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KIMP’s Picks 5th July: Weekly Highlights In Design, Marketing, AI, & More

Is the social media landscape overwhelming you? But there’s no escaping the big tech trends and the AI updates that people are discussing on social media. So, what do you do? Keep an eye out for the weekly edition of KIMP’s Picks.

KIMP’s Picks is our weekly social media roundup. We have handpicked posts that summarize marketing strategies from the pros, advancements in AI, and design inspiration. Buckle up and get ready for a quick social media recap!

In the Marketing Realm 

Google unveils new tools for Display & Video 360

Search Engine Land, a popular source of search and SEO-related news and updates shared the below post. The post discusses some fresh updates coming to Display & Video 360. 

Display & Video 360 and Campaign Manager 360 are both getting better reporting features. Additionally, User ID redactions are being implemented for users in specific states, reflecting Google’s commitment to data privacy compliance. 

YouTube Instant Reserve campaigns are also getting better with first-position targeting.  This allows advertisers to get premium ad placements. That’s one way to increase brand awareness and engagement, particularly for in-stream and Shorts video formats.

These updates are particularly to help streamline workflows, address evolving privacy regulations, and also enhance YouTube advertising capabilities. So, if you are an advertiser actively using YouTube look out for these updates before you schedule your next campaign. 

Brand partnership campaign inspiration 

Ads of the World, a popular ad library that discusses creative campaigns from brands around the world, shared a post featuring a recent campaign from KFC. 

Ruffles and KFC Canada are back with a fiery collaboration – the all-new Ruffles Double Crunch KFC Zinger flavored potato chips. But what stands out is the campaign the brands have created to celebrate this partnership. 

The brands have created a limited edition Plunge Bucket—a cold plunge tub shaped like a KFC bucket, complete with a chip holder. The Plunge Bucket campaign includes a giveaway on Ruffles Canada’s TikTok and Instagram. This comes as a nod to the cold plunge trend, offering a humorous way to cool down after enjoying the fiery chips.

While brand partnerships are great, creative merchandise and out-of-the-box campaign ideas like this one are required to create buzz around these partnerships. 

Some trendjacking inspiration 

Marketers are always on the lookout for all things trending. Because jumping on the relevant trends means joining a conversation with your target audience. A recent example of trendjacking is a campaign from Heinz. Ads of Brands, a popular online reserve of creative campaigns shared a post discussing this recent Heinz campaign. 

With this campaign. Heinz is taking a lighthearted approach to marketing and the campaign is titled “The Everyday Heroes.”  Created by BETC Paris, the ad series celebrates the unsung heroes of ketchup application – like the bottle-opening experts. Given the buzz around the Olympic games and “medals,” the brand has tapped into the idea creatively. 

Creating mobile-friendly emails 

Social Media Examiner, a leading authority in digital marketing and social media news shared the below post discussing some useful tips to create mobile-friendly marketing emails. 

Given that a majority of users open their emails on their smartphones, it’s essential to create a mobile-friendly marketing email design. And this post delves into the “how”. 

From keeping your emails simple to adopting single-column layouts, keeping the text minimal, and previewing the emails on different screens, the post explores various useful strategies. 

Using Google AI to improve ROAS

Google shared a post discussing some useful strategies to improve ad performance. The post particularly delves into the benefits of using Google AI to improve ROAS. to reiterate the effectiveness of the AI capabilities available for advertisers, Google also gives Porsche’s success as an example. 

The brand was able to see a 19% increase in their ROAS all thanks to adjusting their bidding values with “assigned conversion values”. 

The post gives an overview of the Smart Bidding feature that helps advertisers understand their campaign performance better and so as to tweak their ads to achieve their marketing goals. 

In the Content Marketing Realm 

Some content insights from YouTube Culture & Trends Report 2024

YouTube shared the YouTube Culture & Trends Report 2024 recently. This report gives some insights into the use of YouTube content. The data shared in the report discusses how YouTube users consume content on the platform giving brands and marketers a way to understand how to make the most of this platform. 

According to the report, about 74% of Gen Z users seem to enjoy when brands create content around things that they are fans of. Popular movies, sports events, sports teams, fictional characters – fandom in all forms seems to engage viewers effectively. Therefore, understanding what your target audience likes and marketing around these interests can make a big difference.  

Digital marketing trends for marketers 

Popular online marketing tool Semrush shared a post discussing some vital digital marketing trends for marketers. The observations about video content are highlighted in particular. According to Semrush, short-form videos happen to be the best performers as of now. 

According to the graph they shared, product videos and company videos, customer success story videos, and product overview videos come next on the list. This gives a brief overview of the types of videos to focus on when drafting your content plan. 

