Ads Trends

E-Sports: the brands will spend $ 325 million in 2016

2016-04-11T01:30:00.000-07:00

The e-sport, which includes online games and in multi-players competition, arouses the interest of the brands. In fact, they would be even ready of spending 325 million dollars in this activity, according to a study of Newzoo. This office of research specialized in the games plans that brands will spend 128 million dollars in "sponsoring" and 197 million dollars in advertisements linked to this activity.

At such a level, this spending should represent 70 % of income generated by the sector. Newzoo considers that the trend should be confirmed in the next years and that the spending of the brands regarding e-sport will reach the 800 million dollars by 2019.

The most common video game genres associated with eSports are real-time strategy, fighting, first-person shooter (FPS), and multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA), and according to the american Michael Morhaime, the president of one of the main publishers of video games committed in the e-sport, Blizzard Entertainment : "In the next five years, watch his favorite players playing a game of his favorite video game is something that people will make like watching the Superbowl" .

But why the brands are so much interested in this entertainment? The report published by Newzoo indicates that more than half fans of Esports are young people of the generation Y, aged from 21 to 35 years old (the favorite target for large brands).

The sponsors don’t make a mistake there. There are not only the hardware manufacturers and game consoles that finance e-sports, but also giants brands as Coca-Cola, Red Bull, Nike or New Balance.

In fact, a lot of companies are closely interested in the development of the e-sport.

In 2014, Amazon paid out 970 million dollars to buy the company Twitch, a platform of division of session of video games in streaming. Today, this site claims more than 100 million unique visitors and more than 1,7 millions of broadcasters.

If you want to learn more about the report about E-sport made by newzoo, clic here

IMMERSION : The Future Of Advertising

2016-04-02T03:00:00.000-07:00

The purpose of immersion is to immerse the consumer in a world entirely dedicated to a brand in order to deliver a message. Previously, it was difficult to speak of immersion because the technologies did not allow to make such an experience with somebody.

Today technology offers more and more opportunities for brands to create this immersion directly to the consumer. The most obvious and most current example is the 360 ° video on Facebook and Youtube. With this tool, we can push the user to interact with the video to see the brand's universe.

The other example that could be cited is that of virtual reality helmets. Although this technology is still far from being democratized, no doubt that the VR will be the future of entertainment, and therefore advertising. Brands have started to communicate on this technology (recently Coca-Cola) and operations will increase more and more in the coming years.

In the following video Coca-Cola proposes to transform its packaging specially created for the occasion in "Cardboard". Far from the real VR headset that costs several hundred euros, the "Cardboard" is an inexpensive way for easy access to this technology. Created with cardboard and simple lenses, the Cardboard enables brands to provide a "modern" image while creating content to communicate.

Indeed, immersion is more than just a trend. This is why the display advertising is undoubtedly the channel that will most suffer of this development in the coming years.

Considered as too random and not sufficiently targeted, the display advertising is far from being able to offer the same return on investment as the immersive campaigns. With display advertising, opportunities to connect the consumers with brands are complex. In addition, this channel is now an integral part of our urban environment, and passersby got used with this type of advertising.

Companies must consider a mutation of this channel to a technology which provides immersive content to consumers (through their mobile, for example).

YouTube, the best media of political communication ?

2016-03-28T07:58:00.000-07:00

According to the study of Burson-Marsteller, videos and YouTube play an essential role in the communication of closeness with the citizens.

About 77 % of the countries-members of the UNO are officially present on YouTube. It represents 148 countries. With a total of 200 000 videos published by the leaders, YouTube becomes one of the social major media of the political communication.

After Facebook and Instagram, the study deals with the place of the broadcasting in the political communication. If YouTube becomes inescapable, a lot of leaders don’t use it as a social network but rather as a center of resources videos and a search tool.

They also neutralize comments and functions like and dislike. Others see on the contrary the way there to mobilize communities, to spread speeches live, to answer the questions or to publish the activities of the week.

The popular success of the networks of video sharing as lever of digital diplomacy shows itself not only through the high percentage of international leaders who are present, but also through the number of views (1,2 billions).

At the top of the list: the White House and Barack Obama. The White House counts the largest number of subscribers and interactions; the channel for the campaign of Barack Obama collects most views and the average largest number of views, likes and interactions by video.

The button "I don’t like" proposed by YouTube makes way for the critics. The videos of the leaders have collected more than a million of thumbs down.

