Brands embrace Periscope to cut through $60B worth of web advertising noise

Brand advertisers have taken notice of new livestreaming platforms like Periscope, and they are trying to use them to cut through the noise of digital marketing.

This year, the digital advertising spend will approach $60 billion, so brands are increasingly challenged to get their message out to the right people.

At a session at the Ad:tech conference in New York Thursday, several brands ran through case studies where live digital content is being used to reach consumers.

Twitter was in the house, too, to talk about its Periscope service, which brands are increasingly seeing as the go-to medium for their live content creations.

Periscope, by the way, now supports horizontal video, and can be viewed in the living room on Apple TV, said Twitter senior brand strategist Tom Chirico.

Blumhouse Films (makers of the Paranormal Activity movies) produced the first live horror movie on Periscope, called Fifteen, on Halloween.

General Electric used live Periscope footage shot from drones to show its vast fields of clean energy wind turbines from the air. The drones also toured GE testing facilities and manufacturing plants across the country.

GE created a whole campaign around the drone videos, and promoted it to media.

“Anytime you innovate on a new platform, you have to build the whole experience around it, and you have to make a big deal out of it,” said GE global director of innovation Sam Olstein. “You have to make a big deal of it internally.”

Wendy’s used YouTube stars Rhett and Link (Good Mythical Morning) in a live video session where the two interacted with fans. Behind it all was a branded campaign for a Wendy’s drink.

In all, Wendy’s six-hour session produced 57 customer videos, started 1,378 Twitter conversations, and reached 1.5 million unique visitors.

Wendy’s is working with the idea of spending its entire advertising budget on nontraditional media like live web video and Periscope, said digital marketing director Mike Bueno.

“We can’t talk about specific sales numbers, but we did see that this program did substantially move sales,” Bueno said.

“These platforms are the new studios,” said Will Keenan, Streamup‘s president and chief content officer, of the Periscopes and Snapchats of the world. “Wherever the eyeballs go, advertisers will follow.”