Advertising

Currently, there are five ad formats currently supported on Facebook: Photo, Video, Carousel, Slideshow, and Collection. Today we will determine which Ad Format is the default best of the bunch and what the strengths and weaknesses are of each.

Photo

Facebook loves its photos. Have you noticed how your Timeline has become more picture based over time? Facebook took cues from Instagram (which it owns) and evolved its Timeline to be more eye-catching. روليت Photo ads are fantastic at drawing consumers in with their fantastic visual display. Photo ads are also great at helping you raise awareness and take only a few minutes to set up and run. For the ad professional that wants to grow leads quickly and build off of impressions, the Photo format might work best for you.

Video

If a picture tells a thousand words, then perhaps a video is worth one million. Video ads on Facebook are designed to pull in the audience. People love video on Facebook as it is just second to YouTube for most watched content at over 100 million hours. Video ads help you grow awareness of a product, promote something awesome, and push sales. With Video ads, you can tell a more well-rounded story for your product than in a Photo ad. These are for the marketers with a story to tell and the passion to tell that story in the best way possible.

Carousel

If what you seek is high performance, Carousel ads boast the best stats. With the ability to showcase 10 images or videos at a time, Carousel ads have become a fan favorite and rank highly in conversions. Use carousel ads to tell a story in a shorter format than a single video or display more than a single product at a time. Carousel ads are interactive and scrollable which means they will leave the audience wanting more when that scrolling stops. Carousel ads are great for advertisers who want to really give the audience a great view of what they are selling.

Slideshow

Slideshow ads are quite a lightweight and cost-effective option open to advertisers. Tell a story using images that play one-after-the-other along with motion effects and sound. Video ads can be expensive to produce, slideshows are much less expensive and have a similar effect. They do not buffer like Video ads so they are playable at any connection speed anywhere. For the cost-savvy business-person, we recommend Slideshow ads.

Collection

Collection ads are probably the most interesting of the Facebook ad formats currently available. Collection ads are fantastic because they are undeniably effective, and great at telling a brand’s story. These immersive ads give the user a full-screen interactive experience that doesn’t require leaving Facebook. الرهان في سباق الخيل These ads are best used to drive awareness and bring in new customers that are curious about a product. العاب مقابل المال These are sales generating machines that when made with Canvas, allow the user to be fully enveloped in your ad.

Verdict: Facebook offers a variety of great advertising options and depending on the business you want to promote and your budget constraints, you can offer your audience some fantastic storytelling ads and in the end, that’s what you really want to do. With great storytelling, clicks and purchases will surely follow. 

Helpful Links:

https://www.facebook.com/business/products/ads

Peak Seven representatives worked for more than one year on intensive planning, licensing negotiations and creative development with Disney and Lennar officials on a large-scale collaborative effort to promote Lennar’s move-in ready homes in Southeast Florida. 

Disney’s goal was to raise awareness of its Florida resident annual pass program and the company’s four Orlando-area parks: Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, Disney Hollywood Studios and Animal Kingdom.

The creative meetings took place in the prop rooms at Hollywood Studios.

“It really is an enchanted place where we were able to craft amazing ideas with our Lennar client and Disney partners,” said Peak Seven CEO Darren Seys who brought together the iconic entertainment and homebuilding brands.

Peak Seven created print, radio, television and digital campaigns along with supporting marketing materials featuring new and classic Disney characters and imagery.  The integrated campaign allowed customers to engage with both brands on many different levels. Visitors to Lennar’s Welcome Home Centers received a 12-inch Olaf doll from Disney’s “FROZEN” blockbuster movie just for visiting. Those who bought a Lennar move-in ready home received two annual passes redeemable at any one of Disney’s four Florida parks.

And did the campaign have a fairy-tale ending?

“We couldn’t be happier with the results,” said Heath Rosenbaum, Content Relations Manager for Disney Destinations.  Lennar’s Welcome Home Centers were buzzing with traffic and homebuyers were excited to receive the annual passes at closing. Based in Miami, Lennar is one of the nation’s largest builders of quality homes.

“Working with our client and a company as iconic as Disney has been an incredible and exciting experience,” Seys said.  “It’s like being a kid and going to, well, Disney.”

Wanna see the creative?  Check it out here

In our first installment, you got a peek of sleep’s benefits to boost creativity. Check out how sleep can help you with your next successful campaign and creative!

Log Happy Hours: Sleep makes us happier people

Although not a direct creativity booster, a boost in happiness levels generally makes people more creative in that it motivates creative self-expression. And as it turns out, you needn’t look further from your pillow to find the silver bullet, or happy pill, of happiness. The effect of sleep on happiness is even greater than that of money!

