Guest post by Alex Vilhena

Here at Chute we say we’re in the middle of a visual revolution, and this visual revolution has opened the doors for another revolution in Brazil. Photos of injustices and events spread like wildfire across not only social media platforms but also the world. In a matter of days, a generation united itself to mobilize protests in dozens of cities around the globe.

Photo by @samuell_piris on Instagram

What’s great about the generation we live in is that these platforms give the people a voice that can be heard. The flow of information has become a two way street, and this newfound dialogue makes the possibility of change more attainable. The people of Brazil have been able to document their own revolution – sharing images of peaceful protests like carrying flowers, wearing white, or even hugging police officers. Due to the power of platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and even Chute to showcase those stories, the general public can have their voices heard at a level never before reached.

Our generation in Brazil has been called many things – the Coca-Cola generation, the Facebook generation, the comfort-zone generation. The conotations always revolved around the same things – that we didn’t fight for anything, that we didn’t have a cause, that we were just comfortable in posting pictures about ourselves. However, the events that ensued after PEC37 and the increase in bus tarifs have evoked something I have never seen or felt. People took to the streets, found their voices, and began to fight for what they deserved. Brazilians showed that they could no longer be appeased by things like Carnaval and the World Cup. Quoting what many have been saying: we don’t want stadiums. we want hospitals, education, proper spending of public funds. A first world country isn’t one where the lower classes also have cars, its one where they have education and healthcare.

You can see see some of the photos being shared from the demonstrations below.

Alex is a recent addition to the Chute sales team. He is a Brazilian who has spent his life between both countries and is the co-founder of The Focal Point – a visual media based non-profit.

Marketing’s purpose is to appeal to the public and get them excited enough to buy into a product, event, or idea. The first step of marketing is to grab someone’s attention. The second step, and most difficult, is to hold that attention to build a stronger and more long-term relationship with the consumer.

A few years ago, content for marketing was created months in advance and then distributed and repeated to consumers. Today, the thought process hasn’t changed much even though our culture has. Retargeting through banner ads has become the golden child of online marketing, despite research that demonstrates the ineffectiveness of using repeated content.

Human Attention to Visual Stimuli

Let’s take a step back and analyze from a non-marketing perspective. At the root of all these theories and proposals is the mighty question: how are people going to react? Human attention has been studied by scientists for decades, ranging from infants to adolescents to adults.

In one study of infants, ranging from 14-to-52 weeks old, researchers measured their attention to faces and various stimuli (both strange and familiar). Conclusive results showed that in the older infants, their look duration tended to decline when repeatedly exposed to the same patterned stimuli, or faces; however, when shown new and different images, they tended to look at the object for the same, if not longer, period of time.

Keep your babies entertained, or they’ll lose interest fast! (taken from Instagram, @mypjays)

What this phenomenon tells us is that this basic property of human behavior is instilled in us from infancy. As an audience, we easily become bored with banners, billboard ads, and commercials the more they are shown to us. For example, everyone loves the revealing of the annual SuperBowl ads for their fresh and entertaining content; however, when shown the same commercial weeks later, our reaction is much different than it was initially because we become bored with recurring content.

Live advertisement offers fresh, engaging content every single time.

Authentic Engagement

Perhaps the most effective approach to marketing is user engagement and integration. While innovative and creative ads can be interesting to view once or twice (such as the SuperBowl ads), users who are able to personally interact and shape content feel a much stronger connection to the platform. We’ve seen this in past Chute-powered campaign launches by companies like Vanity Fair and the NBA, and now what we’re doing at Chute is taking the real-time and user-generated content that makes these campaigns so engaging and bringing them to ads.

New user content is still getting uploaded to VF’s ‘Best Dressed’ Challenge!

Months after the Vanity Fair ‘Best Dressed Challenge,’ new entries are still flowing in – creating evergreen content that can be syndicated across a variety of sites. This constant engagement and audience shows the sustained effectiveness of the real-time and user-generated experience.

NEW YORK, June 12, 2013 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The Wall Street Journal announced today the 24 startups chosen by Wall Street Journal editors to participate in ‘WSJ Startup of the Year,’ an episodic video documentary for WSJ Live, the Journal’s online video platform. Premiering June 24, the series matches the 24 startups with global business leaders and influencers, and tracks their progress from startup to success over the course of five months. In conjunction with announcing the 24 startups, the Journal has also unveiled the documentary’s sizzle reel and will host a panel discussion on entrepreneurship at the Northside Festival in Brooklyn tomorrow, June 13.

