It’s not news that we’re all watching TV whilst surfing the net, tapping away on our smartphones and engaging others in discussion around our favourite programmes (just log on to Twitter during X-Factor and Strictly!). What I’d like to applaud here is how broadcasters are taking this social engagement and building communities of loyal fans beyond the TV schedule.
Sunday night saw the last ever episode of the BBC’s thrilling MI5 drama Spooks. After nine years and 10 series it was time for the sliding doors of Section D to close for a final time. I knew I would probably be a little tearful and mourn that I’ll no longer swoon over the incredibly suave terrorist-fighting male cast, nor dream of emulating the leading ladies; however, what I absolutely loved was the show’s commitment to social engagement.
As an avid Tweeter, I was super-excited to find out during Series 9 that you could actually follow the characters on Twitter. The thing that they have got so right with these feeds is that they are active all year round (unlike @bbcLuther who only tweets when Luther is airing). Not only are they active but also attentive. They care about their followers and will take the time to respond to individual tweets.
First up, can you imagine my surprise (and delight) when @Dimitri_MI5 tweeted back to a message I sent about being excited about the final series starting…
I certainly *grinned* on receiving that back, but this was topped off by a response from the boss man himself @Harry_Pearce when I tweeted after the final episode…
I’ve honestly never felt more social media love than that and I’m sure anyone who has received a response or RT will be feeling the same way!
It’s great to see other dramas are taking a lead from Spooks, with ITV’s Downton Abbey creating profiles for all cast members – @LadyMaryCrawley is winning the followers race with over 1,700 at the time of writing. So when you’re watching on Sunday night, you know where I’ll be… wrapped up on the sofa with Blackberry in hand, tweeting away.
Our relationships are all built on dialogue. Talking to each other, sharing ideas, working together, creating things, discovering new stuff, having fun, laughing, crying, flirting, arguing – everything that makes life worth living is built on our ability to actively engage with each other. Why should that be different from the relationships we build with the brands in our lives?
For most of its history, Marketing has been pretty much a one-way conversation – a kind of Orwellian 1984 scenario where brands tell you what they want you to know and the customer has no way of talking back (something Apple seemed to pick up on in their famous ad). Of course, that was primarily driven by the available marketing channels which didn’t give customers a voice.
But like the hammer in the Apple ad, the digital age, and particularly the social media age (rather than the Apple Macintosh), has smashed through the barrier separating brands from their consumers. And this starts to give us some fantastic examples of how brands are using these two-way channels to form deeper and more natural relationships with their customers.
Of course, there are lots of different roles for brands to play when fuelling this dialogue. They can engage directly with their clients, but they can also fuel the dialogue in more subtle ways by becoming an integral part of their customers’ own conversations. Either way, the principle is the same: give your customers a voice and enable them to have conversations with you and with each other.
Dialogue between your brand and the customer
There are many examples of brands engaging directly with their consumers. One common form is around customer service. Facebook and Twitter provide incredibly useful information about what customers really think about your brand. Look for it, listen to it and do something about it. When @interactiveamy’s pizza took over an hour to arrive, she vented her frustration on Twitter. When the General Manager Raymon DeLeon saw her tweet, this was his response. It’s a longish video – no need to watch the whole thing:
The famous Old Spice Man and Blendtec’s “Will It Blend” campaign are further examples of brands that respond to input from their customers with great results. And, of course, Tippex gives you the chance to have loads of fun with their Bear in the Woods.
‘Crowdsourcing’ – actively soliciting ideas from you customers and doing something with them – is another form of dialogue which works for more than just funny marketing campaigns.
General Electric Ecomagination is an open call to businesses, entrepreneurs, innovators and students to submit breakthrough ideas for energy creation, management and use. In addition to providing the ideas, the public also vote for their favourites. With a pledge to invest $200m along with GE’s technical expertise to bring the best ideas to market, this is one form of dialogue that could literally change the world.
Pepsi are doing something very similar with their Pepsi Refresh project. They are looking for ideas that will ‘Refresh the World’ with a similar commitment to funding the ideas that get the most votes from their consumers.
What is particularly strong about the Pepsi Refresh programme is how deep the conversations they facilitate flow. Not only have they created a powerful platform from which consumers can interact with the brand, the strength of the programme itself encourages consumers to build meaningful conversations with each other online, which grow into ‘real-world’ conversations (as individuals look to build momentum behind their own proposed initiatives), which culminates in a tangible legacy in an American community that consumers will talk about for years to come.
