Rethinking the Live Concert Experience: Would you wear headphones during a live concert if you could stream the audio feed direct from the soundboard on your phone? Or choose which instrument you want to hear? Incubus guitarist Mike Einziger invented a company called MixHalo that does precisely that. The company raised $10 million to bring it to market, and Quartz wrote a great review this week. Even Elon Musk thinks this is going to transform the live concert experience.
Twitter Updates: Starting today, Twitter is banning all political advertising. They also launched a feature to “Hide Replies” on your tweets. Just tap the gray icon that appears on your post and select “hide reply.” Those replies will be moved to a different page, where they can still be viewed by other users. To see the hidden replies, users can select the “hidden reply” icon on the tweet. Twitter is also testing scheduling tweets from the native platform, similar to Tweetdeck.
Livestream Shopping Expected to Grow in the U.S.: Livestream shopping generated $4.4 billion in Chinese sales in 2018, but U.S.-based platforms tend to focus on ads instead of facilitating live purchases.
Vogue Business has the story: “Since the 1980s, US television networks like QVC and HSN have been broadcasting presenters who sell products from costume jewelery to pots to millions of homes globally. But they now have to transition to the age of online shopping: 66 per cent of QVC sales in 2018 were made in a mobile app. They are competing with platforms like Instagram and TikTok, where younger people spend more of their time… The reality is that Western consumers crave seamless social shopping experiences just like those customers in Asian markets… For the younger generation, online and offline blend together in everything they do. Live video shopping brings all these aspects together and enables the future of retail.”
TikTok Updates: This week TikTok updated their web browsing platform, added a Trending page (no account required) and a “TikTok for Good” page (for how to use TikTok for social-good campaigns like WWF’s Earth Hour). Adweek has an exposé on how the company plans to incentivize influencer content, including their formula for going viral. Even if they can’t vote, teens are roasting “Mayo Pete” Buttigieg. And people have figured out how to use iPhone group texts into collaborative masterpieces.
Facebook’s Meme App: Facebook is testing a meme-making app called Whale in Canada. The app allows users to decorate photos with text and stickers in order to create memes that can be shared to social media or texted to friends. Remember when MySpace started being overrun by low-quality images, GIFs and memes and users migrated to Facebook for a ‘cleaner’ experience? Sometimes lessons are repeated until they are learned.
Insta Insights: This interview with Jeffrey Wisenbaugh, Instagram’s head of content who runs the @instagram account, shares best practice insights like consistently scheduling content results in higher engagements.
Key quote: “Having a repeatable format for a [IGTV] series is very important. If I know that this series goes up every Tuesday, I’m excited about it, and I’m going to go there every Tuesday and feel like I have a personal connection with them. This can be through comments, sharing or one of the new features that are on their way that will make IGTV a more engaging place.” Watch here.
Podcast of the Week: Just in time for the reissue of Prince’s “1999,” Minnesota-based music journalist and author Andrea Swensson debuted a new podcast about that transformative period in Prince’s career and how the album came about based on her personal relationship with the artist, interviewing his band and more. It’s super good! Listen to Episode 1 here.
Tweet of the Week: This new chat bot on Twitter is writing Super Bowl spots based on short descriptions of Super Bowl ads that aired between 2015 and 2019: @SuperBowlBot.
Meth. We’re on it. This week everybody had an opinion about South Dakota’s new campaign to spread awareness of the negative impacts of methamphetamine use and promote resources for prevention, treatment and recovery.
“Hey Twitter, the whole point of this ad campaign is to raise awareness. So I think that’s working,” Gov. Kristi Noem tweeted Monday afternoon.
For those of us who want to go deep on the campaign, Keloland wrote “Behind the scenes of the “Meth. We’re on it.” campaign and how it got approved.” And because this was a government project, you can review the full 170 page RFP and pitch deck here. Get on it!
GREG SWAN 