• by Doug Chavez , Columnist, July 11, 2013

“Stuck on you…

I’ve got this feeling down…

Deep in my soul…

That I just can lose…

Guess, I’m on my way…

Needed a friend…

And the way I feel now I guess…

I’ll be with you till the end…”

--Lionel Richie – “Stuck on You”

Lionel Richie is back on tour this summer, and I figured some of you might actually be going to see Lionel and getting your ’80s groove on. 

Everyone seems to love stickers of some type, from bumper stickers, “Baby on board,” “Wi-Fi here,” to dinosaur stickers stuck all over kids room walls, car seats and windows. The fun and ubiquity of sharing stickers is something that transfers well from the physical to the digital world, especially in social sharing. Stickers can provide engaging and fun value-added content between brands and consumers that will, for lack of a better word, stick. 

Path, Aviary, Facebook and several other social networking platforms and mobile software development kits (SDK) have recently launched “sticker packs” for their users. Path introduced stickers earlier this year, and with when it saw a massive spike engagement and over a million messages sent, that included stickers. The latest update includes a seemingly endless supply of stickers. Path’s update is just the latest salvo in the branded-stickers space. 

This past April, Aviary, a photo-editing SDK used by branded apps such as Walgreens, Flickr and Dogster, launched a special edition Diane von Furstenberg Stickers, Frames and Filters capability. I liked the concept back then and viewed it as a great proof of concept for the space, since the Aviary app isn’t widely known by the big sticker users nor does it have the distribution or massive scale of a social network. No matter, it’s a great way to show (sell) its functionality. Path’s latest update with stickers proves that this area is indeed sticky, drives user engagement and a new way for brands to surround content versus interrupting the user experience. 

Many brands “know” they need to be in mobile but lack the insight to figure out where to spend, partly because there is a near-infinite list of choices that is somewhat paralyzing the decision process. My message to digital brand folks is to pick a couple and test, test, test and then iterate on the ones that work. Stickers are a good place to go do this. Brands should think about how using stickers as a tactic to drive consumer engagement can ladder back up to the overall brand objective, goals and strategy. User engagement with stickers will certainly provide the measurement that brand mangers need to convince management and CMOs that mobile works.  And unlike sponsoring other types of content, where your brand message disappears at the end of the campaign, stickers go on living in perpetuity, since the content is created and shared by users – a nice residual side effect of branded, sharable content. 

The fall advertising, media and tech conferences will soon be in full swing. If you’re running digital at a brand, I strongly encourage you to attend and pick events where you can learn more about SKDs, APIs and other ways to find a sticky way to engage with your consumers.  And if you want some ideas, leave a comment here or ping me at @dougchavez. I always enjoy kicking around ideas.