Sir Richard Branson, Founder of Virgin Group, Steve Case, Chairman of the Case Foundation, Chairman of Startup America and co-founder and former CEO of AOL, and Tory Burch, CEO and Designer of Tory Burch LLC, are among the global business leaders participating in WSJ Startup of the Year.

Ranging from the fields of health care and philanthropy to energy and education, the 24 companies were chosen from more than 500 applications. Each startup is based in the U.S., has a prototype or proof of concept in place, and less than $10 million in annual revenue. A quick look at the selected companies condensed from their own words:

• Asius Technologies: A new way to deliver sound using patented, inflatable in-ear technology that delivers a richer sound at one-quarter of the volume. asiustechnologies.com
• Brain Sentry: Targeting the more than seven million youth in the U.S. who play football, lacrosse and hockey, Mr. Sentry has developed a helmet-mounted sensor that emits audible alerts when an athlete experiences significant head impact. brainsentry.com
• Brewla: With a focus on consumer health, Brewla aims to reinvent frozen food with items derived from brewed processes. Their current product line, Brewla Bars, are all-natural ice pops with no more than 70 calories, less sugar than an apple, and naturally enhanced with vitamins and minerals. brewlabars.com
• Chute: Helps brands, publishers and agencies leverage real-time and user-generated visual content from photo-sharing tools like Instagram and Flickr. getchute.com
• Gamemaster: Creates a seamless transition between the digital and analog worlds by interactively connecting people through mobile real-life games to be played in real-time. gamemaster-inc.com
• Infina Connect Healthcare Systems: Automates manual coordination processes, enabling medical practices to send, receive and track patient referrals. Since inception, the company has served more than 4,500 physician users in 1,500 clinics in North Carolina. infinaconnect.com
• Kairos: Brings facial recognition to businesses via Kairos ID, helping retailers identify and better serve loyalty customers in-store. kairos.io
• Kenai Sports: Sportswear brand that makes clothing out of trash, including plastic bottles, cell phone cases, keyboards and organic waste, from landfills across the country. kenaisports.com
• Light Point Security: Protects enterprises from web-based malware by allowing employees to browse the web from a virtual machine in the cloud. lightpointsecurity.com
• LiveSchool: Provides schools nationwide with a system for tracking and improving school culture via an app to track behavior and other key classroom management data. whylivesschool.com
• The Muse: A career platform that helps people figure out what they want to do with their lives – and then how to get there – by surfacing job listings, career content and rich media profiles from a spectrum of retail, tech and media companies. themuse.com
• MyCityWay: A multi-national startup pioneering a new generation of self-learning, personalized mobile interfaces and apps to guide residents and visitors through their daily experiences. mycityway.com
• NanoSatisfi: Grounded by the premise that access to space should be simple and widespread, the company enables students and educators to run their own applications, games and experiments onboard a satellite.nanosatisfi.com
• PlanetReuse Marketplace: With a mission to help reduce the amount of landfill waste in the U.S. from 40% to 30% by 2020, PlanetReuse Marketplace powered by InvenQuery makes reclaimed material easier to procure to save money, serve LEED efforts and sustain the planet. marketplace.planetreuse.com
• Radiate Athletics: A sports apparel brand designed to inspire athletes to achieve optimal performance levels by showing body temperature increases during exercise through color changes in the apparel itself.radiateathletics.com
• Rebellion Photonics: Builds special chemical imaging cameras that can spot explosive gas leaks on rigs and refineries. rebellionphotonics.com
• Snaps!: Allows users to add virtual content or “snaps” to new or existing photos to connect brands and consumers more easily. snapsapp.com
• Speek: Makes simple, free and visual conference calls by creating an easy-to-remember personal link (i.e., speek.com/YourName) for calls rather than using a traditional phone number and PIN. speek.com
• SwipeSense: Aims to save 100,000 lives lost every year due to hospital-acquired infections by providing hospital staff with a portable, trackable hand sanitation device that dispenses alcohol gel with the swipe of a hand while transmitting usage data wirelessly to a web-based application. swipesense.com
• Syntellia: Revolutionizes typing on smartphones by allowing users to type on the familiar keyboard layout without needing to look at the screen. It does this through patent-pending, predictive text technology initially created for the blind. syntellia.com
• Trendalytics: A platform that helps brands and retailers understand which merchandise trends resonate with consumers in the apparel and accessories industry by monitoring over a billion online signals and leveraging proprietary algorithms to identify patterns in online search behavior and consumer engagement.trendalytics.co
• Troop ID: Digital identification technology that allows members of the military community to securely prove military service online in order to claim exclusive benefits from retailers. troopid.com
• WeDidIt: An online and mobile platform for nonprofit fundraising that provides organizations the tools they need to develop and launch engaging crowdfunding. wedid.it
• ‘ZinePak: Creates small-format entertainment magazines called ‘ZinePaks for celebrities, musicians and brands. zinepak.com

