3. How Mercedes
Benz did it The Campaign:
• X Factor’s TV audience influenced TV creative in
real time via a social platform
• Social video winner went live alongside TV version
The Result:
• #YouDrive trended organically on Twitter
• 40% increase visitors to Mercedes’ site
• 82% of business leads came from new prospects
• Mercedes lowered the age of its prospects
The Lessons:
• Brands need a distributed strategy, reaching out
with relevant content where prospects are
already spending their time
• Young adults spent 5 minutes interacting with
the content because it followed the principles
of long-form entertainment, providing
plot, character and conflict
• Engagement works as a discernible mechanism
to directly drive sales
5. Day 2: The Viral Peak
Did You know?
Sharing trends:
200 most shared branded videos of 2012
Source: Unruly Viral Video Chart
• 10% of the shares occur on day 2
• 25% of shares occur in the first 3 days
• 50% of shares occur in the first 3 weeks
12. Go Long for Real Time Success
“Brands often don’t realize how much viable content exists
in their organizations and how, with a little, ingenuity, it can
be repurposed, reformatted, recut or recombined to
incredible effect with minimal budget outlay.”
“Too often in the rush to real time, you forget the strategic
reasons your brand implemented a digital strategy in the
first place.”
We are all here today because real time marketing is getting a lot of attention. Clever, opportunistic creative that has people buzzing. It works because it makes people take notice. Consumers, and certainly the press, have a reaction. They’re surprised, amused, and a little awestruck. They’re compelled to share these real time moments and become a part of the zeitgeist by doing so.Video, with its production lead times, is seemingly unsuited to real time marketing. Which has been tough for marketers. As marketers – we LOVE video. It’s an especially useful medium. There’s storytelling, plot, the music swells, the actors emote or crack jokes, and the audience feels something. If a picture is worth 1,000 words. Video is a bestselling novel. It helps viewers connect with your brand.The great news is – video CAN participate in your RT strategy – and make the audience connect with your brand even faster. Unruly has been launching brands’ social videos for 7 years, and we have 5 tips for brands that want to use video in real time to connect with your audience.
Whatever your media – “spontaneity” requires planning. Luckily, the major events the world is watching (while Tweeting and Posting) are scheduled well in advance. For ALL media - they key things to keep in mind as your Plan for Spontaneity are:Stay on-point with your ongoing marketing strategies. Have your campaign goals, objectives, key messaging and KPIs established in advance. You don’t want your in the moment haste to be off brand or out of line other initiatives. Have the relevant necessary parties pre-assembled - Your designers, copy writersdecision makers/ stakeholders (and possibly Legal) - and ready to act quickly. Run a few quick turn practice drills.Have your 140 characters counted, social copy and photos/imagesanticipatedand ready to go with the push of a button. Have a wish list of images you hope to take live,to be prepared for being “in the moment.”To extend this to video:Work backwards – Again, anticipate outcomes and have your content tagged and ready to be pulled at a moment’s notice. You can pre-produce content based on expectations orreduce, reuse, recycle and repurpose existing content reuse / repurpose existing content as opportunities present themselves.If using paid distribution, have your players launched and in place on the sites your targets frequent, and prep your partner to be on call for uploading the new footage you selectIf you’re using an Unruly player, you can send through new “zeitgeist” calls to action and change up the creative in the Brand Bar, creative canvas, photo gallery or annotations our player supports. Push a new hashtag, or change the links these elements click through to.
Mercedes and Unruly participated in a live, real time event.Mercedes had the goals of lowering their age demo and appealing to a younger audience.The Brand ran a multi-media, multi-screen choose your own adventure, with a live, real time ending. The X Factor and Unruly ran the first spot on night 1 of a back to back live X Factor broadcasts. And viewers were given the opportunity to vote via tweet for their preferred ending.Mercedes ran the full spot + viewer selected outcome in the next night’s live broadcast. And simultaneously with Unruly. We were well poised to partner on this – the players were launched according to Mercedes’ younger demo goals, in the environments these targets already frequent, and we had both versions of the final creative tagged up and ready to go. We posted the preferred outcome in complete sync with the live broadcast, having our Ops team watch the X Factor that night for perfect alignment.This delivered great prospects for Mercedes, helped them reach the younger viewer base they sought, and helped consumers actively engage with their brand. The Lessons pulled here are actually from a trade pub that covered the campaign and shows that the 40% increase in site traffic from the desired age demo and over 80% growth new prospect business leads are hard evidence that a Distributed strategy with entertaining content that drives engagement can directly drive Sales KPIs.
Budget for real time – you don’t come up short when the perfect opportunity presents itself.We recommend holding = 20% of your event marketing foropportunistic use.Track your metrics and campaign ROI in Real Time, and if you’re seeing success, you want to have budget left so the momentum doesn’t fizzle out.
