Snapchat plans to snag San Francisco-based Vurb, a search and recommendation app, for more than $110 million.  Vurb is an app that was launched in 2011 for iPhones and later expanded to Android and Amazon devices.  Its core purpose makes convenience a priority by showing the user what’s going on in the local area, right down to which groups may be performing.  It also offers recommendations and different ways to communicate with friends.  It seems to be the one-stop shop for finding out what’s going on in your local area, and then some.

 The Details
Vurb is available on both iOS and Android devices and has been referred to as a search engine, much like google.  Once you open the app and create an account, a search bar appears allowing you to search for anything.  Once you search for something the app will pull up relevant information regarding the search item, like Yelp reviews, and directions, to name a few.

However, below the search bar, most of the work has already been done for you.  Recommendations appear on everything from nearby restaurants, movies, performances, and even what’s showing on TV.  The app is also customizable.  You can set up preferences that reflect the things you’re most interested in.  The preferences will also reflect in the types of recommendations that are displayed.  In essence, Vurb is a messaging app, a social network, a recommendation service, and a personalized location-based search engine.

Social Options
Vurb provides many ways to communicate with friends and even has its own feed, much like Facebook.  You can message friends and share local events and happenings with them.  You can even bundle your search results together and share them with friends. This is convenience at its finest.  It even has Uber and google maps roped into the framework.  Although Snapchat is a messaging app, it will be interesting to see how Vurb and Snapchat mix.

Snapchat’s Vurb should prove useful to many people: personalizing searches and making everything easier.  With so many social perks included, it should make sharing any and every type of information a cinch for users.  The fact that the app provides users with information from a localized perspective, makes it extremely useful and personal.  An added plus is the fact that you can go a step further with personalization by using preferences.  It may not have caught on when it first came out, but perhaps Snapchat will give Vurb the steam it needs to power ahead.

Contact Blast Creative today for all of your Social Media needs!

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You’ve seen the minimal, graphical representations known as emojis everywhere – even if you don’t send emails or text frequently. Popular as addendums to notes; or sometimes used as messages all by themselves, emojis are now forging a new niche in advertising, where their capacity for communication has already been employed by industry giants such as Domino’s Pizza and the World Wildlife Federation.

First of All: What Is an Emoji?

An emoji isn’t merely a picture – it’s a character of text in the form of an image. Your browser actually treats it like a language, and the images are uniform in this way. For example, Domino’s might tweet pizza emojis to followers; if you wanted to send a pizza emoji to a friend, you could use the same one as Domino’s. There are, of course, multiple different kinds of pizza emojis; the point is that the same ones available to the pizza giant are also available to you. The word emoji, itself, comes from the Japanese and means “picture, writing, character.”

The verdict is in: people love emojis. They’re a succinct and visually-appealing way to convey a quick message, as well as to immediately identify the company in the breakneck pace of mobile advertising. If your local zoo, for example, tweets out a message with 5 lions as emojis, this could quickly suggest that they just got an import of five new lions – and now would be a great time for that zoo visit you’ve been putting off.

Making Sure Emojis Work for Your Brand

While it’s true that brands can make and use their own emojis, these won’t be considered a part of the official emoji language supported universally by mobile applications and browser. And since the whole point of a company sending out such messages is for public consumption, sending one out that browsers can’t recognize defeats the purpose of advertising.

As is clear, the best way to utilize emojis is on social media platforms. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words, right? The right combination of the two energizes your message, and gives it priority over all the other businesses out there that send out the same entirely word-based tweets and Facebook Wall message week after week.

Businesses That Have Seen Success with Emoji Advertising

There’s a general rule of business: if you want to know what’s successful, watch what the giants are doing. After all, they’ve got expensive and robust analytics at their disposal, and rarely do anything without tons of market research strongly suggesting success. Dove – the soap-maker – uses emojis liberally; in fact, the company made its own, and then made these available for download so that others could use them. Here are a few others:

• Burger King made chicken fries emojis as part of a campaign to announce the return of this food item upon customer request.
• NBA 2016 champions the Cleveland Cavaliers made a string of emojis featuring their current roster of players
• Celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and rapper Wiz Khalifa have made emojis bearing their likeness
• Auto giant Ford Motor Company has also gotten into the emoji spirit

By all accounts, then, it seems as though emoji advertising is beneficial. They make it easier to convey a message in the limited space available for getting your message across on a Smartphone or tablet, and some say that they could form a big part of the future of mobile advertising.

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