Dovetailing with the launch and as part of the Northside Festival, a multi-day event focused on technology, music and film, the Journal is hosting a panel focused on entrepreneurship tomorrow, June 13, in the Wythe Hotel’s private screening room in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Moderated by Vanessa O’Connell (@VanessaOConnell), the Journal’s entrepreneurship editor and creator of The Accelerators blog, the panel features three Startup of the Year mentors: Jeff Pulver, co-founder of Vonage, David Tisch, managing partner at Box Group and co-founder of TechStars NYC, and Nancy Lublin, CEO of Do Something Inc.

The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is the exclusive sponsor of the five-month project. Launched in 2012, NYSE’s Big Startup initiative is a nationwide jobs-growth program designed to connect young companies and entrepreneurs with corporate America.

NYSE is not involved in the creation of the content, which is solely the responsibility of The Wall Street Journal news department.

WSJ Startup of the Year is produced in conjunction with New York-based production company Ish Entertainment.

To watch WSJ Startup of the Year’s sizzle reel, please visit: wsj.com/startupoftheyear

About The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal is America’s largest newspaper by total average circulation with more than 2.3 million subscribers and 36 million global digital visitors per month. In recent years, The Journal has expanded its core content offering to include coverage of the arts, culture, lifestyle, sports, and personal health, building on its heritage as the leading source of business and financial news. Published by Dow Jones, one of the world’s largest news gathering operations with 2,000 journalists in more than 50 countries, the Wall Street Journal now spans 12 editions in nine languages, engaging readers across newspapers, websites, magazines, social media, and video. The Journal holds 35 Pulitzer Prizes for outstanding journalism.

Instagram offers brands the unique opportunity to create a more personal experience with their audience. Just like the platform allows you to share and see moments from everyday life, companies on Instagram get to humanize and shape their brand personality in a more authentic community-focused manner.

While the platform provides the opportunity for a more casual look into a company, there are still some practices to avoid. Below we’ve listed 3 of the most common mistakes brands make on Instagram.

1. #Tagging #Every #Single #Thing

The hashtag is a powerful tool in our social society, and it’s only going to continue growing. However, creating whole paragraphs of hashtags isn’t an effective use-case. When your #sentences #begin #to #look #like #this, you may want to reevaluate your social strategy. Instagram is a place for you to shape your brand’s image, and using too many hashtags can look a little desperate or like spam. Nobody wants that.

The remedy? Some simple research. Before launching a product or campaign, you’d do some market research, right? Your social accounts are no different. Create a list of competitors and similar businesses along with top brand accounts on Instagram to see how and what they choose to tag. Take note of which tags generate the most interest and what tags don’t perform as well.

Now, create a list of hashtags you think your brand could use – from orignal branded tags to popular tags you want your brand associated with – and do a quick search of each. You don’t want to accidentally be using another company’s branded phrasing or a tag that generates content you don’t want your brand associated with.

This list of curated, researched, and active tags will prove infinitely more beneficial than random phrases and words that are loosely related to your photo.

2. Not Planning

One other mistake is not planning out posts, which leads to missing a great moment or opportunity to grow your audience. While much of what you post to Instagram is going to be real-time moments, think about upcoming events you want to document or types of content you can make anytime in-house that you know your fans will like. Create a growing list of the kinds of regular content around your products and audience’s interest. For example, online fashion retailer Asos posts nail art and outfits as part of their regular content and the Today Show always features lots of behind-the-scenes photos.

3. Lacking Agility

Then, there are the accounts that only ever plan. When a story breaks, people flock to social media to get the latest developments. In these moments, your audience potential grows exponentially. After the Superbowl, was any ad discussed more than Oreo’s Instagram photo during the blackout? Is any ad still discussed as much as the Oreo Twitter photo is? No. And it wasn’t even an ad! Nobody paid millions of dollars to put that ad in front of millions of people. Instead, Oreo knew that people would be flocking to Twitter to discuss the power outage, and decided to leverage that new audience.

What are some Instagram mistakes of tips? Share them with us in the comments or on Twitter.

Venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) recently released their annual Internet Trends report – showing the direction digital media is heading in 2013 and beyond.

The first bit of info that stuck out to us was the substantial and swift growth photo sharing saw from 2012 to 2013, which is the largest spike from the year range of 2005 to 2013. The growth isn’t slowing at all either with platforms like Instagram and Snapchat driving the acceleration.

