The “selfie”, a pop culture phenomenon, has become the new face of advertising.
We are all guilty of taking the occasional selfie, some more than others, and our Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter would not be the same without them. The “gym selfie”, which floods our social media every Spring and Summer, has been popularised by fitness models such as Jen Selter, who created the “belfie” and has over 4.6 million followers on Instagram.
Friskis and Svettis, a Swedish gym franchise, has capitalised on the popularity of the selfie through the ‘Selfie Ads’ marketing campaign, which began in 2013. The brand distributed t-shirts to gym members with the reversed logo on the front and name of the gym branch, and asked them to take a selfie wearing the t-shirt at the gym, and post it on Instagram with a trending exercise hashtag.
In the two week campaign, hundreds of selfies were posted on Instagram, and were featured in the most popular exercise feeds. This generated millions of impressions in the target market, and increased the visibility and popularity of the brand on social media. People continue to post these selfies on Instagram, which are used as advertisements for the brand.
This campaign provided Friskis and Svettis gym members with the opportunity to become part of the brand, and create their own content, which established a more personal relationship between the brand and it’s customers. The use of popular hashtags, such as #gym, #training, and #fitness, increased the visibility of the images, and is an effective tool that marketers can use to promote their posts on social media.
A great example of how brands can use the selfie to promote their products is Samsung and the famous “Oscar’s selfie”, which is the most re-tweeted selfie of all time.
This may seem like the “perfect” selfie, however, it is actually an advertisement for the Samsung Galaxy Note 3, which generated over 32.8 million impressions in the first 24 hours. Samsung sponsored the Oscar’s for $20 million, while the selfie is reportedly worth between $800 million and $1 billion in value to the brand.
LG even created an advertisement using the notorious Oscar’s selfie:
To learn more about the truth behind the Oscar’s selfie, read these articles from The Australian and Advertising Age.
For all you selfie lovers, here is some inspiration!
What do you think of the selfie trend? Do you think it should be used as a marketing strategy?
The Digital Life 