KIMP’s Picks 13th December: Weekly Highlights In Design, Marketing, AI, & More
Welcome to KIMP’s Picks – your one-stop destination to get this week’s social media roundup. Whether you’re a brand strategist, a marketing enthusiast, or just someone who loves staying ahead of the curve, this is your Friday dose of inspiration, insights, and innovation.
From trailblazing AI updates to campaign inspiration, and social media algorithm changes we have them all right here. This weekly social media recap is curated so that you can catch up on all the crucial updates of the week in a few quick minutes.
So, are you ready to read about this week’s social media buzz? Let’s dive in.
- In the Marketing Realm
- In the Content Marketing Realm
- In the Design Realm
- In the AI Realm
- Midjourney joins the worldbuilding race
- Grok can now generate images with Aurora
- Meta unveils Llama 3.3 – a powerful and cost-effective upgrade
- It’s Gemini’s first year anniversary and Google has announced Gemini 2.0
- Gemini 2.0 Flash sets a new trend in agentic experiences
- Google unveils a personal AI research assistant in Gemini Advanced
- All that’s new from OpenAI
- Social Media Feature Updates and Algorithm Changes
- That’s a Wrap!
In the Marketing Realm
The next era in in-store digital advertising
Adweek recently shared a post discussing the future of in-store digital advertising. This one discusses the collaboration between the in-store digital advertising company Grocery TV and the popular supermarket company Hy-Vee.
This collaboration integrates Hy-Vee’s digital screens into Grocery TV’s national network, enabling advertisers to purchase ad space programmatically through The Trade Desk. Adweek discusses this campaign highlighting the increase in in-store media spending.
This partnership underscores the value of combining innovative technology with customer-first strategies. It also highlights the importance of leveraging omnichannel opportunities to drive incremental revenue and better campaign insights.
The socially conscious “Social Wreaths” campaign
The next post we have is a campaign inspiration that highlights the magic of creativity. In an innovative effort to combat distracted driving, the Chilean government partnered with VML Chile and VML Health to create the ‘Social Wreaths’ campaign, a culturally resonant initiative that transformed the country’s iconic roadside memorials, or animitas, into powerful symbols of road safety.
The campaign reimagined animitas as floral wreaths shaped like app logos for Instagram, WhatsApp, and TikTok, drawing a poignant connection between mobile phone use and road fatalities.
The impact was remarkable—a 17% reduction in road deaths. This campaign demonstrates the effectiveness of using culturally-rooted, symbolic storytelling to inspire behavior change.
KFC’s creative campaign to create a buzz
KFC knows how to create a buzz. Their recent campaign to promote their crispy fries proves the point. In response to the negative comments that KFC often receives for their fries, they recently partnered with popular influencer Emma Guerrero for “The Highest Launch”.
She then helped promote the launch of KFC’s crispiest fries in Ecuador from about 16,000 feet up in the air. And this was done in a live stream. On the whole, it employed a combination of creativity, influencer marketing and live streaming through social media.
In the Content Marketing Realm
Google announces Year in Search 2024
Google Trends is a great source of inspiration for marketers working on their content strategy. Creating content based on trends increases your reach and visibility on digital channels.
Google has released its annual “Year in Search” report for 2024. Every year, this report offers a fascinating snapshot of the topics, people, and events that captivated global attention. The report highlights search trends across categories like world events, entertainment, sports, and even unconventional searches like songs hummed to Google.
Google also spotlighted new ways people are searching, such as using Google Lens and multimodal technology for translations, shopping, and object identification. Searches combining text and images, as well as voice search, showcased how users are embracing alternative tools to deepen their search experiences.
How generative AI is revolutionizing content creation
Adobe recently shared an insightful post discussing the influence of AI on content generation. The article explores the transformative role of generative AI in marketing. With the ever increasing demands for personalized content across diverse channels, formats, and languages, generative AI emerges as a key enabler of efficiency and scale.
