Just ahead of his scheduled appearance at the ICA’s “Engagement In The Social Entertainment Age” event in Toronto, Contagious’ North American editor Nick Parish talked to Marketing about how brands can be nimble, human and even forgiven online.
What can people expect from your talk tonight?
I’m going to talk about engagement. People used to think engagement online had to be really deep and immersive. There are some things that are really great at being deep and immersive, but there are a lot of ways marketers can do little things, more tactical things, and still be pretty engaging. I’ll talk briefly about the idea of social entertainment and what it’s looking like to gather people around big events like the World Cup or the Royal wedding. And then we’re going to get to briefing. Everyone wonders how you brief for engagement. I think one of the most important things there is if you brief for advertising, you’re going to get advertising back. If you brief for engagement, you’re going to get something that’s engaging back. So the question is: how do you create a platform that’s going to lead to engagement rather than one that leads to advertising?
Okay, I’ll bite. How do you create a platform that leads to engagement?
Everything has to start with participation. How will people participate in this? How will people engage with what you’re doing? And then how will they get there? How do you make something that requires a response? And then from there, how do you get people to respond to that? And then, what’s going to be the content it’s built around, and how do you measure that? How do you monitor it? The last of those is obviously the biggest question for people. It’s sort of the Holy Grail.
What are the features of the new “social entertainment” age?
It feels like every time there’s a huge event that happens in the world, we kind of recalibrate our idea of what a smash hit really is in terms of how people respond to it online. So just last year Lady Gaga’s new video would come out and there’d be one or two million hits over the weekend. You’d have this massive amount of traffic and everybody would say, ‘Oh my God, that’s the fastest rise to this, ever.’ Since then, we’ve obviously had some interesting things happen in the world that are kind of recalibrating our sensors as to what’s influential or what is going to gain traction. You’re seeing things like the massive volume of tweets during the Super Bowl or a more massive amount of tweets during the capturing/killing Bin Laden saga. You’re seeing this escalation of activity around these things. So what are brands doing to get themselves involved in these things?
Any tips on how brands can capitalize on a big event or happening in the news?
The Ashes is a major cricket tournament between Australia and Britain and there was a 20-year-old babysitter from Massachusetts and her Twitter handle was TheAshes. She was constantly getting mentioned in all these different discussions about [cricket]. She started getting upset about it. Some of the people who were down in Australia we’re saying, ‘Hey wait a second, she doesn’t know what cricket is, she’s getting all of this attention, maybe we can do something about this.’ And so someone working with big marketers down there like Vodafone and Qantas got in touch with her and they brought her to Australia and they had her doing all these different charity events and going around learning about cricket.
What North American companies are doing this well?
I think the Kraft/Ted Williams thing was interesting when they acted really quickly to make him the voiceover star of the brand. If you think about a consumer packaged goods company or a foods company like Kraft, you don’t really think they’re going to be super nimble with their marketing. But they were able to do a good thing for him fairly quickly.
But on the flip side, there must be some concern about acting too quickly.
That’s the number one fear. We talk to a lot of marketers about this and there’s definitely a fear of being wrong or jumping at something and jumping wrong. But the internet is very forgiving. If you do something dumb and you admit that it was dumb… people are going to say, ‘you’re right it was pretty dumb [but] at least you took a chance.’
There was a really funny snafu in early February when some volunteer for the Red Cross was manning the Twitter [account] and he accidentally tweeted from the American Red Cross account rather than his own account. He said something like ‘I found some four-packs of this Dogfish Head Beer. I’m going to get slithered tonight’ or something definitely unbecoming of the Red Cross. So the tweeter obviously deleted it, but the Dogfish Head guys saw it because they were mentioned in the tweet. So they said, ‘This is great. We love that we’re getting love from the Red Cross, anyone who tweets with this hash tag as well, we’ll donate $5 to the Red Cross.’ There was an air of forgiveness there, the Dogfish Head guys looked supremely cool, the Red Cross guys looked like real humans on a faceless charity and everybody won out.
