It may be the only place on earth featuring Dolly Parton hanging out in a van with Kermit the Frog!
The famous fall right of passage – the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade – is not only a cherished tradition, like turkey, dressing and pecan pie, it’s also a primetime place for brands to build awareness and resonate with audiences.
Start with the trucks, an army of Dodge Rams 75 strong, the “official vehicle” that will tow each float in one of the most stunning logistical spectacles of the year.
KFC will make a first-time appearance in the parade, and Colonel Sanders in a 17-foot white Caddy driven all the way from Corbin, Ky, the site of the first fast foot chicken restaurant, will roll into New York in fine fashion. The float is marked with the routes taken and, of course, the colonel himself is aboard. That the float is three bus lanes wide and 12 feet tall.
Other branded floats this year:
- Hallmark’s recreation of a home at Christmas complete with a fireplace that looks like it’s actually burning (Mariah Carey will ride this float).
- A huge Ocean Spray Cranberry float with an enormous goose and turkey wearing waders for the bog (the band Train will be aboard).
- A Peanuts float complete with Charlie Brown’s sad little Christmas tree celebrating the TV special’s 50th anniversary
- Build-A-Bear Workshop float that features a bear astronaut.
All of them will be pulled by Ram trucks. When asked whether people would actually notice the trucks in the parade, Todd Brown, brand manager of the Ram 1500, said they would. “The parade shows our capability and style in a different venue than consumers are used to,” he said.
Here are some fun facts and figures about the parade:
- This year was the 89th annual Macy’s Day Parade. The retailer began planning the 90th a month ago – 13 months in advance!
- It takes six hours to assemble the 26 parade floats once they make their trip from New Jersey via the Lincoln Tunnel.
- There are 40 tons of sandbags holding down the balloons, which take 90 minutes to inflate.
- There will be 12 marching bands that will practice in front of Macy’s in a 15-minute window between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. the morning of the parade.
- A staff of eight costumers oversee 230 people who will dress over 4,000 of the marchers in two-and-a-half hours.
- There will be more than 850 clowns put into makeup. They meet on “clown corner.”
- The first float will be towed back to New Jersey before the parade ends.
- The parade route will be lined with 5 million spectators.
- Fifty million viewers are expected to tune in. (A company does not have to buy an ad in the telecast in order to have a float in the parade).
- The Hallmark float weighs 8 tons.
- There are 10,000 marchers.
The last float contains Santa Claus and he can’t be late. “If he doesn’t get to the front of Macy’s by 11:56 a.m., the world ends,” said John Piper, vice president of Macy’s Studio.
The Word of the Year – Not a Word, Not a Plane … Emoji!
Oxford Dictionaries rolls out its word of the year each fall – and The Spin Cycle, a recovering journalist and consummate word guy, loves learning the linguistic lexicon that shapes our cultural vocabulary for the year.
Surprise, surprise, the word of the year for 2015 is no word at all!
It’s really difficult to pronounce. Because it has no letters. It is a cartoon yellow face, shedding two giant tears. They are not tears of sadness for the English language. It is a happy crying face, most commonly used as an LOL alternative.
Every year, Oxford Dictionaries’ lexicographers choose a word that captures the year’s biggest trends or changes in the English language. The organization knew it wanted to pick an emoji for 2015. The tiny illustrations that pepper social media and text conversations that have surged in popularity in recent years.
“You can see how traditional alphabet scripts have been struggling to meet the rapid-fire, visually focused demands of 21st century communication,” said Oxford Dictionaries’ president Casper Grathwohl in a statement. “It’s not surprising that a pictographic script like emoji has stepped in to fill those gaps.”
The official name for the chosen emoji is “face with tears of joy,” according to the Unicode Consortium, the organization in charge of emoji standards. It was first introduced in 2010 and variations can be found on iOS and Android devices, on the web, and across social media.
There are more than 1,000 emoji characters, but Oxford could only chose one. A taco or unicorn emoji would have represented the most buzzed-about newcomers. The red heart is one of the oldest emojis.
Oxford Dictionaries teamed up with SwiftKey, a maker of emoji keyboards, to identify the most commonly used emoji. It found the tears of joy face was the most frequently used emoji in 2015, making up 17 percent of all emojis in the U.S. and 20 percent in the UK.
The emoji is the latest in a string of light-hearted picks from Oxford Dictionaries. Last year it went with “vape,” in 2013 it was “selfie,” and in 2012 it was “GIF.”
Social Ads As Effective As Traditional Ads, Study Finds
Social advertising is growing on nearly every platform – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat and more – but the biggest knock against paid social has been proving effectiveness.
It appears the tide is changing. According to a recent study by IZEA, 52 percent of companies surveyed have a sponsored social budget and they find social ads to be in the top three most effective marketing investments they’ve made.
For the second year in a row, marketers are seeing the value in leveraging content creators to reach their target audiences in authentic and original Sponsored content has the ability to dramatically change the trajectory of conversations and sentiment for and about brands – and have the power to send products flying off of shelves.
An interesting trend: many consumers surveyed also said that social ads were as effective as TV ads.
Just how prevalent are social ads? From the IZEA study:
- Over one in three adult online users age 18 to 70 have seen a Sponsored Social message in the past year.
- Consumers estimate they see a total of 86 Sponsored Social messages per month across all platforms – or about three per day.
- About two in five consumers are seeing more Sponsored Social messages than one year ago, with highest penetration sites driving the greatest increase.
- Marketers are feeling a lot better about social ads than in the past. More than half (54 percent) of marketers surveyed feel more positive about paid social than they did a year ago. It definitely shows in the budgets of those polled — 25 percent had an annual budget greater than $500,000; 5 percent of brands surveyed said their social ad budget is greater than $5 million.
- Marketers also reward content creators, as they are willing to pay 2.1x premium for sponsored video and blog posts over other forms of social advertising. Sponsored social is a source of income for 9 of 10 creators, who say it accounts for 55 percent of their income.
Golden Mic | To Paris With Love, Hemingway Style
The world is showing so much love to Paris in the wake of the senseless acts of terrorism that is uniting the world in new ways against the unforgivable ISIS acts. As we continue to reach out to Paris with love, The Spin Cycle wanted to tip his pen to an American who loved Paris more than all others. Ernest Hemingway, whose letters from the City of Light are packed with earthy detail and sensuous appreciation.
The timeless appeal of Paris has lured American expatriates of all shapes and varieties for more than a century. They went there to touch history, and romance, and creative freedom.
Paris became a celebrated destination in the years following World War I when Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and the rest of what Stein dubbed “the Lost Generation” made their homes in the grand city.
Hemingway’s Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast (titled Paris est une Fete in French), is one of the best books written by the prolific story teller. So as the world focuses on the City of Light, the Golden Mic goes to this hero of a bygone era, of happy times once realized – that will certainly be realized again!