Shared content especially saw massive growth from 2005 to 2013, growing 9x in the time between 2008 and today. KPCB projects that by 2015, the amount will double.

So, what is the takeaway from the trend report? First, that visual media is more important than ever before. The Visual Revolution isn’t just a trend, it’s a complete shift in the way people are creating, sharing, and ingesting stories. With consumers making this switch, it’s vital for all companies, from brands to publishers , to be swift and agile in their own transition to visual-focused content.

Second, sharing is becoming more intrinsic to the human experience. And with KPCB predicting that wearable tech like Google Glass and Memoto are going to be the next smartphones and tablets, that is only going to become even more true.

Only a few years ago, marketing content was created in meetings months in advance. Today, companies are beginning to create in-house newsrooms to create sharable content in real time and to engage their fans to do the same. This cutting-edge marketing technique is going to be the standard in only a short amount of time.

You can view the entire report over at KPCB’s website.

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The media industry has shifted to a 24/7 publishing cycle, and Chute is helping advertisers do the same. Today, the online ad industry is looking for a way to create ads that actually engage and spark consumer interest. We created Chute Ads as the solution to a web filled with static and forgettable ad units and will be launching our first ad with Conde Nast Traveler this month.

Whether you’re trying to make sure your retargeted ads have more impact, leverage your earned and owned media through paid media, or just create a more engaging ad experience for consumers, Chute has rich-media solutions.

Memorable retargeting

Retargeted ads offer huge potential for marketers to create strong and memorable relationships with consumers, but often this potential is squandered with the use of static repeated ads.

Earned media meets paid media meets owned media

Whether it’s on Twitter, Instagram, Vine, or another social platform, users are interacting with brands at an unprecedented rate. Furthermore, brands’ marketing teams are trying to operate more like publishers while publishers are creating more media for their social outlets. Chute empowers marketers to safely and easily leverage this earned and owned content into paid content. We make it easy for you to not only use this content but create it.

Real-time and evergreen content

Brands are launching and promoting ongoing hashtag campaigns on rolling and one-time basis to engage with online users. King Arthur Flour encourages people who cook or bake with their product to snap a photo of their food and add #KingArthurFlour, and Sephora uses #SephoraPantone to promote the Pantone makeup collection and Color of the Year. These are tags that people remember and use in current and future posts. Chute Ads lets you put this evergreen content along with one-off campaigns in real-time ads.

Social and interactive capabilities

Interaction with ads is becoming one of the most important features of the ad experience. Interaction is what encourages a longer-term brand/consumer relationship. Whereas social sharing spreads the word about your campaign and ad to thousands more.

To learn more about how Chute can help your advertising, shoot us an email at hello@getchute.com.

After one of the most destructive tornados in history, CNN Opinion Columnist John D. Sutter decided to walk the tornado’s 17 mile-long path – photographing and tweeting the entire way with #TornadoWalk. The result is a glimpse into the communities affected and the resilient strength of the rebuilders, volunteers, and emergency workers.

Ok im up early and starting the #tornadowalk. 17 miles. 40 min for the tornado. Will be longer for me.

— John D. Sutter (@jdsutter) May 24, 2013

American flag. VHS tapes. Party ballons. Plaid sofa. Gas can. Tree limbs. #tornadowalk twitter.com/jdsutter/statu…

— John D. Sutter (@jdsutter) May 24, 2013

You can check out all photos shared during Sutter’s walk over at our display here, and be sure to follow him over on Twitter.

Maintaining a fashion-brand’s Instagram account takes more than just posting photos of new clothes. People use Instagram to show moments from their everyday life, and scrolling through an active Instagrammer’s life gives an insight to their personality and lifestyle.

Likewise, a really well-maintained brand account will do the same thing. In the case of Burberry, that means lush parties and behind-the-scenes of runways. For Victoria’s Secret, that means sun-kissed beaches and summer-themed quotes. These accounts promote an entire brand lifestyle, creating a full experience for a consumer to buy into when they make a purchase.

Check out the gallery bellow of 5 of our favorite fashion brands on Instagram.

From Left to Right: Burberry, Forever21, Nike, Victoria’s Secret, TopShop

This past Monday was arguably one of the better days Yahoo! has seen in awhile. The company made two big announcements that underscore the growing shift towards consumer-created content with the acquisition of Tumblr and redesign of Flickr.

Not only do these announcements reflect Marissa Mayer’s influence and impact as Yahoo!’s new CEO, but they also represent the speed in which our industry is moving towards a world where the media is made by the consumer.

