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Oscars Real-Time Marketing: Which Brands Got It Right & Which Did Not

In Social Media on 02/24/2013 at 9:55 pm

Oscars-2013

We are an hour into the 85th Academy Awards and already, at least six brands are hard at work attempting to recreate what Oreo and Tide did during the Super Bowl blackout. With 273,000 tweets in before the Oscars have actually begun, it is no surprise that brands want to take advantage of this social media-driven night.

Let’s take a look at which brands are participating in the Oscars conversations and what kind of real-time content they are creating.  I also took a look at the impact of these activations on brand engagement and have assigned a letter grade to each brand for their efforts.

JC Penney:  The retailer giant is advertising during the Oscars tonight. They also changed their Twitter Handle biography to accommodate the Oscars and have created real-time content about red carpet moments. Instead of simply pushing out promotional messages about their store, they are delivering content that’s relevant to the Oscars and is of entertainment value.  The tweet that has received the highest engagement rate also happens to be their Promoted Tweet, which is how I discovered it.  The rest of their tweets are not supported with any paid media—these are also not getting as nearly as many “retweets” and “favorites.”  Because the activations have little relevancy to the brand and are only garnering attention with the support of paid media, I give JC Penney an A-.

Pantene North America – This P&G brand has been posting during E’s Red Carpet LIVE event both on Facebook and on Twitter.  The brand is only posting about their nominated spokespeople—Naomi Watts and Bradley Cooper.  On Twitter, the brand hijacked the organic #bestdressed trend, supporting it with a Promoted Tweet campaign.  Their Promoted Tweet is one of a behind-the-scenes photo of Naomi Watts.  Pantene is using hashtag #WantThatHair for tonight’s tweets.  I love the fact that Pantene is integrating their spokespeople into the Oscar conversation, giving the brand credibility to associate with tonight’s event. I also love that they’ve hijacked an organic trending hashtag. However, the posts are a bit too promotional and they’re not actually creating any new and fun creative that is based on real-time conversations.  For this reason, I give Pantene North America a B.

Colgate Optic White – This brand is live tweeting about the Oscars together with influencer, Jeannie Mai who is a makeup artist, an actress, and a TV personality.  All of the tweets are related to the actors’ beautiful, bright smiles.  They are using hashtag #brilliantsmile. The brand is also repurposing a Twitter giveaway (rules originally written for an August 2012 promotion), asking users to tweet a photo of their own red carpet smile and which actor/actress has the most #brilliantsmile. Ten lucky participants will get an Optic White kit. What I love about this campaign is that the brand is actually engaging viewers with an interactive, user-generated giveaway. However, the brand is only partially wave branding because they are only using pre-planned activations, but are not integrated any real-time content.  However, because the Optic White Twitter account did pop on my Topsy Pro list as one of tonight’s most influential users, I will give it some extra points.  I give this brand a grade of B+.

Skinnygirl Cocktails – Earlier today, Skinnygirl Cocktails launched their first TV spot during E’s Red Carpet LIVE show, featuring Bethenny Frankel.  They also tweeted throughout the day, posting photos of Oscar cocktail recipes using their product. Tonight, the brand is hosting an Oscars Twitter Party with a number of different beauty and fashion influencers.  The icing on the cake is their $2,500 donation to charity, Dress for Success, for each red dress worn at the Oscars tonight.  The brand is donating at least $7,500 to charity—Sally Field, Kerry Washington and Paul, the monkey who makes Oscar predictions have all worn red. This brand deserves the best grade for their wave branding efforts—the launch of a TV ad during the Red Carpet show provided the brand with credibility to own the night.  Their tweets were not only relevant to the Oscars, but they were relevant to the brand without being pushy or overselling.  Congrats Skinnygirl Cocktails, you get an A.

