Summer is in full swing and we have crossed the first half year mark. Time to look at some digital stats (kindly provided by We Are Social).

Facebook is still the dominating social media platform with almost 1.5 billion users. They are adding more users every day or impressively put ‘6 new users per second’. What is interesting is that what follows Facebook are messenger platforms like WhatsApp, WeChat or Messenger. This is particular interesting development in the mobile social world. People seem to prefer chats to the conventional social networks. Ads on WhatsApp soon?

What also fascinated me is that the statistics show that 225 million people around the world used the internet for the first time in the past 12 months. According to telecommunications giant Ericsson, cellular subscriptions will continue to grow to almost 8 billion active subscribers over the next 5 years. That’ll be more than the world population. And remember: not every world citizen is connected yet!

What does that mean? As I have written here in the past, as marketers we really need to place more effort on smart mobile devices. Not only are they part of our everyday life, for many people around the world is it their “first screen”, their only device. And they use it for everything from communicating, browsing the web, watching TV to shopping. This is the place where brands need to make an impression because it is becoming more than just a channel.

Speaking of marketing, mobile and social, I really like Talenti’s new ‘Flavorize Me’ campaign that uses social media profiles to create a personalized ice cream flavour. An algorithm analyzes the key words you have in your Facebook, Twitter or Instagram profiles, breaks those down into tastes and then into ingredients that match those. I ended up with “Marmalade Green Chili Biscuit”. Sounds very interesting. Talenti is only available in the US so unless they decide to take my personalized flavor and use it for actual production (which btw according to their website they will let me know by September 15), you will find me eating gelati in Italy this month.