#trends2015

DISPLAY TRENDS 2015

What a year for Social – it’s now the UK’s favourite activity online, accounting for almost a fifth of the two hours and 51 minutes a day people in the UK on average spend on the web.

2015 was definitely the year that social media enabled shows of solidarity. From writing ‘Je Suis Charlie’ back in January, to changing your profile picture to a rainbow-coloured photo after the Supreme Court of the US ruling, social has seen the simplest of actions become the post powerful.

We’ve recapped on what a year in social it’s been.

Social Campaign of the Year

So many great campaigns to choose from this year, but Dove definitely cracked it once again at the early part of this year with the ‘Choose Beautiful’ campaign.  A video showcased women who were given the choice to walk through doors labelled either “average” or “beautiful”, with the focus being on reinforcing self-esteem in women. Appealing directly to their core audience, the video highlighted how real woman should see themselves as beautiful; as those who choose “average” then decide they should have opted otherwise.

The content was kept simple and the emotional connection that related to the target audience was incredibly effective.  The video of course went viral, and Dove got massive exposure from it.

Emerging Trend

2015 will definitely be the year of the emoji.  The small yellow pictograms have rapidly replaced the use of acronyms to express emotion (e.g. ‘LOL’ or ‘TTYL’). Brands have even got in on the act creating their own unique emoji’s and subsequently, the Oxford Dictionary has actually selected its ‘Word of the Year’ as an emoji – the little picture of a smiley face crying.

The power of the hashtag

The power of the hashtag has grown massively this year.  Twitter revealed at the start of December that this year’s most talked about subject on the social platform was the Paris attacks. Tweeters used the hashtag #JeSuisParis to show their solidarity with Parisians after last month’s terror attacks as well as the attacks in January at the headquarters of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

We also can’t forget the internet debate that surrounded #TheDress back in February - people were divided over whether it was black and blue or white and gold, with over 4.4 million tweets discussing the “optical illusion”. I’m still not sure to this date what colour that bloomin dress actually is!

Platform of the Year

With new social networking platforms appearing from behind every corner, this is a touch one – Real-time video sharing has been massive this year with many users more likely to create and share videos from their smartphones. We’ve seen Periscope launched which offers great things for live events and news-streaming but this year Snapchat has exploded, with over 400m users and a valuation of US$19 billion already. Snapchat has enabled brands to communicate far more effectively with audiences in the 14-28 year old demo – which we all know have previously been very hard to reach.

For brands and businesses it can be hard to know exactly where to commit your time and resources but investment in social media is definitely a necessity, not a luxury. Next year we will definitely see even more companies either hiring social media strategists or employing agencies to become full-time social media managers for their business.

Social Media Fail

Starbucks ambitiously launched #RaceTogether in March, following the killings of unarmed teenagers Michael Brown and Eric Garner by the police and subsequent rioting. The campaign aimed to spark a national dialogue about race both in-store and on social media, which unknowingly catalysed a negative Twitterstorm.

Unsurprisingly, pushing the brand into such an emotionally charged issue of racial inequality was considered superficial by most consumers,  and so the campaign ended a week later.