In a bid broaden its perception beyond a site to post food and DIY pics, Pinterest, now positioning itself as the “visual inspiration platform,” is taking the wraps off of a new global ad campaign.

The campaign is from Accenture creative agency Droga5 and Interpublic Group’s media agency Mediahub. The agencies say its unveiling comes just as people are beginning to re-evaluate their post-pandemic lives and how they will spend their time.

It also arrives after stellar growth for the platform. In the past year, with people stuck inside and consuming much more content, Pinterest claims it gained over 100 million users worldwide to 475-plus million monthly active users.  

As people emerge from a year of chaos and uncertainty, the campaign is designed to showcase how Pinterest can feed them new exciting and fulfilling ideas to act on. As the creative notes, “You just might surprise yourself.” 

“On Pinterest, you may come to explore mid-century modernism, find maximalism and end up loving cluttercore,” says Celestine Maddy, global head of consumer and brand at Pinterest. “Our campaign defies the perception that Pinterest is just recipes, DIY projects and wedding dresses, and instead is an invitation to invest in discovering something new or try something you’d never thought you’d try,” she adds.  

The anchor film, titled “Discovery” was shot in Mexico City and Los Angeles and takes the audience on a fast-paced journey of exploration focusing on one woman’s discovery before branching out into an unbroken, energetic thread of other characters' experiences. 

It and other spots will be placed in markets around the world across a wide array of media channels including OOH installations in New York, Chicago and London.

There are also media partnerships with CRWNMAG, a hair culture and lifestyle magazine for Black women, and NTWRK, a mobile-first video shopping platform that blends entertainment and commerce.

John Moore, Global CEO at Mediahub said his team designed a plan with “high-impact media presence, [and] meaningful and diverse partnerships, and targeted activations that show the true breadth and depth of ideas available on the platform.”

Pinterest is also launching a similar brand campaign in Japan this week.

Mini USA has created an on-the-move New York City activation in support of the 2022 Mini hardtops and convertibles. 

The NYC Looking Glass bus activation kicked off May 24 and runs through Memorial Day, May 31. For eight hours a day, the bus will drive around the city. The theme is “Who says you can’t find parking in NYC?” and the bus features a convertible inside the bus, wedged between two large SUVs. 

The automaker worked with Pereira O’Dell on the creative for the bus and Universal McCann though fellow IPG agency Rapport to produce the bus.

The goal of the activation is to continue to promote new Mini hardtop and convertible models that received significant updates for the 2022 model year, including the addition of a Zesty Yellow exterior paint option on the convertible, say Rah Mahtani, brand communications manager, Mini USA.

“The activation is fun because it visually shows how easy it is to park our new Mini,” Mahtani says. “Personal vehicle ownership is up in a lot of cities, and people are going back to work, so parking is going to be tight.”

This type of activation is new for Mini, although the brand is known for being “disruptive,” he says. 

“We wanted to go back to our heritage by being bold and showing off our new model in an unforgettable and relatable way,” Mahtani  tells Marketing Daily. “Not only is the Zesty Yellow convertible eye-catching in color, but it’s the perfect vehicle for the warmer weather.”

It was timed to coincide with increasing tourism in New York City, particularly over a holiday weekend, he says.

The New York City activation complements the two-month Mini USA out-of-home  campaign launched in April in key markets across the country, including Boston, Chicago, Dallas (first time in market), Los Angeles and San Francisco. Digital and static boards and wallscapes are positioned in high-traffic areas.

“It’s important that customers feel that brands are relevant and can meet them where they are in their life,” Mahtani says. “We felt that Mini has the perfect opportunity to make people smile during their day by showing them it’s not that hard to park in New York City -- when you have a Mini."

The BMW Group brand is also launching augmented reality digital creative for mobile devices. Consumers who search for Mini Cooper will have the option to explore the vehicle using AR. It will also be promoted via digital banners.

