Regional grocery chain Piggly Wiggly is proclaiming itself “Local Since Forever” in its first new brand campaign in six years. The Charleston, S.C.-based chain is using a two-minute spot to kick off the new positioning, spokesperson Christopher Ibsen tells Marketing Daily. It plays off the area’s special beauty, as well as the chain’s 65-year history of local ownership. “It taps into this deep sense of pride and commitment to what we’re trying to accomplish,” he says. “Besides plenty of imagery of the Carolinas and coastal Georgia, there are familiar images of our stores, and the commitment to local communities, whether that’s sponsoring church picnics, Little League games or parade floats.” The two-minute spot break will break on all four local network stations, leading into the NCAA’s Final Four Men’s Basketball Championships on April 2, and will continue to run for several weeks, before switching to shorter versions of the ad. “There will be no escaping it,” he says. And the new theme will also appear in radio ads, billboards, newspaper circulars, store signage and collateral, social media spaces -- and later this year, on the company’s new Web site. The positioning stemmed, in part, from the 100-store chain’s long commitment to local gastronomy, which it began touting more prominently this year. Pig Swig, for example, its private-label beer -- which includes Pig Tail Ale and Pig Pen Pilsner -- was launched nine months ago, and has significantly exceeded all forecasts, he explains. And at about the same time, it began running weekly “The pig makes local happen” ads in papers, each focusing on a local product and the people behind it, from simmering sauces to local frozen biscuits and area cheeses. Ibsen says the time seemed right for the new campaign, because as customers settle into the new realities of continued high food and gas prices, “the shopping trip to the local supercenter doesn’t offer the value many shoppers thought it might. Our studies have shown a great deal of self-loathing that comes from shopping at supercenters, including longer drives, walking across immense parking lots and through enormous stores. We offer a more consistent value in terms of pricing, as well as the satisfaction of shopping at an employee-owned store, which our customers say makes a big difference to them.” The positioning also taps into an ongoing effort from the South Carolina Department of Agriculture, encouraging people to become Palmettovores, eating South Carolina-certified products.
The image-based social network Instagram still won’t commit to a specific date for moving from its iOS-only presence to Android. But the company is not in official tease mode, at least. Instagram launched a sign-up for the “beta” rollout of an Android version at its site this weekend. “Want to be first in line for Instagram on Android?” the site asks before prompting for an email address. No -- we have no idea what being first on line for an Android app means, unless the company plans a limited or public beta. At any rate, this tease follows up on appearances recently by CEO Kevin Systrom in which he offered a demo look at the Android version and hinted it might be better than the iOS app that has garnered over 27 million users in little more than a year. Instagram allows users to apply visual effects to their snapshots and share the result on Instagram’s own and other social networks. Apple iTunes has named the social media app its App of the Year. While Instagram does integrate with other networks, it has grown to be a substantial social net in its own right, as users often prefer to peruse one another’s images on their phones. Image editing program Hipstamatic announced recently that it was now using the Instagram API to feed photos into the network. It is the first third party to push images into Instagram, and officials claim their users are now shifting their sharing habits to the iOS photo network. Marketers are starting to leverage Instagram in creative ways. In recent talks, Systrom outlined how brands have already used the network. TechCrunch reports from the Federated Media conference that Systrom cited Burberry and its use of the network to share images from fashion shows and Tiffany’s, which solicited users to share love-themed images that it posted to its own site. Instagram has not announced specific plans for monetizing its social network, but Systrom used these examples to demonstrate his claim that Instagram could be “the next big opportunity for display advertising,” because advertisers work and speak in images.
