Over the past couple of months, you may have heard some things about Facebook’s metrics.

There was talk of numbers — lots of them. Things were overestimated. Others were underestimated. People were kind of upset. But mostly, they were confused. What the heck happened? How was Facebook going to respond? And at the end of the day, what did it mean for marketers? Breathe, and don’t panic — we’re here to answer all of that.But before we dive in, let’s make one thing clear — none of it is the end of the world. In fact, most of the issues have already been addressed and repaired; at this point, the most important item on our agenda is to clarify what’s actually going on.

What Happened?

It started with video

The drama began in September 2016, when Facebook revealed that there was a problem with its video viewership metrics — the average time that users spent watching videos was being largely overestimated.

Mathematically, Facebook wrote in a statement, that metric should have been the resulting figure from dividing the total time spent watching a video by the total number of people who played it. Instead, the total viewing time was divided by the number of times the video was watched for three seconds or more.

So, let’s say a video received a total viewing time of five hours, or 300 minutes, and it was watched by a total of 1,000 people, 700 of whom watched it for at least three seconds. The viewership metric should be 30%. Instead, Facebook was dividing those 300 minutes by 700, resulting in a larger metric of nearly 43%. And, says the Wall Street Journal [WSJ], that went on for nearly two years.

For a social media platform that boasts how effective its video tools are for marketers, the announcement was an embarrassment. The advertising world was especially unhappy about it — Publicis Media, an ad-buying agency, told its clients that Facebook indicated viewing time overestimates of up to 80%. There were calls for third-party metric verification protocols to be put in place, and while Facebook said that it fixed the error and would be looking into such improvements, the metric misfortune didn’t end there.

A bit of a bug

In fact, just yesterday, Facebook announced that it discovered a bug in its Pages Insights that’s been lurking since May. The summary displaying seven- or 28-day organic page reach was incorrectly added up as the sum of daily reach over that period. That means duplicate visitors were being counted in every instance, leading to a number that was 33% higher than it should have been for seven-day summaries, and 55% for the 28-day ones. Facebook clarified that this error would not impact paid ads.

Here’s how Facebook visually represented the error — the red circle indicates where the duplicate viewership would have appeared.

Source: Facebook

But you’ll notice that there are green circles in that image, too. Those indicate the insights that were unaffected by the bug — which was the “vast majority” of them — and includes the following measurements:

• All graphs
• Daily and historical reach
• Per-post reach
• Exported and API reach data
• All data on the Reach tab

What else was impacted?

In addition to the Page Insights, the bug really only impacted a total of four out of Facebook’s 220 measured metrics, according to WSJ. The remainder included:

More video miscalculations.

This time, the “video views at 100%” — which has been renamed to “video watches at 100%” — metric was impacted, thanks to a glitch that sometimes causes a video’s audio and visual components to be unsynced.

That means that even though the visual is played to completion, the audio may continue after the visual stops. But since about 85% of Facebook video is consumed without sound, viewers are likely to stop watching the video before this latent audio completes. As a result, “video watches at 100%” metrics might now increase by an estimated 35%.

Instant articles.

Here’s another case of Facebook’s overestimations. The average time spent reading Instant Articles — a method by which Facebook displays news articles at a rate 10X faster than a typical mobile web browser — was reported to be 7-8% higher than the actual length of time per article.

Referrals.

In Facebook’s Analytics for Apps dashboard, “referrals” are intended to measure the number of clicks on a post that were directed to an app or website. But it turns out that the “referrals” metric was counting more than that, and inaccurately also included clicks on the same post to view media, like photo or video. That led to an overestimate of referrals by about 6%.

Facebook’s Response

In Facebook’s defense, significant measures have been taken to resolve all of the above issues.

For some, the errors pertaining to ads seem to be the most pressing, which could be why the social media platform has dedicated an entire page to the updates around ads reporting alone. Most of those changes are intended to provide clarification over what exactly is being measured and how — mostly in the interest of “fairness and transparency,” Mark Rabkin, Facebook’s VP of core ads, told WSJ.

Plus, Facebook claims to be taking the feedback to implement third-party measuring protocols seriously, and aims to further clarify how it’s going to calculate ad viewership, as well as the source of that data. Some of it will be coming from Moat and Integral Ad Science — platforms that are used to measure ad and content engagement — which will be used to measure display ad campaigns (previously, those platforms were only available to measure video campaigns).

But Facebook is also enlisting the help of a true viewership pioneer: Nielsen.

Nielsen has its own Digital Content Ratings metric, which Facebook will be implementing to count video viewership — both on-demand and live. That comes with Nielsen’s Total Audience Measurement, which helps marketers compare digital metrics to those from TV.

There’s also a new blogging property launching — Facebook’s Metrics FYI — which will contain regular updates about any and all changes to the platform’s metrics henceforth.

These efforts are all compounded by the formation of a Measurement Council — or, as we like to call it, Facebook’s jury of peers. The Council will be comprised of “business and measurement executives,” and is a bit of an extension of Facebook’s existing Client Council, which helped to develop the tools that help businesses measure ROI.

What It All Means for Marketers

So just how seriously should we be taking it? Well, in short, marketers have reason to be happy about the improvements that Facebook is making, but shouldn’t freak out over the miscalculations.

Why is that? According to Daria Marmer, HubSpot’s social product manager, “Most of the metrics in question are what we’d call vanity metrics. Views and impressions are important, but don’t have a huge impact on your business at the end of the day.”

And while Marmer echoes the benefits of Facebook’s measures to fix these discrepancies, “We really encourage marketers to tie their social efforts to more concrete metrics,” she said, “such as website visits, downloads, new leads.”

She adds, “The social data from Facebook in HubSpot customers’ portals won’t change based on these updates.”

We’ve got you covered. And, we’ll continue to bring you updates to all things social as they emerge.

What do you think of Facebook’s latest announcements, and what sort of action are you taking? Let us know in the comments.

Thanksgiving is just around the corner, which means #GivingTuesday isn’t far off. This year, it’s on November 29. If you haven’t already put together any special campaigns to promote giving or volunteering around #GivingTuesday, don’t worry. Yes, we’re getting down to the wire here, but that doesn’t mean you can’t create something around that day that will make a big impact on your annual goals.

Video is the New Darling of Digital Marketing

Email is awesome, no doubt. But people can only read an email so many times. It’s time to give a little shock to your subscribers’ system with something new. How about a little video content? How about a little live video content?

