5 things you need to know this week

In a week, which has seen KitKat significantly redesign its packaging and the WWF charity introduce a new way of using emojis to generate donations, Marketing Week rounds up everything you need to know from the marketing industry over the last seven days.

1. KitKat has embarked on its biggest packaging redesign to let consumers ‘YouTube their break’

KitKat is undertaking its biggest wrapper redesign since the brand came to market almost 80 years ago, changing the logo on more than 100 million packets to reflect the different ways consumers spend their breaks – including one with “YouTube my break” branding.

Some 600,000 YouTube break KitKats will go on sale with the aim of “helping people make the most of their down time,” according to Lisa May, Nestle’s marketing director for confectionary in the UK and Ireland.

On top of the packaging changes, Nestle is making use of Google’s voice search technology. Anyone who searches for “KitKat YouTube my break” on their phone will be shown a KitKat-branded video followed by a playlist of the latest top four trending videos on YouTube.

A further 71 “breaks” will also be promoted on KitKat aimed at representing different types of people, including “chatty break”, “cheeky break ” and “reading break”.

2. TUI’s CEO compared Thomson’s rebranding to ‘renovating a house’

It was confirmed this week that UK package holiday brands Thomson and First Choice Holidays will be fully rebranded to their German parent TUI, with the process set to take up to two years in order to ensure a smooth transition.

Over the next two to three years, the TUI brand will first replace Arke in the Netherlands before being introduced in markets such as France and Belgium. It will then be rolled out across the rest of the group, with rebranding in the UK market part of the second phase.

Ahead of the UK rebranding, the Thomson website is set to be converted to www.tui.com/uk and airlines will start to carry TUI branding in order to slowly raise awareness of the brand among British holidaymakers, for which Thomson is an established force.

Speaking to analysts, TUI co-chief executive Friedrich Joussen admitted that ending the Thomson brand could be seen as a “risk,” but insists that rebranding to TUI is the right long-term decision.

He said: “Thomson is a successful power brand and we know people may categorise this as a risk, but this is like renovating a house as once you’ve done it and see the results, you wonder why you didn’t do something earlier.”

3. Interactive ads are not gimmicks but ROI boosters

With outdoor ad spend on the rise, brands that are looking to cater for experience-hungry consumers are venturing to outdoor channels to provide interactive campaigns that can be easily shared.

OOH ad spend rose by 3% in 2014 to surpass 1bn or the first time, with digital OOH ad spend up 27.3%, making up a quarter of that total.

This suggests that recent ‘interactive’ poster campaigns from Birds Eye, Carlsberg and Pepsi haven’t just been gimmicks, but are part of a strategic move to get greater exposure and returns from outdoor advertising investment.

“Innovative outdoor campaigns create a talking point because they’re disruptive – they stop people in their tracks and encourage them to take notice in a way that the average advert cannot always guarantee,” says Steve Chantry, UK marketing director at Birds Eye.

4. WWF and Domino’s Pizza introduced donations and sales via emoji

wwf emoji

The World Wildlife Fund launched a Twitter campaign this week that uses emojis to tell the story of endangered species and encourage people to donate via the social network.

The campaign encourages people to tweet an image of one of 17 endangered emojis. Using technology developed by Twitter, WWF will then count the number of times users tweet an endangered emoji in a month and convert that into a donation amount (€0.10 per use).

Speaking to Marketing Week, WWF’s digital innovation manager Adrian Cockle said the idea for the campaign was sparked by the discovery that 17 characters in the emoji alphabet represent endangered species.

5. Although privacy remains a concern, acceptance of wearables is growing

Apple watch

A new global study has shown that seven in 10 global consumers favour digital devices, such as wearables and smartphones, which monitor “every aspect” of their fitness and psychical health.

The research, which was conducted by Havas Worldwide from an online survey of 10,131 people aged 18+ in 28 global markets, shows that nearly half of (45%) of the US market is accepting of such devices.

However, privacy remains a serious concern for consumers and could hinder the progress of devices such as the Apple Watch, which place a heavy impetuous on tracking exercise and activities.

The research found that more than four in ten global respondents were concerned about the loss of privacy that comes with new health-monitoring wearables.

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