Mini has never before used an AR solution as part of its website or sales process, Mahtani says. 

“However, with the digital landscape ever-evolving and customer shopping research, we thought it was a perfect time to dive into this,” he says. "We want to show up where customers are at, and in this case if that means having a Mini show up in their living room, we’ll be there. It’s the perfect way for customers to explore the car and get a good sense of a Mini before they even get to a dealership.”

Universal McCann is also the lead on the AR solution. Free Range Games built it in partnership with the Google, using UNREAL Engine to bring it to life. The brand is partnering with Syracuse-based RAM Industrial Design, Inc. and Syracuse University students to develop even deeper AR capabilities in 2022, he adds.

A month into Apple’s enforcement of its new App Tracking Transparency framework, the picture is getting clearer on its impact on consumers and advertisers alike. There are also some surprising unintended consequences, like a corresponding boost in Android app ad spending.

I’m not saying the smoke has exactly cleared. We are still getting wildly different data about consumer opt-in rates from a variety of different sources, utilizing different app publisher coverages. But the overall consensus is that it’s not nearly as dire as some had predicted, and is likely to get better over time. Unless you’re Facebook.

“Since the rollout a month ago, some articles have suggested that global consent rates from users could be as low as 5%,” writes app measurement and tracking firm Adjust CEO Paul Müller in his blog post this morning, citing data from AppLovin that shows the reality “appears to be much more optimistic.”

While consent rates vary widely -- ranging from a low of about 27% to a high of 75%, depending on the app -- average rates are trending well above the early predictions.

Indeed, Week 4 of AppsFlyer's ATT tracker dashboard shows the global average opt-in is still around 40%.

“Our theory regarding the broad range represented is that early reports were taking overall numbers (from apps that asked for consent as well as those that didn’t ask for consent because they haven’t added the flow or don’t plan to) instead of only focusing on apps that explicitly request consent,” writes Adjust’s Müller, who predicts opt-in rates will actually rise over time.

Meanwhile, the impact on the mobile app advertising marketplace also appears to have been greatly exaggerated.

While some had projected a “50% decay to ad revenues” as consumers opted out of being tracked, Adjust’s Müller says the reality has been about a 30% drop in CPMs (not advertising volume), so iOS app advertisers appear to be getting a better deal in the short run, even if publishers are feeling an iOS pinch.

That said, Müller notes there has been a corresponding increase in Android CPMs, so if those publishers are operating on both operating systems, things should be balancing out as mobile marketers shift value between platforms -- but not out of the medium altogether.

Healthcare data has become one of the most coveted pieces of personal information as consumers have the opportunity to pick and choose what type of data to share.

Google has struck a deal with the national hospital chain HCA Healthcare to develop algorithms using patient records. The companies announced the deal Wednesday.

The partnership with Google Cloud, which will rely on customer data, aims to create a secure and dynamic data analytics platform for HCA Healthcare and enable the development of next-generation models focused on insights and improved workflows.

HCA Healthcare said it will protect patient privacy and secure the data, using information from 32 million annual visits. The idea is to identify opportunities to improve care, as well as support its 93,000 nurses and 47,000 active and affiliated physicians.

Google Cloud’s data, analytics, and AI offerings will power custom solutions for clinical and operational settings, built in partnership with Google Cloud’s Office of the CTO and Google Cloud Professional Services.

The partnership should support physicians and nurses who use the healthcare organization’s workflow tools, analysis and alerts on the 90,000 mobile devices that help the system operate.

Harshit Jain, founder and CEO of Doceree, a global network of physician-only platforms for programmatic marketing, understands the importance of artificial intelligence to build out healthcare services.

Jain worked with McCann, one of the largest ad agencies, for seven years on three continents after leaving his post as a physician in India. All that before building out the platform Doceree, which relies on AI to target ads. He said marketing on digital channels have been a barrier for pharma marketers to overcome to reach physicians, and aims to solve the challenge using AI.