To begin with AI streamlines tasks like product descriptions, social media posts, and ad copy, freeing teams to focus on strategy and creativity. Secondly, AI is also effective in content personalization.
The post also discusses the role that Adobe’s Firefly platform plays and why it is an effective AI tool for marketers. It empowers marketing teams with tools for personalized and secure content creation. Firefly’s ethical design, leveraging licensed and public domain data, ensures its outputs are commercially safe for production environments.
Instagram discusses B-roll ideas
B-roll footage might be less explored in marketing but they are engaging and can be persuasive when deployed correctly. If you are wondering how to create more B-roll videos for your brand, here is a post from Instagram for inspiration.
The post discusses close-up videos, wider shots, timelapse videos, and top-down shots as the 4 effective options to begin with.
The video also gives some ideas for each type of B-roll footage. So which of these ideas will you explore next?
Content marketing stats for marketers
As we bid adieu to 2024 and get ready for a new year, it is a good time to stop and take a look at some content marketing statistics. The post here from the Content Marketing Institute talks about some recent developments in the world of marketing, content marketing in particular. It gives a few statistics to help marketers understand the current state of marketing. Therefore these insights can be useful for marketers working on their content strategy for 2025.
From the ways in which AI has been transforming content workflows to B2B content statistics, the post discusses several fresh perspectives for marketers.
In the Design Realm
Packaging design inspiration
Packaging of the World is a great source of inspiration for those working on packaging dsign projects. This post highlights the packaging design of Barzini, a canned beverage brand.
It highlights how the design blends contemporary elements and a hint of nostalgia to create something that stands out. Aimed at young, outgoing consumers, the design channels the spirit of lively gatherings and vintage Italian charm.
The design draws inspiration from mid-century Italian soda branding, featuring hand-drawn illustrations and a vibrant color palette.
Given that hand-drawn illustrations are among the graphic design trends predicted to dominate the field in 2025, designs like these are worth exploring.
Brand identity inspiration
Having discussed packaging design, let’s now talk about brand identity design. Brand identity is crucial because it lays the foundation of how people see you brand and remember it.
The Brand Identity, a leading source of creativity inspiration, recently shared a post discussing the brand identity of Storytel a popular audiobook company.
Their new illustration and motion identity redefine their brand presence while honoring the timeless tradition of storytelling. Drawing inspiration from its orange flame logo – symbolic of gathering around a campfire to share tales – the new design system blends modern aesthetics with storytelling’s rich heritage.
The revamped identity features bold, abstract shapes that evoke emotions and foster open interpretation.
How Canva helps Salesforce preserve brand consistency
Canva has rapidly evolved into a popular creative platform for designers and non-designers alike. The AI features on Canva have further enhanced the effectiveness of the platform.
To highlight the power of the platform and its usefulness for organizations, Canva shared a post discussing how Salesforce has been using Canva.
Before using Canva, Salesforce struggled with maintaining brand consistency across 140+ global social media accounts and lacked a clear approval process. The adoption of Canva Enterprise has transformed how Salesforce manages its social media presence, ensuring cohesive, on-brand content across 22 regions and 18 languages.
With Canva’s Brand Kit and tools like Resize & Magic Switch, Salesforce’s creative teams have been able to scale content efficiently, saving valuable time.
There are several such ways in which brands around the world continue to use Canva. How do you use this platform to transform your design workflow?
Need help with your Canva designs? Get a KIMP for Canva subscription.
Riding the Mocha Mousse wave with Canva
Pantone recently announced the Color of the Year 2025, Mocha Mousse. When color trends like this one start trending brands around the world want to adopt these trends. From social media visuals that align with the trend to subtle tweaks to branding and marketing graphics, brands have diverse strategies when it comes to following trends.
Canva shared a post that gives users access to a custom collection of stock assets that help content creators explore the Mocha Mousse trend. From Story posts to Feed posts for social media, the collection includes a variety of templates.