In The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working: The Four Forgotten Needs that Energize Great Performance, President and CEO of The Energy Project, Tony Schwartz, dedicates an entire chapter to the importance of sleep and happiness. One of the studies the book highlights, done at the University of Michigan, found that sleep had a more significant effect on a person’s state of mind than earning more money. Yet another study published in the professional journal Science supported this finding. betfinal عربي The Science study’s authors concluded, “Large increases of real income in the developed world over the past 50 years have yielded no change in reported life satisfaction. [On the other hand,] differences in reported sleep quality are associated with a very large difference in reported enjoyment.”

More than Just a Rat in a Cage: Sleep and memory

Did you know that lab mice dream about mazes? You’re probably wondering where I’m going with this? (Pun intended.) Well, it turns out that only after a good night’s sleep can lab mice actually figure out how to get around obstacles in a maze. It turns out it’s the same with people. I guess the Smashing Pumpkins were right after all…about the “rat in a cage” part. العاب وجوائز مالية حقيقية But save the angst, this is good news – sleep improves memory and learning.

Author Tony Schwartz notes that learning actually takes place during sleep. He notes, “Although the acquisition of knowledge occurs only during waking life, there is evidence that we process, consolidate and stabilize memory during sleep…[During sleep,] we appear to process and consolidate fact-based information, such as a new language or the capital of a state.”

If you don’t think memory is important in creativity, just consider that, as noted by author Vera John-Steiner in her book Notebooks of the Mind Explorations of Thinking, some of history’s best-known creatives such as Mozart, claimed to turn to memory to create their many Magnum opi. Mozart called his muse his “bag of memories” – a collection of experiences from which he gleaned inspiration for his musical pieces. Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman equaled the creative flow state to “plunging into the deepest roots down into the world of childhood memories.”

In fact, John-Steiner emphasizes the importance of sleep in helping creatives craft ideas from seemingly unrelated things, what she calls combinatorial creativity. She writes (quite creatively, by the way):

Among the invisible tools of creative individuals is their ability to hold on to the specific texture of their past. Their skill is akin to that of a rural family who lives through the winter on food stored in their root cellar… The creative use of one’s past, however, requires a memory that is both powerful and selective.

 Don’t be 40% Less Smart: Sleep helps us learn better

In the creative field, we are constantly learning what works, and what doesn’t, and staying abreast of the latest trends in marketing and branding to create more effective campaigns. Whether you’re learning from the past, learning from your mistakes or learning from the pros, if you’d just learn to turn in earlier for some z’s, you’d be a whole lot smarter.

According to the National Institute of Health, sleep is key to boosting our smarts. لعبة سباق الخيل Dr. Matthew Walker, a sleep scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, says, “We’ve learned that sleep before learning not only helps you prepare your brain for initial formation of memories, but that sleep is essential to help save and cement that new information into the architecture of the brain, meaning that you’re less likely to forget it.”

Dr. Walker explains, “While you snooze, your brain cycles through different phases of sleep, including light sleep, deep sleep, and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, when dreaming often occurs. The cycles repeat about every 90 minutes. The non-REM stages of sleep seem to prime the brain for good learning the next day. If you haven’t slept, your ability to learn new things could drop by up to 40%.”

It may seem counterintuitive in a culture that’s driven by coffee-fueled long hours to suggest logging in some downtime, but as we’ve learned, sleep isn’t downtime. It’s when we get smarter, happier, and more creative. So next time you’re struck by writer’s block, artist block, or whatever you choose to call your creativity drought, spend some time under the sheets. Your clients will thank you for it!

Our society’s inability to unplug from technology and demand for instant gratification mean the attention and time we can dedicate to even the simplest tasks are decreasing. Even reading factual articles on the Internet is too time-consuming for us! Content shock, as we touched on earlier, is a phenomenon where readers skip reading articles in full because they are bored, busy, or disinterested. So how do we present information to readers that interests and helps them learn? Enter infographics: content that combines text and graphics into one. Could infographics solve the problem of content shock, or is it just a temporary fix to our society’s short attention span?

Visualize

Content marketers and companies alike create infographics to convey boring material in a quick, creative and meaningful manner. According to Social Media Consultant Mark Smiciklas, infographics are “a visualization of data or ideas that tries to convey complex information to an audience in a manner that can be quickly consumed and easily understood.” Remember the five senses: feel, smell, see, hear and taste. All 5 senses transmit information to the brain, but 90% of that information is visual! In an average day, a person is exposed to 174 newspapers full of information, with only 1% of that information getting through to the brain. Why is this, you ask? The brain processes images simultaneously and text sequentially, meaning that visual stimuli makes it to the brain much more quickly than textual stimuli. To be specific, the brain processes visual stimuli 60,000 times faster than text. Additionally, Google search volumes for “infographics” have increased by well over 800%. I prefer to think of infographics as children’s books for adults: mostly picture accompanied by minimal text. We teach and treat children as visual learners, so why can we not do the same for adults?