American Express – This credit card brand is also live tweeting tonight, but very sporadically. They are weaving in promotions for the synced Amex Card, small business (stylists and designers), and products that consumers can purchase via Twitter. Two weeks ago, AMEX announced their partnership with Twitter—now consumers can purchase products simply by tweeting. Today, the brand is leveraging the Oscars to heavily promote a wide variety of products that can be purchased via Twitter. They are also leveraging the organic #bestdressed hashtag.  However, since Pantene has bid more dollars on the same hashtag, the AMEX tweets are not appearing at the top of the Twitter timeline. Although I deeply respect AMEX for their innovating social media marketing efforts, I am just as disappointed about their Oscars activations tonight.  I give them a C+; at least they tried, right?

Samsung Mobile – This brand was one of the sponsors of the E’s Red Carpet LIVE show. They also have a Promoted Trend running on Twitter, which means they spent at least $200,000 to part take in today’s Oscar conversation.  The Promoted Trend is used to promote Galaxy Note 10.1 although the brand is rotating a wide variety of tweets. The way Samsung is aligning Galaxy to the Oscars event is by showing off the product’s sketch features.  The brand is showing Twitter users sketches of actresses’ dresses, creating truly real-time content.  I love the way the brand is using the product to create interesting, real-time Oscars content without being too promotional.  I give Samsung an A-.

Which brand do you think did a superb job riding the Oscars wave?

Leave a comment or share this blog and your selection with hashtag #oscarsRTM.  The social media industry is keeping a close eye on which brands use real-time marketing during the Oscars with this hashtag.

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How To Maximize Your Brain & Your Day

In How-to's on 02/24/2013 at 9:12 am

New York’s Social Media Week has wrapped up yesterday.  One of my favorite sessions was earlier in the week, “Maximizing Your Brain, Maximizing Your Day.” Although this session had nothing to do with social media per say, it can certainly help all of us who work in a fast-paced and dynamic agency environment.

It turns out that most of our work day is processed by the prefrontal cortex (PFC), also known as the “working memory.” The PFC is responsible for allowing us to make decisions, understand, memorize, inhibit, and recall things.  It is also the same part of our brain that is used to pull information from our long-term memories.  However, the PFC has limited conscious resources.  One of the reasons the PFC is limited is because of how energy-intensive it actually is.  Here’s an interesting fact: The brain represents only two to four percent of body mass but the amount of energy it takes to operate it is 20 percent.  Every time you make a decision, you use up your energy.  If you can’t replenish enough energy, you hit a mental cognitive wall.

As the difficulty level of an activity increases the brain must utilize more neurons to achieve the precision necessary to complete the activity. For example, deleting emails, dealing with the present and with people is less difficult than scheduling meetings, dealing with objects or with something we’ve seen very little of, and recalling the past.  Work that involves high level of focus, centers on the future, is conceptual and is something we’ve never seen before is very difficult to process.  It’s also the most common type of work we are tasked with.

How does our brain process and how can we accommodate the processing to maximize results?

Serial processing effectively means one process has to be completed before the next starts.

Things that impact serial processor:

  1. Multi-tasking - When you want speed and accuracy, you don’t want to multi-task. When you add one task to another, you actually lower the quality of both.
  2. Incomplete intentions - We tend to act on incomplete intentions first. Research reveals that our unfulfilled intentions become a distraction for us. Too many open intentions can hinder our capacity to prioritize and focus and ultimately impact our productivity.
  3. Queues - Step back and look at the high-level vision; see where you want to get to. Keep asking people about their next steps to move people through the process of getting to a vision; don’t ask people about the big, conceptual vision first.

The PFC processes in small stages.  How can we maximize this space?

  1. Clarifying  – Boiling down lots of language to its essentials
  2. Chunking  – Breaking down the projects into manageable pieces
  3. Using Visuals – The brain is more robust when seeing visuals, hearing metaphors and analogies

Mental peak performance training should be based on a clear, simple understanding of what types of shifts in mental states are necessary in order to optimally accomplish the task at hand.  The brain releases two types of chemicals–dopamine when one is interested in something they are doing and feel good about it, and noradrenaline when they experience a sense of alertness or a level of threat.  With enough interest and alertness, performance increases.  However, with too much threat or excitement, the cognitive ability is diminished.  The big question for management is how do you create enough level of threat and enough level of interest to get your staff to do something? One way to do it is to offer a reward in exchange for performance because it makes the landscape less threatening and the person is focused on the reward rather than on the threat.