Adults in the United States watch, on average, an hour and 16 minutes of digital content every day. The shift from television viewing to online video viewing continues to grow, which is great news for organizations (most of them) that don’t have budget to produce television content and buy airtime.

It may be too late to produce a full-fledged digital video, so live video may be your only option on short notice. Don’t panic. Live video on short notice may actually be some of your most authentic, accessible video content. You don’t really need anything more than a smartphone.

See, publishing live video is much easier than it sounds. It offers the chance to connect in a less formal, more direct way with your community. Consider doing a Facebook Live video or Periscope session. The video capabilities on pretty much every smartphone produce some decent quality video. It’s certainly video quality we’re all used to. Facebook’s new Live Stream function also lets you use traditional video camera for your live stream if you prefer. You can read about how to set that up, along with other good Facebook Live Stream tips here.

Your live stream can be of a visit to somewhere that’s received funds from your organization or follow a group of volunteers. Pair up with another local nonprofit and broadcast a goofy “giving Olympics” competition (e.g. who can pack the most care baskets in 5 minutes), with viewers voting on the winners. Let your lack of planning work for you and bust out some rough-and-ready creativity.

Plus, once you’re done, you’ll have recorded video content you can slice up and repurpose in other ways.

Activate Your Undiscovered Ambassadors 

Use #GivingTuesday as an opportunity to tap into your most digitally engaged constituents and convert them into donors or volunteers. You probably have a crew of people who have engaged with your online content, but have not yet donated or participated in any of your events.  You can find them by analyzing your metrics. They have a higher than average email open or click-through rate, or number of site visits. Maybe they have a lot of interaction with your organization via social media, sharing your content or making comments.

Segment this untapped community and run a #GivingTuesday campaign to fuel some offline engagement. Start running targeted email or social ad retargeting campaigns promoting #GivingTuesday as their chance to finally get involved.

The #GivingTuesday organization provides great examples from previous years. For example, the HALO Foundation ran a campaign asking people to forgo their daily cup of coffee and donate the $5 instead. Take the day to get a large group of volunteers to take care of some backburner project. Community Missions in upstate New York used the day to get more than 120 volunteers to help repaint and renovate its food pantry.

These digital warriors have shown a lot of interest in your mission. Take advantage of the global giving momentum the day generates and provide them a specific, purposeful call-to-action that converts them into real world participants in your organization’s mission. 

Freshen Up Current Projects

Create some new ways for current members and volunteers to get involved. Hold a special event for donors, such as a cocktail hour or BBQ. (Hey, maybe you live stream the event too…) 

You could also offer a new incentive to donate. It’s never too late to find a new gift-matching partner, especially when you can pitch the partnership as part of a global event. Run a campaign that asks current donors to submit matching gift requests with their employers. 

Or put together a limited edition #GivingTuesday swag bag giveaway for different donation levels. Include a CTA for some user-generated content with their new swag in your thank-you email.

Whether you’re off-pace to reach your annual giving targets or itching to blow them out of the water, create a #GivingTuesday – focused donation campaign and start running it now.

If you don’t want to pay out for a lot of swag, put together a line up of super-swag and run an online auction that closes on November 29. If you have the experience (so the legal issues are already sorted) running an online raffle, you do can do that with the winner’s drawing happening on #GivingTuesday.

Do Something 

The organization behind #GivingTuesday wants to make it easy for you. They’ve put together a rich resource page of content, tool kits, and templates you can use in your campaign.

Put together a targeted campaign or two, say one for active members and one for your subscriber/lurkers. It could be a single event, whether a real world volunteer day or online auction, but customize different promotion campaigns for these different groups.

Don’t overthink this. The day is coming up fast.

Content marketing continues to dominate as a key component of a successful marketing strategy, but to see strong results, you need to regularly produce content — specifically content with a high-viral potential.

Most marketers would argue that no one can predict whether or not something will go viral, but a lot of these same individuals simply aren’t satisfied with run-of-the-mill results. In their ideal world, an investment in content marketing should deliver exposure that rivals celebrity headlines and breaking industry news.

The problem? They’re failing to recognize that many of these high-profile headlines gained traction because they were highly controversial.

You see, polarizing ideas work because they trigger an emotional response — and this kind of reaction has a huge ripple effect due to the innate self-interest generated. Remember, though, that brands walk a fine line when it comes to controversy. That’s why we’ve put together a few things to keep in mind below that will help your team stir the pot while not crossing any boundaries.

How to Experiment With Controversial Content (Without Alienating People)

1) Produce something that will resonate with your target audience.

For controversial content to work, it has to be rooted in more than just shock value. In fact, it should aim to provide real value to your target audience, too.

Who could forget the Ad Council’s incredibly successful “Love Has No Labels” video? The organization’s mission — to “produce, distribute, and promote campaigns that improve everyday lives” — aligned perfectly with the clip, which promoted tolerance through acceptance by taking an interesting look at each other’s differences.

The idea was quite simple: Using an X-ray machine, passersby saw different sets of skeletons showing different signs of affection to one another before revealing identity — their gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, and so on. This approach forced viewers to rethink any unconscious biases they might have and appreciate that love is love no matter who is involved.

The result? More than 57 million views on YouTube alone, and currently holds the title of the second most-viewed community and activism campaign of all time.

2) Use a familiar, credible, and relatable data source.

In order to mitigate any backlash from publishers and readers, your campaign should feature reliable content and credible sources. The last thing you want is the validity of your content to become a point of contention, especially for something that is already controversial.

Consider UN Women’s “Auto-Complete Truth” campaign from 2013. The concept of each ad was simple: Using the world’s most popular search engine (Google), the images highlighted real search results of female-focused queries like “women need to,” “women should,” and “women cannot” to reveal some of the most appalling opinions women face around the world.

What made this campaign work is that it relies heavily on a data source that is both familiar and credible: Google’s autocomplete feature. And by presenting the data in a visually striking manner — each ad’s fine print reads, “Actual Google search on 09/03/13” — the message reached a wider audience without being diluted.

The campaign instantly went viral, earning spots on Adweek, The Guardian, and Fast Company. This encouraged the brand to revisit the campaign, where it saw similar results.

3) Offer a unique perspective.

Another thing successful controversial content does well? It offers a different look at a familiar subject.

Fractl is no stranger to controversial content, and for our client Bulimia.com — a California-based organization that provides resources to individuals struggling with eating disorders — we produced this campaign that reimagines superheroes to reflect more realistic body types.

With the help of Photoshop, comic book icons like Batman, Iron Man, and Captain America shed their bulging biceps in an effort to look more like an everyday individual. When paired with the originals, the stark contrast between the two images offered a new way to discuss body issues, particularly for men.

