December & January's Newsletter
Ringing in the New Year! We hope you all had a safe and happy holiday season, and we cannot wait to share with you everything that we will be working on in 2022. Cheers to another year of creativity and fun!
News Flash ⚡️ :
In case you missed it on our socials, we are beyond excited to officially announce a new partnership with WildBrain CPLG and Azerion.
Bare Tree Media is collaborating with WildBrain CPLG to welcome the Teletubbies into the Habbo and Hotel Hideaway metaverses. This partnership comes just in time for the brand's upcoming 25th anniversary. Under this partnership, we will manage the launch of Teletubbies-branded avatar onesies and other virtual goods into the metaverse. Read the details here!
“We are thrilled to bring the Teletubbies into the metaverse in the form of virtual goods for avatars and virtual spaces within Habbo and Hotel Hideaway. The nostalgia that the Teletubbies evoke as true pop culture icons is a perfect fit for the game demographics and we look forward to furthering releases throughout 2022” - Robert Ferrari, President of Bare Tree Media
We are also thrilled to announce that we are working with Sanrio do Brasil and Azerion to launch Hello Kitty into Latin American metaverses. Habbo and Woozworld users will have access to holiday-themed Hello Kitty furniture, clothing, and other virtual goods. For more information about this partnership, click here!
#BettyWhiteChallenge:
On December 31, 2021, beloved TV and cultural icon Betty White passed away at the age of 99. Not only did we love Betty for her role on the Golden Girls, but she was also an active supporter of animal welfare—a cause near and dear to our company.
In honor of Betty White and her dedication to animal advocacy, Bare Tree Media has accepted the #BettyWhiteChallenge and will donate to numerous animal shelters throughout Massachusetts on January 17, 2021. We challenge YOU to donate to your local animal shelter and uphold her support for animal causes. For more details on the #BettyWhiteChallenge click here.
Holiday Highlights 🎄 :
1: Tasty Peach Holiday Stickers
Udon is ready to bring you all the presents and treats this holiday season. Find this adorable sticker pack on iMessage and use it to spread some holiday cheer all year long.
2: Garfield "Happy Holidays" Stickers
Garfield, Odie, and Friends are ready to celebrate the holidays with you. This festive sticker pack is available on the App Store for download.
3: Starshine Glam
In December, we released a 4-in-1 Snapchat Lens to celebrate the holidays. Users can pick from 4 different backgrounds by sliding through an options tab. This lens is perfect for spreading some cheer and smiles, not just during the holidays but throughout the entire year. Try out "Starshine Glam" here or scan the Snapcode.
Keep Calm and Tweet On 📱 :
Our design team has been busy designing Twitter Branded Likes and Hashtags for our partners! Check out some of the work that was created and released this month.
https://www.baretreemedia.com/portfolio/twitter-branded-likes/
In Other News 📰 :
Have a Smurfy Holiday Season! Our team had the opportunity to partner with Quidd, the original digital collectible marketing place. Through Quidd, we released 3 sets of Smurfs digital collectibles. We enjoyed designing the stickers and assisting in the release process.
The Book of Boba Fett:
Suit up for the next chapter of the Star Wars series. Our team had the incredible opportunity to work with Disney and create Twitter Emojis and animated GIFs for the premiere of The Book of Boba Fett. The new series premiered on December 29, 2021, only on Disney +. Find Book of Boba Fett animated stickers on GIPHY!
We're Growing the Team 🌱 :
We are currently hiring for the following positions within the company:
If any of these sounds like you or someone you know, send resume & portfolio link over to info@baretreemedia.com .
Azerion welcomes WildBrain's Teletubbies into the Habbo and Hotel Hideaway metaverses
The iconic and beloved Teletubbies brand is bringing joy and delight to the popular online social communities through virtual products.
Amsterdam, Dec. 14, 2021 //
Azerion, the digital entertainment and media platform behind the popular online games Habbo and Hotel Hideaway, is welcoming the Teletubbies to the metaverse in celebration of the brand’s upcoming 25th anniversary in 2022. Under a new partnership with WildBrain, owner of the Teletubbies and a global leader in kids’ and family entertainment, the collaboration will include the exclusive release on December 14 of virtual products in Habbo and Hotel Hideaway. Products available for purchase with virtual currency include Teletubbies-branded avatar onesies based on Dipsy, Tinky Winky, Laa-Laa and Po, as well as custom furniture, including the Tubby Toaster, Custard Machine and Noo-Noo the vacuum cleaner, for players to decorate their rooms in the game.
