Messenger announces another new group AR effect for New Year’s, this time partnering up with famous fashion and lifestyle magazine, Cosmopolitan. The new effect supposedly enables users to welcome 2022 with interactive chicken nuggets inside a champagne glass.
As Messenger explains:
“Developed in partnership with Cosmopolitan, today we’re releasing Nugget Cheers, a brand new interactive AR video calling Group Effect created just for New Year’s Eve. The effect features the (weirdly) perfect pairing of champagne and chicken nuggets that you’ll be able to toast and share with friends on a Messenger or Instagram video call.”
A Toast To 2022!
Pretty astounding, right? I mean, why didn’t anybody think of it sooner? Fancy glassware and chicken nuggets, absolute perfect combination. Guess not even McDonald’s saw it coming.
The feature makes use of Meta’s group AR options for video calls, which was added just recently by the way, enabling multiple in the same group chat to engage with the same effect all at once. Besides getting a nifty new addition to its set of engagement tools, Messenger now allows group chat members to nod their heads in unison to activate an effect that features chicken nuggets in wine glasses, in celebration of NYE.
Again, this is pretty revolutionary stuff.
Over the past five years, one of Meta’s key challenges is its struggle to keep touch with evolving web culture trends, something that its competitor platforms, Snapchat and TikTok, have excelled in. In an attempt to close the gap, Meta, first through Facebook, then Instagram, chose to gradually erode many of the cultural nous within each of its respective apps, focusing instead on massive growth above everything else. Such a move did prove successful in bringing it the maximum number of users, but the same approach has also caused its platforms to lose their ‘cool factor’; their Mojo.
If you build a company whose structure is built to solely focus on growth and not so much on culture, then while you’ll have highly skilled executives and leaders who are expert systems builders and are very adept in formulating engagement algorithms, you’ll also have to balance out the same premiere team due to their lack of understanding when it comes to whatever is cool or trending. In short, while you’ll have at your disposal a bunch of business-proficient nerds, their inability to focus on anything else besides growth will end up costing you relevant longevity.
This is exactly the reason why Meta, and now spreading to its host of other apps, plays copycat. It can’t come up with any of the features it replicates on its own, because the people in charge of that aspect of innovation simply aren’t equipped with the knowledge and skills to be able to catch onto cultural trends and behaviors. As a result, it lost credibility and support from younger audiences, choosing instead to go on the platforms that better ‘connect’ with them.
While Meta has more staff, more money, more capacity, more resources than any other social platform to-date, despite it being able to develop cutting edge tools and options that trivialize achieving high engagement rates, no one is pointing out that Facebook is ‘Cool’. Even Instagram is being overtaken by smaller, less resourced players. Because again, there’s just too much of a ‘disconnect’ with these apps.
The Wrap
While small, new, sudden partnerships and additions do help stir a little buzz around Meta and its cast of social apps, that’s usually as far as it gets – just a spark. In its campaign to supposedly win back younger users, it’s not made any real headway up to now. While both Facebook and Instagram have released a number of ‘new’ updates these past few months, they really aren’t that noteworthy, though they do boost engagement somewhat, which, again, isn’t something that Meta should still be focusing on, at least not right now.
Either way, linking chicken nuggets and wine glasses is totally random. While that might work in the case of memes and joke-posts, when it comes to campaigns and branding, it just seems forced and disingenuous. I mean I like my fair share of chicken nuggets, but simply chucking them in along with some totally random and seemingly obscure piece of kitchenware won’t necessarily make me interested.
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