The project was incredibly successful: In just nine days, the campaign earned more than 200 pickups and nearly 90,000 social shares in 20 U.S. states and 25 countries as visualized below.

4) Don’t go in with an agenda.

Think about the last time you read an article that seemed like it was only presenting one side of a story — specifically the side that benefitted the author. You probably didn’t think too highly of the news source after, right?

The same thing goes for polarizing content. To keep your campaign from being too negative or one-sided, you shouldn’t come across like you have an agenda. For instance, many believed that McDonald’s crossed the line in its “Carry On” campaign. Audiences felt like the commercial was propaganda, trying to parade itself as an exemplary model of corporate kindness when most people believed otherwise.

5) Avoid shaming one group over another.

Although polarizing content should easily resonate with its target market, it shouldn’t alienate other groups entirely either — particularly through any sort of shaming. Remember there’s a fine line between assurance and arrogance.

Last year, U.K. fitness brand Protein World ran billboards that featured a skinny woman in a revealing swimsuit with the provocative tagline, “Are you beach body ready?” Unsurprisingly, a lot of people were unhappy with the bold weight-loss ads, arguing that it encouraged an implied standard of beauty.

Although the brand did see significant, short-term results — in large part due to the massive exposure generated by the controversial tagline — the campaign ultimately failed because of the narrow-minded treatment of the ad.

6) Respond to disagreement respectfully.

People are going to disagree with your content; that’s a given. To minimize backlash, you need to make sure that you respond to criticism in a cool and collected manner. However, this same principle works when producing your content — specifically if it’s in response to an idea your brand disagrees with.

Airbnb got into some hot water back in 2015 with its passive-aggressive ads that told San Francisco citizens what to do with the several million dollars in back-taxes the startup finally paid due to the city’s 14 percent hotel tax. “Dear Public Library System, We hope you use some of the $12 million in hotel taxes to keep the library open later. Love, Airbnb,” read one ad.

“Dear Board of Education, Please use some of the $12 million in hotel taxes to keep art in schools. Love, Airbnb,” read another.

Although the ads were intended to inspire gratitude in San Franciscans for the additional funds, they mostly ticked people off. Citizens lambasted the ads all over social media, forcing Airbnb to pull the campaign.

Final Thoughts

Producing a polarizing idea isn’t a kiss of death for your brand. As these examples prove, many marketing teams can find success in controversy — it’s just a matter of finding the right balance on an incredibly fine line.

Remember that in a web full of clutter, you need to stir the pot to get noticed, but the recipe calls for something a little more than vanilla.

What tips do you have for experimenting with controversial content? Share them in the comments.

We’re all familiar with traditional brainstorming as a method for producing new ideas, but there are many alternative exercises for tackling problems and developing new ideas, both individually and in a group setting.

Ranging from structured to silly, here’s a selection of ten simple techniques and exercises to help you get your problem solving juices flowing:

10 Alternative Creative Exercises

1) Storyboarding

If you’re trying to design a process, storyboarding can help you see where your collective understanding of a problem supports or conflicts with a proposed solution, and where more thought/research is needed. By developing a visual story to explore the problem at hand as a narrative, your team will be able to see how ideas interact and connect to form a solution.

Sticky notes are your friend. Take a few minutes to have everyone on the team write out their ideas as individual notes. These don’t have to be complete thoughts — physically pinning up quotes, pictures, user info, and the like can help you see new relationships between different components.

Once you have a group of sticky notes to work from, start arranging them on the board as a progression: first this, then that. Organizing your ideas as a continuous series will help you see new connections and eliminate extraneous material that doesn’t support your end goal.

2) Forced Connections

This exercise involves bringing together ideas that serve very different needs or interests to form a new concept. You see this sort of thinking all the time in products like the Apple watch, the Swiss Army knife, smartphones, or even sofa beds.

To put this method into practice, bring a bag of random items to your next meeting, or draw up two lists of unrelated items on the board. Ask team members to pick two or more items and explore different ways they can be connected. This technique can produce some silly results, but it’s ultimately a helpful way of getting your team out of a creative rut.

3) Brain-Writing

In this exercise, participants simply write down a few rough ideas for solving a particular problem on a piece of paper. Each piece of paper is then passed on to someone else, who reads it silently and adds their own ideas to the page. This process is repeated until everyone has had a chance to add to each original piece of paper. The notes can then be gathered, ready for discussion.

The big advantage of brain-writing is that it makes sure everybody is given the opportunity to have their thoughts and ideas thoroughly considered by the group. This avoids the loudest or most extroverted people unintentionally dominating the sessions.

4) Zero Draft

The Zero Draft is an ideation technique for individuals often used by writers and is essentially a form of focused free-writing. For marketers and agency professionals, it can help focus the first stages of a new project by establishing what you currently know and getting your initial ideas out of your brain and onto paper.

Taking your central theme or topic:

1. Write down everything you currently know about the subject.
2. Write down what you need or want to know about the subject, but don’t currently know.
3. Reflect on why the subject is important.
4. Add anything else that takes your fancy — this is a chance to get whatever’s floating around in your head out into the world.

The Zero Draft method is all about getting everything you can think of relating to your topic down on paper, so don’t be concerned if it looks messy and unfocused. The goal is just to get past the initial block that often plagues creative professionals in the early stages of a new project.

5) S.C.A.M.P.E.R.

S.C.A.M.P.E.R. is essentially a process for expanding and improving upon ideas by testing and questioning them from different angles. For each letter of the mnemonic, ask yourself a related question about your project or the problem at hand:

• Substitute, e.g.: What would happen to the project if we swapped X for Y?
• Combine, e.g.: What would happen to the project if we combined X and Y?
• Adapt, e.g.: What changes would need to be made to adapt this project to a different context?
• Modify, e.g.: What could we modify to create more value on this project?
• Put to another use, e.g.: What other uses or applications might this project have?
• Eliminate, e.g.: What could we remove from the project to simplify it?
• Reverse, e.g.: How could we reorganize this project to make it more effective?

This method forces you to approach your project or problem in unexpected ways. Each question asks you to dig a little deeper into the issue and consider new possibilities.

6) Questioning Assumptions

We all carry assumptions with us — assumptions about what is and isn’t possible, about what people want, what will work, and what won’t. This exercise forces us to challenge these and put everything on the table.

Draw up a list of all the assumptions you can think of about your currently project — true or not — and discuss the list as a group, questioning each one. Doing this at various stages in your campaign development can spark fresh ideas, as well as identify knowledge gaps.

