I am just leaving Austin after spending five days at SXSW, and between the nightlife and all day conference sessions, it’s safe to say I need to sleep for a couple days. Despite the exhaustion, it was an amazing time, both educationally and socially. Here are my Top 10 Takeaways.

1. Ad Blocking is Killing Traditional Digital Advertising

Ad Blocking is listed as my first takeaway as it addresses the core issue with the advertising industry today. Most of the following highlights are based on how marketers can adapt to address the fact that consumers 1) aren’t seeing ads or 2) aren’t connecting with ads when they do see them.In many ways the ad industry has had its head in the sand as ad blocking has been looming on the horizon for some time.In 2015, $22 billion in revenue was affected by Ad Blocking and this year, that number will rise to $41 billion. Soon, half of all 18-24 year olds will use ad blockers. Today, 22% of all Brits already do.

(1) Source: Page Fair & Vizium

But wait - there’s hope...

2. Tell Better Stories by Staying in Touch with Human Emotions

When consumers connect with a story, they listen and remember.During what was probably the hottest panel of the conference, J.J. Abrams told a story about another director who once showed him a 6-minute action filled reel that was jam packed with many of the latest special effects technology. While the visuals were amazing, he said, “I couldn’t connect with it because it lacked a human element. Even though we now have access to amazing technology, it’s important not to lose sight of what makes us human.” In essence, movie markers need to tell stories that allow people to truly relate with the characters and feel a deep connection to them.Brands are no different. Marketers need to tell better, more meaningful stories. But how?

3. Branding in Social is More Important than Ever

In a session called Stay True to Your Craft and Online Brand, the conversation was about the power of branding today. It’s more important than ever for brands to know who they are and what they stand for. According to Jey Van-Sharp, “A Brand is storytelling. It’s a concept, it’s an idea. Replace the word ‘brand’ with ‘personality,’ then how do you think about it?”Social Media is one big conversation. With people listening less and less to traditional ads, brands need to be louder in social and the ones with the strongest and most consistent POV in a positive direction will gain the most attention.

4. The Messenger Matters

Brand Ambassadors are the best storytellers. People want to hear from other people and not from large companies. I listened to and participated in a discussion and Q&A with executives from NASA, The Peace Corps and U.S. Travel, all of which are big supporters of brand advocacy within social media. The key question for them is – what is the best way to get people talking positively at scale?

Jonathan Townsend from NASA said, “People are much more likely to begin talking about your brand if you get them in a room of likeminded people.”Make them part of your culture. Connect them with one another and they will build more of a connection with your brand. The best thing a brand can do is to create a community where people have a sense of belonging and pride.For example, NASA arranges 120 events that people can attend. It brings out junior to mid level speakers who are actually doing the work, rather then high-level executives who may be a bit removed. They also arrange special tours for their advocates that are not available to the general public. This gives people a real sense of community and belonging.

5. The Best Marketing Improves People’s Lives

Kevin Plank, CEO and Founder of Under Armor, participated in a Q&A surrounding his incredible success story of building a company to $4 billion in annual revenue and growing. Recently, Kevin invested $710 million in app technology to help people track their health across the four quadrants of sleep, activity, fitness and nutrition. He now has 160 million users, growing at a rate of 130,000 downloads per day. Last year, users uploaded 8 billion food entries and 2 million workouts with the purpose of tracking, monitoring and optimizing their health.While Kevin’s core goal is to help people improve their health, he is creating two incredibly powerful marketing byproducts:

• Intelligent data that Under Armor can use to create products that help people to become healthier, fitter and happier.

• One of the most effect CRM channels ever built, giving Under Armor a direct link to potentially hundreds of millions of users who use the company’s technology daily to improve their most valuable asset: their health.

6. Brands Need to Drive Culture to Be Most Relevant

In a session called From Niche to Movement to Mainstream, Chris Barth from Contagious and Diego Figueroa from Lapiz focused on how cultures grow, using the examples of food trucks and hip-hop. There are multiple catalysts to growth - not just one tipping point - and predicting a groundbreaking cultural phenomenon is extremely difficult. But, for those brands that do, they can help drive culture and will become an integral part of a movement, such as when Adidas supported Run DMC early on in support of hip-hop. To be successful, brands should hedge their bets and participate in 10 cultural movements to see two take hold.

