From Eric Jacks, Chief Strategy Officer, Collab  

In your opinion, what was the best 2021 brand campaign(s) and why?

This isn’t one of our campaigns at Collab, but #TeamSeas with Mr. Beast and Mark Rober has everything we look for in a successful brand campaign. It pairs a mission-driven organization looking to clean the oceans with two of the biggest YouTubers who have the skills and creativity to help remove 30,000 lbs of trash by the end of the year. Each creator developed videos in their own personal voice and style, and they are well on their way to reaching this goal by the end of the year. 

And if we were to pat ourselves on the back, I’m a big fan of our epic campaign with Urban Decay x Prince. This was the first-ever beauty collaboration with the estate of the multi-platinum recording artist and pop legend. We activated nine of the top beauty creators and were able to sell out the product line in under 24 hours by producing a once-in-a-lifetime campaign.  

 

What do you think will be the major advertising trends to look out for in 2022?

Co-creation will be the new KPI. Brands that can leverage communities to co-create will rise to the top. TikTok’s success has been driven by their ability to enable communities to co-create with each other via duets and stitches. This year, TikTok had an unmatched engagement of 9.78% on the platform, compared to 1.22% on Instagram. We’ve already seen TikTok overtake YouTube in terms of average watch time, and we expect to see competing platforms continue to build out their product roadmaps to drive engagement through co-creation.

 

What is your impression of brands that continuously evolve their messaging around the pandemic during these unprecedented times? Does it resonate positively or negatively?

When the pandemic hit, some brands chose to actively pivot their messaging while others stuck to their evergreen pre-pandemic messaging. Brands that were successful understood this environment and knew the importance of both what they were and were not communicating throughout the pandemic. Brands didn’t need to actively communicate Covid-19 in their messaging, but successful brands knew how their messaging would be perceived in the context of a global pandemic.  

WeWork was hit hard before and during the pandemic, but their pivot to messaging flexible and clean workspaces is allowing them to take advantage of the hybrid work economy. 

On the other side Scrub Daddy, the friendly face sponges and cleaning products, did a great job of understanding their products function during the pandemic, while simultaneously maintaining their fun and entertaining brand voice. 

How do you see the world of advertising technology changing in 2022?

Plenty of the attention this year has rightfully been placed on short-form video, but we are excited by the audio side of things in the year to come. On TikTok alone, 88% of users say sound is essential to their experience. Additionally, ads with audio generate significant lifts in both purchase intent and brand favorability. It’s not rocket science that people enjoy audio with their videos, but the importance of audio has implications on content shareability and licensing. Developing original and custom audio will be a big business in 2022. Sure, the average social media user can use trending audio and music whenever they like, but brands will have to follow stricter guidelines and ensure that they have ownership or licensing of the audio they are using. Additionally, we expect to see audio-focused media offerings to follow suit with more brands developing custom sounds for advertisements across TikTok, Instagram, Spotify, and podcasts.