Brand Nation: Leading Marketers Share their Vision

Posted by Steve Hall · Sunday November 11, 2007

Moderator: Louise Story, New York Times
Panelists:
Daina Middleton, Global interactive Director (Printing & Imaging), HP
Joe Epstein, VP WW Digital Marketing Strategy, Columbia Tri-star
Mark Fogelberg, ANA

Brand nation is about marketers to get loyal customers to be citizens of their brand nation regardless of global boundaries. This was a huge “show and tell”, illustrating how these companies are doing it.

HP and Columbia seem to “get it”. They’ve taken their marketing out of the silos and have put together some impressive campaigns, integrated across all media and using multiple consumer touchpoints effectively.

Joe Epstein creates campaigns about Sony’s films when they hit the theaters. He talked extensively about Spider-Man 3, which was a “4 quadrant film” for parents, kids, Hispanics and alpha fans (who convert fans into marketers). The objective was to encourage fans to immerse themselves and immerse into the marketing plan. The Strategic Approach: Recruit the most active Spider-Man online fans to participate in the marketing campaign.

Columbia started by creating the Spiderman movie network: providing first look content and news for 250k registered members with network member only message boards and a social network on AOL’s AIM pages. “Face of the fan” online blogs featured participants chosen via the UGC program on Sony’s Grouper.com Winners provided news and info on the Spider-Man Movie Blog throughout the campaign. This was on location at New York’s Spider-Man week and the Tokyo world premiere. It generated 5.3 million views on the official Spider-Man 3 blog. Global Trailer launches featured a simulcast trailer in NYC and London. Sam Raimi answered fan questions live from one of the locations. This used local social networking sites to recruit fans to the local premiere. The full trailer launch (domestic and international simultaneously) generated 20+ million views combined. Finally, the “battle within game” beta test created an immersive gaming experience allowing select alpha fans to beta test the game via a secret website; users provided feedback on game play; the game was modified for final launch. The secret link became a huge pass-along on chat boards among the alpha community. A Valentine’s day stunt targeted females with thematic Valentine’s day giveaway of his and hers engagement rings, with a Myspace homepage execution on Valentine’s day and appropriately themed ads on other female-targeted sites. Night of heroes premiered an extended 7 minute clip of the film on NBC.com through Heroes, which generated 1.9 million streams. The Spider-Man Fan Photo Mosaic on the day of release launched a Spider-Man fan photo mosaic via Yahoo’s homepage and worked with webshots to generate an enormous number of submitted photos of fans and generated 1.1 million interactions and 147 million impressions. As you can see, it was consistent and pervasive. Wow.

Daina Middleton of HP was equally impressive. Daina is responsible for $28 billion dollars worldwide in cameras, desktop printers, cartridges, supplies, large format output etc. and now has trade advertising as well as digital programs.

HP launched a campaign last month with Youtube, the Project Direct online film festival, a first for HP and for Youtube. Jason Reitman hosted this international film competition by announcing the contest on Youtube and participating in judging. Youtube users in 7 countries will access the festival via localized Youtube sites; each film submission must follow director’s guidelines. The festival was announced October 1, with the winning video announced on December 5th. Week one got 1 million views and over 250,000 comments, was favorited over 250 times and was the #8 most subscribed Youtube channel. It’s an integrated campaign in the US and Canada with search and site targeting campaigns. It’s gotten an effective 5% clickthrough rate.

The HP community mosaic on flickr featured thumbnail images smaller or larger depending on the number of clicks and comments each photo receives. It will include outdoor, for example HP will wrap a building in Times Square with images about “what does New York have to say?”

HP is also building a platform to syndicate content externally. HP Uncut started as a community created inside HP (might we say, “intranet”?) to allow employees to upload videos for customer-relevant topics. It’s syndicated with new external video destination site with 2.0 functionality. Benefits: it’s a morale builder for employees, and a tool providing relevant content with easy to get business conversational sales and marketing for Customers.

Daina concluded with an extensive map showing all the online customer touchpoints. Again, impressive for the breadth and range of initiatives, and for how they interconnect.

Finally, Mark Fogelberg of the ANA (Association of National Advertisers, an industry association for brand-side marketers) gave the view from 30,000 feet. It’s a great time to be in digital. Marketers are hungry to move to digital. We need to close the gap between digital media consumption and digital media spend. To diminish the gap you need to come up with standardized metrics, sorely lacking now. Marketers will put money behind things that are accountable and generate ROI. Digital can return great ROI. We need to build more digitally savvy organizations. Advertisers look to suppliers to help them become more digitally savvy—24% said they consider their organizations to be savvy, 18% consider themselves to be leaders in the space. According to Mark, the key to success is to help marketers succeed, help them become more savvy, to grow as marketers. The first sale is not enough. If you can help a marketer sell a second or third time, you’ll succeed. The number 1 constraint? “I don’t have time or resources: if you can come to them and provide time and resources, you’ll succeed.” Sound advice all the agencies attending should heed.

Related topics: NY 07 Sessions

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