | 04 February 2014, 9:55AM |  In the course of a recent co-creation session conducted in our London offices for our next global study, The Truth About Shopping, we asked a diverse group of participants to pitch concepts for the retail store of tomorrow. All of the pitches that the teams provided were daring in their potential for shoppers of the future. And, all of the pitches of the day pointed to an unexpected truth about the contemporary shopping experience.
Let's begin with the winning concept chosen by the workshop participants, "The Driv-Inn." We, of course, loved the witty title for the store concept. "The Driv-Inn" was a hybrid venue: part car dealership, part boutique country hotel. The insight that the team drew from was the fact that when purchasing a car, looking at it in a showroom is not nearly enough; the buyer really needs to drive the car. Moreover, simply driving a few kilometers around town is not nearly enough experience to make such a massive purchasing decision.
| | | | The most innovative ad from Super Bowl 48 didn't happen on TV | | 03 February 2014, 4:28PM |  As VW pointed out in its teaser ad, there seem to be a tried and tested formula for Super Bowl spots, which usually includes celebrities and/or animals, slapstick humour and very high production values. For the 48th edition of 'the biggest show on Earth' a lot of advertisers stuck to some variation of this creatively, which is understandable since a 30" spot on Fox can cost up to $4m. However, this year many more brands were thinking beyond airtime to tap into the cultural phenomenon that is the Super Bowl.
| | | | | | | | | | Anti-social behaviour: What's the opportunity cost for brands not doing social? | | 03 February 2014, 11:05AM |  Last week a senior client-side financial services marketer asked me the following question: What is the opportunity cost for brands not doing social? While on the surface this appears to be a straightforward question, it's trickier to answer than you may think.
The most high profile example of a brand apparently not 'living social' is none other than Apple. Is the brand suffering as a result? Hardly. In November of last year the brand once again dominated Forbes' list of the world's most valuable brands.
| | | | Infographic: visual design trends for 2014 | | 03 February 2014, 10:30AM |  Shutterstock has published its global trends infographic – a snapshot of purchasing habits over the past year across the UK and the rest of the world and a guide to design trends to watch out for in 2014.
| | | | Super Bowl - the rise of the advertising blockbuster | | 31 January 2014, 12:25PM |  As memories of mince pies and the Christmas ad battle fade away, the global television event of the year is almost upon us. Whilst Seattleites and Denverites are eagerly awaiting the Super Bowl to will on their team to claim the mantle of world champion, for others, it is the commercial breaks that are the real draw. This year is no different, with celebrity-laden adverts taking the limelight before and during the big day. But why is it that the adverts capture the imagination of people almost as much as the sport itself?
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