Category Archives: Photo Activation Marketing

Content is King

Marketers know there’s nothing more important than content – and that’s true of our photo activation solution too.

Photos taken at brand events give you the opportunity to engage with your audience and build a special, more personal relationship with them.

And since photos are the most popular type of content shared on social media, your pictures are happily shared by event participants. After all, who doesn’t want to share interesting moments that make them seem fun and exciting?

Green screen technology transforms the content of your photos. Suddenly, they’re more fun, exciting and interesting than ever before.

Green screen photos are special, surprising and engaging. Our analysis shows they’re much more likely to be shared by event participants.

And, when they are, they’re the sort of photos that demand attention from friends, followers and colleagues.

There’s no doubt about it – content is king. And, with green screen your content created with a photo activation has a bigger reach than ever.

Mobile drives our social obsession with images

smartphone-sharing1Five years ago or even less the concept of photo sharing on social networks revolved primarily around grainy family photographs – sometimes embarrassing ones – holiday snaps that few other people wanted to see and cute, furry pets. They were a place reserved for the individual and, for many, were a sanctuary from brands and their heavy-handed advertising messages.

How times have changed. Brands have finally begun to realise how to leverage social networks in a manner that isn’t intrusive but which instead is genuinely engaging. They have also found that when that engagement is natural, users are happy to share brand or product information. As a consequence, the benefits can be more significant than they could ever have imagined. Photo-marketing is not the future of marketing; it’s the here and now.

A big part of the reason for this has been the explosion in the use of mobile devices. Recent research from Adobe showed that 71% of tablet and smartphone owners access social media from their mobile devices. This fundamentally changes the dynamic in terms of how we, as individuals, receive and post information to social networks as well as how brands deliver their marketing messages. Brands that have yet to tap into the power of mobile marketing and social media are already behind the curve.

And, of course, great use of mobile devices means a greater use of images. Facebook and Twitter have steadily recognised users’ desire to communicate through images as much as text as the way to communicate, whilst sites like Pinterest, Tumblr and Instagram are growing in popularity exactly because they are image-oriented.

As consumers, we can’t get enough of it. Smartphone sales exceeded feature phone sales for the first time last year. Gartner reported worldwide mobile phone sales totalling 435 million units with smartphone sales up 46.5% from the previous year. Deloitte reported that between 12 and 13 million tablets were sold in the UK in 2013. The demand for image content is only going to grow and so, to compete in that social space, brands will have to adopt increasingly interesting and creative approaches to content and image marketing in 2014. The rewards for brands the put themselves in the picture could be enormous.

Smile….you’re on a social network

Smile….you’re on a social networkWhether we admit it or not, all of us like to think we’re popular. And for many of us this has manifested itself in sharing our experiences with friends online whether they want to share them with us or not.

In the pre-digital age, this meant passing around the holiday photographs at family gatherings or getting people to huddle in the front room to watch homemade movies. But today, in the age of the smartphone and the social network, the immediacy of being able to do that means we can not only share our experiences instantly through photography but we can get the validation that our friends’ feedback represents.

One of the reasons behind the growth in social networks has been our genuine need as individuals to engage in social contact with our friends. In part this is down to our desire to show off – to share the places or events that we’ve been to and the experiences that we have had. Others might be genuine achievements, like running the London Marathon or taking part in the Race for Life. The positive comments we receive as a result encourages us to do it more.
The reason for using photography as the medium for this is the old adage that a picture speaks a thousand words. They don’t only convey your message it also sets you in the context of the event or the situation you are keen to share. Photography has become the medium through which we live our lives – so much of what we do and what we experience is captured as an image and shared with the world. Now we have the technology at our fingertips to enable us to do so in almost real time.

Imagine, now, if you, as a brand, could share in the intimacy of those special moments and be part of the memories that each of us wishes to share with our friends. Imagine that, in a subtle and unobtrusive manner, you could be in that picture with me at Glastonbury, or sharing that drink with my friends and, in some way, through your presence, impose some credibility or verification on the image that I wouldn’t get from simply the picture on its own.

That’s how photo-activation marketing works. It authenticates your experience by attaching it to the brand, proving that you were where you said you were or did what you said you did, but in a way that enhances rather than detracts from your achievement. And because we like to share, you – the brand – become joined in that experience, part of the group, a friend for a day and you enjoy all of the word of mouth benefits that go along with it.

Brands need to get the picture to maximise the real benefits of social networks

zuckerbergBrands which most successfully engage with consumers through shared photographic and video content will be the ones likely to derive most tangible benefit from their presence on changing social media platforms, according to an expert in the field.

Pictures Experience, which works with brands, experiential and activation agencies, to optimise the use of shared photography on their experiential campaigns, says that the major social networks are already making changes of their own to recognise the importance of photography and video.

“It has been clear for some time that photo sharing has been the cornerstone of what Facebook has to offer,” explains Pictures Experience director Gosia Kalicka.