Established in 2000 by Finnish company Sulake as the first metaverse of its kind, Habbo is a user generated virtual world and social gaming platform with a distinctive pixel-art style, available across nine language communities and attracting young adults (Gen-Z/Y) from over 150 countries. Hotel Hideaway is from the same makers and offers a 3D role-playing experience with seamlessly integrated creative events, full of opportunities to meet, create and share.
The Teletubbies brand partnership and launch is managed by Bare Tree Media, a leader in digital engagement for brands and the global digital licensee of Teletubbies, in collaboration with WildBrain’s leading licensing agency WildBrain CPLG.
“We’re excited to work together with Bare Tree Media and WildBrain CPLG on welcoming the iconic Teletubbies into our virtual worlds,” says Madelon Smittenaar, Business Development Manager of Azerion. “This partnership demonstrates the many possibilities when it comes to brand partnerships and immersive experiences in this space. The values the Teletubbies embody will really resonate with the diverse and inclusive communities of Habbo and Hotel Hideaway.”
“We’re thrilled to bring the Teletubbies into the metaverse in the form of virtual goods for avatars and virtual spaces within Habbo and Hotel Hideaway,” adds Robert Ferrari, President of Bare Tree Media. “The nostalgia that the Teletubbies evoke as true pop culture icons is a perfect fit for the game demographics and we look forward to further releases throughout 2022.”
“This is our first venture into the metaverse with the Teletubbies and we’re excited to see how Gen Z fans engage with the brand in a new and unique way. This is just the start of our Teletubbies 25th anniversary celebrations with a raft of new partners and executions expected next year that will continue to bring the beloved brand to life for fans,” concludes Jasen Wright, VP of North America at WildBrain CPLG.
Join us in celebrating the Teletubbies’ twenty-fifth anniversary!
Download Habbo and Hotel Hideaway!
Then get into character by dressing up in Habbo and Hotel Hideaway as your favorite Teletubby!
About Azerion
Azerion is the European gaming, entertainment, and media platform specializing in digital advertising and the creation and distribution of premium digital content. Since its founding in 2014, Azerion's ambitious growth strategy has been strengthened by the company's network of in-market presence across the European Community (EC), which serves the interests of local audiences and digital advertisers, publishers, and content creators.
Azerion is based in Amsterdam.
About Bare Tree Media
Bare Tree Media is a digital agency and publisher focused on helping brands reach and engage fans within the metaverse, AR experiences for Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok, Twitter emoji campaigns and popular messaging apps as mobile stickers and GIFs. Learn more at www.baretreemedia.com
About WildBrain
At WildBrain we inspire imaginations to run wild, engaging kids and families everywhere with great content across all media. With approximately 13,000 half-hours of filmed entertainment in our library – one of the world’s most extensive – we are home to such brands as Peanuts, Teletubbies, Strawberry Shortcake, Yo Gabba Gabba! Caillou, Inspector Gadget, Johnny Test and Degrassi. At our 75,000-square-foot state-of-the-art animation studio in Vancouver, BC, we produce such fan-favourite series as The Snoopy Show, Snoopy in Space, Chip & Potato, Carmen Sandiego, Go, Dog. Go! and more. Our shows are enjoyed worldwide in more than 150 countries on over 500 streaming platforms and telecasters, and our AVOD business – WildBrain Spark – offers one of the largest networks of kids’ channels on YouTube, garnering billions of views per month from over 245 million subscribers. Through our leading agency, WildBrain CPLG, we also license consumer products and location-based entertainment in every major territory for our own properties as well as for our clients and content partners. Our television group owns and operates four family entertainment channels that are among the most viewed in Canada. WildBrain is headquartered in Canada with offices worldwide and trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: WILD). Visit us at www.wildbrain.com
For more information, please contact:
Aimée Norman at The DDA Group
aimee.norman@ddapr.com
+44 (0) 7957 564 050
The Best of Snap Summit 2020
Like most recent events, this year’s Snapchat Summit was adapted virtually as opposed to existing in a physical space; it might seem like a no-brainer for a company whose expertise is in the digital realm—but if anything, this year’s summit has proven Snapchat’s ambition of bridging the gap between between augmented reality, and reality.
