The weekend before April Fool’s Day, Rethink partner and creative director Dré Labre hosted a livestream on Periscope, the new Twitter-owned app.
After going live, users in the chat (another element of Periscope) kept asking the same question: “What’s in your fridge?”
As Labre discovered, the same question was being posed on all corners of the app. Launched on March 26, Periscope’s first week live brought on its first meme: showing off what’s in your fridge a la MTV Cribs.
The trend gave him an idea. One of Rethink’s clients, Coors Light Canada, had asked for an April Fool’s stunt, and his team was working on a fake product that winks at unnecessary “innovations” in product design – Coors Light Sacks. Inspired by bags of milk, the sack prototype was dead simple: it’s just a bag of beer.
Labre decided a Periscope fridge tour was the perfect way to launch the product. First thing Monday, he pitched the idea to Coors Light. Instead of promising big results, Labre said he positioned the livestream as a test. The best case scenario, he said, was that a handful of people, maybe 10 or 12, would watch the stream and Coors would walk away knowing how to use the app.
Labre said his approach to new technologies is to test small, then scale later to avoid big mistakes. Periscope and its chief competitor, Meerkat, have been the talk of the marketing and tech industries for the past month and brands are still trying to figure out how to best use the apps. The Coors Light Sacks stunt, Labre said, was a chance to test Periscope in market without much risk.
The client loved the idea. Two days later, Rethink rigged up a fridge with dry ice and filled it with sacks of beer. Then it ran a promoted tweet with a small budget, directing people to the stream of the fridge, teasing a surprise.
For the first two minutes of the stream, the feed showed a timer counting down on the front of the fridge. Right away, people started joining the stream. By the time of the reveal, about 60 people were watching – a small number of eyeballs by any media standard, but Labre said both he and the client were pleased.
The rest of the launch went well, with one tweet about the sacks receiving 395 retweets and 500 favourites, making the Periscope element of the stunt an added bonus. The real benefit though, Labre said, was getting a handle on Periscope, its still-developing culture and how people will interact with brand content on it.
THE TAKEAWAYS:
The Power Of The Promoted Tweet
Putting media dollars behind the tweet announcing the Coors Light Periscope brought people into the stream. One of the chief challenges of Periscope is audiences are small. Coors Light has 16,500 followers on Twitter. At any given time, only a handful of those will be online and only a small portion of those followers will click on a tweet. By pairing Periscope with media dollars, brands can ensure their stream will be seen.
Reactions Happen Quickly
The span of Coors Light’s Periscope experiment was just a few minutes, but in that period of time the brand was able to drive real engagement. Consumers came in and chatted about what was coming for the first two minutes, then posted reactions to the Coors Light Sacks Reveal.
The Kinks Are Still Being Worked Out
Labre calls the current version of Periscope a minimum viable product, meaning it doesn’t have the polish of say, the Twitter app. He expects a slicker, easier to use update to come soon with new features. For example, it was tricky to send consumers directly to the stream after it ended. Periscope streams can be viewed for 24 hours, if the creator chooses, so consumers can re-watch them the way they would any video. However, it’s still not easy to discover streams after they air, a challenge Labre expects the app will soon address.
Livestreams Are An Opportunity For ‘Real’ Real-time
The pace of apps like Meerkat and Periscope ups the ante for real-time. While consumers expect prompt responses on Twitter and Facebook, Periscope is a chat environment, meaning a response is expected almost immediately.