This is Unruly’s social diffusion curveWe’ve been tracking videos since 2006 – with 344 billion streams tracked to date – and we plotted the diffusion curve for the top 200 branded videos from last year. The research shows that the first days following a video’s launch are key to both short term and long term success. However you launch your content, front-loading your distribution budgets to maximize shareability in the early days of a campaign leads to long term sharing. Early success yields long tail success. You want a high number of shares sharing early on for maximum effect – because on average, each share = 25 additional views, with the opportunity to share and share and share.
Of course, you can also film videos in real time as well. With smart phones, our video cameras are always on hand. Consumers film live moments to tweet and post – and brands can too.
Vine is the fastest and easiest Real Time video sharing available. It takes as little as 6 seconds to produce a Vine and one second to launch it. Brands can respond to any pop culture event with VIDEO using Vine to capture the moment and deploy it as the lead video content in your player. Oreo with their 4 minutes from blackout to tweet could have possibly cut their to-market time by over 2000% and using Vine video content. At Unruly, we recently debuted a new Vine app to allow users to cycle through vines from an overlay in the player – in addition to hosting a vine or multiple vines as main event player content.
There’s also real time in day to day life. Yes, the major Television/News/Entertainment events get a lot of press for smart real time content switch ups. But there are 359 other days in the year to provide a custom and relevant experience for your viewers. However you distribute, get real-time feedback and use it to inform your creative choices, refine your campaign and optimize the content your user sees. At Unruly, for brands that launch multiple videos in our player, we use Dynamic Creative Optimization to use user engagement levels to optimize in real-time which video plays first to always put your best foot forward and increase engagement levels, video completes, and dwell time.
An early DCO partner was Nissan. The brand launched multiple videos in our player.Nissan wanted to optimize on engagement. We tracked engagement levels in real time for each piece of content, and very quickly, a clear winner emerged, based on user trends. Unruly optimized this video to play first to give each viewer the best real time viewing experience.The digital account manager at Nissan shares that they experienced some of the strongest engagement levels ever from a social campaign with +83% in completion rates. http://www.reelseo.com/dynamic-creative-optimization/
When it comes to making real time content or quick turn content to create or participate in an on the fly, unexpected zeitgeist event, brands need to act fast. You need to ID these trends as they are emerging. Otherwise, it’s just embarrassing to arrive late to the party. You can create content quickly to participate in these trends, or even better, make sure you have an easily accessible content vault and reuse or repurpose content to act quickly. This will help with speed and agility. The Harlem Shakes User Generated and from brands (as well as the Swedish army and Miami Heat) took the social world by storm, then it was music video mash ups with goats that yell like humans, and now videos of brands scaring the bejeezus out of people in simulated experiences before rewarding them with the brand’s product. Adweek recently dubbed this “Prankvertising.”
…and are you tracking the right metrics?These are the tools we use to track trends as they occur. We saw the Harlem Shake emerge weeks before the press jumped on this. The Unruly Viral Video Chart tracks shares as well as views. But we rank on shares as this is the more true gauge of social success. It’s tracking social conversation vs. media spend. We also have a global ads chart to see what’s emerging in the various territories around the globe. We are also in beta testing for Unruly Analytics, which allows brands to track their share of social video voice in real time (as well as historically with a toggle) against their competitors, to gain insight into how new and current initiatives are affecting the social video makeup of their sector in real time.
I read an interesting article on Digiday, nearly one month ago. It popped out at me because it was an early dissention from the “Yes, We Love Real Time and You Can Do It Too” real time lovefest.Julie’s post reminds us not forget one key thing – You’re in this for the long haul. As a brand, you want to build sustainable, long-term relationships with your customers, with the goal that they recommend your brand to their friends and that you have strong Word of Mouth. This leads to advocacy and advocacy has been prove to lead to sales.Which all circles back to planning. A strong RT strategy is based on strong prep, prediction and practice.This is not a time to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Don’t forget the strategies, KPIs and “the strategic reasons your brand implemented a digital strategy in the first place”. Planning for spontaneity will help brands to stay on-point with their existing marketing strategies. Have your players launched in the appropriate media in advance, so you can change the main content while still holding true to your targeting goals. Reuse existing or pre-produced video content when possible, or leverageon-the-fly video creation from Vine or video taken from you iPhone.Savvy brands can conserve resources by creating fewer pieces of amazing content and being eagle eyed when it comes to leveraging zeitgeist events – if the content is well archived and tagged for accessibility.Having that long term mission will help you to be selective about identifying which real time moments make sense for your brand. Checking RT opportunities against your long term strategy will help you make on-brand decisions, and avoid those that don’t make sense for your strategy. Source: http://www.digiday.com/brands/brands-stop-obsessing-over-real-time/
