From live stunts to augmented reality and everything in between, 2016 has seen some of the marketing world’s most innovative work yet. In its fourth year, the Mashies, Mashable’s annual celebration of the agencies and brands that are creating the most innovative digital marketing campaigns, is bound to see some stiff competition.
There are only a few days left to submit your work to be considered for the Mashies. We’ve got our judging panel all lined up and ready to help us name the best of the best in all things digital marketing. Now all we need are your submissions.
Submit your work by 11:59 p.m. EST on Friday, June 17 for the chance to become a finalist or win. We’ve added new categories this year, which include best use of live streaming and best PR stunt.
You can find more information, including rules of entry here, or reach out to Melissa Shulman with any questions. For sponsorship opportunities, please email Marian Barrett.
Zeta Interactive, the marketing-focused big data and analytics firm that recently acquired the CRM division of eBay Enterprise, today announced it has bought Acxiom Impact,Acxiom‘s marketing automation solution for enterprise marketers. Sources close to the companies tell me the acquisition price was just north of $50 million.
Zeta Interactive, which was co-founded by David Steinberg and former Apple and Pepsi-Cola CEO John Sculley, focuses on data-driven marketing and customer lifecycle management solutions. Acxiom Impact has a similar focus, with an emphasis on one-to-one email and cross-channel marketing tools for the enterprise.
Zeta CEO Steinberger tells me the company wants to use the acquisition to “create a ‘best of both’ marketing technology platform that builds on Zeta‘s core strengths of flexibility, scalability and omni-channel orchestration,” as well as a “best in class”‘ professional services organization.
As part of this acquisition, Zeta and Acxiom also entered into a long-term partnership agreement. Steinberg tells me the company hopes to be able to capitalize on this partnership to enhance its offerings.
“Zeta has a long-standing relationship with Acxiom at the operating unit and corporate levels,” Steinberger told me when I asked about how the acquisition came about. “Zeta had identified Acxiom Impact as an asset that we believed we could operate more effectively than the existing parent company (similar to how we viewed e-Dialog when it was part of eBay). As Acxiom was evaluating its corporate strategy, an opportunity to acquire this business arose. Zeta moved quickly.”
For now, Acxiom Impact will become part of Zeta’s CRM divisions and will continue to operate as it does today. Over time, though, Zeta plans to integrate the two products into a single platform “to provide clients with an even stronger solution that helps them win in an increasingly complex marketing ecosystem.”
This marks Zeta’s tenth acquisition since it was founded in 2007. Last July, the company raised $125 million from Blackstone Group. That was on top of the $70 million it raised back in 2012. The company currently has about 1,000 employees.
Like the old Wild West, today’s digital frontier is vast, dangerous and, for many brands, a little scary. Today’s marketers and advertisers are the pioneers when it comes to engaging with consumers and creating cross-platform content. For this year’s Mashies, Mashable’s annual digital marketing awards program, we’ve wrangled one of our best judging lineups yet to help us navigate this year’s submissions. We’re pleased to introduce more of our 2016 Mashies judges:
Ron Amram, VP of Media, Heineken USA - Leading one of the most decorated marketing teams in the U.S., Amram heads media investment, communications strategy and implementation across paid and earned media for some of the most social and followed beer brands.
Caitlin Bergmann, Director of Content & Creative, MediaCom - Deemed one of the top global innovators in advertising by The Internationalist, Bergmann has already shared her expertise during our Mashies Twitter chat.
Kenyatta Bynoe, VP of Marketing, Spalding - Named a member of the Event Marketer “Dream Team,” Bynoe is responsible for managing and fulfilling the strategic partnership with the NBA under which Spalding serves as the official basketball and backboard.
Katy Lee, Digital Communications Manager, Hershey - Managing digital strategies and innovative projects for the largest chocolate manufacturer in North America, Lee’s work in social media has won her numerous awards and recognition.
Ray Velez, CTO, Razorfish - Velez knows so much about the importance of technology in modern marketing that he could write a book about it. In fact, he already did!
Bringing in professionals ranging from cable networks in Australia to insurance companies in Hong Kong, the 2016 Mashies judging panel is also our most diverse—both in industry and nationality. To get your work in front of this esteemed panel, submit your work for the 2016 Mashies. Applications close on Friday, June 24 at 11:59 p.m. EST.
For this year’s full list of judges, categories and rules of entry, visit the Mashies website.