“My goal is to reduce the cost of healthcare,’ Jain said. “I want to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of physician marketing efforts, which will lower the marketing costs from 25% to 20% for pharmaceutical and healthcare brands.”

He believes reducing marketing costs for brands will also bring down drug prices to make healthcare more affordable.

Following the launch of Doceree’s Point of Care messaging platform earlier this year, the company developed ESPYIAN, Doceree’s identity-resolution engine, an AI-powered solution that provides marketers access to more than 150 different data points to comprehend the digital behaviors of physicians, such as their prescribing and treatment behaviors.

With AI illustrating the digital footprint of physicians across endemic and Point of Care networks, pharma marketers share hyper-targeted messages that connect with physicians’ mindset in the moment.

Physicians on telehealth, eRx and EHR platforms present a tremendous opportunity to communicate with physicians and share information that enables them to better care for their patients.

With ESPYIAN, Doceree can optimize communications to ensure doctors receive the correct message.

“For instance, having the comprehension of a physician’s practicing behavior and their prescribing habits, enables marketers to have a deeper understanding of informative content,” he said. “Our data identifies the preferred platform that delivers the highest engagement rate. In addition, our platform instructs marketers on the instances during the physician’s journey on Point of Care mediums when messages will be of most interest to the physician to maximize the ROI achieved for the marketing campaign.”

Grey has created a new campaign for Argentina-based bank Itau to promote its new “Chat Account,” which the bank says is the first Whatsapp-driven bank account in the country.

The communications app, owned by Facebook is hugely popular across Latin America, where many consumers use it in place of texting. Research shows 84% of mobile users in Argentina use Whatsapp as their main messenger channel.

The campaign, created by Grey Argentina, is anchored by several spots that highlight how consumers can easily use the Itau’s Chat Account to do their banking.

Sample the work here and here.

Following a series of unusually aggressive actions by what would be expected to be a partner trade association, Kym Frank has resigned as president of Geopath, the advertising and media industry's only media measurement organization jointly overseen by advertisers, agencies and media suppliers.

The timing of the move is almost equally as intriguing as the events leading up to it, because it happened in the middle of "Future Proof: OOH Media Conference," an annual out-of-home media conference jointly hosted by Geopath and the Out-of-Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA), which alternate serving as lead host and conference programmer.

This year's event, which ends today, was programmed by the OAAA, and is scheduled to kickoff this morning with a keynote by Frank, which was previously recorded.

But executives said Frank resigned when several of Geopath's board members -- many of whom are also on the OAAA's board -- expressed a lack of confidence following a series of events leading up to this year's conference, especially the OAAA's surprise issuance of various industry standards that appear to encroach on other peer trade organizations, especially Geopath, but also the Digital Place-Based Advertising Association (DPAA).

"Coup by Anna," was how one knowledgable source described it, referring to OAAA President Anna Bager.

In recent weeks, the OAAA has issued new measurement standards for both overall out-of-home advertising measurement, as well as well as a mobile media measurement standard for digital out-of-home media, and according to knowledgable sources, both were made without consulting the other relevant trade bodies.

While trade associations often are not in lock-step in their approach to industry standards and other initiatives, because their job is to service their own membership first, such tensions between trade associations is usually uncharacteristic unless they represent rival media, explicitly.

And what makes the OAAA's ambush of Geopath so striking is that Geopath is actually the only media measurement organization operating as what people outside the U.S. would call a "JIC," or joint industry committee in which all sides -- advertisers, agencies and media suppliers -- jointly set the standards, methods and execution of the measurement system.

Equally puzzling is the fact that the OAAA's new out-of-home advertising measurement standard appears to be a regression from what many consider to be a higher one developed by Geopath under Frank's leadership.

