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Aura is personalising pigmented haircare

Aura by eSalon, California

California – Aura is offering a personalised and adaptable hair colour range to inspire people to keep experimenting with their hair.

Its new range of shampoos, conditioners and masques include the option to add a semi-permanent pigment in tones of pink, lavender or teal, or customers can opt for classic shades to enhance or refresh their natural colour. Aura also gives the option to add neutraliser components to help offset unwanted tones.

As well as choosing their preferred colour, customers can also select from five different aromas, with the ability to adjust the scent strength or go fragrance-free altogether. In this way, Aura can adapt to customers' changing haircare needs and preferences, allowing them to easily alter the intensity of pigments and aromas. Graham Jones, CEO of parent company eSalon, explains: ‘[Our] biggest strength is our understanding of the client feedback loop over time.’

Hair colour innovators are making products and processes more malleable, with Aura showing how a one-product-for-all mentality is no longer necessary. For more, explore Colour Refresh.

Billy Blue uses AR to develop educational marketing

Start Your Adventure by SomeOne, VCCP and Unbnd for Billy Blue College of Design at Torrens University Australia

Australia – Australia’s Billy Blue College of Design is pushing the boundaries of educational marketing with its first-ever augmented reality (AR) prospectus.

The campaign, dubbed Start Your Adventure, is an interactive alternative to traditional course guides, running across multiple billboards in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Taking a phygital approach, the AR experience is activated via a QR code, bringing to life various aspects of Billy Blue's design courses and the college experience. Among the activations are a TikTok advertisement and an influencer engagement initiative, tapping into the visual-first behaviours of its target youth audience.

Partnering with creative agencies SomeOne, VCCP and Unbnd, Billy Blue is connecting with prospective students in a way that feels familiar and engaging, while also showcasing its creative abilities as a design school. ‘AR advertising... offers a much more immersive and emotive experience that really captures users’ attention in a memorable way,' says Beth Duddy, customer experience director at VCCP.

While educational marketing traditionally relies heavily on print-based brochures and ads, Billy Blue is developing communications for the sector by allowing its audience to experience college life in a bold new way.

PepsiCo turns to Minecraft for employee training

Global –The drinks company is incorporating aspects of the video game Minecraft into its digital training programme, with the aim to improve inter-pandemic employee learning.

PepsiCo teamed up with design studio BlockWorks to create a customised virtual training course that exists within the Minecraft universe. BlockWorks built a virtual PepsiCo warehouse to simulate the firm's in-person training sessions. Within this digital twin, employees are tasked with productivity puzzles visualised by Minecraft’s block-building features.

Having moved its training to digital platforms like Zoom at the start of the pandemic, PepsiCo found many employees experienced difficulties or fatigue with video sessions. To make these sessions more entertaining, the company drew inspiration from an employee’s son’s adoration of Minecraft. ‘Using Minecraft to simulate a 3D PepsiCo warehouse enabled our teams to solve problems in a virtual teamwork environment and complete the training in a fun, interactive and engaging way,’ explains Molly Nagler, chief learning officer at PepsiCo.

This creative take on employee training demonstrates how brands can create virtual and mixed realities in order to upgrade organisational learning.

PepsiCo in collaboration with BlockWorks

Stat: Covid disruption will cut Gen Alpha’s earning power

Finding a Digital Letter-form by Gang Buron-Yi

According to a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), the long-term effects of remote education will lead to huge monetary losses for British children.

For 8.7m children across the UK, Covid-19 could cut £350bn ($475bn, €392bn) from their lifetime earnings due to lost learning time away from formal classrooms, with even higher losses for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. According to the IFS, for someone earning £1m ($1.38m, €1.14m) over their working life – not far off the likely average in the UK – losing half a year of schooling will mean a loss of £40k ($55.4k, €45.6k) in income over their lifetime.

‘The inescapable conclusion is that the lost schooling represents a gigantic long-term risk for future prosperity, the public finances, the future path of inequality and wellbeing,’ explains Luke Sibieta, research fellow at IFS. ‘The lack of urgency or national debate on how to address this problem is deeply worrying,’ he continues.

In our youth macrotrend Reformation Generation we explore how this gap in education could affect young people’s future careers, with many likely to start their own business as a result.