In the AI Realm
Midjourney joins the worldbuilding race
Last week Google announced Genie 2, their groundbreaking tool that helps generate interactive 3D worlds in seconds. And now Midjourney has joined the race too.
Midjourney, is expanding its capabilities with a new collaborative tool called Patchwork, designed to empower creators to build immersive, interactive worlds. Yes, that’s very much like Genie 2 from Google and the innovative tool that World Labs announced recently.
Patchwork allows users to construct digital “worlds” using AI-generated assets in real-time. Additionally, this model also supports collaborators. Currently Patchwork is available as a research preview for Midjourney users.
In addition to creating their own virtual worlds, users can also travel to those created by others and collaborate with creators to enhance their own.
Grok can now generate images with Aurora
X has upgraded Grok with new image generation capabilities with the integration of their generative image model called Aurora.
Aurora is a powerful autoregressive model that enhances its ability to create photorealistic images and precisely follow text instructions. Aurora, a mixture-of-experts network, was trained on billions of data points from the internet, giving it a deep understanding of the world, which helps it excel in creating highly detailed visuals.
In addition to realistic images similar to those generated on other AI tools, Grok can also generate memes, realistic portraits and images of celebrities. This generative AI model also comes with impressive image editing capabilities.
Meta unveils Llama 3.3 – a powerful and cost-effective upgrade
Meta’s Llama 3.2 was announced in September as a suite of lightweight models for various applications. And now the time has come for Llama 3.3. Meta has released the Llama 3.3 model as a significant update to its open-source language model. This update is designed to deliver top-tier performance at a fraction of the cost of previous models.
Built using an optimized transformer architecture, Llama 3.3 is capable of running efficiently on common developer workstations, making it a highly accessible tool for both commercial and research applications.
Currently, this model supports languages including English, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Hindi, Spanish, and Thai. Designed for a range of applications – from assistant-like chat systems to natural language generation tasks – the model is also adaptable for synthetic data generation and model distillation.
It’s Gemini’s first year anniversary and Google has announced Gemini 2.0
Exactly a year ago Google announced Gemini 1.0 their now successful AI assistant. Marking its first anniversary, Google unveiled Gemini 2.0.
Gemini 2.0 marks the era of AI models designed to empower “agentic” experiences – AI that can understand the world, think ahead, and take action on behalf of users. Building on the success of Gemini 1.0, which was a breakthrough in multimodal capabilities (handling text, video, images, and more), Gemini 2.0 expands these features and introduces powerful new abilities, particularly in multimodal output, advanced reasoning, and native tool use.
Gemini 2.0, now available as an experimental model (Gemini 2.0 Flash), introduces key enhancements like natively generated images, text-to-speech multilingual audio, and the ability to call external tools such as Google Search and third-party functions.
Gemini 2.0 is also available on the mobile app version of Gemini.
With this comes Gemini 2.0 Flash for developers. Reportedly designed with twice the speed, 2.0 Flash outperforms 1.5 Flash.
Currently, the experimental version of 2.0 Flash is available to developers via the API.
Gemini 2.0 Flash sets a new trend in agentic experiences
We briefly discussed Google’s announcement of Google 2.0 Flash for developers. The gist is that this one taps into diverse agentic experiences. It introduces a range of capabilities designed to support agentic experiences, including multimodal reasoning, long context understanding, complex instruction following, and native tool use. In other words, these advancements pave the way to the development of new AI agents that can understand, reason, and take action on your behalf.
There are 3 main agents that Google highlighted.
- Project Mariner – to revolutionize browser interactions.
- Project Astra – a universal AI agent.
- Jules – an AI agent for developers.
These agents are merely samples of the new agentic capabilities that Gemini 2.0 Flash brings with it.
Jules is our experimental AI-powered code agent that can help devs fix bugs or other coding tasks — all with supervision. It’s now available to a group of trusted testers.
