Tobias Lutke, the CEO of Shopify, once told me that the heart of a conference is the hallway—not who’s on stage, but who’s standing in line beside you, introducing themselves between sessions and available for a mid-conference coffee.
For the past three years, I’ve trekked to Austin, Texas for South by Southwest Interactive, where lanyard-ed inventors, investors and advertisers rush between presentations and lunch meetings in an attempt to divine where technology may lead business in the year to come. What I’ve learned there has informed years of reporting. But as Lutke suggests, the best ideas always came from conversations, not presentations.
So this year I went with a plan to have coffee with as many marketers, media people and content creators as I could fit into 120 hours. What emerged was a sense of excitement, but also concern about what marketers don’t understand about digital culture.
Where’s your army of brand advocates?
Abby Lundardini, VP brand marketing, Virgin America
As the first sessions of SXSW begin, it’s hard to tell whether the line snaking around the perimeter of the Hyatt Regency lobby is for a presentation or the hotel’s Starbucks. The woman at the tail end confirms it’s for a panel on how to build an army of brand advocates. I’m in the right place.
I fire a text to one of the speakers, Virgin America’s Abby Lundardini, who promises to join me for a coffee once she finishes. The big takeaway from the presentation: brand advocates spend twice as much on products they love, but only 20% of U.S. marketers run advocacy campaigns.
Sitting with our coffees, I ask Lundardini the obvious: if advocates are so valuable, why aren’t more marketers investing inthem? Her answer is dead simple, but smart. Advocacy campaigns, she says, require swinging the gates of communication wide open, and most brands aren’t ready for that.
“If you open up that conversation, you have to deal with where it goes,” says Lundardini. Meaning, if you fish for advocates, you might reel in angry customers.
For brands like Virgin, though, advocates have become something of a secret weapon. Last year the airline faced off against Southwest, which was lobbying the City of Dallas to keep Virgin America out of Love Field airport. Virgin America didn’t have the budget to lobby or the massive local workforce that Southwest did, so it turned to its frequent flyers for help.
Mobilizing advocates through a private site for its VIP fans, Virgin got 27,000 signatures for a Change.org petition asking the city to let Virgin into Love Field. It fuelled a media storm, and Dallas let Virgin in despite Southwest’s pressure.
The campaign worked, Lundardini says, because Virgin laid the groundwork in advance. Constant communication with loyal customers before the fight ensured those relationships were strong enough to wage a political battle.
Big brands often have trouble fostering those relationships, she says. Before you can get customers to talk about your brand, you have to listen to them, serve their needs and fix their problems. For brands with customer service challenges—an epidemic in the airline industry—the optics of an advocacy program might as well be a minefield.
“Opening that Pandora’s box can be scary,” Lundardini says.
How to Work with YouTubers Pt. 1
Mitchell Moffit and Gregory Brown, Creators of ASAP Science
After their panel with GE on “the science of mind-blowing videos,” the co-creators of YouTube series ASAP Science came with me to the Hyatt Regency’s lounge.
The first thing I ask is whether they feel more famous at SXSW than they do at home in Toronto. They respond with yes, they’ve been recognized more than usual. As the creators of a very successful series with millions of views every week, Mitchell Moffit and Gregory Brown have that specific brand of online fame: Moffit tells me about a young girl who asked for a photo on a patio this week while everyone else at the restaurant looked at them, like, “who?”
They agreed to a panel with GE, they tell me, because they think it’s the type of collaboration marketers should know about. About a year and a half ago, the company pitched them on a show idea: the science of 3D printers. It was a perfect fit for both the show and the brand. GE wanted to associate itself with the technology, and 3D printers were a sure hit with ASAP’s audience of science fans. Since then, they’ve produced several more videos with GE, often tapping the company’s internal scientists to fact check or provide the type of information they’d normally get from peer-sourced papers.
Creative control hasn’t been a problem. GE has been happy to give them final say and ASAP has been happy to share scripts with the GE team. The connection between the show and the brand is crystal clear and both parties benefit.
But for every GE, the hosts say there are dozens of would-be partnerships that fall apart when a brand realizes Moffit and Brown won’t slip a line of messaging into a video. Since they’re a science show, they say, the imperative to maintain editorial integrity is at a premium.
Plenty of brands have been happy to agree to their terms in exchange for getting in front of the loyal eyeballs glued to their videos. Audible and Squarespace are two regular sponsors, and Brown and Moffit get several new pitches every week.
That’s one thing many marketers don’t realize, Moffit says. Top tier YouTubers get pitched all the time. I ask him what marketers looking to partner with YouTubers should know. The most important thing, he says, is research. It’s like PR: know who you’re pitching. Narrow it down to the YouTubers that work best with your brand, then think about what you could do with them.
How to Work with YouTubers pt. 2
Tyler Oakley, YouTuber
I follow Tyler Oakley out of his session and hear an audible gasp from the 25 teens waiting to meet him. They’re trembling and clutching phones, hoping for a selfie with him.
Oakley’s about as internet famous as it gets—6.6 million YouTube subscribers, 3.7 million Instagram followers, 3.8 million on Twitter. And if you’re a marketer looking to reach young millennial girls, he’s the hottest ticket in brand partnerships.
Later, sitting on the Four Seasons’ back patio, Oakley tells me he’s now working on establishing brand relationships that would span two to three years, like the ones he has with Nature Box, MeUndies and Audible. Those brands may not be familiar, but all are big advertisers on podcasts and online video. I ask why Oakley thinks those platforms work for them, and he tells me it’s because they all have a digital call to action—a subscription signup or online purchase hosts can direct fans towards. These companies are looking for a direct sale and he can show them clear ROI.
It would be a savvy response from a non-marketer, but Oakley actually is a marketer, and a skilled one at that. Before his channel became a full-time job, he was a social media manager and says he’d always intended to work as a digital marketer. In a way, he says that’s what he is, only applying those skills to his own brand.
So I pose the same question to Oakley that I asked ASAP Science: what should marketers know about working with YouTubers? Successful YouTubers, he replies, all work from their own unique formula. They know their brand, audience and tone of their show. If the brand can’t fit into that formula organically, a partnership’s not going to work.
“I’m not a billboard for a product. But we could work together and I could be a vehicle [for a brand].”
There’s more! Russ Martin spent five days in conversation with entrepreneurs, innovators and marketers from Canada and abroad. You’ll be able to read his full travelogue in the latest issue of Marketing. And subscribe today for full access.
