Reaching Communities Through Mobile Advertising

The Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity had the who’s who in advertising and communications flocking to France last week. The festival presented an opportunity for marketers to share insights and new innovations as participants waited to hear who would be awarded a prestigious Lion award.

Facebook’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg, and Airbnb’s CMO, Jonathan Mildenhall, presented on the growth of global communities and how marketers can reach them through mobile advertising.

The trend in marketing has been to move away from selling a product or service and instead connect the consumer with a community. Airbnb especially relies on the idea of community as it utilizes technology to connect people in real life. “Without our community there is no Airbnb, there is no brand,” says Mildenhall.

To effectively reach these communities, Sandberg says brands need to create attention-grabbing native mobile ads with “thumb-stopping creative”. With Facebook and Instagram, advertisers are able to test an ad’s performance while maintaining the ability to change out creative if the desired results are not achieved.

Noteworthy campaigns often combine multiple mobile elements. The “New Year, New Roads” campaign for Chevy used video and chatbot among other platforms to connect with consumers.  

Airbnb has seen significant benefits to investing in its own community with user-generated content receiving six times more engagement than advertising video on social media.

“At the end of the day,” says Sandberg, “this (ad) community’s job is to drive our businesses. Explain our purpose, but also drive sales.”  

Futuristic Facial-Recognition Software is Coming... Soon

We’ve all seen futuristic movies with hi-tech technology that seems too far-fetched to ever be a reality; but could that very technology be right around the corner? Jason Warnock reports for Marketing Land that facial-recognition technology might be a reality sooner than most people think.

Among many assumed uses for facial-recognition software lies email marketing. Businesses have already started using geofencing software in their email campaigns. This software allows them to send emails to customers as they walk passed their store or walk into the mall. The biggest downfall to this is how easily customers can ignore or not even be notified about new emails. With facial-recognition, there is no hiding.

For this software to work, businesses would need to capture headshots of their customers. From there, they can take action. The first point of action will be working to solve the problem of consumers’ lack of brick-and-mortar shopping. Marketers can send emails to customers offering “deals at the door” that are only accessible when their face is recognized entering the store. This will also allow marketers to avoid the hassle of single-use coupons that are currently offered via email.

Thanks to modern day cameras, marketers will be able to retain information like height, weight, gender, and approximate age. These metrics will allow marketers to create more sophisticated promotions to combine consumers’ digital and physical personas. When these customers do enter the store, cameras will be able to track their purchases; even if these are cash purchases. Currently, purchase behavior can only be tracked through the use of credit cards, however, with facial-recognition that won’t be the case for much longer.

Just like with any new technology, this facial-recognition software may have some hurdles to jump like how to prevent information leaks, guard against hackers, and deal with customers refusing to participate.

With this technology right around the corner, I am interested to see how this “futuristic” software integrates its way into our marketing world.