7) Wishing

This technique encourages your team to let imaginations run wild. Ask participants to dream up the most unattainable, extreme and impractical solutions they can think of to a given problem. Create a list of a few dozen wishes pertaining to the task at hand.

Focusing on a selection of wishes, consider and discuss the ideas in detail, with the aim of triggering new but more realistic concepts to pursue. What makes them so impossible? How can that idea be scaled down? Which features of that wish could we integrate into this other approach? You might be surprised to discover applicable, real-world solutions among your team’s wildest wishes.

8) Alter-Egos / Heroes

This is a fun exercise where small groups imagine how they would go about solving a given problem if their team were led by a famous character, fictional or real. How would Cat Woman go about positioning your brand as a thought leader in virtual reality? What would Steve Jobs do to improve your latest communications package? How would Don Draper get your core messages across to millennials?

You can either chose someone you think embodies the right qualities for the job to help develop your vision, or someone at the opposite end of that scale, to explore less conventional ideas.

9) Group Sketching

You don’t have to be an artist or a designer to benefit from sketching. Visual thinking can help to trigger and develop ideas that discussion and writing might otherwise leave unturned. Similar to brain-writing, group sketching involves participants building on each other’s ideas.

Each member of your team will sketch an image related in a central way to a concept, idea or topic you want to explore further. Each sketch is then passed to someone else, who sketches another related image on the same piece of paper. This is repeated multiple times around the group. The final images are then reviewed and discussed with the aim of discovering connections that individuals hadn’t spotted on their own.

10) Six Thinking Hats

There’s a whole host of problem solving exercises and tools that help participants to put themselves into the shoes of another. This particular tool was invented by Edward de Bono, a psychologist, author, and consultant who pioneered the technique in his 1985 book Six Thinking Hats. The method involves breaking down ideas into six areas of thought:

When approaching a new problem or project, have each member of your team put on one of these different “hats” for the discussion. Each “hat” represents a unique set of priorities and perspectives that will help focus your discussion and consider the project from a wide variety of angles.

For example, if you’re wearing the “Devil’s Advocate” hat, it’s your job to consider the project’s limitations and challenges. It may feel uncomfortable at first to temporarily adopt a very narrow form of thinking, but the extremes can help teams fully explore a project or idea.

This is a modified excerpt from Creative Ideation for Digital Marketers: Theory to Practice by Dani Mansfield

Does any aspect of your job intimidate you?

For content creators, sometimes the most stressful part of the role can be opening a completely blank document to start a new project.

Whether it’s writing a blog post, designing an infographic, or creating an ebook, it’s challenging to start creating a new piece of content from scratch, especially if you’ve never done it before.

Here in the HubSpot content shop, we want to take the work out of it for you. Instead of trying to master how to create every type of content in existence, cut down on the stress and inefficiency and read about our collection of nearly 400 free, customizable content creation templates. 

We’ve broken this list down into types of content marketing, so jump ahead if you specifically want: Content Planning Templates, Written Content Templates, Visual Content Templates, or Email Templates.

Content Planning Templates

A Content Planning/Goal-Setting Template

(Download the content planning template here.)

HubSpot teamed up with Smart Insights to create a content planning template that will help you put together an effective content marketing plan for either your business or those of your clients. These templates will help you complete a SWOT analysis on your content marketing efforts (and develop a plan to improve them), define the right objectives and KPIs for that plan, brainstorm content ideas and map these across your funnel, and create a timeline for your content plans.

A Content Mapping Template

(Download the content mapping template here)

You know you need a content marketing strategy in place to support the success of your inbound marketing and sales organizations. But how do you get started? We’ve created a content mapping template so you can walk through your target audience’s buyer’s journey. The template helps you identify buyer personas, their challenges and needs, and to brainstorm content that provides solutions. You’ll come away from the template with tons of targeted blog post ideas to attract your audience to your site and convert them into leads.

A Buyer Persona Template

(Download the buyer persona template here.)

Marketing with buyer personas means marketing smarter. This buyer persona template will help you easily organize your research to create your very own buyer personas. Use it to create beautiful, well-formatted buyer personas that you can share with your entire company, while learning best practices for persona research along the way.

3 Blog Editorial Calendar Templates

(Download the blog editorial calendar templates here.)

Having an editorial calendar for your marketing content will save you a whole lot of time — not to mention sanity — as you plan your content release timeline. We realize there isn’t a one-size-fits all solution, so we’ve created three editorial calendar templates to use at your leisure: one for Google Calendar, one for Excel, and one for Google Sheets. (Read this blog post for a step-by-step guide for using the Google Calendar template.)

2 Social Media Content Calendar Templates (for 6 Social Networks)

(Download the social media content calendar templates here.)

With so many different social networks to manage, a social media manager’s life becomes a lot easier when they can plan which content to share on each account — and when. This easy-to-use social media content calendar for Microsoft Excel lets you organize your social media activities far in advance. Use it to plan your updates and learn how to properly format your content for the six most popular social networks: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, and Pinterest.

Written Content Templates 

5 Blog Post Templates

(Download the blog post templates here.)

Here’s the thing with blogging: There isn’t one, easy template you can fill in to produce a quality content offering. You need to spend some time brainstorming a title, outlining core content, and so on. While our templates are by no means a fill-in-the-blank type of deal, they’ll walk you through the critical steps for creating the following five blog post types:

• How-To Post
• List-Based Post
• Curated Collection Post
• SlideShare Presentation Post
• Newsjacking Post

We’ve seen these formats crush it on our blogs, and we would love for you to use them to hit your own goals.

5 Ebook Templates

(Download the ebook templates here.)

Year after year, marketers cite lead generation as one of their top content marketing goals for the year. If you want to succeed at lead gen, then you need content offers — like ebooks — to help you get there. Our internal creative design team went to work building five, beautiful ebook templates — in both PowerPoint and InDesign — for you to download, customize, and use. 

A Press Release Template

(Download the press release template here.)

While public relations has adapted to be more lovable and less spammy, press releases can be effective when used correctly. Our press release template takes this into consideration and provides an inbound-optimized version. This means the template can help you script press releases and do so in a format optimized for sharing on your company blog. It’s built in Microsoft Word, so you can easily adapt and customize as needed for your PR needs.

50 Call-to-Action Templates

(Download the call-to-action templates here.)

