KIMP’s Picks 14th August: Weekly Highlights In Design, Marketing, AI, & More
As we embark on a new week, we’re back with the KIMP’s Picks 14th August edition. This Monday tradition from KIMP is all about bringing to you trending posts and hidden gems covering insights and updates on various topics that interest marketers and entrepreneurs everywhere.
Because, we know, social media can be overwhelming. Keeping up with what people are talking about on social media can be overwhelming. And we’re here to lighten the load a little. We’re here to share some of the share-worthy posts we came across this past week.
So, are you ready for our weekly rendezvous into the realms of marketing, AI, and design? Let’s dive in!
In the Marketing Realm
Is market share a measure of brand success?
When you are looking for ways to fine-tune your marketing strategies, knowing what marketers around the world are prioritizing helps. On that note, the Language of Effectiveness survey by Marketing Week brings some thought-provoking insights to consider. Marketing Week shared the below post summarizing the elements that brand-side marketers are focusing on.
Based on the results, it appears that most marketers are prioritizing market share as a measure of their brand’s success. Surprisingly, the focus on growing profit margin happens to be the last on the list. The post discusses the ups and downs of these priorities and what they mean for your brand.
A fine example of adjacking
With the competition getting fiercer by the day, you need to get really creative with your ads to get noticed. And part of the creativity lies in finding the optimal placement for your ads. Adjacking is a novel marketing concept that taps into this process of placing your ad close to another brand’s ad and creatively playing with the connection between the ads.
Because of Marketing regularly shares some of the most creative ad campaigns from around the world. And they shared the below post on their LinkedIn page highlighting the brilliance in adjacking in it. Scotland’s renowned beverage, Irn Bru, adds a playful twist by reacting to Pepsi Max’s outdoor ad in Edinburgh. Creative play with words, like the below ad, is hard to ignore.
FIFA Women’s World Cup is the talk of the town
The hashtag #WWC2023 has garnered more than 7.2 billion impressions since the event began. This means that everybody is talking about the FIFA Women’s World Cup. Global tournaments like this one bring people together. This also means a potential opportunity for brands to connect with their audience through “shared interests”.
The massive popularity of the hashtag only shows that it’s a good time to plan your campaigns around this one or at least to get into meaningful conversations on the topic with your target audience.
Looking for inspiration? Check out this blog highlighting five of the best FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023 ads.
There’s one secret ingredient that helped Yelp increase its ad revenue
Search Engine Land is a great space to find search and marketing-related insights. In the below post, they spoke about the 14% increase in Yelp’s ad revenue.
The post goes on to discuss how Yelp exceeded expectations with Q2 2023 ad revenue of nearly $322 million, a 14% rise from Q2 2022. And there’s a secret ingredient behind this revenue rise – performance marketing. Yelp executives observed a transition from brand-focused advertising to performance marketing, which offers marketers a streamlined method for tracking and assessing ROI.
From cost-efficiency to delivering measurable results and better targeting, performance marketing offers a lot of benefits for brands big and small.
Moz introduces Brand Authority Metric
Known to be one of the leading names in SEO tools, Moz recently introduced a parameter called “Brand Authority”. Moz talks about the same in the below post.
To summarize what’s discussed, Brand Authority offers insights to untangle the complex link between brand strength and search engine outcomes, empowering informed marketing strategies for maximum impact. Evidently, this can be a productive metric for brands to track in order to find new opportunities, understand and address gaps, assess brand value or even to understand the effectiveness of the PR efforts.
Podcast boosts a mattress firm’s sales
Images, carousels, videos – there is an endless mix of content formats for brands to explore. Amidst this, should you really worry about podcasts? Short answer: Yes! Audio marketing might sound like an old-school approach but is still a very effective tool.
The below post from AdWeek proves this point. It talks about the effectiveness of podcast in the marketing efforts of Mattress Firm, a leading mattress brand. Data shows that the brand’s official podcast, Chasing Sleep, has helped with a 45% in-store sales boost.