In a final example of engaging directly with your customers, Puma have just launched this Facebook App, which allows Spurs fans to play around with the design of their team’s 2011/2012 kit. Of course, it would be even better if the fans had some input into the final design of the kit rather than simply “guessing the design” – but surely that won’t be too far away. In fact, given the passion that football fans have for their team’s kit, and the ease with which they can speak to their fans, it is amazing that all kit manufacturers don’t get some form of fan input. Here’s what happens if you don’t: http://bit.ly/mzWVT3.
Inserting your brand into your customers conversations
In addition to speaking directly to customers, brands can get their customers to talk about them by giving them the content or platform to fuel the conversation.
How did a Turkish Mobile Network get mentioned in 56,750 tweets (topping the Turkish trending tables for 8 days), which reached approximately 3.6 million people (in an initiative that probably cost them less than £20,000)? Find out here.
Staying with mobile networks, Orange has also done a great job of creating a reason for fans to mention them. In this example, which works particularly well on the back of their film sponsorships, Orange will make sure that your tweets are read out in the style of a film voiceover. Go on, tweet your plans for this summer here. And then of course, share it with all your friends and followers, who will receive the Orange branding.
Guinness FanFinder used a similar technique during their sponsorship of the RBS 6 Nations. They published a massive picture of the crowd at various matches and encouraged people to find and tag themselves and their friends. With over 5,000 snap shots posted to walls via the Facebook App and an average of 130 Facebook friends per person that’s some more pretty good exposure for Guinness.
In an attempt to encourage dialogue around their new album, the Kaiser Chiefs kicked off a “create your own Kaiser Chiefs album” campaign for their latest album, The Future Is Medieval. Music fans get to pick out 10 songs from 20 of Kaiser Chiefs songs listed online, create their own album cover, buy it and then sell it online. To make it even better, for every sale of their album they will receive £1. Whilst socially engaging this campaign also pushes power onto the consumer removing them from their traditional role of purchasing products into the role of producer, giving them the chance to create their own product and sell it on to others. Thus creating a tangible benefit for the consumer for positive dialogue about the Kaiser Chiefs brand.
Finally, in a brilliant piece of work by our sister agency Jam, Samsung added considerable spice to the dialogue between tech bloggers and their audience via their “Extreme Unboxing” series of videos.
In all of these examples, the brands found an authentic role for themselves and encouraged conversations between communities with a common interest.
Where does sponsorship fit in to all this
So what does this all mean for sponsorship? The answer is simple: passion. People want to talk about the things that they really care about. With all due respect to most brands, your customers are unlikely to care as much about you as they are do about sports, music, film, art, technology, the environment or activity in their community (to name but a few). So, if you want to start a conversation with your customers, talking about something that they are really interested in is a good place to start. And finding a shared passion with your customers is, of course, at the very heart of what sponsorship is all about.
In many ways, this blog goes hand in hand with the brilliant piece on Content written by Ben in last month’s Synopsis (definitely read it if you haven’t already) because the key to stimulating this dialogue is great content. But, what I hope this blog makes clear is that creating great content and putting it in the right places is not enough. It is then all about opening up the channels and fuelling the conversations that make life so interesting.
Principles of Dialogue
Listen to your customers, learn what they care about and value their contribution. Actively open up two way communication channels
Find an authentic role for your brand (a reason for you to be there) and don’t overstep your bounds
Think about whether it makes more sense to talk with your audience directly or to get them to talk about you
Remember, this is about your shared passion – not about you
Have fun and be creative – remember engaging with other people is what makes life fun
The Royal Wedding dominated much of April, making it almost impossible to escape the media exposure and hype. As expected, hundreds of companies jumped on that media train, grabbing a piece of the action on the way, and subsequently cashing in.
With a surge of wedding related memorabilia, tenuous marketing and product tie ups, we take a look back at two royal wedding campaigns that kept true to their brand values.
What we like:
T-mobile – Royal Wedding
With another edition to their ‘Life’s for Sharing’ campaign, T-mobile brought us this viral ad featuring 15 royal lookalikes strutting their stuff to ‘House of Love’ by East 17. The viral captures the note of celebration in T-Mobile style, being an instant youtube hit with 21 million views and counting.
What the brand says:
Spencer McHugh, director of brand at T-Mobile, said: “T-Mobile is famous for creating adverts that are entertaining and also give people something they want to share with others.
“We’re seeing the trend for people to video choreographed wedding dances, turning into a real online phenomenon, and with Royal Wedding fever sweeping the nation, we decided to combine the two and create T-Mobile’s very own version.
