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KIMP’s Picks 17th May: Weekly Highlights In Design, Marketing, AI, & More

Feeling lost in the social media vortex? We’ve all been there. Welcome back to another edition of KIMP’s Picks, your one-stop shop for all things social media. This week we bring to you the hottest social media trends, insightful discussions, and game-changing updates that took the social media world by storm.

Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or a curious social media enthusiast, we’ve got something for everyone. Let’s explore the week’s biggest social media happenings, shall we?

In the Marketing Realm 

Some quick Google I/O updates 

Google I/O 2404 has been one of the most trending topics on social media recently. Google recently shared a short video that gives a peek into some of the biggest updates announced this year. From AI ventures that Google is undertaking to product updates coming to the Google ecosystem and so much more! 

We’ll be looking at a few of these updates a little later in this blog. For a more detailed venture into the Google I/O updates from this year, check out Google’s blog on 100 things they announced. 

Google adds a “Web” filter for text content 

Google has been refining their search experience consistently over the past few months. Especially with their AI-driven features. And now there was one more feature announced and that is the “Web” filter on the search page. This is for those times when you are looking for informative long-form content. 

The main search page displays a variety of search results including images, videos and articles. But if you wish to cut the clutter and go only for text-based results, then the “Web” filter comes in handy. 

Another refinement coming to search is that Google will now have multi-step reasoning capabilities to help simplify your research process. Here’s a post they shared announcing this. 

Leveraging LinkedIn for market research 

Social Media Examiner is a great source of information for social media and marketing updates. They shared the below insightful post discussing the ways in which B2B marketers can use LinkedIn for market research. 

The post delves into strategies like tapping into LinkedIn analytics for audience insights, and for content analytics to understand what types of content work best. From competitor analysis to mentions, the post also covers a variety of other ways in which you can make the most of your LinkedIn company page for market research. 

McDonald’s Ride the Arches campaign 

This next post we have is a campaign inspiration if you are looking for creative ideas to engage your audience across diverse channels. 

McDonald’s Philippines is revving up the cycling community with “Ride the Arches,” a clever initiative transforming their restaurants into cyclist-friendly pit stops. This program caters to the booming cycling scene in the Philippines, where there are now more bikes than cars!

Ads of The World, one of the best places to find the most creative ads from brands around the world, shared the below post featuring this campaign from McDonald’s. 

The featured campaign combines diverse marketing channels, and leverages influencer marketing, experiential marketing, and a host of other strategies to create something truly memorable and impactful. This shows that understanding your target market and your customers can help create magic and earn media coverage as well! 

Samsung responds to Apple’s ad 

You’re probably aware of Apple’s recent ad that received a backlash eventually leading to the brand apologizing for it. The idea was to demonstrate compressing creativity into an iPad but the portrayal was not received well. And this has been the talk of the town! 

Samsung has a long history of campaigns that prove that the brand is pro when it comes to competitive marketing, especially with their ads that take a direct dig at Apple. They tapped into the current situation as well, with their new campaign which is a direct response to Apple’s ad. 

With visuals reminding you of the Apple ad, the brand concludes the video with a message that “Creativity cannot be crushed” – a brilliant example of moment marketing, don’t you agree? 

In the Content Marketing Realm 

A list of content marketing tools to explore 

Semrush, a renowned name in the world of SEO shared the below post on their X page. The post gives a quick glimpse of some of the most productive content marketing tools for marketers to explore. 

From coming up with the most effective content marketing strategy for your business to identifying topics and writing the content, the post delves into tools for various applications. These are tools that are meant to simplify the process and save time for content marketers while also allowing them to elevate their content marketing performance. 

So, if you are struggling to consistently create quality content to boost reach and engage your audience, check out the tools listed here. 

In the Design Realm 

Design inspiration from The Ordinary 

One of the most popular online magazines for design inspiration, Ad Age, featured a recent OOH campaign (out-of-home) from the popular skincare brand, The Ordinary. 

What makes this campaign stand out is that the brand chose to ditch flashy visuals and celebrity endorsements which happen to be some of the most common things you see in beauty ads. Instead, they chose a minimalist approach that utilizes out-of-home placements featuring bold text emphasizing the brand’s core values – science-backed formulas and transparency – at affordable prices. 

The campaign aims to disrupt the beauty industry’s reliance on celebrity endorsements and highlight The Ordinary’s commitment to effective ingredients and clear communication. And it is also a great source of design inspiration for creatives because the idea here is to take cues from the core identity of the brand and the brand’s personality. These measures work perfectly in favor of the brand. 

Another OOH campaign design inspiration 

This next post we have is from The Inspiration, an online reserve of design, art, and photography inspiration. This post also features an OOH campaign. And this one is from the renowned Mexican beer brand, Corona. 