Therefore, if you are still contemplating the need for podcast marketing, now is a good time to make your move.
In the Content Marketing Realm
SEO checklist
When it comes to evaluating your content, SEO is an undeniably significant metric. And marketers are always wondering whether they have done their best to optimize their content for search. To address the confusion, Semrush, a leading Saas platform for keyword research and more, shared the below SEO checklist for brands.
The shared checklist covers various quick tips for on-page and off-page SEO, technical SEO, and keyword research. So, if you are looking for some quick insights to enhance your website’s SEO, then this checklist is a good place to begin with.
Bringing AI into content generation
AI helps enhance content creation. But what if you already have a well-established content workflow? How do you plug AI into your existing content workflow? This is perhaps a common question most marketers have. Content Marketing Institute, a leading authority in the world of content marketing shared the below post to answer this question.
The post highlights the friction that exists in bringing AI into content generation and some tips for a smooth transition. It also talks about the various consideration for the plan of action and the steps to achieve a hybrid model that makes the most of AI and human intelligence.
In the Design Realm
Canva updates to catch up on
With several new AI tools and feature updates in image and video editing, Canva has been getting more and more exciting by the day. Wondering what’s new on Canva? The below post highlights some of the recent updates on the platform. From better translation to creating interactive presentation charts, there are several nuances introduced to enhance the experience.
Struggling to keep up with the updates to make the most of Canva? Choose a KIMP for Canva subscription.
Google reminisces its doodle for celebrating Hip Hop
Last week Hip Hop turned 50 and Google celebrated it by throwing back to one of the most popular Google Doodles for Hip Hop’s 44th anniversary.
Google Doodle is one of the many ways in which the brand shows the strengths of good visuals in branding. From maintaining cultural relevance to creating positive user experiences, Google uses Google Doodle to shape its personality as a brand and to create memorability. This is a great example of how you can use design to do the talking for you, to help your brand ace storytelling, and therefore strengthen customer connections.
Adding text effects in Adobe
Adding special effects and using statement typography is one way to grab attention. The below post from Adobe gives a quick look at how you can do this.
There are several such ways to experiment with the styling of the text in your design. And since typography holds a significant place in the effectiveness of a design, choose your font styling details carefully. You do not want the style to mess with the visual theme or distract the user from the core message.
Creative on-brand outdoor ads from Lyft
In the digital age, outdoor advertising maintains its relevance. Brands like Lyft continue to utilize outdoor ads, reaffirming its effectiveness. Ads of the World serves as a valuable inspiration hub. In the below post, they showcase an impressive outdoor ad from Lyft.
The ad features a minimalistic color palette focusing on the brand color for instant recognition. And another highlight here is the use of a creatively worded crisp copy. The ad shows that the perfect balance between copy and design can create magic in advertising.
In the AI Realm
ChatGPT introduces Custom Instructions for free users
Custom Instructions is a handy feature that ChatGPT announced recently. It allows users to personalize their conversations with ChatGPT and fine-tune the responses. This is achieved by allowing users to save information that can help ChatGPT understand their requirements better.
This feature was first launched only for Pro users but last week, OpenAI announced that the feature is now available to both free users and Pro users. So, have you tried customizing ChatGPT responses with the help of Custom Instructions?
Midjourney brings GPU updates
Midjourney has been adding refinements to its features consistently. And recently, Midjourney announced the introduction of GPU cluster updates in the below post.
These updates are available to both Pro and Mega users and will result in faster generation of the images. Additionally, the update is also said to make the renders cheaper.
Google’s Gemini
Google has been taking huge steps in the AI realm and one of the recent discussions regarding this has been their new AI model, Gemini.
According to Google DeepMind CEO, Demis Hassabis, Gemini is to come with better performance than GPT-4 by combining AlphaGo’s prowess with LLM capabilities.