Getting your website images to load faster

This next post we have for you is also an insightful one to help enhance your SEO by improving your website loading times by optimizing the image loading times. The video that Google featured on the post gives four useful strategies for marketers to use in order to shorten the loading times of images on their website. 

These include tips for choosing the right image formats for web, compressing the images choosing a responsive sizing, and finally about lazy loading. Therefore, if you are looking to optimize the images on your website to improve its loading times, then this is a great post.  

In the Design Realm 

Scheduling TikTok posts from Adobe Express 

Recently, Adobe and TikTok joined hands in bringing a lot of new features that simplify TikTok content creation in Adobe Express. But it does not just end there. Have you tried scheduling your TikTok posts directly from Adobe Express? The below post tells you why and how to do that. 

The post featured here talks about Adobe Express Content Scheduler which comes in handy for planning your content on TikTok. It lets you schedule and preview your TikTok videos directly without leaving the platform. This feature is available on both the desktop and mobile versions of the tool. This complements the vast TikTok template library on Adobe Express that helps simplify the process of creating content for TikTok. 

Infusing personality into your brand identity 

Not all branding designs that are visually appealing help your brand stand out. You need to have something unique – something that reflects your brand personality. And the below project featured on the X page of It’s Nice That, a popular source of design inspiration, exemplifies this. 

The post uncovers the brand identity of a frozen meal delivery service, The Dinner Ladies. The brand itself has been known for its campaigns that break the mold and sway away from the seemingly “mumsy” campaigns often used in the meal delivery context. Their brand identity also follows the same path and draws inspiration from old-school tattoos. Reportedly, the idea was to represent the “messiness of real-life situations” that parents face during dinnertime. And the raw and unique identity achieves that effortlessly. 

Packaging design that attracts interaction 

Creative agency Korak has reimagined the packaging design for Kopex’s Ajvar range of condiments. And the popular branding and marketing design inspiration space The Brand Identity shared a post discussing this project. 

The design team understood that the previously used packaging design was ordinary and uninspiring. They set out to create something unique and exciting and the results are pretty good. The core element of the new design is the tall font used which creates an eye-grabbing design. But what makes it stand out is that customers will have to pick the jar and rotate it to read the label. This encourages interaction instantly and thus makes a better connection with the audience. Similar strategies in creating innovative packaging design helps improve product visibility and sales.

Adobe aims to tackle content chaos with Content Hub

Considering the increase in content volume driven by generative AI, Adobe’s Experience Manager Assets has introduced Content Hub, a cloud-native digital asset management (DAM) solution. 

Content Hub is designed to facilitate seamless collaboration and governance across teams, partners, and agencies. This creates an intuitive portal for easy access to all brand-approved content. With this, it’s easier to ensure compliance and brand consistency.

In addition to all these perks, this update is also meant to aid non-creative users in creating content variations and therefore reduce their reliance on creative teams for small tasks. 

In the AI Realm 

Meta 3D Gen is all set to simplify 3D asset generation 

Recently, Meta announced Meta 3D Gen, a cutting-edge AI system designed for the rapid generation of high-quality 3D assets from textual descriptions in under a minute. This model reportedly combines the powers of Meta 3D AssetGen and Meta 3D TextureGen. With this combination, you can achieve high-resolution textures for your 3D assets along with material maps with exceptional prompt fidelity. 

Given the time and effort required in creating 3D assets via traditional methods, advancements like this one can be a boon to marketers and business owners looking to leverage 3D assets in various places. 

Apple creates a buzz with its public demo of a new AI model

Apple’s 4M (Massively Multimodal Masked Modeling) model announcement comes as a surprise considering that Apple has been pretty slow in the generative AI space and also has a history of staying silent with respect to their R&D. 

As of now, their 4M demo on Hugging Face Spaces allows users to experiment with the model’s functionalities. These include image generation, object detection, and 3D scene manipulation all through text prompts. One of the most notable elements here is that to make AI applications more versatile, this 4M model allows various data formats (text, images, 3D data) simultaneously. Here’s a VentureBeat post that discusses this new move from Apple. 

Google’s Gemma 2 is here 

Google’s Gemma 2 joins their line of open-source large language models. The model is built to be a high performer that also improves efficiency for developers and researchers. 

According to Google Gemma 2 is able to outperform models more than twice its size. What makes it even better is that this model available in 27 billion parameters can run efficiently on readily available hardware like NVIDIA GPUs and TPUs. Therefore, it helps reduce deployment costs.

Google enhances Gemini AI capabilities with a 2 million token context window 

Google announced that their popular AI model Gemini 1.5 Pro now supports a 2 million token context window, the largest ever. This is meant to enable more extensive and detailed prompts. And to complement this, they have also added context caching. Together they help reduce costs for tasks using repeated tokens. All of these are now available in the Gemini API. 

Moreover, Gemini 1.5 Pro and Flash models can now dynamically generate and execute Python code. 

