Coca-Cola is upping its own ante by “gamifying” its approach to this year’s Super Bowl, blowing out the social media and engagement elements, and dropping the highly successful polar bears-themed creative used in 2012’s big game. The 2013 Bowl campaign, dubbed “Coke Chase,” is based on letting consumers determine the outcome of a “chase” in real time, and therefore the content of a post-Bowl commercial, by using any screen (mobile, tablet or desktop). The creative premise of the campaign, from Weiden + Kennedy, is that three groups of people are lost in the desert -- “cowboys,” “showgirls” and “badlanders.” All spot a mirage of a thirst-quenching Coke in the distance, and commence to compete to reach it first. The marketing concept: Through second-screen voting -- plus the ability to “sabotage” their favorite team’s rivals -- consumers will determine who wins the Coke Chase game, with the winner and all results to be revealed in a TV spot immediately following the end of the Super Bowl. In addition, with post-game-viewership fallout in mind, the first 50,000 consumers who engage with the brand after the game, via MyCokeRewards, will receive a free Coke, according to Coca-Cola North America CMO Allison Lewis. The campaign, described to press in a Coca-Cola Webcast, launched Jan. 22 with the airing of a 60-second “Mirage” TV spot (on “American Idol”) that sets up the basic premise, and 30-second teaser spots across other mass-audience programs/television outlets. That will be followed, on Jan. 23, by a YouTube takeover encouraging fans to vote/participate early to influence the ultimate outcome. Users are directed to visit CokeChase.com from any device (the experience has been optimized by device) to view the 60-second ad and vote for their favorite team. CokeChase.com features bios/photos of each team’s members to help participants choose their favorite team. They can also participate by sabotaging rival teams -- setting them back in “fun and ridiculous ways” (e.g., a stoplight, or a pizza delivery from Coke partner Domino’s Pizza -- in the middle of the desert) -- and can then watch rival teams’ votes go down as their favored team gets closer to the finish line. Users who share the experience can unlock additional sabotages. Pre-game, Coke is employing multiple media and social platforms (beyond those used in 2012), including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and MyCokeRewards, plus Coca-Cola media channels such as out-of-home and vending machines. Coke has created “hundreds of pieces” of content, including photos, to optimize those experiences, reported Pio Schunker, SVP integrated marketing for Coca-Cola North America. Multiple-platform voting/sabotaging activities will continue throughout the Super Bowl, up to the closing whistle, with the results determining which of three 30-second Coke ads will air immediately following the game. Coca-Cola’s 2013 Super Bowl campaign reflects lessons learned from its 2012 campaign, which generated some nine million second-screen consumer interactions (with an average engagement time of 28 minutes), according to Schunker. In that campaign, the bears reacted in real-time to the Bowl game’s activities and ads, and viewers could share their reactions to the bears’ reactions via Facebook or Twitter, among other engagement activities. But for the 2013 Bowl campaign, Coca-Cola decided that this approach was “too passive,” and also that it had missed opportunities to follow up with the participants, said Schunker. The marketing team also consciously decided to take a risk with a new creative theme, despite the polar bears’ theme’s success, Schunker said. “After much discussion, we chose to walk away from [the polar bears]” to avoid the “temptation” or “trap-door” of a sequel, he said. Furthermore, C-C learned that it had used a creative theme (the bears) in such a way as to make it difficult to follow up with that theme through the year. The 2013 Super Bowl campaign -- which despite rumors, apparently does not include one of Coca-Cola’s new anti-obesity ads -- is intended to solidify the “brand credentials” behind Coke’s “Open Happiness” theme and so set the stage for its overall 2013 campaign, Schunker and Lewis said.