If the theme of Snapchat up until now has been “show, don’t tell” the mantra they’ve adopted moving forward seems to be “experience, don’t show”. What this means for brands is that Snapchat has uniquely positioned itself to allow artists & studios to create unique, branded AR experiences that transcend the digital sphere.
Below I’ve highlighted the features that I’m most excited about, as well as how they can be utilized to elevate users’ AR experiences.
Local Lenses:
These dynamic lenses use real-life locations (whole areas or specific buildings) to create a unified AR experience that different Snapchatters can share, as long as they’re in the same physical space—the first of its kind. In the example above, multiple people are creating a mural of different colors on one shared space using multiple phones. This added expertiental element creates a unified experience that exists wholly online, but that facilitates physical community. This is the first best of both worlds experience.
Photo courtesy of Snapchat.
Snap Scan & Marker Lenses:
Scan Partners is a powerful tool for brands. It allows the camera to recognize an item and then attaches it to a specific lens. The examples Snapchat used were a plant-identifer that, when clicked, would provide information on how to care for that plant (including links to buy those items). But they can also be utilized by luxury brands in order to create beautiful AR experiences in the physical world, once again blending the 2. Louis Vuitton recently added their logo as a marker lens, which means that when their logo is scanned in real life in Snapchat, a virtual door to their latest showroom opens highlighting classic and current collections in a virtual showroom. Too-Faced marked their 'Born This Way' product packaging—so when scanned, users can try it on virtually. Marker lenses elimiate the need to advertise via Snapcode, as well—the product is the Snapcode.
Photo courtesy of Snapchat.
SnapML:
The developer tool now features SnapM (or Snapchat Machine Learning), which lets developers bring their own machine-learning models to power Snap lenses, making what is possible to create limited only to the imagination. This allows for the creation of lenses that were previously impossible (such as the Van Gogh filter below, created by Nicholas Dominici) that would benefit anything from a new movie or video game with a singular aesthetic, to a museum wanting to highlight a current exhibition.
Additionally, this allows the creation of extremely accurate tracking of faces, gestures, feet, and even landmarks such as buildings. Below, you can see the practical application that Wannaby has used: they created a try-it-on filter that lets users see their newest shoe in a variety of colors (yes, that shoe is AR, not real).
In short, SnapML has destroyed many creative boundaries that previously existed—the new “brand experience” is limited (mostly) by what you can imagine vs by technology, as used to be the case.
Photo courtesy of Snapchat.
Places:
Snapchat is making it easier than ever to integrate call-to-actions with their app and lenses. One example of this is “Places”, which would lead to an outside-Snap call to action such as ordering a physical product online, whether it’s that new lipstick or food from their favorite delivery spot! This would be especially crucial for smaller businesses that need to receive local support.
Photo courtesy of Snapchat.
Integration SnapKits:
If your brand has an existing app, Snapchat will now let you integrate their technology with it in order to create a new layer of interaction with your fans. This is more abstract in thought, but can be applicable to any number of brands across any discipline—it’s an equally powerful tool both for those brands within the entertainment industry, and outside of it. Rally Road is an app that is meant for classic car investments, but has integrated Snapchat’s CreativeKit to let users purchase shares in rare items and share them with their friends in a unique AR environment. Atom movie tickets has also utilized this to let its users browse movies, purchase tickets, and choose seats together in one easy experience. There are numerous types of kits available, each with their own unique perks (AdKit, which makes monetizing apps easy with SnapAds, CreativeKit, which allows apps to bring real-time data into Snapchat, and CameraKit, which brings the power os Snapchat camera to your apps).
Photo courtesy of Snapchat.
Where Do I Start?
If you're interested leveraging Snapchat for Any of the above uses, a qualified creative studio is your best bet, since we know the ins-and-outs of not only best creative practices to create an attractive filter, but can also help determine which strategy is the way to go when the options can seem endless and equally appealing (especially after this year's summit).
We here at Bare Tree Media would love to collaborate with any artist, strategist, or brand who's just as pumped about these new Snapchat features as we are! You can take a look to see the lenses we've already created.
Twitter Emoji Campaigns: A Primer
What is a Twitter Emoji Campaign?
Twitter emoji campaigns are a visually smart way to separate your hashtag from other hashtags. As the name may imply, they aren’t permanent additions to a brand’s main hashtag, but rather are centered around a specific campaign that the brand is putting out.
For a price tag of $1M, Twitter will—for 90 days—attach a picture that you provide to a hashtag of your choice (given it doesn’t infringe on anyone else’s IP, of course).
