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02 : 11 : 18

Sweden – The H&M Group’s youth-focused fashion brand has launched a campaign to draw attention to the positive and negative sides of social media.

The campaign, All The Feels, features video interviews with three social media influencers who double as mental health advocates. Emily Bador talks about her role in the body positivity movement, John Yuyi discusses how her online persona is juxtaposed with her real identity, and Elyse Fox shares her story on building her collective Sad Girls Club.

The brand also released a capsule collection of nine items that encourage women to express their emotions on their clothing. The range of accessories and clothing comes with contrasting slogans such as ‘bad day’ and ‘good day’, which can be added or removed with Velcro depending on the wearer’s mood.

While social media’s damaging impact on young people is a hot topic, the positive effects are less documented. For more on how Generation Z are taking control of their emotions, book one of our in-house presentations.

UK – The new hotel concept will offer travellers compact rooms for ultra-low prices.

The rooms were designed by PriestmanGoode, an agency with experience designing for compact spaces such as airline and train cabins. Adhering to the motto ‘basics done brilliantly’, the rooms offer a choice of bed sizes, an en suite bathroom with a power shower, a digital screen, television and free wifi. With stripped-back facilities, Premier Inn hopes to encourage guests to use the communal spaces.

Zip by Premier Inn will be located on the outskirts of UK towns and cities, with the first 138-room hotel opening in Cardiff in early 2019. The rooms, which will be less than half the size of a standard Premier Inn room, will start at just £19 ($25, €22) a night.

As travellers spend more time outside their hotel room, hospitality brands are redesigning their facilities to focus on the basics. To see how this has infiltrated the luxury sector, see our microtrend Stripped-back Hospitality.

US – A campaign by material innovation brand Allbirds honours its classic line of shoes, which are created from natural materials such as wool and eucalyptus tree fibre.

One of the Meet Your Shoes video ads follows a man who abandons his haircut to get on a plane and meet his shoes, which turns out to be a sheared sheep. An online portal allows customers to get involved by entering a product code. They are then directed to a live feed of a sheep or tree in their natural environment.

One of the pioneers of the rapidly growing Synthetic Leather Market, Allbirds prides itself on creating sustainable, all-natural footwear, which includes the Wool Runners, created from Merino wool, and Tree Runners, sourced from FSC-certified eucalyptus trees.

In a world where consumers are questioning the source of their products, Allbirds shows how brands can demonstrate the transparency of their supply chain in a humorous way.

Generation X, those aged between 38 and 53, are still buying products they see advertised on television, according to a recent poll by YouGov and MarketingCharts. Almost a quarter (23.5%) of respondents made a purchase influenced by tv advertising in the past six months, making it more influential than personal recommendations (22.5%), consumer reviews (19.6%) and online video ads (8.3%).

The results demonstrate the importance of traditional tv advertising in a marketing landscape where brands are increasingly producing campaigns exclusively for digital channels. Companies that want to harness the purchasing power of this forgotten demographic should reconsider how they use this medium.