Coca-Cola is upping its own ante by “gamifying” its approach to this year’s Super Bowl, blowing out the social media and engagement elements, and dropping the highly successful polar bears-themed creative used in 2012’s big game. The 2013 Bowl campaign, dubbed “Coke Chase,” is based on letting consumers determine the outcome of a “chase” in real time, and therefore the content of a post-Bowl commercial, by using any screen (mobile, tablet or desktop). The creative premise of the campaign, from Weiden + Kennedy, is that three groups of people are lost in the desert -- “cowboys,” “showgirls” and “badlanders.” All spot a mirage of a thirst-quenching Coke in the distance, and commence to compete to reach it first. The marketing concept: Through second-screen voting -- plus the ability to “sabotage” their favorite team’s rivals -- consumers will determine who wins the Coke Chase game, with the winner and all results to be revealed in a TV spot immediately following the end of the Super Bowl. In addition, with post-game-viewership fallout in mind, the first 50,000 consumers who engage with the brand after the game, via MyCokeRewards, will receive a free Coke, according to Coca-Cola North America CMO Allison Lewis. The campaign, described to press in a Coca-Cola Webcast, launched Jan. 22 with the airing of a 60-second “Mirage” TV spot (on “American Idol”) that sets up the basic premise, and 30-second teaser spots across other mass-audience programs/television outlets. That will be followed, on Jan. 23, by a YouTube takeover encouraging fans to vote/participate early to influence the ultimate outcome. Users are directed to visit CokeChase.com from any device (the experience has been optimized by device) to view the 60-second ad and vote for their favorite team. CokeChase.com features bios/photos of each team’s members to help participants choose their favorite team. They can also participate by sabotaging rival teams -- setting them back in “fun and ridiculous ways” (e.g., a stoplight, or a pizza delivery from Coke partner Domino’s Pizza -- in the middle of the desert) -- and can then watch rival teams’ votes go down as their favored team gets closer to the finish line. Users who share the experience can unlock additional sabotages. Pre-game, Coke is employing multiple media and social platforms (beyond those used in 2012), including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and MyCokeRewards, plus Coca-Cola media channels such as out-of-home and vending machines. Coke has created “hundreds of pieces” of content, including photos, to optimize those experiences, reported Pio Schunker, SVP integrated marketing for Coca-Cola North America. Multiple-platform voting/sabotaging activities will continue throughout the Super Bowl, up to the closing whistle, with the results determining which of three 30-second Coke ads will air immediately following the game. Coca-Cola’s 2013 Super Bowl campaign reflects lessons learned from its 2012 campaign, which generated some nine million second-screen consumer interactions (with an average engagement time of 28 minutes), according to Schunker. In that campaign, the bears reacted in real-time to the Bowl game’s activities and ads, and viewers could share their reactions to the bears’ reactions via Facebook or Twitter, among other engagement activities. But for the 2013 Bowl campaign, Coca-Cola decided that this approach was “too passive,” and also that it had missed opportunities to follow up with the participants, said Schunker. The marketing team also consciously decided to take a risk with a new creative theme, despite the polar bears’ theme’s success, Schunker said. “After much discussion, we chose to walk away from [the polar bears]” to avoid the “temptation” or “trap-door” of a sequel, he said. Furthermore, C-C learned that it had used a creative theme (the bears) in such a way as to make it difficult to follow up with that theme through the year. The 2013 Super Bowl campaign -- which despite rumors, apparently does not include one of Coca-Cola’s new anti-obesity ads -- is intended to solidify the “brand credentials” behind Coke’s “Open Happiness” theme and so set the stage for its overall 2013 campaign, Schunker and Lewis said.