The idea here stands out particularly because of its creativity. For this campaign, the brand placed their logo on a set of stock photos and yet won the hearts of their audiences. The creative manipulation of the images and the fresh perspective in this campaign make it unique! 

This is clear proof that you do not need a massive budget to make waves. All it takes is a professional design team and the magic of creativity. 

Adobe After Effects tutorial 

Do you use Adobe After Effects in your motion graphics workflow? Then the below post from Adobe is for you. Adobe shared a video that gives a sneak peek into some of the things you can do with the tool. This one in particular takes a simple video created with Adobe After Effects. 

The video shows the steps it takes to create something extraordinary from simple raw footage. So, if you are looking to push the boundaries and get more creative with your motion graphics projects, this can be a quick dose of inspiration. 

Font idea from Google Fonts 

Variable fonts can add value to your brand designs by allowing you to make adjustments on the fly and to create a more dynamic personality. Google recently featured a variable font, Danfo. 

What makes this font unique is the distinct shape of the letters. Additionally, the font also features an “Element Shape” axis. Mimicking vinyl cutouts, the variations feature peppy cutout-style letters. So if you are looking for some fresh fonts to make a statement, this is a great one to add to your list. 

Canva adds interactivity to charts 

Canva makes it easy to include Charts and other data visualization elements in your design. But to make things even more exciting, they have also added more interactivity features in Charts. 

In a recent post highlighting what’s new on Canva, they spoke about the interactive charts you can add to your Canva designs. These can be in the form of treemaps, packed circles and a variety of other formats. 

Firebase has a new logo 

Google’s app development platform for mobile and web apps, Firebase, has a new logo. Again, going back to Google I/O 2024, there were some exciting new announcements made about upcoming features on Firebase. 

Clearly, the platform is evolving and becoming more dynamic. To keep up with these changes, the brand is also evolving. The new logo is fresher and more fluid. But it retains the signature color palette to preserve brand recognition. However, the colors are now more vibrant and the shape is more organic. 

Overall, the refreshed brand identity of Firebase gives some quick tips on design strategies for rebranding. 

In the AI Realm 

Google announces Med-Gemini 

A few days ago, there was news about Google’s research in generative AI for the medical field. And recently, Google made the official announcement introducing Med-Gemini. 

Med-Gemini reportedly builds on the capabilities of Gemini but focuses on the requirements in the medical field. With multi-modal capabilities, this model is designed to tackle large volumes of data like lengthy medical records. According to Google, Med-Gemini surpassed state-of-the-art performance on 10 out of 14 medical benchmarks. 

The model is also built to understand 3D medical scans which can be a crucial leap for diagnostics. Overall, this looks like a big leap in the field of AI-powered healthcare. 

Google announces a new generative video tool, Veo 

Among the AI-related updates from Google I/O 2024, one of the biggest ones has been Veo, Google’s new generative video tool. Given that there has been a lot of buzz about Sora, OpenAI’s generative video tool that is still in its research stage, Veo could possibly spice things up in the AI realm. 

Touted to be a big contender for Sora, Veo is built to create high-definition videos from simple text descriptions. Currently, this model is available for access through VideoFX. Also, Veo is built to handle 1080p resolution videos longer than 1 minute. But yes, there are limited features currently available in this model and Google lets you join the waitlist to give these features a shot. 

Google has also announced that some of Veo’s features will also be introduced into other Google tools like YouTube Shorts. 

Meta’s next big venture could be “camerabuds” 

When Google has been busy making all these announcements, Meta hasn’t been silent either. Yahoo Finance shared the below post about a possible project that Meta is working on. 

The project involves AI-assisted earbuds that also come with cameras. Their Rayban smart glasses are already making waves in the AI-powered hardware segment. And now these AI earbuds could be huge! 

Reportedly, these earbuds will be able to identify objects and even translate languages. 

Anthropic revolutionizes prompt engineering 

There are plenty of AI tools out there. But the results in these are only as good as the prompts you use. Naturally, prompt engineering has become a major topic. If that’s you and if you struggle to come up with the perfect prompt to get things done with a generative AI tool, then the update from Anthropic AI is sure to intrigue you. 

Popular AI company Anthropic has announced some updates coming to their popular AI model Claude. These updates are likely to revolutionize your creative workflow. Because with these updates you can now leverage the power of Claude, to generate production-ready prompts tailored to your specific needs. Better prompts mean better results! 

OpenAI’s GPT-4o is a big leap in the generative AI landscape 

OpenAI has unveiled their newest flagship model, GPT-4o (“o” for “omni). In a gist, this model is about understanding audio, video, text, and image prompts in real-time. The aim is to create more natural human-computer interactions through this multi-modal model. 

