Gracie's Top Five Highlights From February 2016

Hi I'm Gracie, and I'm at 10 Yetis this week for my work experience, so welcome to my first blog!

As 2016 scarily gets into full swing, let’s look back on my personal top 5 highlights from February.

1) Lush open pop up cinema to promote new fragrances.

Everyone loves to smell great, right? You know that experience when you’re sat in the ‘so almost summer’ sun eating your packet of walkers ready salted, then all of a sudden that passing person who smells so great makes you want to jump up and stop them to ask what fragrance they are wearing?

Well, Lush opened up a vintage popup cinema to get customers senses tingling through an experience at the good old fashioned pictures. This was a really quirky venue, laid back but also a great social media strategy, with people wanting to share their time in this special event.

They included popcorn and promotion of new fragrances throughout the movie, infusing the room with the various scents and also an on-site tuck shop. I thought this was awesome! I mean who wouldn’t want to have beautiful scents surrounding them while watching a classic with a tuck shop wheeling round your favourite snacks and drinks? Don’t mind if I do!

2) Samsung predict what the world will look like 100 years from now.

Everyone loves to have an insight on the future; whether it’s preventing wrinkles with the newest most fabulous eye cream, finding out who Justin Bieber could be getting with next week, or a new release on how the latest bride to be will fit into that dress; so it didn’t surprise me when this popped up.

The concept features: “Hyper-tall skyscrapers, underwater bubble cities, personal home "medi-pods" and civilian colonies on the Moon” – which are thought to be a reality in 100 years’ time.

I felt it was really interesting because it just shows you how far our technology can be taken to in such little time. Everyone loves to see how the world will be evolving and its and exciting insight that many will take onboard and look forward to seeing evolve.

4) Marmite bans ‘bae’ from personalised Valentine’s Day jars.

People time and time again say you either love it or hate it - I’m a fence sitter myself. But why ban bae? Marmite brand manager, said: “We appreciate that Marmite is a spread best enjoyed at breakfast, and nobody wants a side helping of nausea first thing in the morning, so we thought it made perfect sense to ban the most hated pet names.” Personally I think this was a choice wrongly made, as people, like me, like to have a laugh and express their sense of humour, so why not at breakfast through your fave spread? There’s no better time to do so if I don’t say so myself. Marmite think that this would “save lots of relationships” by banning the most hated names such as ‘babycakes’ and ‘snookums’; I disagree , just let it go, put your feet up , boil the kettle and have a giggle.

4) Direct Line launched a new campaign with Alfie Deyes to improve driving.

Direct Line used on the way to fame, number 1 best-selling author Alfie Deyes to help give a seat belt of safety to the drivers on the road. Using people that are highly recognised by the younger drivers is definitely a great way to make people stop and think about safety on the road while improving the way they drive as well as others. “The aim of the relationship is to target 17 to 19-year-olds, who make up only 1.5% of UK licence holders but are responsible for 12% of fatal and serious crashes.” I think this is a perfect way to influence target audiences effectively and decrease accidents.

5) Instagram adds a new video count.

The video count is now the replacement of likes , which I think is a good way for easy recognition of popular content; but for me as I’m sure others will agree I liked being able to see how many likes people were gaining, maybe I’m just nosey, I just don’t think it’s the same . According to Instagram “views are the most widely expected form of feedback on video.” Personally, I think likes are more accurate and means that people have taken their own time to ‘double tap that’ where as a view count is verified from 3 seconds of viewing (on Instagram and Facebook) resulting in possible accidental views, therefore likes can be classed as more accurate when comparing likes to views.

So from Lush to Marmite to Instagram, it’s fair to say that all have caused a rise in conversation with some brands using stunts, while others just seem to be having a lot of social media attention. That is my top 5 highlights for February, what are yours?