News Bytes and Blogs _

If you are into social media you definitely must’ve heard,’ if it doesn’t show up on Instagram, did it even happen? ‘

On a daily, more than a billion Stories are shared across Instagram, Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp. It is surprising that Stories have captured people’s imaginations. Arguably so, because they are convenient, full-screen, and immersive just the right place to show creativity. It is an incredibly easy way for people to stay connected to the brands and products they love. Stories are the new canvas and inventive creatives can boost brand awareness, drive sales and business.

Leading brands are turning to Stories to become engaging storytellers. Breaking rules and fresh ideas as always is the key to keep things interesting. Let’s look into some major brands that are crushing on stories and killing it too.

Taking a bite at the cringe-worthy vacay photos from romantic beach vacay sunset, to infinity pool shots and their likes, Hotels.com brings forth this “hate-like” concept as the foundation of their campaign.

For Stories, Hotels.com put their icon, a hotel concierge in a number of situations that could spark a good ‘hate-like’. At the beach, He does the jump, asking “If you don’t take a #jumpingpic on your trip, are you even making memories?” In his luxurious hotel, he words “If you don’t take a #mirrorselfie, does your hotel even have a bathroom?”

The whole campaign spoke to the audience in a natural and native way with humor and relatability at its core.

McDonald’s came up with a campaign that played with the often projected idyllic perception of summer and the reality that summer can actually be hard work. To popularize its Fresh Beef Quarter Pounder burgers during summer, McD took to homemade photo fail as well as user-generated “summer fail” videos to portray the difficult side of summer. The campaign then reminded people that McDonald’s Quarter Pounder is easy, lazy and therefore quintessential for the season, and punchlined it as summer’s simplest pleasure.

The Lit way to Read

In this age, books may be a task to promote but not at New York Public Library. They toyed with the novel idea of Stories(social media) to tell stories. They employed the fast and fleeting media to project full works of classic literary fiction. How it works? People can click on novels on @nypl Instagram account and simply rest their thumb on the screen to hold the page and lift their thumb to turn the page. The thumb holder doubles as a flipbook. More than 300,000 people are reading books through this format and it is a grabbing the fantasies of the audience like never before. It is also a great publicity triumph for the library.

Luxury served to millennials

Millennials have not always figured into the category that luxury cars have been catered to but not with Acura. They understand that when millenials are ready to invest in luxury cars, they are looking for luxury and performance vehicles, and typical advertising tactics may not work on this gen. Luxury carmakers generally don’t focus on millennial but Acura is, meeting them on their own turf, the mobile.

They used Stories on Instagram and enabled users to reach in to control the user experience of the Acura ILX sports sedan. Acura let Instagram users customize their dream ILX directly in Stories. They could simply tap to add custom elements such as wheels, accessories and additional packaging to their car, as well as use other branded stickers, directly onto beauty shots of the ILX. They also teamed up with top Instagram influencers and Giphy artists to create custom stickers that users could add to their ILX vehicle. Takeaway? When targeting millennials, relevancy and authenticity rule. Conversations are no more one-sided but rely on real connections between people and brands.