The most popular channels are also the most submitted to the disapprovals / "dislikes" . The White House and Barack Obama collected most negative mentions (respectively more than 469 000 and 365 000), that is an average rate of 18 % disapproval and 22 %. Unsurprisingly, numerous government have decided to deactivate the mentions "I like" and "I don’t like" on their videos.

MAPPING THE ONLINE WORLD

2016-03-26T09:39:00.000-07:00

How would be the world if countries were represented by their internet extensions? This is the project of Nominet (company responsible for registering domain names in the UK), which offers a rather special world map. This map 2.0 suggests correlation between inequality and online on the web. For example, Africa has more than one billion people but the continent is largely underrepresented on the map.

Internet represents more than 3.2 billion users worldwide (against 400 million in 2000). Its international dimension has been strengthened since the 80s, when the establishment of a system to allocate to each country a dedicated online space. Each countries have received a code consisting of two letters. The first three to have received these codes were the United States (.us), the United Kingdom (.uk) and Israel (.il).

Thus, Nominet chose to visually represent the overall use of the Internet. The result is a redesigned atlas based on the number of sites in each area of the world.

First, we can see similarities with the real world map. However, looking more closely, we see major differences, starting with a growth of Europe, a narrowing of the US, the disappearance of Africa and a giant mysterious island in the Pacific.

Indeed, "Europe Online" is much larger than its actual geography, particularly because of greater use of the Internet by population. In the UK for example, in 2015, nearly 4 out of 5 adults went online daily, and more than 3 out of 4 bought goods or services online. With 10.6 million recording, .uk is the 4th most important area of the country, with a new site .uk recorded every 20 seconds.

In addition, the United States showing a strange phenomenon: despite a significant use of the internet, there are few recording under the internet domain ".us", the "official" country code. Americans and companies prefer .com, which is the most common code in the internet (123 million records).

Another anomaly is the Tokelau Islands, located off the Pacific. With 1,400 inhabitants, the domain .tk site recorded 31 million of website. This popularity is due to a rather unusual model: the sites can be registered for free and can generate revenue through advertising. According to some studies, .tk sites account for 1/6 of GDP of the the Tokelau Islands.

Click the map below to open a full-size version:

What the Color of Your Logo Says About Your Company

2016-03-25T09:50:00.000-07:00

Today, a logo is a reflection of a company: it represents its DNA, its business, its values. In fact, the logo design is a lot of hard work and intense reflection.

Indeed, the meaning of colors is paramount when creating a logo. The colors have a different interpretation depending on the country. Therefore, if you want to building a company abroad, it is important to study the colors mean in each country in order to avoid mistakes. For example, in Iran, blue is synonymous with mourning while in China it reflects immortality. The orange color means spirituality in India but characterizes the revolution in Ukraine.

For all these reasons the French agency Creads unveils a study on trends to know and consider to stay fashionable in 2016.

According to the study the minimalist trend is still required: 78% of newly created logos are flat design, style that excludes superfluous details (shadows, color gradients ...) and 2/3 of logos have only 2 colors: for example, YouTube, Flickr or Leetchi.

It should be noted that 5 elements are to be considered to color a logo:

1. The Business Activity: each color has its own color codes for a better understanding of the public. Thus, food brands generally favor the color red, retail company prefer the yellow and environment companies prefer the green.

2. The Target: each company must define the public characteristics (age, gender, culture). Yellow is more suitable for a younger audience and gray is more appropriate for mature audiences.

3. The Values: this is the essential point of brand strategies. The goal is to define three major personality traits to describe brand. Coca-Cola, Netflix and Canon chose red, which embodies the energy, ambition and modernity.

4. The Colors: the tendency is to make a minimalist logo, it is better to focus maximum 2 or 3 colors to convey an impacting message. Certain color combinations work better than others: the yellow is works well with blue, red and green for example.

5. Internationalisation: As we have said previously, if a brand is exported abroad, we must pay attention to color meanings in different cultures.

If you want to know more about the meaning of colors, discover the image below or click here

AUDIENCE NETWORK: Facebook expands its advertising network on mobile

2016-03-15T08:39:00.000-07:00

At the end of 2014, Facebook launched its advertising agency (Audience Network) to allow:

- To Developers to monetize their mobile applications ;

- To Advertisers to serve ads on these applications ;

This ad network was hitherto reserved for mobile applications and Facebook has announced the expansion of Audience Network in all mobile sites.

Indeed, according to Comscore, media consumption by the mobile has increased by 53% between 2013 and 2015. Moreover, media websites realize about 40% of their audience via mobile devices, and the "mobile web" traffic represents 93% of these visits.