With over 1.6 billion monthly active users, there is no doubt that Facebook is the place to be when it comes to looking for platforms to scale your growing business. But how can you leverage this dominant social media channel to make the most of your impressive business efforts
Here’s a list of seven apps that your company should consider if Facebook is a part of your growth strategy.
While Facebook has been known to be a brands’ go-to marketing channel, oftentimes your actual customers can generate enough hype around a product to drive sales. Indeed, leveraging user-generated content (UGC) such as customer reviews or user-uploaded images on Facebook can help your business immensely.
With Yotpo’s Dynamic Ads feature you can use tools to share customer reviews and photos organically, as well as incorporate them into paid ads — a tool so valuable, Facebook used it as a case study.
Facebook dwarfs all other social channels when it comes to active users, content sharing and referred click-throughs to websites. But the average Facebook users don’t spend their time looking for business opportunities — they’re there to see amusing content and keep up with friends and loved ones. To effectively take advantage of Facebook’s immense marketing potential for business, therefore, companies need to keep their messaging light and fun.
ViralStyle provides a solution for fan community monetization that takes the friction out of selling branded merchandise. This social ecommerce platform lets you offer t- shirts, hoodies, iPhone cases and other products with your own art, and because it’s all printed and shipped to order, there’s zero hassle for inventory or fulfillment.
Using ViralStyle’s marketing tools, it’s easy to set up a “campaign,” which adds a ticker to product pages for a sense of purchase urgency. The platform also integrates with Facebook ads(soon with Shopify as well), to allow users to seamlessly promote creations to highly relevant and targeted buyers.
Today, business owners and marketers are expected to always be reachable and ready to address customer inquiries. While this may seem overwhelming, there are great tools that help facilitate better and more frequent communication between prospective buyers and sellers.
For instance, Desk.com integrates with Facebook as a highly-effective engagement feature that will help address immediate customer questions and concerns. I personally use them for my payments support and it's helped us manage our thousands of customer tickets each month, a large portion of which comes through Facebook.
With so many different marketing options on Facebook, sometimes it is difficult to get the most out of your campaigns. Thankfully, there are solutions such as GetResponse’s Facebook Web Form App that embeds sign-up forms on your Facebook company page. This allows prospective leads and/or interested page visitors to easily sign up for more information.
For businesses, being able to stay ahead of all the marketing tasks can be daunting, especially when data plays a major role in your scaling efforts (as it should). Visuals can help make sense of this mess.
Cyfe’s business dashboard, for example, displays various metrics that are often indicative of successful or poor marketing campaigns. With this information at hand, marketers can look to scale based on specific benchmarks.
For ecommerce businesses, Facebook is often considered a second priority to your company's online store. Being in the payments space, I've found that most business owners don't even consider Facebook for ecommerce. Having just discussed the dominance of Facebook usage, you may need to reevaluate your relationship with this outlet.
The Shopial app is a timely one for ecommerce, as it essentially acts as a bridge between the store's website and Facebook store, allowing you to easily add and advertise specific products to boost engagement and eventual conversion levels.
On Facebook, B2C engagement outshines B2B prospecting, but savvy business leaders know how to use the ubiquity of Facebook to their advantage. In the B2B space, the journey from curious website visitor to converted customer is complex and rarely predictable. As buyers transition from sales-driven product education to self-service content discovery and become more guarded with their contact details, it isn’t always possible to capture email addresses and use prospects’ inboxes as hubs for lead nurture messaging.
Today’s B2B marketers therefore employ a litany of tactics to track prospects across devices and marketing channels, engaging with potentially interested parties wherever possible. With Leadfeeder, you can circumvent the need for lead capture and instead see a dynamic list of anonymous visitors to your website, along with intelligence on the companies they work for and logs of pages they click on. Now here's where it gets interesting. Because the system integrates with your customer relationship management (CRM) and you can use it to export segmented lists of contacts, the B2B growth hackers out there can easily use Leadfeeder as en engine for creating hyper-targeted “Custom Audience” ads on Facebook.
Do you have suggestions for other apps that help grow your business on Facebook? Share them in the comments below.
John Rampton is an entrepreneur, investor, online marketing guru, and startup enthusiast. He is the founder of online payment company Due. John is best known as an entrepreneur ...more
Mashable recently hosted a special #Mashies Twitter chat to discuss how to adapt to the changing landscape of digital marketing.
Over the course of an hour, @MashBusiness covered an array of questions, ranging from some of the challenges brands and agencies face in digital marketing today, to different ways brands can adjust to the various changes social networks make to their platforms.
Our obsession with selfies — we take millions of them a day — is finally generating something useful: innovation.