Redesigning your call-to-action buttons can improve clickthrough rates by 1,300% or more. That means visitors will spend more time on your website, and it’ll encourage them to become leads. To help you design clickable calls-to-action, we’ve built 50 pre-designed CTAs for you. These CTAs are super easy to customize, so you don’t need to know any fancy design programs — just PowerPoint.

Bonus: There’s also a handy free tool in there that lets you track your CTA clicks in real time so you can see the exact number of clicks that your designs are reeling in.

Visual Content Templates 

195+ Visual Marketing Templates

(Download the visual marketing templates here.)

Not a designer? Not a problem. We partnered with graphic design software company Canva to create over 195 visual marketing templates that are easy-to-use, work for any industry (finance, dentistry, agriculture, law — we’ve got ’em all), and are completely free. Best of all, they’re ready to edit in Canva’s online design tool, which is included for free with this set of templates. The templates include…

• Infographics templates
• Facebook ad templates
• Facebook post templates
• Twitter post templates
• Email header templates
• Blog title templates
• Facebook cover photo templates
• Twitter header templates
• LinkedIn cover photos templates

15 Infographic Templates

(Download the infographic templates here.)

We’ve created fifteen, pre-designed infographic templates right in PowerPoint (+ five bonus illustrator templates). That way, marketers can skip the frustrations and start creating the graphics right away. Within each template, we even provide guides to teach you how to use the templates effectively. 

100 Social Media Graphics Templates

(Download the social media graphics templates here.)

Visual content is 40 times more likely to be shared on social media than any other type of content. But we know well that creating visual content takes more time and resources — which why we’ve created these 100 customizable templates for you. These templates are in PowerPoint, so they’re very easy to edit — no Photoshop skills required. Simply customize the text on an image, save it, and post it to social media.

5 Social Media Cover Photo Templates

(Download the social media cover photo templates here.)

I don’t know about you, but I sometimes have trouble keeping straight the different size dimension requirements on different social media networks. To take the guesswork out of it and to avoid frustrating re-designs, we’ve created five templates in PowerPoint that are pre-sized for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and Google+. You can customize them for your social networks without researching design specifications — don’t worry, we’ve got it covered.

3 PowerPoint Templates

(Download the PowerPoint templates here.)

PowerPoint can be a powerful tool for lead generation, brand building, and thought leadership. Don’t let boring slides stand in the way. You don’t have to be a designer to create beautiful slides. To help you get started, we’ve created three, eye-catching PowerPoint templates so you don’t have to start from scratch or rely on standard, old-school styles.

Bonus: We’ve also included four video tutorials on PowerPoint tricks in there so you can learn how to enhance images, clean up your text, install premium fonts, and so on — right in PowerPoint.

5 SlideShare Templates

(Download the SlideShare templates here.)

Creating a SlideShare presentation in PowerPoint doesn’t have to be daunting. With the right and tools at your disposal, you can easily create an engaging, visual presentation — all without fancy design programs, huge budgets, or hiring contractors.

To help you make a SlideShare of your own, we’ve created some free PowerPoint presentation templates for making awesome SlideShares — so your presentations will look great and be a breeze to put together. (Read this blog post for tip on how you can update and edit the templates to suit your specific needs.)

Email Templates

15 Email Templates for Marketing and Sales

(Download the email templates for marketing and sales here.)

Did you know that workers spend almost one third of their time at work reading and replying to emails? There are many ways you can streamline your inbox to save time, but you ultimately will still have to create and send emails. That’s where these templates come in. We’ve written the copy for 15 emails marketers and sales reps are likely to send over and over again to save you time and get you results.

There you have it, content marketers: over 386 templates to help you start creating content easily and quickly and further your inbound success.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in November 2013 and has been updated and for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

 
                                   

 

Search engine optimization (SEO) isn’t all about focusing on keywords anymore. Search engines are getting smarter and better at understanding a searcher’s intent and how they can provide them with meaningful content.

Over the past few years, marketers have lived through everything from changes in search behavior (like the serious increase in mobile search queries) to search engine algorithm updates (like Google’s rewarding more secure websites). Nowadays, following and adapting to these changes has been a big key to a business’ success.

If you’re struggling to keep up with the changes in SEO and what you as a marketer need to do as a result, you’re in the right place. Check out the infographic below from Digital Marketing Philippines for a crash course in the most important parts of SEO marketers need to know to be successful in 2016 and beyond.

You’ll learn which ranking factors are the most and least important, how to optimize your website for mobile search, how to figure out what searchers are looking for, how to optimize for local search, the content length that’s best for search, the place website security has in good SEO, and more.

I was ready to buy. My finger hovered over the “Add to Cart” button. But I still wasn’t sure.

While all the images on the site were professional and inspiring, not one of them was user-generated or showed an outfit on an average-sized human being. If I’m spending a couple hundred dollars on a dress, I want to know it will be flattering on my body (and I’m not a size zero — who is?). That conversion didn’t happen. I’m shopping elsewhere.

The wrong visual content can kill conversions as quickly as the right visual content can increase them.

In fact, conversion rates for brands that use custom visual content are seven times higher than those that don’t. And there are so many ways visual content can increase conversion rates. Since they’re so sharable, you can use them as social proof, and you can use them to quickly explain your product’s benefits and features. Essentially, all the functions you’d like your content to offer can be done — often better — with images.

It’s no wonder that the right visual content increases conversions, but only when used the right way. We compiled five of our favorite methods of doing just that.

5 Ways You Can Use Visual Content to Increase Conversion Rates

1) Experiment with video.

Videos & Product Pages

Product videos have been shown to improve conversion rates — 73% of U.S. adults, for example, are more likely to purchase a product or service after watching a video that explains it. That’s way up from the 20% conversion increase reported on Unbounce in 2012, and there’s a reason for that — the internet has gotten faster. Loading these videos used to be a pain in the router, if you will, but with faster speeds, it’s quickly becoming the favorite way to get information. After all, Google didn’t acquire YouTube for fun.

But it’s not as simple as “Video = Conversions.” Videos only work this well when placed in the hottest areas of your product page, like next to product images or “Buy” buttons. When you give your videos prominent positions — above the fold, top and center — visitors stay longer, engage more, and buy more.

But what should these videos be about? Consider what your customers (don’t) want. They probably don’t want to read a lengthy product description — most web visitors only read 25% of text. Instead, show how the product works and how real people are using it. And remember, features are nice, but what they really need to know is how your product will improve their lives.

Make sure these videos are accurate and will lead to more realistic expectations. That way, it can help reduce product returns, since a video shows how products are used day-to-day. It’s worked for Zappos — and other brands, like ASOS, have estimated that a 1% fall in returns would add $16 million in profit.

