It was only a matter of time before Apple Music made a claim on the Super Bowl Halftime show, and with their inaugural sponsored performance for Super Bowl 57, they certainly aren’t starting small. Rihanna has been officially named as the headliner and the announcement came not from an official tweet, a news release, or a press conference, but through a static Instagram image of her hand holding an NFL football. The post’s simplicity saw immediate virality across nearly every social media platform reacting to the image.
Supporting this release, the NFL changed its Instagram bio to read: “National Fenty League @badgirlriri | @applemusic.” Additionally, Apple Music curated two official NFL Halftime pre-performance playlists titled, - Essentials by Rihanna and Super Bowl Halftime Headliners - to feed fans who would certainly be searching for Rihanna’s catalog of music.
As a bystander watching this all unfold, it was impressive to see how the biggest moment in sports and culture leaned so heavily on this idea of simplicity when the social world has been pushing users towards more dynamic, video-based content to see the engagement they want from the algorithms.
This choice of digital strategy opens an important question we must answer – to drive real engagement across social, should we be leaning more into this idea of creating cultural currency rather than chasing trendy of-the-moment content framework like short form video?
For the NFL and Apple Music, the announcement called for curating content that could let Rihanna’s unique type of social currency shine. In fact, it could very well be said that Rihanna carries the most cultural currency among any celebrity, musician, or influencer even without having released any new music or content in the past few years.
For context, this year Rihanna is to date the 34th most streamed artist generating 1.67 billion on-demand streams. Additionally, Rihanna’s cultural currency has remained more consistent than almost any other recording artist this past decade as noted by the success of her album Anti which has spent a whopping 332 weeks on the Billboard 200 and has earned 5 million equivalent album units.
As we get closer to the big Super Bowl Halftime show, it will be interesting to see how Apple Music and the NFL utilize Rihanna’s social currency across TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and of course Apple Music’s streaming service to drum up excitement for the biggest night in sports and culture.
Quick Hits: Data
- Acast, the world’s largest independent podcast company, has released the first ever research on podcast listening habits in Asia. The report found that 81% of podcast listeners in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan now listen daily or weekly. Additionally, podcasts form a considerable part of listeners’ media consumption, with people listening for seven hours on average each week.
- Pew Research examined Americans’ use of social media for news consumption and found that 33% of TikTok users now say they regularly get their news on the social video app, up from 22% in 2020. Meanwhile, nearly every other social media site saw declines across that same metric — including Facebook, where now only 44% of its users report regularly getting their news there, down from 54% two years ago.
- Morning Consult polled 16,000 "Gen Z adults” in the US, to find out how favorably they view thousands of brands;86% of Gen Z adults have a favorable impression of YouTube, making it the most popular brand in the cohort. Additionally, 6 of the top 20 standout brands for Gen Z are gaming brands or brands heavily involved in the gaming industry including Discord and Twitch.
- Spotify released its latest Fan Study, Podcast Edition report which found that Gen Z’s podcast discovery is growing at more than twice the rate of other age groups. Podcasts on Spotify tend to see their biggest traction within the first four months of a show’s history.
- Music Watch’s latest streaming survey found that 73 million people listened to music on social video platforms, including TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts. On average, users of social video apps who are listening to content with or about music are spending nearly 8 hours per week on those platforms.
- Domo published their annual ‘Data Never Sleeps’ overview, which looks at exactly how much activity is happening online every minute: 5.9M google searches, 66K Instagram posts shared, 500 hours of YouTube videos uploaded, and 16M texts get sent every minute.
- Adobe released its annual Emoji Trend Report, which looks at how, when and why people are posting emojis: 73% believe that adding emoji to your messages makes you cooler, friendlier, and funnier while 91% use emoji to bring levity to conversations. The top 5 most popular emojis in the US are: 😂, 👍, ❤️, 🤣, and 😢.
- Snapchat found in a new report that AR may actually be a far more significant, practical innovation, with immediate use cases that can provide direct value and enhancement to everyday life when compared to the metaverse or broader Web3 technologies like NFTs. By 2025, around 60% of people in the US, and almost all people who use social/communications apps, will be frequent AR users.
- Social Psychological and Personality Science found that women are more likely than men to choose true crime media because of the educational aspect, the psychological aspect and because the victims are often female.
- Triple Whale found that TikTok is the most valuable platform for direct-to-consumer advertisers. Ad spending by DTC brands on TikTok has surged 231% over the past year, hitting $30 million in the second quarter of 2022, the highest growth among major online platforms including Facebook.
- Cumulus Media’s 2022 Audioscape report which examines the latest podcast consumer and smart speaker trends found that the podcast audience is 50% more likely to have graduated college and have a post-graduate degree. From an employment standpoint, podcast listeners are 29% more likely to be full-time employed, 39% more likely to work in a white-collar role, and 36% more likely to have a $100K+ household income.
- Regus’ new future of work report found that more than 2/3 of company leaders believe that the metaverse is the future of work, while a similar proportion anticipate that their company will embrace working in the metaverse in the future.
