In a world where products are increasingly bought or worn like a badge of honour — Android versus iPhone, anyone? — it could be said that you are what you advertise. One startup hoping to cash in on the steadfastness of brand loyalty is Barcelona-based Adictik.
The company’s iOS app lets you create ‘personal’ ads for the brands you love. Take a photo, overlay a brand logo from a choice of over 500, and share the resulting photo on the Adictik social network and elsewhere.
“We realized that we can solve two problems in one app,” says Adictik co-founder Laura Santolaria. “In one hand, users increasingly generate more and more brand-related content, yet brands fail to appreciate the significance of their fans. In the other hand, brands are trying to connect with their target audience through an infinite number of channels.”
Thus Adictik wants to be the channel for brand affiliation to rule them all. Or perhaps the ‘Instagram for brands’ with its focus on photo creating and sharing.
But will fans of brands bite? So far the startup thinks the signs are good. A quiet launch in July has since seen 15,000 downloads. More promising, 10,000 ads have been created by users, ratcheting up more than 500,000 mobile screen impressions.
“With Adictik we created an app that turns your photos into ads where you are the star and brands can use them for their brand content and reward the fans’ generated content,” adds Santolaria.
And whilst there’s the obvious risk that some fans will use this form of re-mix culture to create photos that are negative about a brand or invert a brand’s message, the upside is that part of Adictik’s business model is to provide detailed analytics via a dashboard for brands that will enable them to take ownership and do things like make available official logos and run competitions.
Related to this is something Santolaria calls visual hashtags: specially created logos or slogans tied to a specific brand-related event. “Brands can create ephemeral logos,” she says, such as one made available during TechCrunch Disrupt, for example.
Meanwhile, another path to monetisation being considered is through “segmented” push motivations. “An example could be: Aloha Steve, have you alredy drunk your Ristretto today? We’d love to see your Nespresso moment,” says Santolaria, disclosing that the startup is currently working on several deals based on this idea.
“Our vision is that Adictik becomes the world’s largest ad agency, without advertising agents,” she adds.