This week in Inbound Marketing Highlights, one brand takes Father's Day to a (cheesy) new level. We're also fact-checking a viral meme and learning about a soon-to-be Instagram update. Keep reading for these stories and more!
This Father’s Day, Get Your Dad the Cheesiest Gift of Them All – a KraftCheese Sculpture of Himself
If your dad is a cheese lover, you may have missed out on the perfect Father's Day gift. KraftCheese auctioned off five custom-made cheese sculptures earlier this week. The sculptures are not only made from the brand's Sharp Cheddar Cheese, but they're also carved to look just like the customer's dad! Customers had until June 12th to place a bid on this opportunity at ebay.com/CheeseYourDad. The sculptures start as a 40lb block of cheese and are carved within a three day period. Proceeds of this gift were given to the hunger-relief organization with matching donations from Kraft. So how much did the sculptures go for? $2,225.99, $2,200.99, $2,150.99 and $2,100.99 respectively.
Reducing the time it takes to write meta descriptions for large websites
Meta-descriptions. Although they're only 1-3 lines, it can be a tedious task to make sure they're on each one of your website pages. Not only do they need to be competed, they need to be written in a way that optimizes the webpage for SEO, while also compelling the reader to click and read more. Many businesses' don't have custom mega-tags, allowing search engines to just pull from the article. Often times, these are irrelevant lines to the article and thereby not doing the intended job. This however, is expected to be a problem of the past sometime soon, as machine learning will be able to craft the perfect text for you in the future. Read more here.
See Also: Inbound Marketing 101: Do's and Don’ts for Keywords and Meta Tags
Don't Be Fooled by the 'Forced a Bot' Meme
With awareness of AI technologically rapidly increasing, people have taken to social media for satire. The latest viral hoax is someone who claimed to "force a bot to listen to 1,000 hours of Olive Garden commercials." The twitter user then provided a commercial script the bot allegedly "generated" from listening to all of the content it heard. And although this script and other circulating ones are funny, many fail to realize that most of these are jokes and not actual examples of artificial intelligence. Scientist Janelle Shane, who actually trains computers to do funny things with machine learning (like naming guinea pigs for instance), explains how to tell the different between these fake scripts and real AI.
“Neural nets learn by example. If you show it 1,000 hours of video (assuming 120,000 unique 30-sec Olive Garden commercials exist), you’ll get video out, not a script with stage directions,” explains Shane in a thread.
Instagram’s new shopping bag icon adds e-commerce element to advertisers’ Stories
E-commerce brands now have increased opportunity on Instagram, with the launch of their new shopping bag icon. Starting this week, a select number of accounts will have the icon on their Instagram Stories, displaying more details about the featured product. If a user clicks the shopping bag icon, they will see product info, more images, images of other products, as well as descriptions and pricing. They will then be directed straight to the brand's website for purchase. Although this isn't widely rolled out yet, it is expected to help streamline the process for advertisers and customers on this platform.
See Also: Instagram Mistakes You May Not Even Know You’re Making
Is radio dead? Not according to those who are investing in the industry
With streaming platforms and podcasts growing in popularity, many would guess that radio is being left in the dark. This however is untrue, with digital audio ad revenue topping $1.6 billion, a 39% increase from 2016. With these huge numbers, big brands like Google are investing in programmic audio ads. Today it is easier than ever to buy these ads, with platforms like RadioSpot allowing marketers to buy them digitally, rather than over the phone. RadioSpot also claims to provide real-time reporting and analytics, something that couldn’t be done before.
That's this week in Inbound Marketing Highlights! Stop by next Sunday for more!
You May Also Like