Quick Hits: Platforms
- Twitch is set to reduce the subscription revenue it shared with some of the biggest streamers on its service, shrinking their cut from 70% to 50% in certain situations. For context, from April through June 2022, people watched 5.64 billion hours of streams on Twitch across 9.6 million distinct channels on the service whereas YouTube Gaming, the internet’s second-most-popular service, topped out at 1.13 billion hours according to StreamLabs.
- Spotify launched an audiobooks section on its streaming service, offering a third type of audio content for its customers beyond music and podcasts. Audiobooks will be made available to U.S. users who will be able to access a selection of some 300,000+ titles, recommended by Spotify editors. But over time, the company says it plans to expand audiobooks to other markets, grow its selection and begin to use algorithmic recommendations to suggest books to users, as it does now with its other audio formats.
- LinkedIn launched Document Ads which will enable advertisers to promote long-form documents direct in user feeds, which can also be made available via sign-up to maximize response data.
- LinkedIn launched two new features to better curate company account pages. First, businesses can now highlight their favorite comments on posts by pinning them to the top of the comment section. Second, LinkedIn added a new section of LinkedIn pages called “Our featured commitments” where your organization can showcase its most important values for job seekers and potential partners.
- Twitter has launched a public test of a new ‘Views’ count on some users’ tweets, which displays the total number of times that each of your tweets was seen in the app.
- Twitter is adding new features such as a video recommendations tab in the explore section and viewer expands videos to full screen with a single click, allowing you to easily access the full, immersive viewing experience to make it easier for users to watch and discover videos on its platform.
- Twitter launched alt-text reminders, a tool that makes your content more accessible and inclusive for fans who use screen readers. Alt-text reminders are written descriptions of what is in an image and are an opt-in feature, so be sure to turn it on in account settings.
- TikTok launched a new feature for #BookTok fans in partnership with Penguin Random House that allows users to share and link to their favorite books within their videos. When clicked, the link directs viewers to a page with details about the book, including a brief summary and a collection of other videos that are linked to the same book.
- TikTok rolled out its comment “dislike” button to users worldwide. The button, like Reddit’s downvote, allows users to signal which comments they think are irrelevant or inappropriate.
- TikTok increased the character limit for video descriptions from 300 characters to 2,200 characters, giving users more room to explain their content. By including more descriptive keywords on your posts, you create more opportunities for your videos to be discovered in search results and recommended in the For You page. For instance, you can include step-by-step instructions, product breakdowns, recipes, or descriptive context.
- TikTok added video retention stats to its in-app analytics. The feature includes a graph showing the points where viewers stopped watching your video. This can help you understand your viewers’ behavior to inform your content strategy, as you can track when fan interest in your content starts to decline.
- Instagram confirmed it’s developing a feature that would protect users from unsolicited nude photos in their DMs. The feature will be opt-in when launched to the public, according to findings in the app’s code.
- Instagram announced Stories under 60 seconds will no longer be split into 15-second segments, providing fans with a more seamless viewing experience. This also makes it easier to repost Stories onto your main feed as Reels, as you no longer have to worry about the segmented format.
- Instagram is testing a tool that lets creators add more than one link to their profile bio. Prior to this announcement, many brands and creators leveraged platforms like third-party link-in-bio-platforms, like Linktree, to create single links that, when clicked, showcase several links all in one place.
- Discord launched Forum Channels to allow community members to break off into subchannels for more focused, topic-related conversations. Server owners can create permissions and guidelines for Forum Channels to steer the conversation, and there is no limit to the number of channels you can create.
- YouTube added new features and capabilities for narrating Shorts content, including the ability to add voiceovers. Using this feature, you can incorporate more creativity in your content by including instructions, explanations, reactions, funny comments, or new sounds.
Quick Hits: Podcasts
- Cumulus Media has struck up a partnership with YAP Media to monetize, market, and distribute all their existing and forthcoming podcasts. Joining the Cumulus Podcast Network is YAP Media’s flagship podcast, Young and Profiting, hosted by YAP Media founder and CEO Hala Taha, who interviews the brightest minds in the world to unpack their wisdom into actionable advice.
Quick Hits: Metaverse and Web3:
- Walmart has officially entered the metaverse with two experiences, Walmart Land and Walmart’s Universe of Play, in gaming platform Roblox. The retail giant’s first foray into the virtual world will feature a blimp that drops toys, a music festival with hot artists, a bunch of different games, and a store of virtual merchandise, or “verch,” which matches what customers may find in Walmart’s stores and on its website.
- Dating.com opened a “meta-dating space for modern singles” in Decentraland where singles can meet, mingle, and go on dates via their avatars. The company said in a statement, “singles can build relationships focused on personality, shared values and common interests, without any fear of wasting time and money on in-person dates.”
Quick Hits: Campaigns We Are Inspired By
- Jack in the Box is looking to hire a Twitch streamer to run the company’s Twitch account. Jack in the Box has put a call out to all Twitch influencers and creators to share a video of why they should be the ones leading this initiative. The job responsibilities will be centered around the development and execution of social media and content creation strategy. The creator will also unveil a virtual avatar version of mascot Jack as well as host weekly programming and other events. Another key function of the role is to collaborate with personalities and streamers, which could help the company spread its roots to niche fan bases on the platform.
