Continuing on with the campaign being created between Soho Pixels and Meta, we met up with a young up-and-coming music producer from North West London. Such a cool kid with an interesting story and outlook on life as he navigates Uni, his ends and creating the canvas for some of your favourite musicians to write to.
Soho Pixels is happy to announce we’ve become an official Meta partner. Under the agreement we’ll be collaborating on some cool cutting edge content, so make sure you check back over the coming weeks and months to see what we’ve been up to.
As the New Year resolutions begin to fade out, and the motivation to make this year ‘the best year ever’ personally and professionally for most, we in the office got to talking about if when people say all of this, they really mean for themselves, or the company they work for?
Well one man that was willing to do anything to ‘succeed’ for the company he once worked for is Andy King. Remember him? The guy that was literally willing to ‘suck the seed’ out of a customs official in order to get drinking water for the failed Fyre Fest? Well, Andy didn’t have to in the end, they released the water but the Festival had bigger problems as we’ve come to now know.
Well it’s all water under the bridge, but for Andy, water continues to be part of his life as Evian have partnered up with him. As it is the one year anniversary of the Netflix Fyre Fest doc that Andy featured in, the water company has released a special water bottle in honour of the ‘team player’ which is superbly branded with the slogan, “So good you’d do anything for it.” Absolute liberty, but funny at the same time.
Could the idea behind this collaboration set the precedence for 2020 and this decade where we’ll see other big brands using viral moments or the personalities in them as content or marketing angles to get their products and services out there? Should we expect those who had 15 minutes of fame to be back for 15 days more?
Soho Pixels is going to go out on a limb here and predict that this decade is going to be the most creative to date for advertising, content and marketing, and we are so looking forward to it!
It has been a little over 3 weeks since season 3 of ‘Top Boy’ has been released, and what an impact it has made culturally and socially. Ask most people if they know who Dushane and Sully are, and we’re confident they’ll say they’re characters from ‘Top Boy,’ as everyone and their aunt seemingly has watched it. The gritty urban drama has certainly ventured out further than just to a predominantly black audience this time around, and for good reason.
More than just gangs, guns and drugs, the well thought out script and narrative focuses on the human element of impoverished London, touching on the socioeconomics and family, or lack of, as to why kids get drawn in to this murky world. Being released 6 years after season 2, season 3 has fully been embraced by social media with memes and captions of clips and dialogue regularly being seen in tweets and posts on the time line; with “Daily offender, crazy Eastender,” being one of the prominent ones, as said by Modie (played by newly crowned Mercury Award winner Dave) during his jail break scene.
Having waited 6 years, it seems like everyone is already craving Season 4, so did Netflix miss a trick here by releasing all 10 episodes in one go? Yes we realise this is their business model, but had they released an episode every week, it would have been a brilliant 10 weeks of ratings for Netflix as each episode left you on a cliff hanger. This leads to our train of thought at Soho Pixels on brand partnerships with this drama franchise, or at least the huge potential of it.
So with the anticipation of Season 4 already on everyone’s lips, will it equate to big brand synergies for this urban drama, or will the violence and reference to drugs and gangs scare them off? My question is, what’s the difference in the violence to say a ‘Game of Thrones’ episode? What is the difference to gang and drug reference that a number of the ‘James Bond’ movies had? Oh wait, let me guess, they’re fictitious characters right? Well, one show centered around true life events featuring gangs, drugs and violence was the BBC’s critically acclaimed series ‘Peaky Blinders,’ yet this hasn’t stopped brand endorsements and even a festival put on just recently in the shows honour.
All it takes is for one big brand to be brave and attach themselves to what is shaping up to being an iconic TV show. Cool adverts or clever content pieces for product placements could be very lucrative for both the show and any brand. Maybe the real problem is the brand execs are scared about ROI and paying Sugar his money if the show flops. Tell them don’t worry, it won’t, and he’s dead!
You hear the stories constantly of online bullying amongst the teens, with it sometimes creeping in to adult interaction. So this new user option is a design by the tech giants to help curb issues that may lead to mental health and possible social-media addiction.
Although it is only being tested at this stage in certain countries (New Zealand, Italy, Japan, Brazil, Canada, Australia and Ireland), what could the long term ramifications be for so-called ‘Insta-bloggers’ and self-made ‘influencers’ who always use the lines, “make sure you subscribe and like…” when introducing or exiting their content pieces? It is being engrained in to society that we must ‘like’ posts that we watch.
A lot of these self-made influencers rose to prominent exposure due to views and likes as their clips went viral. Now although views are not part of the testing, it can be argued that it goes hand-in-hand with the likes, no? Most users are more likely to re-post or even view content by firstly looking at how many likes it has, or possibly the views. How then will we get the next great Insta sensation if we don’t see how many ‘likes’ their post gets? Some sceptics reckon this is a subtle way of curbing the mass production of trash content so that only those with real ability and talent will get seen. Somehow I don’t believe Instagram care or are that calculated.