3M – Post-it Super Sticky Notes
A simple and predictable tactical ad by 3M. However, this outdoor themed campaign is an effective campaign with a nice emotional link.
3M’s Super Sticky Post-it note read:
“Will and Kate, may you stick together forever. Congratulations” “holds stronger, longer”
What they said:
“Post-it Notes are an iconic product that everyone knows and loves,” added Jason Wall, business director at OgilvyAction.
“Given their status as a household name it made absolute sense to develop a tactical campaign that would reinforce the ubiquitous nature of the product and teasingly link them to the Royal wedding, through the Super Sticky messaging.”
The NFL’s Super Bowl is prime material for us marketing folks. Granted, a number of us love the actual football being played on the field, but a huge majority are even more excited by the entertainment during the time outs. And I’m not talking pom poms and dancing girls (fans of the cheerleaders though we are at Synergy…).
In advertising terms, Super Bowl is prime real estate. The most expensive ad spots in the world offer brands the chance to reach 111 million U.S. viewers – this year all watching on FOX – with the price tag reaching up to $100,000 per second. Yes, that’s right, per second. Between $2.5 and $3 million for a 30 second ad spot. Phew.
This is a sporting event that so embraces its sponsors and advertisers that a whole section of the NFL website is dedicated to showcasing that ads that run throughout the programming. So ingrained is the element of entertainment to the action on the field.
Expectedly brands go all out in preparation for this miniature slice of branded entertainment. So much so, that this year, we saw adverts advertising adverts. For real. Non US-based fans were obviously bereft of this fervent marketing build-up, but trusty BrandChannel was on hand to give us regular updates of the preview ‘teaser’ ads (and then later the actual adverts) as they became available on screen and online.
These teasers ran across Network TV (presumably not just FOX) in the build up to last weekend’s clash at the Cowboys Stadium, building anticipation for the actual 30 second spot that would run in one of the many time outs during the game.
The most effective of these thas to be the Bridgestone ‘Reply All’ and ‘Carma’ spots, both of which I just loved:
Bridgestone, official tire sponsor of the NFL, carried its Super Bowl website URL at the end of each spot where viewers can catch the full versions of the final ads – should they not have tuned in to the big game.
2011 was certainly the year of the car, with Chevy, Audi, VW and BMW all taking a spot. Quite a cluttered marketplace. On entertainment value alone, VW’s mini Darth Vader seem to deliver the most buzz online with Contagious Magazine reporting how, three days before the big game, the video went from 100,000 views to over 1,000,000 in the first couple hours – hitting 5.3 million after the first day. But did the cute factor do more to shift children’s Darth Vader costumes than actual cars?
The spot that seemed to attract the biggest UK media commentary, was the U.S. XFactor trails. Given the UK love affair with Cowell and Cole, it is possibly not surprising. Cowell took centre stage in the dramatic 30 second spot – which again was touted as having close to a $3m price tag.
No Super Bowl would be complete without a beer or two, and Bud Light probably took the crown for the most entertaining execution – seeing a bunch of bored office workers go to extreme lengths to get their hands on a six pack (the office setting seems a popular choice for football marketing, given Reebok’s brilliant Terry Tate/Office Linebacker campaign from several years back).
And then there was Glee. The hit US TV show bagged the much-coveted post-Super Bowl TV slot on FOX, evidence (if it were needed) of its immense popularity and cult following. Interwoven into this year’s Glee Super Bowl extravaganza was Chevrolet. The uber-American car brand – one of GM‘s stable, themselves an official NFL sponsor – have actually bagged themselves a deal with Glee, in addition to their NFL partnership.
This all beautifully dove-tailed on Super Bowl night, with a Glee/Chevy ad spot – at once a trailer for the show and the car – and positioning both as integral to the entertainment of Super Bowl night. Branded content meets sponsorship meets advertising. All in one glorious explosive, all-singing, all-dancing package:
These provide just a snapshot of the 50 adverts that aired last Sunday. So perhaps it is no wonder that you hear of some U.S. viewers nipping out of the room to the bathroom, or to the bar for beers during plays in order not to miss the adverts. The NFL Super Bowl is a world where the advertising becomes central to the evening’s entertainment and fuels the pre-game build up – especially amongst a wider fan base – more than any sporting preview analysis can.
There may be talk of the death of advertising, but on this particular playing field, an audience of 111 million is pretty difficult to argue with.