As Meyer said during Yahoo!’s event in which both announcements were made:

“There’s no such thing as Flickr Pro, because today, with cameras as pervasive as they are, there is no such thing really as professional photographers. … We wanted everyone to have professional quality photos, space, and sharing.”

The lines between professional and consumer content generation are blurring – making the hashtag even more compelling and powerful.

One of the reasons Tumblr has thrived and garnered the attention of Yahoo!, stems from the communities built around specific hashtags such as a favorite TV show like Game of Thrones or social issue like immigration reform.

When a person joins a community that shares the same values or passion, that topic moves from being just a passive engagement into one that is more personal and emotional. The need to promote and share these interests across the digital landscape become heightened as these activities are increasingly woven into the fabric of their day-to-day lives.

The hashtag is no longer just a search tool – it’s a community builder, and as the hashtag grows to be supported on more and more platforms like Pinterest and (soon) Facbook – it becomes and easy and instant way for anyone to plug directly into a community on any platform. While this has often happened organically on Tumblr, it is still up to brands to add legitimacy to the community and encourage it to grow. This can explain why so many brands like Target, Coca Cola and the BBC have joined the site to engage with their customers in recent months.

A case in point is Doctor Who. As one of the BBC’s more popular shows, Doctor Who turned to Tumblr to develop communities of fans where viewers can discuss and share their feelings about certain characters and storylines featured in the show through fanart and gifs leading up to and during the airing of new episodes.

As a result of this shift, we are also seeing the proliferation of the brand advocate – the regular fans who post post about or create content around a brand just because they’re a fan. Essentially, what Tumblr and similar sites have created is an innovative platform for fans to voice their feelings about a specific brand. This is arguably more impactful than any paid media since people have a propensity to trust their own friends.

In the days since Yahoo!’s announcement, a lot of questions have been raised about whether or not this deal was a good one and how the company plans to make any money. The community and content-focused environment would suggest the Youtube partner opt-in model might be a good option for the blogging platform.

However, the value should not only be seen through the monetization of any inventory, but rather the number of advocates a brand can accumulate. You can’t put a price tag on consumer trust. Not even $1.1 billion.

During a search for the perfect daily camera bag, I perused the site of a popular bag designer. Afterwards, I spent the next week being followed by ads for the designer. I was retargeted.

Basic retargeted ads make total sense on the surface. Show someone the same picture over and over again encourages brand recognition. It may even encourage buying a product by reminding the user of it. But does it create any kind of lasting impression? Does it build a relationship between the consumer and brand? No. Each ad from that designer featured the same model in the same pose with the same bag. If anything, it dulled my interest in purchasing the bag at all.

Retargeted ads offer so much potential. When a consumer goes to look at a brand or publisher’s content, they’re making the first step in developing a relationship with the company. Retargeted ads, when done right, should still create that brand recognition, but it should also go a step further and encourage brand loyalty, advocacy, and community.

Here are 4 common issues with retargeted ads:

1. They’re static

Have you ever experienced the sensation where you say a word so many times that it begins to lose its meaning? The same can be said of advertisements. Each time you have someone look at the same image it’s going to lose it’s impact – especially when it’s already a fairly standard-looking image.

Today especially, people are used to a constant flow of new information. In 2008, being able to show someone the same image over and over again might have been seen as revolutionary. Now, it’s just a waste of your ad’s potential.

2. They lack amazing content

Here’s the thing: people don’t really like ads. Or, at least, they don’t like the boring standard ads they’ve grown accustomed to. They are viewed as a necessary evil for them to get to the content they really want to see. The burden on advertisers is to create content that is just as, if not more, interesting as the competing content on the page. This means the content should be unique, visual, and useful to your audience – even if its usefulness is just that it’s entertaining.

3. There’s no interaction

And no, that link to your site doesn’t count. Give your audience the chance to get creative in your ad experience, and make sure that that content is shareable on their social channels. Often companies will create these experiences as standalone pages – like when Lionsgate gave Hunger Games fans the ability to build their own District identity cards. But there’s no reason why content like this can’t live within ad units around the web.

4. They’re not human-focused

Every ad needs to have a human element – something your audience can see and relate to. Chances are, your audience isn’t going to relate to the model you place on every website. People can relate to their friends though. And they can relate to stories from people that could be their friends. This is where user-generated content comes in.

Using retargeting to connect with the users most likely to engage with your company is great. However, you’re not going to promote any kind of longterm relationship or engagement with a boring (and ignorable) ad. We saw these missing factors in ads and created Chute Ads in response, so marketers could create interactive human-focused ads with real-time updated content.