Bard, SGE, and now Gemini – Google’s ventures in the AI segment have all been head-turners. Talking about Google’s AI experiments, the next one also involves the company’s big collaboration in this area.
Google and Universal Music Group to collaborate and tackle AI-powered voice cloning
Concerns rise in the music industry due to AI-powered voice cloning technology, risking copyright issues. Alphabet (Google’s parent company) and Universal Music Group are reportedly in early discussions about an AI music licensing system that enables fans to create legitimate “deepfake” songs using artists’ voices and music, with royalties for participating artists.
Fox News AI brings all the latest updates on its Twitter page. The below Tweet was shared on the Fox News AI page discussing this upcoming collaboration between Google and Universal Music Group to tackle AI-powered voice cloning.
Firefly will soon be available in NVIDIA Omniverse
Firefly is one of the most powerful and user-friendly text-to-image generation models out there. And recently NVIDIA announced that it is planning to integrate Adobe Firefly’s generative AI models as APIs into Omniverse, to enhance design workflows in the virtual reality realm.
This move aims to captivate the creative community, offering Adobe’s suite of AI models for use within Omniverse, although a specific release date for the Firefly APIs remains undisclosed by NVIDIA.
Making the most of Bard
Bard has been around for a while but are you really leveraging it to its full potential? If not, then the below post from Google will give you plenty of great ideas on how to incorporate Bard into your workflow.
From learning something new to writing your post drafts, planning a trip to brainstorming ideas, the featured post talks about a lot of useful ways to collaborate with Bard.
Social Media Feature Updates and Algorithm Changes
Instagram DM control options
The below post from Social Media Today, an information hub for social media updates, highlights the upcoming improvements in Instagram’s DM control options.
This move from Instagram is to combat unwanted contact, restricting non-connected users to text-only invites that require recipient approval before further interaction. It is to counter spam and offensive content often sent by bots and spammers seeking attention through DM requests.
Threads brings more updates
The first few weeks have been nothing short of a roller-coaster ride for Threads with the upward and downward spikes in the platform’s active usage. However, the Meta team is not giving up that easily. They have been bringing new updates trying to keep the interest in the app. Head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri shared the below post on Threads announcing all the new updates coming to the app.
Post by @mosseriView on Threads
From sharing Threads in Instagram DMs to sorting the accounts you follow, the new updates include some fine user-experience improvements.
TikTok brings AI content label
Creators are now required to add the “AI-generated content” label when sharing videos generated by AI. Creators can toggle the option from the “More Options” section. AI-generated content without the label will reportedly be taken down by the platform. Matt Navarra, one of the world’s most well-known social media industry experts, shared the below post highlighting this move from TikTok.
This feature aligns with TikTok’s commitment to transparency, as it had banned deepfake videos under Community Guidelines in 2020.
Instagram now lets you add music to carousels
In the below post, TechCrunch, a leading source of insights in the world of business spoke about Instagram’s recent updates. One of the main updates includes the option to add music to photo carousels. This exciting addition complements Instagram’s previous music-related feature update that lets you share snippets of your favorite tracks through Instagram Notes.
Updates to clickable links on YouTube Shorts
YouTube is cracking down on spam by banning certain link placements across the platform, including clickable links in prominent areas of YouTube Shorts like comments and descriptions, starting August 31. The Verge, a popular tech-news website shared the below post talking about this upcoming update to clickable links on Youtube.
This move is to address the misuse of links to direct users to harmful content and the removal is to take effect gradually. Additionally, long-standing features like social links on desktop channel banners are also to be phased out.
A final word
With that, our expedition through the landscapes of design, AI, and marketing comes to a temporary halt, but the energy and insights linger on. With the closing of this week’s KIMP’s Picks, we hope you’ve found your dose of creativity from the featured social media posts. Let’s meet again next Monday for a fresh burst of inspiration from the world of social media!