Marketing Lessons from the World’s Most Illusive

Whether you like it or not, social media is increasingly becoming the choice of channel for breaking news. There will always be sceptics - those who don’t use it, those that don’t trust it and those that don’t understand it. In fact, in February 2010 a study found that some 18% of companies weren’t using social media. This was up 9% from 2009, and a further 13% said social media was unimportant. Even with those that have embraced social media it is largely considered “un-strategic” and often frowned upon by traditional marketers.

So here’s the lesson, if the White House uses Social Media to get the message out about the execution of Bin Laden, then it’s pretty obvious that social media is one of the first places you should be looking to get your message out. The image of the President, Vice President and members of the national security team in the Situation Room of the White House on 1 May receiving an update on the mission is one that was beamed across the world, made the front page of the National Press and will no doubt be shown to generations of the future. And where was it first published? On Flickr, a social media site.

Not only this but it was Twitter that was responsible for the breaking of the news by an aide to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld albeit unknowingly by an IT consultant living in Pakistan annoyed by the early morning chorus of four stealth helicopters ‘creeping’ into the area! After the raid, Sohaib Athar (34) Tweeted ““Uh oh, now I’m the guy who live-blogged the Osama raid without knowing it.” Subsequently, by the end of the day, Athar (@ReallyVirtual) had over 33,000 followers on Twitter.

But after this, what’s next? Twitter is a great place to vent your feelings and find out the latest headlines, but what happens after that? 140 characters is hardly the medium for detailed, accurate journalism. You can find out what’s going on, but where do you go to get the ‘real’ news? More often than not, back to traditional media where you can separate fact from fiction, and gain perspective.
So, social media and traditional media should be seen as complementary, rather than a replacement for each other.

In the same way, when you’re looking at new innovative ways to drive response from your target audience, you should be thinking integration. The increase in the importance of social media has crept into the advertising spotlight. It is now on the agenda of many large advertisers with many employing a specific body to deal with advertising across the social media spectrum. It has become an important part of an integrated marketing campaign – it allows the advertiser to accurately target their demographic whilst using press as getting their message to the masses. Hence, social media can be used to enhance the effectiveness of a traditional approach whilst not losing sight of your core strengths and possibilities.

What people need to recognise, as the White House already has, is that social media is here to stay … and that goes for the cynic on the other side of your meeting room table as well!

‘JustTextGiving’ – Enabling Charities to Harness the Power of Text

It was announced this week that JustGiving and Vodafone have teamed up to launch a new service that will enable all UK registered charities to raise money through text donations. The initiative, called ‘JustTextGiving’, is a simple and free service. Unlike previous charity text campaigns which have involved a steep charge on the donation value, this removes the set up and running costs, as well as the commission fees. This means that the donor can be confident that every penny of their donation goes towards their chosen charity.

So, how does it work? The charity must obtain a ‘JustTextGiving’ unique six digit short code, which allows it to invite others to make donations of up to £10 by texting the code to 70070. The value is then secured from the donor’s bill or pay-as-you-go balance. However, nothing has yet been said about ownership of data which poses the obvious question ‘just how valuable the donors might be in the long term, given that this is based on a one-off gift.’

The new initiative is available across all network providers and will be welcomed by fundraisers. We’ve already seen the potential of text as a means of securing incremental income across a number of our clients’ results – RSPCA, WaterAid and The Salvation Army have all capitalised on the use of text as part of their DRTV campaigns as a means of increasing income in some instances by up to 30%. This has transformed results in a time of declining phone response rates (not to mention a decline in overall giving, as reported by the Pennies Foundation last week).

Not only will this initiative make text giving more accessible for all UK charities but it will also facilitate and improve engagement between charities and the next generation of donor. It’s now more important than ever that fundraisers are speaking to potential donors in the most relevant way and using all of the tools at their disposal in order to do so. Some of our clients have already seen the potential value that text has to bring to the table – for other charities, it’s just a matter of time…

Helen Guard
Senior TV Planner Buyer

Integration: action speaks louder than words

Not so long ago at new business presentations one of the main things that kept the pitch team amused was to count how many times the term ‘integration’ was mentioned. My record personal best was 26! I’m not sure though anyone really understood what integration really meant. To me it’s more than media alignment, it’s more than consistently communicating a core message across all platforms. Integration is about enhancing the customer journey towards a profitable place – hearts and minds as well as the bottom line.

Nowadays social media practitioners such as Brian Solis from Future Works, are leading the way in integrated communication planning and we can learn a lot from them. They essentially build community through engagement and possess a great deal of knowledge about their audience. They proactively reach out to potential ambassadors to spread the word by integrating communication that’s personalised, real-time and consistent. At the very heart of this integration is being able to start and maintain a conversation that is amplified when it’s held across various platforms.

Good conversations evoke engagement and this is where TV has lots to offer. TV is the most effective advertising medium in generating talkability as we are about to see once more with the launch of this year’s Britain’s Got Talent. And ITV have made a huge effort in not only instigating conversation on a large scale but through its platforms are able to prolong and deepen them in terms of both soft and hard metrics. An example of this is where the advertiser on a mobile internet site can feature product information, special offers, downloads, games, competitions and data collection opportunities. Store locator – users text a keyword and their postcode to a short code on-screen. They then receive an SMS informing them of the nearest location where the product is sold. All this is in the context of talking about a show which for a huge part of the country dominates popular culture for weeks.

It has long been accepted that multi-media strategies are a good thing – sum of the parts and all that. The natural progression is that integration is an even better thing. Integration can only be achieved by strategically executing creative across all media. In our experience, creative relevancy appears to add value by matching creative to context. With huge pressure on budgets this has become a really important aspect of media planning for both direct response and brand campaigns although with integration the line between the two has become even more blurred.

At mc&c we like to prove the blindingly obvious just in case … For one of our clients we developed a model which helped them to put a value against integration for a campaign whose objectives were to convey trust as well as generate funded accounts with an average value of £30,000. The model compared multiple messaging across multimedia platforms to one single message deployed across multiple media. Interestingly, what we found was that the single-minded integrated message produced 25% more funded accounts. There was also the added benefit that in research carried out softer metrics such as trust and confidence, the campaign scored well. It seems creative integration wherever the dialogue takes place engenders brand acceptability and higher levels of response.

We’re probably still a long way to fully understanding integration but least we’re doing it rather than just talking about it.

Ian Prager, Planning Director