Regional grocery chain Piggly Wiggly is proclaiming itself “Local Since Forever” in its first new brand campaign in six years. The Charleston, S.C.-based chain is using a two-minute spot to kick off the new positioning, spokesperson Christopher Ibsen tells Marketing Daily. It plays off the area’s special beauty, as well as the chain’s 65-year history of local ownership. “It taps into this deep sense of pride and commitment to what we’re trying to accomplish,” he says. “Besides plenty of imagery of the Carolinas and coastal Georgia, there are familiar images of our stores, and the commitment to local communities, whether that’s sponsoring church picnics, Little League games or parade floats.” The two-minute spot break will break on all four local network stations, leading into the NCAA’s Final Four Men’s Basketball Championships on April 2, and will continue to run for several weeks, before switching to shorter versions of the ad. “There will be no escaping it,” he says. And the new theme will also appear in radio ads, billboards, newspaper circulars, store signage and collateral, social media spaces -- and later this year, on the company’s new Web site. The positioning stemmed, in part, from the 100-store chain’s long commitment to local gastronomy, which it began touting more prominently this year. Pig Swig, for example, its private-label beer -- which includes Pig Tail Ale and Pig Pen Pilsner -- was launched nine months ago, and has significantly exceeded all forecasts, he explains. And at about the same time, it began running weekly “The pig makes local happen” ads in papers, each focusing on a local product and the people behind it, from simmering sauces to local frozen biscuits and area cheeses. Ibsen says the time seemed right for the new campaign, because as customers settle into the new realities of continued high food and gas prices, “the shopping trip to the local supercenter doesn’t offer the value many shoppers thought it might. Our studies have shown a great deal of self-loathing that comes from shopping at supercenters, including longer drives, walking across immense parking lots and through enormous stores. We offer a more consistent value in terms of pricing, as well as the satisfaction of shopping at an employee-owned store, which our customers say makes a big difference to them.” The positioning also taps into an ongoing effort from the South Carolina Department of Agriculture, encouraging people to become Palmettovores, eating South Carolina-certified products.
In addition to “friending,” “liking,” “tweeting,” and “checking in,” the social-media savvy have added “pinning” to their repertoire as Pinterest.com has taken off more than 1 billion page views per month. As with other social networks or sites that have significantly increased traffic over a very short time, the rules of engagement, particularly for brands, are not yet entirely clear. However, we know that social media marketers have a continuing desire to drive traffic and monetize the ever-growing word-of-mouth engagement power of social networking. They want to make sure their brand is not late to the pinning party. Below are some of the key legal issues that brands will need to consider when joining the legions of pinners. What is Pinterest? Pinterest is an online digital bulletin board that allows users to post and share images they find on the Internet or upload from their personal files. Users can create themed pinboards to categorize the images they share, each of which functions as a link back to the Web site on which the image was originally located. What Should Brands Be Aware Of? Violation of terms of use: First, the current Pinterest terms of use prohibit commercial use, however, over 250 brands have already created branded profiles. It is unlikely Pinterest will start removing brand pages and will instead likely encourage brand presence on the site. Copyright concerns: In the Pinterest terms of use, users agree when they use the site, they own or have permission to use all images they post, yet users are pinning third-party content without the content owners’ consent. While there typically is a link to the original site and the content owner may be happy with the increased traffic, many content owners, including stock photography houses, may not be pleased. Pinterest has responded to some of these complaints by introducing codes to allow sites to prevent pinning. Pinterest may be alleviating some of its own liability with this new technology and may be relying on legal protections, such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Since users are not typically pinning for commercial gain, brands should treat pinboards as they would any other advertising platform. This means that brands should associate their branded profile and pinboards with only images that have been fully cleared for potential intellectual property issues. Brands can also control their pinboards by not allowing other users to contribute by pinning to them. Rights of publicity and privacy: Another area of potential risk for brands is using Pinterest’s capacity to violate individuals’ rights of publicity and privacy. First, any celebrity images, or even photographs of ordinary people, posted by users or brands that do not have permission to use those individuals’ images, would risk the right of privacy or publicity claims. Less obviously, if brands use Pinterest users’ names in connection with their branded content, those users may have right of publicity claims. This has become a reality for Facebook, which is facing a class-action suit over the use of people’s names in connection with “likes” that were re-published as advertisements. As the popularity of Pinterest unfolds, brands should tread carefully and consider these “Pinning Rules” as a guide.
The image-based social network Instagram still won’t commit to a specific date for moving from its iOS-only presence to Android. But the company is not in official tease mode, at least. Instagram launched a sign-up for the “beta” rollout of an Android version at its site this weekend. “Want to be first in line for Instagram on Android?” the site asks before prompting for an email address. No -- we have no idea what being first on line for an Android app means, unless the company plans a limited or public beta. At any rate, this tease follows up on appearances recently by CEO Kevin Systrom in which he offered a demo look at the Android version and hinted it might be better than the iOS app that has garnered over 27 million users in little more than a year. Instagram allows users to apply visual effects to their snapshots and share the result on Instagram’s own and other social networks. Apple iTunes has named the social media app its App of the Year. While Instagram does integrate with other networks, it has grown to be a substantial social net in its own right, as users often prefer to peruse one another’s images on their phones. Image editing program Hipstamatic announced recently that it was now using the Instagram API to feed photos into the network. It is the first third party to push images into Instagram, and officials claim their users are now shifting their sharing habits to the iOS photo network. Marketers are starting to leverage Instagram in creative ways. In recent talks, Systrom outlined how brands have already used the network. TechCrunch reports from the Federated Media conference that Systrom cited Burberry and its use of the network to share images from fashion shows and Tiffany’s, which solicited users to share love-themed images that it posted to its own site. Instagram has not announced specific plans for monetizing its social network, but Systrom used these examples to demonstrate his claim that Instagram could be “the next big opportunity for display advertising,” because advertisers work and speak in images.