“We know that 70% of the content shared is photographic and that is very powerful. Twitter is now focusing heavily on public photo, while Google+ is also looking at how to make photo sharing easier for its users.”

In September, Facebook revealed that it hosts more than 250 billion photos, and that people upload more than 350 million photos to it every day. Kalicka says that, from a brand perspective, inclusion of photography encourages sharing and leads to invaluable word of mouth marketing and social brand endorsement.

“For every 1000 of our branded photographs that are taken at an event or during a campaign, we know that each one that is downloaded is shared with and seen by 30 friends on Facebook. This leads to around 115,000 brand impressions on Facebook and around 6500 web site hits. Brands that don’t move effectively into the social photographic space are missing out on a fast developing area of social consumer engagement.”

“There is a sense here in that Twitter is upping the ante and positioning itself as the platform for brands and individuals to go to for broadcasting viral images. Facebook will inevitably respond. The emergence of micro-video apps like Vine and others mean there is likely to be more movement toward real-time video sharing as well. Either way the opportunities for brands are only going to increase.”

Pictures Experience, which has worked with brands including Coors Light, Nikon , British Army, Nokia, Berocca and Warburtons , offers participants at brand events to have a free picture taken. A brand ambassador scans a card with a unique picture code, takes the picture and hands the card to the participant, who can then download their image immediately and free of charge. As part of the download process, participants provide valuable data and are encouraged to share the branded picture with friends and family across social platforms. All social network posts are linked back to the client’s branded web site to drive even more traffic.

Auto industry puts its foot on the gas to exploit Facebook potential

car-social-mediaRecent research that made its way to us from Simply Measured made for interesting reading. The research measured the engagement rate of top brands across a range of sectors on Facebook – this is there ability to engage with their page fans. The report showed that whilst, on average, leading brands average an engagement rate of 12%, when viewed by industry, automotive brands outstrip others by some distance.

Automotive brands receive nearly twice the Interbrand average per-post engagement. They also post more frequently and share a higher percentage of photos on Facebook – 84% compared to the Interbrand average of 74%. Automotive brands are able to sustain more engagement with high quality photos of the cars their fans love.

This shouldn’t really come as much of a surprise. Automotive brands were early adopters of social media marketing and they have continued to believe that it represents a cost-effective method of marketing. They have succeeded in making social media a durable channel for them by keeping momentum in their conversations and enabling visitors to address issues that are of genuine interest and importance to them. They recognise the potential that social platforms offer as a channel to listen to their consumers and genuinely seek to make their product or their services better.

The fact that cars are so photogenic coupled with the fact that around 70% of all the content shared on Facebook is photographic means it should be a marriage made in heaven. That’s why photo-activating social marketing can do so much for automotive brands. We know, for example, that if you take a picture of a customer with a stunning new car the likelihood is that the image will be downloaded and shared online with friends. We similarly know that for every 1000 such images that are uploaded, the brand can expect to get around 115k brand impressions on Facebook and around 6500 hits on their web site. That’s powerful.

Consumers today don’t want to be sold to. They want to be informed, educated, engaged and entertained. The automotive industry has put itself in the driving seat of social media engagement; now it needs to press on the gas and exploit it even more.

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Picture this – mouth-to-mouth marketing that boosts a brand

whisper2Any marketer will tell you – probably as a quiet, whispered aside – that effective word of mouth endorsement of your brand is not only the most highly valued by consumers but also the Holy Grail for brands. McKinsey once claimed that word of mouth was “the most disruptive force in marketing.”

As the majority of brands recognise and ready themselves to increase their presence and investment in social platforms only a relative few have still been able to determine how to quantify the success of their marketing on social platforms, and on offline activities driving consumers online.

This challenge is addressed in a new white paper by marketing analytics expert MarketShare and the Keller Fay Group, called “Quantifying the Role of Social Voice in Marketing Effectiveness”. The paper demonstrates how word of mouth (offline and online) drives sales, has both a direct and an indirect impact on sales and amplifies the impact of marketing as people talk about the marketing or share it via social media.

Let’s consider that amplification for a moment because there is a mood change happening in social media with consumers moving rapidly away from words and towards images. Between Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr, consumers share nearly 5,000 images every second of every day and this doesn’t even factor in Pinterest’s estimated 40 million users and the rise of SnapChat. Brands not only need to think socially to connect with consumers online, they need to think visually. Brands need to harness the fact that a picture – especially if it is one that is personal to the individual – speaks a thousand words and creates emotions and conversations that transform the relationship with the brand from purely transactional to social and emotional ones. And that’s hugely powerful.

We know from the work we have done with brands how you can create an emotional connection with consumers through photography. We know that for every 1000 photographs taken with our system at an event by experiential or field marketing teams, around 550 of those branded photographs will typically be shared on Facebook, which will lead to 115,000 brand impressions on the world’s biggest social platform. This, in turn, will generate around 6500 hits on the client’s web site. And all from 1000 photographs taken at one event; as the saying goes – you do the maths and then ask yourself whether photography is as big a part of the service you deliver for your brands as the figures suggest it should be.