Creative Showcase I: Going Beyond Digital—Contagious Ideas that Change the Conversation
It’s no longer enough to communicate. We must change the brand’s conversation to the brand’s advantage. According to Forrester there are 33.5 billion brand conversations every day in the US—and that’s just online.
As Domino’s Pizza found out this spring, if you don’t mange the conversation actively it will manage you. We’ve gone from word of mouth speed to word of click speed—news used to spread from one person to another, one at a time. Now, it spreads geometrically on the web before you know it or can react.
The job of marketers is to have more people speaking positively and fewer people speaking negatively, the ultimate goal being to get endorsed and recommended. According to a study by the London School of Economics, brands with the most recommendations in their category grow four times faster than the category average. Increasing recommendation by 12% doubles sales growth.
It’s not just about buzz. Buzz is just noise. Consumer choice has exploded, and cutting through a highly fragmented media landscape is becoming harder and harder. We want customers to live in high recommendation and conversation. We need to be talked about positively.
How do we do this? It begins with a Point of View. People are holding brands to a higher ideal. Brands must share their values. It helps to create a purposeful and immersive brand experience—an experience beyond expectation. Broadcast still has a very important role to play. A point of view recruits brand believers instead of a target.
Rob Feakins and Mark Hider of Publicis started with lots of “show and tell” to illustrate the point. Vicks’ major brand is Nyquil. The typical ad in the category has some guy in a bathrobe with a red bulbous nose who takes medicine and goes to bed. It’s all just focused on symptom relief. A year ago Publicis and P&G started talking about what could Vicks stand for—not symptom relief but how can you be a better you.
They needed a contagious idea to start the conversation. What’s a contagious idea? How do you know you’ve got one? It’s not just a stunt, not a “one off”, not simply viral. It’s an idea that instigates, influences and ultimately changes brand conversation across all media and across all brand experiences. The means of transmission is your consumer’s vast network of connections. They showed us the commercials which were—how should I put it—lovely. Really lovely and memorable.
The old school way was to “create an idea”. What does it communicate? Do I agree or accept it? In the new school we ask, will people want to share it? Will they personalize it?
Here are a some of the other “show and tell” examples.
Speight’s Brewery in New Zealand lost its market position. Publicis created a new campaign: Speight’s Great Beer Delivery. Speight’s built a pub and shipped it from New Zealand to London by ship. To do it, they needed a crew… 6% of the entire drinking population applied. Speight’s is now the number one beer in New Zealand.
The next example was seen by 43 million people in the US. The “Yes We Can” campaign for Obama was a phenomenal success and contributed to Obama’s victory. According to the panelists, the video was watched more than 26 million times.
T-mobile’s “faves” campaign was based on the fundamental insight that most of us call the same 5 people 75% of time. The campaign generated lots of buzz, including references by Oprah and Jon Stewart. Talk about viral marketing.
Jacques Hagopian of P&G next talked about Charmin. Charmin is a category you don’t think about till you need it. It’s an iconic brand over 80 years old. Mr. Whipple was one of the first brand advocates. He still has tremendous recall. This was relevant in the time frame but something new had to be done.
Charmin came up with a contagious idea: the “red cross of restrooms”. 70% of times you choose to go to the bathroom, it’s outside your home. Most people don’t even want to think about that. Charmin first created a 57 foot truck, the Potty Palooza. P&G took it to places where there is a terrible bathroom experience, like state fairs. Then they took it one step further. In 2006, they took Charmin to Times Square, the highest tourist traffic location in the US.
The objective was to provide a welcoming home environment with—get this—clean bathrooms like home. Jim Stengel, P&G’s CMO, presented this to a group of P&G alumni (including me) a few years ago, and it’s brilliant. It has transformed the way we look at the brand. They’ve been visited by over 1.5 million consumers. The whole campaign got 2.5 billion media impressions, exposure in every major newspaper and on every major TV network. The average visit is 45 minutes, and they get more daily visitors than the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building. This was accompanied by an iPhone app, “Sit or Squat”, in which participants rate public restrooms (sit is positive, squat is negative). Charmin took over sponsorship of this and it’s become a new and innovative way to live the brand’s purpose. The iPhone app provides mobile access, heavy user involvement, and has no seasonal or geographical limitations. Consumers vote on quality of toilets and there have been amazing results: 8.5 million mobile web ad impressions, 350 million impressions, 400,000 app downloads since the Charmin sponsorship.
Finally the panelists presented TGI Friday’s Meet Woody campaign. It is the intersection of social media and branding. Woody started on Facebook with a viral video (http://www.facebook.com/fanwoody). The challenge? If Woody could get 500,000 Facebook fans, TGI Friday’s would give a free burger to each fan. There were no ads for the first four days. By Monday when the TV campaign launched, Woody had 85,000 fans. Four days later Woody had 500,000 fans. The success was so overwhelming TGI Friday’s had to change the target to a million fans. Woody won the bet and TGI Friday’s collected 600,000 email addresses. 60% of those who got a coupon redeemed it for a TGI Friday’s burger.
The bottom line is this: think outside the box, combine social marketing with other elements of the marketing mix, and you can score home runs. If you think outside the box, it doesn’t matter if you’re big or small—all you need is your imagination.