Videos & Landing Pages

When Dropbox first put a video on their homepage six years ago, conversions went up by 33%. That impact has only increased over time, especially since there have been a few improvements and innovations in video marketing that can improve those digits.

Now, we have access to user data, which marketers can use to personalize experiences at scale. Below, Lowe’s leverages user data to customize its video based on:

• Whether the viewer had purchased from Lowe’s in the past.
• Location of the nearest Lowe’s store to viewer.
• On-sale items that were most relevant to the viewer based on their location and past purchases.
• Weather conditions, and weekday vs. weekend timing.

Lowe’s ultimately had more than 180,000 variations on the video, each of which was personalized to the individual viewer.

On the lower-tech end of the spectrum, you can improve conversion rates by simply placing the video you use front and center, above the fold. We also recommend using a text call-to-action, like “click to play.”

2) Show people how to use your product or service.

Pre-Purchase Product Tours

There are a number of ways to show how a product works — even without video. Virtual product tours can serve the same function, but if done incorrectly, they can be clunky, boring, and overwhelming.

Most product tours become available after a product has been purchased, as part of the onboarding process. But pre-purchase product tours can act as powerful conversion enhancers, too. Take Visme’s product tour, for example. It’s cleverly designed for the early stages of the buyer’s journey, the visuals are large and simple, and the copy is concise. Not to mention, benefits are stated front and center, with “here’s how it works” displayed with an arrow below the top image, acting as a CTA to scroll down.

From there, you can see templates for infographics, presentations, and other visual content. With a couple of clicks, you can also see how to use Visme for social and web graphics. But what really makes it work is the “What others are creating” section, which shows the product in action.

3) Use Pinterest to your advantage.

It might not work for everybody, but if your target client is female, listen up — Pinterest is where they are.

SmartMarketer Founder Ezra Firestone knew that, which might be how he managed to generate over $40,000 in ecommerce sales from a $775 Pinterest ad spend.

“At that point, I’d already had my eye on [Pinterest] for quite some time,” he explained. “With warp-speed growth, a user base of 70% women, and an average user household income of over $100,000, Pinterest was shaping up to be an ecommerce marketer’s dream.”

But here’s the thing — you don’t need a visually appealing product to get attention on Pinterest. You just need visually appealing, genuinely useful marketing. Depending on your product and audience, Pinterest could be a game changer for your conversion — about 19% of active users say they make a Pinterest-inspired purchase monthly (or more). But that doesn’t mean that you have to restrict your pins to visuals of products only.

Have a strategic look at the most popular category — in the U.S. and Canada, for example, that’s Food & Drink. So, if your product is, say, a grocery store list app, you have an amazing opportunity here to post something like a link to a recipe on your site. If the recipe has a call-to-action to download your app and add the ingredients to your grocery list — see how that works? — you have your conversion.

Yes, you have to think a little outside of the box with Pinterest, but you will be rewarded.

4) Integrate your social content with the rest of it.

Curate Social Proof with Twitter & Instagram

Few marketing tools are as persuasive as social proof – other consumers talking about your product or service. It’s why almost 40% of Twitter users say they’ve made a purchase because of a tweet from an influencer.

The trick is to curate the tweets about your brand. Save the good ones, and make sure to include the entire body of it — otherwise, it won’t seem authentic. That can be done by clicking on the three dots below a tweet, clicking “copy link to tweet,” and bookmarking that URL. You can retweet them, or if they’re product-specific, embed them on your site next to product photos of the “buy” button.

Why does social proof work? Consumers are more likely to believe the reports of other consumers, like themselves, rather than marketers — hence that fancy statistic above about influencers. Seeing other people report favorably on a product removes fears and doubts, leading to more conversions.

Similarly, adding user-generated Instagram photos to product pages can increase conversions thanks to social proof. Vanity Planet increased conversions by 24% by adding customers’ Instagram pictures to popular product pages, just above the reviews:

Still not sure you should hop on the Instagram bandwagon? Here’s a fun Instagram fact for you: Engagement rates for brands on Instagram are more than 10X higher than those on Facebook. (Want more Instagram inspiration? Check out these accounts.)

5) Not Selling Sweaters or Makeup? This Still Applies to SaaS.

Your product may or may not live in the Cloud, but these rules still apply:

1. Prominently-placed videos sell products. Make them fun and benefits-driven. Show people how your product works with a pre-purchase product tour early in the sales funnel — don’t wait for the demo.
2. Use social media – but do it cleverly. (Check out how some unconventional brands use Twitter here.)
3. Remember: Pinterest leads to your site pages, which can lead to conversions, as per the app download example above.
4. Twitter and Instagram give you social proof, which reduces fears and — you guessed it — can also lead to conversions.
5. Instagram produces much higher user engagement than Facebook, so make sure you’re investing the right amount of resources in each social network. Pew Research Center’s Demographics of Social Media Users might help, and once you know which networks to leverage, you can plan your social media posts with a calendar.
6. All visual content should deliver real value for the user.

Picture This

Fundamentally, people want information, and they want it as fast and fun as possible. One of the most effective ways to give them what they want is through visual marketing. And when you give the people what they want, they’re more likely to give it right back to you, with increased conversions and positive feedback.

How has visual content benefitted your conversion rates? Let us know in the comments.

Everyone loves online videos. People in every age group are shifting their viewing habits to online video and away from television. Unsurprisingly, Americans between the ages of 18 – 24 watch the least amount of television and drive online video consumption rates with their phones.

Using video boosts engagement and conversion rates in pretty much every type of marketing content, from landing pages to emails. We also know that 86% of universities and colleges already have a YouTube presence. So if you’re not using video marketing yet, your competitor schools are, that means you’re falling behind.

Frankly, YouTube is only the jumping-off point. All your video content should make its way to your YouTube channel, but if you’re putting all your video focus solely on YouTube, you’re missing out on opportunities.

Here are some ways you can effectively incorporate video into your admissions marketing.

Video is All Over Social Media

From Facebook’s Live Stream feature to Snapchat’s Story Playlists, you have a ton of social media video options. Start with clarifying which social media platforms are most popular with your different personas. Parents with young kids are on Facebook. Those in or close to college are also big users of Instagram and Snapchat. These, of course, are the generalities, but they’re good to understand when picking where to place your efforts. Your specific target community may show different preferences, so do some research and focus on whatever they are.

