#digiawards

Natasha Negovanlis @natvanlis

Content creation is something that really interests me and, recently, I had the opportunity to hear from the best what’s going on in the industry at Next Media, an annual media conference, that happens in Toronto, Canada. 

Among the speakers were head chiefs of Facebook and Instagram, advertising agencies, big corporations  and influencers from social media. They were all engaged in the conversation about the future of content and commerce. Aside from being present in the pannels, I learned which companies are trending in Toronto and got the chance to talk briefly with people in the industry.

This opportunity was only possible because I was volunteering for the event (which is expensive for my student budget!). And, since I was working, I had to restrain my urge of using twitter to broadcast what was happening. So I tried to take notes to share the knowledge here on Tumblr. Two things that really interested me during the two days of event were:

-          Brands and Social Media Influencers working together

-          New technologies changing the game

Brands and influencers:

Youtube, Instagram and Tumblr artists were present to talk about their experience. Sam Cannon, a photographer based on Tumblr, shared her experience: “I learned I would get more followers if I shared my life style and more of myself. But I wanted to focus only on my work, to be a photographer. So I had to understand how to connect with my audience”.  

Two brands looking for Community Engaging reached social media in different and both successful ways. McCain fries used several Youtube influencers to make recipes for them and put them all together under the tag “modifry”. “#Wethenorth” for basketball in was also a campaign that reached social media in a larger way than the creators expected. They said the hashtag came from social media users, it was not something already made.

Wattpad is a fairly new social media platform specifically to create content. Brands are asking users, mostly writers, to create stories about movie releases: “Age of Adeline”, “Insurgent” and “The duff” had successful campaigns.  Rebecca Sky, a famous writer in Wattpad, shared a good insight: “Use the brand as a way for your character to reach a goal, not just throw the product there. If it’s done correctly, it engages”.

My take from that is that Social Media influencers know their audience and they can help the brand. Social Media is a community, they know this medium and how to deal with it most times better than marketers and CEOs.

  New technologies:

Think mobile! Advertising has thrown the same types of ads from the print version, into desktop and now they are transferring them to mobile. What advertisers are struggling now is how to make native advertising. Build content specifically for mobile.

Virtual reality is getting bigger and closer to the consumer. Secret Location, a company based in LA and Toronto, shared their experience when creating a VR for the TV show Sleepy Hollow for the San Diego Comic Con, which won them an Emmy. They showed how creating a narrative was so important as the special effects, otherwise the visitors wouldn’t engage with it.

Gaming will be a $93 million market by 2019 so the opportunities are huge right now. What the specialists say is that you need to pick your audience, there is an increasing demand for different content, other than the traditional form of games. “We want to create games that people will want to press the ‘share’ button on PS all the time”.

Hologram was also present at the conference with one speaker being virtually there. He answered questions and could see the audience.

What I learned from all this is that content creation is a valuable asset and brands are interested in thinking outside the box. There is space and money for that! 

At the end of the event, there was a celebration of the industry best work from this year at the Digi Awards. And I met some social media celebrities, like Jus Reign and Baddie Winkle.