As a long standing fan of all things The Apprentice-related, you can imagine my joy at this week’s return of the hit BBC show, now in its sixth series. And last night’s episode ‘Bangers’, watched by nearly 7 million viewers, didn’t disappoint. Another motley crew of egotistical fools forced together, last night to make and sell sausages, jostling competitively to be picked by ‘Suralan’ (sorry Lord Sugar these days) for their next stab at employment.
Better still, the boys’ team chose to call themselves Synergy. Good name, rings a bell.
Which is why at Synergy Towers, we’ve decided to get behind the show by offering the last remaining member of the show’s Team Synergy a much sought-after internship here.
We may be offering considerably less than the six figure starting salary the show’s winner will take home but the lucky candidate will get to work on a series of sponsorship related tasks (none of which will involve sausages) for a selection of our international clients which include the likes of Betfair, BMW, Pernod Ricard, Coca-Cola and Diageo.
I think our CEO Tim Crow sums it all up rather nicely, “After seeing last night’s episode, supporting Team Synergy was an obvious thing for us to do. We’re looking to give this year’s ‘Pantsman’ the opportunity to get their teeth into the world of sponsorship. No job interviews from hell. No boardroom showdowns. And hopefully not all of the candidates will turn out to be self-delusional idiots by the end of the show. Who knows – they may even prefer it to working for Lord Sugar!”
Next week’s episode is all about designing and creating a brand new beach accessory. Let’s hope Team Synergy does a little better than last night or I fear 21 year old Stuart ‘The Brand’ Baggs could find himself back in the boardroom.
Which frankly might be no bad thing for us here at Synergy.
Torrential rain all week in Manchester, followed by one glorious sunny Thursday, meant only one thing…’The Betfair Player Challenges’ were in town and heading to Carrington.
At 7.00am a combined team of Betfair and Synergy boarded the train at London Euston and headed to Carrington, Manchester United’s training ground. With the sun shining it was the perfect day to see six Manchester United players take to the field for some slightly unusual ‘training’.
With the Ryder Cup fast approaching it seemed only fitting to have the Manchester United players take on a golfing challenge. So it was decided that their first contest would be the Betfair Ryder Cup Challenge. This saw the players divided into two teams, Team Europe versus Team Americas (sound familiar?!).
Europe’s team comprised of Wes Brown, Darren Fletcher and John O’Shea, and representing the Americas we had the Da Silva twins, Rafael and Fabio, along with Anderson. The teams were taken back to the basics of golf with the ‘simple’ task of chipping a ball into a bucket.
It soon became apparent that the ‘simple’ Ryder Cup challenge was right up Team Europe’s street and perhaps a challenge that Team Americas would rather forget.
With neither of the two Da Silva twins having ever held a golf club before, it was up to John O’Shea to share his pedigree with the opposition, attempting to add a little competition to procedings. But unfortunately O’Shea’s advice fell on deaf ears as both Da Silvas and Anderson failed to make it anywhere near the bucket. Proving Europe’s strength, both Brown and Fletcher chipped close but it was John O’Shea who was victorious chipping in.
With over 200,000 views on You Tube in just five days and millions tuning in to see Graeme McDowell reflecting John O’Shea’s victory by winning the final point to bring the Ryder Cup home for Europe yesterday, it seems it’s not just the Manchester United players who have got Ryder Cup fever!
The King of the World is dead, long live the King of the World.
You have to hand it to James Cameron: at $1.88billion in takings to date, his 3D epic Avatar is officially the biggest box office ticket of all time. And having taken only six weeks to eclipse the record set by Titanic, JC’s last feature film, this is likely to be just the tip of the iceberg.
Yes, the world and his wife (and their three children, plus extended circle of friends) have queued up at cinemas to see Avatar: whilst it’s not perhaps a film for everybody, it has nonetheless garnered some strong reviews, and, 3D effects aside, features some of the best CGI ever used in medium. The spectacle in 3D, however, elevates Avatar beyond movie to experience, drawing the audience into Cameron’s alien world of Pandora without simply resorting to the customary “oh, that was the 3D bit” camera pans. Not all 3D films can claim to do the same.
Avatar is a 3D success because the extra something this technology brings makes us believe it more, enriching the immersion and further suspending disbelief. The question is, how to monetise this on a more regular basis, as opposed to only once every 15 years, when Mr Cameron decides to take us one step beyond?
Naturally, the answer came in the form of the ever-inventive Sky, with Sky Sports’ first foray into 3D programming the live coverage of Arsenal vs Manchester United last weekend. For those lucky enough to be in one of the nine bars across the UK to feature 3D screens – well, if you’d call ‘lucky’ being reciprocally filmed by Sky Sports looking like the rejects from a Buddy Holly casting session – the experience was mixed. The customary Sky Sports graphics, player line-ups (where a sense of depth and perspective is inherent to the camera view) and wide angle shots from behind goal were suitably impressive; however, the third dimension was not the totally eye-popping revolution many were imagining.
