LinkedOut

I have wrote a lot of advertising trends that are the future or trends that I like. I have to write something that I actually dislike. I know anybody could write about an advertising annoyance but this one will be different. This is about something that is actually misleading to people that use the product and can be very frustrating. It is something that actually hurts the brand.

Any person who has LinkedIn has most likely experienced this annoyance. I will get to what this issue is in a second but first I want LinkedIn is for people who are trying to grow their connections and help out their business profile. It is a very serious form of social media. It is a very useful outlet for people to try and become something of themselves professionally. So one thing that has become very frustrating and misleading is when I get a notification that someone has messaged me but ends up being from LinkedIn. I believe it is someone who is contacting me about a potential job but sadly it is a LinkedIn employee letting me know about a limited time offer to upgrade to join LinkedIn Premium. I get these messages a couple times a week and it has become very frustrating. I am not the only one who feels this way either. According to many other blogs I have read, these people also hate this annoying constant messaging from LinkedIn about LinkedIn. LinkedIn hurts itself because people are stubborn and don’t like to be annoyed. When stubborn people get frustrated it becomes a war. Stubborn people will refuse to buy LinkedIn Premium now just because of the never ending messages from LinkedIn. Many people want it to end, and hopefully it is not a strategy for the future.

Augmented Advertising

The growth of augmented reality has brought about many changes to the technology world and it doesn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon. The market is predicted to grow to around 90 billion dollars by 2020. One big reason for this growth is actually because companies want to showcase and advertise their own products more personally to the consumer. They are tired of the boring way to advertise.

A trend that has been on the rise for companies, is the ability to produce interactive ads for their audience. They are allowing customers the ability to do more than just read words of off a billboard. There have been many concepts and ideas that have been getting proposed. As a person who is constantly being exposed to this type of technology, these ideas will most likely happen in the next couple years. We are already seeing it with different apps that allow people to virtually try on clothes to see what it would look like without actually being at the store. These weren’t the only ideas that have been in motion or used. Many ideas include being able to hold up your phone on a busy street and looking through the camera and being able to see what businesses are in the line of sight of the camera. This would advertise a countless amount of businesses so this is definitely the future of advertising. These are just a few of the thousand ideas that are out there. There are also countless of apps that have these ideas already working. So it is just a matter of time before it becomes the mainstream of the way to advertise.

Game of Ads

Game of thrones has been one of the most talked about TV series in the last 100 years. The trailer for the newest upcoming season alone has garnished over 37 million views in just 3 days. This TV show is larger than life and now has transcended fictional TV and into actual reality.

Game of Thrones fits into advertising because it has slowly been causing companies to tip toe the line of infringing on intellectual property. You may not know this, but companies have been using characters from Game of Thrones for commercials to advertise their product. Let me tell you, I am all for it. There is something so satisfying about seeing your favorite character from Game of Thrones advertising KFC chicken. I personally feel like this is a bonus to both companies because technically, the company that is advertising its product isn’t actually stating that it is a character from the show so they aren’t crossing any boundaries. Not only that, but they are helping the show advertise because they are causing people to continuously talk about the show. It causes people to think about Game of Thrones when it could be the last thing on their mind, thus growing the brand. All in all I love this trend and I would like to see it from more companies, involving more than just Game of Thrones characters.

Non-alcoholic beer?

Heineken released a non-alcoholic beer in the United States in January and they are calling it the zero-alcohol beer. It has been pretty popular in Europe but is very new to America. They brew it almost identically to the normal beverage they are serving minus the alcohol. This product is very unique and most likely only applies to a very small market. Non-alcoholic beer drinkers only take up about 1% of the beer industry, so pretty small. I don’t really see how there is some untapped potential that Heineken could reach but obviously they do. So why zero-alcohol beer? Well apparently there are trends that actually cause the beer industry some trouble. One of these trends is called Dry January. Dry January is where people swear off alcohol for the month right after the holidays. This causes beer companies to suffer so this is why Heineken created this product. They want to reach the consumers who are giving up alcohol.

The other thing that makes this product unique is the way that Heineken has been advertising this product. They are using the hashtag, #NowYouCan, to show people that they can now essentially do things they weren’t allowed to do before. They say this drink is for situations where you can’t normally drink beer. For instance in one of their commercials they had someone in a business meeting drinking this beverage. I think this marketing strategy is genius because it is telling consumers that they are defying the man by drinking this. It is giving people a way to break the rules without actually breaking them. They give many other scenarios that involve rule breaking that also give the idea of people defying authority. I personally do not understand the drink but after reading about their marketing strategy I really want to try it now.

Is Twitch the new way to advertise?

Many of you have heard of the video game Fortnite and how successful it has been. Fortnite is one of the biggest reasons why Twitch exploded in popularity. Approximately 226 million hours were watched on Twitch last year, and that was just for one streamer. The streamer Ninja drew those numbers in himself and he doubled the number of hours watched from the second most watched streamer on Twitch. So where does Advertising play into this?

Well the newest battle royal game to be released is called Apex Legends. It is of the same style of game as Fortnite but it has its differences. Many people hadn’t even heard about it two days prior to its release. So how has it become so popular already? Apex Legends had over 24 million players after the first week. Apex Legends was announced on a Sunday night and was released the following Monday morning. Apex Legends specifically marketed itself through streamers and Twitch itself. They first just had streamers come to their office and play the game then had them advertise this mysterious new battle royal game. Then after the game was released, they gave incentives through Twitch that had players be given new items if they used their Twitch Prime account to sub to a streamer. It became a symbiotic relationship between Twitch and Apex Legends. Streamers were happy with the extra subscribers and Apex Legends was happy with the added support from streamers. They realized that in the video game world streamers are the most influential part. That is why I see more video games doing this in the future, especially after how successful it was for Apex Legends.