Inspire

Great infographics inspire emotions – be it happiness, sadness, wonder, or surprise. Great infographics use challenging content, tell a story, take your readers on a journey, or provide readers with a fresh point of view. As a marketing tool, infographics are viral magnets. They are easy to share due to their attractiveness and versatility across social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Because of their viral magnetism, infographics are helpful to your webpage’s SEO and can ultimately help rank your website higher on Google’s algorithm. You can also easily increase brand awareness by simply placing your logo on the infographic. Placing your logo on the infographic allows you to position your brand as an expert of the topic you are explaining.  If you are not creating your own infographic but simply sharing another’s, you can use the infographic to add value to your content. Just be sure to give credit where credit’s due, which may include the author’s name, website, and a link back to the website or place of origin.

Learn

Research done by Barbara Miller and Brooke Barnett of the Newspaper Research Journal showed that combining both text and graphics is the best method learning information. Their summary stated:

“On their own, text and graphics are both useful yet imperfect methods for communication. Written language allows an almost infinite number of word combinations that allow deep analysis of concepts, but relies heavily on the reader’s ability to process that information. Graphics may be easier for the reader to understand but are less effective in communication of abstract and complicated concepts. … combining text and graphics allows communicators to take advantage of each medium’s strengths and diminish each medium’s weaknesses.”

Think of your favorite children’s book growing up; it probably had tons of pictures and illustrations. Children books feature a combination of text with illustrations because the combination of the two media helps children understand and mentally visualize the story they’re being told. Children have more active and wild imaginations than adults, yet as we age, we find ourselves referencing and learning from text-dense material rather than a combination of pictures and illustrations. In the case of adults, you would think that with a less wild imagination, you would need more imagery to explain concepts. Infographics prove that the adult brain still prefers to learn with a combination of imagery and text than with text-dense information alone.

Research

Beyond having great content and imagery, you must always do your research before creating an infographic. Assuming you want to appear as an expert in your field, it is essential to provide your readers and customers with accurate and up-to-date information. Use multiple sources, but not too many, to gather your data: too much information can fatigue or disinterest your reader. Additionally, use multiple sources to check the accuracy of your information. Include plenty of statistics in your infographic; pie charts, bar graphs, line graphs, and percentages accompanied with images help clearly illustrate statistics and other complicated pieces of information.

Create

Not every company or business has a graphic design department that can readily turn out great infographics. As a content curator, your biggest challenge is not finding content, but rather finding a way to present it to your audience that is both exciting and informative. Fortunately, Peak Seven’s team of dedicated designers can make your infographic dreams become reality. Infographics allow endless possibilities for presenting dense information to readers in ways that are interesting, meaningful, and easy to understand; Peak Seven helps you master these obstacles while helping you stay true to your brand. As 65% of the population are said to be visual learners, we should be presenting information to readers that interests them and helps them learn, not information that exhausts and bores them. Think you’re ready to get started on your own Infographic? Reach out to Peak Seven today, and check out some of our recent info graphics below for Skypatrol.

After watching Apple’s keynote for the iPhone 6 and the Apple Watch, it’s safe to say that Apple wants to integrate itself in all possible aspects of our lives. From the innovative Apple Pay to Apple Health, an Apple product a day may be enough to keep you away from traditional items you’ve used for years, such as the newspaper, and even your wallet. We all know that Apple is ridiculously amazing at marketing anything, but are there more exciting features that make me really want the new iPhone 6, or should I just stick to the iOS 8 upgrade?

iPhone 6 Exclusive Features
When I first began watching the announcement Tuesday evening (a little late, yes), I was excited to see what Apple had in store, but also very skeptical. Every product announcement that comes from Apple is “the best iPhone EVER,” a product that’s “going to change everything,” and they always, somehow, manage to convince everybody that they cannot go another day in their ordinary lives without this extraordinary new device. For every iPhone release, we expect the same things: a bigger screen, better resolution, and a better camera. So how would the iPhone 6 be any better or different from the iPhone 5S or 5C? Do I really need to shell out all that money for a new contract and a new phone?

Mobile Wallet
Apple aims to revolutionize the way we go about our everyday life, and the Mobile Wallet is no exception to that. Ever felt so inconvenienced by having to pull your wallet out of your pocket and decide which credit card to use? Have no fear – Apple has solved the issue for you! With the new Mobile Wallet feature, you can pay for lower-priced items using the integration of Passbook and Touch ID. Skeptical about Apple storing your credit card information and purchase history? They claim to do neither – instead assigning your credit card a one-time unique number that is used to complete the transaction with the merchant. Apple claims they won’t see your purchases or track your purchasing behavior.

Better Battery Life
One of the more exciting but lesser innovative features of the new iPhone 6 is better battery life, which means 11 hours of video watching and Wi-Fi browsing. As Apple gives us reason to become even more dependent on our cell phones, a longer battery life is absolutely necessary.