It seems everywhere we turn we hear more about social video. Not just branded video that marketers release on YouTube and promote the heck out of. But social video powered by social games — you know, those things we’re all really doing when we’re on social networks — Car Town, Deal or No Deal, Happy Pets and the like. Online video platform TubeMogul is eager for a bit of the social video action. The company has introduced a real-time buying system for social video that lets marketers serve up ads in games being played on Facebook. This is a smart move for TubeMogul because it ties in the company’s existing expertise in real-time buying with social video, which is super popular right now. TubeMogul said advertisers can use demographic or behavioral data to target the spots, drawing from their own data, third party data such as that from a BlueKai, or retargeting tools from a brand’s site or a Facebook page. As with most things social video related, there’s an incentive for consumers. Game players will see a "watch video" or other icon that invites them to earn Facebook credits in exchange for watching an ad, TubeMogul’s spokesman David Burch explained. “The ads can be traditional 15 or 30 seconds, or (more common) longer-form ads that are intended to be shared.” TubeMogul is working with tech firm TrialPay, which handles the transactional component. In testing for ads longer than 90 seconds, about 2.2% of viewers shared the ads with their Facebook friends, a higher rate than the 0.6% of sharing resulting from a 30-second ad, suggesting longer-form might be the best creative type for this medium, TubeMogul said. TubeMogul also said these type of ads can drive sign-ups for brands, as well as lift metrics such as “message association,” citing data from its pre-launch research. “While it is not traditional video advertising -- pre-roll is increasingly selling out at higher and higher prices -- initial data from 4,000 random viewers sees in-message association rise by 7.6% and 2.1% in purchase intent,” Burch said.
It happens while you sleep. One night, you’re visiting your favorite website. Then, you wake up, visit it again, and you can’t recognize it anymore. Did you enter the URL correctly? It’s not your imagination: your favorite site has been turned into yet another Pinterest clone! Shut down your laptop, run for the hills, and stock up on Smirnoff as you wait out this Pinterestpocalypse. The success of Pinterest, amazing and deserved as it is, has inspired many sites old and new to mimic its design. That’s making all internet users victims of Pinterest’s success. This is a new era for mimicry. During Web 1.0, there was little attention to design at all, and sites tended to borrow each other’s features. Then with Web 2.0, many major sites and startups all conformed to a number of the same design elements. With Pinterest, the degree of mimicry is usually what you expect when a site like Facebook gets big in the U.S., and then nearly identical sites pop up in China and Russia. American companies are now so brazen that dozens seem to have collectively decided to copy Pinterest’s design and functionality with absolutely no concern of diluting their own properties in the process. There are many forms of Pinterest cloning. Here are six ways this is happening now: Existing properties relaunching as Pinterest clones: Sadly, this has happened to a couple of my favorite sites. While I’ve never been the target audience for StyleCaster, I have always loved their work, but their redesign is so reminiscent of Pinterest that I can’t get past the new homepage. Then there’s bo.lt, a company I’ve always found innovative and often found controversial. I tried out their new beta site, which looks even more like Pinterest than the background of the new bo.lt homepage implies. I asked the fun-loving crew there if it was a practical joke mocking Pinterest clones. It isn’t. Given my deep admiration for the teams at both companies, I can only hope that the Pinterest emulation pays off. Pinterest clones that encourage sharing inspiring images: We Heart It says that you should “create your own inspiration gallery today,” and then encourages you to “start hearting and sharing your favorite images.” Heart should never be a verb, unless you’re an Oberlin alumnus living in Brooklyn who is trying too hard to be ironic. We Heart It also says to sign in with Facebook or Twitter, or “join manually.” I think it’d be fun to join manually, like writing out a membership application on a typewriter, or with a pencil and paper, and then submitting it through the mail. How much more selective would you be with registering for sites if you had to join manually? Pinterest clones even more directly focused on shopping: Have to Have says “save time and money.” The Fancy says “unlock crazy good deals.” Both scream, “We’re too tired to be original.” Pinterest already makes it easy to buy many of the products shared through its site, so as Pinterest forges ahead with a commercial model, these sites