Facebook Audience Network, advertiser side
The advertisers who want to make ads via Audience Network may opt for the classic formats of Facebook (including carousels) as well as banners in size 300 × 250 pixels or 320 × 50 pixels (see the image above)

Facebook Audience Network, editor side
If an editor want to monetize their mobile site through Facebook Audience Network, they need to join the public beta of Audience Network for mobile. The advertising spaces are easy to integrate, via a simple Javascript code. Several media are already participating in this beta such as Slate.

Publishers like Answers.com are seeing positive results:

“Answers is thrilled to be an Audience Network for mobile web beta partner. As one of the web’s largest premier publishers, we’re always looking for innovative ways to monetize our high-quality content. The Audience Network for mobile web showcases Facebook’s unique approach to providing value for publishers and advertisers and is already becoming one of our top monetization partners on mobile web. With the company’s massive reach and unrivaled audience targeting capabilities, this new offering will be a game-changer for the digital publishing industry.” — Rich Dredge, CEO Answers.com

Audience Network is a direct blow to Admob created by Google. According to several specialists the leverage effects provided by the 1.5 billion users of Facebook and its targeting capabilities may generate a real migration of advertisers to Facebook.

TOP 5 COMMERCIALS OF SUPER BOWL 2016 !

2016-02-24T07:50:00.001-08:00

As every year the Super Bowl (the final of the American Football League) is accompanied by a lot of amazing advertisements. This year, 50 brands and 84 spots were seen 373.9 million times on social networks, including 178 million on Facebook

For this 2016 edition, CBS had fixed the price of the 30-second spot at 5 million of dollars. In fact, this is the most awaited event for brands to communicate to the American market in order to show new products or simply to increase their brand awareness.

Today I invite you to discover the top 5 best advertisements of the Super Bowl 2016 (please note that this ranking is subjective)

5 - Save Water (Colgate)

The Colgate advertising hopes to change people's behavior with regard to water wastage. Indeed, this 30-second ad aims to convince people to close their tap when they are brushing their teeth in order to save water. Given water shortages worldwide, the brand uses the hashtag #everydropcounts on social networks.

4 – Pokémon Train On (Nintendo)

To celebrate its 20th anniversary, Pokémon has aired a campaign on social networks.

The campaign is entitled "Train On" and uses the hashtag # Pokemon20 inviting fans to publish on social networks their favorite memories of the Pokémon video game.

3 – Restricted Bling (T-Mobile)

Drake has shot a commercial for the mobile operator "T-Mobile". In this advertisement, we can see the rapper who is making the video of his famous song "Hotline Bling". But three directors of T-Mobile try to interrupt him to place brand references.

2 – Find your Magic (Lynx)

The deodorant brand Lynx, in full overhaul of its brand image decided to participate in the Super Bowl 50 years, taking advantage of the event to unveil its new line of communication. His new campaign "Find your magic" bet on the strength of every man, namely its singularity and difference.

1 - First Date (Hyundai)

Kevin Hart sees her daughter have a first date with a boy. To please her, he lends him the keys of his new car Hyundai Genesis.

After that the actor Kevin Hart will be desperate to prevent them from continuing their story.

WHY PEOPLE BLOCK ADS ?

2016-02-18T10:32:00.001-08:00

Intrusive ads, affects site performance, privacy concerns... the agency Teads conducted a study to identify the reasons that lead users to use Adblock.

This study was conducted among 10,000 internet users in December 2015 in 9 countries (US, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina), via an online questionnaire.

Respondents were divided into three groups:

-Ad blockers active users on desktop / laptop,
-Ad blockers on mobile active users (smartphones / tablets)
-People who knows what are advertisements blockers, but not having yet installed.

This study includes adoption by browser and shows that 62% of users have adblock installed on google chrome.

More interesting, the study shows some solutions to adopt. User choice is a solution to preventing blocker adoption but also giving users choice can reduce adoption. That is why ads on the internet should be non-intrusive and targeted.

In fact, according to the study 58% more likely to uninstall ad blockers if they are provided the opportunity to scroll past an ad whilst consuming content.

More over, 37% installed an ad blocker through word of mouth influence, with 22% being inspired by online news, creating a dangerous ‘copy cat culture’.

To finish, Teads give 5 recommendations for creating an optimal ad experience :

1) Integrate advertising formats which create a seamless user experience

2) Leverage features that give users control of the ad experience through choice

3) Limit the use of advertising formats that are considered intrusive such as pre-roll

4) Create formats which are built specifically for mobile to improve users’ perception of mobile advertising

5) Strategically use targeting to ensure ads are relevant to the user