Faster Networking & Internal Processer
The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus boast a 64-bit A8 chip processor and M8 co-processor. For those of you who are like me and have no idea what that means, the Apple iPhone 6 is now 25% faster and 50% more efficient than its predecessor thanks to the A8 chip. Additionally, the M8 measures your motion activity for the Health app without draining your battery life. The M8 chip also can measure elevation and tell when you take the stairs,
thanks to a new feature called “Barometer.”

Larger Screen Displays
As people have complained that Apple’s screen is too small to watch movies on (seriously people, go an hour without watching TV I dare you), Apple has announced that its iPhone 6 will boast a screen of 4.7 inches, and 5.5 inches for the iPhone 6 Plus, going for a “Phablet” look.

Improved Camera
Selfie-obsessed Millennials rejoice: the newest iPhone boasts an 8-megapixel camera, an improved sensor, True Tone flash, and an even faster autofocus. This means you can take even more selfies in a fraction of the time it took you before!

iOS 8
Despite these new features for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, most of the cool new features are available from iOS8, which can be downloaded onto your outdated and totally lame iPhone 5. Sure, mobile wallets are convenient, as is better battery life and a faster processor. But let’s be real here: nobody who has an iPhone 5 should be crying poverty. If you are due for an upgrade, I suggest you take it. My mom has an iPhone 4S for example and it’s time for her to trade on up, not because its embarrassing that she has such an old phone, but because the functionality of her phone is decreasing by the day. However, if you have a newer iPhone model and are considering the upgrade, I suggest saving your money and instead downloading iOS8 for free; these are my reasons why.

Health and HealthKit
Arguably the coolest feature for fitness geeks like myself, Apple’s new HealthKit feature syncs with third-party apps and services to measure your fitness activity in order to provide you with a “health dashboard.” You can measure your heart rate, calories burned, blood sugar, cholesterol, and even create an emergency card that is accessible from your Lock screen. While the new iPhone 6 boasts the M8 chip, which is more advanced in measuring your motion activity, it is not essential to the use of the app itself.

Better Chat
Texting just became so much more. Instead of being able to send one picture at a time, now you can send multiple. You can also name, mute, or leave group chats, which we all know can be both annoying and serious battery drainers. You can also tap your messages to add video, voice, or your current location at a much faster speed. لعبة القمار اون لاين Apple has also graced us with the convenience of tapping to see any attachment in the text conversation, instead of having to scroll up through endless messages. Thanks Apple!

Interactive Notifications
Ever been so-in-the-zone playing Candy Crush or Words With Friends that you couldn’t respond to a text? Drop down notifications for texts, tweets, and calendar events are now actionable, meaning you can interact with these features without having to switch out of the app you are currently using. بوكر اون لاين Hallelujah!

Keyboard Enhancements
QuickType will feature predictive typing suggestions, allowing you to not only type out messages faster, but finally your iPhone will stop autocorrecting to “ducking!” Additionally third-party keyboard support will come with iOS8. Apps like SwiftKey lead the way in keyboard support apps, which already embody the predictive typing software by memorizing syntax, slang, and social language usage. I hope Apple can totes keep up with all my abbrevs!

Integration of Siri and Shazam
Siri is now voice accessible with the command “Hey Siri,” and she can even identify songs for you and direct you to the iTunes store to purchase the song. I foresee many “accidental” embarrassing song purchases in the future of those who have had a beer too many. Way to capitalize on us during our weakest moments, Apple!

Self Destructing Photos and Recovering Deleted Photos
IOS8 will feature a “Recently Deleted” album in the photos app, for all those who may have mistakenly deleted a good photo (or selfie). Additionally, following the lead of what Snapchat originally was supposed to be, iPhone users will now have the option to make a photo “self-destruct” after 2 minutes. طريقة الربح في لعبة الروليت

Continuity Between Devices
When Orange is the New Black season 2 premiered, I did not want to do anything else with my life other than watch it. However, I was inconvenienced by the fact that my seating location of choice did not have an outlet nearby, meaning that when my computer died, I was SOL. Now, with Apple’s latest feature of Continuity, you can start something on your computer, and finish it on your phone or iPad (or any other combination of the 3), so long as these devices are nearby. Thanks, Apple, for helping me maintain my addiction to Netflix!

Verdict: Save Your Money & Download iOS8
Unless you’re trying to be the next Annie Liebowitz, suffer an actual addiction to your phone, or are truly inconvenienced by the fact that you have to have a wallet, I suggest keeping your iPhone 5, 5c or 5s, and simply downloading the software update. While the price tag for the iPhone 6 is no different than the price when the iPhone 4 or 5 were released, most of the truly great and useful features come in the software update.