Marketing Trend Tracker - Series 3
Welcome back to this month’s edition of our Trend Tracker series! This past month brought the release of the long-anticipated Barbie and Oppenheimer movies, the introduction of Meta’s new app, Threads, and new collaborative tools on Canva.
Barbie and Oppenheimer Take the Marketing World by Storm
The wait is over. Arguably, the two largest movies of the summer were released last Friday. Over the weekend, the films brought in a combined revenue of $235.5 million in the United States, with Barbie accounting for $155 million and Oppenheimer bringing in the remaining $80.5 million.
Barbie and Oppenheimer have coexisted for several months as natural opposites, much like a yin and yang relationship, because of their differing subject matter and color schemes. Fans created a friendly rivalry between the two films and encouraged people to pick a side: Team Barbie or Team Oppenheimer. Through this emerged the term “Barbenheimer”, a collective term for both films.
On top of the immense amount of organic content generated by social media users, Barbie launched a marketing campaign that undoubtedly blew Oppenheimer out of the water. The Barbie marketing team partnered with brands like Vans, Progressive, Crocs, Coldstone Creamery, and
more. A listing for a
Malibu Barbie DreamHouse-themed property even went up for rent on AirBNB.
Warner Brothers’ $150 million marketing budget (which surpassed the film’s production budget of $145 million) for Barbie made most of these extravagant strategies a reality.
Threads: Twitter’s Newest Rival
On July 5th, Mark Zuckerberg and the Meta team released Threads, a Twitter-like app that is connected to each user’s Instagram account. The app received an astounding 100 million sign-ups within a week of its debut. Hundreds of top brands flocked to Threads to begin their social media campaigns on the app and generate higher engagement rates than most other social platforms.
In spite of its strong start, over the past week, Threads has seen a
70% decline in its active users. Meta has said that it plans to add significant updates to draw users back to Threads. However, Elon Musk’s
rebranding of Twitter to X could be the driving factor that Meta needs to pull users back to Threads.
Canva Becomes More Collaborative
Over the past few months, Canva has continuously released new innovative software updates, including Create an Animation and Magic Edit. In July, Canva announced the release of three new tools to help your marketing team collaborate seamlessly.
Canva’s Draw feature lets users freely sketch on a digital whiteboard using various drawing tools. This feature is extremely useful when sketching out ideas for social posts to share with your team. These whiteboards can then be shared on your team’s planning documents and spreadsheets.
Canva has made sharing these whiteboards and other designs even easier by embedding them straight through the share button. Users can embed these designs into their documents and spreadsheets to make content sharing with coworkers and clients less complicated.
If your team prefers to collaborate right on Canva, sticky notes are now available to make comments on designs. Sticky notes can help you leave suggestions directly on any design, limiting confusion while making edits.
At SparkShoppe, we never miss a beat when it comes to keeping up with the trends.
Reach out to us today to learn how we can help your company stay ahead of the times with our expert team of marketers!