7. Virtual Reality is Exploding – Jump In Now

VR is clearly at its tipping point and was omnipresent at SXSW. NASA created a VR experience for its upcoming trips to Mars in 2018 and 2023. The University of Texas at Austin created a VR driving game on texting while driving, which always comes to an abrupt ending with a head on collision with a Mack Truck. Gillette and Discovery created VR stories on skateboarding, skeleton racing and slack lining. And, The New York Times hosted three discussions on the topic.If you are not doing VR, find a way to do it to now before your competitors. There is a huge consumer appetite right now and your efforts will get noticed. While the distribution of Oculus and Google Cardboard is low, Facebook 360 is clearly getting some nice distribution to reach millions of consumers.

8. UGC Storytelling through KnowMe

During J.J. Abrams and Andrew Jarecki’s session, Jarecki featured his new app, KnowMe, which allows users to quickly and easily create stories by stringing many videos together and adding a voice over narrative. The app just launched and my guess is that it is going to explode quickly as there is nothing out there like it.

9. Mobile Video Just Added A Sense of Touch

On the trade show floor I met a company by the name of Immersion that enables mobile video to have feeling. In other words, it vibrates to the tune of the commercials, movie trailer or other video. I became so immersed in the experience of watching a Mission Impossible 5 trailer that I didn’t realize that my sense of touch was included in the experience. I did recognize, however, that the feeling was much deeper than what I was used to.Adding the sense of touch to digital content will undoubtedly enhance experience and increase recall for advertisers.

10. SXSW Still Throws the Best Parties

I had the fortune of attending most of the best parties too. My favorite was The NYT’s with its VR Experience, 10 piece band and outdoor setting.Pandora’s event had G-Eazy who put on a stellar outdoor show with his 100+ “real” fans looking in from the outside of the fences.Spotify landed 82-year old Willie Nelson who was still pickin’ well after all these years.Funny or Die brought in the popular DJ Alice in Wonderland to spin.Mashable did not have any celebrity entertainers but the event was hopping to say the least.And, as always, Rainey Street was in fine form each night with an array of house bars, joined by Food Trucks galore to take care of late night munchies.There are plenty of stories to be told about the last five days. The most relevant for all of us is that advertising and marketing are changing faster than you can say SXSW. Between ad blocking, DVR, social media and people simply protesting traditional forms of advertising, sticking with the status quo is much riskier than trying new things. So dig deep to find your true brand voice, tell authentic stories in social and use ambassadors and new technology to amplify your message. Do any combination of those things and much success and opportunity lie ahead.Want more tips and tricks for how to dominate social this year with Data, Creative and Amplification? Download our 2016 Social Media Survival Guide.

Facebook has officially launched Canvas, arguably one of the most exciting ad units available to social advertisers today. Described as “A new space for big ideas on Facebook,” Canvas gives advertisers more creative freedom than ever before, offering an immersive and interactive…well, uh, canvas…on which to tell your story.Facebook is doubling down on the benefits of interactive storytelling as a way of connecting with your audience in meaningful ways (without driving them outside the platform). Facebook LIVE, Facebook 360 and Canvas are all prime examples.In the not so distant past, Facebook ads were limited to pictures. People paused for a quick second while scrolling the newsfeed and either clicked on a link or kept scrolling. Then video came along and advertisers were able to lock viewers in for a bit longer to tell a bigger (more in-depth) story. Now with Canvas, advertisers are able to capture the video view attention span while also allowing for the interactivity that users today thrive on.With Canvas still in the very early stages, it will be interesting to see what further testing reveals as it relates to calls to action, metrics and benchmarking. Facebook’s model remains unchanged - it will not be charging more or less depending on what is put into the Canvas. Facebook will, however, be able to report on deeper metrics such as time spent on the ad and increase in ad recall.Now is the time for brands to take advantage of this “thumbstopping” creative opportunity while it’s fresh. The rich media opportunities are incredibly exciting for a wide array verticals.

