For the last month or so, there has been a pretty consistent narrative amongst the digital marketing-inclined. Various articles, infographics or videos seek to pinpoint the marketing New Year’s resolutions that will move your company forward in 2018. Even we got into the act. But, we also thought it would be helpful to add a little bit more context to this. We took a look at some of the trends that were identified this time last year to see who nailed them in 2017.
Marketers were called upon in 2017 to advertise via new platforms. The most notable of these was augmented reality. AR uses a mobile device to project an image onto a physical space. The user sees the image and can facilitate and engage with its placement around them. Anheuser-Busch and Warner Bros. Pictures were the first to place AR ads on the social media platform, Snapchat, cementing them as effective companies in terms of this resolution.
We coined native advertising as the chameleon of the advertising world, meaning there is an unidentifiable blending of an ad with a more natural space. Oftentimes, this is achieved by a collaboration between a media outlet and a company. Airbnb and the New York Times hit theirs out of the park with a piece on New York’s famed Ellis island that doubled as an ad for the hotel industry disruptor.
With essentially every social media offering a “live” version of video posting in 2017, the feature was becoming a major part of video marketing campaigns. West Jet capitalized on this. As AdWeek writes, the airline sought to create stunts over the holiday season and turned to kids for ideas. Then, they livestreamed the results. Not only did West Jet nail this livestream campaign, they also nailed the emotional aspect of seasonal marketing campaigns.