The lack of support in the workplace is a form of a threat that impedes performance. The key is to move from unmanageable threat to manageable threat.   As a manager, when you give people a little sense of control in an uncertain environment, it makes the landscape less threatening, you are stressing them less and you are improving performance.

Below you will find key activity ingredients for maximizing your brain and your day.

The Healthy Mind Platter for Optimal Brain Matter: 

  1. Sleep Time  (quality is most important)
  2. Physical Time
  3. Focus Time
  4. Time In (mindfulness)
  5. Down Time (reflective time)
  6. Play Time 
  7. Connecting Time (physical connections)
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A Day In the Life Of An Advertising Newsroom

In Career, Culture Marketing, Social Media on 02/23/2013 at 10:11 pm

sparks & honey advertising newsroom

During this year’s Super Bowl, brands like Oreo and Tide didn’t just stick to their traditional pre-planned paid advertising routine—they tried something new.  Along with six others, they flexed their social media muscles and jumped on the unexpected blackout bandwagon, creating new content in real-time as half of the Superdome went dark.  Brands that took advantage of the blackout made front page news for their quick thinking.

Unsurprisingly, buzz around Oreo’s “Dunk in the Dark” execution and Pepsi’s take on the Harlem Shake has been high during New York’s Social Media Week. The recent shift towards creating culturally relevant content in real-time has publications such as the Harvard Business Review opining that advertisers will operate more like newsrooms by the year 2020. But at sparks & honey, Madison Avenue and the newsroom came together back in March of 2012.

I’ve been working as a senior community manager at sparks & honey almost since the agency’s launch.  My role is part-social media, part-editorial and newsroom reporter.  It is not your typical 9 to 5 job.  We eat culture for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  We are equipped to monitor live events while engaging social media users in real-time and co-creating content with them, which makes for more memorable and shareable content.  With the data-driven newsroom model and 24/7 social media reporters, we put culture and consumer behaviors at the forefront of the content we develop.

So what does a typical day in the life of sparks & honey’s advertising newsroom look like?  It’s a little challenging to describe, because there really isn’t one.  Not only is each day different due to the very nature of culture and news, but also because we continuously work with different clients and create a wide variety of content ranging from editorial and graphics to videos and offline events.

As culture breaks during the day – whether an emerging news item, a new meme, a viral video or some other fast culture touch point – we swarm newsroom-style to address the item and make decisions in real-time as to how it may impact the brands with which we work.

We like to refer to the environment in our newsroom as “controlled chaos.”  We have very specific routines, mechanics and planning processes that allow us to monitor huge quantities of cultural information and activate on it quickly.  We brief a minimum of three times a day, with early morning and late day briefings by email, and a mid-morning cultural briefing that allows for a melding of minds between our cultural strategists, behavioral scientists, account teams and creatives.

We stay tapped in all day via our Bridge – a series of giant screens erected around the sparks & honey offices that stream emerging trends and breaking news as they happen. Throughout the day, we monitor and analyze these trends using our proprietary platform and data mining algorithms that help us track the energy and determine the likely longevity of a particular cultural burst. Our philosophy is to identify emerging trends early in their “wave” cycle and then help brands participate in the conversations by creating relevant content in real-time.  We call this process “Wave Branding.”

As we uncover developing trends that relate to a client’s target market, business objective and brand essence, a multidisciplinary team gathers to quickly decide on the approach we should take and type of content we should curate, adapt from our pre-planned reserve library, or create from scratch.  Our newsroom-style creative process differs from the traditional advertising model of briefs, brainstorms and a seemingly infinite number of revisions. We prefer to find order in chaos, strategize in real-time, execute with urgency and inject our brands into culture with authenticity.

* Please note that I’ve originally authored this for sparks & honey and it has first appeared on Big Think.

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