HEALTH + FITNESS

The health and fitness category is exploding on social for a reason. For one, it’s incredibly community-driven by nature. The storytelling – and story starting – opportunities include everything from product news/reviews and recipes to coordinated fitness challenges and workout tips. We put together the generic Canvas example above to give you a sense of what’s possible. As the #fitspo saying goes, “two months from now you’ll regret not starting today.”

RESTAURANTS

Restaurant marketers have been agonizing over the best way to uniquely communicate ingredient quality and food freshness. Worry no more. This is the perfect opportunity to SHOW your customers where your food comes from, how it’s made and who makes it. Throw in a side order of LTOs and special offers and you’ve got yourself an engaged – and hungry – audience.

ENTERTAINMENT

Canvas allows movie marketers to introduce viewers not only to a trailer, but also to the characters, memorable quotes and critic reviews (and more) in a single location, without having to leave the newsfeed. It’s an immersive experience that’s actually going to drive ticket sales.

BEAUTY

Beauty is perhaps the single most review-driven category in retail. With nearly 70% of all people trusting online reviews when making purchasing decisions, Canvas allows beauty, bath and body marketers to tell real stories from real people. When shared alongside product news, influencer tutorials and the lat est trends, you’re looking at one hot new tool.

CONSUMER PACKAGED GOODS

Feature your products, sponsorships, influencers, UGC and special promotions all in one place. This is a formula that can be re-skinned over and over again depending on the season or occasion. When you consider the stories and lifestyle that surround your product, the opportunities are endless.Header image taken from https://canvas.facebook.com/

Every :30 second Super Bowl commercial you watch this Sunday came with a price tag of five million dollars. The same amount that GoPro will grant in cash prizes this year to its fandom of content creators in the GoPro Awards.

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The former represents the behemoth of traditional advertising, and the latter is arguably the future. Super Bowl Ads tell :30 to :60 stories that make an immediate impression and the GoPro Awards start stories that last a lifetime. One is an expense and the other is an investment.

‍As a marketer which one do you prefer?

Let’s start by looking at the benefits of Super Bowl ads:

• They reach an average of 114.4 MM people (CNN/Money Feb. 2015).
• People actually watch them. Imagine that!?!
• There is a viral effect, particularly for the good ones, which are talked about for several days before and after the game.
• Ads on the Super Bowl provide a nice ego boost to the marketing and C Level Suite executives.  Sorry, almost left this one out but it’s so true.

What are the drawbacks?

• The ad is “one and done.” On Monday morning, the money has been spent and the ad has run. It is void of any CRM play, i.e., an email, a pixel, or a Facebook ID to keep in touch with the target audience.
• Many of the Super Bowl viewers are not in the target market for a high percentage of the advertisers. For example, Maserati ran its first TV ad during the 2014 Super Bowl. How many people can afford a Maserati?
• Marketers are entering the most competitive, most highly produced ad environment known to man, creating risk that ads will fall short of expectations and end up toward the bottom of the rankings.

Now let’s look at the GoProAwards. To begin with, what are they? The GoPro Awards is a contest that embodies the very essence of GoPro’s mission, which is to empower consumers to capture and share life’s most memorable experiences. The GoPro awards serve to aggregate the world’s best User Generated GoPro Content, and will award five million dollars to the best content in multiple categories ranging from Extreme POV to Family. With the creation of these Awards, GoPro is walking the talk and investing in the people – the heroes - who buy and use their products. GoPro has created a StoryStarting Campaign where it has developed an idea that seeds stories and places its brand in the center.

What are the Benefits?