They also shared a set of demos and based on these, the update does look promising. 

One of the most notable traits of GPT-4o is that it’s designed to promptly process information and respond to audio prompts in as little as 232 milliseconds which is a drastic leap from the previous models. Moreover, OpenAI has also designed this model with capabilities to effortlessly understand and respond to prompts in various languages. 

According to OpenAI, there are also other powerful upgrades like understanding of the tone and emotions in conversations to retain the tone of responses and to provide more contextually relevant answers. Indeed, GPT-4o appears to be a big step for OpenAI and a major benchmark for other AI platforms to keep up with. 

Google’s universal AI agent – Project Astra 

Yet another AI update that Google announced at I/O 2024 is Project Astra. This is about a universal AI assistant with muti-modal capabilities. And the assistant is particularly designed to tackle everyday applications on personal devices. For this, the team shared demos captured on a Google Pixel phone. 

From the demos shared, we see the AI assistant explaining things from a drawing, recognizing pictures and drawings of landmarks, and memorizing object sequences among other things. 

Yes, that sounds a lot like what Meta’s camerabuds will reportedly be able to do. But the difference here is that you do not need additional hardware. The features are more likely to be available on smartphones. There are no official timeliness announced so far but the demos are intriguing indeed. 

Google’s Imagen 3 is here 

Google’s Imagen models are undeniably some of the most competent options in the generative design segment. And at the Google I/O 2024 event, they announced Imagen 3 which is reportedly their most powerful yet! 

The model is designed to deliver life-like photorealistic images with exceptional details sans blurry distracting elements. Moreover, the model is also built to understand more natural-sounding prompts better to give results that are closer to the prompt. 

One other major leap is that Imagen 3 will now be able to more accurately create designs in defined visual styles. However, one of the biggest updates is that this model will be able to achieve clear and accurate text rendering within designs which is currently one of the biggest challenges for generative design tools. 

Expedia is exploring AI-powered features 

Popular travel company Expedia is bringing some AI-powered tools to enhance user experience. TechCrunch, the popular online magazine sharing technology news shared the below post about Expedia’s move. 

Reportedly, these new features are meant to simplify search within the platform. Therefore users will soon be able to see more optimized results based on data obtained from other resources like AccuWeather and Yelp. On the whole, the advancements aim at improving the travel planning process for users. 

Ventures like these show that there is absolutely no limit when it comes to the capabilities of AI and that it all depends on how a brand chooses to apply this technology to their processes. 

Social Media Feature Updates and Algorithm Changes

WhatsApp gets a fresh new look 

There were some fresh new changes introduced in the WhatsApp app recently. Have you noticed them? Starting from the basic interface to the icons and illustrations within the app, the updates are to make the app easier and more fun to use. 

One of the biggest changes is the color palette used within the app. Green has replaced blue in several places and the tones are now deeper and the dark mode is now darker! 

Instagram might let you add notes to posts  

Leading social media news site, Social Media Today shared the below post about some minor changes that Instagram is working on. According to this post, you might soon be able to see the option to add notes to Feed posts and Reels as well. 

The Notes feature was initially introduced within the chat interface and then on the main profile as well. Now based on this post, you will also be able to add notes to your regular posts, especially for those meant for friends. And your friends can then reply to these directly. Like the Notes feature in the other places, this one is also meant to be ephemeral and will disappear in 3 days. 

YouTube is introducing new ways for creators to collaborate with brands 

Brandcast 2024 has been a big event for YouTube Creators from around the world. There were several new YouTube-related updates announced in the event. And one of them has been the new YouTube Select Creator Takeover option. 

Creator takeovers are not a new concept in marketing. In fact, brands leveraging Snapchat actively might already be well aware of this feature. And now YouTube will also allow this interaction making brand-creator collaborations much more wholesome and customizable. 

TikTok might soon have a smart search feature 

Popular technology news website The Verge shared the below post discussing some changes coming to TikTok. If you have been following the KIMP’s Picks series you might remember that in the past few months, there have been several updates from TikTok indicating how the platform is trying to bridge the gap between search engine and social media. 

Another news in this scenario is that TikTok is reportedly testing a smart search feature which is reportedly AI-powered delivering ChatGPT results directly within the platform. This shows that TikTok is consistently working to improve the in-app search experience. 

To Conclude…

That’s all the social media updates for this week. We hope that this recap gave you that much-needed end-of-the-week inspiration!  We’ll be back next week to dive into the latest breakthroughs in the worlds of marketing, AI, and social media. Stay tuned! 

Posted On

17 May, 2024

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