brand

Stellar examples of 6-second marketing on Vine

Just three months after release, Twitter's Vine video service for creating 6-second clips has already become the muse of marketers looking to reach people through imaginative messaging.

Brands such as Lowe's, Urban Outfitters, Taco Bell, and Bacardi, with the help of their digital agencies, have embraced the platform to test unconventional campaigns on social audiences who seem to appreciate their business-as-unusual approach.

What follows is a panoply of creative Vine brand campaigns. If advertisements as looping, GIF-like videos scare you, I suggest you turn away now.

Note: If for some reason a particular clip below shows up as nothing more than a black box, you can click on the white banner along the top of the box to open the clip in a new browser tab.… Read more

A measure of Apple's success: Oppenheimer cites Japan

Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer took a minute during Tuesday's earnings conference call to cite Apple's success in Japan -- an important metric in a country where national brands were once invincible.

"In Japan, IDC Japan announced that iPhone gained the number one position for all of calendar year 2012, as well as for calendar Q4 2012 in both handsets and smartphones," Oppenheimer said.

He continued. "This is also the first time a non-Japanese company has achieved the No. 1 spot for an entire year...In addition, Apple was ranked No. 1 in Nikkei'… Read more

Facebook helps brands monitor and respond to comments

Facebook has been tinkering with how businesses, brands, and celebrities can deal with all of the comments they receive on the social network. And, today, it's rolling out another new tool -- a way for brands to more easily monitor and respond to comment replies.

Setting up a triage comment system through a new API, Facebook is making it possible for programmers to set up different comment "views."

The first view is "top level comments," which can be ranked to show those that a brand wants everyone to see. Then there are "replies," … Read more

At SXSW, brands take over

AUSTIN, Texas -- Meander through the halls of the Austin Convention Center or traverse the city's surrounding streets and you'll soon realize that nothing at South by Southwest Interactive, once the trade show of startups and geeks, is without a sponsor.

In the past few years, big, consumer-facing brands have traversed down south, and, with elaborate setups and fancy door prizes, are drowning out the little guys. This year in particular.

For instance, Oreo, the now on-trend brand that acquired a bit of social-media fame with its savvy Super Bowl tweet, is lining up attendees at a mega … Read more

Wikimedia, Internet Brands settle Wikivoyage lawsuits

The Wikimedia Foundation and Internet Brands have agreed to settle all litigation between the two over the recently launched Wikivoyage travel information site.

Wikivoyage is a free, user-generated travel help and information site that anyone can edit. However, a large portion of the content on the site was copied from Wikitravel under the Creative Commons license.

After Internet Brands purchased Wikitravel in 2006, many volunteers on the formerly not-for-profit project grew disillusioned and left, taking much of the site's content with them. In response, Internet Brands filed a lawsuit last August against two volunteers on the Wikivoyage project, claiming … Read more

Instagram gives brands shortcut badges to drive traffic

Shortly after launching its online profile pages, Instagram is giving brands a way to get more customers to look at the profiles.

The company today introduced shortcut badges, icons that link to a brand's Instagram profile. Businesses can place the icons on a brand's Web site or blog, encouraging one-click access to profiles, which gives businesses a different way to show off their goods and promotions.

According to Facebook, which owns Instagram, merchants frequently request this feature. It's a reflection of Facebook's agenda to focus more on revenue by catering to brands. Badges are designed to … Read more

Samsung to ape Nike in corporate makeover -- report

Samsung has enlisted Scott Bedbury, a freelance brand consultant that helped Nike develop several projects, to revamp its corporate identity, Australia-based Channel News reports.

Samsung plans to unveil its new corporate identity in January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

According to Channel News, the effort is expansive in its scope, and includes everything from changing Samsung's messaging to customers to eliminating its current logo and developing a new one. The company's advertising will be "linked to lifestyle activities, similar to what Nike does," a source told Channel News.

Samsung has continued to solidify … Read more

How Googling others affects voting, hiring and dating

Despite all the new ways of learning about someone -- including Facebook and LinkedIn -- Googling others remains a major online activity. A new survey by BrandYourself, an online reputation company, and polling giant Harris Interactive shows that when it comes to voting, business and dating, people place a lot of emphasis on what they find in personal search results.

Here are some excerpts from "Just Google Me":

General -- Almost all online U.S. adults use search engines to look up other people: 86% used a search engine like Google to find more information about another person. … Read more

Twitter: Huge mobile use makes us ideal for real-time marketing

Sixty percent of Twitter users access the microblogging platform on mobile devices, and there are more than 400 million tweets per day, Twitter said today. And promoted tweets have an engagement rate of between 1 percent and 3 percent.

Just a couple of hours after Twitter unveiled a new feature for big brands that will allow them to embed surveys in tweets, at a session called "Building a real-time brand" At Advertising Week in New York, Twitter President of Revenue Adam Bain and sales marketing chief Shane Steele shared statistics and anecdotes demonstrating that the service is an … Read more