On-the-nose advertisers may remember the tremendously successful #shareacoke campaign, one of the earliest campaigns to combine an emoji with a hashtag. The campaign created waves that led to the immediate introduction of other emoji/hashtag combinations.
The hashtag that launched a thousand twitter emojis
But how worth it really is it invest in a Twitter emoji campaign? Since the #shareacoke campaign debuted in 2015, the number of hashtag/emoji campaigns has skyrocketed up; what value do these little emojis hold that are making them mass hits?
The benefits are threefold:
Create Campaign Hype
Having a visual next to your hashtag will instantly create an association in people’s mind, and creates hype around the campaign. It separates your hashtag from other hashtags that may be similar, and even after the campaign ends, people will be left with the imprint reminder of your campaign. Additionally, it allows the user to create an emotional bond to the campaign that a text-only hashtag simply would not be able to achieve. The reason emojis are so popular is that people connect to them emotionally. Is your campaign cool? Funky? Nostalgic? Whimsical? The Twitter emoji’s art style paired with your hashtag will help determine this and will shape how people perceive the campaign overall. Yea, it’s that important.
Promotes Interaction Around the Campaign
A hashtag creates a quick avenue for a community to be built around the hashtag, and in turn around your campaign. Once again, the visual element greatly helps people quickly recognize the hashtag, so they’ll be able to click on it and begin to interact with others who are also using that hashtag. This creates a feedback loop where those who are interacting with each other build on the conversation and continue to use the hashtag, keeping it active for others to see in their timelines and become interested in!
It Improves the ‘stopping power' of your Tweet
Twitter users cumulatively generate millions of tweets a day, so the average user is scrolling quickly down an array of hashtags. Internally, Twitter refers to tweets and hashtags that hold people’s attention and pause them in their action of scrolling ‘stopping power’—essentially, it’s a level of retention that determines how effective a campaign is going to be in a user’s mind.
Twitter found that the stopping power of tweets with emojis increased by 10%, and if those tweets were promoted, that figure jumped up to 6x their previous impressions.
Case Study: Christopher Robin
For the release of their new movie Christopher Robin, Disney asked BTM to help them with their Twitter campaign, and we were more than happy to oblige! Christopher Robin was a movie steeped in nostalgia, so we definitely wanted to play up that angle and create emojis that felt timeless and resonated emotionally with the user. They actually had five hashtags, one for each of the ‘major” characters in the movie as well as one for the movie title:
Lovingly rendered above are #Pooh, #ItsPiglet, #Eeyore, and #Tigger! All for Disney's #ChristopherRobin!
This was one of our first Twitter emoji campaigns, as well, so we were very excited and curious to see how it would fare. The thought was that users would have an emotional reaction to the characters’ faces and thus use the hashtags because of it.
Once the hashtags were live, we monitored the hashtags to see how they were doing. Sure enough, almost immediately we began seeing tweets that reflected nostalgia beyond what we even expected. Some users were tweeting specifically for seeing the hashtag characters!
So for your brand’s next ad campaign, consider utilizing the power of Twitter emojis! And if you need someone to help you out, hit us up!
We Can GIF It
Be A Trendsetter, not a Follower
Keeping up with the trends in today's society is the priority for brands who adhere to the schema of remaining relevant. They need to understand what conversations their consumers are having, what’s important to them, and prove that they are also a part of this conversation.
What if I told you that’s the wrong approach to take?
Brands need to start the trend, not catch up to it. Trying to appeal to an audience using memes won't win you any brownie points with consumers—it’s too transparent for the hyper-jaded consumer of today and rings so hollow it may actually push your audience away. They are too aware of the 'corporate' image, and view the attempt like an adult trying, embarrassingly, to relate to youth using what they perceive as 'the new culture' but in inexperienced, and incorrect, ways.
For brands who want to proactively expand their audience, the solution is a little different: to insert themselves into their consumer’s popular culture and become the medium through which the conversation is had in the first place. And in 2018, the form of discourse is memes, and specifically memes through GIFs.
There is one clear champion of GIFs: you might have heard of them, but in case you haven’t it’s a huge meme depository called GIPHY. It’s a free, online platform that lets users upload their GIF content and access this content through a whole host of platforms including: Facebook Messenger, Instagram, (and most recently, Instagram DMs), Snapchat, Twitter, Viber, Slack, Discord, Outlook, and seriously, there’s MORE.
