Nowadays we are all brandlovers, just ask the people around you how many brands they like and you’ll be surprised. Some of them love Apple, other Samsung, some like Nike and others prefer Adidas… We feel a bond to certain brands and we are ready to defend them if anyone has a negative opinion of them, so we become their best ambassadors.
Social networks have been key in creating that bond between a brands and brandlovers. Users can share their tastes and talk about their favorite brands through social media, which become a very profitable form of advertising for companies, due to their capacity to reach many people (and, more important, people interested on what that specific brand is telling them) and their low costs. Thanks to these channels brands become more and more popular, but there’s also an increasingly rivalry between them to achieve greater presence and interaction for the companies which invest on them, which are, after all, who support their business model.
Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or Twitter have become platforms for communication excellence 2.0, where users themselves are the protagonists of advertising and conversation. But not only users contribute to this conversation, as the brands themselves are often allied to these channels in order to greater visibility. In fact, the brands are not the only ones to struggle in order to get more brandlovers; the channels themselves fight each other to become more popular and to gain users. For instance, Instagram is fighting Snapchat by implementing a new way of sharing pictures and videos called “Instagram Stories”, but by doing that, is losing it’s original essence, forgetting what made it popular in the first place, and all for the sake of being the best social network to share moments.
But this is not all, this desire to retouch images with either filters or emojis goes beyond showing our ability to create nice pictures, as consistently more applications and tools provide you with the opportunity to add the logo of your favorite brands in your photos, therefore creating free advertisement for them only by swiping our finger, and sharing the creations on your social channels directly.
Following that tendency, Twitter has launched the so called “sponsored stickers”, a tool with which you can decorate your images with Sponsored emoji that undoubtedly remind us of Snapchat. The first brand to join this initiative has been Pepsi, which has created eight emoji accompanied by the hashtag #DILOCONPEPSI. Who will be the next brand to join this initiative?
There are others applications that allow you to add the logo of your brand, like Adictik, a Spanish social network that allows brandlovers design their own ads with the images taken with their Smartphones, and they can share them in any their social profiles.
What is clear is that social networks have become the largest advertising space around the world, where we are all ambassadors and consumers of advertising 2.0. They are also contributing to the existence of a collaborative communication model where we have much to do and much to learn, never forgetting who we are and why we are there.
