Commentary

Innovation: We Do It Because We Have To - And Because We Can

We are working in the midst of a Technology Revolution, our own fast-motion version of the Industrial Revolution. But rather than looking for ways to make machines more effective and efficient, we are looking for ways to make ads (and content) more effective and efficient 

Case in point, 2015 gave us “micro-moments” — coined by Google as an update to its Zero Moment of Truth research. Google revealed that smartphones have fractured the consumer journey into “hundreds of real-time, intent-driven micro-moments” — moments that brands must win. This last year also gave us real-time marketing tools, multiscreen sync technologies that allow TV-to-digital ad syncing to combat second screening, and — compounding all of this — ad blockers. In Q2 2015, according to the PageFair 2015 Ad Blocking Report, more than 45 million people used ad blockers.

Micro-moments and ad blockers are just two of the challenges we face. I can’t think of an industry with more new innovations and new applications than advertising. But we can’t stop ourselves. We do it because we have to — and because we can.

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In this and future columns, I will pay homage to marketers who are embracing technological innovation and using it to tell effective, non-siloed stories to meet people where they are. Here, I take a look at how Foot Locker has used various technologies to extend an excellent late-2014 campaign into effective cross-channel territory.  

Horse with Harden,” produced by BBDO New York, is a great example of marketing that fuses deep audience understanding with mobile technology and social platforms. Using social channels with mobile hooks, they took a simple playground game into the 21st century, and connected fans not only with their brand, but also with NBA star James Harden in a very cool, relevant way.

The campaign digitizes the game of Horse, a basketball game in which players try to out-do each other with difficult shots. For one week, the campaign challenged fans to grab their smartphones and record short videos of their most creative shots. Hundreds of fans tweeted or Instagramed the videos to @footlocker with #horsewithharden. The cool part: James Harden then attempted to recreate the best submissions and the resulting videos were socially distributed across Foot Locker’s feeds.

Followers of @footlocker were glued to the event online over the course of several hours as they witnessed James’ attempts to duplicate the shots submitted. It received coverage across sports and national websites, and reportedly doubled Foot Locker’s average monthly Web traffic in one week, with its YouTube subscribers tripling in one week alone.

As well done as the Foot Locker 2014 campaign was, the changes in technology that occurred within one year of its launch could have brought even more potency to the effort. The brand’s newly acquired audience could now easily be activated during and after the campaign as well. Hashtag retargeting now allows digital ads to be served to audiences that have shared or commented using #tags. They are available on Twitter, plus various ad networks or DSPs as a social-targeting tactic. YouTube has excellent paid extension tactics too — including video remarketing, which gives brands the ability to serve additional videos based on previously-watched content. YouTube cards (an evolution of annotations that work on mobile and desktop) allow additional video distribution, product merchandising and social actions within the current video setting as well.

And the valuable content generated by the campaign can also be showcased in native and rich media units to extend user-generated content shelf life. Technological innovation now gives us the ability to serve these videos in rich media units in real time through the #tag and, finally, search retargeting offers multiple venues to continue the conversation. Google’s Customer Match allows email addresses to be targeted with different search ads and its Retargeting Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) allows brands to serve customized ad copy to audiences based on specific pages or actions taken on your site.

Now, to take it even one step further, any first-party data, such as emails or cookies collected from the campaign, can be location targeted through mobile ads, thereby serving up Foot Locker offers when consumers are near a store, or are at a competitor’s store.

Basically, Foot Locker and its agency BBDO New York said, “I’ll see your ad blocker and micro-moments and raise you cross-channel everything.”

The technology today allows us to connect the dots one impression at a time; to offer consumers relevant, valuable information just about anywhere along their path to purchase. Now we can entertain them with more content, or give them product specs and offers once they’re ready to buy. 

What other tools and tactics have you used to continue brand dialogue with your audiences? I’d love to hear about them.

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