October 7th, 2018

As I wrap up my blog posts on the effects that celebrities have on social media marketing I want to focus on the major sports athletes and how they are utilized on social media ad campaigns. Obviously of late the one that would pop to mind pretty fast is Former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Whether you support his beliefs or not you can’t deny his polarizing effect on social media over the past calendar year and nothing was bigger when Nike decided to utilize his services in an ad about standing up for what you believe in no matter the cost. The video itself was viewed on YouTube 26 million times alone with over 9 million on Instagram. While there were varying opinions on how this effected Nike’s business as a whole with reported greater sales but a fall in stock it ended up being just what it was intended to be, a talking point. Obviously, ad campaigns are supposed to be made to do nothing but help business but this isn’t a perfect world and unfortunately no matter what people aren’t going to like it but what usually doesn’t happen is the viralness of an ad like the Kaepernick one. EVERYONE was talking about Nike after that aired, Nike isn’t a company anyone would consider small, everyone knows what they bring to the table and in my opinion this ad was more about showing where they stand. Did they lose customers, and will they lose more?  Sure, that goes without saying but what they gain is potential customers that may have been on the fence about having a reason to support Nike in the first place and this could be the thing that makes them purchase a Nike shoe. Conversely you may be thinking well what about all the people that they lost, sure they may have alienated a large group of people but I see a company that is so sure they are the best when it comes to sportwear that all those disgruntled people will come back when they aren’t getting what they had for years with the Nike in the first place It’s a calculated risk, Nike decided to weigh out the options and they decided to go with what they felt was the right decision. A Social Media marketing hurricane brought on my an athlete that not only did all this with off the field actions but one that hasn’t played in 2 years. Imagine the power someone like LeBron James has on social media. But alas that is for another time. Thank you for following me on this Journey, until next time, thanks for reading.

Alec

October 6th, 2018

We’re going to continue looking at how YouTube celebrities can be an amazing asset to companies when it comes to advertising. As I mentioned in my last post there are YouTubers that focus their whole account to them playing video games and no video game YouTuber has become a bigger celebrity than Ninja. He is a YouTuber that has turned him playing a game Called Fortnite into an empire, and the businesses are starting to exploit it. While the game Fortnite itself is a game that is downloadable for free but the money maker for them is an in game currency called vbucks. Vbucks are something that makes you be able to purchase in game upgrades and new clothes for your character and considering that Ninja has over 18 million followers with the vast majority being kids that play the game are dying to get the things that they see Ninja using that they will buy countless Vbucks until they get the item they want. Recently Fortnite has become playable on mobile devices and Samsung has decided to go all in with Ninja and rapper Travis Scott being the figure heads on their new TV campaign that focuses on the Fortnite capabilities of the new Galaxy phone. With the almost religious nature of how Ninja’s followers follow him there is not doubt in my mind that the amount of Fortnite specific buyer of the new Galaxy will literally be off the charts. Ninja wasn’t the first to get huge off of playing video games online, one of the most popular that even I got caught up in was back in 2014 and a few YouTubers took to playing Fifa the soccer video game that had an online gameplay mode called Ultimate Team which consisted of card like individualized players that you could get by buying “packs” the best packs obviously cost more ingame currency than the bad ones so what started happening was these YouTubers would become sponsored by “cointraders” which was outside of the actual Fifa game. Instead of doing the ingame purcahses of “Fifa points” that didn’t garuntee you anything good and could have turned out to be a waste of money these coin traders would sell the actual coins you needed to purchase the player cards and it turned into a hundreds of thousands of dollar business that actually ended up being such a big business that it took away from the people spending money on the actual in game purchases and two games later EA Sports the maker of Fifa figured out a way to ban the purchase of coins so it would stop effecting their business. The power of Social media never ceases to amaze me, good, bad or indifferent the reach for companies legit, or fraudulent is amazing. Visit me again tomorrow for the last installment in this little blog series.

October 5th, 2018

As I continue with my second blog post I want to continue with the theme of celebrities and their effect on social media advertising. After doing some surfing around social media and other internet outlets over the last day I have found some interesting trends I want to discuss. One of the biggest things now a days is the YouTuber. In case you aren’t familiar with that term these are people that make a living (or try to) recording vlogs of their day to day goings on or reviews of products, there are even YouTubers that make their whole page about playing video games or just about anything imaginable. On the Vlog front one of the most popular is a man named Casey Niestat, he is a filmmaker out of NYC that I actually have spent some significant time watching in the past and he’s pretty good at it, what is unreal to see is the change in his life since YouTube, he never shamelessly plugged companies or products instead it was quite the opposite, he would tell the honest to god truth about products, sometimes good and sometimes bad but what he did give was opportunity. There used to be a “Mail Time” segment in his Vlog where he would open packages from companies and random people alike. This turned into companies exploiting the chance to get their products in his hands and just hoping that Casey’s review was a good one. Even if it wasn’t great for the company Casey would offer suggestions as to how it could be improved (if he thought it could be). This type of advertising is amazing in my opinion, Casey has over 10 million subscribers on YouTube. While all 10 million might not see the video or product the millions that did saw the company’s product at no cost to the company except for the product itself and a UPS label. If the review went well the orders would sky rocket because those millions of viewers that saw Casey give the product the thumbs up would love to have something that must be good if Casey thought it was which in turn would create a boom in business virtually no cost like I said before. In the case of a bad review you still got your product or test run of a product out there and maybe more importantly you now have suggestions on what to make better, you take those suggestions, tweak the product and send another product and hope it goes better this time. I mean this kind of think won’t work with Casey for every product known to man but there are countless YouTubers with tremendous reach like this, they may not always provide a free podium for products but it would be worth a look or 2 to see what this powerful social media engine can provide because a company’s outlook can change tremendously just because of one viral video. That’s all for today, check back tomorrow as I think I’m going to continue looking into YouTube and it’s endless opportunities.

October 4th, 2018

When it comes to social media almost everyone follows some celebrities, as much as we may not like to admit that we actually do care what they’re doing Social Media allows us to get some insight on their lives on a daily basis. Companies have utilized the celebrity as an advertising tool since the beginning of advertising and it is even more powerful because of social media. If we look at Americas favorite family to say they don’t care about, the Kardashians. As a collective unit the 5 sisters have 478 Million followers, that number is downright unbelievable to me, the reach that those sisters have is unmatchable, tv advertising can’t even come close to it, according to leichtmanresearch.com in 2017 there were 92.2 million tv subscribers. The social media reach the sisters have is also global and not just national, it only makes sense for companies to pay the sisters to post ads on their respective social media accounts and let the views pile up on their product. Teami Blends utilized Kylie Jenner’s reach on an Instagram ad that received 3,856,550 likes, now I don’t know the click rate of Instagram users visiting Teami’s page but all of those like represent almost 3.9 million potential customers because of one picture that was posted, obviously the company has to pay them for their ad but it is way less cost to the company to pay for an Instagram picture then it is to make and produce a commercial ad campaign, it almost doesn’t make sense for companies to not try and get a social media ad with celebrities like the Kardashian clan. As the general public gets farther and farther away from traditional advertising outlets social media is the one thing that everyone from all facets of life can seem to agree on, now if they actual agree on the things they post to it that’s a different story but the fact remains that as of now Social Media is the front runner when it comes to bang for the companies buck with advertising. As these blog posts continue throughout the course I will continue to look at the effects of the celebrity on Social Media and how companies can continue to utilize that platform. Until next time, thanks for reading.