To be fair, Sky does spoil the viewer: with up to 20 cameras tracking the game in regular Ds and lovely High Definition crispness for those willing to pay an extra tenner a month – it’s hard to say whether the final spectacle of 3D could ever match up to our expectations. It’s no massive surprise that this was basically a glorified experiment by the broadcaster – football may not be the ultimate sport to benefit from an extra dimension, versus, say boxing, rugby, or even golf – but the fanfare of such a world’s first certainly captured the public’s imagination, leaving viewers hungry, or at least peckish, for more.
Whatever the future holds for in-home 3D, it’s clear that from a sporting perspective, as James Cameron understands, the extra dimension needs to add something to our experience, to give something back, with Sunday’s experiment representing a small step in furthering Sky’s opinion on exactly how it plans to achieve this.
This summer, we at Synergy are working with Betfair, the online betting exchange, to bring their ECB partnership to life through a fun and entertaining online campaign. Ashes fever is sweeping the nation as ultimate rivals England and Australia battle for the Ashes urn. We’ve signed up Ashes legends Phil ‘The Cat’ Tufnell and Jason ‘Dizzy’ Gillespie to go head-to-head in a series of (Synergy-inspired) challenges that can be watched on the dedicated website FANvFAN.com.
The website, designed by Engine group company Altogether, offers more than just the videos with the chance to win tickets to each Test match, a chance to play alongside Tuffers and Dizzy and the opportinity to win £4,000.
Bravo Lewis Hamilton, cue media frenzy – with, as ever on these occasions, a predictable focus on Hamilton’s future earning power. Thus we find Max Clifford in the Telegraph (not an everyday occurrence in itself) predicting that Hamilton will be ‘bigger than Beckham’ and this, my personal favourite to date, from the Mirror:
He is already on a £75million five year contract with McLaren and has a £10million three year sponsorship deal with Reebok. But extra sponsorship deals could see him on £1billion next year.
Now that would be bucking the credit crunch.
There is, of course, much more interesting territory to be explored here. For example, how will the nascent ‘Brand Hamilton’ be evolved? To what extent does Hamilton’s appeal extend beyond F1? And what effect is Hamilton having on the F1 brand and audience?
In the UK at least, we already know some of the answers. Yesterday’s Grand Prix drew an average audience on ITV of 8.8m, way ahead of the channel’s slot average for the year so far of 2.6m, with a massive peak audience of 12.5m watching at 18:45 as the race went down to the wire.
I’ve posted before about the fact that NPD has been one of the key drivers in modern sponsorship, with virtually every week seeing new platform and property models being unveiled. NPD being what it is however, they don’t always work out, and the most recent example of this is golf’s FedEx Cup.
Launched by the US PGA Tour two years ago as an attempt to reinvigorate the final weeks of the Tour and counter audience migration to the start of the American football season, the FedEx Cup has had a difficult start to life.
For two years in a row, the Cup has been won anticlimactically early, last year by Tiger Woods (remember him?), this year by Vijay Singh, who has only to finish the final tournament of the season this weekend to claim the title. As one columnist from the National Post put it:
‘Under the current FedEx points system, Singh would have to step in a gopher hole or assault a rules official in order to lose the event. He could play all 72 holes with a belly putter and a persimmon three wood and still take the title, even if his card went into three-figures four days in a row.’
And despite changes introduced this year by the PGA, the format and credibility of the FedEx are still being roundly criticised by the media, in pieces with headlines such as ‘Once again, playoffs are a snoozefest’ and ‘FedEx Cup ending with a whimper’.
Tim Finchem, Commissioner of the PGA Tour, admitted that it was a case of back to the drawing board for next year in a recent media conference, although I suspect what he said will have done little to reassure the players, the media and most of all, his sponsor (whose current tagline is ‘Relax, it’s Fedex’).
Using the analogy of golf course designer Donald Ross and his work on the famed No. 2 course at Pinehurst NC, Finchem said that even a second set of format changes to the FedEx might not get it right:
“[Ross] made 213 or 220 changes in the first 12 years of [Pinehurst No. 2's] existence. Sometimes to get perfection, you have to keep working at it, and we intend to do that.”
Let’s hope, for the sake of FedEx in particular, it’s a case of third time lucky in 2009.
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