What does this mean? It means that putting your content on GIPHY makes your content as ubiquitous as GIFs have become across the internet. Given that, it’s amazing that it’s remained fairly underutilized by brands has a whole.
The Way Forward
Maintaining a GIPHY channel is great for brands who have high or low recognition alike. After creating the GIF content, they just need to be uploaded and tagged appropriately. From there, the tags will do all the work and users will find and spread the GIFs (literally) everywhere. It’s free marketing, but more than that, it’s the creation of a culture around the brand.
If brands are worried about maintaining the channel themselves, or are unsure about how to go about optimizing search results, fear not! There are companies who will help you create and manage your GIPHY channel (like us!) Although it will come at a price, the recognition that stands to be gained and the opportunity to insert your brand into the cultural lexicon is worth the hassle.
In fact, in this sense GIPHY can be even more advantageous to brands who aren’t well known. What better way to build your brand than by letting it expand organically through conversations that consumers are having? You can tailor the image you want by the content you upload and then wait to see how your consumers use the content you’ve created.
So while other brands struggle to remain a part of the conversation, those brands on the social beat will recognize the importance of being a part of the language spoken.
AR in Advertising: The New Era of Interaction
Connection to audience has always been fundamental in the creation of a brand message. The link between brands and their audience is what creates brand loyalty—people buy things that align with their personal values and that they feel an emotional attachment to. That’s what keeps them coming back. However, what that connection looks like has begun to shift. Augmented Reality (AR) is changing the way brands can interact with their fanbases in an unprecedented way, and many brand juggernauts have already embraced paving the way for the new era of interaction.
Amazon
Amazon is known for taking risks and trying almost anything in order to get results, but their foray into AR is a decidedly calculated risk. They recently acquired Body Labs, a company that uses cameras to scan their users and report weight, size, and height. The implications of this save Amazon a lot of headache: consumers will not worry about their clothes fitting if bought online (the largest detractor by far for why people don’t shop online), and Amazon won’t have to issue as many refunds or track as many returns. From a business perspective, they’re addressing and eliminating reasons that consumers don’t buy their products and creating a better experience for when they do buy it, since the clothes will fit versus a disappointing or even frustrating return. This positive experience becomes associated with Amazon and drives the consumer to go back.
Entertainment Industry
Snapchat needs no introduction: they are one of the leaders for AR filters, lenses and games. This technology is still evolving, and so is the community centered around creating for it. They have, on average, 70 million users using AR lenses for 3 minutes per day. This is the perfect platform for brands in the entertainment industry (TV shows, movies, and personalities) to promote themselves and their brand. However, recently Snapchat has been moving into a new arena—ecommerce for ANY brand, thanks to a new feature called now Shoppable AR. Shoppable AR allows companies to actually advertise through Snapchat by redirecting users to a website from a lens. This could be a product page for merchandise, a trailer for a movie—any link on the internet is fair game. Forerunners of taking advantage of this include King, who promoted their famous game Candy Crush through an install button right in their filter, STX Entertainment, who had a trailer for their upcoming movie “I Feel Pretty”, and Blizzard Entertainment, who utilized a filter to promote their new expansion pack, Battle for Azeroth.
Exponential Growth
AR isn’t just entering the ecommerce industry, it’s redefining it. It’s providing its consumers the ability to directly interact with their brand, to become a part of it. That kind of inclusivity encourages attachment, which encourages brand loyalty. The brands that have found the greatest success don’t just appeal to their consumers, they engage with them and become a part of them, like a member of their family. They make their consumers feel good; AR provides an unprecedented engagement level on that front.
The data speaks for itself: AR has exploded in growth over the last year, and it’s not looking like it’s going to stop anytime soon. Augmented Reality companies have grown 50% since the beginning of 2018 across 290 prominent companies, according to The Venture Reality Fund. AR and VR companies have raised over $1.8 billion in funding and are only continuing to expand. And although AR started out small, like the Facebook and Snapchat lenses we’re all familiar with, it’s beginning to branch out at a rapid pace, continuing to be developed and supported by goliaths and forerunners who see and fully comprehend its value, and who know making an investment now will yield profits later.
AR is still an understated marketing tool for now, but that will change sooner rather than later. Instead of being behind on the trend, brands should take full advantage of what AR can offer and showcase their product in a way that gets consumers excited about it—and thus, drives sales up, up, up.