— Google (@Google) December 11, 2024
Learn more → https://t.co/53jC0ItgfT pic.twitter.com/MLArYrkUai
Here’s a peek at the future: Project Astra, our prototype showing glimmers of a universal AI assistant. We showed an early glimpse of it at I/O, and it’s now in the hands of trusted testers. Here’s how Robbie is using it. Can’t wait til we start shipping, 2025 is going to be an… pic.twitter.com/rci2XeyeHp
— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) December 11, 2024
Google unveils a personal AI research assistant in Gemini Advanced
Google is expanding the capabilities of Gemini Advanced with a new feature Deep Research. This mode turns Gemini into your personal AI research assistant. Based on your prompts and preferences, Deep Research comes up with a multi-step plan for the research. And then proceeds with the research to give you comprehensive insights.
Finally, you will also get a detailed report based on the research along with links to references and some additional resources to explore further.
All that’s new from OpenAI
Holidays started early at OpenAI with their 12-day event called “12 Days of OpenAI” which consists of 12 days of exciting announcements.
We have seen 5 days of announcements so far and they have all created a lot of buzz.
Day 1:
The first announcement was the introduction of the $200 monthly ChatGPT Pro plan for anyone looking for research-grade intelligence.
The other announcement on Day 1 was the update to OpenAI o1 System Card.
Day 2:
Day 2 marked the announcement of the alpha access to Reinforcement Fine-Tuning program for researchers.
Day 3:
The announcement from Day 3 has been the biggest one so far. Yes, one that the creative world has been anticipating for a long time now – Sora! The generative video model from OpenAI.
Day 4:
ChatGPT Canvas which was announced earlier in October is now available to all users in the 4o model. Moreover, this is now accessible through web and desktop app on Windows as well.
Day 5:
Among the new set of Apple Intelligence features that Apple announced with iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, and macOS Sequoia 15.2, one of the crucial ones is the seamless integration of ChatGPT into various functions. This was the crux of the announcement on Day 5.
All these big announcements did create a lot of buzz. How do we know? Several of OpenAI’s tools were down for a brief period on 11th December. And Sora was momentarily not available due to the heavy surge in usage.
Social Media Feature Updates and Algorithm Changes
Instagram announces trial Reels
Instagram has launched Trial Reels, a new feature enabling creators to test content performance by sharing it with non-followers before showing it to their core audience. The tool is designed to help creators experiment with new formats, genres, or ideas without worrying about how their followers might react.
Trial Reels are shown to non-followers first, allowing creators to gauge engagement metrics such as views, likes, and comments within the first 24 hours. If the reel performs well, creators can share it with their followers in one tap or enable an automatic sharing option, where the reel is published to followers if it meets performance benchmarks within 72 hours.
TikTok Shop comes to Spain
TikTok has relaunched its eCommerce efforts in Europe, starting with the introduction of TikTok Shop in Spain. This initiative allows Spanish retailers to host live shopping streams, showcase products, access affiliate programs, and run shop ads within the app. The move marks the first step in TikTok’s renewed strategy to tap into the European online shopping market.
Reddit announces AI-powered Answers feature
Reddit has unveiled Reddit Answers, an AI feature designed to streamline the way users access information based on Reddit posts. The new tool, currently in a limited test phase for U.S. users, allows people to ask questions and receive AI-generated responses derived exclusively from Reddit content.
Users can click through to the original posts for more details, ensuring the AI serves as a gateway rather than a replacement for Reddit’s content.
Unlike other generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, Reddit Answers emphasizes the platform’s own data instead of pulling information from across the web.
That’s a Wrap!
That’s all for this week’s KIMP’s Picks. We’ve explored some exciting developments in AI, marketing, and social media trends. Which of these updates caught your eye? How do you think they’ll impact your approach? Don’t forget to check back next Friday for another round of the latest and most relevant insights – see you then!