Marketing News Canada: Partnerships, Announcements, and More!

Thinkingbox Announces Partnership with Snap Inc. In Canada

Global creative collective Thinkingbox has today announced that it has been named an official Canadian partner for Snap Inc., building out AR lens experiences for a variety of brands.

Thinkingbox has been developing AR experiences for brands like Cheetos, Porsche, Adidas and Kiehl’s since 2012, building everything from AR apps and out-of-home AR to webAR and filters/lenses.

"We're seeing an explosion of interest in AR on Snapchat in Canada," said Matthew Shore, Senior Creative Strategist, Snap Inc. "As one of Snap's first official Canadian partners, we look forward to working with Thinkingbox on innovative AR experiences as the demand for AR marketing continues to grow."
“We are well established in the use of Snap’s Lens Studio with our brand clients, so moving to being a Canadian partner for the platform really feels like a natural fit that solidifies our expertise,” said Amir Sahba, CEO and Founder of Thinkingbox. “Our teams have an extreme passion for the medium and all its forms, and our portfolio speaks for itself. We are extremely excited to be partnering with Snap Inc. and continuing building on our success.”

Thinkingbox is a global creative collective shaping the future of brands like Adobe, Intuit, Riot Games and Pinterest through craft and curiosity. Our diverse team partners with business at the intersection of creativity and technology. We champion collaboration to deliver authentic strategy and storytelling across our four key service offerings; digital, experiential, content, and social.

Mailchimp Announces Direct Integration with Shopify

Mailchimp is excited to announce a new partnership with Shopify to deliver a new direct integration available today. New and existing users of Mailchimp and Shopify will be able to connect their Mailchimp account with their Shopify storefront through a direct integration, eliminating the need for third-party tools and manual data transfers.

By connecting Mailchimp and Shopify directly, merchants will be able to combine the power of purchase data with marketing data and use those insights to help drive conversions, increase revenue, and reach more customers at the right point of their buying journey. Mailchimp is launching this new direct integration now so that its small business customers are ready to connect with their audiences and make this one of their most profitable holiday selling seasons yet.

“Last year, Mailchimp customers generated 36 percent more orders from Thanksgiving to Giving Tuesday than they did in 2019, showing just how important having an online presence for commerce and retail businesses really is,” said Joni Deus, VP of App Marketplace at Mailchimp. “We’re thrilled to have partnered with Shopify again ahead of our customers’ busiest season to make it easier for merchants to reach their customers, sell more stuff, and be successful.”
“As our merchants prepare for the holiday season and continue to adjust to the new realities of commerce, we're excited to welcome Mailchimp to the Shopify Partner Ecosystem,” said Fatima Yusuf, Director of Commercial, App Ecosystem, Shopify. "The combined power of Mailchimp's suite of marketing tools and Shopify's robust commerce infrastructure will level the playing field and unlock even more opportunity for independent businesses to grow and succeed into the future.”

The company is also excited to share that they’ve acquired the ShopSync app, which has helped tens of thousands of Mailchimp users connect their accounts to Shopify stores over the past two years. Mailchimp so appreciative to the ShopSync team for their excellent work in building the app and supporting it for the last two years. Their great work made it easy for the company to bring it in-house and integrate it into the platform.

Amazon Ads ‘unBoxes’ Four New Advertising and Measurement Solutions

Amazon Ads announced four new products and updates designed to help Canadian brands grow. Relentlessly inventing to create value for brands, sellers, authors, and shoppers, the new offering by Amazon Ads will allows users how to build authentic connections with their customers while proving they’re accomplishing their goals through high-fidelity measurement.

These powerful tools were announced this morning at Amazon Ads’ third annual unBoxed Conference. Streaming live and on-demand through October 27th, the event features conversations from Amazon executives across Twitch, Amazon Studios, and Wondery about the latest trends in advertising and insights into how technology has transformed the customer journey.

Specific to Canada, Amazon Ads unveiled the following new services to the market:

Brand Metrics

• A new, self-service solution that goes beyond ad-attributed metrics. Brand metrics helps brands quantify and optimize their performance based on high-value shopping with their brand in Amazon’s store.

Sponsored Display in livestreams on Twitch

• Sponsored Display adsareself-service, cost-per-click ads that can be created in minutes and extend a brand’s presence to reach relevant audiences both within and beyond Amazon’s store.
• While Sponsored Display ads already appear on Twitch browse and discovery pages, now for the first time, brands who use Sponsored Display will be able to reach audiences with display ads as they watch Twitch streamers.

Two new updates to Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC)

• Amazon Ads’ has added two new updates to AMC, which is the service’s holistic, media measurement and analytics solution. The updates enable advertisers to upload their own datasets and the addition of an Instructional Query Library in the AMC UI.

For more information, you can read the Amazon blog post here!

Billboard debuts its new Hot Trending Songs Powered by Twitter chart

Billboard Hot Trending Songs Powered by Twitter provides a real-time ranking of the most discussed songs on Twitter globally and will capture conversations over the last 24 hours and the past seven days.

A weekly version of the chart will cover activity from Friday to Thursday and will post alongside Billboard’s other weekly charts on billboard.com & Billboard’s Twitter handles, @Billboard and @BillboardCharts each Tuesday.

From conversations around upcoming song announcements to comments on new releases, trending tracks and buzzworthy musical moments, Billboard Top Trending Songs will chronicle what is happening in music right now, demonstrating the power of Twitter to ignite or re-ignite a song or an artist. Billboard and Twitter are uniquely positioned to give fans a window into trending music culture and to give brand partners a chance to be a part of the Twitter trending conversations in a consistent and impactful way. The chart is sponsored by Rémy Martin.

Compiled by Emma Whiten, Editor of Marketing News Canada