ElevenLabs announces Voice Isolator 

There is a breakthrough AI tool in town, one that is designed to remove unwanted background noise and extract clear dialogue from any audio recording: Voice Isolator from ElevenLabs. 

The tool can easily eliminate street noise, microphone feedback, and other distractions in the audio file in order to enhance audio clarity. The idea is to isolate and clean up vocals, making them crisp and prominent in the final audio output. Therefore, this can make a big difference to content creators looking to clean up their audio of their video content or even podcasters looking to enhance their audio clarity. 

Currently, Voice Isolator supports files up to 500MB and 1 hour in length and is priced at 1000 characters per minute of audio. 

OpenAI is going to use GPT-4 to help monitor GPT-4 models for mistakes 

Generative AI models still make mistakes. And OpenAI announced that they will be using their new GPT-4 powered model CriticGPT to look for mistakes made by GPt-4 models like ChatGPT. 

This innovative approach tackles a growing challenge in AI development – effectively evaluating complex AI outputs. Unlike ChatGPT, CriticGPT is trained on a massive dataset of code that contains deliberately inserted mistakes. Therefore, the tool is able to identify patterns and inconsistencies, highlighting potential errors in ChatGPT’s code.

Character.ai makes real-time conversations with AI characters possible 

Character.ai is revolutionizing how you interact with AI with the launch of Character Calls! This exciting new feature allows you to have natural, two-way voice conversations with AI characters, just like a phone call with a friend.

The idea is to create immersive AI experiences for users. As an added benefit, you can also personalize your conversations by changing the voice and language of the characters. 

Social Media Feature Updates and Algorithm Changes

Meta is changing the labels for AI content 

As a part of responsible AI practices adopted by most social media platforms, Meta announced that content made with AI will carry a “Made with AI” label. However, recently, Meta was in hot water for inaccurately labeling even actual photographs as “Made with AI” content. 

However, the intention was to communicate that there were possibly AI tools used in the creation or processing of the photo posted. To effectively communicate this without ambiguity, they have chosen to swap the “Made with AI” label with the “AI Info” label. This will label content created entirely with AI and images where some of the post-processing happened on an AI tool. 

Threads is celebrating its first-year anniversary 

Yes, it’s been one year since the launch of Threads, a platform that was touted to be an X-rival. But since then, it has evolved and come a long way with Meta making refinements and introducing new features consistently. Moreover, according to Meta, Threads also has 175 million monthly active users as of now. 

Given the fact that TikTok’s Instagram rival Whee did not garner the expected response, we can safely say that Threads performed quite well. 

YouTube’s new policy to tackle deepfakes 

According to an article shared by TechCrunch, Google has reportedly added a new policy silently to tackle deepfakes. This policy allows users to flag AI-generated content that bears semblance to them. 

Therefore, if you come across any video on YouTube that seems to use content that looks or even sounds like you, you can report the video for YouTube to take down the content. Once this report is raised, YouTube will inform the respective violator for them to take down the content failing which the company will review it. 

New features for Snapchat Plus users 

The Verge shared a post discussing some new features coming to Snapchat, particularly for Plus users. With this new feature, you will be able to design a virtual house and place it on the Snap Map. 

The idea is to allow users to create a fancy representation of their location on the map. Therefore, when you share your location, the virtual house you created will appear in place of the default map markers. This is in addition to other addons like the option to add your pets to your Bitmoji. 

TikTok’s Genie 

According to the popular social media news site Social Media Today, TikTok is working on a chatbot called Genie. This AI chatbot will likely improve the platform experience for users. It’s meant to act like a virtual assistant that helps users by answering their questions and engaging in natural-sounding conversations. If you have used Meta AI assistant then you might know what an AI chatbot can do within a social media platform. 

Based on the current progress Genie can tackle most simple questions and the team is working on improving it so that it can tackle complex queries. 

You can now create YouTube handles in 75 languages 

The content creation sector is booming and there are creators around the world from different demographics and different native languages using the platform to reach a global audience. To make it easier for everyone including non-English speakers to create a YouTube channel and effectively utilize it, YouTube has announced the option to create handles in 75 languages including English. 

In general, YouTube handles are visible in comments, mentions, and Shorts, and can also be used outside of YouTube for promotion. Therefore these unique identifiers of your channel can now be in your own language as long as it falls within the list of the 75 languages now supported.

A Final World 

With that, we bring the KIMP’s Picks 5th July Edition to a close. We hope this assortment of posts gave you a snapshot of the week that was. So, if you think that with so much happening on social media being in the loop is challenging, all you have to do is come back for the next edition of KIMP’s Picks. Because every week we bring to you all the major updates so that you do not miss anything important that’s buzzing in the world of social media. 

Posted On

05 Jul, 2024

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