A few short months ago, Facebook elevated a dozen Preferred Marketing Developers (PMDs) into an elite new class called Strategic PMDs (SPMDs). These folks not only drink the Facebook Kool-Aid, they dispense it without reservation, pouncing on the opportunity like grizzly bears in a salmon run. And despite my growls to the contrary, SPMDs and the companies they work with are more bullish than ever about Facebook’s future. As they see it, Zuckerberg and Company continue to enhance THE social network for both users and advertisers, leading me to these six tasty reasons why marketers will keep feasting in Facebook land. 1. Mouthwatering mobile monetization One of the big question marks for Facebook when it went public was whether or not it could monetize mobile. Lucy Jacobs, chief operating officer at Spruce Media (a SPMD), remarked: “Facebook is now on track to generate 20% or more of its ad revenue from mobile in Q4 ’12, up from just 3% in Q2 ’12.” Jacobs added: “The performance of mobile has plenty of room to grow, especially for price.” 2. Custom audiences are no mere appetizer Introduced last fall, custom audiences allow marketers to use their own email lists to serve up their Facebook ads -- an approach that Jacobs called “a game-changer in digital advertising.” “Facebook is the only platform that [now] enables accurate individual targeting on a large scale, shifting Facebook advertising to a very sustainable business model of reach and frequency,” concluded Jacobs. 3. Click-through rates are rising Defenders of Facebook’s change to its EdgeRank algorithm last year have pointed to the fact that click-through rates (CTRs) are on the rise. Jacobs confirmed this increase, noting: “Mobile newsfeed and desktop CTRs are up 34% and 49%, respectively.” Erica Barth, VP of products and partnerships for Resolution Media, noticed this too, calling Facebook “one of the largest drivers of traffic to a client’s new online product.” 4. Yummier optimization and reporting By designating a select group of SPMDs, Facebook does not appear to have starved out any of the other major players or decreased their appetite for Facebook. For example, Resolution Media, a digital agency with operations in 40 countries, simply partners with SPMDs “on a self-serve basis, using the SPMDs’ technology platforms to streamline management, optimization and reporting.” 5. Open wide for Open Graph According to Facebook, “Open Graph helps people tell stories about their lives with the apps they use.” For marketers, Open Graph creates the opportunity to align their “stories” with their targets, increasing the likelihood of positive interactions. Patrick Toland, chief revenue officer of Optimal (another SPMD), believes “this [tactic] is much better than the survey-based data [of other media].” 6. Marketers are eating it up Jacobs, Barth and Toland all served up satiating case histories, but alas, I can cover only one here. “Using a combination of our analytics and Custom Audiences, we helped a F100 financial services company refine their target demos and increase their fanbase by 350% while lowering costs by 60%,” Toland reported. “More importantly, we found them people who were more likely to be customers,” he concluded. Final Note: In preparation for our panel discussion on the impact of SPMDs at MediaPost's upcoming Social Media Insider Summit, I was delighted to be able to catch up with Jacobs, Barth and Toland. You can find my complete interviews with them now on TheDrewBlog.com.
One of the most significant trends in customer engagement over the last three years is the rise of social media outside marketing and inside customer service. Social media is moving beyond contacts and interactions to a culture of community and collaboration for the most engaged and customer-centric companies. More than 23% of consumers between the ages of 18 and 32 prefer social media when learning about products. Consumers are no longer relying solely on the traditional channels of phone and email. They are interacting online with peers over sponsored communities and over the public cloud via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. Consumers and consumer groups are setting up social media and other online advice services themselves. Approximately 83% of consumers tell their friends if they get a good deal, demonstrating that the demand for advice from fellow customers is present and strong enough for consumers to act to enable this type of advice. In the financial sector, for instance, more than 12% of consumers turn to blogs and almost 7% use other forms of social media as a resource for advice. Social is more than an interaction, or transaction; it is a culture. Social is an approach to doing business in a more interconnected way. Social media is becoming the answer for crossing functional and departmental barriers and for collaborating as one business. Social media is the answer to getting that one contact who comes in once a year connected to the one person in the company who has the experience and insight to provide the right insight at the right time. Social is a philosophical belief that more people working together is better than one person working alone. Follow these five steps to establish a customer engagement strategy:
There's a single, fundamental reason it would be harder for an upstart new website to beat LinkedIn than for one to beat Facebook: There is more risk associated with losing your network on LinkedIn. As I prepare for a business trip to New York next week, I sifted through my connections on LinkedIn. I'll admit, I don't use LinkedIn that often. But when I do, it's definitely more purposeful than my daily meanderings on Facebook. Looking through my connections, LinkedIn told me that a friend from high school had a new job that definitely related to the purpose of my trip to NYC. This same friend is one whose Facebook photos I've commented on, she's done the same, and occasionally we catch up via chat. And, yet, I had no idea that we should be talking personal AND business. The question suddenly crossed my mind: what holds more value -- my Facebook friends or my LinkedIn connections (especially if many of them are one and the same)? The answer, simply put, comes down to risk. What If You Lost Half Your People? I'm not a power user of LinkedIn. In fact, I need to be better about connecting with people after meeting them in the real world. So I have about 500 LinkedIn connections. Facebook isn't too different, with 486 friends. Probably many of you are similar, while others have many more friends. But, imagine this: What would be the effect of losing half of your connections or half of your friends? That’s the likely scenario if you were to switch from Facebook or from LinkedIn to something else. You'd choose not to link up with some people, some people would choose not to link up with you, and some people would just get lost in the shuffle. Half of Facebook I value all my friends greatly. But, I'd wager I have about a dozen close friends, a couple dozen more regularly talked-to friends and three dozen more friends whom I hope, but can't be certain, to see in the next year or two. That leaves a lot of friends left on the list. It's not that I don't care about those friends. It's not that I won't miss them and think about them. But, in the next six months, it won't necessarily affect me not to be linked to them via social media. Heck, there are probably a couple dozen for which I wouldn't be all that disappointed if I stopped seeing their messages in my Feed (for my friends reading this, OF COURSE I don't mean you). Half of LinkedIn I don't regularly talk to, communicate with, share with and otherwise interact with a good 75% of my connections on LinkedIn. However, I would find it absolutely tragic if I lost half my connections on LinkedIn. You see, it's easy to friend someone on Facebook -- there is very little being asked of that transaction. However, connecting with someone on LinkedIn inherently means you are agreeing to talk business with them -- a transaction with both a personal and professional stake. Someone you see the value in connecting with today will likely hold much less apparent value in six to 12 months if you haven't had any interaction with that person in the time in between. Ramping Back Up So, that connection you haven't talked to in two years, who suddenly represents a win-win business contact, has a lot more risk associated with losing than…that friend you haven’t talked to in two years whose really cute kid’s photo you might miss. At the end of the day, leaving Facebook for a new platform isn’t that risky. But, leaving LinkedIn and risking your connections not reconnecting is extremely risky. Said another way: it’s a lot harder to ramp back up on LinkedIn than Facebook Now, I’m not saying Facebook is currently at risk, but what can your business take away from all this? - Make sure your Facebook strategy is portable. - Experiment with LinkedIn, since it will be around. - Know the mentality the same user is bringing to Facebook vs LinkedIn (or any social media platform, for that matter). - Connect with people on LinkedIn now, as opposed to later. Okay, I gotta go. I have about 300 business cards for people I need to connect with on LinkedIn.
This week’s Presidential Inaugural may serve as an interesting milestone in the emerging power of mobilized multimedia as crowdsourced journalism. Instagram encouraged its users at the Monday events to post their pics to a series of hashtags that included #inauguration2013, #inaug2013 and in concert with the cable news network #CNN. In my memory this was among the highest-profile instances of a major world event being reported by design by hundreds of thousands of attendees. The torrent of images coursing through Instagram and the various hashtags throughout the day attest to the rapid rise of Instagram into our consciousness and certainly its potential as a media platform. In general, the flow of images was as tedious and boring as a common Twitter feed. To be cynical for a second, looking at the raw feed of personal images into a hashtag like these is a bit like being trapped in the world's longest, most boring slide show ever devised. Back in the day of the Kodak Carousel, showing Kodachrome slides of the family vacation in a darkened living room was the nightmarish end of many a suburban dinner party. How many wives had to nudge their husbands awake so as not to be rude? While many media watchers will wring their hands over the notion that crowdsourced journalism further undermines mainstream media models, the practice also calls into high relief the value of the editorial hand. CNN did it up right on its page aggregating the feed. The site ran the feed of user-generated content, but called out Editor’s Picks that captured a blend of photojournalistic quality, historic poignancy, news interest and personal excitement. Events like these and experiments in leveraging UGC point to an emerging art of news curation and aggregation. Traditional journos may turn their noses up at the idea, but I suspect we will see news outlets assert different tones, styles, and perspectives in the way they curate the mobilized reporter pool. And of course this crowdsourcing of event imagery becomes a platform for the raw, raucous, oh so democratic process. Partisans and wags were out in full force in this feed of Inaugural images. Online and mobile images joined with superimposed headlines have become the new graffiti of digital democracy. Politicians and media figures were lauded, lampooned and slandered in the feed. One image that captured former President Bill Clinton mugging a bit in the background of a photo of Kelly Clarkson on the podium went viral quickly with a host of different lewd headlines. Which is to say that crowdsourcing event coverage and its potential to deflate power and privilege is more fundamentally American and democratic than the pomp, ceremony and wealth on show at the event itself.