Although we understand that this new proposed feature will not affect brands and is more designed for the everyday consumer, what if Instagram decided to roll this out across the whole platform, how do you think your brand will cope without the world seeing how many likes your post received? Yes you have the metrics on the backend for your marketing analysis and what not, but to the average consumer, as mentioned, they may only be looking at engaging because they have seen or heard how many likes your content piece received, which can sometimes be a talking point in itself when being discussed and reviewed on media outlets.
So far, early indication suggests it is having a positive effect on test users in Canada. It will be interesting to see if they roll it out to the UK for testing, and if it gets the full green light across the platform as a whole. For now though, the brands and influencers that we like, we can still see that we do.
With Stormzy recently headlining Glastonbury over the weekend, and a host of other urban acts performing at what is known as a predominantly ‘guitar/rock band’ festival, is urban culture the preferred go to in our society?
Music, film, sports, fashion, no matter where you look in popular culture, you can’t help but notice major influences that can be traced back to urban culture. Even in ad land when marketing to consumers, brands have certainly leaned towards an urban makeup within their content. With Nike releasing their iconic ‘Nothing Beats A Londoner’ advert last year, featuring the crème de la crème of the urban music and social influencer scene mixed in with notable Nike ambassadors, it seems their closest rivals Adidas have pulled from the same creative pool with the launch of their new kit deal with Arsenal Football Club.
The £300 million kit deal was launched today with a clever ad paying homage to when Arsenal used to wear an Adidas kit in the 90’s during a more successful period for the club, whilst mixing conversation back and forth with the current players and a few legends like Tony Adams and Ian Wright. What was striking though, was that the voices of the current players that featured in the promo were substituted largely for ones with more urban slang and expressions, making the ad on trend, and had it stand out like Nike’s ‘Nothing Beats A Londoner.’ Being a London team in the heart of Islington Borough, It wouldn’t sound foreign to hear local youth talking with the dialects and slang used in the ad. Check it out for yourself https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VLZeTOID0jU .
Where Adidas were spot on, other brands have certainly failed in trying to incorporate urban culture, whether it be the language, fashion or even mannerisms. This can make or break hitting your intended target as authenticity is very important when using and targeting an urban audience.
We predict we will see many more urban driven campaigns from major brands over the next five years as pop culture continues to gravitate towards all things urban, as the key purchasing demographic continue to be influenced by the urban culture.
Knowing your market is always key to a business. In the case of this sandwich shop, food and sex may well be on the mind of their customers, so why not combine the two to come up with this memorable name. The branding may face a few copyright issues but great idea nonetheless.
Depending on the nature of your business, your name can be the first point of advertising. When our creatives get to planning a production we always look at the option of basing any content around the name of our client’s business to coincide with the reason they chose that name. This can be a compelling strategic story, which at times can play in to a great connection between their brand and their audience, which can be represented beautifully with visual content, and therefore a long lasting marketing strategy.
It was an absolute pleasure working with Tommy Mallet and Fredi Hilton on the Rays Of Sunshine Charity & Tommy Mallet Footwear Collaboration to produce this promo content.
Check out a snippet of it here: https://www.instagram.com/p/BwtlimoHPcX/?utm_source=ig_web_button_native_share
For similar or any other visual content surrounding your brand, advertising and marketing needs, please get in contact with us.
Listen, it never hurts to check in with your inner-creativity just to make sure you’re still on track with your goals every now and then. Just make sure it’s an ‘inner’ conversation and you’re not muttering it out loud on public transport on the way in to the office like me today. 🤦♂️ Lol.
Oh, and make sure you leave a voice note for every idea you come up with, no matter how small! #SPContentRULE4
Whats with the law makers and Article 13? If you’ve been hiding under a rock, the long and short of it is that the European Union has written up a directive on copyright in the digital single market that is designed to limit how copyrighted content is shared on online platforms.
Arguably the most interesting part is Article 13, which requires online platforms to either filter or completely remove material from their sites, otherwise they will be held liable. Er…one little problem though, they haven’t quite sorted out how these platforms are expected to identify and remove this content.
So which platforms will this affect? Well the wording near the end of Article13 gives an insight in to which platforms will need to create or employ special filters to remedy copyright infringement:
1. The platform has been available for fewer than three years
2. The platform has an annual turnover below €10 million
3. The platform had fewer than five million unique monthly visitors
Well, that’s a hell of a lot of platforms then! But will the fun loving meme be affected as a result? This isn’t certain, as memes are for the most part based around copyrighted images. Up and coming independent content makers will surely suffer from this though as they build their platforms.
Will it be such a big deal though if memes are affected? Hell yeah, they’re just too funny in modern day society where bitesize content rules! So leave them the **** alone!
