Tag: social media

Guest Speaker

Having guest speaker Ana López come and speak to our class the other day about advertising and brand marketing was a really cool and interesting experience. I was able to learn an incredible amount about different types of advertisements and how they affected the company she works for, Estrella Damm. López studied journalism and worked for 3 years as a journalist at a communications agency. She has a masters in communications and marketing and currently works for Estrella Damm.

Estrella Damm is the first brewery in Catalonia and the third brewery in Spain. The brand advertises that drinking Estrella Damm will provide good moments and a mediterranean way of life. They advertise this through music videos, short film, music, culture, friendship, gastronomy, and party time. In 2009, Estrella Damm created a short music video, which increased their YouTube views and brand awareness by 225%. The music video, which worked with a not so well known Swedish band, ended up being the most downloaded song of the summer in Spain and Fromentera, the location of the music video, was the preferred travel destination that year.

In 2015, Estrella Damm created a 10 minute short film (shown below), featuring Dakota Johnson. After this video was published, their brand awareness increased by 5% in Spain and 30% in the UK. YouTube awarded Estrella Damm as the best campaign in Spain. Afterwards, more than 1 million people followed Estrella Damm on at least 1 social media platform. During this campaign, Ana López was leading a team of more than 30 people from inside and outside the company (agencies that work for Estrella Damm). The Estrella Damm budget increased from 100,000 euros in 2009, to 1 million euros by 2015. The way Estrella Damm advertised worked very well for the company and was able to successfully increase their brand awareness, not just in Spain but all over Europe.

After their huge success in 2015, the company began to look for the creation of growth and communities, they searched for campaigns that would fit in with every type of social media platform, not just YouTube. They also formed relationships with key partners, such as the media, Google and YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram communities. In order to grow their comapany and grow digitally, they collaborated with partners from restaurants, to festivals and football teams. One thing that the company learned through all of their success is that it is so important to match the interests of the brand with the interests of your target audience. In order to achieve this, one must put the community first (find the motivations and beliefs of the company and its target), reach media influencers, advertise online and offline, and work with agencies that understand the companies needs.

 

Politics 2.0

The use of social media played an enormous role in the recent United States election. Using social media for campaigning became a smart tool back in the 2008 election when Barack Obama brought new ideas to his presidential campaign. In the 2012 election, there were obvious differences between the use of social media for campaigning between Obama and Romney. In 2016, we had the highest rate of social media use for a presidential campaign yet.

Former US President Barack Obama used a numerous amount of social networking sites in his 2008 campaign. The tools used in the Obama Online operation were his own personal website, Twitter,  YouTube,  Facebook,  Myspace, SMS/ callcenters, online advertisements, and a blog. All of these tools are what helped increase people’s knowledge of Obama and his ideas if he were to become President of the United States and helped him to win the 2008 election. By using various social media platforms, Obama was able to get the support of many young Americans who use those social media websites on a daily basis: “Obama had won nearly 70 percent of the vote among Americans under age 25– the highest percentage since U.S. exit polling began in 1976” according to US News. Ever since the 2008 election, the use of social media for political campaigns has become more and more necessary for winning elections.

In the 2012 US Presidential election between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, it was evident that Obama knew about more social network platforms in order to reach out to young voters, where as Romney, who is older than Obama, was not as up to date with social media, so he used far less social media platforms for his presidential campaign. When comparing the Obama and Romney, Obama used about 10 different social media sites to campaign for the election, where as Romney only used 5. Campaigning on social media platforms helped Obama get the attention of young voters and keep them up to date with his campaign.

In the most recent US election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, campaigning on social media platforms was extremely important in order to succeed. Facebook played a big role in the election, especially for Trump. One of the biggest scandals from the 2016 election was about the fake news on Facebook. There were many articles posted on Facebook that were bringing a lot of attention to Trump, and although it was not all good news about Trump, it still brought a lot of attention to him. Stanford did a study on social media and fake news in the 2016 election, where they looked at the changes in media and politics and how fake news affected the presidential campaign. Considering that many people use social media sites, such as Facebook, to get news, when these people saw the fake news stories posted on their Facebook they actually thought that they were real because often times real news is shared on Facebook. Because of this, some people believe that campaigning on social media platforms skews the election results. Over the past several years, we have seen how much campaigning with social media has influenced the outcome of the election.