Your content options are endless on social media. You can broadcast live, from sporting events to on-campus speakers. Your students are already publishing their own video content about life at your school. Encourage their efforts with a specific user-generated content (UGC) campaign. Say, a quick hello from their favorite class sharing why it is so. Or post their favorite ways to take a break while studying.

Professors are also video content machines. They can broadcast (live or not) full lectures or put together short videos digging into a particular aspect of their field that makes the subject interesting for everyone. 

Put together a short guide to helps staff and faculty create, publish and promote their own content. Include practical how-to tips, as well as content ideas.

The focus of your video content for admissions should be all about helping students see themselves loving life at your school. What their days would be like, the educational and social opportunities. Video content geared towards parents should give them confidence that this school is a place where their child will really flourish.

Webinars Educate and Connect

Webinars are potent tools for presenting a human face for your school to a large group of people at once, while still sparking that personal connection. Use webinars to educate and inform prospects about your school. You can have an admissions counselor hold a live webinar about the application process and best practices. Each program can run webinars with different faculty that talk about their program. Include current students by having Q&A webinars about student life.

Continue to run live webinars on common, popular topics so new people can have a chance to have their live questions answered. But you can also take advantage of your growing library of recorded webinars. Make the best ones available on demand on your website and various social media video channels so people who can’t make a live one can still watch. Create clips of the best soundbites so you can embed them into relevant emails or landing pages. 

Create email nurture campaigns building towards inviting people to a webinar targeted to their persona and stage on the enrollment journey. You don’t need a live webinar coming up. Invite registrants who didn’t attend the live webinar and other prospective students to watch a recorded webinar.

Using Video to Boost Conversions

Just as you don’t send out emails merely so people can read them, videos aren’t only for the watching. They’re conversion tools.

Gate some video content behind a form so you can get people into your prospect database. The form can be a registration to attend a live webinar or to access a recorded one, or to access a live streaming event.

On the back end, insert appropriate calls-to-action (CTAs) within and at the end of your video content. If the video is a Facebook Live Stream of the tailgating before a school football game, make sure your host peppers her narration with CTAs and hashtags to share and like the live stream so more people can join. Embed a CTA to schedule a call with an admissions counselor or schedule a campus tour at the end of program information webinar. 

Identify what phase in the enrollment journey the specific piece of video content is for and where you want to take people next. Build the CTA you include around whatever that next step should be.

Don’t Let the Word “Video” Intimidate You

Video sounds expensive and involved, doesn’t it? It doesn’t have to be. Phone and desktop video recorders do a pretty good job. You can invest (or borrow from another department) in more sophisticated video equipment for your more sophisticated videos. Not all your videos need to be award-worthy.

Treat your video content as you do your other text-based content. Some videos are blog posts, some are glossy graphics, or comprehensive reports. Allocate your resources accordingly. Start building your video library now. Your prospects are eager for it.

Despite changing demographics and consumer behaviors, the holiday season remains one of the more influential times of year to launch a campaign and seal it into holiday memory for years to come.

To do that, though, your brand needs to come up with something seriously innovative, engaging, and interesting — something that’ll resonate with your customers. This usually means lights, emotions, and celebrating family and friends.

Of course, there’s no harm is looking to the past to see which other brands and campaigns have made their way to the holiday retail hall of fame. Here, we look back on 150 years of inspirational ads and campaigns that many consumers say the holidays just wouldn’t be the same without.

What can your brand do this year to stand out?

If you’re a marketer of any kind, this phrase is probably lurking somewhere in the back of your mind when you start a new project:

“How do we make this brand really stand out?”

The constant battle to differentiate a brand in a crowded playing field is challenging, and it’s pushing some marketers to the extreme.

We’ve rounded up 14 creative campaigns and promotions that rely on unconventional mediums to spread brand messaging to consumers. Check them out below for some unique inspiration for your next big campaign.

14 Unusual Brand Promotions

1) Nivea Kids Sunscreen

This marketing stunt from Nivea made for some interesting headlines when it debuted at Cannes in 2016: Seagull drone poops sunscreen…uh, thanks (CNET), Nivea’s Drone Bird Poops Sunscreen on Your Kids (Dronelife), How Bad Was This Nivea Bird Poop Sunscreen Project, Really? (AgencySpy). The list goes on. 

The folks at German agency Jung von Matt/Elbe designed this seagull drone to squirt Nivea Kids Sunscreen onto unsuspecting children on the beach. In the case study video below, they explain how the drone can be used to make sure all kids are protected from the sun, even when they refuse to apply sunscreen themselves. It may seem like a parody at first, but make no mistake: This drone is 100% real.

Say what you will about the taste level of the pooping seagull concept — it definitely generated a lot of attention for Nivea and left an undeniably memorable impression. Cannes Lion jury president Sir John Hegarty told a group of journalists, “It’s the most stupid thing I think I’ve seen in my whole life. I actually thought the Monty Python team had gotten together and entered it into [Cannes], to see if we would vote for it.”

Spoiler alert: They didn’t vote for it. Nivea’s well-intentioned pooping seagull flapped away from Cannes without any awards. 

2) Milka Chocolate

When Swiss chocolate company Milka launched in France, they turned to Paris-based agency Buzzman to devise a unique way to introduce their product to the French people. The chocolatiers ended up removing a small square from 13 million of their classic milk chocolate bars, and giving consumers a choice: Do you want the “last square” sent back to you, or do you want to send it to a loved one?

Consumers who received a Milka bar with a missing square were given a code they could enter online, where they could either send a small piece of chocolate — along with a personalized message — to a friend or family member, or enter their own address to have the missing piece returned to them. 

3) Cub Cadet PRO Z Riding Lawnmower

Who says the physical press release is completely dead? To promote industrial brand Cub Cadet’s newest riding lawnmower, agency Colle+McVoy came up with a steel alternative to the classic 8.5-by-11 inch paper document. 

The press release — which weighed in at a hefty 14 pounds, 13 ounces — was made entirely of Cub Cadet’s signature Triple 7-gauge steel, the same material used in their rugged lawnmowers. Outfitted with bolts and shipped to media outlets in a custom crate, the press release also came with a free crowbar (because why not?). 

Image Credit: Adweek

4) The Art Institute of Chicago and Airbnb

Have you even dreamed of walking into one of your favorite paintings? How about staying the night? In this creative campaign to generate publicity for the Art Institute of Chicago’s Van Gogh exhibit in 2016, agency Leo Burnett partnered with Airbnb to create a unique, immersive experience for art lovers.

The agency worked with designers and museum curators to meticulously transform a simple studio apartment in Chicago into one of the Dutch artist’s most recognizable paintings, Bedroom in Arles. 