Frank, who joined the nearly 80-year-old Traffic Audit Bureau (TAB) as president six years ago, rebooted it as Geopath and pushed to elevate its methodology to what some have described as a "likelihood-to-see" advertising model, because it utilizes an "eyes-on" method that estimates when people actually look at out-of-home advertising. Most, if not all other media measurement currencies utilize what often is described as an "opportunity-to-see," meaning they only estimate that consumers are able to see the ads.

The new measurement standard issued by the OAAA reverts the out-of-home measurement industry's currency to an "opportunity" from Geopath's "likelihood" metric.

The OAAA also recently issued new "industry-wide" standards for utilizing mobile media for measuring digital place-based media, which appears to have encroached on the DPAA's turf, and this week it issued a "Digital Video Out-of Home (VOOH) Buyers Guide," which also appears to usurp the DPAA.

While Geopath's Frank comes out of a traditional media research background, OAAA's Bager took the helm of the OAAAA in the fall of 2019 after serving as a long-time executive of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).

Philo will raise its monthly price, for new subscribers only, by $5 as of June 8, CEO Andrew McCollum announced in a blog post.

The increase, from $20 to $25, is will be the first since the livestreaming TV service was launched three-and-a-half years ago.

Those who become subscribers prior to June 8 will still get the lower rate.

As a value-added with the higher price, Philo will extend the time it keeps recordings in unlimited DVR from 30 days to a year. Current subscribers can opt to upgrade to the higher-priced plan to get the extended DVR.

McCollum said that despite the company’s “relentless” efforts to keep its price low, managing costs cannot indefinitely cover the annual pricing increases that content and billing partners pass on to Philo.

Philo, which offers 63 channels from partners including AMC Networks, Discovery and ViacomCBS, reported 800,000 subscribers as of November 2020—up 300% year-over-year.

At the end of March, T-Mobile announced that it was shutting down its five-month-old TVision Live and TVision Vibe streaming services, to instead offer similar services through partnerships with Philo and YouTube TV as of April 29.

T-Mobile customers who subscribed to TVision Live, Vibe are now eligible for a $10 discount on the monthly fees for Philo, the base live-TV service option, or YouTube TV, the premium option (normally $64.99 per month).

Hyundai Motor North America’s Ioniq 5 electric compact utility vehicle will feature an in-vehicle payment system the automaker has been piloting since 2018. 

The system will bring in-car credit card payment capabilities to customers via the infotainment screen. In-car credit card payment will be available with major brands and allow drivers to find and pay for EV charging, order and pay for food to go and find, reserve and pay for parking. 

The system will include brands like ParkWhiz, Chargehub and Domino’s and others to be added via the Xevo Market, per a spokesperson.

The automaker began working with Xevo, a company which develops software and smart user experiences for the automotive industry, testing in-vehicle payment technology in 2018, as detailed in a YouTube video. 

Brands integrated during the proof of concept included ParkWhiz, Applebee’s to Go and Chevron/Texaco gas stations. Since the Ioniq 5 is an all-electric vehicle, the gas stations are replaced with charging stations. Applebee’s is will not be available at launch. 

During the test, the in-car payment apps originally operated through the Android Auto smartphone interface but the Bluelink Infotainment system eliminates the need for that interface.

The Ioniq 5, which goes on sale in the fall, integrates advanced technologies for an enhanced digital user experience. The wide, configurable, dual cockpit features a 12-inch, full-touch infotainment screen and hoodless 12- inch digital gauge cluster that can be customized to meet customers’ needs.

Ioniq 5’s infotainment system provides real-time travel radius mapping based on the current state of charge. The Infotainment system’s connected car services also help search and plan the best route to include a charging station along the way.

Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are available and Bluetooth Multi-connection support is also available, so two devices can be paired at the same time—one for phone calls and one for streaming audio. The navigation system comes with three years of Bluelink Infotainment/Map updates.

Hyundai is offering the latest version of its upgraded Bluelink connected car services. This range of new features allows customers to control their car with their smartphone or voice.