brand-e Panel on Morton’s, KLM, Intel, Heineken
Social media figured highly in 2011, and the brand-e Campaigns Panel has flagged up a number of initiatives in its look-back at last year.
“Two Thousand and eleven was the year more and more businesses started to realise the creative and cost-efficient opportunities offered by social media,” says Pat McCaren, senior planner at Dare in London. “With decreasing marketing budgets, businesses need to be creative with their marketing, and often this means capitalising on an opportunity when it presents itself. My favourite example from last year was Morton’s Steakhouse.
It began with one man, a tweet and an empty stomach. Peter Shankman, a passenger about to board a flight to Newark, tweeted “Hey @Mortons – can you meet me at Newark airport with a porterhouse when I land in 2 hours? K, thanks ☺”. Sure enough, two hours later, when he arrived, he was met by a Morton’s waiter carrying a cooked porterhouse steak.
“While this may look like cute customer service, it’s a well-thought-through idea rooted in a basic understanding of how social media works,” says McCaren. “Mr Shankman has over 100,000 followers, so for Morton’s, the cost of a steak and a taxi to reach over 100,000 people was minimal compared to what a press ad or TV spot would have cost. Better still, the Morton’s name would be shared by Mr Shankman’s followers, and their followers, and so on. It wasn’t long before the story was emblazoned across the evening news, giving Morton’s huge reach and positive coverage.”
Dare also singles out KLM for embracing social media with gusto, with the airline producing a mega-mix of genuinely social content aiming to involve fans and customers as much as possible.
“From offering to change a flight to Miami by a week if enough people could fill the plane to ‘stalking’ people at airports using Foursquare and Twitter, KLM have generated a glut of content that always puts the customer at the heart of communications,” McCrean says. “It feels experimental, which makes it very exciting – you’re always wondering what KLM are going to do next.”
For Lawrence Weber of The Brooklyn Brothers, the standout social media campaign of the year was Intel’s Museum Of Me, where the tech brand deployed a Facebook app enabling consumers to build collections of their lives on the Social Network.
“This is the one campaign this year that has crossed over from the agency bubble to my real friends,” he says. “A beautifully produced and effortlessly simple way of creating a personal history from your Facebook data. It was another example of Intel’s ongoing commitment to support interesting digital work.”
Wander Bruijel of Philips points to the activation of Heineken’s EUFA Champions League sponsorship where the brand and ad agency AKQA researched how fans actually watched football on TV. They found viewers were dual-screening, accessing their laptops, phones and social networks to share experiences watching games.
“The Star Player app taps into that behaviour, enabling them to interact in real time with a televised game,” explains Bruijel. “It challenges users to predict goals and play games, whilst allowing the user to gain creds by amassing points and badges for Facebook.
“Star Player is a good example of how a brand can use technological innovations to add value to real life experiences. It taps into real consumer behaviour and insight and marries it up with smart tech to bring something new and exciting to how they experience things. This is not one of the many single-use apps out there that are resolutely removed from your smartphone. It drives real interaction, repeat visits every time a game is on and virality, stimulating value-add interaction with the brand. Smart guys there at Heineken and AKQA.”
Richard Bates of the Brand Union notes that not everything sticks in the mind, however.
“Of late, digital social media campaigns seem to be a string of one-offs that generate great immediate excitement and response, but do not always maintain a sustained, memorable conversation with the consumer over time,” he says. “The use of digital and social media and the campaign activations they foster are, by design, “of the moment.” The immediacy suggests immediate gratification, and there is certainly an excitement – and potential risk – to the speed of the quick call and response between brands and consumers.”