As part of the campaign, posters advertising a room to rent and resembling vintage newspaper classified ads were plastered around Chicago, inviting passersby to text “Van Gogh” — aka, Leo Burnett’s clever social media team, who fielded all messages in character. A few lucky early respondents were able to rent the room via Airbnb for only $10 a night.

The campaign was a massive success for the Art Institute, leading to the museum’s largest daily exhibition attendance in 15 years, and earning them national media attention. 

Image Credit: AdAge

5) Tiger Beer’s Air-Ink

Tiger Beer — an American-owned company that operates out of Singapore — wanted to find a way to turn air pollution into something useful and positive. Enter the talented team at Graviky Labs, who devised a scientific process to capture pollution and transform it into Air-Ink — a fluid black paint. The brand then worked with Australian agency Marcel Sydney to put the ink in the hands of influential street artists and film the results. 

It turns out just 40-50 minutes of diesel car pollution can produce a rich shade of black ink, and artists were more than willing to incorporate the paint into their work for the project. 

6) Adobe Stock Apparel

If you’re a marketer, you’ve experienced the pain of sorting through seemingly endless pages of bad stock photos in search of one that just isn’t too awful. To promote their new stock photo service Adobe Stock, Adobe partnered with Swedish agency Abby Priest to develop a tongue-in-cheek fashion line that features outdated, overused stock photos.

“Some stock images have earned their place in the history books,” said Abby Priest’s Creative Director, Oskar Hellqvist, in a Q&A on Adobe’s blog. “Classic motifs that have been overused and established as hilarious clichés, known, loved and/or hated by all … Turning them into a limited edition clothing line is our way to salute them and an attempt to create something disruptive and unconventional in the genre.“

You can see the full Adobe Stock Apparel lookbook here.

Image Credit: Adobe

7) UberPOOL

As part of a major advertising push in Latin America, Uber’s in-house marketing team launched a guerrilla campaign in Mexico City, sending out a small army of drones equipped with cheeky signs promoting UberPOOL. Drivers were confronted with the small aircrafts and their mini-billboards while waiting in stagnant rush hour traffic. 

Although they don’t plan to replicate the stunt in other markets (since doing something similar in the U.S. or Europe would require some major bureaucratic hoop-jumping), the stunt gained significant earned media attention for the car service app. 

Image Credit: MIT Technology Review

8) KMFA-FM Austin

How do you get millennials interested in a classical radio station? This Twitter-powered metronome is a good start. Developed by agency Archer Malmo for Austin’s classical music station KMFA-FM, this metronome ticks at a tempo determined by the number of Tweets sent in the Texan city.

“We want people to give KMFA a try — it’s not a stereotypical, stodgy classical music station,” Archer Malmo executive creative director Matt Rand told AdWeek. “That audience happens to be younger and use Twitter more, so basing our ‘heartbeat of the city’ off Twitter volume is a fitting way to connect with them.”

Image Credit: Adweek

9) Laphroaig

Most ads run for 30 seconds. This spot from Laphroaig Whiskey clocks in at three and a half hours — and it was all filmed in a single take.

U.K. agency Multiply was behind the video, which features comedian Andy Daly reading real reviews of Laphroaig in a filibuster-style speech. Ranging from glowing to downright disgusted, the strongly worded and ultimately mixed reviews are intended to highlight the polarizing nature of Laphroaig — you either love it, or you hate it. But the brand wants to hear about it.

10) Lipton Green Tea

To encourage consumers to make healthier choices while shopping for groceries, Lipton Green Tea partnered with agency Wunderman MENA to create a shopping cart that tracks your steps, calories burned, and time spent moving at the grocery store.

Aimed at people too busy for regular exercise, the cart is intended to show consumers how many calories they can burn just by walking around at the grocery store. The hope is that they’ll also think twice about what they put in their shopping cart if they can see the calories they’re burning in real time.

11) Burger King

Burger King and McDonald’s have always had a rivalry, and on Halloween 2016, the home of the Whopper played a prank on the Golden Arches.

A Burger King location in Queens, NY dressed up the entire restaurant as “The Ghost of McDonald’s”, sweeping a massive white ghost costume over the building and adding a saucy message to their sign: “”Booooooo! Just kidding, we still flame grill our burgers. Happy Halloween.”

Although only one location participated in the spooky prank, Adweek revealed that it was a stunt pulled off by ad agency David Miami.

Image Credit: Burger King

12) Paqui

To drum up some buzz for their gourmet tortilla chip brand, Paqui released a fiery chip spiced with Carolina Reaper peppers — the world’s hottest variety according to Guinness World Records. The Carolina Reaper Madness chips are so dangerously spicy, they’re packaged individually and sold for $4.99 each.

So why would you ever want to eat this thing? It’s part of a challenge, naturally. Following in the footsteps of other viral internet food-based challenges — like the cinnamon challenge, which never, ever ended badly for anyone — Paqui’s marketing team launched the #OneChipChallenge.

The premise is simple: eat the the Carolina Reaper Madness chip, post your reaction online. The brand offered prizes to select participants, including a year’s supply of their less-spicy chips.

Image Credit: Forbes

13) South Park Video Game

Add this one to the list of things no one ever asked for, but somebody made anyway: A virtual reality mask that lets you smell farts.

To promote the South Park video game, Ubisoft worked with agency Buzzman to concoct an odor that perfectly mimicked the smell of someone passing gas. It was actually a lot harder than you’d think. Buzzman consulted multiple chemists and perfumers to get the smell right, and worked with a team of software engineers and industrial designers to develop the VR nose mask. They named it — what else? — Nosulus Rift.

The mask (thankfully) isn’t for sale, but Ubisoft uses it at promotional events to build hype for the South Park game, which features a particularly flatulent character.

Image Credit: Buzzman via AdAge

14) Virgin America

Have you ever looked at your shoes and thought, “Man, I really wish they had a phone charger and WiFi capabilities?” Virgin America has heard your very first world cries, and developed these almost comically tricked-out shoes to promote their first class flying experience.

California-based agency Eleven, Inc. designed these extravagant kicks over the course of eight months to mimic the look and feel of Virgin America’s first class cabins. The final product includes mood lighting, WiFi, a USB phone charger, and a small video screen — you know, in case you feel compelled to watch some Netflix on your shoes.

The sneakers sold for $97,877.77 on eBay, and all proceeds were donated to Soles 4 Souls, a charity.

Image Credit: Adweek

Feature image from Air-Ink