• GoPro puts its customers and itself in the center of the conversation between friends, family, and people interested in similar lines of content.
• This program creates a new community of people that can connect and discuss how they use their GoPro products.
• The content is largely self-sustaining because it is crowdsourced and will have a tremendous level of depth and growth.
• The site satisfies the ultimate rule for Growth Hacking by developing a marketing program that inspires and incentivizes consumers to use and promote a product in the way it was intended.
• By developing its own destination site, GoPro now has created the beginnings of a massive CRM database of e-mails, cookies, product usage, and behavioral patterns.
• The site is anything but one and done.  It is an ongoing, breathing marketing asset that should increase significantly in value.  Think YouTube for GoPro videos.
• The GoPro Awards is built into GoPro’s site, allowing visitors to simply point, click, explore and, of course, buy GoPro products.

What are the drawbacks?

• The website requires ongoing maintenance.
• The traffic builds over time and is not all at once.
• Five million dollars is a lot of money. The difference is that GoPro is giving the money to its customers rather than to a TV Network.

Which do I think is better?

‍Having worked in TV for 5 years and now in digital for 20, I have an appreciation for the value of both; however, it must be quite obvious that I prefer the story starting aspects of the GoPro Awards, and the potential it represents for the industry as a whole.

GoPro has answered the most important question in marketing today:

‍What type of experience can we build that inspires our customers to use our products more and become advocates for our brand?

‍Today’s best marketing strategies answer this question and create experiences that move their customers and drive culture. The brand becomes an integral part of the customer’s experience as opposed to simply being the sponsor. Spending money to lease a spot in a piece of content – radio, print or TV – will never be as powerful as being the originator of an experience that allows your customers to thrive and carry your story further.

Next Up: In my next blog learn how any brand can be a story starter.

‍Want more tips and tricks for how to dominate social this year with Data, Creative and Amplification. Contact us here.

One of the coolest things about working in social is getting phone calls from clients that allow you to geek out on really awesome new sh!t.That’s why when Paramount calls with a request for you to produce a Facebook 360 video to promote the final installment of Paranormal Activity: Ghost Dimension, you may or may not squeal with excitement and pull out all the stops to make it happen.It should also be noted that this 360 video is the final piece of content that will ever come from the revered horror franchise, so we needed to give it a proper, ghostly disappearance…er sendoff.The video shows a group of teenagers breaking into the abandoned garage of the original Paranormal Activity house. Filled with the dusty remnants of the franchise’s victims, the kids use the garage for a séance in an attempt to experience the paranormal. Things take a quick turn for the deadly.Click on the video below to check it out for yourself. Best seen on tablet or your phone. If you are on desktop, click and drag from left to right to get the full 360-degree experience. NOTE: 360 videos aren’t viewable on Safari or Internet Explorer.

360 Degree Paranormal Activity SeanceContacting the dead is never a good idea - unless you record it on a 360-degree camera.Posted by IGN on Tuesday, December 15, 2015 

Our team endeavored to make this a truly immersive, interactive VR experience that touched on the film’s themes, and included plenty of “Easter eggs” for the viewer to discover. With surprises, frights and delights coming from all angles, viewers are enticed to engage in repeat viewings. As of mid-January, the video has been watched more than one million times.

As a fun, strategic twist, we decided to cast social influencers and fans of Paranormal Activity to star in the video. The cross promotion coming from the influencers helped us to expand our reach and social prominence. We also partnered with gaming and entertainment behemoth IGN to further amplify distribution.Facebook 360, which was initially only available for testing to major brands and publishers, is now available to anyone looking to dabble in VR. And let us just say, if there is any experiential element to your brand or story whatsoever, you better get to dabbling.From places you want to go, to things you want to see or know, the possibilities are truly remarkable. Facebook 360 allows you to become fully immersed in news, brand experiences, entertainment, sports, travel and live events like never before. And it’s just the beginning.Want more tips and tricks for how to dominate social this year with Data, Creative and Amplification? Download our 2016 Social Media Survival Guide.

Our 2016 Social Media Survival Guide provides the What, Why and How to succeed this year, with a look at the Three Core Pillars of Social Media - Data, Creative & Amplification.Here are some specific topics that we cover:• How Small Data trumps Big Data• Why First Party Data is critical today• Why building your Archetypes is essential• What Shiny New Things you will need this year to survive• What 7 out of 10 brands lack when it comes to community management• Why 2016 is more about Story Starting than just Storytelling