World, meet the automated selfie stick. It extends, or telescopes, on its own, has a pair of beauty lights that extend from the back of the iPhone holder and even fans that fold out to blow your hair back for that perfect, wind-swept look.
It’s the craziest and most impractical selfie stick ever. It’s also, sadly, not available for purchase.
Created by Thinkmodo — the madcap hacker/video-makers/marketers that brought you Devil Baby and Super Strong Meter Maid Lifting Taxi — the automated selfie stick is a working gadget, but there are only two (one is a backup) and they were built to promote the upcoming season of Lifetime’s Unreal.
Unreal is a fictional, behind-the-scenes look at the making of a The Bachelor-like show. It’s a funny but trenchant look at manufactured reality.
"Lifetime wanted something that communicated self-image manipulation," said Thinkmodo co-founder Michael Krivicka, who edited and directed the above video.
Krivicka, Thinkmodo co-founder James Percelay and producer Sam Pezzullo came up with the idea of a sort of next-gen selfie stick to help market the show, which premieres on June 6.
Lifetime loved the concept, said Pezzullo.
Not your ordinary selfie stick
Thinkmodo spent three months building the device, which features a large black and red handle that houses the wiring, motors and batteries necessary to auto-extend the stick, and the phone holder that houses the lights and fans. There’s even a second battery on the back of the phone dock to power the beauty lights and the motors that extend them and the fans. Did I mention this is a heavy selfie stick?
The automated selfie stick quickly attracted attention.
IMAGE: THINKMODO
"It’s a little bit heavier than a regular selfie stick, but did you see the features?" said Miami-based actress Noa Lindberg who is featured in the video. "Every time they add a feature, it gets heavier, but it’s totally worth it."
Lindberg said she didn’t need to be trained on how to use the sophisticated selfie stick. There’s a clearly labeled button for each main feature.
"All the parts are custom-made," said Krivicka. "The fans were designed from scratch."
In the video, Lindberg sidles up to other selfie-takers who are clearly stunned when she whips out the automated stick, which starts extending with a press of a button. "Generally, they said, 'Oh my god, it’s so amazing, where can I get it?'"
How it works
Like a regular selfie stick, this one connects to your phone via Bluetooth (iPhone only) and the photos in the video were actually shot using it. Even the fans work, though Thinkmodo admits to using a little artistic license in the shoot.
The retractable beauty lights were a nice touch.
IMAGE: THINKMODO
"The fans are strong enough to blow hair, but like in any commercial, we might have added some wind effect to enhance it."
Lindberg, who is currently shooting a vampire movie called The Soiree, said she has a favorite automated selfie stick feature. "[It] definitely is the lights. It’s just fantastic. It’s like a to-go studio," she said.
Unlike some of their previous video outings, this wasn’t a prank and Thinkmodo didn’t use hidden cameras. Even so, during the two-day shoot, "when the boom extended, crowds gathered quite fast," said Krivicka. They all wanted to know where they could buy it.
Which is nowhere.
Thinkmodo has no plans to mass produce the stick.
"We hate to see an awesome idea like this going to waste," said Krivicka. "If there was enough demand, we’d go back to Lifetime, put our heads together and see what we can do with this."
But would anyone really want it? The handle looks huge and is quite heavy. Plus, we don’t even know how much it would cost. Thinkmodo refused to tell me how much they spent (and Lifetime paid) to build it.
Sure, the automated selfie stick is just about promoting a TV show, but Thinkmodo built it to actually work.
IMAGE: THINKMODO
If they ever did commercialize the Automated Selfie Stick, Lindberg said she would buy it, and Krivicka believes there is at least one other virtually guaranteed customer. "We think it’s something Kim Kardashian would love to get it for Christmas."
Budweiser has renamed its beer "America" for the summer of 2016, probably to get websites like ours to write this very post.
It is a shrewd branding move by a company that is mostly known for is ability to make gigantic Clydesdale horses befriend tiny puppies.
It's an even shrewder move when you remember the company is owned by Belgians. Still, the sentence "can you toss me a fresh American" has a certain ring to it.
Fast Company first reported on the redesign.
No word yet on if Bud Light will become "America Light." If not, we'd like to suggest that Bud Light just become "'merica."
As far as shameless market ploys go, this one is crisp and malty, if not a bit watered down. The can's overall aesthetic isn't set to change much, aside from the word change.
IMAGE: BUDWEISER OR AMERICA WE'RE NOT REALLY SURE ANYMORE
As you can imagine, Twitter had some jokes to make around the news.
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