will be even less relevant. Pinterest clones so overtly derivative that a freshman college student interning for an ambulance chaser could draft the cease-and-desist letter to shut them down: For Exhibit A, I present Pinspire. This is where you “discover, collect and share your inspirations.” They’ve cloned Pinterest’s functionality, design, and even its name. And there’s absolutely no sign of shame in doing so. I have to give them credit for coming up with even more “pin” words, though. For instance, you can earn “Pinpoints” when you “pin, and repin, like, and comment on pins and more.” Are these people insane? The only thing that offends me more is that the spelling and grammar are so good that it’s clear someone literate is behind this site. Pinterest clones that are just for men: Since Pinterest’s audience is disproportionately female, a number of people independently arrived at the same idea: men would love the site if only it was filled with condescending, testosterone-heavy stereotypes from the 1980s. At MANteresting, you “share manly things with the community.” When I visited, the homepage featured a photo of “Mad Men” dolls. Guys who think playing with dolls is too masculine to share on Pinterest are probably the same ones reading “The Help” because “The Hunger Games” is too feministic for them. Another clone is Dartitup, which men are supposed to use “to collect ideas for everything from bachelor parties to bachelor pads, sports, glutinous food and all of life's glorious wonders.” Dante probably envisioned a region of hell for copy this bad. It’s also unintentionally hilarious on multiple levels. I’m familiar with the stereotype of men being gluttonous, but I had no clue that guys enjoyed sticky, viscous food, as this copy suggests. Pornographic Pinterest clones: Pinterest is a dangerous site. During a talk last fall to 200 of my agency’s most important clients and all of our senior management, I inadvertently showed a Pinterest screen capture that included a very artistic and very nude female. I’ll never forget the dinner afterward, when a client asked, “So what was up with the naked chick?” Despite my firsthand education with the steamy side of Pinterest, the site is way too tame for some people, so there are pornographic Pinterest clones like Snatchly (the landing page at snatchly.com is mostly safe for work, if you’re curious). This is the one genre of cloning that should be condoned, if not encouraged. After all, the mass market has spent years stealing digital innovations popularized by the porn industry, including live chat, streaming video, and freemium online content models. It’s about time the broader digital media industry can return the favor to pornographers. The future for Pinterest clones is questionable. Pinterest is just getting started, but the hype around it will settle. By the time that happens, Pinterest will need to focus even more on growing its mobile audience, and its mobile app presents a far more straightforward user interface, given screen size limitations and other factors. The clones won’t disappear, though. Some will adapt and clone whatever Pinterest becomes, some will morph into whatever internet users glom on to next, and -- one hopes -- some will quietly fade away, as the horrors of the Pinterestpocalypse recede.
Several leading online video technology vendors have inked fresh partner deals and rolled out new features in the last week, including Taboola, Digitalsmiths and Kaltura. Tracking particular deals, such as these, can offer insight into emerging trends in Web video. For starters, apparel and footwear retailer Zappos paired up with Kaltura to use its enterprise video tools to power online video on the Zappos site. Zappos is a big win for Kaltura given the prominence of the brand. But the deal also underscores the importance of online video as a marketing tool for e-commerce. The retailer will use the video player, interactive features and also Kaltura’s analytics to understand how its visitors are viewing and using video. Zappos senior manager Laurie Williams said in a statement that Zappos has already found that video on product pages has increased purchases and lowered the number of returns. Then there’s Digitalsmiths, which is adding the tracking of real-time social buzz into its video discovery tools, the company said. Digitalsmiths targets service providers, programmers and consumer manufacturers, among others. Building in social chatter is a smart move that speaks to the growing importance of social media recommendations amongst consumers. Increasingly, consumers are learning about new shows or tuning into them after hearing about them via Twitter or Facebook. Also, video recommendation service Taboola said it’s working with live news site Livestation to layer in video recommendations to news feeds. This is another deal to watch because it highlights the need for publishers to surface potentially relevant videos to users to keep them on their sites longer. The deal was first reported via Beet.TV.